womble
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Posts
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Joined
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Days Won
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Everything posted by womble
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Someone mentioned in passing upthread that the theatre commander has been removed. Is that Aleksandr Dvornikov, the guy that "took over" after the pullback from Kyiv? Cos my Google-fu can't find any reference to such a change in command structure... It'd be a Big Thing, I reckon, if that butcher was gotten rid of.
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Jack In The Box Effect - Russian Tanks
womble replied to CanuckGamer's topic in Combat Mission Cold War
Are we seeing more turret-launches because of the way the ammo is laid out to minimise hits into storage from the side, but many of the hits on tanks in the Ukraine have been from top-attack munitions which "see" a much bigger slice of the propellant pie...? -
The beeb reported this, so it might not be just rumour.
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Ever heard the saying "Two wrongs don't make a right"? You said: "But nobody will object that they had every right to do this in german territory as retaliation ." Which is categorically untrue. Lots of people object that they had this right for "retaliatory" purposes. It doesn't matter what living under the Nazi boot was like. They did not have that right. Now, that doesn't mean it's impossible to understand why they felt great rage. Understanding their state of mind isn't the same as condoning their behaviour, though.
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Which wouldn't even work if they had the resources to produce all those tubes and the manpower to throw at the problem. Ukraine seem to be providing some pretty solid evidence that "massive artillery" isn't enough in the modern battlespace. What use is an overwhelming number of tubes if they can be hunted down and killed by UAV-guided counterbattery missions? Missions fired by weapons that outrange the RU systems and are more precise and more agile. While 140M people might be able to turn up quite a few warm bodies able to struggle across rough terrain in the face of determined opposition, what are the Russians going to equip them with? Again, an AK and a tin hat isn't going to cut it in the modern battlespace. They need comms gear and battlefield intel equipment that Russia simply doesn't have the tech base to produce out of their domestic supply. While the sanctions hold, they're boned in that department. At some point the reality will catch up with the Russian mood. In '89, they celebrated the demise of the Commissars who'd been oppressing them for 60 years, and missed the chance to take hold of their own futures. If they miss the next chance, they won't have any futures to take hold of, since they'll be "pumping gas for China". What Russia "believes" doesn't change the facts on the ground: they can stop, or they can drive themselves into the ground until they're so mired they can't carry on. Bit like a T-72 in the good black earth of Ukraine.
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You may be right. Does alcohol have a calming effect on someone who's huffing angel dust while dropping LSD?
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An MRSI mission is going to be the fastest mission for "that number of rounds", from first shell lofted to last, so will (if it's "enough") mean the time till you can scoot-after-shoot will be the least, which is a Good Thing in a hostile space... I get the feeling that a system that's good at MRSI is going to be good at all the other agility factors, too. In, of course, the right hands. Certainly, given the cooldown time after an MRSI mission, your PH-2000s won't be hanging around in their first firing positions waiting for the sclerotic Russian C3 loop to finish cycling and the CB incoming to start arriving.
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But, but, but... "Zed for Zelensky", surely?!
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Aye, that's what the PH-2000, AS-90 and the rest supply for the gun laying: automation, fast autoloaders and quick pointing. I think it all probably has to be calculated and the components properly selected and sequenced in the autoloader before anyone pulls a lanyard. But that's what the computer's for, I guess I first ran into the concept of MRSI in the context of Crusader, I think, but that got cancelled, and I've not seen any article claiming (let alone verifying) the capability for the M-109, added since the cancellation of NLOSC, which was supposed to replace it. The RoF of the M109 doesn't seem fast enough to support more than a 2-fer MRSI.
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That mostly* tracks with other articles I've read** on MRSI. Your limitation is "how far can a minimum-charge round get". With a 5-fer, you can shoot the maximum range of your 1-bag round, with a pair of 2-bags, and a pair of 3-bags, each pair shooting one high and one low trajectory. If your system can shoot 6, the range will be a bit shorter than your maximum 1-bagger, because you have to shoot a high and a low round with the 1 bag charges, which will reduce your reach. I can't begin to imagine what having glide-capable munitions like Excalibur adds to the MRSI potential, if anything more than range... * There's one comment that doesn't even know that MRSI is different to TOT... ** I make no claim to expertise beyond the cursory theoretical... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery#Multiple_round_simultaneous_impact
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Very glad you posted. Apologies would be inappropriate, IMO. Hope it helped.
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The point here is that the unreasonable nature of the reaction to external action that was nothing to do with them is a symptom of the root problem. Partly that's to do with the willingness to believe the Government's lies (which are all focused on turning your resentment of your state of existence outward away from its root cause, kleptocracy), and partly to do with your willingness to believe the worst about the foreigner rather than recognising that it's a projection of your own national aggressiveness. Edit: the Germans had at least some rational justification for their resentment of the Versailles settlement; it was draconian, and recognised as such by many folk on both sides at the time. Russians had precisely no justification for fearing bombing after NATO's intervention in the Balkans. None. Zero. It. Was. Never. Going. To. Happen. Never.
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Open your eyes. The only reason all those former WP nations wanted to join NATO was because... Russia was a clear, obvious threat to them. If they weren't in NATO, they'd be annexed now, like Crimea. Look at Sweden and Finland. Sweden has been an officially neutral country since '45, even though their social and political make up suits them ideally to be members of the NATO bloc. But they've ploughed their own furrow until Russia started making actual moves westward. And now Russia thinks that threatening people who're looking for shelter from their threats is a great way of persuading them that they don't need to worry about the threats. It's the politics of imbeciles. If Russia hadn't been an existential threat to the Baltic states and Poland and Romania and Czechia and Slovakia and Hungary would not have felt the need to shackle themselves to the defensive alliance which comes with only obligations (if you aren't going to be attacked), not concrete benefits (those largely come from EU membership). The former Warsaw Pact countries would no doubt have rather ignored their military and "beat their swords into ploughshares". But Russia has always loomed large as the object lesson that "them as beat their swords into ploughshares end up ploughing for them as don't". Start, as we in the West do, by assuming anything your Government tells you is a lie (or, if you want to be generous, a self-serving shading of the facts on the ground). Your problem seems to be that you only have Government organs telling you anything, so you've nothing to fill in the gaps that ignoring the Government's lies leaves. We over here in the free world (you're not in that, by the way, though you'd be welcome) have the option of listening to other sources. Sometimes, those sources confirm what the Government is telling us, and that does make life easier when that's the case. Oh, wait: you've access to this forum. Read it. Judge how the information is being presented. Draw your own conclusions.
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Hi DMS
I know you've grown up with the "NATO wants to eat Russia" narrative, but I'm telling you, person to person, CM-addict to CM-addict that we never did*. When the paranoid thugs that ran the USSR were finally gotten rid of, we looked forward to working alongside former antagonists, for the benefit of everyone.
If you're not familiar with game theory, I'd recommend finding out about a thing called "Prisoner's dilemma". It's a very abstracted demonstration that it's usually better to work together than to constantly work against each other. As an introduction to non-zero-sum "games", it was an eye-opener for me, a couple of decades ago.
That's what the West wanted when the Iron Curtain was drawn back. Russia, with its vast mineral wealth, could have become a truly significant economic power. But the oligarchs stole it all and gave it to their gangster friends. Eventually, they became all we had to do business with, and then they decided to invade Ukraine and we couldn't even, in good conscience, do business with them.
We probably shouldn't have let the kleptocrats do so much business with the rest of the world. They managed to spend their way to a kind of legitimacy that we're only now, belatedly, starting to undo. That's our fault. But your peoples carry the bear's share of that responsibility for letting them get away with it.
What you see in your national news is controlled by your Government. What we see on our internet feeds and on the multitude of independent press and broadcast outlets across many nations never could be. That's why our view of what's happening is closer to the reality than yours is.
Just look at the claims and actions of your Government and its mouthpieces for evidence that they're not telling the truth. A 3-day "special military operation" is coming up on 3 months old, and your leaders keep trimming back their avowed objectives. I know you're not allowed to call it a war, but you're allowed to read the suggestion that this "special military operation" is at least as much a war as the wars in Afghanistan, or Vietnam (which was, I believe, officially a "police action"), and think about it and decide for yourself whether your leaders** are basically taking you and all your countrymen for idiots.
When people talk about "derussification", it's not some sort of wish to see Russia done and gone and replaced with some fractious, easily-manipulated balkanised successor. No, it's a desire for Russian people to be able to move on from the negative habits that generations of suppression and oppression have inflicted on you. It's a difficult concept to handle, and new to most westerners, because we'd largely swallowed the Kleptocrats' lies ourselves. But the "victim mentality" and the continual outward focus of aggression need to stop.
I truly wish you and yours the best. You're in an invidious position that I do not envy, and I can't think of anything I can do to help other than try and explain why what you think about the West seems to be so very mistaken.
Good luck.
* And never had the capacity to. As you pointed out, Russia's a big place! And its folk are determined defenders.
** Who don't give a flying fart about you; they only care about the billions of USD they (used to have) squirrelled away, having misappropriated it from your national wealth.
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The gap between perceptions is huge. One of them is much, much closer to perceiving the true nature of reality than the other. The facts are clear right now. While the Internet provides opportunity for lies, it also provides plenty of opportunity for corroboration, and the atrocities perpetrated are pretty close to 100% forensically established fact. The full extent of the war crimes and atrocities will probably take a few years to come out, but the fact that there are a lot, that they have mostly been committed by Russian forces and that they're as bad as any excesses of the SS is six-sigma clear right now. Perhaps you can shed some light on the process of mental gymnastics that can reflexively deny the facts on the ground, in the context of the official (it's on the telly, so it's straight out of the Kremlin) propaganda that's spewing forth like acid bile. How is it inconceivable that Russian troops would commit atrocities when the mouthpieces of your leaders virulently encourage such treatment of your Ukrainian "brothers"? Also, your immediate assumption that "derussification" might involve some sort of invasion and violence shows a massive, gigantic blind spot: the West has, since WW2 never wanted, nor believed it was feasible, to militarily invade and commit violence against the USSR or the RF. You've been told about this mythical threat for so long by the manipulative excrement you've had for leadership that you might even believe it. The correlation of forces has never supported the possibility (not for Napoleon, nor Hitler, nor NATO; some might argue that it might have been possible for the Western Allies for a brief moment, right at the very end of WW2, but the operation name for that endeavour is pretty much bang on...), and the most cursory inspection of military realities should allow you to reach that conclusion yourself.
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I think the British media might be a bit optimistic on this one. Or at least "shading" the news. While the 56th AC might be equipped in the future (so "will be equipped" isn't quite a fib) with Dark Eagle, it seems unlikely they are currently equipped with it. Static testing of the rocket booster was only commenced in October last year... and according to Wikipedia, the Army "hopes" to begin live fire testing this year. Now, maybe they're gonna live fire test it on a live combat range... but I kinda doubt it... And it'd be a miracle delivery, so far ahead of schedule, for a high tech system that, IIRC, was suffering quite a lot from development issues.
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Can't see the vid, Chuck... Might it have anything to do with "...Major Ford and General F*****g Motors!!"?
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Or 10+ tubes firing a 3-round MRSI mission, or 5+ PH200s firing a 6 round mission.
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Still, better to have made the plans and set up the contingency orders, and not have to use them, than to be reacting in surprise to something you could have seen coming. Because even sane people make mistakes. And Putin seems to be staggering from one mistake to the next at the moment.
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The war, following the COVID shock and the effects of Brexit has set the entire world's economy on a knife edge. Cost of living increases here in rightpondia are creating real pressures, but they are nothing to the problems that the lack of UKR and RUS grain and sunflower exports are going to create around the world*. The Chinese economy depends on the US economy and has its own structural problems, on top of the merely short term issues. Worldwide recession is, i feel, more likely than not. * Or maybe this will be a stimulus to improve distribution networks so that the excess food that's produced can get where it's acutally needed...
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I think a "secret ultimatum" is no ultimatum at all. Because it gives Putin the option of backing away from it without losing face, if NATO responds with defiance/bluff-calling. NATO's leaders are far less concerned about "face" than they are about "the electorate's reaction to massive civilian casualties and the collapse of civilisation", and making a public ultimatum plays into that position. Just stopping for no reason would be "odd", but backing down in the face of the overt threat of Armageddon could be argued as the rational course of action, at least, if the threat was well publicised. Of course, it's the very acme of brinksmanship, so maybe well within Putin's wheelhouse, but he'd also have to be predecided that it actually was a real threat, because if he fails to follow through on it, he loses face that he thinks is important.
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Aye, the political structures in Afghanistan were riddled with corruption to the same extent as (or even more than) the structures in Russia, so even if there were progressive, nation-loyal recruits, the treasure to support them got diverted, and tribal leaders spent it on other things, including troops who were "loyal" to them. Ghost formations were widespread and most of the formations that might've fought for the idea of Afghanistan as a nation that we'd recognise were under-resourced. Ukraine was the polar opposite: the concept of nationhood had been being strengthened by an existential threat and the national structures were overwhelmingly supportive of the effort to defend the nation.
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Interesting. Wonder whether Swiss banking laws (recently reformed, IIRC) will quickly allow the truth of this claim to be assessed? Could just be Russian stirring. Could just be the Russians attempting to explain why they haven't cut the Germans et al off from supply yet.
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I don't think they've been prepping for war against NATO, which is why they got so pissy when the people they were preparing for war against joined that organisation. And is probably a contributory reason for the timing of their misadventure in Ukraine: since '14, Ukrainian popular support for application for NATO and EU membership has been growing, for entirely understandable (if you're not a Russian) reasons, I gather. I also don't think they planned for a prolonged war at any point. They assumed that the EU (and hence NATO) wouldn't get involved for risk of losing their gas supply. So maybe the adventure in '14 was the first mistake, since it woke at least some people up to the possibility that RUS might not be the best people to be dependent on for anything, and some progress, at least, had been made in some quarters to provide contingency plans for the disappearance of Russian supplies, which has made the rest of the EU less petrified that they'll freeze without Russian gas.
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A slightly relevant personal experience: The assembly plant where I work used to get a large number of the HDPE mouldings we attach to the units from one factory. But then it burned down. All of it. It took three months before we started getting any more mouldings that hadn't already been en route. That's simple plastic mouldings. Imagine how long it would take to find a supplier for precision or high tech parts and get them ramped up to standards and volume for large war-scale production.