LongLeftFlank

Pairing this thread with Mick Ryan's latest on the practicalities (for RU) of evacuating the Kherson bridgehead. Great synthesis here. We might expect the later stages of their withdrawal to be chaotic.

Come on, our Echo Chamber is the Best Echo Chamber! I suspect he meant bleaching, but wow, quite a segue there from nuclear Armageddon. Mind you, Lugnutz is totally in the mainstream for political press conferences these days.

MacGregor, for those who care. In the name of the 'Friends Don't Let Friends Echo Chamber'...

This stuff, I think? (Zoka is a pro-RU Serb who rage quits Twitter on occasion) Claimed to be from Soledar, north of Bakhmut: middle aged bougie Wagnerites getting into the TikTok scene? shooting up random stuff that doesn't shoot back. Including an (unmodified) T62 just rolling up and firing off a round randomly, without the TC even moving. Mainly interesting for the conditions: wet and muddy, fogs. Be advised: this guy posts months old footage, or UA material showing Russians getting blown up and claiming it's 'hohols'. He used to be a touch more selective but doesn't seem to care now. **** Also, didn't realise the Saheds are largely ineffective against (hard) military targets. Sound is eerie.

Amazed nobody has found these yet.....

A lot of that functionality is already built into the game; scenario designers just don't tap it that often unless they're representing historical engagements with elite or heroic named personnel. On the defects of NCOs in nonWestern armies, the root causes are fairly simple and universal: 1. Career NCOs are selected and promoted not for their MOS or command skills or ability to lead men in battle (if they DO have those skills, it's incidental); but rather 2. for their peacetime usefulness to senior officers: misappropriating military property, skimming draftees' pay, falsifying reports, general toadying, etc. Their base pay rates are virtually starvation wages (junior officers aren't much better off), so they simply have to graft to make ends meet. It's expected. Yes, the basic military jobs DO get done: there's only so much you can get away with before the higher ups start to look bad. But the shortcutting and inattention definitely show up in combat, with results we see now. That's pretty much true of all non-Western armies, including China, although the PLA command at least doesn't rent out its draftees as factory labour so much anymore, or so they claim. 'Good iron is not used to make nails, nor good men to make soldiers.' Soldiers in much of the world are viewed by the citizenry as little better than bandits; neither a source of pride nor security. That has been true for most of human history.

Floods their side, but also makes an assault crossing that much more problematic. And impacts on Kherson city would also be nonnegligible.

New long form interview with Kamil Galeev, for those (like me) who like him. Much of it is familiar to readers here. https://www.chinatalk.media/p/kamil-on-nukes-and-civil-war-in-russia?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=auto_share&r=r0yx Key points: 1. Russia’s nuclear status depends on the goodwill of the West.... the continuous import of hardware and software from developed countries. 2. Russia is not so much a nation-state as it is basically the last European colonial empire that wasn't decolonized. 3. in the beginning of this year, almost all armed people in Russia were included in formalized bureaucratic structures directly answerable to Moscow, now it's not really the case.... a number of regions, which I'm not going to specify, formed battalions, armed them, equipped them, and didn't send them anywhere.... These are not ethnic republics: they are regions perceived as ethnically majority-Russian. At this point it seems that some of these actors are basically preparing for chaos. 4. In this war, for the first time in Russian history, common soldiers are really being paid. In a small town, you could be earning 30,000 rubles per month, but on the front line you could easily earn 200,000 or 300,000 rubles.... Pskov, for example, is a really poor Russian region bordering Estonia that hosts VDV.... Some local girls married one VDV guy after another, because they're dying quickly enough that you can get several compensations in a few months. But in a sense it's a Ponzi scheme: the Russian government compensated lavishly the families of the first dozens of thousand killed in action, incentivizing the rest to comply with this mobilization, but it cannot continue indefinitely. I think those families that now are enthusiastic about their family members being sent into Ukraine are going to be cheated mostly.

[I notice the BFC forum is starting to chug on all the embedded tweets or sumfink (it doesn't reliably save 'draft' posts anymore). So I need to paste something, post it and then keep updating.] Conflicting reports: are they evacuating or reinforcing? Maybe both....

Wonder what the Austin narrative to Shoigu was? toss a nuke boys, and Crimea is 100% joining NATO.... 2. Meanwhile, on the RED team: We will need new unit animations for the new CM game, Charles! to go with the 'national characteristics' Steve is contemplating lol.... PS, these bungalows gotta provide units about *zero* in the way of hard cover.

From WarMonitor3

Ooh, are you being tempted by the long forbidden CM fruit of 'national characteristics' (aka ubermensching?) [EDIT: Ninjaed by @sburke!] One could argue that this kind of behaviour might be modeled more generically by having an option to give a unit a 'home zone' it would tend to retreat to / not leave unless its morale was shattered. Representing mission orders or simply that unit's assigned position.

Intriguing! Do you discuss this elsewhere on the boards?

Speaking of 'flipping' Can we empty out the vintage warbird museums in a good cause?

Yeah, this is one of these places where if I somehow had the time to do a CM map it would really aid understanding of what both sides are grappling with. It's nothing dramatic but just well chosen ground, defended by highly professional soldiers.

Sounds like Stalingrad: Commissar's House, Chemist's shop, etc. This last one is one for the future map files. Curious whether it is (or was) a wine shop or an actual winery: Chateau de Azovstal? This is the region's 'sun belt', so certain hardy grapes will grow there. Never seen vineyards though, in my various map perusings. I always thought of it as more a Sochi / Crimea thing. Topos, a week old. River, though tiny, looks like it makes these defences tough to flank or envelop. So Ivan needs to plough straight ahead along the streets.

OK, ya got us! A sinister cabal of Canucks has been pulling Steve's strings the entire life of this board. What, you actually still believe Vermont is a US state? ....And as for @BFCElvis? Ha! he's been our sock puppet all along. Just post an Eighties hit and that poor sap rolls right over.

1. OK, back on track. Living off the land, 17th century style. This sounds like something out of Twilight: 2000 (speaking of Poland). If draft horses were still used in Eastern Europe, I'd expect to hear about foraging cavalry raids. 2. Yes, I know, Russia Sux Echo Chamber and all that, but, c'mon! They laid out a Potemkin Siegfried line, FFS!

Wrong forum, lunkheads!®

Hmm, somebody took his grumpy pills this morning (or is jetlagged). Silence, in Polish!!!! (been a while since I broke my vows and posted a meme) We must make allowances for our Polish cadre. Hopefully we see a lot more Polish content for all CM games!

No, he's right, I meant Berling and typed Anders. And I even walked the pilgrimage trail from Hill 445 to the Polish cemetery at Cassino. ...See what I mean about being careful what you post on this Mother of All Boards? **** .... extending remarks, this historical sidebar is actually ending up more interesting than the OP deserves. In addition to sheer callous indifference to life, there's also a pragmatic reality that by 1944 the Red Army is (successfully) operating thousands of AFVs and other vehicles, plus aircraft and reasonably competent artillery. So by 1944, those who are literate, or at least have fundamental mechanical skills by Eastern European 1930s standards (the Hammer), as well as Russian language skills -- so that's Russian and Russian-adjacent urban proletarians -- more likely end up as mechanics, gunners, tankers or air crew. Meanwhile those who don't (the Sickle) get the high casualty grunt roles. So there's that.

And in addition to the Like, you get a special shoutout for using 'the Russian' in the singular. As in: Der Russe ist tot! Lol (sardonically)

Sure, and Poles got caught up in it too, along with Romanians, Bulgarians, Slovaks, etc. The 'lucky ones' went to General A̶n̶d̶e̶r̶s̶' Berling's Polish Army. Others simply got stuck in Red Army units, as ordinary infantry or else doing whatever menial jobs (often hazardous, like mine clearing. 'Letter to Ilza' is a memoir). *Nobody* is whitewashing the Red Army in WW2 on here either, btw. This board is filled with hard core grognard wargamers who have spent their adult lives reading deeply into all the corners. We are pretty hard to gull. So if somebody shows up making an extraordinary claim that by late 44 the ethnic Russians are largely running punishment detachments of everyone else in front of them onto the German lines, well, bring your sources mate. Because the consensus is, the Red Army were pretty much equal opportunity bastards, with a brutality exceeded only by their enemy.

Thanks for this, yes, although I prefer to leave the burden of proof on the accuser. ....Because he can just claim your stats were all falsified by Stalin, the same way his demographers had the average Georgian male living to age 99, blah blah blah. I mean, there is no question that after 1942 the Red Army was either shooting as a fascist or else conscripting every male it could lay hands on as it retook territories in the RSFSR, Ukraine, White Russia and then various non-Slavic possessions. (This would seem to imply that Russia proper did its fair share of dying, relative to the entire USSR) ....But as you note, his conclusion is... simply false, and of a piece with the rest of what he spews on here.

And I will once again call BS on this assertion. Cite a credible source on Red Army demographics.