dan/california

Outstanding work putting that map together!

There is a famous anecdote from Normandy. A captured German soldier with experience on the eastern fronts says "If you used infantry the way the Russians use infantry you would be in Paris by now." A non zero chance a Russian commander would have flogged his people thru the minefield to close with a force that much smaller. Wagner at least still seems to use that approach. I think a lot of Russian generals think they can still use it too. All the evidence though, is that it usually ends badly. The tape from Vulhedar being exhibit A. Nothing on the eastern front was as deadly as drone directed 155. And STAVKA was better at their job, at least from 43 on. Or maybe Stalin just realized he had to LET STAVKA do its job. By which I mean they usually launched attacks where it made sense, and with enough force disparity to succeed. Both traits the Russians have lacked in this war. Gamey b%%E##@#s, on the other hand I feel justified in my iron rule about hitting the the three highest points on the map. Even if I am short on ammo. On a slightly more serious note, putting the sensor package from a small drone on every high spot you have seems quite likely to become absolutely standard

Does some sort of massive jamming system drive around with the TOS-1 to keep a drone from finding it, and thus something killing it? It seems like they would be max priority targets, and there range is much shorter than 155, or a lot of other systems for that matter.

It has not gone well....

I have fairly strong hopes that someone is going to come up with combine harvester scale machine to rid agricultural fields of the various smaller nasties after the have been swept for AP mines and unitary artillery rounds. sadly I think a lot of the tree lines and larger forested areas of Eastern Ukraine are just going to be no go ares for fifty years or more. I do wonder if those African rats that have proven to be excellent mine finders can stand at least summer weather in Ukraine.

You are correct on the technical details, But the Russians have rained their version of DPICM, and those really unpleasant plastic toe popper mines on scale I can't even think of a decent analogy for. I will eat my hat if they have kept any records at all. The old work one the hydraulic fluid won't come out of. Throw in the general expenditure of ~60% and counting of conventional ordinance made in the former Soviet Union since 1955. All of Ukraine that has been fought over is going to have to be de-mined. Yes it is a truly overwhelming mess. Hopefully we will get better at the miserable process. But nobody can get a good start on that until the Russians go home. The DPICM might move that along. Edit: Cross posted with The_Capt

We could save the next round national/political/hitsorical recriminations for the heart of mud season in a month or so? There is an awfully lot of actual war to talk about right now. These poor *%%*(*%#@ fools for instance. They have somehow gotten this far without noticing that they live in Mordor. I suspect they will gets a lesson shortly...

There is a great video from early on the war of some AFU guys realizing they were digging a trench in a spot the Germans had used eighty years ago. The landforms were theyy same so it was still the rational spot for a trench. Already mentioned, but the fact the Russians don't trust their crews to scatter the second they realize they are on the bulls eye is not the least of he reasons they are losing this war. This was really good tactics by the BMP, he was perfectly key holed, at least relative to what he was shooting at. The_Capt has nightmares about this being next stage of drone development. Someone finally got the the coordinate pass thru to work entirely electronically? The drone is literally talking straight to the FCS of a Krab or PZH-2000?

Anybody else think bears an enormous resemblance to at least one side in the Spanish Civil War?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/world/asia/china-spy-balloon.html I suspect the spy balloon is less the cause of U.S. China problems than symptom of them. Relations are not happy and getting worse as Billbindc has alluded recently.

The West spent thirty years trying to ignore Russia, make money, and indulge in our own vast stew of disagreements. Putin has forced us to pay attention. He will regret that.

We just aren't going to have a good understanding of Ukrainian casualties until this is over. In the mean time we get huge distortions in both directions due to the political, and military, needs of the moment. Edit: Every single loss hurts, every single one is Putin's fault, and Russia's.

Whatever claims Russia had to any anything have been abrogated by their behavior in this war. We should be free to commit warcrimes at at will on neighboring countries is a flat no. The two other things about DPICM is that are worth throwing out there. The U.S. has lot of it sitting in warehouses, when people at the front are screaming for any ammo they can get the arguments for not sending it are in bad faith, or simply detached from reality. The other thing about DPICM is that it is cheap enough to take the "maybe" shots. Their might be two or two hundred Russians in that stand of trees over here, and we don't have a drone available to go look. We can take a very real risk of getting the company recon team killed? Or we pop a couple of rounds of DPICM and see what jumps? I know what the recon teams vote is.

It will be a major effort to get the Ukrainians most of the way to high functioning armor units by late spring. We REALLY should have started the training six months ago. It is year or more out for them to go to war with a whole new air force. And that is if they can lean on NATO assets for a lot of the ISR. There are only two things that can wreck the Russian rail system all the way past Belgorod, Rostov on Don, and the Kerch Bridge. Those would be ATACMS, and the United States Air Force. I don't want the The_Capt's blood pressure to get so disturbed he starts whacking me on the knuckles. So why don't we start with a slightly less aggressive target set than the one I just mentioned for the ATACMS, and see if the Russians finally get the point. And those missiles could be ripping out of HIMARS launchers in a week, probably less.

I have said this before, but the AFU general staff are cold eyed B$%&&*$%s with a plan. if they think they need to wait until some precondition is met, they will wait. Even when price payed every day is excruciating. When they do take their next swing at the Russians, i am expecting it will not be a love tap. Blowing through what is left if the Russians at Vuhledar and driving all the way to Sea of Azov, would work just fine... If they could make it half way, about 45-50 kilometers, they would be in 52 caliber 155 range of Mariupol. That make the Russian supply situation land bridge a LOT worse.

Putin is willing to grind his entire army to rotting hamburger to achieve his imperial dream, and if they don't have the sense to shoot him, i honestly think they deserve it. ISW also does their usual excellent job of detailing the actual fighting, of which there is an approximately infinite amount. Putin obviously does NOT think time is on his side and is throwing his dice right now, all of them, indiscriminately. My two cents, worth what you paid, is that if Ukraine can mostly hold until the end of mud season, there will no shortage of places where real attack will simply vaporize whatever shellshocked mobiks haven't expired due to bad food, worse vodka, and general military incompetence.

I think the entire board assumed this was case, but I am quite surprised anybody involved admitted it, even on background.

I hope they searched Orban before they had Zelensky stand right in front of him for the picture.

I try not to quote myself, but forgive me just this once. If all an aircraft can do is fire precision missiles from ten miles behind the forward edge of battle and then run for its life, a nice heavy duty truck is a LOT cheaper, and the driver even more so.

I mean ANYTHING with NATO hard points and avionics would useful. But the return on investment is not there.

I plead guilty to getting my Nordic countries mixed up, I apologize to both.

The A10s apparently need SEAD support than they are likely to get in this war. I am not saying they wouldn't be of some use, but they couldn't be used aggressively enough to REALLY change the balance. If we are going to give the Medvedev an embolism, ATACMS is the the thing that could be going boom on Monday morning.

Grippen, it was designed from the ground up to work with bad/improvised runways/bases. The Finns understood from that they wouldn't have any other kind five minutes after the balloon went up. Edit: Swedes, not Finns, sorry.

It means they just shoot you in front of the whole unit, instead of torturing you to death, not joking. But I also suspect it means recruitment just became entirely involuntary. They will just round up whole everyone in a given camp who can move under their on power, and herd them towards the Ukrainian machine guns.

Disentangling ourselves, by which I mean the West, from China is going to be a slow, hard process in the best case scenario. If China picks the fast way, it will be much, much less pleasant than that. But at the end of the day China imports a lot of its food, and a lot of its energy. That worked out great for Japan in WW2.