dan/california

source?

This concludes my twitter crawl for the day.

Dmitri is on it today, and the The U,S. should have started shipping cluster munitions a year ago. We ought to start shipping M26 rockets TODAY. The deletion of a few grid squares is exactly what Ukraine needs to move the offensive along.

Ukrainian counter battery advantage is just grinding the Russian artillery out of existence.

Whereas Russian morale...they don't have any.

Doesn't get more hardcore than that...

here has been a fair amount of evidence from this war that senior Russian flight officers fly MORE than their juniors, simply because the juniors have never gotten the flight hours to be competent. Like this guy, he is a fat forty odd if he is a day, and the Russians had him flying combat missions until his number came up. My read is that they do this because once upon a time he went through a real training program that Russia is to broke, corrupt, and incompetent to run any more. In the U.S. a guy like this would naturally rotate out to some sort flight instructor position, probably as a contractor with that waist line. But that is because we HAVE real training programs.

What are the chances this ISN'T Wagner/Russian backed move? We need to start hunting Wagner in Africa the same way hunt Al Queda/Islamic state.

All three days of it, if they were lucky? The disappearing officers, the bad food? Russia has violated every Western tenet of how to build high unit cohesion. The only reason the Russian Army is still in the field is that they have been conditioned since birth to think life is awful, and will probably get worse. To my amazement, and I suspect a great many other peoples, this does produce an army with some minimal level of functionality. The key word though is minimal, when these units are pushed past there very low ability limits they just melt. And the problem gets worse every day. Both armies may be declining in manpower quality as the pre war forces are attrited, but the problem is far worse for the Russians, and has been since they got the cream of their pre war "professional" army slaughtered around Kyiv due to the worst plan in military history. And the Russian state and army is still being run by the people who made that plan. Indeed they seem to be purging the competent ones as political threats.

The reason the fighting in the south is so much harder than the fighting around Bakmuht is the mines. The Russians have laid a stupefying quantity of them, but not an infinite amount. Once the Ukrainians get past the primary mine belts this thing is going to move along. Also the 155 cluster munitions just got there. Now fI ully agree with the next thing you are going to say, they should have been there a year ago. But whether it is effectiveness, or just having enough ammo, the Russians are starting to SUFFER. Unlike the Ukrainians they have no idea why they are there, that will tell in the end.

Also a relatively small force of KA-52s is experiencing ongoing attrition, and and most of the direct combat losses seem to kill the pilots, too. That is why a full bird Colonel was flying a front line mission, there wasn't anybody half that competent left to send. Russia really is on the verge of a situation where it could run out nearly everything on some important piece of the line. And if Ukraine breaks out of the mine belts it will be hard to stop them.

The answer sadly is that if only ten percent of them work, that it is probably enough.

I have always thought the real military potential of Combat Mission was to teach people not to make mistakes exactly like , well, this one. Almost everyone who plays the game has tried to rush a prepared position and gotten wrecked. They really ought to give a copy of CMBS to every 90 day wonder Ukraine commissions. Are they even getting 90 days?

I look forward to their sudden keen interest in prison reform. Hopefully they will have years to study the problem from the inside.

https://twitter.com/markito0171/status/1684794089659625472 Says 60 out of 500 man battalion left alive.

Russian and Ukrainian aren't enough? We have to add french to mix, just ti finish melting my brain? Bleep me that sucks, it has a real charge of the light brigade vibe. It is also more proof of the most fundamental tenet if modern warfare, mistakes are BAD.

was for another thread

LOOK INSIDE Share Also Available: The Origins of Victory How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers by Andrew F. Krepinevich https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300234091/the-origins-of-victory/ See if this comes up any better

Long and very good article about Putin's situation relative to the war. Writer is a Romanian with goverment experience and connections.

We can check back on Putin's position in a month. Ukraine will either have made major gains in the south or not. That leads to two very different situations in Moscow.

If Ukrainians start moving forward right after the cluster munitions show up, whether it is due to volume of fire or effectiveness, the decision to withhold them for more than a year is going to look even worse. Edit: it will mean the ban on them gets rather shaky, too.

So there are approximately fifty miles/85kms between Ukraine's two primary pushes. How deep do they have to get before all the Russians in between have to bug out or risk being caught in a huge pocket, with either very limited seaborne supplies, or none at all depending on how Ukraines exploitation works out?

Someone is headed straight for the worst trench in the whole war...