The_Capt

That is brilliantly put. I would only add “…lose too much.” However the longer this drags out I am less sure a soft landing or off-ramp exit for Russia is possible. They might just break themselves on this rock.

I don’t think this is because Russia “won’t” negotiate with their own defeat, it is because they do not know how to. Or at least the current power regime for Putin and the political power architecture he put in place for over 20 years, this is an unsolvable riddle. They painted themselves into a box they cannot escape. To admit defeat or even a negotiated end state is to declare that 1) Russia has no manifest destiny in its Near Abroad, 2) it was driven to a negotiation table by a minor rump state it considered an ersatz province, and 3) Russia is not strong, it is in fact incredibly weak. For Putin and cronies none of this computes and they will never accept it. As you note, even if they are pushed all the way back to the old border, they cannot quit if Putin is still in power. So What? They only way out is looking more and more like a regime change scenario. RA military collapse in the field may do this but there are other mechanisms. Problem will be, which ones do not see the entire thing fall completely apart and spark possible worse?

Really depends. Most AT mines need around 100kg of pressure to detonate. So mud could soften the ground and make that a bit harder. But Tanks and AFVs weigh tons so I would not bet the farm on doing doughnut drag circles in a middle of a minefield because it gets muddy. In fact it could complicate breaching operations for both mechanical and explosive systems. Solutions to minefields are the same as they always were: - breach the minefield - kill all the enemy covering the minefield - breakout Those first two seem to be the problem here as it looks like one has to spend a lot more time on the second before you can do the first.

It’s Chernobyl - no one is going to deliver bad news to the boss, who just blew a plane load of opponents out of the sky, so they try to ignore it. The human mind is fantastic at rationalization and that is what we are likely seeing here. There was no mass panic last Fall (correct me if I am wrong), it was written off as an “operational adjustment” of the lines. There wasn’t even a panic the previous spring when the entire Northern front collapsed. This is not likely stolid Russian steel will, it is simply denial. My sense is Russian forces could be dog paddling in the Azov Sea and Russian senior military and political leadership would frame it as a “reverse amphibious assault” to draw the UA into a trap. This is not good news in reality because it is signalling that Russia is not negotiating with its own defeat. There appears to simply be no outcome in their reality where they do not win. This really means there will likely need to be a complete collapse of the current political power system for this war to end - of course many were saying this already. The tricky part is quickly inserting a new political system into place to replace the old one before things unravel. It has happened before in the 90s, although was pretty dicey at times.

The one weapon on the battlefield that never runs out of ammo.

But gunners are right next to logisticians in the combined arms pecking order, unlike loggies they have to go forward for showers. But I supposed gunners are not a race, more a creed really.

Wow, way to make it all about you. Pretty sure people had the same complaint about the Roman Empire.

Steve, question on process. What latitude does the President as Commander-and-Chief have to take extant defence funding and shift it over to military aid? I have seen us play that shell game during Afghanistan (it is how we got the Leo 2s).

Well at least not yet. The key advantage of remote unmanned is the lack of danger for the operator. Doing stuff up close and personal turns every German tank into a Tiger and every 20 bad guys into a Division. You definitely need to get up close and personal to take prisoners, take physical intel/SSE and get the human sense of what is going on at ground level. However, as we have seen in this war, everyone is leading with unmanned to give an objective birds eye and then sends in close recon - hopefully after arty has killed a bunch of enemy caught by UAS. Finally, UAS are just one component of a massive ISR architecture at play in Ukraine right now. From boots and eyeballs in the dirt to space. Focusing on a single capability as the "reason" for anything is the hallmark of someone who really does not understand the business. Like you say could very well be taken out of context.

In the circles I swim in this is definitely not the sentiment. A lot of freaking out on the impact unmanned is having, and will continue to have but no one is saying "Hey you know what? Dial back on the UAS and send more people forward." In this day and age any field commander that decided to do recce by troops and keep the UAS parked is not long for command (and maybe life given the circumstances). Of course if one does not have UAS or can't substitute other systems like GSR you might be forced to go old school but the idea of send the guys forward to poke bushes as the primary mode of recon in this environment is absurd.

Its right up there with "be more manoeuvre-y!" and use mission command. We in western militaries have not been in a fight like this since maybe Korea. One cannot manoeuvre across obstacle belts kms deep. This is a straight up grudge attritional match until breakthrough. I am sure the UA has made mistakes but this continual stream of "well if you just did it like us" nonsense is both arrogant and completely disconnected from realities they are facing on the ground. UAS are integral to recon and SA building now. This would be like advocating to "rely on radios less" in this environment. The second I read that I thought that this was either some very oblivious US government hack, or a misinformation campaign.

That rings true. Not sure if every Ukrainian soldier receiving training feels this way but there is some truth to what this is saying. Last time we trained for this sort of war would have been in the early 90s. Last time anyone saw one like it would have been mid-late 90s. Most western troops of the last 20 years are “unshelled” by this wars standards. The Ukrainian recruits really need the old Cold War training we used to do but there are damned few left in service who remember it. I am pretty sure western troops are swinging their training back towards peer conventional conflict but it is largely theoretical for western forces at this point.

Like to see what twit suggested “stop using UAS so much”. Right, much better to send men forward to die while being spotted by the other sides UAS.

This is what happens when I leave you guys unsupervised. We were moving most of Aug…god I hate moving.

Damn is this thread still going strong? A real tactics and warfare thread? The anti-Peng? Well done guys.

You shut your mouth! Super sexy…almost too sexy. All covered in dirt and bad manners.

Poor Priggy - too crazy for Coup Town, too much coup in him for Crazy Town. Like a falling star he fell to earth after shining ever so brightly, and having a wing blown off. My sense is that although popular in some circles, I don't think he is going to become the martyr for a movement. Unless said movement is already well on its way and simply wants to slap his mug on the T-shirts. Keep aiming for the bushes Priggy, and say hi to Lucifer for us all.

Looking more and more like Tokmak is the overall operational objective for this years offensive.

This is where the “it will be fine camp” are sucking and blowing at the same time. “All the bad people will leave back to Russia, the locals will do nothing but we will need to hunt down collaborators before they try to get us killed again”. I do not disagree with you or Haiduk in the least. The stakes here are very high. Collaborators can become the skeleton of an insurgency and they will try and kill you. The problem is finding them without alienating or pushing larger groups of the population into a situation where they see violence as the only way out. It takes precision. These situations always go badly. Neighbours snitch before they can be snitched on. People get mis-identified. People take the law into their own hands. All of that can turn very ugly very quickly. This will take a masterful steady hand and an intelligence architecture for the ages. It may take outside the box thinking like amnesty for low low level offenders to catch the big fish. Or accepting a few big fish to get the rest.

I cannot express enough that I hope you are right. And I totally respect your identity and citizenship. If there is any justice left in the world Crimea will be liberated - let me be clear on all of that. It is human: error, fear, biases, ignorance, hatred and greed that I point out as major concerns on post conflict…and not just for the Ukrainians themselves. The conditions for things going badly and organized resistance/insurgency exist in Crimea and the Donbas. They did before the 2014, they do now. A major weakness of this thread is to put Ukrainians on an unfair pedestal. The defence and retaking of their homeland is one for the history books but they are still human beings and are just as capable of losing the post-conflict bubble as anyone else. The points of failure have already been outlined. Loss of property, deportation, revenge killings/swift justice, collaborators. All of that will be done within a very large population overseen by a Ukrainian military who is very pissed off. An idea would be to bring in international security forces to assist but that comes with its own issues. Regardless, I think this topic has been flogged enough. I have provided my analysis and assessment, everyone can take it or leave it as they wish. Hopefully it does get people thinking about post-war and the challenges we are likely going to face.

Well as Haiduk has already mentioned, revenge killing do happen and are very likely to continue. Plus we are comparing areas that were occupied for about 6 months to a region that has been under Russian rule for nearly a decade - untangling that mess is going to pretty brutal. I honestly hope and expect that official government process will be done in accordance with the law but these are slippery slopes for all the reasons our friends in Ukraine have noted. Finding “collaborators” on the scope and scale of the Crimea or entire Donbas is going to be messy no doubt about it. If that messy starts to look like oppression we are back to feeding fuel into resistance. I honestly do not understand what it is about Westerners and their firm belief that rule of law will triumph. We keep running headlong into situations completely missing the fact that war and conflict are deeply personal and build resentment that last generations. How many interventions where we don’t get the bloody parades or locals running into our arms do we need to experience? How many crappy civil wars that are never really settled and conditions for re-emergence are always just under the surface do we need to see? War is not about military units firing at each other and the rules we try to throw over that. It is about entire societies killing each other. It is deeply personal and tends to unravel the best intentions.

Now there is something I never thought to ask, what is the winter warfare capability of the UA right now?

That statement alone sends shiver up the spine. And I know you damn well mean it, you have every right to…but, shivers.

Pretty good summation but there are other points on the spectrum. We could see levels of fragmentation as power players see opportunity of risk as things unravel. Hanging the entire thing on Russian (or any other human collective) apathy is a gross oversimplification of the situation in my opinion. People live in bubbles while the rest of the world spins around them. They will take an enormous amount of repression and chaos, so long as their bed is not burning when they try to sleep at night. They can be sheep…right up to the point they are not. No one can predict when or where that point will be. I spent a lot of time with political soothsayers and witch doctors in 2014 and no one predicted the Arab Spring. The conditions for a mass movement had been around for years, decades. Many were right in it being inevitable, but when and where matter a lot, and no one was able to predict that. Same goes for Russia. The conditions will be present (are present) within its current society for a tipping point towards serious collapse. Will a massive loss in Ukraine do it? I personally do not believe anyone who says definitively in either direction. In reality it is a possible outcome, probably the most dangerous. So what? Well you plan for it and be ready to try and head it off. You mitigate and try and stay ahead of that reality but at the same time do not 1) let it hijack all your thinking or 2) dismiss it out of hand because it is “too hard”. This is strategy, threading needles and keeping diametrically opposed outcomes in balance while they try to fly apart.

Because these things are always messy as hell. Trying to find the “good ones” in these sorts of situations is always messy. Totally hypothetical, what if he claims to have lived in Crimea before 2014 but can’t prove it? Once stuff starts blowing up and burning you could have thousands in this position. And then there are Russians who try and fake their way into Crimea (especially if Russia is in such a bad state and they want to keep their homes), what proof will they have and how does one spot the fakes? This is before trying to figure out who the 15% of the population prior to 2014 who were on the Russian agenda. “All deals are legally void”, is exactly what some are going to see as repression “ie taking my house”, especially if how people are selected as “good” or “bad” is flawed, and it will be. People always start to turn on each other when it gets like this. Post conflict is almost always one of the toughest stages to manage. Why? Because we end up trying to fix human micro-social space with bureaucracy and policy. Re-integration has been done well but more likely it will be messy, “how messy?” remains the core question. There will need to be an entire DDR effort along with massive reconstruction. When do the Donbas and Crimea get to vote again? You are not going to figure out good from bad “Crimeans” over a weekend.