LongLeftFlank

...I suppose the general idea is that we must regretfully put a Russian Home Front Collapse (((((Dolchstosslegende)))) in the 'nice to hope for, and not entirely outside the realm of the possible, but I wouldn't bet on it', category of causative dei ex machini for an early cease fire. Until it happens, sure. Adam Tooze is pretty sound; no particular ideological brief I can discern in a decade of reading him, and his historical work on Weimar/pre-WW2 Germany political economy alone makes his views on these topics well worth considering... IMHO. But sure, he has no better direct line to Gawd than any of us mortals. YMMV. @billbindc (our go-to for the Permanent Establishment Party line ) Tooze is fair dinkum by you, amirite?

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-236-russias-long-war-economy Adam Tooze, from late August. Not optimistic about likelihood of Russian economic collapse. Setting aside the economist-speak, key points: - Emigration and mobilisation may have cost the Russian workforce c.2% of male workers aged 20-49.... [Up to] 10% of the high tech workforce left Russia in 2022. - Unlike Ukraine, Russia is running nothing like a total war economy.... [RU military spending] might be in the ballpark of US spending during the Vietnam war, at around 9-10% of GDP. This spending has provided a boost to some industrial sectors. - The deficit in 2022-2023 of 2% of GDP is a large stimulus but far short of the kind of deficit that would trigger hyperinflation and a currency collapse. Kremlin policymakers still have measures available to sustain the militarised economy. Their planning cooly estimates the probability of rising unemployment and losses of real income. - The war in Ukraine is woven into the fabric of public life in Russia....

Great stuff mate! One small mapping point: unlike WW2 Europe, power or phone poles in rural 1950 Korea would be quite rare except along rail lines, or in the immediate area of (largely coastal) industrial cities, or in the North connecting hydroelectric dams to cities. https://photius.com/countries/korea_north/economy/korea_north_economy_korea_under_the_japa~119.html

S̶a̶i̶l̶o̶r̶s̶ Warriors fighting in the dance hall Oh man, look at those c̶a̶v̶e̶m̶e̶n̶ grognards go It's the freakiest show Take a look at the lawman Beating up t̶h̶e̶ ̶w̶r̶o̶n̶g̶ ̶g̶u̶y̶ ̶ KevinKin Oh man, wonder if he'll ever know He's in the best selling show I̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶l̶i̶f̶e̶ ̶ ̶ Are there panzers on Mars?

Tangentially OT, but I bought and played CM:Touch briefly in 2015, and liked it for its CM1 QB-like ease of play. The scale (map size, AFV count and smallish fire teams) is actually pretty close to a lot of the tactical actions we see here in UKR. Any chance of doing a quick makeover for Black Sea? BMPs for tanks, APCs for HTs, add mines, quicker arty response, longer range ATW, thumb up the fatigue thresholds so infantry can't dash around so much over long distances. ...Could make a useful training aid too, for small unit leaders to practice the basics of recce, moving to contact, suppression and envelopment. Less of a learning curve than the full CM.

There is nothing Taylor can't explain about like, anything. https://defector.com/you-must-understand-that-taylor-swift-knows-me-better-than-anyone-else-on-earth

The Russians (probably even their command, who could know better if they had any interest in doing so) and their apologists in the West are also proceeding from an rather different set of 'facts', or assumptions than the people on this board: In their looking glass version, it is Ukraine that is rapidly running out of capable troops, particularly infantry. - ALLEGEDLY, UA leadership (officers and NCOs) was more or less wiped out over 2022, especially in the Bahmut 'grinder'. The UA are putting unwilling, ill-trained and ill-led noobs into the field, particularly non-Ukrainians. - ALLEGEDLY, on some fronts these troops are being forcibly kept in the field by nAzov fanatics, Mansoor Chechens and skinhead mercenaries (primarily Poles). - ALLEGEDLY, several million bourgeois Ukrainians have fled overseas or bribed their way out of serving. 'NATO's proxy war' is extremely unpopular among Ukrainians under 30 across all demographics. - ALLEGEDLY the Ukrainian domestic economy, which is run by (largely Jewish) oligarchs living outside the country, has never fully mobilised for war except inasmuch as it can profiteer off it. - In any case, 'so-called Ukraine's' economy, infrastructure and society can never function separately from Greater Russia without being entirely rebuilt, ground up, and that's allegedly impossible under wartime conditions. The entire project is a scam, or at best a NATO-fed delusion dreamed up in London by, well (((((the usual suspects)))). - ALLEGEDLY, since so-called Ukraine cannot sustain it, since 2008 UA is basically a NATO construct and puppet force, entirely dependent on NATO/NGO stocks and direction. These are now rapidly running down owing to poor discipline, wastage and pilferage. - ALLEGEDLY, Western military organisation, experience and doctrine is ill-suited to fighting against the Russian army, and the hohols only do ok when they ignore it and fight in the Cossack (Russian) way. Giving them first line Western kit is actually an act of desperation; there is little else to send now. - ALLEGEDLY, any quality edge the hohols might have enjoyed in 2022 in terms of drones, night vision, missiles, ISR, etc., is now largely closed and Ukrainian troops are now the ones getting trench bombed. China, being the world's workshop and wanting NATO to lose, is quietly providing huge quantities of pretty much anything Russia can't make itself. **** Again, all these points are 95% false, so don't even bother to refute them or pretend I am advocating them. But negatives are by their nature (and by design) quite difficult to disprove, and there's enough 'supportive' anecdotes out there for people like McGregor and Big Serge to wave about, along with a bunch of handwavy 'you know nothing, bourgeois Western fools!' historical pseudo-analogues (Kursk, etc.). ....Since holding a different view of the world is impossible -- as others pointed out above -- the Russians choose to believe the above 'facts'. And while folks like Rybar or Girkhin may admit Red Army performance in the SMO has also been weak, under their chosen set of facts, it's now merely a matter of bringing their 3x weight advantage fully to bear, and holding on before NATO's puppets, wait for it.... Collapse. Like I said, don't bother to beat up this straw man. The point is, they can 'find' their own facts if they choose to, and have done so.

Lol, I was going to wind you up (again) by posting his latest tweets (he's still pushing the idea of this Russian -- now Wagner -- "outta nowhere" right hook through the Pripet marshes to sever the Uke supply lines at Lviv!), but abstained. But I tell you, the man is great fun at parties.

"A Elbereth! Gilthoniel!"

The Ukrainian military continues to struggle with scaling offensive operations, and conducting combined arms operations at the battalion level and above, with most attacks being at the level of a platoon or company.... Western official criticism that Ukraine won’t mass forces, and accept the inherent casualties in such an assault, fails to appreciate the real constraints on that military’s capacity to employ forces at scale. The United States has been misinterpreting this as a failure to commit forces to the offensive. Given the challenges the new brigades faced at the beginning, brigade assaults with multiple battalions instead of companies likely would have exacerbated coordination issues and led to greater losses. Ukrainian forces prefer sequenced assaults, making fires the decisive element and exploiting with maneuver, less so using fires as a supporting component of a maneuver force. These much criticized 'company scale' actions aren't exactly pinpricks and seem to me well-suited to the fragmented combat environment and to the limited support/resupply/medevac capabilities of the UA. Kind of like Normandy, as others have noted, where even divisional attacks break up rapidly into smaller close actions encompassing 1 or 2 fields. Not much situational awareness of what's happening in the next hedgerow. Also, they don't seem to wind down because the Russians reinforce and then outnumber the attackers. The 'scenarios' basically end once the enemy guns find the range. In sum, this just doesn't seem to be a 'run the enemy out of reserves and then break through' kind of fight. At least not tactically.

https://kyivindependent.com/isw-russian-operations-limited-by-lack-of-infantry/ Quotes the 28 Aug ISW: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-28-2023 The Russian military command has consistently relied on VDV formations as both an offensive and a defensive force and they are likely degraded from their high operational tempo. The degradation of these forces will likely weaken Russia’s ability to sustain complex defensive operations and almost certainly disrupt any Russian intent to resume offensive operations at scale. As I recall, more important than any 'elite' status, VDV battalions were also organisationally better suited for the battlefield conditions of this particular war than the infantry-poor and roadbound BTGs of the regular Russian army. At this point, is the remaining VDV cadre able to integrate and command an influx of mobiks and Central Asian migrants with limited Russian language? Or do these guys just more hapless trench jockeys in sailor shirts? perhaps with a slightly higher priority for kit and resupply (I think the commander of the VDV is also still commanding all the ground forces in Ukraine now?). If the trucks can get there of course.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ukraines-real-killing-fields-an-investigation-into-the-wars-first-aid-crisis/ Two-thirds of Ukrainian soldiers die from blood loss.... ‘You have to drag a person with your hands approximately three to five kilometres. You can’t drive there even in armoured vehicles because of the heavy shellings and mines.’ Medics, she says, try to avoid using the official first aid supplies issued to them, because of the admin that is involved.... Why should Ukraine ask for more medical equipment, when officially the shortage doesn’t really exist? To allow for one medic for every 30 soldiers, Ukraine needs to train at least 15,000 combat medics.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/29/holdouts-quit-kupiansk-after-renewed-russian-shelling-ukraine In Kharkiv... a Soviet-era sanatorium converted into a rehabilitation centre for soldiers in need of psychological support.... This centre, one of five around the country, caters for 100 soldiers at a time, with a programme containing elements ranging from aromatherapy and swimming through to individual and group therapy sessions – we visited one session discussing what to do when your buddy freezes with fear on the frontline.... Soldiers arrived feeling “moral, mental and physical exhaustion,” he said, with sleep problems the most common symptom, worsened by lack of rotations from the frontline. But Ukraine needs troops and 90% are sent back to the battlefield.

yes cheers, bookmarked, but in my experience it often doesn't capture the latest threads or posts. EDIT: Ah, ok, you need to enter the full handle of the author (e.g. Tatarigami_UA) to bring up the full feed. I'm not great at this stuff; other oldsters here may be in the same boat.

Many thanks to you, @The_MonkeyKing and others here for providing reports on the on-the-ground military situation and tactical dynamics. I don't do Xwitter ever since Musk made it nonnavigable for nonsubscribers, so threadreaders or copypastes of key points and graphics are greatly appreciated!

Good stuff, assuming this is factually accurate. Key quotes above.

This thread is *really* good, many thanks. Design material here.

Can you all take this North Africa DAK red herring to another thread, s.v.p.?

China wants to secure undisputed hegemony over all of the former USSR east of the Urals (i.e. Asian Russia and the Stans). I would too, if I were Chinese btw. The resources of these lands are infinitely more valuable than the South China sea floor, and their de facto control by China would enhance its (resumed) status as an economic superpower. Even anticommunist Chinese patriots view Russian control of these lands and peoples as yet another unfortunate and accident accident of history, which they generally blame on the Chinese Empire being undermined by perfidious European colonialist incursion starting in the mid 1700s. The reality though is that the Qing / Manchu dynasty, being preoccupied with its own power struggles within China plus the deeply conservative nature of Confucianism, bears most of the blame for its "century (or two) of humiliation". However, as with most of history the picture is mixed. The Western capitalist/colonial powers were indeed predatory, but also innovative (see article) in a way that Chinese civilization simply could not match at that time (Chinese people absolutely could, but mostly had to get out of China!). Anyhoo, tying it all back together, regardless of who is in charge in Moscow, Russia must eventually realign in some way with Europe (and presumably the Anglosphere). The only alternative for them (and the West) is to accept Chinese suzerainty over all these lands, on terms more or less dictated by Beijing.* I am talking about the rest of this century, not the next decade; the Russians can clearly live in denial for some time. * Unless of course Xi does something stupid that sets China back a century again.

It's a mod for CMBN... giant unsplittable Italian squads made no tactical sense at all for the IJA (unless they're fighting in China), so I used Polish troops. Go ahead and use whatever you can with my blessing, although I don't know if the textures still fit the wireframes.

So what's 'projecting friction' likely to mean at this particular point that could lower the blood price of slogging through the mine belts? ...Russian C4ISR has been 'stressed' at multiple points for over a year now. It could still collapse, sure, but it hasn't yet. Their gunners haven't run out of tubes or ammo, or not systematically. The trains and trucks are still delivering adequate materiel, it seems. Knocking down enemy quadcopters is hard for squaddies. And the operators are hard to locate. What's the friction point(s) these days?

But Russia retains an almost unlimited capacity to lay mine belts and obstacles, all the way down to Azov and Perekop if it likes. It wouldn't surprise me if they're doing just that, in the absence of better options. Manning these belts properly is another question of course, but to what extent does that make these fields less costly and time consuming to clear? ...And the Ivans are showing signs of moving up the tactical drone learning curve, which means fewer defenders can bombard and bleed out the sappers and assault troops while their movement is constrained. There's no way China isn't already supplying these lower tech systems to Russia in bulk. Ukraine has a breaking point on manpower as well, which it's hiding well but it matters.

Wow, that's got to be one of the most intense combat sequences captured yet.

Re: what the heck are they thinking? I am floating in and out of the boards again, but FWIW my hypothesis remains that, like many amateurs, Putin is focused on maps: trying to attain and secure intuitive 'stop lines' on key features such as rivers or heights that can then be 'frozen' and fortified until a cease fire in place can be reluctantly extracted from a weary Ukraine. ....meanwhile declaiming at home that this 'security zone' was all he ever really wanted from bad Ukronazis all along, cuz Putin iz Chessmaster!

Go to the home site, https://threadreaderapp.com/ and type in, e.g., DefMon3 or Tatarigami. It should search out a list of threads. Click on the author's name (black, not the blue link, that will just take you to the Twitter login) once you've found the correct one and the next page should open a link containing his threads in reverse chron, but it won't show the rest of his feed (individual tweets and RTs). ... This method may not give all the latest threads either, but it's the best way I know of.