LongLeftFlank

I too spent salad days as a penniless grad student in DC, in '93 - 95; one of the only truly bike friendly cities in the US (in Canada, most cities are). U street and 'Madams Organ' were the hopping places back then, although I also caught some great live bands (e.g. Social D) at the 930. Overall, a fantastic city to be young and geeky-but-pretty in. I lived, loved and lost richly!

So did St. Nicholas Although, kids still there???... wtf?!!!! 2. HeliosRunner's sitrep thread. As usual, I like his topo maps, although his front line markings should not be taken too literally.

...killed during an air-raid on Tobruk; a NAAFI tea urn fell on his head. So where might we find imagery of devastated districts of Donetsk City, leveled by 8 years of merciless Banderite terrorist shelling? Pretty easy to find on the Ukraine side of the line.... Both sides filling up hospitals....

Oh, I know there's a Chinese company happy to send Chinese technicians to provide those essential services, and all the equipment... for cash. And hey, why not cut out the middleman, they'll happily modernise and operate all the O&G infra and mines for Mother Russia as well, and provide all the civil infra gratis. Here, just let the nice warm friendly dragon slither its coils around you while your own society dissolves, stupid drunken bear.

Anime take on the drone p^rn....

1. So about that upcoming winter offensive. 2. Mobiks gonna be mighty uncomfortable after sunset. And the Ukies may be able to smell them from a distance. 3. For the CMBS2 terrain files. Urban ground tiles gonna need a lot more ambient litter: paper, plastic, wood scrap.

I assume someone will geolocate this street eventually and establish which side of the lines it was filmed on... But at the moment, I'm inclined to believe it's real, since GirkinGirkin doesn't tend to knowingly circulate Russian prop.

well somebody is wrong then, @FancyCat

I don't know whether that is a hard and fast rule. I do agree to the extent that such a strategy requires a great deal of time (and a very lethal army to carry it out), and that where it does work it's likely a multiple causation thing. 1. In postwar analysis, the Vietnamese noted that the American war had all but run the Southern provinces out of capable draft age males for the VC intake by the time the US left in 1972. In addition to taking kids and oldsters, they were sending large numbers of Northerners south. Cultural conflicts were driving southerners -- including VC cadre -- back toward the SVN government, which in spite of its own manifold defects and corruption still required a series of large conventional attacks from the North to topple in 1974-1975. Demographic data comparing northern and southern provinces supports this conclusion. So, did casualties (and strategic hamleting/population denial) defeat the VC insurgency? We will never really know, but it seriously impaired them.* 2. The Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988 mainly owing to Iranian casualties, worsened by their reckless and costly human wave attacks with young volunteers early in the war. Iran's rulers wanted to continue, but simply could not do so. 3. Less well documented, the often intense insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala wound down when pro-rebel areas ran short of men willing to fight far from their villages. The governments basically paid the remainder to stay home as militiamen. 4. In Iraq, while Allied forces didn't interdict the host populations as such, AQIZ and other insurgent forces ran out of willing recruits to replace those lost in 2003-2005. By 2008 the US was ambushing groups of inexperienced young volunteers crossing the deserts from the borders, as local tribesmen were no longer interested in fighting. In this case, the Allies focused on isolating and shrinking the pool of fervent jihadis. 5. There's some case to be made that Japan was getting pretty close to empty on its national first line manpower pool, had the Bomb never been invented and OLYMPIC had to be executed. The Kwantung army was its last million man formation and when Zhukov took it out, they were really in a kids and codgers situation.... teenage girls with bamboo stakes, etc. Again, I'm *not* responding with a hard and fast 'Oh yes you can kill your way to victory' either. But it can absolutely be a major factor. * This is tempting me to pull one of my favourite hex-and-counter wargames VIETNAM 1965-1975 off the shelf (or onto VASSAL, really). If I only had time for such things, sigh.....

Ukraine Volunteer is 76 years old, and quite an outlier. The UA special forces took him in because of Russian fluency and a basket of skills (EOD particularly) they can't get easily. And he keeps up with the younger guys. Sounds like he also had a Ukie SoF mate while contract soldiering in Iraqi Kurdistan in the 2000s who spoke for him. ....Ref my prior posts on this, or just read the 50 odd posts in the blog which will convince you this is not a fake. The guy is amazing.

We have missed you, brother! Hope all is well! ...for those of us who have read Solzhenitsyn, zek grinder has an extra layer of awful to it. Could some mercurial Western squillionaire or other perhaps offer a 5 figure USD bounty plus an air ticket to a warm country for each severed head of a Wagner starik brought in by a defector?

https://turcopolier.com/partisans-ttg/ These partisans and the Ukrainian SF teams operating in Russian occupied Ukraine are an important part of Ukraines strategy, far more important than in many previous wars. It’s part of the “total defense” strategy now being implemented in many Eastern European countries. ....Murdering wounded Russian soldiers in their hospital beds in Simferopol (Crimea) is just not on though (assuming it happened of course). 2. Fair enough.... 3. Perhaps UA can do without the long range missiles for now. Their enemies seem to be doing quite a good job on themselves.... So much for that fabled 'Siberian Army' They expect that they will be given unusable body armour, so they are now looking at buying their own. "The price tag for them starts at 140,000 rubles ($2225). There's not enough pay here [to buy it]." 4. OT, but umm..... Collapse begins at home! 5. Wünderwaffen? 6. A fleeting peek behind the strange OPSEC curtain on social mobilisation in small town Ukraine. Dubno, east of Lviv: population 37,000. I dunno, maybe Ukrainians or Europeans see these kinds of images on the telly every night (I haven't watched TV news in over 25 years myself). But it would be good for Western media to testify (not propaganda, just show it!) just how 'all-in' ordinary Ukrainians are in this effort, and have been. Even in Western Ukraine, far from the sound of the guns (though not necessarily the rockets).

You may be being a little harsh on FC, I for one have gotten a lot out of his contributions here. ...But for reference, if you click on your profile at the top of the screen, one of the dropdown items is Ignored Users.

That's what I have been thinking, down at the CM Tiny battles end of the combat spectrum. Forget the Big Push that bogs down and gets blasted by arty or air: it's five thousand ambushes or envelopments, all along the front, on average yielding a RU:UK casevac ratio of, say, 3:1. The Russians have been hugely short of combat infantry throughout this war; that was by design (career soldiers were mainly specialists, to be augmented by mobik grunts). To me, that's the essence of why the BTG failed, hard. They've clearly learned since April that screening and patrolling around your positions and vehicles is NOT optional. But their VDV and spetsnaz have been worn away, and it looks like Wagner is going that way now. Where are the cadres to train the new guys in fieldcraft and get them to survive the first bumps? No infantry, no army.

https://ukrainevolunteer297689472.wordpress.com/2022/12/09/one-was-whining-about-his-face-being-numb/ (marshy woodlands south or west of Kreminna, this past week) Obviously they were running tight recon on their flanks.... There have been several of these large probes…one might call them counterattacks, but they seem to lack the structure and cohesive movement to fit that term.... Both of our groups started moving at an angle toward the front and rear of their hide, one firing, the other moving, then switching-out.... they all started running directly away. We cut them all down within thirty yards. This alternating freezing and thawing slush is more of a challenge.... you only do foot maintenance one foot at a time, and only one guy in the unit at a time. We do not sling rifles, nor even carry slings.... The group that generally prevails (depending on force size) is usually the ones who reacts quickly and with extreme violence. [Ivans] do not set-up quickly to fight-off an ambush, they yell a lot, they run.

...wow, like the final scene from The Dirty Dozen. 1. While HeliosRunner has been reading our Mutha Beautiful Thread, baby! 2. Swap Bakhmut for Kreminna? 3. CM Tiny/Small scenario brought to life (in vignettes). Thread w/video 4. Not only stosstruppe tactics but a new form of 'trench mortar', made all the nastier by drone spotting. Squads making the most of their organic weapons, high + low tech.....

Tangentially related to this topic, but for those interested, a good (though quite USA-hawkish) book review that includes the strategic importance of TSMC and also touches on the military uses of chips. I am going to add this book to my reading list: https://asiatimes.com/2022/12/the-semiconductor-industry-and-the-china-challenge/

Stoßtruppen

Putin a little tipsy here, which is quite interesting given the image he prefers to project to the public. But this also does not look like a man who is terminally ill. A little puffy, maybe, but not notably unhealthy for 70.

My read was also this is all a little too smooth. Shooting prisoners isn't a daily event in any army, even the SS. And even calloused shooters (Treblinka, Babi Yar, Srebrenica) observed a certain measured ceremony. Yet, these guys usher the guys into a prearranged clearing in the woods, shove them into line (standing facing them, not kneeling), then step back and casually pop a single burst into them (from below the shoulder). No pause for their last words, no ready-aim-fire, etc. Then a mere instant later, instead of relishing (or staring riveted at) their victims' final throes -- or did they all score perfect heart shots? -- all 3 notice the drone is looking in and abruptly begin shooting at it. ....Notice also the edited jump cuts. Some RUbot needs to post a longer unedited clip, plus some geolocation (there are some skilled pro-RU geolocators like Chris_759) if they want this to get traction.

Yes, undulations are very important tactically. This region gets a lot of precipitation seasonally, as well as snowmelt. That water flows away someplace, cutting deeply into the land. You can see the major streams (steep banks) and also the numerous ravines (yars) that feed them. Those ravines are in turn fed by gullies, which will be filled with brush and scrubby trees. Farmers will cut their own additional drains as needed. Kind of like the US Great Plains (Missouri river valley).

Novoselivske, north of Svatove. Preview from the new CM3 game... Posed shot, but RU soldiers look tolerably well equipped. (pro-Russian Serb but does post interesting stuff now and then) **** Leaving this here, but no idea what this actually is, or which side. It does however look like an impromptu execution, real or posed.

remember also, he's talking (so far) about March-April. A lot changed over the summer. One reality is though, that Ukraine has been evolving from a post-Soviet state and that while its armed forces have showed amazing sophistication at all levels in the combat arms, there's doubtless still a lot of dead wood bureaucrats and mafiya type corruption infesting the logistical tail. That is clearly not a fatal flaw, but is going to take a long time to ferret out.

A little more up to date, latest dispatches from the grizzled polymath Ukrainian Volunteer. https://ukrainevolunteer297689472.wordpress.com/2022/12/02/they-were-on-their-way-toward-a-significant-encounter-assuming-they-kept-moving-the-same-direction/ Lot of heavy combat going on around Kreminna…looks like the work we did in the forest of Endor will finally get a chance to be judged on effect. The aim was to wire the place, and make it a dangerous place for Russians to hang-out.... The ground is froze on top, but not yet deep, but heavy equipment can roll on it now pretty well. One good thing about winter is you don’t smell so much after a bit of a trek, but, I certainly don’t smell like the inside of a supermodel’s purse either… [] Noise discipline very important in this weather….if not for the breeze, you could hear a cigarette lighter snap at 50 yards. Bonus From a pro-Russian feed...