dan/california

One heck of a bill...

The question, always, is at what cost. Micheal Koffman, amog others makes a pretty good case that the men and ammo the Russians burned to take Siverodonetsk is the reason they lost Kharkiv, and Kherson. They just over payed beyond all reason. I have strong hunch they are doing the same thing now.

Ideally you would have one set of trucks to move the guns, and their ready ammunition load out around often enough to stay alive, and another set of trucks moving ammunition. If the trucks that should be moving guns are the only ones available to get ammunition, that is one way to get lots of videos like the one we are discussing. We haven't taken a hard look at the state of the Russian truck fleet for a while, it might be time to get back to that. In terms of moving 152mm guns around there might not be nearly as many civilian vehicle that can do that well as there are fill ins for other jobs. To move guns you probably need 4WD, high towing capacity and so on. That might be why there is a picture of a BTR-50 floating around. they are simply running out of things to do those kinds of jobs with.

The Ukrainians have either gotten a bunch more Excalibur, or something that is better at spotting guns and passing thru coordinates very quickly. Because they have been killing more guns recently. It is also interesting that the trucks to pull these guns are not in the frame. I am very curious if the trucks are somewhere close by? Or are the Russians so short on trucks that each gun doesn't get its own truck anymore? Because that would indicate they are in the process of having a problem.

How much of this discussion is because NATO simply hasn't thought seriously about defense against a serious adversary since 1989? The entire maneuver school simply assumes you have the force ratios and enablers to DO it. It is almost proceeding from the assumption you have a winning hand. Ukraine simply did not have that luxury in any way, shape, form, or fashion. They did do an MC based corrosive defense in much of the north because Russia simply did not bring even a fraction of the infantry it needed to secure its GLOCs. So the order of the month was kill any supply truck you could catch. Since that ran the Russians out of the northern part of the country Ukraine has had a fairly DC based command system. I think it is inherent to a fairly static, attritional, and artillery based fight. I don't think we know the DC/MC balance of the Kharkiv offensive, and I don't think we will until the after war books get written. Even operation "Defend the Baltics" ,whatever its code name is this year, seemed to assume the Russians would take a bunch of territory while we spooled up, and then we Desert Storm Part Two them back to Russia, at least until very recently that seems to have been the plan. Ukraine has proven that we probably could just stop them cold, and also that you can't let Russia seize cities for even a few weeks because industrial scale war crimes is about their only strong suite.

I swear to God he reads the thread...

Kinophile, I think you misunderstood The_Capt's point. He is talking about a U.S./NATO offensive against a Ukraine equivalent opponent supported by China. To whit can a NATO style offensive work against top tier ATGMS, and an air defense system we couldn't just shatter.

To really bexplore the DC/MC thing we need five a side co-op. four players commanding various elements, and an overall commander.

Then we need to pull WHATEVER is required out of U.S. war stocks, and get it to Ukraine in time for a spring offensive. By whatever I mean up to and including a couple of hundred of the very latest Abrams with APS, and several hundred ATACMS. And every single bit of support kit to go with it. If only we had started on that nine months ago... And we should send a division of Marines to Taiwan, and go to wartime production of virtually everything. As the Capitan says, sometimes you have to write checks to stay on top. Edit: That would solve the ambiguity question nicely.

Putins pre war model of "government", if you can call it that, was based on demobilizing the populace completely, so the regime could steal the the place blind. Putin is now being forced into a crash mobilization of the whole society based on blood and soil nationalism. I would argue it owes more to Mussolini's methods than Stalin's. The Soviet model had a great deal of formal structure that did not tolerate improvisations like Wagner. It also had a least a hint of of succession planning. Where as near as I can tell, nobody has a clue who or what comes after Putin. To the extent the Soviet model survives it mostly seems to be a form we pretend to work, you pretend to pay us. This is perhaps best illustrated by the way the mobilization system rounded people up absolutely at random, instead of with vague attempt to get people more fit to serve. How long this hodgepodge of a system can clatter along is anybodies guess, it has already held longe than I thought it would. Ukraine just has to keep killing mobiks until they get the hint. And NATO needs to build munitions plants like it means it. This picture seems very odd to me. The metal seems to have failed in a brittle fracture mode, and there is little or no blackening any where. Also they were not competent enough to run a wire around the break to confuse the continuity tester if the track has one. The picture themselves are lousy, so I may be overthinking all of this.

Everybody on the forum knows my opinion of the Russians, H&LL is far to good for them. That said my opinion about how an occupation would have progressed has has changed as this war has progressed. Partly due to how things have gone in Ukraine, and partly due to how things have gone in Russia. Also keep in mind I think the reasonable worst case scenario is Russia getting a cease fire/DMZ on something close to the current front line. Having said all that... I think Russia was/is willing to kill enough people too make an occupation "work" if they were capable of military victory in the first place. If, again I consider this extraordinarily unlikely, Ukraine fell there would be another huge wave of refugees, possibly five million plus, that would include most of the people most willing, and able to oppose Russia. The way Putin his treated his own people and soldiers makes it absolutely clear he would murder 250,000 Ukrainians in the initial wave of the take over. He would then deport a million plus to Siberia, probably with the intention of letting winter and starvation kill half of those. The pitiful remnants in Ukraine would get the full Xinjiang treatment, right down to forcing women to marry Russian soldiers. "Make a desert and call it peace" is too kind of a description, but it would be relatively quiet. The kicker is that the I think Putin would find the continued isolation from the West that would result more useful than not for his totalitarian project. Yes what I just described is to awful to imagine, that is why we CANNOT let it happen. All evidence is that we have to break the army to break the regime, not the other way around.

My answer was, too...

I have suggested any number of times that the U.S. Air Force Start killing every Russian in Ukraine, and more to the point, every single logistics node. The_Capt says that letting Ukraine grind it out is the lower risk option, but if every single Vatnik had to start walking home because their was simply no food, no gas, and no bullets. they might reconsider their choices in life by the time they had swim/wade the third or fourth freezing river. The_Capt is probably right. But the balance is closer than most people think. I have been banging on for a while that Putin's cronies probably stole more money from the strategic rocket forces than anywhere else, simply because if they were ever ordered to fire them, they were all going to die, anyway. This would be exhibit A Even a missile they actually wanted to launch for propaganda purposes failed. Biden probably laughed all the way back to Poland. I do wonder how many people that got an express ticket to Bakmuht?

And we should crush them there, and ask them if they find the experience instructive.

Remember what I just said about sending the oligarchs kids back to Russia? It is the only way to make the people who are actually responsible pay, or at least worry.

I thought I was that guy...

Because Xi and Putin really want the same thing. Absolute totalitarian power for themselves, to be able to order executions on a whim. Everything Putin wants to do in Ukraine, Xi has already done in Xinjiang, among other places. The fact that aligning with Russia could not be less in the interest of the Chinese people matters less than nothing. It is all about maintaining the power and position of Xi, and the top tier of his faction of the CCCP. To change the Chinese calculus you must threaten the interest of those people. Which is why I think adult children of every Russian oligarch partying all over London, Ibiza, and other European playgrounds ought to be rounded up and sent home. Make it very clear it can happen to the children of the Chinese Elite currently installed in better colleges all over the U.S.. I would start by putting two on a plane to some airport Wagner controls, see what their dad says in his next show. Is that nice? No, but neither is trench warfare in Bakmuht.

Speaking of books, when are you and Combat-Infantry-Man getting together and writing yours? You both have priceless experience and perspective on the last twenty years?

I am quite sure they would be happy take a step back the second the U.S. Air Force agreed to show up. And build munition plants. Is there any opinion about why the hawkish Chinese faction is suddenly in a hurry? Have they decided the military balance now is probably the best it is ever going to be? Or is there some internal pressure driving them? AFU officers are going to suffer death by lecture. Hopefully they will put out a really nice lessons learned presentation with good production values that can incorporated by every staff college in the western world. Interesting question is should that be made public? I mean as we a have watched this war play out you can make a coherent argument that CMBS is so useful its distribution ought to be restricted. I assuming that is not the least of the reasons we have not seen an updated version just yet.

Xi hoped the Russian attack on Ukraine would cause the Western Alliance to completely fail. If it had he would quite likely be holding a parade in Taipei as we speak. Instead he has has to evaluate not just what he would pay for Taiwan, but the possibility he could lose most of his Navy, and still not get it. I don't think he wants to join Putin on the list of fools who thought they were launching "a short victorious war", and wound up with an extended stay in a yellow jacket nest instead.

Excellent job of actually diagramming things. And all of a sudden you can see how it would play in CM perfectly.

Two things: First this entire war, and maybe all wars consists of of little tiny engagements where one side or the other get a real advantage and utilizes it. In the engagement discussed in this post it was the Russians who had it together. In the somewhat larger engagement around Vuhledar recently it was the Ukrainians. The war is determined in large part by which side has more good days. The simple fact that Ukraine is still in this war, given the initial force disparities, implies that it has been them, so far. Going forward it is a contest to maintain an edge in combat power even as attrition continually wears units down. The very crude back of the envelope math is that two percent casualties per week mean a unit is literally gone in a year. So for Ukraine to win NATOs training complex has to produce units that are notably better than the Russian fast enough to stay ahead of that curve. Data from Allied forces fighting from D-Day to German surrender point out just how hard this is. Second point, this engagement is a short form argument for why tanks are still worth having around. If the other side bleeps up and gives you a target rich environment nothing can do more damage, more quickly than a well handled MBT. The very badly handled ones flopping around the minefields around Vuhledar of course provide the counter argument. A bad crew can lose a very expensive asset very quickly. Which brings us back to the question of which side can produce TRAINED people faster.

For the war to end on anything like decent terms for Ukraine, either the Russian army or the Russian regime are going to have to crack. Putin is clearly not going to discover a rational cost benefit analysis of his epically disastrous SMO at this late date. I think i can say that the 'board consensus", if there is such a thing, is that the army will crack before the regime does. So it really is about killing mobiks until they would rather shoot their officers than face Ukrainian artillery. Will it happen this year, I don't know. I just know we need to ship Ukraine everything we physically can, and build a whole bunch of industrial capacity to build more of virtually every kind of munition in inventory. This war has proven AGAIN, that peace time estimates of things like ammunition consumption ares simply laughable.