dan/california

You said this perfectly. Ukraine is collapsing the Russian air defence/ISR/artillery bubble, notably a large part of the pressure on the artillery is actually pressure on the ammo supply. Once the bubbles gone the ground forces have no choice but to leave. We just have to hope the AFU can maintain the pressure long enough. Brave men are dying every hour to get that done.

From ISW The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that Russian forces are deploying elements of the newly-formed 3rd Army Corps, which is at least in part composed of inexperienced volunteers, to reinforce neglected Russian positions in Kharkiv and Zaporizhia Oblasts.[10] The deployment of the 3rd Army Corps may indicate that Russian forces seek to recoup combat power for use in offensive operations around Donetsk City or defensive operations in Kherson by replacing experienced troops with raw and poorly trained volunteer units. From me The Ukrainian General Staff would never go looking for a stretch of line held by raw recruits would they? I men that wouldn't be sporting. A battalion or twos worth of freshly abandoned T-90s would be nice though.

And the entire infinity of pages is correct, but you can't always get the whole chain working. Keeping their heads down a bit is better than not all. Perfectly placing one guided round in every fighting position alway the best, but...

Sometimes there is something to be said for sprinkling the whole grid square, be it however so thinly.

Girkin is NOT stupid, he NOT a coward, and he is effectively bat bleep crazy. I say "effectively crazy" because while he is quite sane in the clinical sense, his belief system is so detached from reality he could do something that makes no sense to the rest of us. He quite capable of turning a "fake" organization into a real one, and using it to launch a coup. Lenin was an irritating gadfly with a lot more grudges, and enemies, than he had friends until about ten minutes before he was the most dangerous man in the world. Then he acted on all those grudges, rather harshly. Ghirkin seems more similar by the day. Hopefully Ghirkin's path has the ending everyone always thought Lenin's would, involving two bullets and an anonymous ditch, as opposed to a blood drenched mausoleum that stands to this day.

You get better at it when you do it five or ten times a day. We will know it is all over the when they can stay longer and pack less hurriedly. It will be the gold standard proof that they have won the counter battery fight.

It could very well be the number 2 guy at the Ukrainian embassy dropped by and asked them to take a day or two off. A request easily sweetened with the promise of an early look at something or another.

Erdogan's government was not already redlined by a war that is in the process of being lost, perhaps catastrophically. Somewhere between 70% and 85% of Russias land forces are in Ukraine, or have been withdrawn due losses that have rendered them combat ineffective. Even a minimal attempt at a military coup would be a big deal in these circumstances. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-moscows-shadows/id1510124746 A podcast on this very subject, in great detail. I recommend it highly. He has several books about modern Russia as well. Any system with that many bodies has a weakness, it isn't like anybody in the Russian system has a moral aversion to a better offer. More than one Roman emperor found that his throne had been auctioned by his own body guards, or taken by the head of the Praetorian Guard. Putin seems very dependent on the Chechens. That is a both a large weakness in and of itself, and engenders a great deal of resentment a great deal of resentment in the rest of the entourage. Additional thought after reading Steve's post; I will bet my house the Russian Nats HATE the Chechens.

And remember 155 outranges 152, So once the Russian guns on the west side are silenced, due to ammo or destruction, the AFU will be able to set up and engage anything else left on the west side with very little counter-battery fire.

They have twice already. My guess is that they are about to do it a third time, though many of them will discover the hard way that 750 meters in flowing water is actually quite a long swim. A lot of people who really should know better seem to think the numbers from Russias statistical agency are not just made up to fit Putin's mood.

We just don't have good visibility into the regime dynamics. The Russian state is pretty clearly at the point where more or less everyone goes to work every day knowing that the boss has lost both his marbles and his mojo. The breaking point is when they decide he is going to get a large number of them killed. And by them I don't means Buryat privates in Kherson, but the upper middle management in Moscow. Saddam Hussein survived a hideous military defeat in the 1991 because the upper middle never thought it was safer to kill him than not. But that was very different regime. Remember the highest risk for top level figures in Moscow is other top level people in Moscow. If one faction thinks another faction is moving it might cause multiple factions to make their play because they are afraid of being late to the party. This was after all a key dynamic in the beginning of the First World War, everybody mobilized because they were afraid of being caught unmobilized, then the whole avalanche just rolled down hill. We won't know anything about a SUCCESSFUL coup until Russian state TV starts playing swan lake for 48 hours straight.

He needs to be run right off the internet...

It is also worth pointing out that the main Russian propaganda TV channels, and those are the ONLY TV channels at this point, basically spout the Nats line. There is a continuous diet of Great RU will grind the Baltics flat and salt the earth. Great Ru will invade Poland, and nuke London. So Moscow may not be buying, but the rest of the country is being brought along quite nicely. They TV also continuously licks the current Czar's boots of course. But the Czar is dead, long live the Czar, is not exactly a new concept in Russia. It comes back to the question of how the coup goes. A clean win for the Nats and the war might get worse, at least for a while, or the Nats do something so bat %*&^ crazy that NATO gets involved. An inconclusive partial success and the SMO in Ukraine collapses completely as Russia descends into civil war or something close to it. If the Nats fizzle, Putin can go back to losing at his own pace, except he will have lost his most effective forces. My two cents on the historical moment is that it might not be 1917, but it is at least as bad for Putin as 1905 was for the Czar. Furthermore it a lot harder to hide a real disaster now, if say the Kherson pocket collapses and there is a temporary dam of Russian bodies at the mouth of the Dnipro. In 1905-7 the Czars regime survived, but it had to make real concessions that haunted the rest of its miserable, utterly incompetent, never to be sufficiently *%%#$# existence. And then of course it led to something even worse, how is that for the cheery thought of the day.

Black Adder, and Yes Minister are the two most educational shows ever filmed, and absolutely hilarious. Can't recommend both of them highly enough.

Perhaps not, but it is a great pretense to REALLY harass every tendril of the Russian government and its extremely well paid enablers in DC. The FBI and related three letter agencies should shake the bleep out of that infested nest of money influence, and espionage and see and falls out. Things are far, FAR past giving the Russians the benefit of the doubt about anything whatsoever. And if they did do it there should be about three Russians with diplomatic passports in the U.S. for the next decade.

So the next question is how the Ru Nats take these multiple "messages"? Do they just slink off into their very dark corners and whisper to each other quietly? Or is slapping them down the equivalent of screwing the relief valve on a water heater shut, and there is going to be one heck a loud noise sometime soon, and a hole in the roof to go with it? There is a rather large difference between those scenarios. Of course the Nats might try something and fail pitifully, allowing Putin's regime to go on about losing this war at their own pace.

The best thing would be giving them this, AND enough artillery. We could spend Christmas thinking about something else.

The Sino-Vietnamese War is a classic case of a better run autocracy. The Chinese made a bad little gamble on a short victorious war, it spectacularly didn't work. They just quit, went home, offered the Vietnamese a return to the pre war state of affairs, and memory holed the whole thing. This is EXACTLY what Putin should have done about March 15. He has endlessly doubled down on a losing hand instead.

But the first question about a coup is can they manage a clean takeover? If the transition isn't quick and complete they will be right where Lenin was in late 1917 to early 1918, making peace with his external enemies at any price so they can fight their internal ones. The separate treaty that Lenin signed to get Russia out of WW1 was one of the worst deals ever. The newly formed Soviet Union was able to tear it up months later when the Germans lost the war, but I don't see where that miracle comes from this time. Edit: And if things are bad enough for an RU Nats. coup to work at all the army will likely be a similiar state of collapse to the one Lenin faced.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/26/opinion/russia-ukraine-oil-gas-prices.html From Krugman, yes I know many of you already have an opinion about him. But this this actual area of academic expertise and he was an upper-mid level government official decades ago when the Russian gas pipelines were getting built. And yes everyone new it was bad idea then, but the Germans did it anyway. The short version of the rest of it is that the most gas dependent parts of Europe should , just barely, make it thru the winter. Th oil and grain markets are moving back towards more normal prices and will probably keep doing so. His big take away is that industrial and trade policy for national security reasons are going to be a long term thing. Trade with China, the Saudis and so on is going to get evaluated on something besides the who has the lowest price next month.

Can I point out that virtually all the really quick ones happen in deserts...

We are taking a detour into a nuclear power discussion, but.... Grid disconnection was also a big problem at Fukashima. There just needs to be a new design requirement that nuclear plants have a completely independent way to run there their own pumps and systems. You could do it by powering the pumps with steam directly, by having a separate small powerhouse that takes reactor steam and run it thru an appropriately sized turbine and generator, or even by the sort of fancy direct heat to electricity thermocouples that are used in many space probes. But if the reactor is hot there needs a to be a grid independent way to use that heat to run the systems that avoid bad outcomes.

These need to be included in the collectors edition of the new game.

All of this closely parallels, or more precisely mirrors 1916-1918. In 1916-18 you had had seething mass of revolutionaries who wanted to depose the Czar and stop the war at any price. Now you have a seething mass of imperial revanchists who want to reinstate a Czar, and in their heart of hearts, declare a holy war and conquer all the way to Paris. I would simply remind everyone that in November 1917 one the the very worst of those revolutionaries seized power and did his level best to wreck the twentieth century. We really need to manage the collapse of the Russian government a little better this time. As an aside do we have the slightest idea who their candidate/figure head for the actual throne is? Second aside, what is the command structure of the military units around Moscow proper? Lenin succeeded by promising the the army units around St Petersburg exactly what they wanted. I am pretty sure Ghirkin knows that rather well.

Been out of town for a few days. A LOT of discussion about different threats to armor in general and MBTs in particular. I would just point out that mines remain an extremely unsolved problem. Given that they are cheap and everyone has them, this is a definite mark against ten million dollar armored vehicles designed to be used out at the pointy end of the spear. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2022/01/13/army-readies-to-deliver-first-set-of-strykers-with-50-kilowatt-laser-weapons/ All publicly available information seems to indicate the army found this vehicle to be worth having around, But there are no specifics on performance. They do not tell us the dwell time required to kill drones of various sizes at various ranges. They do not tell us if the primary tracking mechanism is infrared, radar, radio emissions from the drone, or all of the above. If it REALLY works it would be close to game changing. My definition of "really works" is the ability to swat an Orlan ten at ten kilometers in a minute, and do it minute after minute after minute. This would imply even faster kills against quad copter type drones. this level of performance would force drones to fly like this guy. And would be a significant shift from the current doctrine. The laser Styrker or similar would become an integral part of every artillery battery and command group. All of this ties nicely into the boards previous discussions of protecting your sides ISR bubble while popping the other guys. An open question if even the U.S. can afford enough of them, but the lessons of this war would seem to imply we can't afford NOT to buy them. I still think that hot new thing at the forward edge of battle is going to a multispectral ghillie suit that resembles the bush of your choice.