dan/california

This is very funny! This is true, sadly...

Fair enough...

We thought similar things about a number of Russian units that have been called on to do some actual fighting in Ukraine. By and large they are carbon residue on insta-rusted metal now. The First Guards Tank Army comes immediately to mind.

I merely doubt that most of them work, The Chinese may have very intentionally sold them some little bit of hardware they KNOW doesn't work. Given the level of general dysfunction Russia has displayed in Ukkraine, I simply don't believe even a fraction of the budget for the strategic rocket forces was actually spent on rockets. Reasoning is as follows. If I spend the money on rockets, and we use the rockets, I'm dead, if the rockets don't work, well I'm still dead, but I had a lot more fun first. All evidence points to only one possible answer to this question. The recent failure of the Sarmat test while Biden was in Kyiv being exhibit A.

So does anything else in the Russian land forces use the same ammo as this thing? Or do they not expect them to live long enough to need reloading.

Been saying this for months. Xi can attack Taiwan, destroy the world economy, and almost certainly the CCCP. Or he can bite off the easternmost quarter of Russia, say "sorry Vladimir" and be the toast of Davos, this shouldn't be a hard choice.

We have had a YEAR to pour concrete and order machines bleep it!

In addition to being deeply twisted, this also represents an important stage in the war. It is sinking into the Russian consciousness that going to fight in Ukraine means you come home in a box. I am guessing that will affect enthusiasm for the endeavor, and soonish.

It must kill The Pickle to read the thread, give the Russian MOD excellent advice, and watch them ignore it completely. Hopefully it will increase his blood pressure to the point it breaks something important.

No, the mistake was ~fifteen years before that. We should have brokered a peaceful French departure, and made The North Vietnamese a better offer than China's.

It makes that 1:7 casualty ratio look pessimistic.

I am still hoping the Brits will go all the way and just send the entire Challenger 2 fleet to Ukraine. Then they can either take the short term rational option and buy Abrams, or the longer term one and go entirely next generation, whatever that is in five years or so. In the meantime the Challenger 2s get to go kill the army they were built to fight in the first place. Quintuple points if this is already underway and a hundred plus Challenger 2s lead the spring offensive right down to the sea of Azov. Hey Steve are we ever getting a new game to help answer that what is the next generation question? Or are you at a training center in Germany promoting yourself to medium sized defense contractor as I type.

See below... Putin has fingers in a great many places, his very large problem is that the war broke most of them. Or as has been stated several times, he was winning right up until he started fighting. The combination of incompetence and barbarity with which this war has been conducted has simply undone decades of work on getting the West to effectively dissolve itself. I am really quite hopeful that the trend will continue. Don't want to go deep on U.S. politics because it makes Steve twitch. There is a fair bit of generally similar film out there. The U.A. has some combination of ISR and signals intercepts that can provide an all clear on ATGMs/RPGs right down to the platoon level. And when they find one of these weak points a tank or two show up to play "squash the mobik", love the game, hate the music. The Russians try to do this as well of course, they just aren't very good at it, so we get to grade the turret tosses for height, distance, and artistic merit. This is pure speculation on my part, but I suspect the Ukrainians actively create these opportunities by giving the mobiks very low percentage shots while the drone literally counts down their RPG ammo, and then....

He would be high on my list if available. Along with people who drove the very biggest farm equipment. Some of that stuff is simultaneously massive and very finicky.

Did Ukraine have any of the Soviet versions when this all started? They would still have to learn completely new hardware, But I would think the general awareness of the many things that go wrong when you try to replace a project that takes six months with a massive piece metal that you set down in a few minutes. I can also envision it being very difficult to find soils that would support load in a place with special words for bottomless muck.

I bought the book before the podcast was over. It has a ton of stuff related to CM scale fights. Indeed one of the authors theories is that the size of modern militaries means urban warfare can't be anything else. More when I have had time to read it.

At this point they have real world data on everything except Western IFVs/MBTs, yes? I would think they can put together a really fine grained simulation. There is even enough evidence of the Russians doing absolutely suicidal stuff they should be able to model that pretty well.

The map I posted above actually links to, admittedly low quality, satellite imagery of every listed fortification. This may be the most detailed thing available to the general public. You can't really make out vehicles, but most of the trenchlines are pretty clear. It helps to play with tabs for different false colors and wave lengths. There is more than enough here for scenario design, at least of the terrain. Match it up with Jomni's estimation of what units are where, and it might be possible to actually understand what is going on.

Map claims to show Russian field fortifications. It is the best layout I have seen if it is accurate. There some gaps in there lines. I am sort of assuming they ground that is so marshy or difficult they didn't feel the need. Some if this in more or less the same place I ws post street view shots of a day or three ago. Edit: Ninjaed by Mr Raab...

Wasn't there a very similar post right when the Kherson count6er attack kicked off? The one that collapsed the northern third of the pocket.

It goes back and forth, but it has been VERY tankie this week, with the exception of the Brett Stephens op-ed. The headlines in particular have been very and unnecessarily slanted.

Washington Post makes the case for giving Ukraine cluster munitions clearly and forcefully. Hopefully this means it is moving up the list.

Very sad if he didn't make it. Either way he deserves Ukraine's highest decoration for valor.

Yeah but they have had a bunch of them. And when Brett Stephens wrote a good one I posted that two, in the last three days. But taking both sides amounts to taking Putins. My point is that they need to get behind Ukraine and stay there.

NYT is having an irritating attack of the tankie surrender monkey virus. I wonder who the FSB got too?