LongLeftFlank

I like him too, but SecretSqrl has also been caught out in some Chuck Pfarrer/Igor Sushko level wayyyy-over-the-skis exaggerations in the past, so all his claims, including retweets, should be taken with significant salt. That said, his map analysis is pretty good, which I think is his mil background. Mind you, it would be nice if the map grogs in general could use smaller icons for Bn or Bn-strength formations, to distinguish them from parent formations, and perhaps 'blur' or dotted outline deployments that are only rumoured. ...Otherwise, all these icons are just eye candy (it's probably too much to expect actual unit frontages from OSINT sources given Opsec), if not downright misleading as to relative force strengths (hmm, there seem to be more little red boxes than blue ones, therefore....?) P.S. I miss our own @Grigb's mapwork from last fall. That was quite outstanding, giving the terrain context for the movements and positions. Shout out, brother, let us know you're OK?

...It'll buff right out

For peaceful purposes only! There's also the classic "Breakfast Bazooka / Between Meal Mortar" at 4:15 of this longer video. They say you never hear the sugared snack with your name on it...

There is also this.... But they bought prosperity / Down at the Armoury / We're arming for peace, m'boys / Between the wars

1. So if I follow the last few dozen pages correctly, this frozen front with no cease-fire would require both sides to fortify, man and sustain a 'high hazard' drone-and-arty-vulnerable zone of 25-30kms (?) on each side of line (i.e. mine belts?), extending along some 850 (?) km of front 2. (that excludes Belarus, which btw has got to be in even worse economic condition than Russia or Ukraine, assuming the EU has truly closed its borders to 'Belarusian octopus') 3. Note my stress on 'sustain.' Over 1/3 of that extended front is in the southern zone from Donetsk city to the Dnipr mouth. The river and its adjoining bayou areas has proven vulnerable to raiding, so must be fully manned, including artillery support. 4. With the Ukies now gaining proficiency with ATACMS and other long range precision weapons, including drones, the very finite supply lines sustaining this, ahem, Russian 'Long Left Flank'© become more vulnerable to systematic interdiction and destruction than ever. 5. Supply lines by their nature cannot hunker down. They must move, continually and, in the case of the land corridor, predictably. And in a world where movement carries increasingly high hazard, that's an asymetry I would expect the UA to feast upon richly. ...I would expect at minimum the Perekop isthmus to be shut down. Fix a bridge, knocked down again next day, ad infinitum. Or more likely, the bridging equipment itself gets targeted. 6. In conclusion, we could see a slow motion winter campaign, where we watch Adviivka be very slowly (and expensively) eaten away Bakhmut-style, but where simply holding the Surovikin line saps a majority of Russia's logistics train. Does this win the war? Nope, unless Russia finally decides it isn't worth it. Does it create temporary 'bubbles' that UA land forces can work within? that can only be countered with extravagant RU efforts from bases far away (e.g. air and helos, plus exhausted 'quasi-VDV' kampfgruppen scurrying about and getting cluster bombed -- you know, that movement is hazardous thing). We shall see, I suppose. P.S. Does the Russian defensive conundrum on the southern front start to resemble the Wehrmacht's situation in early 1944, with 'denuded fronts', PZ/SS fire brigades and all that?

Get an inner board, you two.

....but when the vatniks strap a mine to its back, they better make sure they trained it to seek (giant Swiss) cheese under a vehicle running gasoline, not diesel.

Is that a kid-sized toy rifle used for 'training' Little Oktobrists or sumfink? (the colour leads me to suspect it might be) Because if not, then stick that beauty on a skewer and roast it rather than rely on the logistics chain.

For reasons that should be readily evident, no articles on this topic can be published without some form of obligatory confession of faith ("The fascist attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was an act of perfidy"), but that said, this piece has some good hard info on the many human failures that took place at Bibi's overengineered BarLev line, which turned out to have enough holes to literally drive a truck through.... It also reflects some of @Battlefront.comSteve's and @The_Capt's (and others') commentary on modern warfare over on the UKR megathread (which you guys are *really* missing out on if you think it's all tribal meming, gore-pr0n and sh**posting). https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/hard-lessons-from-israels-high-tech We moderns have come to misperceive how things work, misplace our faith in systems, and often accidentally make ourselves more rather than less vulnerable to chaos.... “Because we don’t cross the fence, the other side has become strategically stronger,” as they’d been handed operational initiative." [IDF Col Vach, 2019]... Col. John Boyd, who helped develop modern maneuver warfare (and is maybe best known for inventing the “OODA Loop”) [preached]: “People, ideas, machines – in that order!”.... Boyd had seen for himself the perils of overreliance on Big Brain tech wizardry in Vietnam.... While technologies can certainly offer up solutions to discrete problems, these are often fragile solutions....These over-engineered solutions to guarding the border were not cost effective, instead representing an opportunity cost that could have been better spent elsewhere – like on maintaining a much greater number of disciplined, sharp-eyed men with guns. Etc.

Request to smoke grogs: does anyone here know what the most persistent human generated smokescreen is made of? It would seem to be titanium tetrachloride, favoured by warships, which "hydrolyzes readily on contact with moist air, producing thick [and low lying] white smoke consisting of droplets of hydrochloric acid and particles of titanium oxychloride." As you'd expect though, "fumes are irritating and unpleasant to breathe", which would not make it a good choice for masking friendlies from drones for long periods. Not sure that there is a 'pleasant to breathe' smoke source, beyond natural morning fogs. https://academic-accelerator.com/encyclopedia/smoke-screen This (AI-generated?) aggregator source is rather detailed, except.... One 50 gallon drum of fog oil can cover 60 miles (97 km) of land in 15 minutes. This statement is quite obviously rubbish, which unfortunately calls into question the other information collected there, as does the numerous grammar errors and sentence fragments. ...But it's still an important question, not a panacea of course, but one possible tool to create a short-lived 'bubble' around a tactical movement.

Crikey, that's another 10 Ivans KIA (or permanently maimed if they can somehow get casevac) right there. How long can they keep this up? 1. More unrest in the ranks, in spite of very real and lethal measures being applied to refuseniks. ChrisO thread here https://nitter.net/ChrisO_wiki/status/1717140898411114938#m Hundreds of Russian soldiers may have mutinied in recent weeks as the Russian army accumulates huge losses in offensives in several regions of Ukraine. At least 173 men are reported to have been detained for refusing orders, and this may be just the tip of the iceberg. (Yet) another thread on dire troop conditions here: https://nitter.net/ChrisO_wiki/status/1716556974572114210#m 14/ "Literally three days later, we were left with nine people out of 20, the rest were all 300s [wounded]. Despite the fact that we have been mobilised for more than a year, this does not mean that we have adequate combat training for assaults 33/ "If we fight like this, a lot of people will die ... There were dead anti-aircraft gunners in my anti-tank platoon. Commanders don't want to waste time on training – they just take them and throw them into the breach without any consideration **** 2. Tatarigami's latest, commenting on the (futile) Russian offensive that he admits he did not predict, simply because it made no sense.... From thread comments (by Tatarigami): It seems like they moved more troops from other areas, and are quite determined to continue despite losses, which reeks of political decision. I am not ready to say yet, but it seems like it might roll all the way to this winter, just in a different way. Useful map, showing scale.

When you put your hand in a bunch of goo that a moment before was your best friend's face... you'll know what to do. Yeah, first step back awkwardly from the mess and then step gingerly over the poor bastard. P.S. Ex USSF operator TTG, who has been carrying on the Turcopolier blog since the passing of Col Pat Lang (RIP sir!), had an interesting post on the North Korean ammo resupply and the artillery balance generally https://turcopolier.com/comparative-ammunition-expenditures/ In addition to the poor Russian logistics system as the “HerrDr8” analyst notes, barrel wear has had a massive effect on the Russian rate of fire. Given the initial fire rates, the Russians must have been going through barrels at an astronomical rate. Overhead imagery of storage lots of self-propelled artillery shows the barrels have been removed from the majority of pieces still in those lots. Counter-battery artillery and missile strikes and ubiquitous drone strikes have dramatically reduced both the artillery pieces available and the ammunition for those pieces in the last few months.

I was originally gonna be boring and paste 'When the Tigers broke free', but you know what, you, Roger Waters! This stunner will be vastly more welcome to serenade the lads arriving at the feasting hall from the hellscape. ...However, I will quote a little Fall of Rome (one of my favourites in high school): From here on one could smell the coming battle, one of the turning points of the world. There were streams and trails beckoning to Alaric, and others that refused all passage. There would be only one battlefield possible—the environs of Aquileia—on which, all commanders on all sides knew, an army coming from the east could not win.... The Vallone, cutting like a fissure through the high Carso, is a dry gulch, murderously hot and breathless in the summer. There is no water at all in its ten mile length. It is the face of the Devil.... It was then that the message came from Stilicho. [The Goths] were to hold the end of the Vallone till there was not one man of them left. “You will find it as good a graveyard as any,” was the final cheerful word of the Master General. A distant mirror.

The vibration of a pigeon's heart over Shanghai or sumfink. As a complement to @dan/california's $100k ghillie suits, there could also be a war profiteering future in faking human heartbeats and heat signatures.

Well, she is speaking to a Russian audience after all, where guidance by the honoured chekisty would not be considered unusual. BTW, this may be an U-L in the Spetsnaz-in-Alaska category, but I heard once the only foreign airline allowed to fly into Pyongyang in the 1970s was SAS, owing to an arrangement under which 'stewardesses' furnished post-flight services to the Dear Leader (who picked up the blonde habit whilst at boarding school in Switzerland). All in the name of Juche of course!

Another complete clusterblyat at Krasnorivka (sorry if this was posted before, I only search back 5 pages). Not sure this is the same demolition derby, but yeah, are the Russians learning yet Kofman? Tag 'em and bag 'em...

(from Kriegsforscher twitter)

Don't miss this one. WW1 levels of horrific. And yes, I definitely see the Russian army 'learning' here. [/sarc]

....As I returned across the fields I'd known I recognized the walls that I'd once made Had to stop in my tracks for fear Of walking on the mines I'd laid And if I built this fortress around your heart Encircled you in trenches and barbed wire....

An 'alternative Russian facts' view might suggest some method to the seeming madness. Just a theory, of course: 1. While they won't admit it yet, I'd guess 'pragmatists' in Russia (the term is relative) are looking at the likelihood that neither side can make further major gains and that a cease fire eventually occurs along roughly the current front. 2. The Russians seem truly hell bent on keeping their current holdings in Donetsk and Kherson, and making those a permanent part of Russia. These rust belt zones are of limited economic value, and completely trashed as well, but they shield Crimea which Moscow just plain wants to keep, full stop. (They'd probably love to take north Luhansk too, up to the Seversky Donets, but the terrain -- boggy woods and balkas -- is NOT proving favourable to offensive ops. The Ukes were very fortunate in being able to take back so much land when the 27th CAA front from Kupiansk-Izium collapsed last fall) 3. Since super-dense mine belts from hell seem to be working, at least until tech (fratricide-inducing burrowing LGVs or sumfink?) provides a counter, look for Ivan to duplicate those belts along the entire line. Already happening, I'd guess. 4. If we look at things this way, then reducing the Avdiivka salient could make sense for them 'defensively' (in a way that Bakhmut -- which was supposed to flank Siversk and open the road to Kramatorsk -- did not). It pushes the Donetsk urban area out of regular artillery range and frees up some rail lines. (Remember, they actually believe the stuff about Ukron@zis blowing up elementary schools in Donetsk since 2015)

Well, the wokesters haven't come after 'Paddywagons' yet.

1. So Ukrainian SSO rozvidnyks *seem* to have performed vastly better than Russian spetsnaz in this war, although we don't really know owing to Opsec on both sides. It may be that ordinary Ukie grunts are in the habit of acting as commandos (doin' what needs doin'). Plus Ivan's lovely habit of squandering elite troops as ordinary grunts has probably drained the pool. 2. There's some high priority missions like, oh, blowing up rail and road bridges -- and I mean, in a way that can't be easily patched -- where if you can't use aerial bombs then can you send guys with explosives? Main problem is, getting in and out. 3. And we now see these gizmos entering into use, at first scarce but then increasingly common (and over time, on both sides) https://www.armadainternational.com/2023/08/ukraines-unmanned-robotic-battlefield-casualty-evacuation/ The Ukrainian sources did not identify the UAV model that they are employing, however, it was indicated that it is a commercially available system. It is, however, understood to carry up to 397 pounds (180 kilograms) with a range of more than 43 miles (69 kilometers). 4. So yeah, I think you folks know where I am going with this..... We just watched the Hamasholes doing this stuff, lo-tech. 5. Sure, MANPADS and blah blah blah, choose your routes across the front carefully, but the military 'economics' of killing one saboteur doing a low level hop at night over your minefields and into your backfield are a lot poorer than killing a big helo + crew + passengers. Next iteration? (a lot shorter range of course, but in some situations one might choose getting shot at over stepping on mines) 6. ...And of course, 180kg payload also makes rather a big BOOM if you want to cut out the fleshy middleman and lay a charge remotely, e.g. by a bridge abutment.