dan/california

And the drones would leave with targeting data from satellites that would be no more than a day old. Decoys and tents and such would have to be maintained and move around to work. If one drone and ten got a helicopter it would be well worth it. Ukraine makes every reasonable effort to avoid hitting civilians, but they are also fighting like they are in an existential war, because they are. Low probability targeting accidents are are just one more risk. It is why they can frequently get artillery fire on high priority targets in five minutes. Things get double checked once not seven times.

This should be attached to everything based on a Russian milblogger's reporting.

The War translated thing is worth the time to read in full.

It is about a big piece of the foriegn policy blob, and the Russians of course, wanting to panic the West into settling. What we need to do is demonstrate we are on a short steep path to producing 250,000 rounds of 155 a month, and a great deal else besides. Let the Russian ponder there losses going to a thousand a day, every day, as Ukraines go to 25. They are about to forcibly conscript virtually every person in the Russian prison system who can walk a couple of laps of the prison yard. Ukraines answer needs to be "So what are you going to do in three months when they are all dead?" Edit: It will be very funny if the next batch of meat for the grinder is newly unemployed prison guards.

If I am looking at the map correctly Kupiansk has never been outside of Russian Artillery range. It is just that now that Russia is making a push in this area they are shelling the bleep out of it.

A completely different bit of the Russian Military industrial complex is on fire as well. Putin i just going to have to take the morale hit and ban smoking throughout the Russian armed forces.

Apologies if this is a double post, a very interesting article.

Could Ukraine be so lucky/good that this was the final assembly plant for Krasnopol laser guided 152?

Clearly an ammo plant/dump, the bottom video shows an artillery shell that landed just short of that Lada.

Quantity has a quality all it own, until that quantity stops fighting in mass, or figures out its real enemy is in Moscow. That is basically what happened in 1917. Is the Russian army at that point, at this very moment? Sadly no. If three hundred thousand more essentially untrained bodies are fed into the meat grinder, presumably with even worse officers than the last batch got, it could get there. I emphasize could, not will. Of course the right thing to to do would be to call up several hundred thousand, and train them until spring 2024. But that would require someone competent to be in charge, and the Russian economy not to melt between now and then. Remember that the last Russian mobilization resulted in two or three people fleeing the country for every one who actually got conscripted. Putin could close the borders of course, but that would notably increase the potential for discontent he has been worried about from the beginning. He may feel he has no choice. I would like to bring up two of the underlying assumptions in the strategy gradual attrition leading to a negotiated end to the war that seems to be the Western plan. This assumes that this attrition strategy is the lest likely to result in major instability in Russia, and it assumes the Russian regime is rational enough to quit when it realizes it can't win. The time for a well run autocracy to cut bait, declare victory and go home was May first 2022. Russia just keeps feeding the meat grinder instead. There is a real risk they will keep feeding it until the Russian state loses the capacity to keep itself assembled in more or less its current form. They have already flunked the smart autocracy test, we are now descending into the levels of regime self deception that led Ceausescu to give his standard 3 hour speech of BS to a crowd that was so angry they promptly hung him. There were enough guardrails around Romania, and no nukes, so that it didn't matter much. Does anybody think it would go that well in Russia?

This is exactly what needs to happen. Make it absolutely clear to the Russians that we are going to bury them if they don't quit, and make it clear to the Chinese that bill for trying to take Taiwan will be regime ending.

Too good to check.

They don't have one running plane or helicopter someone can break themselves jumping out of?

Karma for this one will be epic. Their best case scenario now is being run by a Wagner backed dictator that will squeeze the life out of the entire country to pay Wagner's invoices. From there the possibilities step down to various variations of ruinous civil war.

if a not particularly studious nineteen year old, from a part of Russia where hope has never been a thing, can suddenly make multiples of his family's income, some of them are going to volunteer. Not even the entire new section of the towns cemetery for war dead is going to penetrate the conviction that it will be different, for them. Edit: I felt for months now that one of the single worst things Russia has done for its own war effort is screwing up soldiers pay. When you signed up because the money was enough to really change your family's situation, and your wife is calling you at the front to say the fridge is empty and she can't pay the school fees......that is TRYING to lose the war. I mean they pay these guys in Rubles, why wouldn't they just print them if they had too? Of course this is excellent for Ukraine, so by all means I hope the vampire squid that run Russia keep stealing it all.

I realize this is probably the correct answer, but I am not sure it is the right question. I would argue, from a couch in Seattle so feel free to tell me I am full of it, that the right question is whether a northern front hurts Russia worse than Ukraine? Or not? To a first approximation the entire Russian army is strung out from Luhansk to Kherson with virtually nothing in reserve. The Belarusian army appears to barely deserve the name. So there is an argument, maybe not a good argument, but an argument, That Ukraine ought to take advantage of Russia mining most of the current front line into impassability, and go take Minsk. Declare Tsikhanouskaya the rightful president, and start setting up drone launchers within 300k of Moscow. Just a fun thought. At a minimum Ukraine should try to feint hard enough in this direction to give the Russian MOD one more problem. If it is just Lukashenko being annoying by demanding more Russian troops, that wouldn't be useless.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/08/ukraine-western-diplomacy/674920/ Really well said, i thought. The rest of the article is quite good as well.

Ukraines military medical system is infinitely better than Russia's, but also very much a work in progress. It also seems to be a place where some gentle coaching at the higher levels of command could really do some good. They have not fully incorporated the lessons of the last twenty years they could apply in their circumstances. Helicopter evac unfortunately is just not a thing in the Ukrainian environment. The title of the second article speaks for itself.

Clearly the fact the ERA really does work needs to be digested by vehicle designers going forward. Of course the other thing that is rather urgent is a real solution for lancet class drones. And if anybody in NATO thinks they have one it needs to get shoved to the Ukrainian front lines soonest.

I think you identified a big part of the immediate problem, the best Ukrainian English speakers are in much higher priority jobs than jeep driver. The way the International legion tries to minimize this problem may or may not be ideal, but as you said they have the near infinite bravery to BE there, and they deserve our utmost respect. The real problem on the forum is that the volume of publicly available information has gone way down, so we are over chewing what we do get. At least a few Russian mil-bloggers are still posting SOMETHING that isn't pablum. The real answer to the language problem in the long term is probably going to come from software. Indeed I would argue that the more or less automatic translation of online material has been a LARGE benefit to the Ukrainian cause, even if the current generation of stuff is to clunky to help much on the battlefield. In terms of military training, you are quite correct that the syllabus is rather overwhelming now. Software has some role to play here as well, though. language training apps have improved a great deal. I certainly wouldn't mandate that soldiers spend much of their free time using them. I would, though, consider moderately significant rewards of one sort or another if they learn enough to pass even the most basic of proficiency tests in in a language that has some chance of being militarily useful. That could be a bit extra in the pay packet, or have it be a formal positive consideration for promotion. It would be worth doing simply because like so many other things it is difficult to fix in a hurry.

Regardless of the exact lines on the map, the larger question is will Putin accept a Korean war type ending with an actual cease fire. He is trying to project that Russia can keep taking ~500 casualties a day forever to inflict a ~100 casualties on Ukraine. Now this may be pure propaganda on Putins part, that is 180,000 casualties a year, which is a LARGE number. The Russian military could fold next week, but the Vietnamese withstood those kind of numbers for a decade, as did both sides of the Iran Iraq war. Indeed Russia's position now most closely resembles Iraq after the initial stage of the Iran Iraq war. Russia like Saddam, has made some territorial gains, but utterly failed to to achieve the regime change and truly strategic victory that were the initial war aims. But the war continued for seven years until Saddam concluded his regime would fail if he kept fighting. We have to give Ukraine enough support to get Putin to that point rather more quickly. Indeed i would argue that there a lot of parallels between Russia today and Iraq in 1982 or so, an ugly regime that had spent decades justifying itself on the basis increasing prosperity has thrown that prosperity away on a very bad bet. It has now switched entirely to a blood and soil fascist narrative as it attempts to burn off its internal opposition and out group ethnicities by forcing them to bear the brunt of the war. To repeat, the question is how do you make it fail faster than Saddam did. My two cents, worth what you paid.

This is brutal, just more proof that brave men day every day we screw around more brave men die. This however, is excellent news, and brilliant bit of OSINT.

We have to stop this slow boiling nonsense and shatter the entire Russian army in Ukraine. Edit: after an argument with the FTs copyright protection i reposted it with the twitter link.

What was it you said a while back? No need to answer the South African governments calls and say no rudely, just route them straight to the Russian Foreign Ministry.

https://features.csis.org/preparing-the-US-industrial-base-to-deter-conflict-with-China/ We have to pour some concrete get serious about this folks.