dan/california

https://cryocooler.org/resources/Documents/C20/063.pdf Spec sheet for the cooling system on one of Thales thermal imaging systems. I learned some things I didn't know. Definitely ways to mess that up, although they don't give in depth maintenance info on this page. However the words helium and seal appear in the same sentence, which seems to involve a vast space for things to go wrong. If I was Thales I would take down the web page bragging about being used on the T-90.

You can't tell it from their battlefield performance. Maybe that is the first thing they sell? Or it isn't particularly tolerant of poor maintenance?

Modern production can be insanely efficient, and fast once it is set up. Setting it up take a LONG time. Exhibit A is two years into the pandemic I still can't get the bicycle I want, it is expensive, and particular, but two years on from the pandemic induced demand shock they still can't make enough of them. That is with me standing at the counter saying take my money. Now Putin may about to try harder, like if this line isn't running in six months I will shoot your whole family hard. But he is also in a vastly bigger hole. Russia needs to ramp things up by a factor of ten or more in many areas, and they have never owned much of the supply chain, or the underlying manufacturing technologies. Russia couldn't get a new plant up for thermal imagers built in two years before the sanctions, now it isn't clear they can do it at all. I am honestly not sure where China is on some of this stuff. But it is some indication that until very recently, if not still, they were relying on Russian jet engines. With the U.S. congress waving fistfuls of dollars at them Intel says they might have some new U.S. semiconductor production in the U.S. in 2025

But step zero here goes back to the problem with appointing a strong, competent overall commander in a regime like Putin's. The newly appointed commander's first assessment is CAN he win this war. If the answer is yes, he wins it, and then deposes Putin and makes himself the new Czar, justifying it by pointing to all the casualties from Putin's initial cockup up. If the answer is that the disaster is too far gone to fix, he cuts bait on Ukraine and deposes Putin immediately. Then he mails Putin's corpse, and presumably those of most of his close confidants, to NATO headquarters in Brussels and begs them to turn the Russian economy back on before he has to sell the Russian far east to the Chinese outright. Now you can debate which of these is better for Russia, and clearly plan b is better for the Ukraine and the rest of the world. Putin , though, looks at both possibilities, and either appoints a nonentity he thinks he can trust, or so hobbles a real general that Russias grinding defeat just continues

This is the guy with real info on the Donbas front, orders of magnitude more detail. Indeed The Cap'n ought to take a look if this should all be out or not.

They have lost more people in Ukraine in ~six weeks than they lost in Afghanistan in a decade, possibly twice as many. That is just not a remotely comparable situation. Afghanistan was an unpleasant occupation of a place not worth having, they have proved that At least three times now. Ukraine is a straight up shooting war, with losses running several hundred men per day, more when they try to advance. No question the EU need to just turn off the gas pipeline, my guess is that it gets a lot more doable after the French election.

Of all the impossibly stupid things the Russian state/military apparatus could do, Not paying the troops it is already mistreating seems like the very dumbest choice possible. The ruble is already pretty much worthless, couldn't they just PRINT them, at least for this. This seems like active regime self sabotage. That is the MOST sensible explanation, all the others make even less sense. I have seen hours and hours of tape of people just ambling by, or standing next too, burning Russian AFVs. Every time I want yell at them, get the bleep away!

What really matters to Putin is NATO planes utterly wrecking his army, and maybe punching out his ugly little pet in Belarus while they are at it.

Putin has sort missed the point where that sort of doubling down makes sense, not that it ever did. If the battle for Kyiv had been closer there might have been a point where WMD looked worth trying, at least by utterly twisted, amoral, and short term logic that seems to guide Putin's decision making. It could have just maybe, barely, conceivably, at least given his army a chance to march thru Kyiv, once. Now it just gets NATO in the war without nearly enough battlefield upside. If NATO gets in Putins goes from trying to salvage something/anything in Ukraine too praying he hangs on to Belarus.

There is footage of the Russians using SPGs for direct fire in Mariupol. Azov saw an opportunity to discourage the practice.

That was the actual plan in Ukraine as well. It just failed spectacularly. Putin couldn't stand to be embarrassed and just go home. He decided to continue with the plan like the treachery part had worked, and well, here we are. Hopefully the Russian plan F is as bad as A thru E were.

The "find" part of the Russian tactical/operational concept is utterly broken in this environment. The only effective way to do the finding when the Ukrainians have enormous numbers of super high lethality ATGMs/PGMs is with infantry deployed in a tactical way, which moves at MAYBE two miles an hour, or drones or other remote means, which they don't seem to have even 10% of what they need. They seem desperately short of said infantry as well. So they try to do it while mounted in vehicles, and the finding part occurs when multiple vehicles just blow the bleep up. Then they have to attempt to clean up the mess, and go finding again. Said finding occurs by catastrophic vehicle disassembly, rinse and repeat until you don't have an army anymore.

Link?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/opinion/why-russian-sanctions-wont-stop-putin.html Former NATO commander is 100% in favor of NATO intervention. Edit, this didn't the headlines it deserved, He is pretty much 100% where I am. Fuel the planes, roll the tanks and tell the Russians to leave or die.

I think a LOT of the problem is that the Russians have have never done realistic exercises. They can't spend hours getting the entire BTG, much less multiple BTGs, set out in their big propaganda formations. Since the Ukrainian drones/artillery are on the ball, witness the Russian unit getting the bleep shelled out of it a few posts ago, would wreck them. So they dribble in in whatever sized formation they can maintain for the length of the approach marches they are actually having to execute. Then they get shredded in detail by ATGMs and the afore mentioned excellent artillery. Then the next BTG has to drive by the burnt/burning wrecks, and ponder the the fact they have made poor life choices before it happens to them, too. Throw in mud season, and you have the most epic failure of a military operation since I don't know when.

I wonder if the parading forces will march straight to the rail yards, and on to Ukraine? Or if Putin doesn't dare commit his Praetorian Guard?

Glory to Ukraine! Get these people more guided rounds, that was brilliant work, but with guidance they would have erased the lot of them. Also why didn't the trucks just gas it in any direction at all once they figured out they parking in the bulls eye.

I want tape of the meeting where they had to explain that.

I run out of like before i am thru my first cup of coffee, and irritated about it the rest of the day....

Good thread from Jomini today.

I think it is far more likely the drones will be a company level asset. There will be an entire platoon more or less tasked with nothing but drone operations and battle space ISR intergration. So drones will be launched and recovered by dedicated vehicles/operators at whatever schedule their technology requires. Lasers are already well long in development for shooting down drones, there have also been experiments with using lasers to POWER drones via solar cells. I can envision the same vehicle doing both jobs. Feeding low powered lasers to the companies own drones when there aren't bad guy drones to shoot at. God help the corporal that crosses up the buttons.

You can make at least some inferences about the Donbas and Crimea from how they voted in Ukrainian elections pre 2014. They voted heavily for pro Kremlin stooges. They voted for the corrupt idiot that was run out of town by the Maidan protest in an at least sort of fair election. So my basic assumption is that a decade of the Russian equivalent Fox news being the only thing on TV hasn't improved things.

My two cents on the final peace deal, probably worth less than that. Crimea and the Russian occupied Donbas have a far greater affinity to Russia than the rest of Ukraine, and that was before they had their brains poisoned by a ~decade of Putin's propaganda. I would give Putin Crimea and the Donbas to Putin for a signed treaty that gave Russian assent to joining the EU, and NATO. Ukraine would be both much safer, and much easier to govern.

Future sunflower fertilizer...

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1511417219674161158.html Trent making a great deal of sense about the railway lines in the Donbas being very important to the next phase of the war.