dan/california

Mechanize the person for ranging in kilometers, not metres, and you don't need MBT's or IFV's.
Space Lobsters come to mind. 

The complete destruction of Russia's military reputation probably figures in somewhere.  The entire Russian mid and higher echelon has spent the their entire careers being feared and respected, now they are just despised as incompetent child murderers.  They will never get to go on vacation outside of Russia again either.

i almost hope he gets off the ventilator alive just so he find out how well it worked out, ALMOST.

British MOD coming around to fact the Russians are NOT winning, or even tying really.
 

The complete destruction of Russia's military reputation probably figures in somewhere.  The entire Russian mid and higher echelon has spent the their entire careers being feared and respected, now they are just despised as incompetent child murderers.  They will never get to go on vacation outside of Russia again either.

The complete destruction of Russia's military reputation probably figures in somewhere.  The entire Russian mid and higher echelon has spent the their entire careers being feared and respected, now they are just despised as incompetent child murderers.  They will never get to go on vacation outside of Russia again either.

I am sure the Ukrainians only asked for 4 or 5 C5s of very special toys.

Just to reiterate, a maximum effort to tip Belarus into open revolt is the easiest, cleanest way to win this war. The Russian logistics just evaporate.

And they need to shoot down that plane. Lukashenko has a bill to pay, I would hate to see him skip town and miss his date with a lamp post.

They are probably pushing them way forward in attempt to limit the damage drones and or signals intercepts are doing. Forward is not a safe place around the UKR army. And the Russians are really stung out in lots of places. The pincers around Kyiv have at most one and a half safe sides. There is a lot o forward out there .

Garbage in, garbage out, it is the oldest rule in coding.

Bleep me, he called it chapter and verse!

If we don’t blow ourselves up soon then the future is going to usher in some wild advances, quantum computation is one. AI is another and crazy stuff like Elon Musks experiment with implanting micro chips onto human brains.
Science fiction becoming science fact…I’m old enough to to remember watching Star Trek and saying those communicators are cool. We now have them- it called the smart phone.
When I bought my first board war game I thought-it would be cool if this could be done on a computer…
On another note there seems to be a mad rush to monetize this war on social media. People who never had an interest in the military or war are now experts…
There was an earlier post about the experts and their predictions before the war and how they’ve been wrong and why do we listen to them…
IMO it’s about getting your name out there and name recognition. Doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong. If you’re name is known you’ll get invitations to speak at events and monetize your expertise.
Also the defense companies and probably their stocks are going to be quite profitable. Countries are going to spend more on defense and the supply of weapons will need to be replenished.
Also fertilizers will become more expensive and scarce and the wheat shortage not only means more expensive food but starvation in many parts of the world potentially leading to more wars and unrest.
The US military may be very busy for the foreseeable future.

That is only because CM has not evolved an operational layer yet.

Until verified, or repeated as pattern, I would hold off. Humans around maneuvering vehicles easily leads to squishy events.
Even friendly Infantry are nicknamed crunchies by armor folks for a reason...
Id LOVE it to be true - soldiers fragging officers is a really bad (good?) sign.

And they need to shoot down that plane. Lukashenko has a bill to pay, I would hate to see him skip town and miss his date with a lamp post.

Just to reiterate, a maximum effort to tip Belarus into open revolt is the easiest, cleanest way to win this war. The Russian logistics just evaporate.

Whatever victory parade Ukraine holds in Kiev MUST included a company of tractors pulling captured RUS vehicles.
It would tie in perfectly into the whole humour/mocking aspect of Ukrainian resistance, which has been deeply inspiring.

So this was from this board on 26 Feb:
"Overall Summary:  As of the first 72 hours of the war, it appears that the Russian military has overestimated its own capabilities and/or the capabilities of Ukrainian resistance and has not likely met the timelines it had set during pre-war planning.  The assessment is that the next 24-48 hours will be critical in the outcome of this war and if Russian forces are not about to take Kyiv and inflict some serious damage to the Ukrainian people's will, their own strategic center of gravity will become more vulnerable. "
That was 2 days into the entire thing.
Since then we have heard a lot of pundits and retired military folks try and wrestle with this whole thing.  I am not surprised formal DOD, MOD assessments are showing what they are to be honest because pretty much from the start of the this war just about everyone has been using macro-quantitative calculus to try and predict/model what has been going on. 
On a CNN video just a few days ago Gen Petraeus was describing the situation in Mariupol and why it matters.   He did a pretty good job describing the drive for a "land-bridge" between Crimea and the Donbas and why the Russians are trying so hard in this area.  Then he slipped right into the old macro-quantitative thinking.  He outlined how once Mariupol was taken it would free up Russian forces to advance north and cut off great swaths of Ukrainian in the East.  I have seen various predictions of Russian "pincer moves" and the like.  This all makes perfect sense if one is applying conventional warfare metrics, all largely based on macro-quantitative calculus of force sizes/ratios and combat power.
What they are missing, and frankly it is not surprising to see it emerge on a wargaming board, is a view through a lens of micro-qualitative calculus; playing CM, in all its versions, has changed the way we see warfare.   All CM veterans see the signs of something different at a micro-level: abandoned vehicles, loss of high value assets, loss of high level commanders, videos of embarrassing Russian cluster-f#cks and evidence of UA successes just about everywhere.  A lot of these metrics are qualitative and when combined with the macro-quantitative they create a very different picture. 
Social media has allowed us to see a macro - micro-qualitative view as well; we can basically upscale our micro-view through very wide sampling.  By doing this, a lot of us have noted that the texture of this war is looking very different.  It is one, for the Russians, of extreme friction caused by the UA approach.  The Russians are fighting in an operational tar pit, the entire battlespace is sticky for them.  Some of this is by their own shortfalls, while in many places it is by design by the defending forces. I do not know who the military master-mind is on the Ukrainian side but he has clearly been reading about Finland, Giap and the Comanches.  The UA has not only stopped the Russian military, they changed the fabric of the battlespace for them.
This thing is not over yet and will likely continue to evolve.  I am not entirely onboard with the Russian collapse scenario, but we are literally a couple key indicators away.

Well if you really insist.....
In a fun mirror to your 'bistro' story, according to legend when General Pavel Stroganov and the Russian Army occupied Paris in 1814, he wanted to get some of his home cooked food. He was used to this kind of beef braised in cream with a hearty brown sauce. He showed several local cooks how it was made, who then, after he left, Franocfied the dish by adding sour cream and other goodies. We know the dish today by its Anglicized spelling, Beef Stroganoff. One of my favorites. 
I would have loved to be a culinary historian instead of a military one. But I figured it was hard enough to get people to pay me to go around working on something important, I'd never get paid to go around eating pizza. 

Well, the French bistro is derived from the Russian for 'hurry up!' (aka 'schnell!') which the Russians occupying Paris after Napoleon used to shout at the waiters....
Basically, the world's first 'fast food'.
And until our dear comrade @BeondTheGrave shows up to ruin a fun story yet again with dull as dishwater historical literalism 😉, here is my muse Kamil Galeev's twitternote on that same episode:
 
...I'll finish with a little known fact. Borodino Battle near Moscow was the single bloodiest day of the Napoleonic wars. Russian soldiers stood all day beating off one French attack after another. They lost 39000 men, but didn't run away being gunned, shelled and charged by cavalry
You know where Russian army lost more men than at Borodino? In France. After Russian army occupied France, soldiers realised that this is a far richer nation. And after Napoleonic wars it has few men in countryside. So you can easily find a girl wit HER. OWN. PLOT. OF. LAND. 
In a rich country with few adult males who now how to farm their positions on sexual and economic market were great, far better than they could ever be in Russia. Bonus point, the country had no passport system, so you could just disappear and it would be hard to find you 
And the army started disintegrating. It probably lost around 45 000 men due to desertion, much more than at Borodino. Tsar Alexander was very upset and asked king Louis if he could find them. Louis said sorry no - and Alexander marched out with remaining forces out of France asap 
The same soldiers who stood to death against Napoleon when they had no way out, deserted in huge numbers the moment they saw they way out and advantageous perspectives after. So they voted by legs, ending Russian occupation of France quicker than planned 
This should be taken into account when planning modern policies. If you want to influence people, you should give them salt. And you give it to those who *really* need the salt you have. Napoleon deluded himself he has salt Alexander needs, but he couldn't offer him anything.
YMMV.

The thing that doesn't get enough press is how little faith we had in the Ukrainian Government before the war. It was just assumed that it was completely undermined by Russian operatives. This is now 100% proven not to be the case. The difference this makes is hard to overstate. If we had had this much faith in the Ukrainian Government six weeks ago we would have done a LOT of things differently.

Machor,

The  missile sponge aspect is the least of the impacts. For starters, RuAF pilots get very little flying time, and their know-how toolkit is extremely limited in terms of what they can do. Free hunt is by far their worst historically in terms of fighter ops. It is, after all, the antithesis of rigid GCI (and these says, maybe MAINSTAY AWACS) control. Consequently, this requires the best and most experienced crews to fly the missions. These, of course, are the senior officers. Noticed how many of these guys are on the running dead and captured list? Not an accident!  These guys are already run ragged and now have a whole new unforeseen problem and a very angry customer screaming for relief from it. And. when people are tired and stressed, the already fundamentally dangerous act of flying a high performance aircraft becomes far more that way. This leads to crashes on the one hand and avoidable downings on the other.

Today's SAMs are not the SA-2s of yore and demand more more in terms of reaction time, proper CM selection and radical evasive maneuvers. Thus, the planes being flown by the best RuAF has in any unit fighting the TBs are not well postured to deal with UKR SAMs or even AAA, given how low the TB2s fly. 

But there's much more to cover.The Su-35 is, by Russian standards, an extremely sophisticated and complex bird, on par, say, with the US F-14A, at best, the F-14D. This is based on F-14 type (stolen) TWS radar, long range AAMs, etc. As of the late 1970s, the readiness rate of the F-14A was a mere 60%, a situation so dire that, in order to conduct strike ops, the US Navy had to rotate assignments between two carriers in the same battle group, with one doing nothing but strike, the other strike escorts and various CAPs. Yes, it was that bad! 

But remember, the RuAF squadron is 12 planes, not the 24 in the US Navy and Air Force, so there's far less resilience to any number of problems, including possibilities of cannibalization to keep planes flying. In turn, an entire aviation regiment of this type is 24 planes, one US squadron equivalent. The maintenance specialists are at regiment, not squadron level. And if an all-out effort to find and kill TB2s is the regimental combat assignment, that's where all the scarce resources and skilled people will be focused, sidelining most of the regiment as a result. In some ways, the Su-35 is even more complicated than even the F-14D, because it has thrust vectoring nozzles. All in all, the logistics and maintenance situation for an Su-35 unit is super demanding in peacetime and perdition defined in war. High tech is simply not the Russian strong suit, and there's much competition for technically qualified staff to keep high complexity, high leverage equipment operational. Those TOPOL-M COs, for. example.

Do you believe the RuAF is immune to the same systemic influences that have tires failing wholesale in the ground units? Do you believe that the Russian spare part situation is better than what the US has? Do you believe their supply chain is more efficient than ours? What is the RuAF fuel situation and near term forecast? How deep is the RuAF Su-35 level flight crew bench? What are the MTBFs for their FCS, engines, fly-by-wire, other avionics, etc.? 

All in all, it seems to me that Ukraine should do anything and everything to flood the sky with drones of every sort and cause the best RuAF units to wear themselves right out of the sky--in combat, in crashes by mechanical or electronic failures, exhaustion of flight crews, landing and takeoff accidents, not to cumulative wear and tear on systems and subsystems with far shorter service lives than, say, US aircraft of the same type. How well do unexpended missiles handle repeated takeoff and landing cycles? Crew burnout requires weeks of rest, might I add, to fix. The Soviets learned this the hard way in North Korea. But it's not just the aircrews that get exhausted, but the crew chiefs, techs, planners, tower personnel and more, with the resulting loss of efficiency, attention to detail, decision making and. more. The best pilots in the world can't fly if their crew chiefs and underlings can't function.

Regards,

John Kettler


 

The Lukashenko's army doesn't have any underpinnings, they haven't bought a new piece of equipment since 1989.  I doubt their maintenance practices are much better than the Russians either. To the extent the have done, or been trained for anything it was as backup riot police. They don't like Lukashenko because he let the Russians in and made them second class citizens, among many other reasons. If they make make it over the border, which I would not by any means guarantee, I predict the biggest problem they cause the Ukrainians is having to build a bunch of POW camps, and then keeping them from sneaking into Poland.
Since it would be an unambiguous act of war it would also let the Ukrainian special forces go after the road and rail network in Belarus like they mean it. It manages the considerable feat of being a worse idea than the rest of this so called campaign. 

They can't count it fast enough. 12 pieces of heavy artillery, just for starters. You have to lose 500 men to lose this much equipment don't you? Either from actual casualties or desertion?