The_Capt

The other area of improvement is the effect of artillery on armoured vehicles. The current CM engine is not reflecting realities we are seeing in the war in Ukraine, I do believe a revisit is in order on just how vulnerable tanks are to heavy indirect fires. This will have a big impact on CW as the Soviets were an artillery heavy force.

Absolutely. This applies to spotting as well. We have run tests and if the Soviets have ten sets of eyes, they will spot faster than a single set. Soviets are all about mass. One could argue that their doctrine is the high point of the concept in a mechanized form. They were not mindless hordes but they always used mass as their advantage.

Ah well then clearly this is nothing more than a bitter-drive by. You are not really here to help, just resurrect old gripes. As to "old tanker" if you could point that one out? As you can see, I was heavily involved in both of those posts - dbsapps (may he rest in piece) pretty much tried a lot of weird stuff to try and prove "CM spotting is broken!" and really did not get anywhere with it. A lot of us ran extensive tests (again) and found the spotting was pretty much in line with reasonable expectation for the equipment and era - not perfect but there you go. The major difference between you and me is that I am one of three game leads for this title and actually has a chance to get things changed, if it is merited. And I am totally open to this, we have a list of fixes and outstanding tweaks. However, it has to based on solid data, not anecdotal drive bys. Why? Well because the fastest way to get caught in a CM-Karen loop is to correct one way and then be yelled at by the next person that we are doing it wrong and to go the other way. That is a fools errand and incredible waste of time. I personally think that if BFC scrubbed the outliers from the game they would pull the life right out of the simulation. War is outliers, a lot of weird stuff that everyone remembers. They not only enhance the experience, they add to combat friction - war is chaos and a lot of the fun in playing is embracing that. Back on topic. VAB results are a solid representation of what we should be seeing. A T72 did not have the same spotting abilities as an M60 - technical, ergonomic or even training and doctrine. Given even ground an M60 should see a T72 first, they were designed to do this because the Soviets had a lot more T72s.

So I believe the term you are looking for is superfluous: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/superfluous Not “redundant”; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundancy_(linguistics) You are also pivoting on your premise to simply be argumentative, or at least that is how it appears. I thought I was “redundant” because you were all discussing spotting between different vehicles. Now it is buttoned/unbuttoned. This is an old-school Internet forum ploy of niggling as opposed to actually presenting any facts to support your position - attack everyone else’s without any real logical framework. So the OP, sounding like a new guy, came on the forum and declared “CM spotting is broken!” We have seen this post perhaps a thousand times in 20+ years. The post is an emotional one and that is fair. Invariably some old timers jump in and try to help out. VAB just did and posted some controlled test results that show what we have also known for years - CM spotting has pretty reasonable means but wide outliers. The outliers represent the effects of warfare on human cognition and perception. I have done dozens of these tests myself, as have many others. And then we get old timers who just want to grind some old axes and be rude. They are not here to solve anything, nor do they put in the actual work to demonstrate their position, because if they did they would get the same results as VAB. They invariably play Reddit games etc until things peter out. But you are correct, we were talking about unbuttoned…even worse for spotting in some circumstances. You see here in the back room of CM we have more than few combat veterans that know exactly what it is like to have someone try and kill them on a daily basis. If one is unbuttoned, unlike the Sunday driver, you are exposed to the environment and specifically to having severe trauma projected onto your head and upper body. The human reflex to this is to look around quickly…furtively and anxiously. This means that one’s concentration is not great and depending on the situation a spotting outlier is likely going to happen. Ivan missed the big tank in the field because he was too busy looking for the sniper in the trees. So here is what you can do to be helpful beyond simply being rude and attacking everyone in some weird strategy to make your point. Go run a series of controlled tests - different vehicles, buttoned/unbuttoned etc and them come back and we can look at them. I would suggest you start with trying to replicate the conditions the OP posted at the start and see where they take you. Less noise, more work (I should put that on coffee mugs).

Well not really. The point is that spotting in a button vehicle in combat conditions is much harder than the average Sunday driver. As to the two separate vehicles, sure it is anecdotally possible that a T34 will spot where a T72 did not but this is not a reliable data set to draw anything from. We have run a lot of spotting tests Will a lot of vehicles and every time we do, posting excel sheet results we wind up with the same conclusion - CM spotting may not be perfect but it is also pretty accurate and consistent. Then someone comes along and has an experienced where “CM spotting is broken” and we do this all over again. Then people will toss different vehicles into the mix without any context - what was the T34 spotting? Under what conditions? We have had this same discussion about a thousand times in the last 23 years. How is that for redundancy?

Well try this simple, easy and fun experiment. Go get an old oil drum and cut some chunks out of it around the top. Build some of those cardboard periscopes with two mirrors and mount them in the hole. Make sure it is a very small barrel…pump some fuel fumes into the barrel, also get it nice and hot in there. Now stay up for 24 hours straight. Now get into the barrel hire people with rifles to hide out in the woods to kill you. Move your barrel around, trying to keep to low ground and not get killed. Now stop in on place and cover a spot in a field. You can see how you may be a bit distracted. I once had a soldier completely check out because he was watching a tree breathe. Trust is very possible in combat conditions for someone to completely miss something right in front of them. We have got thousands of examples of Blue on Blue kills that were caused exactly by these same mechanisms.

This has been a trend we have been seeing for some time - the growing asymmetry of the Ukrainian battle space. This is just another example. So this attack clearly demonstrates that Ukraine still has effective capability to deny airspace in depth. I suspect that it also remains denied for them so at first glance this may look like no change. However, Ukraine has been slowly armed with PGM stand off weapons - GLSDBs, Storm Shadow etc to add to the arsenal of HIMARs and self loitering munitions. Ukraine is still patched into what is likely the largest and most ambitious C4ISR architecture in the history of warfare, output of which they are able to receive targeting packages in near real time. So What? Ukraines ability to conduct an effective deep strike campaign in support of ground operations has expanded and accelerated. Even though they have to stand off 100kms or more, they can still pickle barrel HVTs on the RA side with what is looking like impunity. For the RA….not so much. Their C4ISR was never world class and they have had it mauled for months now and no one to lean on for replacements. Their AirPower is denied but they do not have a lot of stand-off PGM left as they pissed it away on terror attacks. So we are likely to see the Russia. Air Force lobbing dumber munitions from further back in an attempt to stop a UA ground offensive on the move. This is not good news for the Russian war. A lot of this lies on the feet of the Winter Offensive. This was a strategy of putting out a fire with one’s face. Beyond turning convicts and conscripts into fertilizer it left a lot of hit priced equipment exposed and it got hit. They spent thousands on long range missiles on apartment buildings and shopping malls, and now when they need them they are short. Their logistics is a mess. A lot of people still buy into “Russian Will = steel” well they are definitely going to need it as it may be all they have left at this point.

I am not too hung up on exact frontages. If the UA has 18 fighting Bdes they can do multiple 5km frontages - I think the tweeters point was it is a lot of horse power to drop and if concentrated the RA will crack. Whether or not the UA is able to concentrate forces and conduct an old school manoeuvre break-in, break out offensive relies heavily on just how badly eroded the RA is at the time of the assault. The RA has tac UAS but if they do not have any C2 nodes to plug them into then those fires will not able to respond in time. What is the state of the RA artillery? They have been suffering the dual corrosive effects of gun wear out and UA counter battery for months, not to mention ammo production. We have seen a steady drop in RA effective fires as was noted on multiple separate occasions during their winter offensive. As to RA deep strike, well unless AirPower suddenly comes on line and can overcome Ukrainian air denial the RA’s ability for deep strike will be limited to those Iranian drones and whatever their AF can lob from afar. RA would need to solve for all this before it could effectively start hammering the UA logistics tail. We have been seeing a WW1-style defence dominated battlefield for most of this war. Only through rapid and precise corrosion has one side been able to create significant operational gains. The question is, has the RA burned itself out so badly over the winter that conditions have changed fundamentally? If so, then traditional mech manoeuvre and assault is possible for one side in this - the UA. If not then we will likely see a lot more corrosive strategies in play. Between RA erosion and UA force generation has the battlefield become so asymmetric that we might see some warfare we recognize before the year is out? If the UA really has 18 full brigades (a number I doubt, in fact I believe half that may be more realistic) and the RA is blind, brittle and in shock, then yes we could see some significant breakouts and exploits. But “are we yet?”

Wow, Long Lefty comes out swinging after a long nap. It is called Red Teaming and we have residents who fulfill that function - some with more enthusiasm than others. I think JonS’s point is that the RA is severely understaffed with professionals of any stripe because they all “gots killt” and Russia has not been able to come close to effectively generate replacements.

However it is just about right if you want to drive about 150kms deep, cut a strategic land bridge, hold on the left and exploit on the right so your opponent runs back to defensive positions at a geographic bottleneck. And have enough gas in the tank to do c-moves, plug holes or exploitation.

Just another sign in a very long list - troop quality, “no ammo for Prig”/noted drops in RA indirect fire, falling ATGM stocks, and now faltering AD. I am sure it will be blindingly obvious in hindsight - the RA is eroded and prime for operational collapse. I suspect the UA has been slowly waging corrosive warfare all winter while everyone was watching Bakhmut. Little bites and nibbles add up especially for stuff Russia cannot built back. Given some of the force numbers being tossed around I am beginning to think we might actually see an offensive we recognize in the next while - which will no doubt make the tank nuts happy; however, just remember that it took months of precision deep strike shaping to allow for it. I avoid predictions but I am confident we will at least have a decent chance of understanding what we are looking at when it happens.

Only the Chinese ones because lawyers.

Exactly. So right now the simple gravity drop grenades will make living in rubble a death sentence. Next we will see UAS with horizontal GL capability so even in buildings the little bastards buzzing around will make a defenders life hell. And then someone is going to put a single grenade loitering munition into a building and fly it room to room.

So not to pile on and beat up. I get the position, video after video of Russian saps getting blown up may seem excessive and masturbatory, and for some it is. However, every video gives off information. Some is just noise, or repetitive. While others are gold and constitute key indicators which when confirmed by other observations can point to trends. Trends lead to broader deductions and assessments - this is not a single “keyhole” it is thousands of them. In most keyholes the milk maid is bathing, but then you start to notice the copy of Karl Marx next to the tub. ISW and other OS intelligence analysts are doing exactly what professional military are doing. Looking at all the “war porn” and pulling out trends and indicators that tell a larger story. Oryx is not counting blow up vehicles because people get their jollies seeing blown up Russian tanks. They are doing it because individual losses sum up to larger attrition trend which chart the course of a conflict. This is micro-analysis and has pretty much set this group apart - or did, other groups have caught up. Example: back in the early days of the war the majority of open source assessment (and frankly military as well) were expecting this war to take a predictable course. A rapid overwhelming Russian invasion, shock and collapse of the UA, and a drawn out insurgency against a puppet Ukrainian political regime. It was places like this forum where micro-observation first challenged a lot of macro assumptions. We saw war porn, but it added up to something going very wrong for the RA. In fact it pointed to something even more fundamental shifting in warfare itself. This was not a one-shot deal. Micro-analysis backed up be expertise has kept us well ahead of the pack in all phases of this war. Phase II did not become a protracted set of urban sieges - the RA logistical losses and Ukrainian resistance demonstrated that. Phase III did not see an RA “cauldron” despite their use of WW1 levels of massed fires. Phase IV the UA counter offensive did shock us at its scope but one could see that this was indeed a collapse of the RA operationally on two fronts (one slow, one fast). Phase V - Op Russian Leg Humping: was going nowhere - one need only follow the famous “battle of the T” to see why. And we will use it for Phase VI to try and understand how the UA offensive is unfolding. So while some may only see Russian sods getting blown up. I see: poor basic field craft in poorly constructed trench lines which suggest basic training shortfalls. No effective C-UAS counter measures on the RA side. The evolution of drone warfare throughout. The big fact that Russia has still not been able to create information denial (let alone control) in the battle space. HVT losses within the Russian operational system - C2 nodes, A2AD platforms, engineering and logistics. Failures in RA C4ISR…the list goes on. I do not see this through a single war porn keyhole, I see them through thousands of them. Are these view’s skewed? Definitely. But the fact that we do not see thousand of videos of Russian UAS blowing off UA heads is telling in itself (does anyone think the Russian info sphere would show any restraint in this?). Open source is “open”. In the end it is about filtering noise and trying to hear signal - and again, this is exactly what ISW or any other public analysis platform is doing, along with professional military. We are just doing it in house - this is how the sausage is made. What bakes my noodle is that in my lifetime a large virtual collective is able to conduct this sort of work, and demonstrate accurate assessments (more than just a lucky once or twice) is game changing. In twenty years we will all be old, senile or dead. However an another group of young(ish) folks will do this for another war but they will likely have AI support (we have already seen it here in its infancy). They will have access to even more raw information but will have a better ability to use it - they may very well be directly involved in the prosecution of the war and not just sitting in chairs on the sideline. We are at the beginning of an age of Open Source Warfare - all those keyholes are “pixels” in reality.

This is probably the Most Likely COA on the board right now. It can give a win in Donbas is the RA does not take the bait, and gives a win if it does. Here the air picture could get interesting if the UA is indeed short on air denial (but I am kinda doubting this to be honest). Few other possible COAs: - Screw the plot lines, foreplay and mood lighting - go straight to the money shot. A mechanized heavy assault straight down the middle, hammering everything in depth and deep strike laterally to ensure that reinforcing/c-moves cannot really do much anyway. This one is bold and loud but could yield the big results, which are political gold. It would depend very much on the real shape of the RA. If they are severely beat up as I suspect, they might just be able to do this job up front. I would still expect deep strike/fires all along the line to do the shaping on this one. - Do a rough plan A as Steve outlines but roll in a river crossing to the west. If timed right this could break the RA completely. The RA is weakest south of Kherson by all accounts and a bold assault water xing would be simply breathtaking if they can pull it off. - Corrosive warfare and wait and see where things fall apart for the RA. This good is that this would be the lowest risk for the UA, but 1) resource intensive on ammo and 2) time. Would test patience of the West as we would basically be watching not much happen but strikes all over the place. It would mirror what they did last fall. Where the follow-on hammer lands would be conditions-based - so operationally the UA would need to be pretty agile to exploit it.

Looks to me like his squad was decimated by two fresh PGM strikes on their position - you can see them in the first trench he was in.

Now that is an interesting spin. Perhaps Putin is in a dilemma and had to choose between looking weak externally in order to pander to domestic sentiment. Now why would domestic sentiment see overt massive displays of hard military power in Moscow in a negative light? Could be several reasons, not the least of which a “less is more” spin. I have to say that more and more Russia is all up and about Russia. In many ways it always was but a whole lotta domestic internal focus these last few weeks it seems. Could be churn, could be nothing.

Here I agree, however, why they felt they HAD to is where I think the rub may be. I think they had constraints because of the war but they were likely more closely tied to the internal audience narratives and perception than hard resources. I do think they are relevant as they hint at the constraints and restraints that an opponent finds themselves within. These will likely impact their decision making and options spaces as the war continues and may lead to other indicators and signals. The tough part is trying to see what are real constraints and restraints along with their causes. As to result. Well looks like a pretty subdued outing which could be read as solemn and respectful to those still in combat and those lost. Or it could be read as the gasps of a regime that may be slipping. It will hardly go down in history as a defining moment in this war one way or the other.

I seriously doubt Russia could not drum up a few dozen tanks and/IFVs, get them rolling and a new paint job and drag em to Moscow. I am reticent to read into the lack of these vehicles on display as directly linked to Russian shortages due to losses in the war. The losses Russia have suffered are seen in the erosion of the entire Russian operational system to take credible military capability and project it into combat with trained pers and sustain them there…let alone translate that into something that actually compresses Ukrainian options while expanding their own. Pulling a bunch of tanks out of storage and having them driven down a street is a pretty low bar. And if they had done that, I also would not have been getting worried that somehow it showed Russia still had limitless capacity either. Now your point on tank transporters has teeth but last I checked the Russian rail lines are still working and that seems to be the primary mode of transport for these heavies. We have seen rail cars loaded with kit, so we know they can get some stuff around. Ukraine has not had the freedom of action to attack Russian strategic logistics beyond some errant explosions and “accidents”. Frankly we really don’t need a stubby parade attendance to tell us that Russia is bleeding out militarily, there is evidence of that pretty much all along the line. However, we are talking scale here - 20-30 tanks on a parade are not going to make a difference one way or the other when one is trying to hold onto 800kms of front lines. It is the accumulation of attrition that has led Russia into this mess. Push, pulling, or dragging to Moscow is still likely within capability - hell we have not even seen a T-14 in action so we know the 5 or 6 they built for parades are still out there. I personally think it was spun specifically and deliberately, because that is where Russia seems to be right now. Spinning is about all they have left because their offensive has petered out and they are waiting to see where the hammer falls.

Gawd, I remember when this war for Russia used to about the Ukrainians. This is starting to look like preparations for that time honored core staff principle of war "selection and maintenance of the blame".

Before everyone goes all "LOLZ Russia" there are a few things worth noting: - To go light and wheeled was likely a conscious decision. Even in our wildest fantasies Russia is not out of enough tanks or IFVs to make a decent parade - we have seen trainloads of these. They could have polished up and gotten a couple thousand up and running if they really wanted to. They likely would not have been combat ready but rolling and fresh paint etc. So why did Russia make that conscious decision? Same goes for length of vehicle parade. Plenty of troops marching by, might have wanted to stress software and not the hardware. - T34 is obviously a WW2 throwback and feeds into this bizarre "we are refighting WW2" narrative Putin has been selling. - They definitely sent a strategic message with the missiles. Again those could have just as easily been filled with Styrofoam but the nuclear power message is pretty clear. - And as discussed a few pages back, Putin not only showed up and did the speech, he did the walk. So within a week of a "Ukrainian drone attack on his life", Putin now looks fearless and strong - hence my point that it was either an inside job or a mishandled outside one. - Lotta shots of foreign military partners and allies. Political ones as well. To my eyes this thing looks more careful and nuanced, and to billindc's point - it is about the internal audience. In the middle of a war = don't spend an hour driving a bunch of hardware on a parade that should be in Bakhmut - it could turn off the home front. I also think there is a strong note that Russian power is not in its hardware, but in its people, which is definitely going to resonate internally.

Man that is pretty Rube Goldberg. So how is this going to somehow convince MoD to get back in line, seems a bit stretched? Also, so which is it? “Putin has iron clad control of the military so Prig is boxed in” or “The military keeps pushing out of lines so Putin is using Prig and Wagner as a counter-ploy?” I mean I have heard both narratives on this. If Putin has iron clad control of the military then simply order them to give over the ammo. If he does not have iron clad control of the military getting a merc to publicly shame them could just as easily blow up in faces. Even internally this makes Putin look weak - especially against the military, which may or may not be out of line. Anyone think that Putin is not a master-chess player after all? Maybe he is actually just flailing here trying to keep everyone happy and his control is maybe not as tight as we thought?

Help me out here. How does this make Putin look strong? His dog threw a public temper tantrum and threatened to walk away from a military offensive and take his troops with him. The guy gets pulled into Kremlin and promised whatever he wants, essentially giving into blackmail. Why on earth would Putin “stage” this? The optics are terrible. Like what is the angle here?

Unless he convinces some Army leadership it might be a good idea to throw in with him. The thing with these crappy autocratic klepto-crime syndicate-type governments is that once the boss looks weak the hyenas start coming out of the trees. Now not saying "this is it", but this is what "it" would start to look like. My faith in one potato head dictator able to hold this all together is fading rapidly. In fact that whole Drone-Kremlin thing could just as easily be an inside job to shake the fortress. Now if that was a UA op to widen a bunch of internal cracks; we are talking a ballgame. We have commented that this looks like positioning for endgame, but I am starting to wonder, which game? At some point the dogs in the reservoir start to turn on each other...the only question is when does the water get high enough?