Combatintman

That is a reasonable working assumption - there were three brigades of which the French one was slightly 'light' on numbers so a division minus was there (albeit- a lot of the combat support and combat service support was light on compared to that expected of a division across the piece). As an example, the Brits had no gunners and its engineer element was a TA Engineer Squadron. The combat element of the UK's Berlin Brigade was formed by three infantry battalions on a unique establishment roughly equating to the light role Type B establishment and an armoured squadron.

In the Berlin context artillery should have a high rarity value - no idea about the French, but the Brits had no artillery in Berlin and the US had just a single battery.

He's been waiting 22 years for a book ... Christ on a bike, Royal Mail has gone downhill of late - where does he live, the Falklands?

Don't get hung up about the ISR nomenclature - I've been through Recce, RISTA, ISTAR, ISR etc .... all of which amounted to the same thing employing almost the same but slightly fewer resources with each name change (peace dividend, lighter and agile and other great buzzwords) - the bottom line is that FIND is a core function in combat and has been for donkey's years. The Russian/Soviet Army has never had dedicated/organic recce assets below regiment/brigade level in the 30+ years I've been looking at it (on and off). The recce component that you see on the oft posted slide of a BTG is, in essence, what used to be called a regimental recce coy and some sources indicate that the old regimental recce companies in the new-fangled brigades were retitled as brigade reconnaissance companies. Now ... I apologise for being vaguely parochial and slightly platform focused ... but bear with me ... that 'company' that sits in either the old school Soviet regiment, the new fangled brigade, or chopped to a BTG is what in the two armies I've served in would be called a recce platoon. If you've got CMSF crack open any of the UK battalions (minus the formation reconnaissance regiment) and see what I mean. Anyway ... back to effect, rather than platforms ... you can have all of the information/reporting in the world, but it is no good if you don't have an HQ that is capable of processing it and empowered to act on it in a timely fashion. In my trade and in the reconnaissance game, you are looking for redundancy and multiple source information so there is nothing wrong with UAVs and SIGINT in the mix. I'm sure I posted an example on this thread a few days back as to how you cross-cue your collectors to confirm or deny various activities. Doing so; however, (I'm getting boring now) requires grown-ups to be able to plan, task, process and act on what is collected.

Sort of - remember recce is designed to find stuff so it has to be stealthy and agile, not massively protected; however, I agree the point about when all you have is BTGs, then everything must be done by BTGs. If we go back to the old school battalions, none of them had organic recce and; therefore, the grown-ups have no idea as to how to employ it effectively. Every move becomes in effect an advance to contact which is fine if you have an HQ that can cope with assessing the situation on the fly, adapting accordingly and having sub-unit (Coy/Sqn) commanders empowered to use their own initiative to execute the direction given in line with the commander's intent. Qualities which have been amply demonstrated to be absent in the Russian Army.

Staffed with people like me and you naturally ... milk with that brew sir?

Agreed and it reinforces in spades the fallacy of the BTG concept which has stripped away the Bde/Regt echelon of command.

Further to my last post - here's a little more precision ... The red lines which form an offset cross on the complex are the extreme left/right and up/down plots. L-R distance is 138m and up/down distance is 281m. The red line in the top left hand corner of the image is what was reported as the FEBA on 10 April. This sequence; therefore, tells me it hasn't moved much in nearly two weeks. Complex Strike.kmz

More precisely ... here: Maryinka.kmz

Fixed that for you mate ...

At least he won't have to bull his boots, Sam Browne and brasses for the 09 May parade ... he's probably pretty chuffed.

To be fair to the Russians - there is only one military that is any good at SEAD and that is the US. It pioneered the techniques and spent a lot of effort in acquiring the means to do it competently. Nobody else spends enough money to properly resource the capability. A jamming pod and an anti-radiation missile strapped to a fast jet (which is pretty much the extent of every other nation bar the US's capability) do not a SEAD capability make.

Dovhenke is certainly useful if you want to motor down the main road into Slovyansk but indirectly. It sits in dead ground to that road so direct fires onto it are not possible but I see this as either an operation to secure the flanks for anything rolling down the road by denying a safe haven for shoot and scoot ATGM equipped parties or potentially using a covered approach to get into the wooded feature east of the village which does offer LOS onto the road. That then serves as a jumping off point to clear the woods SE and east. This area of ground leapt out at me early on when I was doing the terrain analysis as either a potential Named Area of Interest (NAI) or a Target Area of Interest (TAI). It is not a bad Engagement Area (EA) and sits between a battalion and company-sized defensive position. If resources permit, the Ukrainians could bottle that road up comfortably with a battalion (see diagrams) and if resources are tighter, it is possibly doable with a company, particularly if supported by a reasonably swept up obstacle plan with some gunnery on priority call. My instinct for the latter option would be to position the company where the southernmost company astride the road is located in the battalion laydown.

Soviet tanks are configured so that oil can be injected into the exhaust to create smoke. In RL it seems to be white but that might be an explanation or a design decision was made to make it black to differentiate it between TI blocking smoke.

The sensor rotates on many UAV platforms, particularly military-spec ones so the airframe can move while the camera stays slaved to the target. That said UAVs aren't cutting around at Mach 2, looping the loop and jinking but don't think that a steady picture from the sensor means that the thing isn't moving.

One of my temporarily ex-colleagues caught a flight from Afghanistan at the start of this 'Special Military Operation' to get his family out of Dinipro. He managed to get them into Poland and then went back. He's an ex-Ukrainian paratrooper and got assigned to a territorial unit. Not sure what he's up to at the moment but as of a week ago he and his unit hadn't been doing much. So the point is that there are some very experienced and quality guys to call on.

What's wrong with the war we've already got ... in terms of scenarios, campaigns and stuff - this is being reported in enough detail for any budding scenario maker to make a whole bunch of stuff or contemplate what-ifs and alternate scenarios with CMBS. If Battlefront makes Korea or whatever - you're only going to see it through a less detailed prism than what you're getting now - all those iterations of Barkmann's corner or Wittman knocking over 7 Armd Bde in WW2 are all interpretations by a scenario designer of information with far less granularity than what's available now. If you're truly interested in warfare, wargaming and/or simulating warfare then hoover up what you're seeing now, buy CMBS and hook into it. It has been interesting to note from recent events that maybe 'T-72 spotting is nerfed' and 'Troops running from hard cover is unrealistic' have been proved to be fallacies due to the coverage that is emerging from the tragic events in Ukraine.

It is untidy but can certainly be sold as a win to the important internal target audiences but Ukraine and the ROW is another matter. We are certainly living in interesting times.

Nobody noticed mate ... I think you got away with it - I had similar with trees once ... "why can't I see a bloody thing from this open field?"

Writing bollox or making UAVs?

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His wife had probably insisted on a pink bathroom or something ...

Its an interesting question for which a lot of the variables are unknown - the primary one being the number of contract soldiers in any given formation. There is also the danger of applying too much logic to the problem given the absence of logic in much of what Russia has done to date with its ground forces. In an ideal world you task-organize to .... erm ... task so the composition of a task-organised battlegroup depends on its mission and the area it will operate in. The simple example being that if 1st BTG needs to cross a river then it should get the available bridging assets chopped to it, whereas if 2nd BTG needs to assault a prepared defensive position then it would probably be infantry heavy, get a reasonable slice of gunnery and a lot of breaching assets like mine clearing vehicles. I'm not convinced that this is happening based on what we heard a few weeks back about there being no overall Land Component Commander and for the initial stages of the operation, the divisional commanders were pretty much told to do their own thing so long as that involved pushing into Ukraine. I'll maybe give it some thought tomorrow.

Had a closer look at this now - going back to old money Soviet formations and converting that into the 2017 Russian Way of War pamphlet, what we're seeing in that BTG construct is effectively the regimental reconnaissance company of an old school regiment task-organized to a BTG. It explains why the low ballpark for the number of BTGs that each regiment/brigade can field is one. Theoretically divisional assets, in this case the divisional reconnaissance battalion can also be task-organised downwards as well. If the divisional reconnaissance battalion is at full-strength with contract regulars then it would give each division enough company-sized reconnaissance elements to task-organise to another three BTGs across the division. Within a division of three regiments; therefore, theoretically it can generate enough recce for 6 x BTGs. Conversely, given that the separate brigades only have a single recce coy then they are constrained to generating recce for 1 x BTG.

I'm reading the recce grouping the same as @Bil Hardenberger; however, you are right about the absence of tactical reconnaissance, I had that sense right from the start and it hasn't changed. They're either damned good or they've not bothered. I'm not obsessively tracking vehicle losses but from what I've seen, there hasn't been much in the way of BRMs, PRPs or IRMs getting the good news which tells me they haven't deployed many of them - and leads to the deduction that they've not bothered. This might have been in the expectation of a short fight when the operation launched - who needs recce when it'll be over in a week etc ... One consolation is we haven't seen any BRDM RKh or RKhM vehicles cutting about/being towed by tractors/exploding in a fireball.