dan/california

And we need to pick up our game fast enough to convince China NOT to invade Taiwan and wreck the world economy. 10,000 155mm shells a day need to start rolling of lines where they more or less literally never touched by anything except a robot.

It is a great window in to the prewar forecasts of how the war would go. Rand is STILL giving Russia to much credit. They are a major piece of the "don't make Putin mad" side of the policy debate.

And there a LOT of them out there.

The use of drones to drop grenades in disabled/abandoned vehicles is a brilliant low cost solution. Getting stuff into Walmart is a separate problem. But we have the ability to produce things like GMLRS, and 155 rounds both guided and not at at orders of magnitude higher scale. The catch is you have to write a huge check up front for the factory. But once you get the thing up and running you don't people to do much more than watch and perform maintenance on the machines. Labor cost become almost irrelevant. The video below is from Tesla, forgive me. You just have to START with a plan to produce a quarter of a million shells a month, and get over the front end cost.

A hundred meters on a good day, none at all on a bad one, with a bill that looks like the Somme. At least relative the size of the frontage and forces involved. Edit: So about three hundred days, and anywhere between 50,000, and 150,000 casualties, to get to the defenses in front of Kramatorsk. The Ukrainians have been digging in there since 2014. Mind those casualties would just be for the Bakmuht front.

Ukraine is actively beating the bushes for more effective drone compatible munitions. People have to be working on something designed from scratch for the purpose. It is a pretty unique use case. The grenade is subject to very little stress. There is scope to make a cheap COTS semi guided fuse/fin set up. There are virtually no g forces at any point in the flight. You could do a very thin walled plastic with almost all the mass devoted to either a shaped charge, or explosive wrapped in buckshot. Thermite might be very useful, too.

The bigger question is did the TOS-1 have any rockets left? Those things are beyond explosive. If it had just fired the last rocket it might only be medium damaged either way. I guarantee the crew had an oh bleep moment if it didn't cook off. Also the Ukrainians seem to be getting better at finding them. There is indisputable tape of one of them going boom a week or so ago.

The faster we build new ammo and missile lines the less likely we are to find out.

They still don't get it. You need stockpiles that can sustain a full scale war for AT LEAST eighteen months. While we are at it we might consider making munnitions plants that are not 70 years out of date.

Don't leave out the fact that they have virtually no competent pre war trained infantry left either. The decision to waste however many of them got out of Kherson for trivial or non existent gains in the Donbas will go down as one of the worst command decisions, even in a war full of very bad ones. It is one thing to have a battalion of a thousand mobiks with a command cadre of 50, or even 25 VDV guys trying to keep the wrambling wreck on the road. When the "cadre" are two or three alcoholic fifty somethings who might-maybe went to a military academy thirty years ago. And then got cashiered as lieutenants for that aforementioned drinking problem, there will be no stopping the running once it starts.

Black bread and bitterness...

Another of those creaking noises...

So the Ukrainians take back most of the land bridge, But the Russians manage to hold Crimea, and most of the Donbas they have currently? At least I see that as the most likely scenario... One idea that has been floating around my head is that the Ukrainians will push for Melitopol, and Mariupol at the same, or at least nearly the same time. It would be ambitious, but it would force LOT of Russian forces to retreat or risk being surrounded if it worked. Edit: my other idea is foe them to hug the Dnipro on the left hand/eastern side of the river. So they would basically have Support from Himars and the longer ranged 155s on their flank all the way down to the gateway to Crimea.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/03/08/how-many-russians-have-been-killed-in-ukraine Their guess if 65,000 kia, 250,000 total casualties. Permit to repeat my opinion that the Russian military is so bleeped up IT probably doesn't know.

I am guessing that about all that crew will good for for the rest of the war is turning bad vodka into something even worse.

To the contrary, it was recon by death, conducted by them. So the Russian excuse for forward observers could at least pin down the Ukrainian positions to grid square or two. I do hope they feel honored by being allowed to sacrifice their lives for the Czar in this manner. I suspect they would have lived a lot longer calling the Ukrainian surrender hot line though. I suspect the penalty for insufficient enthusiasm involves mine clearance by beating the ground with hammers.

That is definitely more information. So just to ask a couple of obvious questions, are the people the yach was rented from considered co-conspirators? Their identity is not all that relevant otherwise. So we think every body on the boat gave fake passport, any clue who they actually are? Absent that info we still don't seem to have enough to argue about. I mean we will argue anyway, but... Just working backwards from the "who benefits?" test it sort of screams false flag to me until proven otherwise. Haiduk posted something today about the SBU still actively cleaning up the dregs of FSB agents in various parts of the Ukrainian government. That might be quite relevant. Indeed the guy Haiduk posted about today was a fairly senior person in the Ukrainian Navy or Marines, and now I am REALLY curious about what he has been up to? Still at extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, at least for me.

There is a fundamental similarity between between stocks, and given piece of ground. It is always possible to overpay. Bunker Hill is the canonical example, "I wish we could sell them another hill at that price". But it is still all utterly non-specific hand waving. That seems rather inadequate for an issue as big as this one. And I also really wouldn't rule out some sort of FSB false flag. They need to put the actual findings out, or drop this until are ready to do that. What is released is already more than enough to warn the people who did it, but utterly uninformative to the rest of us.

The fact the bridges weren't blown at Kherson, and Nova Khahovka before the Russians got over them has never been adequately explained...

We see occasional news articles about the U.S. helping the Ukrainians run command staff exercises. I suspect theses are more at the operational level than the tactical. It really does seem to me though that there should be a a whole building full of people working on tactical level stuff using Combat Mission Professional Edition, or similar if such exists to sort out tactics for the vast array of stuff the Ukrainians are getting. It is not at all clear to me that the best tactics for a unit equipped with Leopards and CV-90s is the same as the best tactics for a unit equipped with Bradleys and PT-91s. And there are probably five other kit combinations out there. Do the Brits have a worked out tactical scheme for using Challengers with Marders? Combat Mission Professional Edition is also probably capable of simulating something like the fighting around Bakmuht at very high fidelity, triply so if the people setting it up had access to the AFU General Staff hard drives The_ Capt mentioned. Or is all this just too resource intensive? And staff colleges across the Western world are going to be doing this for the next five years just trying to figure out what actually happened after the fact?

Haiduk's post shows the terrible price of this war on the Ukrainian side. But these are close to if not THE highest numbers I have ever seen for daily casualties of Russian troops and artillery systems, and are high across the board. The 23 guns eliminated almost has to reflect something new coming on line for the AFU doesn't it? Or at least a whole lot more of one of the more effective systems?

From the NYT article. As disclosed this borders on "we have feelings". Don't say anything until you are ready to actually say SOMETHING. Edit: Is this an attempt to head off a planned Ukrainian operation on Russian territory? Or perhaps another strike on the Kerch bridge? The fact the U.S. can't decide it wants to win this war and then act like it continues to be crazy making. The world is not getting rest to status quo antebellum, just isn't.

The article seems to flunk the the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" test.

If I might add a small extra point, Russia simply hasn't shown any of the abilities that help the attackers ratio. They have not demonstrated surprise, they have not demonstrated coordination and/or combined arms, they have not demonstrated the ability to attack anything past a few hundred meters in depth. The lancets might be a small exception to that last part, but they seem to have very few of them. When a U.S. heavy brigade with full air support decides to hit you, things blow up to a depth of tens of kilometers at zero hour, things like that can move the ratios. The Russian tactic, certainly the Wagner tactic, is recon by death. They put a platoon out there and try to spot what killed it. Try to shell it, and then send out another platoon of victims, i mean troops. This is NOT how you move the ratios in a favorable way.