Vanir Ausf B

So here is the part that people who have not been in a war simply do not get - it is an incredibly slippery slope to the bottom.  Humans are natural born killers for the most part and when given license they get very good at it very fast.  So in war, unregulated killing turns into exactly what we are seeing the RA do in occupied territories very quickly.
”I do not see the point of arguing combat warcrimes” is right next door to “killing of civilians is a-ok” when one is talking warfare.  
“What?!  I never said that!”  Well you basically did because “letting boys be boys” in combat will spread to non-combat situations incredibly fast and there is a mountain of history to back me up on that point.
So the notion of a “war crime” started to try and keep civilians out of it.  This turned out to be very difficult and we failed gloriously at it in WW2 - hence the big push in ‘49 and the new LOAC.  
The idea that two sides can kill each other but not “kill” each other seems counterintuitive and for some “woke” but it is core to military discipline and the idea that war does not need to collapse into strategies of extermination on entire populations. 

As to your last point - “stop war” well in 1949 the UN was set up to do exactly that.  War between states without just cause and recognition of the international community is “illegal” - e.g. the Russian invasion of Ukraine is “illegal”.  Why? Because unregulated war is very bad for everyone on the 21st century, not just those directly involved in combat.
Finally without all these legal frameworks the case for defending Ukraine itself erodes.  We may care to keep Russia at bay but in reality they are barely a global power - I mean seriously, beyond the strategic dead end of nukes, Russia poses an annoyance to NATO (and justification to spend money), it is not an existential threat.  
It is the attack on The Rules that underpins our support to Ukraine in this war - if there were not “The Rules” then why should I care about a “border dispute”* in Eastern Europe from all the way here across the Atlantic Ocean?  

[Canadian trade with Ukraine in 2022 was $155M out of over $62B in Canadian global exports.  The $155M we do in annual sales to Ukraine is one sixth support we have provided so far (nearly $1B)]
*(literally the words I have heard from some circles) 
 

Stephen Biddle paints a target on his forehead. Fire away.
__________
First, offensive maneuver is apparently far from dead. Even in the face of modern weapons, breakthrough is still possible, and especially so when astute offensive operations on interior lines pose dilemmas for thinly stretched defenses like those of the Russians in Kherson and Kharkiv since mid-summer. Those offensives would have been even more successful with improved Ukrainian training and equipment, but Ukraine’s ability to succeed with what they have is a powerful demonstration that offensive maneuver has not been rendered impossible by new technology. 
But second, while offensive breakthrough is still possible under the right conditions, it remains very hard to accomplish against deep, prepared defenses with adequate supplies and operational reserves behind them. This is not a novel feature of new technology — it is an enduring consequence of the post-1900 lethality of ever-evolving weapons that has been observed repeatedly over more than a century of combat experience. Exposed defenders are increasingly vulnerable to long-range weapons and sensors, but covered and concealed positions remain highly resistant to precision engagement. Shallow, forward defenses can be ruptured with well-organized combined arms attacks, but deep defenses with meaningful reserves behind them still pose much harder problems for attackers. Overextended positions without secure supply lines can be overwhelmed, but consolidated positions with viable logistical support are still much harder and more costly to overcome. 
Third, neither shallow, vulnerable defenses nor deep, robust ones are universal features of modern war. Both have occurred regularly since 1900, and both have occurred, at various times and places, in Ukraine since February. 
And this in turn casts doubt on the advisability of redesigning modern militaries around an assumption that new technology has made effective offensive maneuver either impossible or available on demand. Successful offense has long been very difficult, and it has normally required both demanding preparations and a permissive defender. But it offers decisive outcomes when conditions allow it, and such conditions recur with enough frequency to suggest that its demands are worth meeting. 
https://warontherocks.com/2022/11/ukraine-and-the-future-of-offensive-maneuver/

To summarize...
Definitely, the liquidation of the Kherson-Berislav bridgehead of the enemy on the right bank of the Dnieper had not only positive consequences for the Armed Forces of Ukraine and Ukraine, but also quite negative ones for them. For example, expanding the capabilities of the enemy command to strengthen their groupings of troops in other directions and sectors, but also, accordingly, acquiring the ability for them to organize and conduct a larger and wider range of active operations.
Under the conditions of strategic defense, to which the enemy has switched, this ability of his does not at all look superfluous for him. Therefore, it is clearly not worth considering that tomorrow, or at least the day after tomorrow, he will again begin to retreat with regular gestures of goodwill ...
 
In terms of the situation at the front, the coming weeks may bring many surprises. Moreover, both positive and quite negative for Ukraine, character ...

Made the grab yesterday but then wondered I can neither download nor find the BP anywhere. The 2.12 patch thing escaped me entirely. lol😅 Now downloading.... 🙄🤣...anyway a well invested 10 Euros. 😎
Edit: installed and activated just fine. Here´s 2.12 change/fix notes:
BUG FIXES
* FIXED: The game correctly overwrites existing saved games when directed to
* FIXED: M3A1 scout car no longer has functioning non-WW2 thermal sight
* FIXED: APDS and turret speed now factored into QB prices
* FIXED: Blast values for some HE shells
* FIXED: APHE lethality versus infantry
* FIXED: 251/2 vehicle mounted mortar now able to fire when vehicle ammo used but mortar and crew still have ammo
* FIXED: Building entry bug and troops breaking & running towards the enemy is corrected

Stephen Biddle paints a target on his forehead. Fire away.
__________
First, offensive maneuver is apparently far from dead. Even in the face of modern weapons, breakthrough is still possible, and especially so when astute offensive operations on interior lines pose dilemmas for thinly stretched defenses like those of the Russians in Kherson and Kharkiv since mid-summer. Those offensives would have been even more successful with improved Ukrainian training and equipment, but Ukraine’s ability to succeed with what they have is a powerful demonstration that offensive maneuver has not been rendered impossible by new technology. 
But second, while offensive breakthrough is still possible under the right conditions, it remains very hard to accomplish against deep, prepared defenses with adequate supplies and operational reserves behind them. This is not a novel feature of new technology — it is an enduring consequence of the post-1900 lethality of ever-evolving weapons that has been observed repeatedly over more than a century of combat experience. Exposed defenders are increasingly vulnerable to long-range weapons and sensors, but covered and concealed positions remain highly resistant to precision engagement. Shallow, forward defenses can be ruptured with well-organized combined arms attacks, but deep defenses with meaningful reserves behind them still pose much harder problems for attackers. Overextended positions without secure supply lines can be overwhelmed, but consolidated positions with viable logistical support are still much harder and more costly to overcome. 
Third, neither shallow, vulnerable defenses nor deep, robust ones are universal features of modern war. Both have occurred regularly since 1900, and both have occurred, at various times and places, in Ukraine since February. 
And this in turn casts doubt on the advisability of redesigning modern militaries around an assumption that new technology has made effective offensive maneuver either impossible or available on demand. Successful offense has long been very difficult, and it has normally required both demanding preparations and a permissive defender. But it offers decisive outcomes when conditions allow it, and such conditions recur with enough frequency to suggest that its demands are worth meeting. 
https://warontherocks.com/2022/11/ukraine-and-the-future-of-offensive-maneuver/

Well, that certainly explains the lack of news from the fronts.  Everyone waiting for the ground to freeze.  Soooooo weird to see this, 80 years later, for us WW2 fans.   Thanks much for sharing these vids.  

Here is a quick and dirty AAR for a scenario I've been working on for Combat Mission Cold War. It should be noted that this is a test run through of this scenario. It features two Soviet tank battalions in the attack against a US cavalry troop, with me playing as the Soviets. The goal for the Soviets is to force a breakthrough. High losses are expected but acceptable if a breakthrough is achieved.

The goal of the initial fires and maneuver plan is to compartmentalize the battlefield by isolating the far left and far rear enemy positions with smoke, while pummeling suspected strongpoints with massed artillery fire before reducing them with massed direct fire

The results are rough.



The enemy strongpoints along their main line of resistance are reduced, but it costs the entirety of 1st battalions tanks to do so

2nd battalion (having arrived as reinforcements) is tasked with carrying on the attack to affect a breakthrough

To support their efforts, the artillery fires are pushed deeper into the map to suppress known/suspected enemy strongpoints. The town will be bypassed unless an AT threat remains, in which case 1st battalion's infantry will assault and clear the town.
And the result of the effort:

2nd battalion is able to reduce the remaining strongpoints and force a breakthrough, taking relatively few losses in the process.
Of the 40 tanks lost in the attack, 30 are from 1st battalion in their effort to smash through the MLR.
Brief Analysis:
Could this have gone better for the Soviets? 

I think there are two answers to that question.
1) The entire scenario is a forced breach against a solid defense, so heavy losses are inevitable. A big part of the Soviet dilemma is choosing where to take the inescapable beating, or put nicer, spend the combat power. In this case I chose to spend 1st battalion breaking the enemy main line of resistance. The result was 1st battalion getting destroyed, but it was not in vain. 1st battalion reduced enough of the strongpoints that 2nd battalion was able to blow through and achieve a breakthrough with minimal losses.
2) The fires plan could also have placed the smoke in a way that would have isolated all but one strongpoint (as opposed to leaving two open). By blinding all but one, it would have made the initial direct fire engagement with my tanks less one sided, but would have created more difficulties later. I've drawn up another graphic of this modified fires plan, this one:

The downside to this is that while it shields the attacker at first, it also puts them in a tough spot that they still have to fight out of. With the far right strongpoint reduced, that still leaves the center and rear right strongpoint to deal with, and the far left strongpoint can still put fire into the kill zone (engagement area) as well, which means follow on forces are more at risk.
There are a few tweaks I'm planning to make (the addition of another battery of 152mm 2S3's as noted in the revised fires plan graphic) and I am also waiting on a friend of mine to finish a playthrough to see those results. This will hopefully be revisited and given a more detailed AAR in the future, but for now I thought this would be a fun pocket sized AAR. 

NATO doctrine assumes that the main role in air defense is played by aviation. As a result, the majority of NATO countries have weak and small air defense. For example, Poland's air defense system in 2022 consisted of air defense systems of an even older model than Ukraine's (S-200, S-125). I found an interesting article on Facebook about the Polish air defense and their ability to repel a missile strike. It is without translation, so I will translate it myself.
What about air defense in Poland, and can the Poles defend themselves against racist missiles
- After yesterday's "arrival" over Poland during the Russian missile attack, there was a lot of wonder about how NATO (as the collective sum of the military power of the participating countries) could "sleep through" the attack. And the problem lies in the fact that even the same Poles have anti-aircraft defense at a "symbolic" level.
If we take data on air defense units in the Polish Air Force, there is only one S-200B battery covering Warsaw. And 17 S-125 Neva SC complexes (in a mobile version, on a tracked chassis).
If we take the data for the units of the army air defense as part of the Polish Ground Forces, then the picture looks somewhat "richer".
In particular, the Poles still have 20 2K12 "Kub" complexes, 64 "Osa-AK" complexes (this figure is as of the end of last year), 42 short-range Poprad air defense systems, 20 ZSU-23-4MP Biala anti-aircraft artillery complexes ( the Polish upgrade of "Shylka"), and about a hundred Pilica complexes - a "hybrid" of the modified ZU-23-2 and Piorun MANPADS. Also - about 300 units of "classic" ZU-23-2.
But the situation with air defense equipment for the Polish naval forces looks the most colorful. Their fleet has two anti-aircraft divisions and two anti-aircraft batteries armed with S-60 and ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft guns and "Peruns". And with such a simple array of forces, the Poles cover in particular the pride of their Navy - two batteries of NSM coastal missile anti-ship complexes.

Short interview with a Ukrainian drone operator.
 

Short interview with a Ukrainian drone operator.
 

The most comprehensive analysis of the air war status from the start to this point. (second one was "Revisiting Russian Air Performance in Ukraine-the Russia Contingency with Michael Kofman" but it has paywall)

One of possible reasons of missile accident - improved Kh-101 missiles, last batches of whicn now equipped with EW counter-measuring equipment against SA-missiles. UKR missile could lost targeting or drawn away by EW work.
Condolences to Poland... Despite this is a war and many wars had border accidents, but... lives can't be turned back.  
 

So if anyone wants to take a break from this entire Poland missile thing - 
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/war-not-an-excuse-ukraine-rail-boss-keeps-trains-running-1.6155075
So this is the kind of thing that I look for with respect to metrics.  If you are in the process of invading a nation it is normally a really good idea to directly attack and degrade its ability to defend itself.  Russia has clearly demonstrated the intent and capability, what it appears to lack is expertise, or perhaps the ability to unify that expertise - but my big question since this started is "why"?  The general answer has been a lot of eye-rolling "well Russia is just dumb" but how they are "dumb" is important to my mind - what is their epistemological failure-engine being driven by?
In this war Russia has expended a LOT of high priced long range missile hardware - https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/october/lessons-russian-missile-performance-ukraine.  It is noted that they are likely having very high failure rates; however, this is further compounded by shortfalls in Russian ISR that allows for precise targeting even assuming all the missiles work.  
But there is more.  We have been bouncing a hypothesis around this forum on how a lot of this war is about Russian identity and its place in the world - that internal political dimension definitely plays a role, at least in Putin's calculus.  Further it is about Russian identity relative to Ukraine - this would be akin to the US invading Canada and losing (again, *ahem 1813*), the collective identity impacts would be severe.  However, we have also suspected that those "identity biased assumptions" have been driving the progress of this war - from the wildly overambitious opening moves, to the re-set of objectives and responses.  In fact it was demonstrated that poor strategic assumptions were a factor for Russia, even back in 2014.
So what?  Well the complete failure to effectively degrade Ukrainian rail is another potential peice of evidence that support that central hypothesis.  Russia has focused its limited long range fires capability on terror strikes, and now it finally appears to be focusing on civilian power infrastructure to keep the heat and lights out.  The central Russian premise appears to be that Ukrainian collective will is vulnerable and all they need to do is keep hitting it towards failure.  Somehow just one more hard push and the Ukrainian resolve will falter - this is nuts at this point in the war.  I have brought up relative rationality before and Russia clearly is suffering from it.  To the point that it is driving their military targeting enterprise.  Russia should theoretically be able to cripple the Ukrainian rail infrastructure.  Railways do not move, their supporting infrastructure is impossible to hide - one can see it from Google Earth.  If Russia had done that, the ability of Ukraine to conduct two simultaneous operational offensives separated by over 400 kms would have been severely challenged. Ukraine having a rail system able to sustain an "85% success rate" (something I know the UK would find impossible to do right now in peacetime, having just suffered their rail system) should not be possible at this point in a war this large - especially when their opponent has the ability to hit the full range of their nation. 
So, so what?  This is less about Russian targeting "sucking" - although their missile failure rates definitely point to that, this is about Russian decision making being 1) rigid well past the point of general rationality, and 2) built on flawed assumptions more about them than the reality on the ground.  For those who have been following this thread throughout the war I understand that this is not really news, but it does lead to a series of indicators and warnings we should be watching out for in case Russia actually figures out that its assumptions are completely broken.  However, I also suspect that they are well past the point of return regardless - too many losses and failures along with the continued corrosion of the RA means that even if they did figure it out now, it is likely already too late to change the trajectory of this war. 
I already have a book title in mind - "A warm, dark, smelly, but safe place - How Russia went to War with Its Head Up its Own Bum."

I think we are a *very* long way away from a no fly zone at this point. The first rule of managing escalation is to maintain proportionality. A no fly zone is not proportional in any way with a couple of errant missiles and it would be an excellent way to create splits in support for Ukraine. I know that's an unsatisfying conclusion on a lot of levels but the reality is that, especially with Ukraine appearing to be steadily winning, nobody wants to induce a reduction in support for Kyiv or an uncontrolled spiral out of control with Moscow.
 

With all the talk about light forces being the future of warfare this video speaks volumes about what matters in the present.
 

Er, can we settle for liberation Cato?

Well guys, at last I got this!  Symbolically in the day of Kherson liberation ) 
Thank you @Kinophile for this initiative and enough "family diplomacy" in resolving of sudden obstacle on "last mile" 😀
Thank you @Battlefront.com - Steve, your "bribe" ) will be worked out ))))
Thank you all, who donated anonymously
Thank you, all other, who just have been reading and support our country - first two months were some nervous and psychologically hard, so this my 24/7 "marathone" here was giving me some emotional relief. 
 

As did the French. It's a lamentable fact the French fought pretty hard in a losing fight only to have that forgotten soon after.

I doubt it's the biggest strike, just a particularly bigger one than usually shown on social. 
+View from one of the trucks involved :
 
 
 
 

{Apologizing for a very long post up front - proceed at your own risk}
Ok now we are getting somewhere.  There is ample evidence that in 2014 the RA surprised the world in that it did not actually suck, there is your citation above and then from the references I posted:
"The Ukraine conflict has been described as “World War I with technology.”11 One aspect that stands out in the Ukraine conflict is the Russian employment of indirect fires. Combining separatist and regular BTGs, Russia has effectively degraded Ukrainian military forces with long range artillery and rocket fire. Russia’s preferred concept of operations has been to keep its fires units at a safe distance, while relying on drones, counter-battery radars, and other intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets to target over the horizon.12 The observed combination of increased range and precision tracks with a general trend noted worldwide, particularly with multiple rocket launchers. As a result, Russia has on numerous occasions successfully blunted Ukrainian operations while avoiding significant casualties. Ukraine, on the other hand, is estimated to have suffered 80% of its casualties from artillery fire.13 The increased lethality has required fewer rounds, yet Russia has also demonstrated that it retains the ability to mass large volumes of fires when necessary."
"A defining feature of Russian fires has been their speed. Ukrainian units report that once a
Russian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is spotted they may receive artillery strikes within
minutes."
https://nsiteam.com/social/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/NS-D-10367-Learning-Lessons-from-Ukraine-Conflict-Final.pdf

 

These by Karber - there is no grey area here and plenty more which we could fill pages with.  Yes, the Russian proxy forces did suck but these were not Russian "hybrids" by any stretch, it was not until summer '14 thru winter '15 that RA conventional forces got fully in the game, and even then highly constrained because - denial.  Once those conventional forces got into the game they appeared to largely dominate the battlespace and a series of major reversals on the UA ensued.  
This surprised the hell out of everyone - I was in FD at the time - because exactly as you note "Russia has been sucking" at conventional war since the end of the Cold War, from Chechnya thru Georgia.  Suddenly this yokel military was doing things that we could not do, particularly with integration of tactical fires.  But...and it is a big "but" (tee hee) even Karber saw some holes that point to the fact that all was not sunshine and roses on the RA side:

Ah ha!  To my old eye this speaks to 1) lack of PGM integration and 2) a rigid system that can deliver very fast but lacks agility to switch on the fly.  So what?  Well in the intervening 8 years the UA adapted to highly dispersed and more mobile warfare.  There is a lot more out there on how in 2014 the Russian's did not suck tactically and even hints they got their act together operationally - but nowhere near enough for 2022.  Finally the results also speak for themselves as the outcome of the war was clearly a Russian win - even with only gaining half of the Donbas, the Russian failure was translating a tactical win to a strategic one.  In fact it appears that Putin simply "post-truthed" the entire thing and called it a strategic win, when it was not.   We could fill a lot more forum space on this but in the end Ukraine was not cowed and subserviently accepting Russian dominance, they pivoted heavily to the west - we started our training missions there then - and conducted major military reforms exactly because they had suffered battlefield defeats.  It is on Putin and Russia for 1) giving Ukraine the breathing room and 2) convincing themselves of their own superiority.  Both factors led directly to the debacle of this war.  In fact Putin likely set in motion the very reasons for this war - a westward facing Ukraine looking seriously at NATO.
So rather than playing "Russia Sucks" and "No It Doesn't - UA rulez" because it is frankly going to get us nowhere lets have a conversation on what the real issue is in the early assessment of this war and why it went largely wrong.  I offer it had nothing to do with "Russia Sucks" or "Russia Rulz" and everything to do with two key factors in the analysis - context and scaling, the pitfalls of effective military assessment. (that is right folks, the deep truths are very often the least sexy).
So the primary issue with pre-war assessments - and I am talking for both the west and Russia - as far as I can can tell is that they took the tactical performance of the RA in 2014 1) out of context, 2) failed to properly understand the challenges of scaling and 3) applied very poor alignment of that scaling.
So what is The_Capt talking about?
Well context is the first daemon people did not slay.  Karber glanced off it and many cautioned against directly translating the phenomenon of 2014 over to this war but it looks like everyone did it to some extent anyway. 
In other work we studied global pandemics for various reasons, the fact we were in one being the primary, and we found that pandemics are not unlike wars when looking at macro and micro social constructs.  It causes similar tensions, vertical and horizontal, and reaches deeply into human psyche.  But that is not my point here, the major conclusion was that pandemics are like wars in that each has commonality between events but also is each unique in its context.  There will only ever be one COVID-19 pandemic.  In ten years COVID could take a twist to the left and do its gig, but the context will be very different.  Primarily, it would occur in a post-COVID 19 world.  The trick in pandemics and wars is being able to identify what is a trend and what is an isolated phenomenon, and how we do this is through careful analysis of context.  
So the 2014 war was very small by the standards of this one.  Russian involvement at the strategic level had major issues - one of which I just explained up there.  Russia demonstrated acumen in strategic subversive warfare - and frankly I have read and heard plenty that we probably over estimated this as well - however, they had no strategic follow through and displayed a lot of poor assumptions and biases both going into and out of 2014.  It was no strategic masterpiece and we should have expected a strategic mess in this war as this was a visible trend from way back to Chechnya.  Further it was made unfixable largely due to political interference.
Next, there were signals that at the operational level the RA was still operating under an old ruleset.  My take away from Steve's posted citations was likely problems with the RA logistical system and the lack of operational enablers.  The Russian issues with operational level of warfare were not really that evident but there were plenty of indications that all was not perfect either.
Tactically, we have already discussed at length but here is where context left the building.  Ok, so 4000 RA conventional troops summer '14, which is what? about 3 BTGs? - managed to score some pretty impressive points against a military that was clearly not prepared for what they brought.  But this does not immediately translate to the entire RA, nor does it mean the RA could do this at a different scale.  Assessing tactical success or failure without context is nearly useless - we learned that in places like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan the hard way.  Further onto the real punchline - tactical success or failure without full understanding of scaling is not useless, it is dangerous as hell.
So scaling can go up or down, and the major failure in understanding this war from a lot of the experts was the assumptions on scaling the RA in both directions.  First there was taking the tactical performance in 2014 and upscaling it.  It was a huge leap, and frankly pretty amateur for the pay grades of some of these experts, to take the observed RA tactical "wows" and upscale them through the operational level to the strategic. The level of complexity and investment to make those "wows" happen on a larger scope and scale, let alone synchronize them is a challenge for the US military who is spending the most on military capability in the history of our species (ok, and before the Prussian, Mongol and Spartan lovers jump in...per capita exceptions accepted...gawd, I hate all you so much).  It was an enormous leap of logic to think that Russia would walk out of phonebooth as a super-military able to do something the US and western allies would think twice about - the upscaling challenges were (and are) frankly humbling.
Now because chaos rules in this universe, it is a bit less of a leap to say badness upscales, I will give you that; however, it is also a risky venture.  Less so for outcomes but it masks a whole lot of the macro-issues, which frankly if Russia ever did solve for, we should be concerned because by definition it will mean they understand their weakness and can learn from them.
So at the beginning of this war, we had a lot of experts who had spent 8 years upscaling 2014 and then failed to down-scale when the war actually happened...seriously?!  A whole lot of wargames and operational research showed the RA in Kyiv in less than a week.  Wargames in the Baltics showed the same Russian blitzkriegs.  So, ok, lets forget that Russian superiority at the strategic and operational level was in doubt even from 2014, failure to downscale and actually test the Russian "wows" against what they were going to be facing at the tactical level (and we had a very good idea what the UA was capable of at the tactical level - we had been training with them for years).  In the business we call this macro-masking, which is where macro calculus fails to take into account micro-phenomenon across a broad range of samples. 
For example, if all the experts had loaded pre-war scenarios into CMBS they would have seen that battlefield friction had gone up significantly.  So if your dice rolls at the operational level say "the RA will advance in three days", well test out that advance across a range of tactical vignettes and lo and behold it did not go so well because it turns out that global ISR advantage, plus smart-ATGMs, plus PGM against what the RA could bring to the party pointed squarely to rethinking those stupid operational dice tables. 
So what?  Well over here in CM land we were looking for other things than those at the macro-table.  The (very expensive) experts with lot of letters behind their names were watching the big red lines on the country map because that is how they played their games.  We were looking at a lot of abandoned Russian equipment - and I mean a lot of very valuable equipment.  We were seeing a steady stream of hi res UAS video coming out of Ukraine on a daily basis when we should not be seeing anything.  We saw RA combined arms fall apart, right along with their logistics as demonstrated by F ech vehicles out of gas and burning re-fuelers.  It did not take a major leap at this altitude to know there was really loud dangerous sounds coming out of the RA engine room, while mainstream was waiting for Kyiv to fall.  However, we also understood upscaling as well.  The effect of the tactical mess spread along most operational axis was consistent - as was the complete lack of operational integration.  Targeting, air support, logistics and the list goes on - the RA was fighting 5-6 separate 2014s, not a coherent and integrated joint operation designed to collapse Ukrainian option spaces.  
So, so what?  Well sitting around and patting ourselves on the back is about as helpful as circle-jerking does for procreation. I think we have established we were, and still are to some extent ahead of the curve - no point dancing a jig on that one.  What we need to do is fully understand what is happening on the ground on this war, what is a trend and what is isolated context.  I am not really interested in what I think I know, I am interested in what I know I do not know.  For example, the old Capt has gone on about mass...at length.  Well if the utility of military mass has shifted, even slightly, the repercussions are profound - one need only study WW1 and WW2 to see why.  Do the principles of war even still apply?  Is conventional manoeuvre warfare still a thing? Is the tank dead? What the hell just happened?  
The point of a highly distributed collective "brain" as we have developed here on this little forum is to try and understand the events better - to inform and create cognitive advantage.  So this is not about sitting around and feeling good watching RA soldier have a bad last day, nor self-validation or promoting/reinforcing echo-chamber; it is about collective learning about war through what is happening in this one...and what better place to do that than a bunch of computer wargamers with far too much time on their hands? 
  
 
 

Well I think we are just going to have to agree to disagree and maybe things will become more clear when more data becomes available.  I am not seeing any corroborated evidence of above and would need to in order to follow a thread from 2014 to here.  In fact reviewing some of this stuff (again) in context of this war I come to the exact opposite conclusion - the Russians were victims of their own success from 2014.
We can nitpik tactical performance all day long but in the end the RA supported a proxy war and then rolled in pseudo conventional forces in new force structures and were observed crushing an opponent who had been succeeding against uncon separatist forces.  They pulled off two major operations that first pushed back the UA and then decisively defeated the in the field in early ‘15 forcing the Ukrainian government to the negotiations table. In the end Russia had taken the Crimea and about half the Donbas and avoided any real western reaction. I am sure there were observations of RA issues, no military in history has ever had a perfect war, but nothing I can see leads to a forecast of what happened in this war in prosecution or outcome.  To take the position of “well they didn’t take the whole Donbas = they suck” is a serious stretch given the context of the conflict.  Did they want the whole Donbas?  Could they do it without a full scale invasion which they were avoiding see: no western reaction?  
Hey maybe you were the lone prophet, the outlier who saw what everyone missed; however, using your own conclusions to prove your own theories is pretty risky and filled with pitfalls.  Further, I am not sure it sets up a theory that is resilient enough to stand up to scrutiny.  I think “Russia sucks” as a general theory is weak and overly-simplistic for explaining the phenomenon we have seen in this war and will continue to do my part to keep looking for other answers.

Or 3.  You and the analyst were (are) basing your conclusions on incomplete understanding - both parties saw what they wanted to see - and when the coin landed, your predictions turned out to be more correct.  None of this is particularly good news as analysis is all about focusing on what you get wrong and digging into that to get a better understanding.  Self-validation creates a reinforcing effect that leads future analysis off a cliff because "you already have it all figured out".  I would say the mainstream analysis before this war did exactly that, but that does not mean you have developed a universal or unifying theory that will inform the next war based on "see, Russia Sucks".  The missing piece as far as I can see is a detailed understanding of "how and why" they are sucking, which I firmly believe the "Russia just Sucks" camp is vastly over-simplifying.
Ok, off the mark, do you have any supporting analysis or post-action to back any of this up?  Is this your perspective of events or does it align with post-war analysis?  If so, well ok, but here is some counter-narratives:
https://nsiteam.com/social/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/NS-D-10367-Learning-Lessons-from-Ukraine-Conflict-Final.pdf  I point to section 3 specifically (pgs 8-13)
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1400/RR1498/RAND_RR1498.pdf  Pages 43-45 cover the period from May 14 - Feb 15 when conventional RA forces were fully engaged to stop the failing of their proxy Donbas forces from LNR/DPR - you can see how quickly the war shifted once the BTGs got engaged and specifically "Although artillery skirmishes continued, both sides took a break to rearm, train, and consolidate between September 5, 2014, and January 13, 2015, when Russia launched a second offensive. Following a second encirclement and defeat at Debaltseve, Ukraine signed the Minsk II ceasefire on February 12, 2015, with terms highly favorable for Moscow." (p45) This Rand document is fascinating in hindsight (note Kofman as lead author) as it gets a lot right in forecasting the weakness of Russian strategic assumptions, particularly in the political and information warfare domain.  It gets a lot wrong with respect to the potential of hybrid warfare, noting it was "inconsequential" when conventional forces arrived on the battlefield (p 70) when the RA crushed the Ukrainian defence.  I think that conclusion led mainstream thinkers down the wrong path at the start of this war.
https://mwi.usma.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Analyzing-the-Russian-Way-of-War.pdf  Interesting peice on the link between Georgia 2008 and Ukraine - punchline the RA learned a lot from Georgia and underwent reforms which led to 2014 success...but not so much in 2022.
And finally the peice by Karber - the guy actually got so close he got hit in an MLRS strike:
https://prodev2go.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/rus-ukr-lessons-draft.pdf
In this peice Karber goes on at length at the effectiveness of the BTG and the emerging "Russian way of War", I know the US military took this pretty seriously, as did we as on paper the BTG could outrange any of our BattleGroups TFs.  We then saw similar trends in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and the mainstream estimate was they would unfold in Ukraine in 2022 - nothing on "Russia Sucks".
So I do not agree that the post-war analysis nor the facts on the ground (see Rand study) support the idea that RA sub-par performance was observed.  The fact that a pretty modest interjection of RA forces in Aug 14 at Ilovaisk ("4000 troops") dealt a major reversal to the UA, and then the decisive defeat of the UA at Debaltseve in Jan 15 forced Ukraine to the negotiation table to sign a pretty bad deal for them (Minsk II).  There is plenty of evidence that the LNR/DPR separatist forces sucked, but Russia was trying very hard to keep a lid on the whole thing for deniability reasons.  Nothing in any of these assessments/analysis (and there are plenty more - Anx A of the first link has two pages of references) point to the pre-ordained abysmal performance seen in this war.
I am not sure what sources you were pulling from to come to your conclusions; however, it might just be possible that 1) all the above mainstream post-war analysis is wrong, and 2) whatever sources you were using were correct, and Russia really did suck...but - the end-state does not support that perspective either.  Regardless of tactical performance Russia achieved pretty much the impossible, it fully annexed the Crimea and over half the Donbas region without a reaction from the West.  The more I read into this, I strongly suspect that Ukraine 2014 was Putin's "Czechoslovakia" moment and he convinced himself the west was so divided (divisions he helped make worse) that we would sit back and let Ukraine fall, so go "full Poland" in 2022.  There is no way to spin 2014 was anything other than a Russian "win" both on the battlefield and on the political stage based on how things unfolded on the ground.
I am afraid that if this served as the foundation of how you saw the outcomes of this war then you too were working with incomplete concepts.  If you had gone into 2014 with "Russia Sucks due to Georgia 2008 = they will lose" you would have been completely wrong.  Bringing that theory to this war does not make it anymore correct - the theory found a war where it made more sense, but that does not make it a workable general theory.  This would be akin to developing a theory "The US Sucks at War" based on its performance in Korea (and there was plenty of evidence in the first year) and then predicting Vietnam as a US loss because "the US Sucks at War" - this glosses over so much nuance and context as to be nearly meaningless.  The mainstream analysis went the other way - "Russia is Terrifying in 2014, so they must be terrifying in 2022", which is not any less incorrect and shame on people who get paid for this work.
So what?  "Russia Sucks at War" is not a workable or even accurate foundational theory in my opinion.  It is inconsistent with observed phenomenon in previous conflicts and fails to take into account the complexities of context and evolutions of warfare over time.  "Russia Sucks at This War", how badly and why is worth exploring in depth, not the least of which is how much the UA/western backed warfare is forcing the RA to "suck".  The very tricky part is to try and distill these reasons into trends that may continue and influence the next war.  There is significant risk in porting over all the observations from this war to the next one e.g. Tanks are Dead - I cannot say if tanks are dead, they appear somewhat out of place in this war but we need to understand "why" before we can say if the next war will see the same thing.  However, I think we do agree that Russian failures and Ukrainian success do not operate in glorious isolation of each other - they have a shared causality with each other.  And the study of that relationship does not neatly sum up to "Russia Sucks", at least not from my point of view. 
 

You mean like going out and playing whack a mole with the TB for 5 years? - the very definition of conducting useless attacks repeatedly for years with no successful outcome.  Now this war compared to COIN is apples to oranges but I do not believe for a second that western militaries are immune to banging their heads against a wall repeatedly.  Russia is really doing the only thing it can think of, and frankly it kind of worked in WW2, or at least that is the myth - just keep feeding live Russian teenagers into combat until the other side runs out of bullets.  I think it is myth as the Soviet military had developed a lot with respect to operational manoeuvre by the end of that war but Putin and his hand picked generals have clearly been reading whatever the Russian version of Ambrose is on WW2 mythology.
Well we are going to have to continue to agree to disagree...cordially of course.  I think you are becoming enraptured with the after glow of the accuracy of your prediction, or at least are at risk of it.  I would red-team the assumptions that your predictions are directly and solely causal to where things are today, maybe just a little bit. 
I do not think it was possible to predict the outcome of this war beforehand unless one knew the Russian strategy.  If Russia had gone for a limited "sewing up of the Donbas", they could have afforded to suck tactically and even operationally but they still may very well have secured their objectives before the world got all up in arms.  I am convinced the response from the West would have been pretty much in line with what it was last time...all squawky and sanctiony but we would not be seeing the massive amounts of military support over a few more acres of Donbass.  It was places like Mariupol and Kharkiv that created the attention and the drama, that and a brilliant IO campaign by the Ukrainian government.
It wasn't until the UA got all the resources to connect the dots on whatever this has become did the fate of the RA become truly sealed, and that needed the political/strategic over-reach mis-step of trying to take the entire country in flagrant violation of the global order.  I do not argue that you very likely predicted the tactical outcomes of this war before it started but the operational and strategic outcomes were impossible to predict until we are about 3 days into this war.  Even then HIMARs and full western support took longer to form up, allowing the RA as poor as it was to still hold onto large swaths of territory and severely damage its opponent.
Finally, the overall Russian offset to sucking tactically has always been overwhelming mass.  You are good Steve but I am not sure Arquilla himself would have predicted just how much the utility of dumber mass would drop in this war, I know I sure didn't.  The Russian initial attack was with the best troops they had, the same approach that worked very well in 2014, and the fall back was Enemy at the Gates with the mountains of Soviet era equipment and ammo - recall everyone freaking out about that back in Apr/May?  No one could predict that would fail on Feb 21st unless they 1) knew the Russian strategy and 2) knew the West would put in place the enablers and support to make the UA able to do something no one thought possible before the war.
I am of a firm mind that a whole lot of conditions had to fall into place in order for us to be where we are in this war today.  Some of those conditions were predictable, like the growing tactical disparity between the two sides as one was modernizing while the other was rotting from corruption.  Others, such as the Russian baffling strategic choices and the UA breaking the rules of warfare to the extent they did, were not predictable and yet were just as determinative to being where we are.  Sure Russian's suck at this war, but that is the beginning of the analysis of this event, not the end of it in my opinion.

Oh I have no doubt new way of warfare is heavily present on battlefield. My point was that considering size of the playground and means available, we shouldn't visualize UAF as crack elite infantry structure with fantastic ISR all along the front. On crucial sectors- yes, usually UAF are trying to press this ISR/PGM?/elite light combo to their advantage. Note for example that Kraken/SSO videos is made by such elite spearhead, who probably had top assets available on demand that other Ukrainian soldiers could dream of. But compare it to Pisky position, where (despite being important sector) defenders in their own words for months only had mortar or old soviet cannon as support on regular basis. There are also numerous videos of Ukrainian vehicles and infantry falling into obvious ambushes, even made by Russian tanks hunting alone (with the help of their own drones, perhaps).
As for effectivness of ATGM's it is much more complicated. There was detailed discussion lately by one polish expert about how Javelins/NLAW's are effective in this war, and the conclusion was that they work differently than in shooting range. For example they tend to hit engine compartments of enemy tanks much more often and are indeed effective, but mainly due to very caucious and selective use by Ukrainian crews. After anti-tank bonanza of first weeks of the war, average AT teams at this point need to conserve them only for "sure kill" situations. Which usually means lower ranges; that is why Javelins are still very effective weapons overall. There also seems to be widespread problems with batteries for various more fancy AT weapons that limit their use.
So it seems chief AT defence of average (not elite) UA soldiers remains RPG-types, mines and normal barrell artillery rounds but heavily corrected by drones. Of course situation improved significantly over time especially in the field of artillery and drones, but blanket of western help is still too short when we consider Ukrainian needs.