Vanir Ausf B
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Posts posted by Vanir Ausf B
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Ukraine is asking for more tanks, specifically from Germany. Predictably, the answer so far is "nein".
WaPo (probably paywalled)
QuoteUkraine’s ability to expel Russian forces from its country as soon as possible now depends largely on Germany and its willingness to send desperately needed armor, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday.
Kyiv believes the requested heavy armor — including battle tanks and personnel carriers — could help shift that turning point into a tipping point. Ukrainian officials are now urging their Western partners to provide them with more weapons immediately.
“The faster we receive this or that weapon from Germany, the faster Germany finally breaks this feeling of closeness with Russia, the faster the war will end,” Podolyak said. He said that Ukraine is specifically asking for armored personnel vehicles and tanks to be able to support its battlefield momentum.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/ukraine-tanks-russia-germany-offensive/
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wrong thread
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1 hour ago, chrisl said:
It's plausible that the WIA:KIA rates are closer to 2:1 or even 1:1 for much of the action.
Not impossible, but pretty extreme by historical standards.
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29 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
The other issue is that if Russia has suffered even 100k casualties of all types (KIA would be around 20k, which is the bottom end of estimates by now), this means a starting force of 140k would be at 70% loss. Obviously that's ridiculous, so let's double that number to take into consideration all that came after... loss rate of 35% for a force of 280k. That still seems high. Let's peg it at 20% loss rate. That means a 500k sized force.
What this means is even if you more than halve the 50k KIA rate you still wind up with about 500k uniformed Russian personnel rotating through Ukraine.
That's a fair assessment, but it circles back to the question of how believable the 50k number is. 50k at 20% loss rate means a million Russians cycling through Ukraine in 6 months. That is why I have been skeptical of the 40-50k Russian KIA numbers.
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6 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
My point still stands. Taking the overall force number that Russia has at any one time does not reflect how many people went through Ukraine in the last 6 months. What we need to know is that number, though of course it's not easy to piece together.
Well, yeah
I remember Girkin predicting last spring that Russia could raise a few "tens of thousands" of volunteers that would get swamped by the Ukrainian horde of millions. I'm sure he was spitballing, but still. I don't know what the number is but several hundred thousand would surprise me.
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10 minutes ago, Calamine Waffles said:
This works because the Russians did not establish any defence in depth whatsoever. Can you always guarantee that will be the case?
I can't escape the feeling that some of the "lessons" we are seeing are artifacts of this war's peculiarities and may not be transferable to other conflicts, even near-peer. Is it that mass doesn't work or is it that you can't mass without denuding vast swaths of frontage, as the Russians are discovering to their chagrin.
24 minutes ago, dan/california said:Wasn't somebody working on a game to explore some of these questions?
One can hope
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25 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
Remember, it isn't total forces committed at one time... it's how many have been rotated through that matters. If Russia lost 10,000 KIA and replaced them with 10,000 new contractors, then the net force size doesn't change. So we have to take Russia's starting force of roughly 250,000, add to it all the units it grabbed from all over the Russian Federation and Syria, then add to it all the volunteers and stealth mobilizations (in particular switching conscripts to contractors). 500,000 doesn't seem an unreasonable number
I'm not sure where the 250,000 number comes from. The numbers I have seen are more like 140,000, or maybe 190,000 if you include DPR/LNR and Rosgvardiya. That would be 300% turnover if we're excluding DPR/LNR. I just don't see where they got that many replacements.
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I keep thinking about the video posted yesterday of the Humvee leading an assault on a village, .50 cal blazing and AT4s popping off. This is exactly what tanks were designed for. Have the Ukrainians discovered that light vehicles are just as good or are they making do with what they have because tanks can't be everywhere?
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8 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
Therefore, either 50,000 KIA is too high or the estimated KIA rate is too low. For example, a 10% KIA rate would mean 500,000 Russians were in Ukraine over the last 6 months. That total number seems more than likely accurate, so it really comes down to us accepting Russia took 10% KIA over this time period. Personally, I think it is plausible.
Steve
500,000 seems improbable to me. Unless the Russian "stealth mobilization" has been far more successful than we thought.
RE: Tanks
Ukraine has about 5 armored brigades to cover a frontage of somewhere around 1800-2000 km. I think this is why we see tanks penny-packeted in company-size units and also why we are seeing wheeled vehicles used in assaults. It's not so much a deliberate decision to avoid mass as it is a condition imposed by this war. At least that's my guess
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1 hour ago, FancyCat said:
Probably busy attempting to resupply the Kherson defenders.
Congrats to Germany, looks like the Gepards proved their usefulness!
I'd love to learn more about what the Gepards are doing. Because prior to this article the last we heard was that the ammunition painstakingly sourced from Norway didn't work.
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On 9/5/2022 at 12:17 AM, markshot said:
Wouldn't it have been simple for BFC to provide an engine based terrain grid?
They actually did try it but according to Steve it cratered the frames per second.
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Russians need to play more Combat Mission. Anyone who has played Black Sea or Cold War knows that when a tank fires it can't sit there admiring the result. You gotta MOVE!
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14 minutes ago, akd said:
Crazy UKR mounted counter-attack near Pisky:
Girkin mentioned this tactic. It's straight out of WW2.
"Sources noted the outstanding audacity of enemy attacks - "on armor and wheels" seizing positions, breaking into them at high speed directly on armored and other equipment, as a result of which artillery lost the ability to strike the enemy on the way to our positions."
https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1567434170460160003
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4 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
Rumor was that 5th Tank Brigade received them and is, in fact, mostly equipped with donated vehicles.
Steve
He meant what Russian unit has T-90M. They're rare and have mostly been seen in the Kharkiv area. The new 3rd Army Corps has some.
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ninja'd, as usuall
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4 minutes ago, sburke said:
and I thought he meant Viagra...
Would be an explosive combination.
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6 hours ago, The_Capt said:
- Military Energy
5 hours ago, poesel said:ok, what is that? Must have missed that in physics.
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Apparently Ukraine is being very tight-lipped.
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3 hours ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:
What do you make of the Russian claims that the UKR forces are suffering significantly heavier losses than the RUS in the Donbass fight? This claim is being repeatedly made, at least by Strelkov.
If this is correct, then the automatic assumption that RUS attacks are "frontal and costly", i.e. costly because they are frontal should be changed somewhat. They certainly are slow and require huge expenditure of ammunition, but if they protect RUS infantry, which is their most precious resource at the moment, this change of tactics is not evidence of stupidity, but quite reasonable adaptation.
Fair questions, and the interview with General Kryvonos that LLF serendipitously posted addresses those points.
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Kryvonos: You don’t have to be afraid of the opponent, but you have to respect him and evaluate him correctly. So here again, I say that the Russians, having a great experience of wars over the past almost 30 years, quickly draw conclusions from their mistakes and promptly adjust the tactics of their forces and means.
(I): I don’t ask for absolute numbers, the number of losses of Ukrainian troops. But I want to ask a theoretical question. And the public thinks that offensive losses must be many times greater than defensive losses. It seems to me from my couch that this was correct in the 12th century when they stormed a fortress. But in twenty-first-century wars, that’s not the case at all. And the fact that you describe the Russian offensive this way does not give us any reason to hope that our losses were many times less than the losses of the enemy.
Kryvonos: Unfortunately, that’s true because the real advantage of domination on the field of artillery duels resulted in our losses being far greater than the Russian losses. Because one might imagine war from the old movie, when people go up to the attack and go there in chains, they are shot by machine gunners. Unfortunately, in this war, it’s a bit different. There are considerably fewer shooting contacts than artillery fire. So, at the expense of the artillery advantage, the Russians suffered fewer losses than we did. And the fact that the counter-battery was not tight enough because there were simply no shells. So we were taking more casualties than the Russians. Unfortunately, we have to recognize this fact. And it is not the fault of the military; it is the fault for not creating the state’s correct military and economic capacity in the last 30 years
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Yes, good podcast. Another item that stuck out to me is that the UAF never really trained for offensive operations.
2 hours ago, dan/california said:Really interesting stuff. The newest bits , at least to me, are about what was happening right before and after 2/24.
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11 minutes ago, billbindc said:
An energy independent China is a very long way away.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/chinas-changing-oil-strategy-and-its-foreign-policy-implications/
I am not going to read that whole article, but if it says that taking over Russia's eastern oil and gas reserves wouldn't greatly alleviate their reliance on middle eastern supply chains then by all means, let them have Siberia. Heck, let them take everything east of Moscow.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted · Edited by Vanir Ausf B
Lengthy thread by Shashank Joshi interviewing unnamed "Western official".
https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1570029079704866816