Sarjen

On a lighter note. 😀

An excellent piece on an Ukrainian artillery unit, videos like this make me miss being a commander. The first several minutes are what really caught my eye, and I'll share some artillery minded observations with you.
First, this is obviously a direct contradiction to my previous claim that most units I see are in the open! I think that's still the case but highlights that drone footage isn't necessarily the ground truth of what is happening - maybe we aren't seeing the videos of artillery in treelines being hit because the UAVs aren't finding them. More on this later however.
Second, it seems that the officer, who I am assuming is the Battery Commander, is the primary person responsible for fire direction. This is a very European way of doing things, and is not really a surprise. The American military (to my knowledge) is one of the few militaries that has a dedicated fire direction section with its own officer that computes firing data. Of note, the American style FDC was "invented" during the interwar period, and allowed a single FDC to control multiple batteries or even battalion. There are stories during World War II of an entire American Corps worth of artillery conducting Time on Target missions. This is contrasted with other nation's FDCs, who had difficulty massing batteries on dynamic targets due to the decentralized nature of battery level fire control. History notes aside, observe that he is using a tablet and phone for what I assume is the calculation of firing data. Presumably this would be the GIS ARTA app discussed early, used to compute a technical firing solution to lay the howitzers. The actual computation of data is not hard, with enough time and patience I could take the American firing tables for a howitzer and put it all in a spreadsheet that spits out an answer as well. A pretty robust solution on the Ukrainian side.
Howitzers begin firing at about 30 seconds in. They are firing off the traditional optical fire control systems, and at 40 seconds in you can see the gunner looking through his pantel (panoramic telescope) to re-lay the howitzer after firing. Note that is highly unlikely that he is receiving new firing data as the narration later on suggests. I have yet to meet a howitzer crew, fire direction crew, or observer team that could accurately and rapidly re-direct fire on a maneuvering vehicle and have it land directly on top. I think this was a nice coincidence that was emphasized in editing to create a better narrative. A little example of the power of video editing that can lead to incorrect conclusions for those not in the know.
I'll take this opportunity to segue briefly into my previous comments about howitzers having to remain close together. One of the most crucial aspects of achieving effective indirect fire is accurate location and direction for the firing unit. Every howitzer in a firing unit needs to be facing the same direction, accurate down to the miliradian. It greatly simplifies firing data calculation, as you only need the data for one howitzer as opposed to 4 or 6 or 8 - all the other howitzers, since they are pointed in the same direction and generally in the same area, can fire that same data. The close you are to your "base piece", the more accurate the fire. So how do they get all the howitzers pointed in the same direction? Enter the aiming circle:

If it looks like a theodolite used by engineers for surveying, you aren't far off, the concept is the same. Through math, multiple rotating dials, and lots of shouting, the aiming circle operator relays direction to each howitzer until every gun is pointed in the same direction. A key part of this step is the pantel that I mentioned earlier, which is how each howitzer references the aiming circle for proper direction. If you firing is spread out in a tree line, or over a great distance, the ability for each howitzer to see the aiming circle with their pantel can be lost. This greatly complicates laying the battery. Additionally, units spread out or in odd formations reduces the accuracy of your barrage - remember, each gun is firing the same data, regardless of their position! Now, with modern computing technology, the ability to calculate firing data for each individual gun can be trivial - assuming you know the location of each gun, down to a 10m or 1m radius. In a GPS degraded environment, that can be quite difficult and time consuming. It's much easier to have everyone located together in a formation that can see the aiming circle and in close proximity to your base howitzer. Then you only need the location of one howitzer.
How do digital systems change this? Well, in a digital system like the Paladin and M777, each howitzer has a GPS and inertial navigation system that accurately tracks the location, but also the direction. The requirement to be laid by the aiming circle goes away, assuming your equipment is working, as the howitzer ALWAYS knows which direction it is pointing. Laying the battery and executing fire missions become simple tasks. You can have howitzers spread out over a kilometer and calculate firing data for each one at the press of a button. The reality is of course more complicated however, and the aiming circle and our "manual" methods still have a role even with fully digital howitzers, but I don't think I will get into that here for a variety of reasons.
Moving on from my not so brief segue, one more point I would like to highlight - at the end of their mission, they all jump into bunker, as a precaution against Russian counter battery that never comes. They have obviously made the decision that taking cover is preferable to displacement - a notion that goes against a lot of Western doctrine. And their cover is not overly complex - enlarged foxholes with trees to stop shrapnel. I suspect the reason we see videos with "abandoned" howitzers sitting in fields reflects exactly the situation illustrated in the video - crew live in bunkers in the treeline and occupy howitzers only when firing. If your howitzers are out in the open, they will be going for that, not you! Again, not something you'll see in a lot of Western doctrine or training. Still, I suspect the level of counterfire doesn't justify the time or effort required to conduct rapid displacements of artillery on a routine basis.
For counterfire I think a lot of what we could be seeing would be probably be described as cross-cueing of intelligence assets in the American military - firefinder radars pickup an enemy battery, but instead of unmasking your own artillery to conduct immediate counterfire, you send a UAV to confirm target location and disposition - greatly enhancing your ability to bring effective fires down on the enemy.

Trent Telenko's posts on Twitter really bother me because he seems to take singular events and extrapolate them into generalities that sound good on paper and which people lap up. It started with his tires post, and if he saw the quality of some of the equipment I had as a battery commander (yes, including their tires) he'd probably have an aneurysm. I've also seen my own share of 40 mile convoys of stopped American logistical vehicles, the difference being that US soldiers got to go home after their training with some lessons learned, and the Russians didn't. And as an artillery officer I don't even want to talk about his observations about VT fuzes.

I'm not entirely sure where he is going with this thread, but having actually worked in a Division level strike cell in Iraq, processing missions from SOF, ground space owners, and targets developed within our own cell, the so called "JAG officer poisoned chain of command" is a gross over simplification at best. Yes, times to strike were lengthy, but it was designed that way and NOT due to JAG considerations, and we were certainly capable of being faster, and routinely did so when the situation required. Trying to compare a COIN oriented environment to the modern LSCO fight is ignorant, and as a OC/T who see units training Brigade level fire support in large scale combat operations on a monthly basis, we are certainly faster then the "hour" he claims we are at. From what he describes, the GIS ARTA app is very similar to the US Army's AFATDS system - designed to process a large range of target requests and associate them with a shooter. It's good to see Ukraine adopting this style of software, but it's hardly unique, and the realities of maintaining the digital communication linkages required for full functionality of the system can be hard in a contested environment. The US military has a difficult enough time doing that in the field, and we have much better comms equipment then Starlink and a lot less incoming rounds.
Sure makes for a good sounding Twitter thread though.

BINGO!



I didn't see Gerasimov, but could easily be that I just didn't recognise him

ROFL, no, no one has the right to rape and pillage as retaliation. That's the same sort of effed up logic we are seeing the Russians use right now in Ukraine.
C'mon, get your head on straight.

Having formerly worked for McKinsey... I second this.  (McKinsey pulled out of Russia earlier this year).  How about we give every other one a rifle?

And then there's this.
As a onetime consultant who hates the entire profession with the heat of a million suns, I think this is a terrible idea.
...In fact, send the entire global McKinsey, BCG and Accenture teams to the Donetsk front and issue them Mosin-Nagants.

I think the way I would put this is that Putin's approach is instrumental and but not just in a direct sense of immediate benefit to Russia. What he's also looking for a more general hostility to the international status quo. Thus, Russia can be friendly with Cuba, Orban's Hungary, China or Nicaragua. The ideology, such as it is, is rejection of American hegemony and the rules based order. 
In that sense, those allies are not useful idiots. They *know* why they are doing it, whether those reasons are Cuban fears of being overwhelmed by Miami, Venezuelan paranoia about regime change or Hungarian ethnic resentment and annoyance at those irritating EU penalties for rank corruption. Essentially, all of these regimes want freedom of action without consequence. 

The Red army was equally evil with the SS and the Wehrmacht. Bye bye.

I dont think these monuments have any resemblence of insight. Its not a memorial to the victims of crimes, it is a celebration of the perpetrators. See the Lenin statues being put up right now in occupied territory.
Would you leave Hitler monuments up so people can google his name and discuss the finer points of his politics? No. You tear that down and put a memorial to his victims on the same ground..
Now what if people TODAY would put up Hitler monuments, would that trigger some alarm bells?

Some of the conversation over the few pages have referenced the former Yugoslavia.  Which brings back... well, not so good memories.
I was a Canadian peacekeeper in Bosnia in latter half of '93.   During the Croatian offensive in the Medak in Sept of '93, I was with the 2 PPCLI when we went into the sh*tstorm to try to stop the ethnic cleansing going on.  The Croatian army attacked our unit during that operation, a thing that the Croatian government denies to this very day.  Despite us photographing the Croatian dead after the battle and collecting their ID, etc.    We had god damn evidence and to this day, the Croatian government position is that they never attacked us.
Part of our job, beside trying to keep the warring factions apart, was to document evidence of ethnic cleansing and I was in charge (I was an officer) of a evidence collection team.  So, literally thousands of photos, videos.  Transcripts of interviews with witnesses and victims.  Six months exposed to that living hell, day after f*n day....
So I had the evidence, because sometimes our official recording devices ran out film or tape and we used our personal recording devices to finish up at a site.
After I got out the military, I found myself sometimes on various military forms about games, such as this one.  Arma forums, military wargame forums... that sort of thing.  And as it happened, I ran into forum members from Croatia and Bosnia Serbs and we would get into it.
Universally, every Croatian or Bosnian Serb forum poster denied what happened there.  And I was called a liar on many occasions for telling them them the truth of that war as I was there and they weren't.  And I have evidence to back up my claims.  No one believed me and if I offered visual proof, they didn't want to see it or they disclaimed it as fake.
I remember a particular Bosnian Serb who was not in the war but we got deep into the weeds discussing what happened during that war.  Deny, deny, deny.  It never happened.  Until videos that the Bosnian Serbs took of them killing civilians and dumping them in mass graves what was recorded by the very soldiers who committed the atrocities surfaced and made it onto their local media and they couldn't deny it any longer.  Those videos were part of the process besides sanctions that resulted in some notable Bosnia Serb / Serbian leaders being turned over to the ICC for prosecution for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.  After the revelation came out, this individual on that forum who I had spent hours engaging with about the culpability of Serbs in the atrocities simply ignored me from that point onwards.  I will never know why.... was it that he discovered that I was right all a long and he was wrong and he was ashamed (as he would have been) or he simply wanted to hang onto his delusion of what narrative he wanted to believe was true and he knew that I would keep chipping away.   
Denial is a powerful thing.   I don't understand why it has such power but it does.  People can dismiss an outright objective reality because to accept the truth is to undermine what they think reality is or should be.   I don't get it and is beyond madding to see the denials in the face of objective reality happen over and over.
Sigh.   I don't know why the hell I rambled on with this.  Maybe it was a story I need to tell to remain sane in light of the same brutality I witnessed back in Bosnia happening in Ukraine now.  Or maybe I still am the greater fool for believing my experiences in Bosnia can be an object lesson to others about holding onto a narrative that is personally comfortable but runs counter to all the real evidence to the contrary.   DMS, I am looking at you....
The truth will come out after all this is over.  At least, I hope it does.  The truth of this war needs to be told and codified so generations that follow can know what really happend.
Now at the end of this and reviewing it, I feel that I should have deleted this or apologize for it.  
I am hitting post. It is my truth.  Let people accept it and learn something from it or ignore it.  I needed to say this for a long time.   
 
 

This one is just odd.  So NATO only bombed Belgrade during the Kosovo War of '99.  The justification was, wait for it...war crimes!  See a trend here?  After Rawanda, we in the west kinda got sick and tired of 20th century genocides in the 90's (arguably we went back to not really caring a couple decades later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide) so when the Serbs began "doing that ethnic cleansing" thing again, it was a pretty short "nope" from the UN and NATO.
I am not sure why Russia would take that as an attack on them, they were on the UNSC that drafted resolution 1199 which kicked the whole thing off.  I am at loss at what either Chechen War had to do with us, but hey why not?
Look this whole NATO expansion thing was arguably a bad idea but the Russian's seem to think it was a deliberate plan.  Seriously, we should let you guys come work in NATO for a day and you would quickly see that "deliberate" and "NATO" are not mutually supporting concepts.  NATO is fine at blowing stuff up, but detailed strategic campaigning is not a virtue I think anyone could accuse NATO of being adept at conducting.  Finally, all those former satellite states came to NATO for a good reason...what is happening in Ukraine right now.  Trust me, it is not them or us, it is you.
Russia is acting like a drunken wife beater, pissed off because Ukraine "made you hit them" and blaming city council for all these damned "assault charges"; an entire nation in need of anger management counselling and couples therapy.
I got to believe Russians are better than this. 

You see, that's the fundamendal flaw in the whole Russian perception of the world. NATO is not moving to the east, it is invited, sometimes desperately begged to come, cause the alternative is living in ruski mir, which really really sucks, in any imaginable aspect.
Also, nobody is really there to get you. Nobody really cares, all we want is for Russian Empire/ USSR/ Russia to piss off and stop being a problem. 

Well thank you but I am not sure how much is "self-sacrifice" and how much is "institutionalized beyond repair". Do something since you were 18 for long enough and it just becomes too hard to adapt to anything else.  This is what made CMCW such a big deal for me personally as I finally saw daylight somewhere else, granted not that far from the homestead, but I will take it.
In my experience, a lot of people in my business are not as brave as we think we are, while "pragmatical cowards" are a lot braver than they think.  Foot voting, is in itself a form of resistance that takes a lot of guts too.
"Peace" indeed.  

Ya, can't let this one slide.  This was a really good post but it fails right about here because it misses a major point.  First off I do not subscribe to the "every able body Russian should take their suitcases of money and flee to a less inconvenient locale (i.e. "sunbelt)".  This is frankly insensitive and demonstrates a serious western bias: when the going gets tough, well just move to Hawaii in your yacht and sip Mai Tais...it will be fine.  What about the rest who cannot afford to move?..."oh I am sure they will figure it out".
You make a solid case for a fracturing of the Russian Federation as a result of this, and a severe risk of "significant civil violence".  I will simply state it, we are talking about a significant risk of another Russian Civil War here.  You note "lack of Moscow military power" as reason this will be avoided, well 1) Will is the primary determiner of civil war, not military power.  Savage civil wars have waged with a lot less than what Moscow will have left, and 2) the unfortunate reality of a civil war in a state that has the majority of the worlds nuclear weapons.  We came close to this during the break up of the Soviet Union but saner heads prevailed; we have no guarantees this time.
I very much think that a NATO v Russia global nuclear war is an extremely low probability.  However, a nation in a civil war, cannot guarantee the security of that arsenal and even a small nuclear exchange has global impacts (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00794-y).  So what?  Well, here we need to recognize a harsh truth - none of us are "safe at our keyboards" in this thing.  The stakes are much higher than the normal western ennuie of "war somewhere over there, donate to charity, feel bad and change the channel).  So, no, do not "move to the sunbelt", try and do something about it.
I am a veteran of two separate wars, both civil in nature, and know exactly what risks we are asking Russian's to take here. However, the risks of "not doing anything" is frankly what got them into this fix in the first place.  And there is a risk of a lot more than "trouble over there" at stake here.  This is why I keep coming back to "Russia needs to figure out how to lose this war and survive".
As to resistance, well simply coming on this board and being exposed to the truth, or at least "other facts" is a first important step.  DMS lives in a country where publicly saying "war" is outlawed and they are being lied to daily on their mainstream media.  My advice is to "get the word out" any way you can as an important first step.  There is opposition to this war in Russia, and there is opposition to the current regime...it needs all the help it can get.
We are a small little wargame forum in a great big dangerous world.  But it is a platform to exchange ideas and voice apolitical opinions freely (well we do have limits), which in this day and age is hard to find.  In a perfect world every Russian would read this website and what we did here and at least a few would go "huh?  Wait a minute."  That would be enough for a start.

I fully admit this is a very German perspective, sure.
This obsession with our own history and trying to draw lessons from it (while sometimes failing to) may seem infuriating to other countries, but I prefer living in a nation that's overthinking its own history to one that simply goes back to business as usual after things like WW2 and the holocaust. 

Time has come. Let's see how it all works out. Good luck.

No, Russia is being judged by it actions, not what it says.  We have a saying in the west.  "Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck.... therefore it is a duck."   The acts of Russia in Bucha, Maruipol, all over Ukraine are in full display for the world to see.  Ergo, if Russia troops acts like uncouth, uncivilized barbarians, we are within our rights to call them out for it.

It is all good.  If I ever find the time, I need to write up a piece on the phenomenon of this thread itself.  We have a bunch of people who are largely only connected via a small wargame, but who are also a collection of expertise in a lot of different fields.  We coalesced here and have produced assessment and analysis that frankly compares to the paid stuff out there in the world.  We even became self-regulating, without - I hazard - becoming too much of an echo chamber.
And all this time no one has really posted their bona-fides.  I mean a few were already known going in, but a lot of this has really just been the quality of discussion and opinion.  Not sure what to call this "emergent analysis", "organic" but it has been really fascinating to watch and participate in.

not to get too snarky, but I suppose if LePen were elected these weapons would've been sent to the Russians?  I thank all the gods she did not win, both for Ukraine and for the world.

Welcome to page 666 of the discussion, thus making this the thread of the beast.

So assuming this goes long (I.e. the Russian military does not collapse), then we are talking about a Force Generation/mobilization competition.  Everyone looks at Russia’s manpower numbers and goes “woah” and starts chattering about Ukraine getting “orc hord-ed”, over-run and crushed.  The crowd along these lines either fear this, and some appear to want it for various reasons.
The reality is that in a Force Generation race Ukraine is already way out front.  The have a bottomless bank, they have western training support and they have already mobilized the manpower.  Further, Ukraine has the entire western military industrial complex to draw from, a complex that is pretty much invulnerable to Russian influence (less natural gas etc).  In short the west can push better, and more, equipment into Ukraine, while Ukraine can training better and faster.
Russia has more manpower, yes. But it needs more than just teenagers lining up to fight, it needs the training infrastructure and trainers to get those kids to the point they can fight as military units. Its frontline ready equipment has been badly shredded and there is speculation as to the state of its reserves.  Russia’s military industrial complex is under siege, along with the rest of its industry.  It ability to produce modern equipment is in question but likely badly eroded and very likely much slower than the west can.
So adding that all up and a long war/mobilization scenario suddenly does not look so good for Russia as it would need to build the Force Gen pipe internally, equip that force all the while under increasing stress.  The longer Russia takes, the worse it gets.  Ukraine is the front end of a proxy war between Russia and the entire western world (along with others).  It’s “allies” such as China have no interest in getting into this as deeply as the west is in Ukraine.
 So the calculus does not look good no matter what Putin “declares” or not in a week or so.  The RA can’t seem to advance more than 30kms without stalling, and this is the best of what is left.  Putin does not have the military to win this, and he can’t build one faster, better than his opponent; like everything else in this war, the math does not add up for Russia.
As to “war on NATO” or nukes, I think those are more likely to get Putin removed from power, perhaps terminally as I am not sure Russians are ready to die en masse for one man, no matter what the polling shows.

Because I'm procrastinating this evening, I decided to plot the artillery impact points from the farmhouse video on to the google maps that @chrislposted above. Red dots are from the initial zoomed in view, orange dots are from after the camera conveniently zooms out just before the first rounds land outside its previous field of view. The purple circle is an area that is clear on the map, but obviously has some degree of ground 'clutter' in the video, but I can't tell what it is. Might well be some vehicles. Green line is 200m in length. 

Random observations:
The first round is a direct hit on the roof of the farmhouse and is possible the brightest explosion. Different kind of round, or just because it's up in the air rather than half-buried in the ground as it explodes?
The center of mass of the red dots seems to be different to the center of mass of the orange dots, which might suggest two different batteries with different central aim points (and the camera apparently knew when to widen its view).
Visually (and from watching the video) it seems like there are more rounds close to roads / treelines / buildings than might be expected by chance given the wide spread of impacts, but you'd have to do some kind of statistical analysis to tell really (and I'm only placing the dots approximately by eyeball, so I might be unintentionally biasing them towards roads etc.)
Here is the purple area ground clutter, before it all starts, and conveniently illuminated by a shell. Can't tell what it is, but for scale the distance between the two tree lines is about 300m, so we are talking (very approximately) vehicle scale stuff here, rather than pebbles or buildings.
 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ghost-of-kyiv-who-shot-down-more-than-40-russian-aircraft-dies-in-battle-q3sq0hztx
May this hero rest in peace.