The_Capt

Oh goody, that kid showed up. Russia is “still there” because they dug in behind minefields and won’t leave, hardly the high water mark of military performance. The UA defeated the initial invasion. Created conditions for a Russian operational collapse, twice. And are now working on a third. Any chance you could be curious somewhere else if the sum total of your contribution is questionable, incited claims and pointing out that Jesus wasn’t really born on 25 Dec? Asking for a friend.

I am willing to bet half the guys on this forum have, or had clearances. Let's just all agree to not go there in here.

After that last US leak on Reddit I would like to say that professionals know better, but there we go. If you know "stuff" one does not go around saying "I know stuff but can't tell you"...you just don't say anything. Simply saying you have access in a unsecure open forum is risky. Could be window dressing, or maybe the young fella just doesn't know better.

Right?! Neither nation is near a human capacity threshold in this war, so the hands flapping is premature. This is now a force generation and sustainment fight...and I like Ukraine's odds.

Ugh, this whole discussion line is starting to sound like info-nihilism, "we can't possible get any truth." Which is almost always followed up by "so I will insert my own."

Too early. That is a really tough one without being inside the UA staff and knowing the details. Of course there was political pressure, we were talking about a UA offensive months before it happened. But there were also military factors. How long do you let the RA dig in? How long to replace losses from their failed winter offensives? What was the force generation trajectory for UA reinforcements? How are sustainment and enablers holding up? My guess is that 1) the UA knew the RA was pretty badly mauled, 2) was creating a Putin line of defence along their most likely axis of advance, and 3) they were in about as good a shape as they were going to get. Alternatively, perhaps the UA knew the offensive would take much longer to yield results and wanted to get to those benchmarks before Winter. The UA tried a western style larger push at the beginning and they all got blunted pretty badly. So they switched to Kherson style small bites, which also would have been programmed into any options analysis. Finally, the rules of war are all up in the air. I am a broken record on that point. Take any metrics you may have about how war is supposed to work and throw them out the window. We have never had a war operationally like this one since Iran-Iraq in the 80s. We have not had one strategically since Korea. We did learn that minefields, ATGMs and stand-off tac aviation still work for the RA, even if their arty has been degraded. It appears that even basic tac ISR is working for the RA in holding a line. The RA are leaning on what they are good at…lots of troops dug in. What is surprising is RA morale. How on earth they are holding it together after last winter is beyond me - I guess that Russian steel is still out there. They have also managed to keep an operational system floating after horrendous losses. As we discussed, the bar is much lower on defence, but still… So here we are, waiting for something to happen. Or not, which is still something. Can the RA still break? Definitely. Can the UA fail and lose initiative? Definitely. Is you favourite pet platform going to make a difference, probably not, but we should probably keep pushing it anyway.

Not entirely disagreeing with your economic points but before we go down the “Donbas and Crimea are the economic heartland of Ukraine”…they aren’t: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ukrainian_subdivisions_by_GDP_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ukrainian_subdivisions_by_GRP As for coal…well it was kinda on the way out anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_Ukraine As for the rest, see Reconstruction. Winning will mean rebuilding and re-wiring Ukrainian industries. Changing transportation of goods towards the west and that will take new infrastructure. We can prop Ukraine up but the end goal is self-sustainment. But your point is not lost. This war did no good things for the Ukrainian economy.

Gotta have a big globe with a bar inside it. Turkey Thursdays. And on Fri we pay hobos to fight each other for nickels.

The RA has clearly run out of grease.

Hey look, peace on Ukraine needs support. Entirely onboard with that for so many good reasons. Right now I am actually more concerned with the reconstruction support than warfighting. However, militarily Ukraine is not on the raggedy edge...they are freakin attacking and sustaining that offensive for months. This is not a sign of a military machine that is going to collapse next Tues. If the UA switched to defence, they could hold out for years on very little. Especially considering that Russia is a complete mess militarily. Does anyone honestly think the RA could somehow re-invade the North and take Kyiv at this point? US funding levels or no? In fact if they tried, it would probably re-activate US support. US support is the Achilles heel of Ukraine offensive war effort. The UA held off the best the RA had back in Mar 22 with a fraction, of a fraction of what they have been given to date. The only thing that could seriously risk the UA competitive military advantage is US C4ISR support and the US president would have to actively order that shut off. Even that might not do it as Ukraine has built their own JADC2 architecture and still has other support coming in from other nations. As to defence of Ukraine, you do know that landmines work for Ukrainians too? They could create murder fields with what they already have, even if the RA could still string together an operational offensive. Now if we do not fund Ukrainian reconstruction, we are totally screwed as we will definitely lose what happens next. If we fail to support Ukraine to the point they cannot even defend themselves, well then this entire discussion is a moot point because the political landscape will have changed fundamentally, and not just in the US. Should we support Ukraine to the hilt, absolutely. But if the party does end, it does not mean Russia "won" by any stretch. This is the major pitfall of the "Victory means the pre-2014 border or nothing" narrative. No, victory through denial works pretty well too, especially if it means you get to stay an independent nation. We not only need to be ready to accept that but then double down and make sure Ukraine can rebuild itself to the point where its defence is not reliant on western political whims.

Guys, gotta get out of your own heads. Russian strategic aims: - Full subjugation of Ukraine, pulling it in as a puppet state a la Belarus. - Division and weakening of NATO in order to give breathing room within Russia sphere - A united greater Russia under a new Czar I don't care if Poppy Orange gets in and cuts off the taps - that up there is not going to happen without the entire world abandoning Ukraine, and whole lot more to be honest. Could we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Sure, but it is a reach to see things failing that badly. Even if we do abandon Ukraine, it is a country of 44 million and really...really...p$ssed off right now. They will dig in and fight like badgers because they have seen what the alternative looks like. After Bucha et al, Ukraine is never going to embrace Russia. NATO has secured unity and defence spending for at least a couple decades because now there is a threat that isn't a few idiots in white Toyotas in countries we didn't even know existed. And Russia is a mess, and will likely remain one. There will be no western normalization with Russia after this, or if there is, shame on us. US Pol is not the driving factor in Russia achieving its strategic objectives (stated or unstated) in this war. It is a driving factor in how badly they lose it.

Funny you should mention it...35 years as a military officer; next 35 as a failing hack fiction writer (and part time game design guy)...that is the plan.

Oh my someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. I was more playfully talking about the pearl clutching and hand wringing "the half empty glass is breaking!!" sentiment, which appears to be spreading. Long list of posts with that tone have your name at the top going way back, hence why I "pulled you in"...and you never disappoint! So we have moved from the monolithic invincible Russia specter, to "how long can Ukraine possibly hold out?!" As long as they want/need/have/can? I sense you, and many others, are really struggling with the unknowns in all this. Welcome to war. It is a collision of certainties that create massive uncertainty. The RA is a "shattered shell" of what we feared on 21 Feb 23 - you can debate that one all day but it is done. It will take a decade or more to rebuild what they were shooting for back in the 10s. They broke it all over Ukraine last year; talk about bad decisions. But they can Defend - as the old Prussian also said, that part is easier, but it does not get the business done. So how long can Ukraine "last" really depends on what they are doing. Can they freeze this conflict in place - yeuup, the RA suicide-fest last winter proved that one. Can they re-take all of former Ukraine...well, jury is still out. Can, as a nation, they sustain a war longer than Russia? Well we will see. Are we talking low-intensity "we are all dug in and raiding now and again"? Sure. Are we talking insanely high intensity combat - well probably not, no one really can. My main point is that just because you can't get answers you want does not automatically mean the worst is happening. Based on what I can see (not imagine I am seeing, like fully functioning Russian rail systems pouring thousands of tons of supplies onto fat happy Russian defenders), the West is committed through the Winter at least. If Ukraine can pull off a breakthrough and regain some momentum, they have a good chance at some serious gains- as we have seen in this war, no one cracks like the RA. If no breakthroughs happen and all we get is very expensive leg humping, then I expect some difficult political conversations are on the table late-Winter, early-Spring. Maybe we call it where it stands and everyone wins/loses. Putin can claim the "greatest Russian victory since Bagration" as he retains an extra 6% of now-blasted and mined wasteland, that cost them 100k lives. Russia can go back and lick its wounds while trying to figure out who to fend off NATO, who scored Finland and Sweden out of this deal - Russia got a pretty weak China...and the big stuffy animal filled with asbestos that is Iran. Oh and lets not forget the BFF of North Korea - like being best friends with that weird kid who tortures bugs at recess while touching himself, and everyone tries not to notice. Ukraine gets to stay Ukraine, starts laying mines - hey look they can do it too! And we wind up with a Korean solution. Maybe Ukraine does not even get to enter into NATO or EU, but money and alliances will be created because containing Russia matters now - South Korea made it work pretty well and their capital is under gun range of one of the craziest MFs since his Dad. https://datacommons.org/place/country/KOR/?utm_medium=explore&mprop=amount&popt=EconomicActivity&cpv=activitySource,GrossDomesticProduction&hl=en To my mind, that is about as bad it will get, at least as things stand right now. If the West - especially Europe, cuts Ukraine lose entirely, then this whole show was a complete waste of time as Ukraine will not be able to survive for long without a massive reconstruction/investment effort - we let that happen, well we deserve what happens next. I know this is not the war you ordered, sir, but it is the one we got.

You and LongLeftt should start a club. In other news the RA war machine is pretty much a shattered shell of what it was before the war. Ukraine has regained most of the territory taken at the outset of this war - right now Russia holds about 6% more of Ukraine then it essentially controlled on 21 Feb 22, and back then what it held was not getting shelacked by Storm Shadows. Aid continues to flow, although there are tremors - that part is factual. The UA currently has the operational initiative and continues grinding assaults while RA - wanna talk about horrendous losses. A lot of people in the West treat war like they are ordering dinner: “An attritional war? That is not what I ordered! Waiter!” But this one is what it is. Right now the real question is whether or not the RA can be forced to buckle again like it did at Kherson and Kharkiv (everyone forgets that part). UA keeps trying and we will have to see. Odds of Russia achieving its strategic aims of this war remain at zero. A realistic Ukrainian outcome remains undefined as we seem to swing wildly between “Every Russian out of every inch, forever…or we’ve lost” and something short of that we can live with. That “something” is what all the dying is about I suspect. So “yes with an if” would be the short answer to the original question from my point of view. “No with a but” seems to be the other.

I was a younger more energetic man then. Now I just want to sit in my chair.

Deep breaths, my friend. Going to get worse before it gets better.

See my post above. The RA being forced onto the Defensive is not magically "happening" either. I suspect the UA is hitting their logistics, but it is complicated.

Well you can and you can't. The UA definitely choked out the RA at Kharkiv and Kherson last year. To the point they basically collapsed. You can create so much friction that the operational system starts to fail. But it very much matters what that operational system is doing. So why is it not working now? Well first off we really do not know if it is working or not. We have seen heavy attrition of RA guns, I am going to assume ammo is getting hit too. RA armor is nearly non-existent - re: reports of the RA using them as static pillbox guns. And the RA is no where near demonstrated any operational offensive capability - that did not "just happen either". I suspect a lot of the logistics attrition is keeping Russia on the defensive right now. As to Defence, well the tyranny of force multiplication appear to be favoring the RA right now. The one mistake the UA made, or maybe it was a forced error, was they let the RA have the initiative back last winter. RA made a lot of noise at Bakhmut while Priggy - now singing with the Devils Choir - sent wave after wave of humans at the problem. Meanwhile everyone was "LOLZing" RA dragons teeth and obstacles in the center - silly Russians. Well it looks like they took that time and mined everything that couldn't run away. Force multiplication essentially changes the force ratios by virtue of offsets. So the UA still needs to 3:1 (for arguments sake, let's not go down that road again) but the RA "1" is in reality fewer people and more mines. Mines don't need breakfast, or medics, or letters from home - pretty stoic bunch. This is what minefields and obstacles really do. They create battlefield friction that changes the force-space equations between the attacker and defender. And it would appear the RA has done this fairly successfully. It also changes the logistical requirements so the RA does not really need trainloads and trainloads of supplies. They likely stockpiled too while everyone was making fun of their obstacles. So choking out a small logistical requirement over a big piece of ground is pretty hard. We don't see it but the UA has likely hammered the rail lines, transport nodes and the like. But we are talking a few trucks to give hard rations and a bit of ammo to a bunch of poor losers living in holes, who are likely already standing on ammo crates. So where do you go from here. Well you keep going forward and hope the Russians run out of mines because mines don't move yet. You also hope they run out of people to watch over those mines...very hard as precision is cutting both ways. This is all attritional. We are observing a massive experiment in corrosive warfare - are we a the limit of what it can do at this point in time? Or you open up a new offensive somewhere else where the RA is totally unprepared for it.

I never really bought into this in its entirety to be honest. Iran is all death to the West and Great Satan. While trying to create offset against Saudi Arabia and hold their own guts in. Russia is...well who knows what Russia really wants? Some weird sort of mash up between Czarist Empire and the USSR so they can be free to flex in their Near Abroad whenever the whim takes them. China is pretty complicated. A lot of noise coming out of warhawk circles in the US that this entire thing is existential - I am not so sure. China wants a New Deal, that much is clear, but it also likes western business/investment. I am not convinced they want to break the West so much as bend it. I do not think we are at "in order for us to survive, you cannot" situation with China. They are still everyone's second largest trading partner. Lot's of room for this whole intense negotiation/competition to go sideways but we are not there yet. I have heard New Cold War for some time now, and even bought off on elements of it. But I am not sure what we are heading into will look like that. I think it will look much more like late 19th and early 20th century pre-WW1 Europe...but with nukes, and internet...cause we weren't crazy enough yet.

At this point I am not really trusting either narrative - “Russia did it”, “Ukraine did it”. The idea Ukraine could somehow ship weapons to Hamas is laughable. But this could also be a play by Kyiv to pin this whole thing on Russia to garner support. Yeesh, can’t we just do one war at a time?

Makes the obstacle very vulnerable to explosive breaching. However I do not think the UA has that capability. Not sure it would work though as line charge systems can be bulky and highly visible. Did Perun mention that this appears to be an odd evolution in the concept of force multipliers? The UA are doing force multiplication via C4ISR and precision. While Russia is dumping dumb massed minefields everywhere. The force multipliers are in competition with each other. Biggest advantage for the UA is that their system can move. Biggest for RA is that it is very cheap.

Wanted to come back to this one. This is not artillery clearing a minefield. It is a minefield clearing a minefield. The mines are too close together and the detonation pressure from one is setting off another. Clearly the RA is in a “never too many mines” mood.

It this kinda goofing (the cyber thing) that tells me that there was no master plan- bunch of come latelies trying to cash in on news cycle. Hamas went and made a mess because they are Hamas and want attention - and they are going to get it. As dramatic as the action was, it was not decisive. Israel has not lost strategic option space, they have gained it. Typical Palestinian strategy of crushing enemies by burning your own house down. As to the war in Ukraine, I mean sure there could be secondary or tertiary overlaps but any “master plan” by Russia is laughable considering how badly they screwed up in Ukraine. As you note they may have some GRU goons pretending to be players but that entire region is like holding a skunk with a firecracker up its *** in the manipulation department. Humans abhor uncertainty - most humans anyway - and we tend to invent patterns to try and make sense of it all. Sometimes it is just another crappy day in the Middle East. As to impact on this war, well I suspect they will be treated as separate issues for awhile but politics are the Playing Fields of Angry Ignorance at the best of times, so we will have to see.

Russia really has been playing both sides down there. They were pretty “ok” with Israel too, a lot of people with Russian family roots in Israel - ironic, they left because life was so crappy in Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel–Russia_relations There is also the whole “anti-Nazi” thing. But at the same time Russia has sided with al-Assad in Syria and played footsie with Hamas and others aligned with Iran. It seems pretty complicated. I honestly think there is daylight between these two wars on the Russian side of the equation. It will likely have an impact on the Westerd side but I am betting it was a surprise to Russia and they are basically going to try and stay neutral. Hamas is a tiny militant group by conventional warfare standards - something like 40,000 at the upper end. Their capabilities are not zero but no AirPower or Seapower. They are very likely to loom at the lessons of Denial in Ukraine and types to apply them but it is a very different dynamic. I mean the world is a crazy place so if hard evidence linking this latest Hamas action directly comes it will be surprising - given Russian history of strategy-stupid. But I really do not expect it. Iran, definitely. That is the shoe to drop on this one. Gaza is screwed. Ground invasion and house cleaning is almost guaranteed. Hell, Israel might go so far as forced deportation but then Egypt gets weird. But if Israel decides to make an a example with Iran we could see a repeat of something like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera Gonna need a bigger forum if that happens.