dan/california

Well bleep, the Russians have not only found a general who can read, but one who reads the right books. This is exactly the tactics the Germans used in their last big offensive in 1918, and it almost worked. Hopefully this works out the same way, that the better tactics have arrived to late save an army that is fundamentally used up. The SigInt people need to find this guy and drop something on his headquarters that leaves the kind of crater they can see from space.

To the extent Russian video/and or claims have ANY bearing on reality, what this demonstrates is why Zelensky spends all day every day screaming for better anti aircraft systems. You simply cannot conduct mechanized offensive operations when the other side has drones up and communicating with effective artillery. If we want the Ukrainians to be able to actually win this thing they need more help with this. If the systems are so bloody complicated that they need to be run Lockheed/Raytheon contractors that "volunteered for the Ukrainian foreign legion" then get it DONE. If there are anti drone systems where the only four working vehicles are at the Yuma proving grounds, get the bleeping things on a C-5/17 and I am sure the Ukrainians and the aforementioned "foreign legion volunteers" will right up a lovely report when it is all over.

Worth the read, both the thread and the article.

Worth the read, both the thread and the article.

You are/were an artillery officer, I'm not, don't take this as not respecting your experience., I do, beyond immensely. But in this case you are bordering on counter-acting your own point. 3 RQ-7s gives you one instance of the scenario I described above. Against a more competent opponent than the current version of the Russians that gets you to ten AM on opening day. The Ukrainians ares shooting down ~5 Orlans a day with shoulder fired SAMs, Soviet era radars and maybe a few modern jammers. The Russians have shown the intellectual flexibility of a Brontosaurus, so in this war both sides are keeping stuff in the air, and inflicting major losses with drone directed fire. And yes I realize it is not nearly as simple as the videos make it look, but one army that no one gave any credit three months ago, and one army that turns out not to deserve any credit to speak of seem to be capable of making it work. It is quite possible that the other side in the next war might be minimally competent, and not utterly crippled by rampant corruption. They are going to think REALLY hard about how to shoot down drones, and how to bring enough of them to deal with losses. A certain large Asian country is known for it competence at mass production, they are going to show up with every intention of just drowning us in eighteen wheeler loads of something like switch blades, launch things like Orlans in flights of thirty or forty, and Baryaktar equivalents in flights of ten and twenty. The only job of the first wave is to spot most of what killed it, because they will have another wave, and another one after that. Drone warfare is going to become as attritional as the current artillery slugging match in Donbas. We have to learn to think of them like ammunition. The side that shows up with most, wins. And again, no disrespect intended.

Thank you!

Trent is Trent, and we all know that he can be rather messy, but he is right here. The U.S. needs a lightly upgraded version of the Orlan-10, and it needs THOUSANDS of them. We have to assume they are doing recon by death, so you send three at a time and hope one of them lives long enough to locate what is killing them. You just have to be prepared to keep doing this until the bad guys run out of things to kill them with. As discussed at length in this thread, if you are the only side with drones still flying you have basically won assuming anything close to force parity otherwise.

Is there a chance in bleep of getting the entire transcript in English? I flunked German comprehensively in high school and was too traumatized to ever try again.

The other factor that makes the DPR/LPR vulnerable is the way Russia is recruiting every military aged male who can pass the mirror test. And then using them up like they were cheap ammunition that is about to expire. If the Russian lines collapse the population that would have provided some sort of defense in depth/partisan resistance will have already been used up.

Interesting for several reasons. First it is not an over edited mess, secondly it shows the first two spotting rounds being way off, then subsequent rounds getting VERY accurate. They also seem quite worried about counter battery if they actually stopped shooting at this point. Because it seemed like their was a lot more targets.

The UN is structurally incapable of refereeing between the Big Five who hold permanent seats and vetoes on the Security Counsel. This is a structural flaw that resulted from the U.N. rules being codified by the victors of WW2 without quite realizing how badly they were going to be getting along in a few years. In any event none of them would have agreed to an organization that had the ability to restrict their freedom of action. "International Law" is just a polite fiction covering the fact that might makes right if you have enough of it. The Ukraine war presents the same three choices it always has. 1) Effectively surrender Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe to Russian Domination. This effectively shatters NATO and the broader "Western Alliance" and points to a an UGLY 21st century. 2) Provide Ukraine enough support to win this war. This is inevitably going to take several more months, and perhaps much longer. Unfortunately this pushes the world food production system to VERY high degree of stress, since Ukraine and Russia quietly became the the worlds leading exporters while virtually no one paid attention. There just is not enough spare capacity to compensate. 3) NATO can end this war in a week and dares Putin to start WW3 over it. My personal opinion is that option one is a non starter, and the balance of risks between options two and three is much closer than is commonly assumed. This is clearly a minority opinion, but Sri Lanka has already descended in to absolute chaos over the food crisis. They clearly had a LOT of preexisting issues, but that just makes them the canary in the coal mine. There are a lot of countries out there just barely holding it together withe bailing wire and the hope that things are getting just a little bit better. A multi year food crisis is going to sink a lot of them. The downside risk of NATO not intervening decisively have been understated, and the Russia's desire to fight NATO has been greatly OVERSTATED. If Russia wanted to fight NATO a tenth of the support we have ALREADY given Ukraine would be more than enough casus belli. Russia isn't fighting NATO because it doesn't want to, and knows it would lose. A rock solid ultimatum and two or three heavy brigades crossing the Polish Ukrainian border would have wonderfully clarifying effect on the thought processes of various factions in Moscow.

The Russians seem to have lost their usual battlegroup per day.

The artillery did its job. The Russian attempt to do something coherent was completely disrupted, and the tank proceed to blunder into an ATGM team. This is excellent combined arms work. I wonder how badly hurt the tankers get on average when they are riding three quarters out of the hatches like that and the tank brews up? They are also vastly more vulnerable to shell fragments and bullets that way of course.

I keep coming back to my theory that Russian company/battalion grade officers simply won't let their men out of their sight. Presumably because they know things will just stop, or rather the looting raping, raping, random murdering, and drinking will immediately get out of hand, oh and desertion. This is unacceptable because senior officers are supposed to get first pick, among other reasons. Some of those other reasons might even include trying to fight the war, but that is less clear every day....

I THINK I saw something about that equipment going to either the Czechs or the Poles to backfill them for the entirety of their armor that THEY just sent/are about to send to the Ukrainians. But it is quite possible that google translate screwed that up, either for me or someone else.

I sometimes believe Putin is intentionally pushing his army to complete failure so it doesn't have the capacity left to depose him when Russia finally loses catastrophically. The DPR/LPR are not big places, this has to push their casualties as a percentage of the total population up towards France in WW1 or Russia in WW2 doesn't it. I mean society changing near male generation wipeout level.

The fact that civilians who should have left weeks and weeks ago are shellshocked and unhappy when the war actually does show up on their doorstep is absolutely awful for the civilians in question. It is not an indication of imminent military failure. The far more significant part of that article is that 777s have entered the fight in that area. Which is the clearest possible indicator that the Ukrainians are addressing the problem.

This is purely a gee whiz video. There is a frame with a pretty good view of the missile before impact.

The thing I respect the Ukr General Staff for the most is not getting sucked into a rescue operation in Mariupol that would certainly have failed. They did the math and said no Mr President it won't work, CAN"T work. It is even more to the Ukrainians credit that not one bit of the back and forth that had to have happened over this has seen the light of day. They might have been able to do it if outside support had moved a lot faster, but that was just too big a lift for various countries political systems.

So I count ~5 BMP/MTLB with maybe five guys each. That isn't enough infantry to run a couple of forward listening posts, Much less attempt any sort of actual perimeter around those tanks. maybe there re some more up the road somewhere?

I think the "just win the bleeping war faction" in the Whitehouse has won, if this is true.

Can we revisit those scenario time limits? A Ukrainian infantry heavy attack on this map is going to take a little while.

You can probably improvise with a narrow fordable spot, and some supply trucks to represent the bridging gear that just give huge points for their demise. The "graphics department" will not be amused to have pontoons thrown on top of their never ending pile.

The Ukrainians don't so much attack as just make it too unpleasant to stay. Which seems odd, but has worked at Kyiv and Kharkiv. We will have to see where they apply it next. I can't imagine the fifth Russian commander in Kherson is sleeping terribly well. Not without staring UP at the bottom of a bottle of vodka first , anyway. For that matter it has worked rather well for the Mujahideen, twice....