Tux

Did you read what Butschi said? It is possible to condemn russian atrocities while warning against going too far and becoming just as bad as the Kremlin propagandists. 
What about the Russians who are horrified by the war and are organising against it? What about the Russians fighting for Ukraine right now?
We must not become the monster we condemn.

...Yes, and allowance has been duly given throughout c1400 pages of discussion. In general, I don't address him unless he addresses me.
However, he also uses his righteous anger to push a quite nasty view of the irremediably barbarous nature of ALL Russians, now and forever, polities, groups or individuals.
.... While all Ukrainians absolutely should be preoccupied right now with the high velocity killing of all armed Russians occupying their country, a lot of our discussion here also circles around the fate of Russia and Russians postwar.
And whether some people here like it or not, Ukraine (and the world) is going be living and interacting with Russians long term. No sane adult is about to back some vile crusade to exterminate them, to occupy Russia, to wall Russians off from 'civilised' humanity, or any other such lunacy. They don't disappear into a flaming pit (unless most of us come with them....).
But sadly, there will be people who will try to pull that kind of thing within Ukraine after the victory, taking it upon themselves to decide by force who is an 'orc' or collaborator, on what will become increasingly thin evidence. Blood libel and collective guilt. First, it won't work. Second, it will utterly foul the fruits of victory, especially in Crimea.
IMHO, Crimea needs to go back to Ukraine (Russia's historical claims are now forfeit due to its terrible crimes, frankly) but WITH the population who lived there in 2014 enjoying the full rights of citizens. Regardless of their native tongue, which happens to be mainly Russian.
FWIW

Semantics.  It's not the first time we are facing the prospect of a nuclear attack since WWII.  But we are facing the prospect of the first nuclear attack since WWII.

The casual racism in this video is disgusting.
It makes me wonder if NATO could not give the Ukrainians a precision guided cruise missile to take out this studio during a live broadcast. Now that would be TV worth watching!
 
(I jest of course. Well, half jest).
 

Anybody who reads this thread knows orders of magnitude more about this war than the general public. Add another order of magnitude because you probably already knew the difference between a a tank, an IFV, and a self propelled gun. The stuff in the mainline newspapers is not written for this audience.

What's interesting to me is how much both strategies are designed to subvert the supports that maintain US hegemony and how badly they perform at it:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-views-of-china-reach-historic-highs-in-many-countries/
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/06/22/ratings-for-russia-drop-to-record-lows/
The danger for both Russia and China...that's fast becoming the reality...is that they don't provide a model that is more attractive than the US/EU because their aims are simply to install a cruder, more restrictive hegemony for themselves.  Therefore, their interactions with likeminded nations don't turn into countervailing coalitions but simply accommodations based on mutual and typically short term interest. You can see that, not all surprisingly, mostly clearly in their relations with each other.
Perforce, they must act like insurgents on the state scale. They act as spoilers, subvert the order of things, put grit in the machinery and try to inhabit (in China's case) parts of the global economy that allow them to exert control. But this has limits. Western oriented states have resilient systems, they are easy to influence but generally hard to subvert outright. And all the while, the clock ticks for China and Russia given the profound demographic problems they face.
I get your take and in many ways I'm sympathetic to it. But over all, I think the historical record comes down pretty heavily on the side of the socially and economically dynamic nations over the episodic pulses of authoritarian states.
 

Do it. I would read it.

I could probably write a book:
Forcing function - The US and west have been the the worlds hyperpower for at least 30 years.  Any conventional matchups come with so many caveats that only non-state networks have really been dumb enough to take them on in the CT/VEO space.  In fact the last time a nation state fell out of line the Gulf War happened and any great power outside of the US/western sphere took note.  So a revisionist state was trapped between the devil of nuclear warfare they could not win, and the deep blue see of being vastly overpowered in the conventional space.
Our History.  We understood our power early.  While interventions and CT work kept us busy in reality the west has not faced an existential state-based threat since the fall of the USSR.  As such, we let things slide in the famous "peace dividend days".  Everyone was counting mothballed tanks and ships, but we also mothballed the NS architecture capable of waging global scale political warfare.  Sure we kept intelligence and the like but funding went way down as we all figured "well who would mess with us".  It got a major boost after 9/11 but it was built to hunt humans in and amongst other humans, not deal with larger scale nation states.  So our ability to actually conduct counter-subversive and pre-emptive political warfare campaigns has atrophied over the last three decades.
Our reality.  Unlike autocratic societies, we lay our internal social divisions and friction-points out for everyone to see, we celebrate and fund them.  Further we have laws that enshrine freedoms and an open society based on the value of each and every citizen.  We doubled down on all of that after the Cold War ended.  What makes our nations strong a great are also some of our biggest vulnerabilities in this arena - not advocating for anything different here, this is just our reality.  Free press, free enterprise, free academia and freedoms "from and to" are what makes us the most powerful versions of humanity that ever existed; also leaves us very open to asymmetric strategies.
Their reality.  The revisionist power states, like China and Russia, were largely left out, or at least feel like they were left out of the re-writing of the global order.  They understand where they stand in the pecking order, and while it took awhile, they figured out that they 1) did not like it, and 2) had to start moving the needle to change it.  Direct confrontation with the west was impossible, so they went sideways.  They all have long histories in the subversive space, hell one could argue the Chinese invented it.  So they renewed old doctrines that leveraged energy resident within our systems to work for them - classic reflexive control.  This was done with long above-water campaigns of influence as they picked up steam.  Cyber and information space meant that societies became connected, but they also became "seeable" in extremely high resolution.  Like the invention of the microscope, this opened up new observable phenomenon, which we could not see in the Cold War.  States and corporations - often overlapping - went to town on this.  They collected data and developed theories of how humanity worked at micro-social scales that did not exists 30 years ago.  They could map those spaces and that could gauge cause and effect.  We used to sell stuff and collect "likes and subscribes", they, the other lost powers, used it to create "options".  Ones that are very hard to attribute and are aimed at what is both our greatest strengths and vulnerabilities - our open society.  These options were not legal acts of war, responses lay outside of our legalities and policies, and they were designed to hit us where they knew we would never even be able to agree at what happened - classic negative and null decision space.
Russia out front.  Russia has a very long history of playing these games and decided to flex first.  China has always been quietly waiting and watching in the background - stealing IP, buying off politicians and power brokers, colleting information and re-drawing maps.  Russia is not that nuanced, never has been really.  They were far more blunt and began act on their new theories - Gerasimov Doctrine/Russian Hybrid Warfare - whatever.  It was an ability to exercise strategic options outside of what we understood as war or peace.  Russia tried things out in Georgia and Chechnya - learned some hard lessons and then went prime time in 2014 in Ukraine.  No big conventional war, they just undecided Donbass and Crimea, and then made it too hard for us to really decide anything about it.  They pulled off wins in Syria and Africa (that no one really noticed) and kept getting free lunches while we in the west sat back and scratched our heads "how did they do that?"  Seriously, as I have told some senior people, "I am tired of admiring the other team".  China was doing all the same stuff, just much more nuanced and quietly - they called it unrestricted warfare/systems warfare but it basically amounts to the same thing; however, China appears much more adept at leveraging the rules and laws of the international order, while at the same time playing outside of them.
Unprepared and paralysis.  We really were in a kind of strategic shock in the west.  Both Russia and China had worked hard to make sure that they played out internal divisions and that groups in our own societies became indirectly invested (ignorantly in some cases) in their interests.  Our national security and defence architecture was too busy chasing "snakes" and was dislocated in dealing with state-based threats.  In many cases we had no policy or legal frameworks for what these new threat theories could do, and we sure as hell did not have counters/pushbacks.  So while we were basically strategically dislocated both Russia and China made great gains while we dithered and argued with each other - and I do not mean solely in the US.  North America, Europe and Pacific partners, all yelling and divided.  NATO was on the ropes, many nations had grown tired of GWOT, and we saw (are seeing) the rise of nationalism and isolationism.
Russia poops the bed - and modern war is in the wind.  For reasons I still do not understand Russia decides to drop its A-Game and fall back on an open conventional military power approach in Ukraine.  I have never heard a good reason why this is, and why they took this risk but here we are.  So China is sitting back watching, again as all this unfolds and what does it see?  Well first thing is that modern conventional warfare is upside down.  By our old metrics/doctrine Ukraine should have lost this, even in the face of Russian crappiness.  The war was going to be longer and grinding but eventually Ukraine would fold under the weight of a military machine that was an order of magnitude larger by some metrics. And then "boop"!  So what the hell happened? - well personally I think the 3rd offset (out of favor now) actually came into it age (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offset_strategy) in doing so it is re-writing conventional war as we know it.  Russia is running into a brick wall but China is watching and noting it. China was feeling strong, by old metrics it was catching up and rising to challenge the West - particularly when one considers our aversion to sacrifice.  Unless China is a complete idiot, and nothing I have seen suggests they are, then this war completely blew up their pre-war estimates.  Modern warfare just got insanely more lethal and expensive - harder not easier.  And once again western warfare looks like it leaped ahead, this was not the plan.
So What?  Well, despite all the sabre rattling with China over Taiwan, I suspect the Chinese are conducting a serious re-think (they should be).  Everyone in the bar is armed and sizing each other out.  A big guy draped with guns and ammo, looking like Rambo, picked a fight with a little guy who just punched Rambo's teeth in with his own ammo belts. A conventional conflict with China just got less likely, if China has been paying attention and I suspect they have.  The metrics by which China was gauging things just shifted and they are not going to pull "a Russia" blindly.
So, So what?  Well China is likely going to do a few things 1) re-set its conventional military power metrics, likely better than we will - we are going to bask in "well there you go, we win!", 2) Keep to its A-game longer and double down and what has been working - it saw what happened to Russia.  We on the other hand are likely to go back to arguing and losing the bubble, making us even more vulnerable.  That is the biggest unknown and question "how do we re-gain internal integrity in our systems, without breaking them ourselves?"  All the while China and very likely what is left of Russia will work in helping us to break us.  We are likely to see a lot more proxy actions done this way because invading is a dumb idea.  China has a decades head start on us, so we face major challenges getting better in this space - it is the one area that China's options are expanding and ours remain stagnant. 
Cold War, Hot Peace, Tepid Status Quo, it all really ends the same; more political warfare happening where the terrain favours the opponent - we need to get over ourselves and agree that in this area we are all of one mind: create equilibrium and expand options, while compressing our opponents.  And this is not all on the US, which has its own problems, we have seen pressures and threats here in Canada in ways that we do not have any response to other than "togetherness and resilience".  Every western country has a micro-social space, and it is largely lying wide open to direct influence, which in a democracy is incredibly powerful and dangerous.  I strongly suspect that this war will be a watershed moment for whatever comes next - likely a Coldish War but one where the lines are far more blurry and a significant continuing of the trend of the re-emergence of political warfare as a primary theater in pursuing national interests while blunting an opponents.     
Finally, my instincts tell me, "don't think 1960", they are telling me "think 1900".  There are a lot of similarities between now and pre WWI with respect to great power competition/conflict.  Accept now we have nukes and cyberspace - and the history of WWI to learn from.  Regardless, we need to win this war, put Russia back in a box and then everyone sit down and have  a serious conversation on how we let this happen and how we need to close the spaces between us or someone is going to use that: one second to midnight at a time.

While military aid is absolutely important, and its important to recognize that Polish assistance is awesome, its also important to recognize the wholeness of western aid to Ukraine, for example, France offered 25% of its active duty Caesar SPGs, something no other state has offered in terms of active duty, in-use military hardware, Germany offered essential hardware like long-range AD, and short-range AD essential to keeping VVS away from the offensive in Kharkiv, the UK is hosting thousands of Ukrainians for training, and news has arrived Denmark will be hosting troops as well, NATO aircraft are ferrying munitions from states like Pakistan, sneaking stuff from Iran thru 3rd parties, smaller NATO states like the Baltics, Norway, Finland, Macedonia, have contributed good stuff, like the Harpoons on trucks, air frames, etc.
It is also extremely important to understand that the EU, being the biggest trading partner to Ukraine, and bordering Ukraine, is a essential part of keeping the Ukrainian economy afloat. I don't think it can't be understated that if Ukraine's home front was not upheld by EU money and EU access, Ukraine would been having a extremely tougher time keeping her home front secure, and by extension, keeping her frontlines going. 
States that see war, see huge economic effects, usually negative as hell, and I'm sure Putin and those RU nationalists were relying on turning home front Ukraine into rubble and poverty as part of any threat to Ukraine, and it can't underestimated, that things like the Polish warmth to Ukrainian refugees, is assisted by EU economic aid to Poland and other states to assist refugees for example. 
I mean, money is important just for defense needs, Pakistan ain't giving away 152mm ammunition that is newly manufactured (nor should they, poor bastards, that flooding is horrible) for free, and I think its not the foreign reserves of the UKR central bank paying them either, its gonna be some sort of money from the EU or otherwise from the West getting those shells made. 
End of the day, its important for understanding that Ukraine ability to fight back is not just due to Ukrainian resolve alone, but Ukraine has done a great job harnessing the ability and resources of the West to equalize the playing field more against Russia, and I bet some of the reasons why the analysts were wrong on Ukraine pre-war, did not take into account stuff like the West backing Ukraine. Ukraine isn't fighting with just the Poles standing a little bit back, and the rest of Europe really far away, that is undermining the work Ukraine has done to ensure that the playing field is what it is today, where Europe is a safe harbor for Ukraine to dock in, and I think Putin absolutely did not consider Europe to be Ukraine's friend, and was expecting his efforts in Europe to make it much, much colder for Ukraine, and not a safe harbor where thousands of Ukrainian civilians can live safely from Russian missiles, and thousands of Ukrainian soldiers can train in peace and quiet, and where hundreds can be treated in safe hospitals. 

Canister has an effective range of, maybe, 2-300 metres. The 30mm cannon has an effective range of 2-4,000 metres.
You could, presumably, design a 30mm canister round with a prox or time or distance fuze, at an extravagant development time and cost, and production cost. Plus the weapon will need to be modified to allow for fuzing at a rate of 2-3 rounds per second.
With either a basic shotgun-style canister round or a whizzy fuzed round, you now have a specialist round for a specialist purpose. How many of the 450-odd rounds carried in the vehicle are this specialist round, where are they carried, and how does the crew access them quickly when required.
Canister has negligible armour penetration. 30mm will readily penetrate whatever a helicopter can still fly with.
A radar requires power.
A radar is fiddly, fragile, and readily prone to battle damage.
A radar requires additional internal wiring, plus display and controls inside the limited turret space.
Who operates the radar? Who now does their role? How much of their training year is allocated to training for this role? What other role(s) gets less training?
Radars are emitters, making the BMPs even easier to find.
 
All of that is solvable with aenough time, money, and manpower, but what is the opportunity cost? And that still leaves you with the question of which vehicles are conducting the IFV role while the BMPs are off pretending to be SPAA?

Some other weapon slang (usually common for UKR and RUS): 
- Dashka (was heard in this video) - hypocrism form of female name Darya - DShK HMG
- Kalashmat - combined "Kalashnikov"+"avtomat" (SMG), but also similar to the Russian word "koloshmatit' " - jargon, which means "to inflict many punches, to beat up" - AK-rifle 
- bekha - jargon name of BMW car -  BMP 
- Kabanchyk ("little boar") - 120 mm or 122 mm shell
- mishka - hypocrism from Russian "medved' "(bear) - tank. I don't know why
- motolyha  - combined from "motor" and consonant jargon word "kolymaha" (eng."rattletrap") - MTLB
- Grach ("rook") - Su-25 
- Sushka - any Su-aircraft
- Krokodil - Mi-24
- Sapog  ("hight boot") - SPG-9  

Yeah, I suspect there is a significant amount of variability in warfare that is distinct from changes over time. Just as, in WW2, the fighting in North Africa was very different from fighting on the Eastern Front, and both were different from the fighting in the Pacific, I suspect that if another high intensity war between two different peer or near peer armies broke out in another part of the world it would look very different from this one in a lot of ways. It's not that this war has its peculiarities, so much as every war has peculiarities. Differences in objectives, scale, level of commitment, doctrine, force structure, and terrain may create a massive amount of variability even in wars fought in the same time period. Time period/technology obviously does make a big difference. If you reran WW2 with modern technology, but all other factors kept identical, it would still be a very different war. But I think it is far too simplistic to think of time period/technology as being the only thing that makes wars different.
For an obvious example, there is probably a comparable amount of difference between a modern land war in eastern Europe and a modern air/naval/amphibious war in the Pacific as there is between a modern land war in eastern Europe and a 1940s land war in eastern Europe, or between a modern air/naval/amphibious war in the Pacific and a 1940s air/naval/amphibious war in the Pacific.
So I don't think we should be talking about how modern war is different from war of decades past, as if modern war and war of decades past are homogeneous things, but about how specific types of war are different from their older counterparts. How is modern European ground war different from European ground war of decades past. How is modern counter-insurgency in desert/jungle/etc... different from counter-insurgency in desert/jungle/etc.. in decades past. How is modern air/naval/amphibious war around scattered island chains different from air/naval/amphibious war around scattered island chains of decades past. How is modern peer vs peer desert combat different from peer vs peer desert combat from decades past.

My wife edited this

Russian soldiers are as disciplined as the rabble participating in Trump rallies...

Given the amount of data that has to be processed I would say it is impossible.  For the ground war alone - this is a Theater Intelligence Cell's job.  That will be a lot of people working in specialist areas - eg current battle, future plans, order-of-battle etc to feed the grown-up who's going to make sense of it and then brief it to the guy who's going to make the decisions.
I am that guy in Afghanistan - On average I read 500 individual reports a day and it takes me about three and a half hours to make sense of them all.  About an hour or so to write up the individual incidents of interest and about 45 minutes to 90 minutes to find and plot where they took place.  About 20 incidents is a busy day for me.  Databasing the incidents takes about 20 minutes.  On top of that it takes me about an hour and a half to write slightly more in-depth pieces for my daily summary.  In-depth collation or in-depth reading?  Forget it ... not enough time in the day.  This is small beer compared to the amount of reporting that's coming out of Ukraine.

Btw. a good reading of how life was for civilians in Bucha.
https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/the-banality-of-brutality/
There was a game called This war of Mine about civilians struggling to survive in warzone... it strikes how realistic it was in retrospect; like CM but from different angle.

this thread right now:
ukr.mp4    

Well first off I am very wary of western analysts declaring anything "settled" in this war considering how much they got wrong in the first place.  By their metrics of tank-power Ukraine should be a puppet state of Russian by last Apr.
So I am curious as to how the tanks have been essential or have been employed.  For example, "15 tanks did the break in battle at Balakliya", that is a single Company, so what/how were they integrated into a break in battle that was kms wide?
It is not so much that the "tank is dead", it looks more like its role is evolving.  Nothing we have seen in this war looks like it was supposed to wrt mech and armoured warfare - so here we have a successful breakout battle and I am still not sure how it was integrated into it.  And then there is "what the hell happened with RA armor?", but by this point I doubt the Russian can keep theirs in gas, let alone in combat.
And then we have this Light Infantry/SOF breakout, unless some of these maps have been wrong.  We wont answer it here but the most dangerous thing we can do with this entire experience is validate pre-existing biases and promptly ignore all the other weird signals.  Especially when the validations might be the weird signals, not the main.

I just realized that these stupid orcs knocked down an ent! He'll be mighty angry when he gets up...

I’m with you on this. If you’re not in the trenches, I don’t think you have the same right to shed basic respect for humanity. When you’re half way round the world looking at this through twitter scopes, not personally implicated in this, I feel we actually have a responsibility not to drop decent values. 

That does presuppose the existence or possession of said values, which isn’t evident or granted of course.

Steve,
Your premise seems to hinge on me not fully understanding the need to relentlessly curb stomping of the russian war machine, in all its constituent parts, into submission - well beyond Ukraines borders of 2013 and the capacity of it threatening any of its neighbours.
I can assure you that notion is completely unfounded… 
The thing is, that at the same time I genuinely believe that “we” are fighting for certain values. Values that does not really include the unnecessary degradation of human beings (that definitely being everyone of us). 
My point here, in the forum context, is that he did’t post that video, made into a meme, on this forum. “We” did that. And what does that say about us? 
That said, I have zero interest in a prolonged discussion on this point. I love the thread and follow it religiously for all it gives. It really is a haven of sanity and life-affirming absurdity.
Please consider my post a soft voice, whispering in your ear as we roll along the colonnades on our triumph.

Having seen the actual clip that the picture originates from, knowing that it is an image of a human being in a moment of absolute terror and anguish, I personally am revolted by its use in a meme. I know full well that my emotions are shaped by what might be described as the arrogance of a western comfort, but could we please refrain from going that much orc and refrain from posting gore here?
 
Looking into the abyss and all that… 

So how many RA troops north of that river?  Was it 20-25k, assuming they only take half, that is a lot of PoWs to deal with.  Well looks like the Russians have a new clever strategy to hurt UA logistics; overburden it with Russian prisoners of war.  
Seriously, don’t mobilize just take 2 million Russian fighting age males, dress them in something that looks like a uniform, walk them over and surrender.  Saves a ton of money and cuts out the problematic killing/dying part.  UA buckles under weight of PoWs and sues for peace, the West sees poor Russian prisoners looking very sad and falters - now that is thinking outside the box!

Ok...STOP.
  I am not a moderator on this forum but I have @BFCElvis on speed dial.  This thread is about the war Ukraine and, yes we have discussed surrounding issues and possible 2nd and 3rd order effects this war could have on the region.  This thread is not about:
- Bafflingly narrow or simply out of date concepts such as solving human cultural overlaps with policy.
- Vilifying the entirely of all Russian peoples as somehow less than human.  No human society, culture or whatever has or ever will be entirely homogeneous, good or bad.  So sweeping ideas of how to solve a "Russian Problem" by a bunch of old guys with too much time on their hands, which they should spend learning more, are not 1) viable or 2) useful here.
- I get we are sore on Russia right now, they earned that one; however, at what point on this incredibly myopic line of thinking do we become worse than that we assign to them?  All in the name of "safety" - a whole lot of atrocity and historic marks of shame lay on the feet of "safety".  I have been to one genocide and trust me none of you know what you are talking about, so stop hijacking the thread.
- FFS, we did not even take the approaches some are proposing here during the Cold War, we went with "contain and attract/entice", and we won that one.  In fact we look back on the occasion of the McCarthy era - which is where this is going- as a dark chapter 
You wanna talk about mass deportations, forced migration, race/ethnic cleansing/purity or any other whack-job nonsense there is literally an entire internet out there, let's try and keep this one small "sane space".    

I'd say that's called being civilized, not soft... Anyway, yes, the Baltics could throw out the Russians but what would they gain from that except some measure of satisfaction. I mean, half the conflicts in the world are about someone having thrown out someone else. For good measure let's start by "relocating" all the Russians to some camps. For their own safety, of course. While we are are it, let's just confiscate their property to pay for our expenses in this war.
We (the West) can rationalize each and every of these measure. Maybe I'm just naive, I mean we could just go full realpolitik and do whatever we feel necessary, morals be damned, but that would hurt our already damaged credibility and that is a kind of capital that should not be underestimated.