dan/california

The fact that some Russians are willing to fight from their holes until the Ukrainians just kill them is why this war is going on.

Look at how many pyramids there are and the load rating of the truck...

Have I mentioned the importance of winning this thing before the bad guys find somebody with a clue? This would be example B, with the Iranian drones being example A. If the CIA wanted to get off its rear end I sure these gentlemen might be open to an offer from the Ukrainian side as well. The Chechens in Ukraine seem well treated and reasonably integrated, There is no reason these guys couldn't be too. The more I think about I more upset I am someone on the good guys side didn't have the idea first.

Gorgeous work!

For the Russia really does suck file...

This seems like a significant data point in the artillery balance swinging to the Ukrainians advantage.

Two weeks before an election. People are doing silly things, and then even sillier things to try and fix it.

The truly epic failure of the Russian air force needs to figure more prominently than it has. The fact that Ukraine has trains running, planes flying, and an integrated air defense system of some sort is utterly in defiance of pre war expectations. I don't think that would be the case against the U.S./NATO, not unless we posit more tech than Ukraine has. Would this difference be sufficient, probably not. but it would be large.

My current "it might work" question is can lidar spot a a standard Russian AT mine in a wheatfield. The implications for food prices in the next couple of years are not trivial. It will take thirty years to sort out the tree lines and hedgerows.

So now the question is whether can we deter the Chinese from doing something EPICALLY stupid....

Yeah Steve, what he said, and when is that game coming out anyway? I mean you can sort of do it now with careful work in the editor, but it would be vastly easier with some new TO&E. It is worth pointing out that a lot of the benefits of the lastest C4ISR tech can be simulated pretty well by just playing the game at lower difficulty levels. Borg spotting and extremely fast supporting fires are great deal of what the latest revolution delivers, at least at the tactical level. Would it be hard to code the ability for two different players in a head to head game to be assigned different difficulty levels? Make the Russian player Iron difficulty, and the other side one of the much easier levels? The level assigned could even reflect the presumed EW environment of a particular engagement. It would be a decent short term fix to let people explore some of these issues while Charles does something more elegant.

I think there is a maximum rate that even very competent infantry, even with sufficient numbers and ample support can do its job. I think we are only now seeing the glimmers of technology that would speed this up. Those little black wing drones being example A. There are also a fair number of attempts at the beginnings powered armor floating around various proving grounds, but they are NOT ready for prime time. I do hope the next game will allow the possibilities of powered armour suits to be explored though. We do not have a good definition of what modern war means. My 2 cents is that the definition has changed more in the last thirty years than most people realized until about two weeks into this war. That all the possibilities enabled by the technology that runs our phones really has changed they way war is fought. What I am really looking forward to are books by the AFU general staff that tell us when THEY understood it A very great deal of the ossification of the Russian state come from the fact that Moscow is the center of everything, yet Moscow should not exist. It is a city with no obvious economic or environmental rationale except to be an imperial capital. There is no great trading port, It has no exceptional competence in some critical bit of modern technology, the lands around it are not some sort of agricultural cornucopia. It can only exist in its current form by claiming most of the revenue from distant colonies that have no reason to surrender said revenues except the brute force that will be applied if they don't. Yet the goal of every ambitious Russian is to move to Moscow, and benefit from the vastly higher standard of living there relative to the rest of Russia. Thus the population of Moscow cannot threaten to bring down the regime without also threatening their own existence in anything like its current form. They are effectively trapped in the machinery of the Russian imperial state, which despite multiple changes in management works a lot like it did in 1815. Whip the money out the peasants backs, steal as much as you can get away with, and send the rest to Moscow, or else. I stole a fair bit of this from Galeev to give credit where credit is due. The entire subject of this thread in many ways is whether the Russians were always this bad, or have recent large scale changes in warfighting and communication technologies combined to make a system that sort of worked as recently as 20014-15 effectively obsolete. The Iraqis got shredded in 1991, but everyone said it was just the Iraqis being incompetent. The Russians would fight much better if it came to it. I am not entirely sure we know the answer to that question. We may never know the answer to that question. What we do know is that the combination of Ukrainian bravery and flexibility, cell phone technology, and and maybe 25% of the latest tech that NATO could bring to the fight has stopped the Russians cold, inflicted massive casualties, and taken back a lot, but by no means all of the gains Russia made in the first push. It remains to e seen if the Russians can manage enough adaptation to achieve any outcome except complete and ignominious defeat. I would submit we want o give them as little time as humanly possible to figure it out, the less skilled player learns faster, usually, from playing games with a better one.

Got it, I was reading battalion, not brigade.

The Russians have dug an entire coal mine under the bottom of that barrel.

The tweet is from some COMPLETELY random account on the internet, that looks like it was created last week. That doesn't make the idea wrong. Maybe the Russians are still in Kherson, because the AFU general staff are still smarter than all of us?

So what is the sentence for treason in Ukraine? Because that sound like a very short trial. Or....Could/would Ukraine trade him for a LARGE number of Ukrainian POWs?

MRB would be ~700 soldiers? Three companies and a weapons company? Plus or minus a hundred from unit to unit?

Wow, thanks!

Russian's under enough pressure in Kherson to commit their rotary wing assets to places they shouldn't go. A month of this and they won't have any K-52s to lose.

And that competence is EXPENSIVE to develop. That money was needed for the yacht program...

I don't know whether to advocate for their immediate demise, or be concerned that they might be replaced with more competent people.

Fifteen or twenty one year plans, instead of one ten year plan didn't exactly help...

For thirty years we have been told that, of course the Iraqis are awful, but the Russians would be much better. There is remarkably little evidence that this is true.

The issue is time. Every time some minimally bright Russian capitan realizes that losing sucks and goes poking around for information this war gets harder. The Iranian drone thing is exhibit A. NATO needs to give the Ukrainians their entire shopping list, so that they can wrap this thing up before the Russians have to many bright ideas to make it expensive. Then hopefully the new arms race we are most certainly having will break the Russian government without a daily body count in the many hundreds. Then we can switch to sending every missile the western world can make to Taiwan. Hopefully in time to keep that an arms race as opposed to a shooting war. Ain't life great? Small postscript: China has taken notes on this whole Shahed 136 thing. Taiwan is going to need an engineered/integrated solution at an an almost incomprehensible scale.

The overall balance of what increases pressure on Russia more is very uncertain. One way to look at is that masses of men in the most productive phase of their lives greatly increases the economic cost of the conscription campaign. If figures are accurate Russia is losing close to two productive workers for every body that the MOD actually manages to acquire. And the economic cost are probably even higher that than ratio because it take money and other resources to leave, so they are probably above average taxpayers. The whole political pressure angle cuts the other way...