LongLeftFlank
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Posts posted by LongLeftFlank
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4 hours ago, akd said:
Possibly most effective use of DPICM seen yet:
Don't miss this one. WW1 levels of horrific.
And yes, I definitely see the Russian army 'learning' here. [/sarc]
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4 hours ago, Twisk said:
The question that brings up is why not attack near Tokmak? Attacking in that sector would likely be easier and also result in a solid political victory (look as we rolled up Ukraine's breakthrough).
....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.... -
24 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:
I can’t second this enough. If Russia was confident, they wouldn’t be wasting precious treasure on something that doesn’t change their strategic position or as some people would say, expand their option space.
If Russia was confident, they’d be improving their fortifications and blunting Ukraine’s offense while clevely husbanding their resources for the spring.
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)
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36 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:
On an unrelated note, the name always gets me. In Polish it is an really old style (like XVII century) derogatory term for a Muslim. Have Russians actually named an IFV after a 500-year old ethnic slur? So random....
Well, the wokesters haven't come after 'Paddywagons' yet.
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On 10/16/2023 at 10:22 PM, LongLeftFlank said:
Four man SSO team whacks a RU truck behind enemy lines. Location undetermined. Nice long drone shots of (night) tactical movement.
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)
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.
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1 minute ago, chrisl said:
I'm also a little curious as to the mud situation. Ideally, Russia will be struggling to shuffle all those forces to Kherson on trucks in mud. And if mud makes it harder for Russia to bring up supplies and reinforcements to the left bank, so much the better.
Yeah, very important point here. In rasputitsa season, heavy trucks have big trouble offroading. But roads are not rail lines.
I'll ask the pros on the board to chime in, but it seems much harder to outright knock down rail and road bridges and overpasses with artillery shells/rockets than using (much bigger) aircraft bombs. IIRC, even the Antonovskii bridge needed a lot of hits to make it unusable.
Plus Russian pioneer troops seem reasonably efficient at repairing, or laying detour pontoon/corduroy sections (for roadways).
But if you can create traffic holdups which further strain the extended logistics chain (and might also provide juicy targets on occasion), that's all to the good.
I guess it's really a question of what you spend your heavy rounds on.
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5 hours ago, The_Capt said:
Think unsexy thoughts. Think unsexy thoughts.
- The facts we hate
- We'll never meet
- Walking down the road
- Everybody yelling, "hurry up, hurry up"
- But I'm waiting for you
- I must go slow
- I must not think bad thoughts
- What is this world coming to?
- Both sides are right
- But both sides murder
- I give up
- Why can't they?
- I must not think bad thoughts
- I must not think bad thoughts
- I must not think bad thoughts
- The civil wars
- And the uncivilized wars
- Conflagrations leap out of every poor furnace
- The food cooks poorly
- And everyone goes hungry
- From then on, it's dog eat dog
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Four man SSO team whacks a RU truck behind enemy lines. Location undetermined. Nice long drone shots of (night) tactical movement.
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35 minutes ago, Haiduk said:
New video of 79th air-assault brigade from Novomykhailivka direction. First part of video with "doghoused" MTLBs already known, but added other episodes.
Despite losses Russian troops of 39th mech.brigade could advance in this direction in last two days.
Russians attack here, trying push UKR troops off from Volnovakha, where will be future railway node, when Russians will complete Rostov - Mariupol railroad as reserve to Crimean bridge.
The vatniks are seriously assaulting across open, mined terrain mounted in softskinned trucks? (first :30)
Wot he said....
... although Tatarigami_UA notes that some of these wrecks are from earlier attacks.
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Don't recall seeing this posted yet.
https://nitter.net/wartranslated/status/1712794208883351965#m
Ukrainian Special Forces compromised the Russian supply of fuel and ammo in the Zaporizhzhia frontline this morning.
"This morning, a unit of the SSO "Rukh Oporu" carried out a successful operation in temporarily occupied Melitopol.
Thanks to the sabotage actions of our soldiers at 07:30 in the morning, the railway track was blown up.
As a result of the explosion, the railway track and the train that delivered ammunition and fuel for the Russian army were damaged.
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2 minutes ago, billbindc said:
The motte was a bad argument. The bailey here is just redefining the motte.
Fair enough, and I'm really not inclined to counterargue in the smashmouth Taleb style either. Plus, OT.
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18 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Well the Peloponnesian War kinda stands as a counterpoint.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peloponnesian_WarPunic Wars don’t really fit either. Neither Rome or Carthage were really “Large countries with centralized identities” in the modern sense.
In fact the entire theory kind of falls apart in the face of history. Large urban areas have been seats of power that rural “peasants” are forced to feed. Those seats of power have pretty much started most wars, at least external inter-collective wars. I mean farmers in France did not start WW1, nor did they set the conditions for it. Government in Paris did. To think that serfs in Imperial Russia had a vote in that countries entry into WW1 is silly. In fact their “vote” was cast in 1917 to leave that war and embrace revolution.
In fact the more one thinks about it, the less sense it actually makes. Commerce does not breed tolerance, it breeds dependence, which can turn ugly and be seen as a threat - See US/China relations. There are so many historical counter-factuals to that position it is not really even worth following up.
This is just terrible deductive reasoning in action. A thesis framework never really tested. Just posted it online as hard truth. I really liked Black Swan and AntiFragile but Taleb needs to stay in his lane - gifted mathematician, not a student of war.
Interesting. Of course, one could argue in turn that the political power of the Athenian oligarchs as well as the Roman Senate (don't know about the Phoenicians) was actually rooted in rural landholdings (worked by slaves), not so much in burghers.
In contrast, 'mercantile' powers like the Venetian Republic or the Dutch Republic derived their political power from gains from trade (backstopped by naval power).
While Great Britain later overtook all its rivals by combining elements of both military rural aristocracy and mercantile savvy.
.... But sure, this topic goes down an OT rabbit hole fairly fast. I might not be so quick to dismiss Taleb's nugget out of hand though.
Tying it back to Ukraine topic, I was thinking about Putin's roots in the St Petersburg mobbed-up political machine, and how the oligarchies in Russia (and also in Ukraine, at least until lately) reflect competing extractive and mercantile interests, and metropoles.
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Aphorisms, especially Taleb's, should never be taken as literal ironclad truths, but there's often something worthy in them....
https://nitter.net/nntaleb/status/1712591137951645880#m
Peace is an urban, city-state thing reached through (non-zero sum) commercial interractions, not signatures at the top. Commerce breeds tolerance. #Phoenicians #Dubai #Singapore
War is a peasant-driven zero-sum thing w/closed-minded Muzhiks hungry for territory.
City states & federations like peace & commerce.
Large countries with centralized national identities are designed by war and conquest, and for war and conquest.
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Back OT, infrared imagery linked by "Special Kherson Cat" show the mindboggling density of minefields on the Zaprozhe front (EDIT: If I understand SKC correctly, this may actually be a Ukrainian minefield near Verbove)
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29 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Well Steve did a pretty good job already. I would say your view is definitely skewed. I am not sure this last RA offensive was “strategic” or “massive”. We really have no idea how hard the RA is “sweating” but did it occur to you they did this to try and project the narrative you are buying into?
As to massed fires, well you do not cite a single source or fact in your entire analysis so it is really hard to follow up on what is essentially an opinion piece. Do you have stats on the levels of fires? Haiduk just posted some that show RA fires dropping, which kind of matches a lot of observations. Also I would offer you go back and look at Severodonetsk last summer, the level of fires there was surpassing WW1 concentrations. Do you have credible sources that show they exceeded this at Aviidka?
My thoughts are that this is a local tactical offensive designed to demonstrate and signal that the RA is not solely on the Defensive…but the cost of this demonstration likely exceeds its actual impact. It shows the UA employing the same elements of Denial they themselves are facing, and they appear to be just as effective.
We seem to be at a point where neither side is able to achieve operational levels of offensive success - no break throughs or break outs. In a war of attrition it is very hard without detailed inside knowledge to see breaking points. Back in WW2 Germany was doing counter offensives nearly to the end, even though it was clear they were broken at Kursk. In this war the UA currently has offensive initiative and has been trying to string a series of tactical offensives into operational conditions setting. We will see if they are successful.
I guess my “analysis” is that the first tactical twitch out of the RA since last Winter does not merit the level threat that you have assigned it. I think some of your basic assumptions are skewed in RA favour - likely not out of support to RA but honest concern - and you need to revisit them. Further, you may want to provide some citations or links that are shaping your thinking so we can check them for ourselves.
Just to add, David Glantz made a career out of digging out and chronicling (in English) the countless failed Red Army offensives of the GPW, some of them quite huge, and lasting up to the end of the war.
In short, for every Sandomierz or Korsun pocket, there were about 3-4 'neverwozzers' that yielded little more than another heap of dead T34s and Ivans, generally piled up at some river crossing and then plastered mercilessly by German artillery.
Since May 2022, the Russians have yet to show anything more than a few shattered factory towns that took them literally months to pry away from the defenders.
But their command staffs seem doctrinally willing to continue launching these forlorn hopes, presumably hoping that one Big Win will make up for all the failures.
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Man, all kinds of doomers coming out of the woodwork. Gonna have to work my connections at the Consulate to secure enough smokes and brandy for the club.
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5 hours ago, The_Capt said:
Two mags is nowhere near enough to get out of a pickle. The standard was the ability to defend yourself for about 20 mins until guns and/or air got into the game. 20 mins of sustained fire, enough to keep their heads down and not advancing on you turned out to be around 8-10 mags per person. So upwards of 300 rounds.
Infantry going out on offence carried a lot more.
Best line I ever heard : “Where is the front line in this damned war? Wherever one of us is standing.”
Outside the wire everyone is infantry…to a point. If you are not, you are a liability.
Come on 'fess up, this guy is basically you, isn't he?
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Another turn of the screw by MuXk?
...Today it appears you can no longer search for a Twitter user by name on Nitter and call up their feed?
https://nitter.net/search?f=users&q=%40DefMon3
Can anyone confirm this? TIA
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17 minutes ago, Teufel said:
As we are already in this and outing, to be fair and honest, and not so much to defend my own post. But to clarify, I have not set foot in Ukraine, nor have I seen live action as combat medic. The story is slightly different, we have had wars on European soil prior Ukraine, not nearly publicized and it was decades ago. Heard it be labeled “conflicts” rather than war but frankly can call it whatever you want. Makes no difference. The “Red Cross” reference has nothing to do with the actual humanitarian aid organization nor combat medic. There are Red Crosses in other national symbols, such as flags and no not the one of England in this case.
Due to above said conflict and ethnical background, by chance and luck more than anything else, was given care and later refugee status, citizenship in Western European country. Unable to return “home” as it doesn’t exist anymore. I have been fortunate to travel through my professional career but finally settled back in this new home. Working for an American owned arms manufacturer in said European country.
I don’t think it will be necessary but Steve or The_Capt can easily verify any of these claims by for example professional platforms. My email used to register to this site contains reference to my actual name. By all means gents, have at it, company is not listed on the platform but this city only has one arms manufacturer operating. So adding the last clues won’t be very difficult. If you want proof and verification that is.
We could get more cozy you and I if want to do that yourself but again I trust it won’t be necessary. You’ll have to take my word for it.
Nope, further inquiries are unnecessary intrusions, cheers mate. Carry on!
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1 hour ago, Carolus said:
I love that these seem to be mounted on standardised truck pallets.
To put on a different melody than my usual whining and hand-wringing: It's stuff like this that shows the kind of ingenuity we need.
Swarms of cheap drones terrorising the countryside? Go for AA cannons, not expensive SAM missiles. Need an easy and cheap way to transport? Just build it to ISO standard. Combine this simplicity and practicality with the edge we have in tech like radar - a field where the West shows it is even still going strong on an old-ish platform like the Gepard, and you have a really nice package. I hope Zelensky orders 200.
I say, the Scotch stands by you, fellow hand-wringer!
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As a squad-level antidrone alternative to AA cannon airburst shells, how about resurrecting shoulder-fired recoilless rifles and cannister/flechette rounds? Like the 90mm M67.
The Antipersonnel (Canister) Cartridge M590 (XM590E1)... consists of an aluminum cartridge case crimped to an aluminum canister.
The canister consists of a thin-walled, deep-drawn, aluminum body that contains a payload of 2,400 eight-grain (0.5 g), low-drag, fin-stabilized, steel-wire flechettes.
When the canister leaves the muzzle, the pressure ruptures the canister along inscribed score marks to release the flechettes, which disperse in a cone angle of approximately 8 degrees.
Cartridge weight: 6.79 lb (3.08 kg)
Projectile weight: 3.97 lb (1.8 kg)
Maximum effective range: 328 yd (300 m)
300m seems about right to whack a quadcopter, and some tweaking might extend the range.
This also sounds like something the Ukes could fabricate themselves.
There's also the smaller FV442 flechette round for the 84mm Carl Gustav RR, already in UA service, although effective range seems to be only 100m.
An American soldier interviewed about how the round killed 25 Afghans referred to the rounds as "the meat grinder".
(I think flechettes were also banned by some pantywaist treaty or other, but we don't go in for that kind of whinging here! Anyway, one could always go back to cannister balls.
https://www.thelocal.se/20110306/32424).
PULL!!!!!!
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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:
Yup, frustrating for sure. We all remember the epic "Russia has 10,000 tanks!" nonsense that was so often repeated at the start of this war.
I think it is rather pointless to talk about strategic losses for either side as it really doesn't matter. What matters is what each force still has to commit and how well things go when it does. On that count, I'd say Ukraine has the upper hand now and for the near future. Russia's forces are degrading in quality, Ukraine's are at least staying stable. Russia's ability to conduct offensive actions is just about zero, Ukraine's is getting better. This is important because Russia's stated goals require offensive action.
Steve
Since we can't have incontrovertible data, then we can only go by the results we see, which indicate quite clearly that Russia can't take meaningful amounts of territory from Ukraine. (We haven't yet confirmed the converse is true -- not sure I can endorse that Ukraine is 'getting better' at attacking tbh).
...The only way Tankies can rationalize this demonstrated reality away is to claim, on no evidence at all, that: Since Russia launched the SMO to denazify/reclaim wayward provinces to the Union State, its forces are exercising great restraint to minimise damage and rebuilding after joyous reunion. At some opportunity cost to themselves, perhaps, but grinder has been working hard and Banderonazis are now fast running out of conscripts, while effeminate NATO bourgeoisie is already getting bored. Ergo, time is on side of patient, chess playing 3.5x bigger Russian Bear. QED.
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2 hours ago, Teufel said:
Without going into details, with that I mean you will have to take my word for it (I don’t fancy doing time in federal prison because I wanted to prove a point).... Thus, we can debate but you can’t see the facts, you have to trust me when I say that American controlled capabilities are in no measurable way dwarfing the Russian capabilities. Just American, in the US and abroad, are bigger and have high double digit growth in some capabilities.
You nor anyone else should be losing your sleep over manufacturing, supply chains, know-how, machinery, components, etc. in potentially prolonger war. If it comes to that, Russians have zero chance and now I am suggesting parity to start with.
1 hour ago, Teufel said:This is a very interesting point! And again, I can’t offer too much details about specific things but let’s keep it on general terms...
OK mate, so while I greatly enjoy your commentary, and (like Martin Q. Blank and his cat) also respect your privacy, by your own account you are a (former/current) volunteer medic (in Ukraine?), seemingly of Eastern European origin.
But (duly accounting for 'lost in translation'), you're asking us to 'take your word for it' (cuz you can't share your sources or you'd go to Federal prison or sumfink?) regarding some high level assertions relating to US/Western vs. Russian production capacity.
Sure, we rando gamer geeks can all express our own opinions here (within reason), and even occasionally float BS we heard in a bar (Spetsnaz on the tundra, anyone?).
...But it's probably best not to pretend to an authority, still less classified insider 'Red Pill' knowledge you don't actually have.
Unless you really *do*, of course. But then you'd have to kill us (In my particular case it's easy, poison my San Mig).
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18 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Gotta have a big globe with a bar inside it. Turkey Thursdays. And on Fri we pay hobos to fight each other for nickels.
["Don't forget to turn off the globe!"]
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Just now, sburke said:
I just want to know what this all has to do with Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift. That, it seems, is the real news.
...Well, I got no response at all to my earlier reference to Beyoncé in biker leathers, so I wouldn't hold out much hope.
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18 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Is 'meming like a mofo from my couch' a legit use of 'the time that is given us', O Mithrandir?
Asking for a fiend....
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P.S. I think Carolus has politely said you may be a guest of the Club, with the cigars and the overstuffed armchairs. And the map table.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
(from Kriegsforscher twitter)