dan/california

This is an outstanding example of getting the little stuff right.

edited to add headline verbiage from article. Unfortunately this number wasn't enough. Ukraine needs the munitions to double or triple it, if we don't want to be having this discussion two years from now.

These are probably to few and to expensive to be used for front line air defense, but if they could park fifty kilometers back and start swatting Russian Orlan and Zala class UAVs they would make a difference, maybe a big difference. Especially say just to the safe side of the Dnipro. in support of the amphibious operation we have been discussing at length. In regards to the the overall state of the war, we started with a positive loop in terms of attention, foreign assistance, and morale in both Ukraine and Western capitals, that lasted about eighteen months. Now that feedback loop has mostly gone negative. So we have Western politicians pointing to declining Ukrainian morale and recruitment as a reason to send less aid, and that becomes one of the major factors driving Ukrainian morale and recruitment lower. The obvious way to break this doom loop is to pass the U.S. aid package and carefully coordinate it with a revised recruiting campaign by the Ukrainians. I suspect that there is no more effective way to recruit more Ukrainian recruits than announcing more Bradley equipped brigades are being stood up. If a couple of more A-50s were to have unpleasant experiences with long range drones, and the F-16s made their first public sorties at the same time maybe we can get this whole thing headed back in a positive direction.

They picked a great place to stop...

And it is going cost real money, real effort, and real admissions of what we did wrong to fix them.

I go back and forth on whether or not to do the drones thru the crew hatch. Clearly the fully automated setup you describe has many advantages, but parking them by the gunners hatch puts them in the most protected part of the tank/IFV.

Russia has never offered anything but unconditional surrender.

With four spares as standard equipment, so they can just literally send the next one out the turret hatch at need. Edit: and fully automated target pass thru for engaging targets out of LOS. There have been a couple of tapes of Bradleys using improvised drone directed fire. It is a good trick to have.

One of the West's great weaknesses is that the total victory in WW2, followed by the Soviet collapse in 1990 has us a conviction that history is on our side. To whatever extent that has ben the case for the last hundred years it means absolutely nothing about how the next hundred will work out. This It truly does, and we simply are not taking it seriously enough. We are two years behind on practically everything in regard to stepping up munitions production. Ukraine today had a great segment about this yesterday, whatever Russias flaws, and they are immense, they did start tooling up for a real war two years ago. "At some point the benefits of compounding interest kick in". There have been at least two cases that have gotten meaningful coverage. One of them was in Avdiivka a few weeks ago, i can't remember the details of the other one. I think on a lot of the front no mans land it effectively to wide to tunnel under. this is doubly true as FPV drones make the first 5km or more behind the lines a no go zone for heavy equipment. If we let Ukraine fall U.S. credibility will simply be gone. The response will be some combination of countries trying to make the best deal they can with Russia and China, and Iran, or absolutely frantic nuclear weapons programs in the attempt to avoid the first choice. I am going to go out on a short thick limb and state that this will amount to a wrong turn for civilization that will take at least a century to fix, and perhaps much longer.

ISW bullet points for Feb 29

The best episode of Ukraine Today in weeks.

Putins little SMO is going so well he is back to rattling his magical nuclear stick. Link is to a FT.com archive site that should work.

ISW has. a ton of details and analysis of the situation in Moldova. the short version is that that the Kremlin is making as. much trouble as it possibly can considering it has no way get more military forces there. Whether or not the ~battalion that has been rotting there. for decades has any meaningful capability seems rather doubtful. They also detail various small gains the Russians may or may not have made up and down the L/DPR front. Small is the operative word, but they aren't quitting

One of the fundamental changes the war has brought is that real money is being spent in the hinterland for the first time in many decades. Before Feb 2022 the Russian states only purpose was to take every single kopeck more than required to stave off starvation from most of Russia and and send it to Moscow for the benefit of the Czar and his courtiers. Most of those courtiers probably wished the provincials would drink themselves to death faster, so even more could be extracted. The war has fundamentally changed this money flow around, now military recruits from the provinces are the most important resource in the realm, along with whatever Soviet military production capacity hadn't been sold off for scrap. Unfortunately it simply hasn't had time to sink in that perhaps as many as half of these recruits are probably coming back in pieces or not at all. So at the moment the Russian hinterland regards the war as the best thing that has happened to them in forever. The very large question is what happens when the the Czar can't keep recruiting by showering money on desperate lower class men, and has to start press ganging them the old fashioned way.

Ukraine needs to keep lobbing every drone they have at the refineries. If they hurt Russias refining capacity badly enough that Putin has to start IMPORTING refined products, or telling parts of the country to relearn how to drive a donkey cart we are in whole different war.

These guys are doing their job as well as iit can be done. But the thing that always blows my mind is the fact that everyone of those bullets is going to land somewhere. That the risk associated with that are acceptable is just the clearest possible indication of the difference between a real war and anything else. Edit: The fact these guys were almost directly under the drones path indicates how good the Ukrainian system for tracking drones and employing their AD assets is. That wasn't blind luck.

It is interesting to get a look at at what the state of the art is in drones, as opposed to what is in mass production. This is the kind of drone tech that could finish of manned helicopters among other things. Use a Baba Yaga drone deploy a line of them at the maximum possible depth behind enemy lines with an acoustic sensor that is tuned to rotor blades. When it hears the appropriate noise it comes out to say hello at maximum speed.

This is the kind of data that shows the grinding down of the the whole Russian system.

In addition to poverty that is beyond mere destitution I suspect most of these guys are basically illiterate. What little coverage is on the radio in Hindi and other Indian languages about the war probably has only a passing familiarity with the truth, if that. The hardest thing for me about analyzing U.S. politics is making myself that this many people can be this stupid. My brain rejects this at some fundamental level, and I have to compensate for it constantly. The thing about Krnky is that it is better for the Ukrainians than you think, Because the terrain on the right/Ukrainian held bank is about 200 feet higher the than the left/Russian held side. That is in addition to the very constricted approach lanes someone else mentioned. So Ukrainian troops in Krynky benefit from a lot more fire support from the other side of the river than you might think, alot more actually which is why they are still there.

This might be one of the reasons for the Ukrainian command shuffle. This happening on the home front to some extent, or Putin would go ahead and call another round of mobilization, but I don't think it is what we are seeing at the front. At the front I think we are seeing a military caste system develop/expand as the war grinds on. Experienced units, and those with political connections function as barrier troops. New meat is beaten, robbed, and intimidated properly before it sent to man forward positions in absolute misery. Between this process becoming ever more obvious, and the horror of forward trenches in winter, desertions are rising. The big question, as it has always been, is can this cascade to large scale surrenders?

And we REALLY appreciate it! And it utterly ceased to be viable after Russias first mobilization. Denial is becoming cheap enough for even third tier powers to afford it.

ISW has a nice executive summary of the whole war if anybody is looking for one to hand out to people paying less attention.