dan/california

If this has any bearing on reality? Either the Russians find a couple of new semi-competent brigades to plug this hole with, or they are going to get flanked right out of Bakmuht.

Everyone feels that way about their own country's politics. At least Musk and Zuckerberg are doing their part to revive the practice.

Spent too much of my morning thinking about this, and I think the best two examples of how little the body count matters to the long term effects are The Russo Japanese war of 1905, and the Rwandan genocide/civil war. The casualties in the two are very approximately the same, somewhere in the mid to high hundred thousands. One of them has had had massive effects that have echoed through history to this very day. The other led to some rhetoric that hasn't amounted to much, and very little else. Not saying that is right, or just , or anything else. Just that one event has mattered a LOT more than the other one.

The task of course is to prevent it from becoming rather worse by Thursday.

I agree with all of this, but it leaves out the obvious and necessary next step. There needs to be a large scale effort to actively feed the Russians bad parts, and corrupted software. If a bunch of their CNC machines just suddenly decided to crash their tools heads catastrophically, or a bunch of there own cruise missiles turned around and headed for Moscow, it would materially damage the entire Russian war effort as vast effort would have to be expended to keep it from happening again.

Admiral Radikin having a chat as well, the Brits seem to be on a bit of a press tour.

They will be very disappointed by their new places, what with it being seven feet by three feet, and six feet deep. You always have read the fine print of the fine print in a Russian contract. You have to read it twice, carefully, and sober.

Remind me what not to buy, please.

I have a suggestion for how they can remedy their error...

I strongly suspect sharia with vodka is even worse than sharia without vodka. Text book example of a well planned and organized strike. Also you have you love it when the bad guys give you an extensive video BDA for free. This is actually a case study in how much deadlier FPV drones will be when they aren't being rigged up in someones garage with whatever random munitions are available. A warhead optimized to have some fragmentation effects behind the HEAT charge, and everybody in that van is KIA. Standard RPG7 HEAT just pokes a hole straight through something made out of sheet metal that light without producing much in the way of secondary effects.

Yeah, this is the thread rendered as policy, procurement, and planning. Now they just need to take the last step to eliminate "unhealthy tank lust" as The_Capt calls it, and send their entire tank fleet to Ukraine. Where it can be expended killing the army it was built to kill, instead of quietly rusting away. Combat_Infantryman, did you write this up and slip it into the appropriate pile, on the appropriate desk, at just the right time?

I have beer cold waiting for the Russians to admit it.

He should avoid windows, and street crossings, and.....

Pet issue request, when the new modern game comes out, can we get one version of this tank with 105 mm it actually has, and one version with a breach loading 120mm mortar? Because I think the mortar version makes a ton more sense, and I am sure someone will volunteer to show me how wrong I am. But I woud really like to test the theory.

The U.S. Army agrees with this strongly enough to be buying a new light tank. https://www.defensenews.com/news/your-army/2022/12/29/new-army-light-tank-under-construction/ Actual funded program, I think it is in at least low rate production. They basically put the Abrams fire control system in a half size package with a 105mm gun. Both of these videos are worth the time.

I agree with pretty much everything I quoted above. I just wanted to bring up the fact that the two most important technical questions going forward are the also the hardest to answer. The first question is how much communications bandwidth can you count on at various setbacks from the actual line of contact? And the second one, basically driven by how AI develops, is how much bandwidth do you need? Well, AI development and our willingness to use it. Different answers two these two questions produce radically different force structures. In particular, per Kimosbread's post, we may really need a certain number of humans at the leading edge, with all the effort it takes to keep them alive, or we may not need them at all. It all comes down to CAN the robots communicate, and do they HAVE to.

I don't think the Ukrainians are close to getting everything right. They are also understandably reluctant to just broadcast there problems on twitter, at least usually. The larger problem is that NATO has been way to standoffish about attaching observers to Ukrainian units. So WE are missing a lot of things we shouldn't be There was a long post about this a month ago. Put on twitter by Constantine. I just can't seem to get back to it in the time I have to look. The thing I recall very specifically is that all of a certain Ukrainian unit's training had been for offense/assault, and that this was huge problem when they had to go on the defensive. The other thing that has been brought numerous times is that drones are omnipresent on the Ukrainian battlefield, and that western training has not caught up with this fact. In particular learning how not to be spotted by drones is EXTREMELY important.

I think you read that far to generously, my take was that they get a week or two off every six months. As well as being signed up for the duration, regardless of what the initial paperwork said. My guess is that the next decree will also cut cut their pay by three quarters.

It took him a year and a half, but Friedman has seen the light.

Minefields, and the breaching of same, were a MAJOR element of El Alamein. That is probably the only battle in the North Africa campaign most people can name.

Do we think it was Putin? Or his own epic bad habits?

Drenched in copium, but he seems to be trying to get it across that things aren't great for the Russians.

Laughing this hard is dangerous...

Oh someone most definitely scheduled it, they just carefully did not inform Prig Please can we get this. I have to take a huge number of notes by hand, or on another device when playing artillery heavy scenarios Steve just brought this up as well, at least part of what probably happened is that the guys who were supposed to be the fourth iteration of the 72nd MRR either flatly refused. Or the remnants of the third iteration, and whatever passed for a command staff, were eliminated quickly enough, and throughly enough, that there was simply no remaining shell the next batch of mobiks could be shoved into.