The_Capt

https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html No military on earth can absorb those losses from op ready frontline forces and then bounce into another theatre against an opponent who has better C4ISR, AirPower, seapower and ground forces fighting a defensive battle. Even if this thing stayed non-nuclear, a pan attack on the Baltics would take the gloves off any Western escalation restraint. Russia would be open to strategic deep strikes directly into Russian territory. The first thing that would be dismantled is Russian transportation infrastructure and logistics nodes (fuel supplies and rail would be big ones). Then C4ISR (such as it is) and military installations/infrastructure. Then probably industry. I think we might actually see Cyber wake up and Russian banking - now isolated from the west - would be hit hard. Along with telecommunications and power generation. This would very likely not be a manned AC campaign, at least not initially. We would be send cruise missiles and long range munitions to maul the Russian backfield before ground forces even got close to each other. Without direct Chinese support - and China would likely stay out of this, Russia is in serious trouble before they even get a chance to get hit at the tactical or operational levels. Then Russia would need to somehow deny their airspace but unlike Ukraine they are not denying it over a single narrow theatre. They would need to deny it across all of western Russia. That is a major bill that they may have been capable of back in Jan 22 but see: Oryx. If Russia loses air denial and NATO establishes air superiority, Russian ground forces - now largely barely trained and equipped in Cold War era vehicles - would be massacred. I suspect NATO would do more damage to the Baltic states killing Russia. Russia could try and go nuclear but they know it is suicide see: US nuclear trident. So unless NATO physically invades Russia itself, and they won’t, this thing could be kept in a box….maybe. Three conditions would need to be met for a successful Russian invasion of the Baltic states: 1. The war in Ukraine was won in a couple weeks back in 2022. 2. NATO collapses and the Baltic states are left isolated, and 3. Chinese support to Russia to create relative parity in some domains. As they are now…not a chance.

We are all over the map here. So here is what I am hearing from you over the last few weeks: - Ukraine is doomed. It will lose this war and fall into a Russian orbit - with verve to fight for mother Russia apparently. No matter what anyone does or how much support…this is a done deal. - The West is a collection of cowards and appeasers because we are scared of Russia. The fact that our partner (Ukraine) is so weak that a stiff wind will knock it over somehow plays into this…? [gotta be honest this part makes no sense] - Our “reluctance” to support Ukraine is a combination of fear and Ukrainian pre-programmed failure. And this is a message to the world to stop trusting the West. - This war has not affected Russia in any way, except making it stronger. Sanctions are making Russia richer. A brutal attritional war is making its military stronger. And politically Russia is a nation of mindless drones who will follow Putin anywhere…forever. - Russia will come out of this war, and inevitable Ukrainian loss, able to quickly invade Baltic or other NATO states. We being the terrified western cowards who failed to support Ukraine - despite its clear destiny to fail - will dither and let NATO collapse by ignoring an Article 5 declaration. And you have demonstrated a history of selectively picking “evidence” to support these positions even though you have also been caught out as either skewing evidence or outright pushing disinformation. I think that covers it? Ok, well…noted. We will file that one away and come back to it.

What?! A cursory review of modern urban battles shows nowhere near the numbers you are tossing around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mosul_(2016–2017) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Fallujah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grozny_(1994–1995) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sarajevo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Huế At 1:5 Gaza is running a far more indiscriminate operation than any of these fights (the freakin Battle of Hue no less). Hell, horror shows like Stalingrad were not anywhere near the ratios you are tossing around: https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Stalingrad. That is approx 40k civilian dead to nearly 2 million military dead. Leningrad - a hellish siege of a city filled with civilians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad The German Army waged that one at about 3:1 and if you count the Russian combatants it goes to nearly 1:1 In fact the only modern battle that comes close to the IDF ratios is this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Mariupol Which puts them in the same camp as the Russian Army - world renown for waging humanitarian warfare. For a western modern military a 1:5 ratio of combatant to civilian deaths is an unmitigated disaster! You have got one thing right…this will serve as a “role model” in the history books. Right along side the Fall of Carthage.

Oh ya, the US is shaking so hard in its boots that Congress is galvanized...wait a minute....no they are not. We just spent a page or two on how Russia may 1) fall apart gracefully like a dying swan and land gently in the arms of China or 2) fall apart fast like a flaming swan and land in a smoking heap into the arms of China or 3) Explode all over the place and leave little nuclear swanling bits for us to deal with. None of this is "Oh dear, Russia rising." No, that would have happened if Russia had taken Ukraine in two weeks and stared us down across the border to Poland. Then the argument would have been whether or not to support a Ukrainian insurgency - but according to you Ukrainian will is so weak there would have been no point. Instead we got this sh#tshow. Russia is still big enough and irrational enough to cause a lot of @sspain, particularly as a strategic spoiler. However, an invasion of a NATO state is not a realistic scenario right now, perhaps in an alternate timeline. Russia does not have either the economic nor military means to take on an opponent 10 times larger than itself. Hell it could not take on an opponent 1/4 the size of itself. I am really not sure what game you are trying to play here but it wont work. We support Ukraine because it is the right thing to do and aligns with our larger interest. If Ukraine totally falls apart as you continue to argue, then we will deal with it. We dropped an Iron Curtain before, we can do it again. We got Sweden and Finland out of the deal, and Russia is a broken sword for a while yet - even with turncoat Ukrainians you describe [note: after Bucha and the other horrors, I would bet a whole lot against Ukraine cozying up to Russia for about a century or more...if ever].

So now you are doubling down and suggesting that "as soon as Ukraine loses this war it will gleefully turn on its former allies in the West and support a Russian invasion of the Baltics"? Seriously...why are you still on this forum?

Well #1 could be said about any nation or alliance on earth. As to NATO/Russia match up: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293174/nato-russia-military-comparison/ And I am pretty sure this list has not been fully updated to account for Russian losses in this war. If we are going to be acknowledging things well lets at least be consistent. The Russia military is broken as far as great power projection and will remain so for some time to come. Right now it cannot gain ground against a minor regional power who was not supposed to last 2 weeks let alone 2 years. Their professional military are dead in fields and burnt out hulks all over Ukraine right now. The have cobbled together a mixture of mercenaries and conscripts, along with Cold War era equipment and minefields from hell to hold onto where they can manage to. The Russia economy is making weird belching sounds while it is both overheating and compressing. The Russian people are a ticking time bomb as casualty rate climbs to a half-million and the Russian government now has to put out all those widow and VA cheques. The West has got issues...lord knows that is true. But this entire "We are weak and puny" while "Russia is strong and made of resolve" is a gross oversimplification and weak tea. The West does have a sacrifice problem and it is a doozy. In this dimension I am far more concerned about China than Russian competition however. Russia is breaking itself on the worst idea it has had since 1905 and all we had to do was keep shoving money and last-gen technology into Ukraine to do it. If we are collectively too dumb to understand this, then we deserve what happen next. But I do not think we are. I think we will reload and reset. This war might be heading into endgame next year but there will be another game right after it.

And let me remind you that the Russian Army was nowhere near ready to sustain those axis and ground to a halt under their own weight. That overextension resulted in 3 operational collapses that historians will be writing about for the rest of the century. I am really not sure what you are going on about "teamwork and negotiations". I am pretty sure an invasion into Estonia and Latvia, where we currently have NATO Brigades stationed is going to result in a pretty damned quick spool up of existing plans - they have floors in SHAPE plotting this stuff out. Ah, so the Russian Army which is roughly 300k mauled and whose ready force has been shattered over the last 2 years (as cited by most mainstream analysis) is going to "win in Ukraine" and then pivot to a NATO street fight in the Baltics...with what exactly...horses? Russia will need a decade at least to rebuild what it had on 01 Jan 22, assuming it can even do it under enduring sanctions. So you are pushing disinformation about Russian superiority, western inferiority and Ukrainian impending defeat...with friends like these....

You know I cannot tell what you are on about lately. I mean it is likely one of three things: - War fatigue. Despair and defeatism based on a long (ish) war and the setback of last summer. - Some sort of weird goading ploy to make us all go "hey, we are no cowards...Imma gonna write my congressman!" - Or a long lead Russian propaganda play to convince the war is unwinnable to make us all go "hey, this is a waste of time and money...Imma gonna write my congressman!" To answer your question above - based on how we saw invasion of Ukraine go down, those Russian columns will likely be stopped cold by local forces while NATO sorts itself out. The RA can barely string together a platoon attack let alone Div level assaults at this point. A push into Estonia would look like last years May Day parade. The immediate response would be NATO airpower which at this point I am not even sure the RA could deny based on 1) it loses and 2) it is already committed to another war in Ukraine. The idea that Russia has a 2-war military at this point in time is laughable.

This. Article 5 does not immediately mean WW3, but it is a hefty escalation. Poland might not even declare it but NATO would be well within its right to extend the AD umbrella to match the ADIZ, which could extend out to Kyiv. This would essentially become a no-fly zone over western Ukraine.

Oh yes, the west is soooo weak and trembly in the face of mighty Russia. Is it West Bashing Day again already?

Not entirely. So any minefield breach is a set of redundant systems. In mechanical breaching plow tanks are supposed to lead. Ploughs are much harder to take out by mines as they push the mines out of way. Even if a mine has an anti-handling trip on it the explosion blows away from the plough and tank. The only thing that could be a threat is a tilt rod with a delay (or MI delay). Then the roller tank comes in behind the plough to prove the lane. Followed by the bridgehead force to secure the far side. If the plough tank gets taken out, the plan is to push on with the roller. If they both get taken out...well denied breach. Meanwhile an explosive breach can be be conducted with another roller to prove it. One always does two lanes to try and secure one - but frankly in this environment that ratio may be closer to 4:1. Again the problem is less the minefield, believe it or not. It is the fact that units/formations are forced into a very narrow and pre-planned defile. Establish the conditions for a safe transit remains the core problem. Even more so now with flocks of drones buzzing around.

Greaaat. All I really wanted for Xmas was an Article 5 escalation….

Wow. So what I saw: - lead tank with rollers got hit by a mine (front driver side) but that did not look like a standard HE mine. Might have been a shaped charge mine with a delay fuse. Basically a clever mine fuse that waits a second after being triggered by a roller so it goes off under the vehicle. Saw a lot of orange/molten which looks more like a shaped charge. - Rear vehicles got taken out by direct fire systems, likely ATGMs but hard to see. Assuming ones in the middle also got picked off. You can see some sort of heavy direct fire tracer flying past. - Last BMP took a mine strike, pure and simple. Section and crew bailed out. UA dropped the sky on them. First was arty/mortars, then a DPICM. And then a freakin UAS dropping grenades to finish the job. - Last finishing hit on lead tank was an ATGM. [edit: actually I think that may have been an FPV] It actually looks like the RA may have tried smoke but those could also just be other burning vehicles. UA UAS watched the whole damned thing and likely directed the indirect fire, which was incredibly accurate. That entire RA unit, looks like a small combat team (Inf Pl with a couple tanks) was completely wiped out. Maybe a few infantry crawled away but those vehicles are complete write-offs. UA ISR likely picked this attack up after it had been spotted well out by operational ISR. I doubt that attack was stopped by more than a dozen troops on the UA side, maybe less.

The only thing I would add is that Israel has pretty much abandoned any high ground it had on the subject of “equality under the law” in prosecution of this war. Those Palestinians non-combatants current being dozed under are definitely not being afforded “equality of citizenship”, hell, they are not being afforded the basic tenants of universal human rights at this point: https://www.un.org/en/udhrbook/pdf/udhr_booklet_en_web.pdf This war is entirely ethnic-centric to the point it is beginning to resemble an ethnic cleansing. Again allegations are unproven by an international investigation but the circumstantial evidence is becoming overwhelming. For example, someone is going to need to explain to me the difference between an IDF “power target” and Russian military “terror strike”.

It is freakin desperate terror strikes. Russia has been hitting apartment buildings since the beginning of this war in some weird theory of putting pressure on the Ukrainian government (and if anyone wants to take a fun ride head on over to the Israel thread and we can talk about IDF “power targets”). None of these are of any military value. Russia has not been able to put together a coherent deep strike campaign in this war. They almost came close last winter as they tried to suppress Ukrainian electricity but that did not pan out. Unlike Ukraine, Russia has all the strategic manoeuvre room it wants in Ukraine itself. But rather than hitting military infrastructure or something that matters, they just keep lobbing a shrinking supply of deep strike capability at random office buildings. I am sure this all plays well at home, but is any Russian really buying it when the government declares another glorious destruction of everything that matters in Kyiv? The biggest threat of these strikes is western fatigue - “another bunch of missiles…Marge, where is the remote?”

Shocking….considering you were likely walking thru a Haitian neighborhood. https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/9018-ct16_TOR_EthnicOrigin_Haitian.pdf

Good question. Frontage has been mentioned but UAS allow an opponent to gather a 360 view of the battlefield. So smoke would need to cover not only front LOS but sides and rear as well. And it would need a density to block at altitude as well. My sense is that creating a screen of that density is very difficult and so neither side is wasting gun shots on it right now. Edit: And of course there is the dispersion issue. Forces in this war a seeing far greater dispersion than we have seen before. Greater distances between teams means a much higher smoke bill than a concentrated area.

Then we are deep agreement. The most dangerous thing about non-state actors with WMDs is that is affords them the ability to negotiate via hard power at a state level. Of Hamas lit off a single tac nuke over the ocean and declared it had four more pointed at Tel Aviv the entire situation in that war would shift dramatically. States never had a monopoly on violence, that is a modern myth. What they do have a monopoly on is the level of violence. At a direct strategic and existential level only states are capable of these levels. No terror action, no matter how dramatic, has ever been truly existential to the state - maybe the socialist revolutionaries of pre-Communist Russia came close but still not anywhere near what a state is able to do. In fact the only time non-state can approach existential threat levels is when it becomes a pseudo state (eg a civil war). So nuclear weapons are about the fireball but as impactful is what the threat of that fireball can do to the negotiating table.

It is the fact that the entire thing is seen via UAS that is the game changer. The UA picked that small armor column up well back, queued any shooters - ATGM or indirect fires (looks like some DPICM at the end - and then provided any corrections and BDA. That lead Russian tank had a roller on it and of course it was first to go. Anything short of complete air superiority, and I mean from ground level to freakin space, is not going to solve this easily. And even then, as we learned in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, a small two man ATGM team is still damned hard to find. Now they have systems that can reach kms. Cleansing a minefield for tens of kms behind it is simply not practical right now.

Well with the Republicans blocking aid in Congress, not sure what Plan B would be other than to try and tie this thing off. Biden admin isn’t bailing, US Congress looks like it is.

And what would be stopping Warlord of Novosibirks from selling a few nukes to Hamas or ISIL if there is no Russian state? The one thing all states agree on is that non-state actors do not get WMDs - not even NK has broken that one. If Russia falls uncontrollably apart and those weapons fall into non-state hands the entire world has got a major problem.

And I am just fine with that. We have never had a nuclear nation lose centralized control and break up into sub-state structures. The USSR collapsed into pre-existing states and Russia was able to keep control of those weapons, although it was touch and go for a bit. A Russian coup that replaces the current regime with one that can exert central control is also fine. So long as whoever takes over can have clean enough hands for us to live with. A full scale free fall collapse has “worse” written all over it. Take the strategic nukes out of the equation, maybe those can still be gripped. But the tactical, chem and bio weapons are going to much harder to contain. Most likely they would get used in whatever internal conflict/civil war that happens in Russia, however the risk of them falling into any number of non-state hands is simply too damned high. They could be employed in Ukraine or any number of places to effect resulting in tens possibly hundreds of thousands dead. A Russia slow collapse is manageable. They will cough and clutter along as a Chinese satellite and eventually simply dissolve. A fast one could be unmanageable, and I am sorry but not even Ukraine is worth that level of risk - especially when the hurt could come back on Ukraine even worse than they have now. I guess if someone is going to start advocating for a quick Russian collapse then my question is “what is the stabilization plan”? How do you explain away 6000 nuclear weapons? Russia under Putin is contained. I know it does not feel that way but Russia is not in the Baltics or any other NATO nation. Some nuclear empowered warlord might not “get it”.

I would argue the level of spin has gone to new heights in the last couple of decades. Journalism in the past did attempt some level of objectivity but telling people what they want to hear appears to have gone into overdrive with the advent of modern information technology. Journalism is not even really a profession anymore, with standards and norms. It has become millions of megaphones all projecting the world as they see it. We are living in an ocean of easily accessible information. And of course everyone is picking whatever truths they wish. Earth is flat. Nukes are a myth. Mass shootings are all crisis actors. Democracy was stolen. As we try and understand a war in motion trying to “see” it has become even harder.

I honestly have no idea. I do some cross-checking but just about everywhere is biased these days…hell it can bleed into wiki. In the end I try to hear from different sources and kinda trust the overlaps.

Dude…c’mon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGO_Monitor I applaud fact checking but check your checks. I mean the head of this thing worked directly for the Israeli government. : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_M._Steinberg