womble

I'm not sure what your referring to, here. There were reports of lots of "worn out" PzH2000s at one point, but given the tempo of their operations at the time, that was hardly surprising, if solely from the point of view of barrel wear. Is there something else?

That's a bit like a WW2 "Portee" unit, a "2 pdr Universal carrier portee" on steroids. But what is it firing at? Elevation looks high, and it doesn't appear to be regulated sufficiently to be putting indirect fires in... Maybe just lettin' 'er rip for the cameras at that point; 100mm ammo probably isn't in short supply.

How about: Reparations Return of kidnapped citizens of Ukraine Reparations Prosecution of war criminals Reparations Probably some things I can't think of right now Reparations. No guarantee provided by Russia is worth the steam off a bear's night soil, so UKR won't be negotiating for that. For this, Zelensky is going to need the continued, probably long-term assistance of the rest of the world in keeping the economic, political and personal sanctions screwed tight, so that the "pips squeak". Since Moscow, St Pete and VGrad are completely off the table, For Ever, sanctions will have to be sufficient. Someone needs to teach the Russians some Game Theory, or at least the concept of the non-zero-sum game. It's the basis of whatever prosperity we can claim for the "rules based international order" having provided, however patchily distributed, and Russia looks like it should have a splendid starting position, with all its resources, if it could just get over the requirement of needing to screw some other guy to get ahead.

I suspect a very few of them might still be here, were it not for the generous vacation allowance that Steve and Elvis have dished their way...

Looks like I misunderstood what you meant about modular kit not needing much technical training. As I interpreted it, you wouldn't be sending the tanks back and forth to Poland, just the postulated FCS module. So I don't know where the German system draws the line between "pulling and replacing a part" (with an assumed couple of clips and a lever-secured data cable... "plug and play") and dealing with the whole vehicle, and what kind of work on the whole vehicle warrants the crew wielding the spanners, and which jobs require the withdrawal and replacement of the entire chassis.

This seems like an excellent reason to choose Leo over M1. Not just for the training requirement reductions, but because it makes keeping the fleet running easier, if all you need is a stream of reconditioned parts coming east and worn-out ones going west. Existing facilities [Edit:] in safe NATO territory [/edit] can do the actual repairs and you don't need to create repair depots up near the front. Sorting out that log train is its own headache, though. It's just a problem that can be dealt with in parallel using different resources to the actual fighting end of the system.

There have been a number of options discussed on this forum over the last 1900 pages. The last synopsis wasn't very long ago, but I guess it's probably quite a few pages, if you're new Basically, it boils down to killing enough Russians that the live ones get fed up and go home. Whether that's because the civilian population start to feel the pinch enough to do something about it, or the situation at the front becomes so untenable that the troops mutiny. So far, UKR has ejected RUS from more than half of the land that was grabbed in the first "surprise attack". NATO-provided munitions seem to have (helped out no end by Russian command incompetence) evened out the artillery battles, and nothing the Russians have tried has worked out as well as they might have hoped (to put it very mildly). Russia's ability to recover from the disasters and debacles that have befallen its armed forces is significantly constrained, and those constraints are only going to get tighter as sanctions bite. They couldn't have replaced the materiel losses that they've sustained, even if their economy was untouched; it took 40 years to accumulate what's been spaffed into the mud of Ukraine in the last almost-300 days, and all the prewar talk of "unique weapons" has turned out to be Armata-shaped smoke and mirrors. Russia will struggle to give all the next wave of mobiks assault rifles; they can't even give the current wave proper boots. If what UKR already have from NATO doesn't turn out to be enough, there are further capabilities that NATO can provide, given time and Will. Longer-ranged precision artillery; heavy armour; SotA airpower. Futher atrocities and intransigence can be met also with stronger sanctions and better enforcement of the existing measures. Russia's allies are deserting her and the messaging from the Kremlin is getting so divorced from reality that it really only has any traction at all with the mind-f***ed Russian populace (out of any demographic that actually matters). Even the pariah states that are helping are doing so only to stick an impudent digit up at "The West". And their capacity to assist is strictly limited. Or, at least, that's my limited understanding of the major points. I'm sure I've missed several somethings, but hopefully it's not too far from the general thrust of opinion for "ways and means".

Some say that before his brain was relocated into the jar, he could crack walnuts with his butt cheeks. Some say that viewing his code without sunglasses leads to permanent eyesight damage, due to its brilliance. We only know that he's "The brain in a jar!"

I was thinking this, too. How long can they keep their bombers flying and their missiles rolling off production lines once sanctions get tightened and the loopholes they're currently using are closed down? Hitler had 3 Army Groups and didn't manage it...

I don't think UKR has enough seapower to interdict the retreat of Russian forces from Crimea, so "same as Kherson". Timescales might expand: it's a larger area, and who knows how long it would take to exfil the forces there via Sevastopol. Or maybe we haven't seen the full distance UKR is prepared to go to get rid of Russians. Maybe the game would be worth the candle.

Just like Kherson? I get the impression that they just want to be left alone, for the most part. Though it probably depends on whether you include all the military settlers that have been planted since the Little Green Men took over. It might also be relevant to consider the wishes of those Ukrainians of whatever ethnic distinction who have been displaced since Putin took control. I'd imagine that the UKR leadership can find enough support among the various Crimean Constituencies to justify inflicting at least as much privation on the current civilian population in Crimea as they did at Kherson.

"Material" corruption, the diversion of hard resources and currency, I can see as being put in the "too hard" pile, to be dealt with in a long term (possibly pie in the sky, but still well-intentioned) future. I'm thinking of the "targeting decisions", for both aid and military action: what was it that kept the West doing things that pissed off everyone-but-the-Government's-Cronies? Why did they keep on "...oblig[ing] them through all sorts of military actions which actually alienated large swaths of the population..." as The_Capt puts it? Did we just not have the intel to realise we were being played, or was it just politically impossible to either refuse the regime's priorities? And if the latter, how come the fact of this couldn't be used to support earlier extrication from an untenable, unpopular, unprofitable (in any sense) situation? Is there any danger of this vicious circle arising in Ukraine? I get the sense that there isn't; Zelensky's regime isn't going to be turning HIMARS on different sectors of Ukraine's population in the same way that the Afghan regime used Western assets to settle scores and command dominance (like the crop burning example).

Can that be chalked up to an intel/information failure? How did the Western Powers fall for the Karzai regime's corrupt power games? Is there anything that can be learned from that mistake which can be applied to how we help Ukraine shed the Soviet/mafia mindset? Edit: And has that been learned, by the current Powers-That-Be?

Partly because China doesn't need Russia to do that (they've got their own strategic deterrent) so wouldn't offer Russia anything for them to officially put their neck on the line in such a way. Assuming there's enough of the Russian nuclear arsenal left under the Kremlin's control at the end of this for it to remain a credible threat anyway.

Interesting. Makes all their shipping legitimate military targets, since they're "reserve" troop transports...

I think he's using "epic" in the sense of "epic fail", since he's fully aware that he cannot ever become US president, having been born in South Africa. Strange duck he may be, but sarcasm isn't beyond his capabilities.

With HARM, there had to have been some very comprehensive technical training so that the UKR techs could integrate the systems with their Russian airframes' electronics and avionics suites, even before anyone got to train in actually delivering the ordnance. I'd imagine the same would be true of JDAM. That the US is prepared to lay these technical secrets out in enough detail for the UKR engineers to be able to design the adaptation is telling in and of itself.

Can anyone shed light on whether this is a likely eventuation? The H stands for high-speed, I gather; is that speed fast enough to make them difficult targets to prosecute over their (relatively, for missiles) short range? Is it likely that UKR flyers would be launching HARM within range of the Russian border, or across it? What sort of system shoots down Anti-radar missiles? Presumably not one that's using radar... Edit: or perhaps "shot down" is Russian optimism for "we pulled the fragments out of the wreckage of an S-400 complex..."

The beeb article suggested that the present might've been a grenade launcher. Maybe there was still one up the spout and the copper forgot his safe weapon handling training...

When we're collating reports on the relevance of armour (especially MBTs) it's perhaps important to recall that the RU and UKR experiences of using tanks differs rather starkly in this war. The UA might have a rosier picture of the usefulness of armour, since they're not facing the same organic AT systems (Stugna, Javelin, NLAW) or the ridiculously efficient PGM strikes of modern 155mm guided by the best battlefield sensor suite ever deployed. The UA is facing an enemy that's much closer in capability to the kind of foe they were "designed" to fight. It's also worth bearing in mind that the Russian experience early in the war was very much skewed by the political/strategic considerations that their planners had taken into account which simply didn't materialise. Much of the Russian loss seems to have been caused at root by the assumption that serious fighting wouldn't take place, and that moving under-screened columns down readily-identifiable lines of advance wouldn't be a problem, amongst a hundred other mistaken assessments (most of which would have had to be correct in order for Putin's initial plan to bear fruit) and systematic failings.

Okay. You're failing in consistency here. You said that Olaf is pandering to the "all arms exports are bad" lobby by refusing Rheinmetall the export permit for the Marders, yet they've all the permits they need to export anywhere else other than Ukraine; they must have to be "doing quite well", because Germany certainly isn't buying lots of weapons off 'em for their own use. This leads me to believe that you're mistaken about the Chancellor's motives. He's being selective about to whom amongst Germany's putative allies and partners Rheinmetall can export, and Ukraine's not on the list for some reason. The balance sheet of Rheinmetall, and the percentage of the exports isn't relevant to "Why not Ukraine?" I've elided the tanks because that's a different question. And "why Marders" isn't a question that's relevant to why Sholz won't let UKR buy stuff on the open market, either, which is why I left it aside in my original post. But since you brought it up: Marders are at least as useful to the UKR AF as M113, if not more so. Everyone on the UKR list of friends, and UKR themselves seems happy that they have a few score (or is it up to a few hundred now?) Gavins. A few score Marders won't win the war, but would likely to save more than a few UKR troopers' lives. And the UKR have offered to pay market price for them, so it's not even like it's "more military aid", not that RUS propagandists would bother with such factual distinctions, but hey-ho. It's literally no skin off Germany's nose, indeed it's a financial plus (small in the GDP scheme of things, but so's any order Rheinmetall will fulfil in the next 12 months) and it's not up to the German Chancellor to question a customer's purchasing choices anyway.

So what's the point of Rheinmetall then? Germany barely has an army, and if they're not allowed to sell out-country, they've no market at all. And I wasn't talking about modern heavy tanks, I was talking about first-generation (bis) IFVs. BMP-2-ish?

Wasn't my assertion. Was the assertion of an expert. And she wasn't saying they couldn't be launched. Nuclear warheads take maintenance to remain in a detonatable state. Expensive maintenance. Sure, if Ukraine was planning on launching all the warheads before the first maintenance cycle passed, they'd have an operable deterrent. Past that? Not so much. Back in the 90s the money simply wasn't there to achieve that. Maybe they could hack some things. Maybe they couldn't. Maybe failing the first couple of times would render the warhead inert and require complete remanufacture. The fact remains that if they could have practically retained and maintained even a reduced nuclear deterrent, they absolutely would have. And probably joined the other non-permanent UNSC nuclear powers in demanding a permanent seat.

Or get guarantees rather than assurances. Like NATO partners have. It's not 100%, but what is, in the world of international relations? Given the efforts expended for a nation that has "assurances", I'm more encouraged now to believe that Western powers actually consider "guarantees" to be as binding as they're meant to be. It's probably necessary for the maintenance of the structures that have improved material well-being across the world since WW2.

Still takes money to maintain the airframes and the warheads, and they had to get round the safety interlocks the Russians had the keys for. The SS-18 is/was a bus, not a bomb. Ukraine had better things to spend their limited money on at the time. Don't you think they'd've hung onto them if they thought they could get a better deal with than without them?