dan/california

I am NOT a Boris Johnson fan, SO NOT a Boris Johnson fan. But credit must be given where credit is due. I am strongly of the opinion that the very large number of NLAWs that Britain shipped in the week or so before hostilities commenced had large effect on the outcome of this war so far. It gave the Ukrainians the critical mass of ATGMs to stop the Russians' attempt at a blind tank rush. The Russians have basically been searching desperately for a plan ever since. And Johnson has been 100% on additional support ever since. Johnson has certainly not been very good on Ukrainian refugees, but It isn't like the U.S. has been great either, and Biden was not previously locked into an extremely anti immigrant stance . In fact I need to write my congressman another nastygram on the subject. 

Please can we get more likes? pretty please?

Now this is a veteran unit with the kinks worked out, and having seen what Russia did north of Kyiv, these guys are long weekend of rest away from showing up in the Donbas with DEEP conviction that the only good Russian is a $&$&$%%*** Russian. 
Another quick number on how hard it is to scale up production in a hurry in the modern world. Higher grade semiconductors spend four months in actual fabrication. That is after you have grown and sliced the silicon to grow them on. Both of those activities are their own ultra specialist industries. So in the unlikely event the Chinese have prepared wafers sitting around,  it would be four months before the first chip came out the other end of the FAB to be incorporated in a tank, or a missile. Furthermore there are essentially no surplus wafers or FAB capacity anywhere on planet earth, they have still not caught up with the supply chain issues and demand shock from the pandemic. So for any significant capacity to be diverted to the Russian military XI would have to force a Chinese manufacturer to abrogate an existing contract. This isn't impossible, but it isn't trivial either. Doubly so since the U.S. would hammer any Chinese manufacturer that got caught building stuff for Russia with secondary sanctions that would make it impossible for them to ever buy anymore semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
 
Ok, it was long number....

Please can we get more likes? pretty please?

Now this is a veteran unit with the kinks worked out, and having seen what Russia did north of Kyiv, these guys are long weekend of rest away from showing up in the Donbas with DEEP conviction that the only good Russian is a $&$&$%%*** Russian. 
Another quick number on how hard it is to scale up production in a hurry in the modern world. Higher grade semiconductors spend four months in actual fabrication. That is after you have grown and sliced the silicon to grow them on. Both of those activities are their own ultra specialist industries. So in the unlikely event the Chinese have prepared wafers sitting around,  it would be four months before the first chip came out the other end of the FAB to be incorporated in a tank, or a missile. Furthermore there are essentially no surplus wafers or FAB capacity anywhere on planet earth, they have still not caught up with the supply chain issues and demand shock from the pandemic. So for any significant capacity to be diverted to the Russian military XI would have to force a Chinese manufacturer to abrogate an existing contract. This isn't impossible, but it isn't trivial either. Doubly so since the U.S. would hammer any Chinese manufacturer that got caught building stuff for Russia with secondary sanctions that would make it impossible for them to ever buy anymore semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
 
Ok, it was long number....

Well, I finally got put in twitter time out for what I said about this.
I honestly think I wan't being harsh ENOUGH! 

Re the Bushmasters coming from AU - I think 3 left yesterday, total of 20 to be sent. Two will be field ambulance config.

Well, I finally got put in twitter time out for what I said about this.
I honestly think I wan't being harsh ENOUGH! 

Torture chambers.  Mass rape.  Genocide.  Threatening their neighbors.  More and more I have to admit this old sailor from the cold war is coming around to the fact that maybe we need to call Ivan's bluff and enter this.  I know it means world war and further the threat of Nuclear war.  I lived through that era and spent 5 years on an aircraft carrier preparing for it and am well versed that there are no winners in that.  But at some point the red line has to get crossed and the world has to say no more.  When the Soviet Union fell I had honestly hoped in the modern world we had seen all the evil that humans could preperatrate on one another, but the reports coming out of "occupied" Ukraine the last couple days have brought me to tears and filled me with so much anger I can hardly control myself.  If I was younger Id already be there doing something carrying the wounded and help the civilians (as I was no soldier) but god damn how much more can we see before we raise our fists?
There has to be more we can do.

Yea, and if you have to build a new fab from scratch it takes about 4 years until it starts producing stuff.
Intel made the decision to build a new fab in Magdeburg/Germany to cover the european market. Start of building the fab is 2023 and they are looking forward to have it ready for production in 2027. The invest in building the fab is about 17 Mrd. EUROs!
Milliarden-Investition: Intel baut Chipfabrik in Magdeburg | tagesschau.de
Intel set to build a new €17 billion chip manufacturing hub in Germany as it pours money into Europe | Euronews

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

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

All very fair points. My angle, to clarify, was more along the lines of the Come As You Are notes earlier...but my post veered off and your own points are perfectly valid in that context.
But ref the difficulty of making modern weapons in non-wartime economies, vs WW2 weapons in fully mobilized societies, there's no real equivalence, I feel.
Even so, I think a modern economy spun up to full wartime mobilization could produce modern gear at a crazy rate, far outstripping the WW2 pace.

Nope. Those are agricultural lands. So by doing this they try to prevent Ukrainians to be able to sow anything. Whether Melitopol will be liberated or not.
Artificial famines are russian classic.

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
 

russians fully retreated from Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy, effectively losing 1/3 of what they gained in slightly more than a month.
Can you name me a single war of theirs in the past 30 years where russians ever gave up anything they captured?
Those losses do hurt.

Russia is more clued up now and using more co ordinated drone strikes over last two weeks apparently 
Bit late lol
Overall  link Talks about Russian Air capability vs taking out mobile Sam's with anti radiation missiles
Difficult for any country apparently 
Nato countries not doing much of this training if any so war is showing difficulties attacking layered mobile air defence - mobile Sam sites
Very detailed talk 
Gives greater clarity on Russian failure

The West might have seen it as cutting its losses in week 1. But at this point, I think most -- ex Germany -- are quite happy to see Russia get its nasty arse handed to it piece by piece and are in no particular hurry to see that stop, barring a reversal.

I was actually thinking about this a few days ago when all the atrocities were coming out. I believe it was something like "I wonder what the Ukrainian Mossad will be called?".

1 You can't make modern weapons from Church bells.
2 Russia has lost plenty of wars.  This Napoleon/Hitler view is hardly the only story of Russian wars.. and in both those Russia got enormous aid from its allies.  China isn't so forthcoming.
You think Russia is stubborn?  I think Ukraine is teaching them a whole other lesson in stubborn.

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. 

I just saw report that UA had advanced SE of kharkiv along the M03 taking Malynivka.  If they can continue to advance on this axis then RU northern 'offensive' via Izyum area would be cut off.  That would be really funny -- if before the russians can even get going they are cut and scrambling backwards. 
This would be just like the Russians so far in this war.  Advance too far w/o protecting their LOCs, like they did east of Kyiv w those tendrils that looked so menacing at first, then just started to disappear.

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.

Do we think there is any chance at all that the US will move into Ukraine by itself  ?  I mean the scale of the atrocities being carried out  ... we can't just continue to sit on the sidelines arming the Ukrainians can we ?

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.