dan/california

The missiles are killing the army they were built to kill, hard to ask for more. This war is lesson 8037 that you need five times as ammo as the most pessimistic planner thinks, maybe ten times. They are either going to have to expand the production lines or move up and expand production of the missile that is supposed to replace the Javelin. Said replacement is actually much further along than I thought, I need to find that article again and post it here. Seems expensive, until you look at the bill for being occupied by orcs.

Every major military in the world is reevaluating its procurement plans for the next twenty years, and in one of histories odder accidents our little hobby has suddenly become very important part helping them decide how to do that. If Steve has a tenth of the military contracts I think he has, or is in the process of getting, it is an outright miracle that he TALKS to us. When the war in Ukraine dies down enough that it doesn't look utterly immoral to release a game based on it, or another one, actually. Maybe we will get some benefit from all that Pentagon development money.

Regardless of how Putin departs, the next guy will have a 25% of GDP incentive to at least convincingly lie that he gloriously happy that Ukraine is member of the EU and NATO. if lying convincingly puts the next war of for twenty years, who knows what will be different.

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hdWRpb2Jvb20uY29tL2NoYW5uZWxzLzUwMzk5MTgucnNz?sa=X&ved=0CAMQ4aUDahcKEwiQkuf-_o_3AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ This is GOOD!

Another pic of the busted bridge, still not the view of the failure point I really want. It looks like the whole end of the bridge landed about two feet down on a lip in the abutment, shame it didn't buckle from the shock and land in the river.

Ammo issue cuts both ways. It is a different kind of ammo, which is obviously bad, and introduces logistical complications. On the plus side it lets Ukraine draw from modern NATO ammo stocks. Hopefully including PGMs, if you have to ship it all the way across Ukraine in a hurry, you might as well send the good stuff.

https://warontherocks.com/2022/04/on-future-wars-and-the-marine-corps-asking-the-right-questions/ We need this guy on the thread. I wonder if Steve has met him.

You can't be more in favor of raining death on the Russians than I am. But I don't think the MQ-1 can operate in the air defense environment in Ukraine. On the other hand the Baraktayars have proven vastly harder for the Russians to kill than most people thought they would. But the MQ-1 is quite a bit bigger, and presumably has a larger radar signature.

They had time time to be afraid, which I would feel bad about if the Russians weren't in an atrocity contest with the SS. So I will just point out they can go home anytime.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/04/12/pentagon-ukraine-weapons/?utm_source=reddit.com I think whatever was left of the don't be too mean to the Russians faction in the Biden Administration has been conclusively routed.

Some, But especially this time of year any meaningful Russian force is completely road bound due weather/ground conditions. So it just isn't that hard to put blocking forces at all the significant road junctions in case they tried something like that. And the The Ukrainians essentially have interior lines all the way across the current front. So they don't have to move as far to block as the Russians do to attack. Again if the Russians actually thought about that they would just quit and go home.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/science/angkor-wat-cambodia-archeaology.html A not terribly recent article about how airborne LIDAR systems can pull centimeter level resolution of the actual ground out of otherwise impenetrable Southeast Asian jungle. Now imagine trying to hide a tank company in Ukraine from the Pentagon's current best efforts.

To some extent they probably do. They seem to utterly lack the command and control capabilities to do much with in real time though. And in the earlier fighting around Kyiv, light infantry dug into an endless suburb with heavy forest cover would be about the hardest thing to see I can think of.

My understanding is that the Russians had sort of cut Mariupol into two pockets, The marines were able to break out of their pocket and combine with Azov. So not a miracle unfortunately, but that much harder and longer the Russians will have to fight to finish things there.

I am honestly not 100% certain for this particular image. But my point is that NATO receives this kind of data from SEVERAL sources, and the Russians would have to fool all of them, and every Ukrainian farmer with a cell connection, to generate meaningful surprise at this point. If the Russian's had any brains at all they would think about that for 90 seconds, and then go home. Really spoofing NATO/Ukr ISR would require six orders of magnitude more operational agility, comms security, and electronic warfare capability than they have shown so far. Impossible, no, and the Ukrainian General staff should be alert to the Russians trying to pull something, but isn't bleeping likely.

Between NATO ISR, and the fact that Russian communications seem to be an open book, it would take a quantum leap for the Russians to generate surprise with more than a platoon sized force. Ukrainian command should be alert in case the Russians suddenly pull it together and try to feed them false information or something, but that would be a thousand times the level the Russians have operated at so far. This is the level of detail Nato assets are getting on Russian movements. If Nato got off of its rear end and put it planes in the air there wouldn't be a Russian vehicle in Ukraine in 24 hours. And that is just one system, hiding just isn't a thing anymore for a mechanized force.

They also just own Belarus now, and could base from there. In 2014 Lukashenko wasn't just a wholly owned Russian subsidiary.

Win the war, and revenge for the Australian submarine thing, too, brilliant.

Getting back to if this was sabotage or not. This looks like the connection to the abutment just failed under load. But if so where is the derailed train. I would think it fail with a train ON it if was due to simply overworking a not great bridge? Maybe someone wasn't quite judicious enough with those handy linear cutting charges and the bridge failed immediately? Instead of under load later as intended?

Too funny not to repost it here.

It is the irritating super cut up style video, but it looks like what is says it is. Russian ISR and infantry situation have to improve if they want to even attempt to stay in this war.

Boris is, well, Boris, but in this case of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, the right thing is the important half.

We may just be moving into a new military era where offensive action is just harder. In WW1 the problem of being. on the offensive against a prepared and supplied enemy was effectively unsolvable. The Germans were beaten by blockade, and sheer bloody attrition. From WW2 until Feb 23 the side on offense usually did way better than the side just trying hold ground, at least as long as they were smarter about it than the Germans were at Kursk, and had air superiority . Maybe the pendulum has just swung again

The fact that it failed form being overstressed, as opposed to blown up doesn't mean it is isn't busted. And that is not the easiest kind of failure to fix. The entire structure is probably really compromised way back from the actual failure there at the abutment. How much of the Russian rail road capacity wast this, Because it is out for several days, at a minimum.

Two related things regarding the the Ukrainians on offense. First, their biggest problem is the air and missile defense they don't have. The Stingers have made close air support too expensive to conduct, but Russian SRBMs and cruise missiles in particular seem to get through, maybe not all the time, but enough of the time. This means the Ukrainians just CAN'T mass for an offensive in a concentrated way. To their credit, they have mostly had the sense not to try. This leads to my second point, what the Ukrainians are doing on offense is more a form of focused attrition than an attempt to actually seize a given spot by force. Instead the Ukrainians pick a place, either because it is a good spot for them operationally, or a bad spot for the Russians, Like the critical road and bridge junctions northwest of Kyiv, and simply make it too expensive to be there. Eventually the Russians give up and evacuate the spot in question. The question I have not figured out is where it makes sense for the Ukrainians to apply this after Kherson. I am quite sure the very next thing the Ukrainians need to do is drop those two bridges feeding the Russians in Kherson, and then make being on that side of the river unbearable. Obviously the best thing NATO can do for the Ukrainians is to SOLVE their air defense problem. Patriot/ThAAD batteries operated by "foreign volunteers" needs to be a thing, YESTERDAY. We also need to give the Ukrainians some level of ~100 mile deep strike capability, so the Russians have to worry about THEIR concentrations at the operational level.