dan/california

Great post!

There is BDA, and then there is a guided video tour of the still burning wreckage.

Russia does NOT want a war with NATO, nuclear or otherwise. I say this with 98% confidence because even as a flood of Western weapons has resulted in somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 Russian KIA, not one Russian shell or missile has landed in Poland, not one. Given that the Russian casualties to date are literally several orders of magnitude larger than most of the casus belli in history, my firm conclusion is that they don't want to fight.

I think this is a non trivial restraint on Putin using one. There is a real chance it might not work. That would be just a wee bit embarassing.

Great thread, worth the time.

Great thread, worth the time.

The contest to make the 21st century come out better than the 20th can'y be won in Ukraine. But it can certainly be lost there. Ukraine winning is a precondition for any truly good outcomes. Is Kadyrov playing offense or defense? It is quite possible he is feeling more pressure from within Chechnya and feels the need to keep more of his soldiers at home. It is also quite possible that he has information about the stability of the Russian Federation that the rest of us are not privy too, and he is preparing for civil war more or less. The tidbit a week or three ago about him wanting an s300/400 system for his own palace makes me wonder if it isn't the latter. There are not a lot of things in Chechnya that require an S400 to stop that Kadyrov doesn't control. Someone is listening to my endless rants about the efficiency of PGMs.

This is "messaging" as the The-Capt calls it. Today you can leave, tomorrow, maybe not so much. I will pre order that book the minute you are taking money. They have been singularly unable to separate their internal messaging from their external messaging. The result has been a fiasco that can only be explained by too many drugs. Again, all the other explanations are even worse. The drone video is a case study in why guided rounds and military grade drones are worth the money. With excalibur and a drone capable of reading the coordinates directly that would be four rounds and four hits. YES, this... Sending ANY tank/ifv into combat without a good thermal imager is some combination of desperation and stupidity.

!00% disagree, Himars has nearly shattered Russian logistics. Their forces on the west side of the Dnipro are half a step from being hostages as opposed to a military force, and the Russians are stalled and bleeding everywhere else. The Ukrainians are just getting revved up to start pushing them back. The Russians can choose to stop dying at any time, just leave. If they try to stay they get to bleed, and bleed, and bleed, until they give up and go home after all. The only thing Putin is getting out of this is zinc coffins and debt.

one of the things that has really stuck with me was some Ukrainian soldiers digging a trench, and finding bits and pieces of gear from WW2, because the terrain hadn't really changed, and made sense to emplace their both times. No Girkin is the smart, bitter kind who wants to write his name into the history books in blood. It is darkly amusing that he is named after a miniature pickle. I clearly need to annoy my Congressperson and Senators AGAIN! The first effort at the northerly part of the Kherson from seems to be going well, or better than that. At a minimum the Russian in village unpronounceable are getting the experience of being shelled from three sides. In the best case scenario they really are cut off.

If the above timeline is correct it implies extraordinary command incompetence from the Russians. Or maybe Putin has given some insane no retreat order, those worked out so well for Hitler after all.

We may have our first morale test case in progress if the Russians can't break out. There is some indication it is a Naval infantry unit. There is not enough info to figure out if these are real infantry/marines, or just everyone from some godforsaken base near Vladivostok who did an insufficiently good job of looking busy, and or running like bleep when the base commander had to round up a battalion from nothing.

Mississippi and New York are not so very fond of each other either, and yet we have shambled on for ~250 years. Granted there was that one outbreak of unpleasantness, but even so. It is also worth pointing out that spread out is just about impossible if the civilian populace doesn't like you much. The battle for Kyiv being exhibit A in some regards.

Shooting lasers at fast missiles/ artillery shells has some inherent limitations involving dwell time. The engagement window is very short and it take a LOT of laser power to apply enough energy in the time available. Drones though are the perfect laser target, since they are, at least in their current incarnation, mostly light weight and slow moving. Doubly so since blinding the optics is essentially as good as blasting it out of the sky. it doesn't matter that much if a slow moving drone at twenty kilometers range and six or eight thousand meters altitude takes tens seconds or twenty seconds for the laser to kill. What matters is being able to kill drones at those kinds of ranges, doing it for few hundred dollars a shot, and being able to do it all day long if the diesel holds out. Zelensky is EXTREMELY aware that the Ukrainian economy is going to be rebuilt by the European Union or nobody. Furthermore what ever assets most of the pre-existing Oligarchs held in Ukraine are pretty much rubble. The Azov steel mill being exhibit A. Both the mill and the private army that went with are casualties of this war. So not only is it now or never to reduce the oligarchs' power, but there are active economic rewards for doing so.

!00% agree laser is the only real solution. Everything else has a huge issue with either range or cost per shot. And you really have to solve both problems. Shooting 5,000 dollar drones, and hundred thousand dollar GMLRS missiles with million dollar interceptors is just not a long term plan.

And those gentlemen usually can't agree on what day of the week it is. No clearer indication possible of how Putin has united people against him.

How much will the very hostile population Kherson effect the Russians ability to resist? I can envision the Russians not being able to move anything, anywhere in Kherson with less than a full company of infantry once the battle is fully engaged. And if the Ukr special forces can smuggle in a truck or two of platter EFPs and those nifty German off route mines, the Russian troops could be effectively unable to maneuver. All of this entails unfortunate civilian casualties, but near as I can tell NOTHING is worse than being occupied by the Russians. A full uprising at the same time the AFU push hard ought to just end it.

It was nice of the camera man to provide such a thorough bomb damage assessment. AFU can now calculate how many GMLRS it will take to drop the bridge with zero waste.

I am 100% with team Steve here. Dropping the bridges, and basically holding every Russian soldier on the west side hostage, or close to it immediately, and completely, changes the narrative for very low cost, and very low risk. It is true that a successful simultaneous attack on Melitipol is more or less a war winner, but don't let the best be the enemy of the good. For extra fun we can have an enjoyable week or two of counting the daily total of Russian helicopters shot down as they try to get supplies in and people out. Maybe the Russians will even get desperate enough to try and get some small ships in. That just becomes another huge propaganda opportunity when they get sunk. I think a lot of the troops in and around Kherson are DPR/LPR a few thousand prisoners from those unhappy so called Republics would take the starch out of them COMPLETELY. All this talk about executing Azov guys from Mariupol would just stop cold. The Ukrainians definitely need to do this sooner rather than later.

I would certainly hit every airfield in Ukraine. Unless you do it with the very first missiles and can catch a bunch of planes on the ground, I don't think the risk /reward is worth it for airfields in Russia.

There is no reason to strike Russia with the first batch of ATACAMs. Drop the Kherson bridges. Smash the pontoon bridge they will surely try to build. Smash all the rail way infrastructure feeding Kupiansk, in and out. Smash all the ammo dumps they just moved. Then ask Russia if they want to see week two. If they were stupid enough to have submarines at dock in Crimea though I would give those anti missile defenses a little test. The Russians cut bait on Kyiv when it came down to that or lose. Maybe Putin will have a fatal headache if Ukraine can demonstrate the whole war is lost and every Russian soldier on the west side of the Dnipro might as well be a prisoner.

So "political necessity" is going to push the Russians to complete military, and perhaps regime, failure as they try to hold onto and or expand their position on the west side of the Dnipro? Because unless they have a counter to things the Ukrainians ALREADY HAVE, much less things they might have soon, that position is not sustainable.

Grigb this is just priceless info, many thanks.

There is at least a strong rumor that that Ukraine is finally going to get ATACAMS. I don't know if those missiles can drop the Kerch straight bridge, but I am absolutely sure they can drop the bridges over the Dnipro behind Kherson at will. I doubt they want to wreck the dam but they can wreck the rail approaches past fixing, especially with Himars waiting to hammer repair crews. At the Kherson bridges they even can even do a simultaneous attack on the air/missile defense with Himars and Tochka. For that matter the front line is only ~55 km from Nova Karkova and the dam. It wouldn't take a miracle to bring the dam into the range of the best 155mm guns, at which point I don't see how the Russians make ANYTHING work on that side of the river. Am I missing something, or is the Russian general staff?

The Ukrainian's previous victories have come when they just made it too unpleasant for the Russians to stay somewhere. I am expecting that Kherson will go the same way. The supplies just get ever more strangled. The partisans get ever more supplied with platter charges and claymores and all kinds of unpleasant go bang, and the rain of 155 just never stops. Any unit that displays real competence gets GMLRSed. Remember that the Ukrainian supply situation is considerably easier on that side of the Dnipro. It should be by far the easiest place for them to win the artillery logistics battle. My biggest question is when the Russians want to go, do they let them to lessen civilian casualties? Or go for a full up cauldron and try to take five or ten thousand Russian prisoners?