Maciej Zwolinski

Yes, do the Cannae thing!

Bobby Fischer used to do this as well in chess. Worked on the Russians.

A musical commentary on the claim that the Russians lost over 200 K dead.

Assuming that attack is aimed at making Russians react and commit reserves before the big UKR push in the south, northern flank over Bachmut is ideal for this. If the Ukrainians break through to Paraskoivka, then they can go everywhere - south hook to cut off Russians in Bachmut, north to Sloviansk to hit the RUS in the Sloviansk direction from behind, north east to Soledar to start cutting off the Sloviansk force in a cauldron. The Russians will not be able to not commit in the face of such danger.

My inference from the same facts was exactly the opposite, that they are using all those wheeled vehicles as battle taxis and therefore they will be used dismounted for the breaching phase of the operation. We will see.

On the other hand, PzH 2000 is praised for the thicker armour than other SPGs, which seems to make an appreciable difference to Ukrainians. So it stands to reason, that an MBT's armour would do better still.

No, because Russians actually do have NCOs commanding squads per TOE (sergeants). My point was not about the Russian actual TOE, but more generally, that the nominal rank of the man does not imply if he is good for a particular job outside of the context of his army. In Wehrmacht platoons were commanded by Leutnant officers or Feldwebel NCOs - so what? But of course the function must be assigned to someone. Do you think RUS squads command themselves? I think you might have picked the wrong level to show where RUS army really lacks NCOs in the sense of the function being not exactly unfulfilled, but collapsed with other functions and thrown at the men who already has too much to do. Platoon is a platoon, but according to our guys, Russians have too few men in the staff functions at the battalion and brigade level. And the missing people are indeed professional NCOs who in NATO armies support junior staff officers, who in Russian army have to do all those jobs themselves. Which negatively impacts quality of staff work. PS. Russians do not have a function named assistant squad leader, but I do not think it matters. There are 6 dismounts in full size squad, there is no reason to think that the man commanding them would be overwhelmed. PPS. This is about full TOE comparison. At this moment in the war a bigger problem for Russians is that their junior leaders have to a large extent been killed off. But my point stands, as having officer or NCO rank does not make one more or less bullet resistant.

This is a popular opinion coming from the active US or UK military personnel, but people who are more familiar with the post-Soviet system (or other systems) are sceptical of it. Actually, if a necessary function in the unit is taken care of, it does not matter if the person doing it is called an officer, NCO, warrant officer or however you name him. It is just that in the US/UK system the NCO is someone who his appointed for his post for a long time and may generate lots of experience, while a junior officer is someone who does this function briefly and then in a relatively short time goes on to more senior things. But this is just a quirk of the military career path adopted in some (maybe most) Western militaries - equally well one could have the same job fulfilled by professional junior officers of long standing.

Are you sure? I thought it is the other way round -I read the Offensive Guards are more of infantry type organisations, so more likely to be used in the breakthrough rather than exploitation.

I doubt it, It did not work like that in WW2 - all literature from the period references the strong camaraderie bonds between Red Army soldiers forged at the front, to the extent that it probably is not entirely made up. And it is the common participation in the dangers and deprivations of the actual fighting which is mentioned in the memoirs as the source of the bond, rather than anything happening during the training. So it must be something capable of spontaneously arising, at least for the people sharing the typical Russian mentality of that time. On the other hand, it was reported that the US soldiers struggled psychologically to fit in units in which they had not been training, but arrived as replacements. Also, Americans were recorded by the Germans as not bonding well with other Americans at the PoW camps (relatively to other nations). So there may be more general psychological issues impacting this.

Also, while their armour is old, it is thicker than SPGs. They must be more resistant to counterbattery. Actually, in the era of counterbattery fire which is everywhere and arrives accurately in minutes having MBT level protection on your indirect fire assets would be very useful. This may be an interesting lesson from this conflict for the future.

That might have been the point of the attack if it was false flag - to strengthen the image of Putin as a courageous man who is not afraid of personal danger, as opposed to the image of "bunkrovyj died" - "the old man in the bunker"

Note it is armed with the most terrible of Russian weapons, the entrenching tool.

I am sure the local Ukrainians will find ways to make money out of those mines. Sell the casings for scrap and use the explosive as fertilizer, or something. They are extremely enterprising people.

More likely, the risk of a T-14 breaking down on the Red Square again was too much for Putin to bear

Also, very short after the Kremlin droning there was another film by Prigozhyn, where he said that it is not time for talking nonsense about nuclear retaliation, but about people responsible for the air defence not working. My personal theory is that Prigozhyn may be behind the drone attack, and making his move to improve his position in Kremlin elite in the wake of likely recriminations following Ukrainian successes. Note he has been saying for some time that the UKR offensive will be successful, which probably reflects his real asessment - he would look a coward by predicting success of the enemy, if it is not confirmed by the events.

It did not work. I think the number of people honestly thinking of themselves as communists or socialists right now may be higher in post communist satellite countries now, than it was at any time between 1950 and 1989. Of course, they are mostly kids with their hair dyed blue and Pokemon avatars getting their Marxism lessons from Tik Tokers in the US hardly older than their audience. During the Warsaw Pact time it was sufficient to have a look around you to see that communism sucks ***, and now that kind of first hand experience is sorely missing. The system was sustained by a large group of people who were co-opted by it and considered that their personal fortunes tied in to the communism, and by the threat of Red Army intervention CzechoHungarian style. Once the threat became unlikely, and the Militia officers realised, they will be better off by buying a second hand Western TV on a free market than by exploiting their elite privillege to get a coupon for a Rubin TV set which requires a sand bucket nearby at all times in case it explodes, communism was dead in a few months.

Or broken without consequences. There is a lot of work on the defence side, and pays much better than the government rates for prosecution work.

From the Ukrainian side there have been many concurrent opinions, that a big item in the Russian plan how to defeat the coming offensive is massive use of airpower. We can expect Ukrainians to shoot all available Hrims at the airports at the beginning of their attack.

Jeez, mate, that whole insurgency was full of civilian targetting terrorists, maybe the least appealing "liberation" cause since Mau Mau...

They are really taking the Kursk analogy to the extreme.

I have always suspected that this theory overdoes the psychological block idea and have always favoured the alternative explanation- that the soldiers had been trained in single fire at visible targets during the basic training, they did not have modern assault rifles anyway, so when they were asked to engage a target described as "the treeline" or "those buildings" without any visible enemy they literally saw no point of shooting at the scenery with individual shots, and just went through the motions to appease the NCO. So my guess would be that modern soliders are less reluctant to shoot for suppression because they have assault rifles which shoot a bullet with every trigger pull, and that makes more intuitive sense than shooting 1 bullet every 10 seconds because you have to work the bolt to reload in the meantime. That said, I do not think that the phenomenon of non firing soldiers ever applied to close combat. At those ranges it is more like the issue of fight or flight reflex taking over in the flight mode

For both questions, it is 1979 war with Vietnam AFAIK

No, today the pendulum swung much more to the other side. Giving any opinion on Werhmacht other than it was useless will set crack and motivated teams of Wehraboo hunters on you.

Does it? Looking at the current performance of Russian army, don't you see there a lot of what German generals wrote about? Lack of concern for own troops, lack of concern for civilians, lack of training, unreliable officers, butcher generals, unimaginative tactics, shoddy logistics, drowning the enemy with massed infantry attacks, etc. etc.? I think it would be a very unlikely coincidence if that description was false at the time when the Germans wrote it, yet unexpectedly became true in the 2020s when a lot of people expected proffessionals kitted out in Ratnik gear, toting AK-12s, supported by Armatas