Maciej Zwolinski
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Posts posted by Maciej Zwolinski
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11 hours ago, Fenris said:
In a video published by Ukrainian GUR about raids on the Boyko Towers sea rig near Crimea, they showed a battle between 3 Ukrainian small boats and a Russian jet. Crew on boats managed to hit the jet and force it to flee.
J**us wept, the Russian could not strafe 3 pontoons without being damaged....
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5 hours ago, dan/california said:
There is apparently some level of military Darwinism occurring, and some of the brighter orcs have lived long enough to impart lessons learned.
That has historically been how Russians got their armies to improve. In WW2 it took them two years become decent, and one more year to be good. Plotting that learning curve on this war's calendar Russians should now be somewhere at the level of Operation Uranus. Luckily, their current counteroffensive in the North-East looks more like Operation Anus, so it looks like they are learning slower.
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15 hours ago, Grey_Fox said:
Attack helicopters with standoff weapons have proven useful and fairly survivable (in that they're still fighting over a year and a half later) thus far in the Ukraine conflict.
This is because they are currently in an assymetric match-up vs NATO-supplied battlefield AA weapons, which has come about due to the AA being an afterthought in NATO armies which assume air superiority, and Ukrainians not having air superiority. This is a fairly random capability gap, which can is likely to be eliminated before the next war. I think it will be eliminated soon as part of the effort to reclaim superiority in the up to 2000 m. sphere (per the_Capt's excellent post from yesterday)
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5 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
UAS have nothing on UGV and that shoe will likely drop very soon. Western powers need to solve for Unmanned, C4ISR and Precision Defence very quickly. We won’t be learning Mandarin, we will be looking very long high intensity wars that our societies are incredibly poorly prepared for.
I hate to repeat myself but I again encourage everyone interested in this to look up "the Invincible" by Stanislaw Lem
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12 minutes ago, Monty's Mighty Moustache said:
He didn't think Starlink would be used for military purposes? Man is either deluded or a liar. Or a deluded liar.
He got scared that the Ukrainian drones will be too succesful and turn Sevastopol into the second Pearl Harbour. Following which Elon would be invited by the vengeful Russians for a polonium tea and strychnine cakes party.
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13 hours ago, The_Capt said:
I honestly think that air superiority/supremacy is the Achilles tendon of the entire western way of warfare.
Amen.
And there are hundreds of ways in which they can be taken out of the fight. For example - with the manned systems approaching USD 100 mil. per unit, I can easily see them becoming something like battleships, so costly that they cannot be risked on many missions, including those which would be feasible for cheaper platforms. For missiles there is a similar problem, already experienced by the Ukraine - once the Russians divided up the large ammo&POL depots into a multitude of smaller ones, they ceased to be economic targets e.g. for Storm Shadows because that would be exchanging "2000 pounds of education" for a "ten-rupee jezzail", to quote Kipling's "Arithmetic on the frontier".
Ultimately, the ground forces should be designed to be able to stand on their own, which includes developing a functional battlefield ADA.
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21 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
I don't understand people like Prig. The man probably had billions socked away and a loyal security apparatus that could keep him safe even if radically downsized.
I do not think Prigozhin considered it sufficiently safe without the political clout that the engagement in African affairs would have given him. Gierasimov and Shoigu would be after his head and with easy access to Putin's ear. A private person, even exceedingly wealthy one, plays in a completely different league, than a warlord. In 1200 yrs of the Roman Empire in the West, three men famously made a successful transition from warlordism to private life: Cincinnatus to plow, Sulla to drink and fornicate himself to death, and Diocletian to grow cabbage. The chances are not particularly high.
So he probably had no safe choice and was bound to chose between risky options.
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29 minutes ago, dan/california said:
Apparently Russia has managed to recruit some small number of Cubans. I wonder if they will live long enough to freeze to death.
They were looking for Kuban Cossacks, but there was a mix-up and have recruited Cuban Cossacks instead.
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54 minutes ago, Carolus said:
I wonder about the talks between Ukraine and Rheinmetall which lead to this choice of ammo types.
This is just a wild guess, but HEI could be for the relatively softer and potentially flammable Shaheeds and similar drones, whereas HVAPDS to engage relatively more hardened cruise missiles.
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1 hour ago, FancyCat said:
2/ Nice catch by @vcdgf555. Could be that they put the cope tyres on u/s airframes hoping that these would draw attacks by dressing them up as being worth protecting Otherwise having to remove them as part of preflight work on active airframes would be fun
I am skeptical about the logic of drawing attention to those planes by pretending they are protected and playing mind games with attack planners (too clever by half), but I could believe in piling up stuff on derelict planes in an attempt to enchance their radar and visual signature relative to the useful ones. Still a desperate action.
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4 minutes ago, Tux said:
As far as I can tell it’s been a combination of the factors California Dan just mentioned as well as some minor tactical tweaks to the composition of attacking forces (less vehicle-heavy, more artillery/infantry-led).
That is more like neutralising all anti-tank weapons, whether heliborne or not, by not showing up with the AFVs. But OK, I see now what you meant.
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5 hours ago, Tux said:
o, in the last few months it seems to be the case that Ukraine have:
- Successfully countered/neutralised the attack helicopter threat which caused some worrying tactical issues in the early stages of the offensive.
Would you be so kind to elaborate on this? Have you seen any new tactics or equipment by which the Ukrainians deal with RUS helicopters, or is this based only on the lower number of reports that KA 52s are causing trouble (and AFAIK it is lower nowadays)?
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6 hours ago, chuckdyke said:
He has life insurance?
Excellent planning. If they take him in the woods, they won't have to take him to the woods afterwards.
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22 hours ago, The_Capt said:
Trainloads of deported Russian who have been living in Crimea for ten years with sad music on YouTube is also not really a good thing either.
If Ukrainians take Crimea, that is 100% certain to happen. The UKR are not going to be fooled twice and leave in place a fifth column ready to make trouble again. This, and some images of Russian PoWs getting a kick on the bottom or some other humiliating treatment. Look at WW 2 images of Germans surrenderring or having surrendered - that kind of behaviour is bound to happen, because soldiers on the good side are not angels themselves, just fighting for a vastly better cause and most of the time, not incentivised to commit outright war crimes.
So it is the duty of UKR PsyOps units to counterballance those images with the horrors of Bucha or indiscriminate attacks on cities, etc. They are good at this so I am confident the public opinion effect will be minimised. Unless the Western governements actively look for excuses to cut aid to the Ukraine, in which case their propaganda machine will be engaged to amplify the sad lot of the Russians being ethnically cleansed. But that would be a result of a shift in policy, not a reason for it.
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15 hours ago, Fenris said:
RUAF launched their attack using kamikadze MT-LB
I assume "kamikadze" means remotely controlled. Anyone know how do Russians implement remote control on those vehicles - is there some kind of "Borgwardization" kit or process, or do they stick to the more budget method of tying a brick to the gas pedal?
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5 hours ago, kevinkin said:
Khodakovsky concluded that Russia will likely have to come to a “truce” and that Russia may enter a phase “of neither peace nor war” with Ukraine.[2]
Yeah, because that worked for them so well when they tried this last time in 1917/1918
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8 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
In short... even if we believe that Russia can keep up with losses by filling in with older revived tanks, there will be a noticeable quality decline from what Russia started with. On top of that, there's the cost and training of new crews to consider as without the ability to support those two things the theoretical tank output is meaningless.
Steve
And the more tanks Russian take out of storage/manufacture/otherwise procure, the more they have to pay, even to restore the old crap to the working conditions. According to the latest video from the Inside Russia channel, the financial troubles have finally come to Russia, and a huge component of that is the costs charged by the military industry. Apparently by August the Russians already burned through their military budget for the entire year 2023 and had to increase it by 100%.
So Russians increasing military production is not entirely a bad thing.
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19 minutes ago, sburke said:
a long illness.. is that a way of expressing that the window was above the 8th floor?
Or that he was dying long enough to say the traditional last words of Russians who die of natural causes or suicide: "Comrades, don't shoot, I too am a Communist". Nowadays it has probably been updated to "a Putinist".
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3 minutes ago, Haiduk said:
Pair of UKR Su-25 launch some guided missiles. Western OSINTers told this is HARM, but some Ukrainian accounts say, that more likely these could be Kh-25
Were HARMs inegrated with Frogfoots at all? I heard that only MIG29s
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5 hours ago, Carolus said:
I present the new way to avoid minefields.
Only float a foot above ground, drop down before entering the enemy trench, the belt system remains with the drone. Once the human weight drops, the drone goes to ground as an escape route if the raid goes awry or can be used as a resupply system. Either AI supported flight or remote controlled.
Yes yes, it is fanciful and dangerous. But since a lot of Russians seem to stay in their dugout after a barrage or even during an assault, it might not be much worse than driving right up with a BMP 1 and hoping no one has an RPG 7.
I have been thinking of using this kind of drone to clear, not avoid minefields. Instead of a soldier, each would pick up a demo charge, designed to blast mines like the explosive in a bangalore torpedo or a MCLIC. Let them fly over the minefield under artillery cover and a smokescreen and just have them drop the charges one after another at precaldulated distances. Say 10 meters between them. You use 40 drones at a go and demine 400 meters, then they fly back, reload and blast another 400 meters. Rinse and repeat, as long as the suppression/smoke cover lasts.
Sort of a longer, hovering, robotic, very mobile MCLIC without a single expensive vehicle for the enemy to concentrate fire at.
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8 minutes ago, kevinkin said:
I think the point is that under the EU there is no reason for Germany to attack France at. al. Other than embedded cultural differences there is little difference between European nations, especially under the NATO and EU economic umbrella, to go to kinetic war over.
Sure. And my point is that while this is correct for those countries, it is quite a limited set. And Ukraine's situation is totally different.
Anyway, this seems to be going in circles, so I will probably leave it at that.
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4 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:
Which still misses the point, that borders delineate the area under control of a nation, which can and will decide on its political course also for the future
I will add an actual example instead of hypothetical. Northern Ireland is part of the UK, and not part of the Republic of Ireland. Therefore, when Brexit happened they left the EU, whereas the people a few kms south of the border did not. Both countries are democracies and people made their choices to live on the northern or southern part of the border not based on life or death matters, but on tax, proximity to workplace, etc. Yet the Brexit happened for some of them, and did not for some others. Border mattered.
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6 minutes ago, JonS said:
And if Russia were a modern secular welfare state with a functional democracy and rule of law then life while holding a Russian passport would also be about the same, and also not worth a war.
Which still misses the point, that borders delineate the area under control of a nation, which can and will decide on its political course also for the future. Assuming "Russia were a modern secular welfare state with a functional democracy and rule of law" in 2023 and someone took up residence within Russian borders on that basis, he would throw his lot with the Russians and run the risk of Russia reverting to its authoritarian ways. If he is a German national of liberal persuasion in 2023, so far he runs only the risk of AFD forming a government, which is probably less probable.The point is trivial, but somehow was missed anyway - borders matter beyond the immediate political horizon.
This seems similar to Fukuyama's "end of history" fallacy of the early 1990s. Everybody seemed to be happy with liberal democracy, so liberal democracy will carry on everywhere forever. Well, it has not.
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1 minute ago, Butschi said:
Seriously? I literally answered this in the next two sentences.
Do you agree that it invalidates your original point then?
It was "I do not care about what country I am a citizen of". Well, you do care yourself, if that other country could be Russia. So in fact, your original point should be narrowed down to "I do not care about what Western European country I am a citizen of".
Yet you expressed that in universal terms, without realising that it was a view limited in time and place to a specific corner of the world. That is the hidden bias I was talking about, which I am afraid colours the thinking about Ukraine a lot. They are not in Western Europe and have different perspective.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
Do you mean shadows like on aerial photos? They can really stand out. Good idea.