dan/california

https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1524087877315231744/photo/2 Maps, someone has maps!. And you can even READ these. Upper link is a high res from around Kharkiv that shows just how much trouble the GLOC might be in.

Closer, and closer to Vovchans'k, With cuts one of the major GLOCs from Belgorod. If the can bring even moderate deep strike any where on the other Route to Kupiansk all the Russian forces to the south of there are REALLY going to have logistical problems

Oh I agree with that, but if you can kill found targets with fewer rounds you can spend more of your logistical support on semi-disposable drones to find targets for those smart rounds to kill. The thing this war is just edging into, but it will be a much bigger deal going forward, is that you have to start thinking about drones as ammo. On average drone model X can survey y square kilometers before getting vaporized. Because everything and everybody out there is starting to understand that you kill the drones, or you can die. It is highly motivational.

So very much of the cost issue, even leaving aside the disaster that is defense procurement, is just being willing to eat the cost of setting up the factory to make a LOT of something. There is nothing in an Excalibur round that is more complicated than an Iphone, or an advanced motor cycle engine. There are some fancy electronics, and some highly stressed parts. But for several billion dollars you definitively could set up a real factory instead of the current almost artisanal process. By real factory I mean virtually nothing is ever touched by a human hand and hundreds or even thousands these of the things roll off the line every hour. If you have their location to the 100 meters you have already won. and the choice of smart or dumb rounds comes down to situational specifics. I think The_Capt's point is that with the quality of Russian ISR they currently need to saturate KILOMETERS plural of tree line to make progress with acceptable losses, and the logistics math just doesn't add, at lest not for them, not right now. Edit I cross posted with The_Capts own response

We appreciate it!

Video of apparent Ukr counter-battery fire. It seems like the first round was dead on, and then the rest more scattered. Possibly leading with one guided round? The other interesting thing is there are a lot of other vehicles in that tree line, but all the fire appears to be directed at the guns set up in the field. Per recent post by the professionals the Russian probably set up this way to get a better survey of their guns, and therefore better accuracy?

We have been seeing more video of guided rounds lately. Does this represent a new supply of guided munitions coming into the fight, or just the release of more videos? Because drone directed guided rounds seem to be a universal problem solver, and enough of them would shorten this war by a lot. I think there is an excellent chance that troops in the rest of the column in the video above got very serious about having a mechanical problem the next time they were ordered to advance. SeinfeldRules thinks that drone defense is a solvable problem. We should be VERY sure we have solved it before the next war, because the penalty for not solving it is rather drastic.

Ukraine needs the second coming of the Red Ball Express, badly, and soon.

Great post, and there is no such thing as too much detail on this board, not from people who know what they are talking about. Also, any opinion on what that drone solution will be? It is a problem that is much harder than it seems, or at least it has been so far.

A lot of them weren't anywhere near full strength battle groups at the start of the war. The Potemkin army thing just got completely out of control. The only conceivable explanation for the Russian war plan is the one Steve laid out above. You can't even guess their strength from the "number of BTG", you need to actually count tanks and bodies.

And yet another BTG, more or less.

Trent's thread is not entirely coherent, but I am willing to believe the Ukr have committed to a next generation force wide target allocation system. Anybody else seen anything mere organized on this in English?

It was not in any way my my intention to offend, and i sincerely apologize. You are a twenty plus year professional at this and I am not. I was basically referring to the ratios discussed in this article https://www.army.mil/article/36324/a_historical_basis_for_force_requirements_in_counterinsurgency Which I think is still a pretty good distillation of the conventional wisdom. Of course you can immediately descend into the weeds over how much lower lower quality indigenous forces that are nominally on your side are accounted for, and very great deal else. Until you arrive at the chart discussed above. My broader point is the we never resourced Afghanistan like we wanted to win. This was always a decision made at the political level, and almost always made rather badly. Allow me state AGAIN that was I not directing my previous comment at you. It has been a great privilege to follow your analysis of the current war, and I am grateful for the opportunity.

It is one of a large number of attempts to obfuscate the simple math. It takes x number of soldiers per y number of population to run an effective counter insurgency campaign. We have wasted twenty years trying to run counter insurgency campaigns with 1/10x soldiers, plus handwavium. Results have been poor. Ukraine is a straight up shooting war, and the side the west is supporting has adequate numbers, unity of command, and real enthusiasm, so it is going rather better.

The Ukrainians really are impinging on the GLOC s for the entire Northern Donbas. One more push like that one and they won't be impinging, they will be &$$&*&* all over them. Fingers crossed the map is accurate, and Ukr momentum holds up. I did say at some point in the last few days the the less the Ukr General Staff is talking, the better they are doing...

Well that settles any questions about the credibility of Ukr estimates of Russian casualties.

Guderian wasn't dealing with satellite surveillance, and enough active ISR to fry every egg in the Donbas.

I am getting this vision of the Russians getting every truck they still own together in one big unmissable target for for a GMLRS strike that eliminates several thousand conscripts, and literally ALL the transport the Russians have left.

Do we actually know if they have been taking in as many conscripts as they say have been for the last few years? Or was this yet another opportunity for graft? The recruiter gets a bribe from the guy who didn't have to show, and the commanders of both the training unit, and the operational unit get to pocket the imaginary soldier's pay. Given the proven state of the Russian army is there ANY reason to think there hasn't been a fair bit of this going on? I can even envision a unit of Potemkin special soldiers the get moved around just in front of the inspectors s they make their rounds. Is this any crazier than seven or eight things we now know to be true?

The only reason I don't believe this is that he has looked like bleep in his recent pictures.

It is entirely believable the Russians would do this. But doing this and then asking them to guard the northern flank, and THE key logistics hub, for the entire main offensive effort is really dumb. It is even really dumb by Russian standards, so my bet is mostly desperation. There may be a certain amount of different Russian military districts trying to hoard stuff for themselves.

The maps in question

The most important thing on those maps is the Ukrainians pushing from Kharkiv towards Kupiansk. Kupiask is the linchpin of Russian logistics in the northern Donbas. If the Ukrainians can even bring it under continuous threat from tube artillery, much less take it, the Russian logistics are absolutely *&%$$& *%*%$&$&*. It will make everything else happening in the Northern Donbas irrelevant. My two cents on the rest of the entire war is that the Russians are either stuck, or paying about a hundred times more in men and material for every meter of ground gained than they can afford. The Ukr general staff seems to talk less when they are doing better, and they are bleeping near silent at the moment, and Steve still wants to hold his cards for a bit on actual game stuff. So the thread has just sort of lost its mind.