Maciej Zwolinski
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Posts posted by Maciej Zwolinski
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4 hours ago, Letter from Prague said:
Haiduk if you don't like Western values then return all the Western help you've got. Maybe some country that doesn't have the LBGT and genders will help.
Let me think of some of those for you:
- Russia
- China
- Hungary (currently blocking EU aid)
- USA with Republicans in charge (currently blocking US aid)
- Hamas
- Iran
well seems you're out of luck. The people with your values do seem to be on the other side of the war. Maybe you should listen to you buddies Musk and Trump and Orban (who hate LBGT and genders as much as you) and just surrender.
That attitude is a huge mistake - this is what keeps the ranks of the West's enemies are always full. If the only ones who are worthy of support are those who share the - rather unique- views of the West on social issues such as homosexualism, religion, ethnic minorities etc. then it is no wonder that finding allies in places such as Africa and Asia is difficult. Kabul University tweets about graduation of the gender studies class a couple of months before the Taliban stormed Kabul come to mind. It is an unforced own goal on part of the West.
If the aim is to defend the post-Cold War order against an attempt to change borders by force of arms, then every victim of aggression deserves to be supported, regardless of his social policy. Think Kuwait 1990-1991.
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1 hour ago, Letter from Prague said:
I'm more curious about the GPS spoofing and other ECM. If Russians can make GPS guided munitions useless, the whole Western strategy of pounding things to dust with PGMs is kind of falling apart.
Targeting method must be different. Guidance based on GPS has always looked like a temporary solution - this is the universal navigation system used by literally everyone and for which millions of engineers worldwide produce all kinds of devices also in enemy countries. The knowledge how to jam it must be widespread.
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13 hours ago, JonS said:
Quite a bit. I havent yet seen a lot of evidence of drones being used offensively as part of go-forward combined arms maneauvre.
Instead we see they're being used as mobile mines or battlefield assassination tools. Which is genuinely really problematic, but also kind of a dead end street.
Kofman in his latest podcast which is focused on drones proposed a reason, why it is significantly more difficult to use drones in support of a go forward maneouvre. He says that Russian ECM is effective and droning Russian defensive positions requires operating within the umbrella of ECM emitters emplaced in the RUS trenches, where drones will work significantly worse. He says that the drones really can shine when engaging units which are on the offensive and have left the ECM cover.
Kofman in general praises Russian ECM and for example, he says that GPS guided munitions have been generally degraded. Excaliburs are left unused in some units, and Ukrainians are asking for GMLRS with DPICM warheads which may still do damage despite the missile being spoofed by ECM and going off course.
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6 hours ago, Tux said:
Ju-87s were militarily next-to-useless but their psychological impact on the enemy was out of all proportion to the actual threat they posed, almost entirely due to the sirens that sounded as the early models attacked.
Where did you get the idea? They were very effective as tactical bombers, only vulnerable to interceptors due to low speed. Where the enemy air cover was absent or not effective, StuKas worked very well.
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11 hours ago, Offshoot said:
I just looked on AliExpress and ethanol detector boards can be had for a few dollars a piece. Sensors for methanol and antifreeze might be a bit more expensive.
A drone homing in on ethanol in exhaled air practically guarantees a hit on Russian soldier.
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2 hours ago, Butschi said:
Frankly, though, I never got the "joke" in Ukrainians or any other Eastern Europeans using Nazi symbolism.
I think the "joke" becomes more apparent in the context of the Soviet Union, when huge part of books, films and art was specifically about Wehrmacht being the worst enemy of the Russian man. And in order to underline the heroism of the Russian man, sometimes (particularly at the beginning of those films/books) the German soldiers were portrayed as extremely well trained killing machines, while the Soviets as victims and well meaning, self-sacrificing amateurs with basic weapons. And of course the atrocities of the Werhmacht and Waffen SS were played up.
So the symbolic message of painting a Waffen SS divisional symbol on a tank or a helmet I would read like a combination of <<Russians, I hate you, I am your worst nightmare, I am a superior soldier and a human being in general, your weapons are no match for mine, and I will take revenge on you with horrible deeds straight out of "Go and See">>. I have no doubts it may be an attractive message for a soldier in this war. Obviously, a hard sell to someone watching news in the West.
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11 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
And my wife wondered why a Russian soldier would push a doorbell on a tree.
He was hoping for a door to Narnia, where no barrier detachments or sellers of polonium tee would find him.
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9 hours ago, G.I. Joe said:
Not sure I can really agree with that...now feels like a good time to make a callback to @sburke's comment about extremism and reason. If I were running a unit in a professional armed service of a democratic nation, I wouldn't want to try to integrate a bunch of personnel who might have serious issues serving alongside and taking orders from men and women who might be of a different ethnic origin, follow a different religion (or no religion), be LGBT, etc. Far too much potential for disruption of good order and discipline.
For an army in the time of peace, that reasoning makes a lot of sense. However I do not think that a country fighting an existential war would be so picky, if the nationalists actually follow their ideology and volunteer for service. And values such as machismo and hatred for the foreign enemy may actually translate into high combat morale, being more valuable than the ability to easily get along with women or sexual minorities. There is a lot of literature about people becoming good soldiers in war often being poor soldier material for a regular peacetime army.
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9 hours ago, panzermartin said:
So the denazification is not a total lie after all but it is known that war attracts the most primitive/far right elements from both sides
There is no better use for far right elements than to draft them into the army and let them fight some other nation. They are supposed to like it.
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22 minutes ago, dan/california said:
What does it say?
"Madiar is a homo"
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7 hours ago, dan/california said:
I don't think he liked the answer...
He would try to surrender if he had any sense. Better to be the butt of a Ukrainian joke than the butt of a Russian rifle, which I am pretty sure he is going to get if the platoon/company commander catches up with him.
On a more serious note, one of the few things which could explain this refusal to surrender which sometimes borders on madness is the belief that Russia will eventually win and all prisoners will be repatriated like von Pannwitz' Cossacks and will meet a similar fate to the repatriated von Pannwitz Cossacks.
That, or those particular soldiers who refuse to surrender are guilty of attrocities and are afraid of Ukrainian revenge more than anything.
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3 hours ago, Haiduk said:
Day cadres from this place - UKR operators laugh over Russian driver, who sits near the pound and probably thinks how much money HQ will grab from him for sunken vehicle and how much strong he will be fu....d.
"Oh BTR of the lake, tell me your wisdom: how to get the hell out of here?"
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57 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Did he say why?
Not yet, he keeps mentioning a future episode discussing drones in more depth.
Although the comment about drones being better on the defensive usually appears in comparison to conventional artillery, from which I deduce that pursuant to Koffman it is the tube artillery which has offensive advantages. My guess is he refers to the fact, that during an offensive against enemy hiding in field fortifications, artillery needs to shoot up trenches, which requires large amounts of HE on target in short time, which drones cannot match, and anyway it would be uneconomical to try to do so .
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1 hour ago, Offshoot said:
Given both cases of changing target, I'm curious if the software has been tuned to prioritise moving targets and if that is a good thing (e.g. breaking off to chase a soldier rather than going after the high-value vehicle).
Very likely. Giving priority to the moving targets is the basic overkill avoidance logic.
12 minutes ago, Carolus said:And also, if this is the case and they become more common, what contraptions the Russians will come up with to try and spoof the drones - cope-cages could be joined by cope-carousels or carriage footmen.
Don't think so - logically, the first step is recognition of the shape of soldier or vehicle, moving vs non moving comes into play when there are several things of the right shape to chose between. The most cost-effective camouflage would probably be breaking up the shape
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9 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
It's interesting that we started this war totally impressed with how artillery could be better directed by drone. In this video I'm reminded how ineffective artillery is, compared to drones, against fast moving targets no matter how well directed it might be.
Steve
For a couple of months already Kofman has been commenting about drones being one more thing which is more helpful on the defence than on the attack. This may be one element of it, the attackers being the side which moves more.
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13 minutes ago, FancyCat said:
Syrskyi has stated the same as Zaluzny no?
I am not sure. I remember Syrski saying that there are many soldiers not used properly, assigned to rear area duties or kept at places without active fighting, like the Bielarussian border etc. who could be reassigned to frontline units. That may indicate that he is more malleable re. mobilisation and more willing to make do through these reassignments. I don't know if there is a specific English term for such activity, but I believe in German it was called Heldensuche.
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43 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
I wonder how much of the decision to do a wholesale military leadership change was based on some of the fundamentals that Kofman points out haven't been improved by the previous leadership. It would appear manpower generation, at the very least, is something that is seeing early and significant attention.
If the speculations about the reasons for Zaluzny's removal are to be believed, it was rather the other way round. Zaluzny was rumoured to be pushing for new round of mobilisation, and Zelensky to be refusing it because of the mobilisation's unpopularity.
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27 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Gawd, I am sorry but Kofman has built an entire career on being an academic contrarian - a conversation of "reconstitution rate, relative to observed attrition, and time required to generate additional formations..." Is really just all components for answering the fundamental question of "when will Russia run out?"
So "when will Russia run out?" is the "wrong conversation." The right conversation is "when will Russia run out?"
I think he means that technically speaking, Russia will probably never exactly run out of war material, because before that happens it will reduce consumption/exposition to risk when faced with a shortage. Therefore one can not just draw a graph with one line representing average production, the other average consumption and at the point where they meet, the Russian army will stop firing guns or have no more tanks. He says this in all his podcasts in particular whenever ammo production is discussed, so I am fairly confident this is what is meant here as well.
And whereas the Russians can decide to reduce the firing rate/usage rate pretty much at will, they cannot increase the production rate by will alone, therefore the replacement rate is the more objectively observable variable.
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1 hour ago, The_Capt said:
So much of war is about projecting dilemma. So load up surface unmanned with air self loitering munitions. Make it a surface/air attack.
And throw in a torpedo or two, even light ones. A ship manoeuvering violently at full speed to avoid a surface drone will not hear anything on its sonar, active or passive. A stealthy carrier drone able to release a torpedo within several kms off the target would be a perfect crime.
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1 hour ago, ASL Veteran said:
I read somewhere that Ukrainian males aged between 18 and 26 can't be mobilized / aren't draftable or something although they can choose to enlist if they want to. I've also read / heard that the average age of a Ukrainian soldier is something like 44 years old - which is nuts. You can't even enlist in the US army if you are older than 35. If true, it sure seems like the individuals that you want most are the ones that can't be had for some unknown reason
The reason is crystal clear. 44 year olds do not have many children, usually. The Ukraine has dire demographic situation and does not want to be in the position, that it survives the war but has nobody to replace the population gap. To put it crudely, it protects the breeders.
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5 hours ago, Kraft said:
Its about 1 km on foot over an empty field from Stepove to Berdychi, even without artillery that would barely work given FPV and a few MGs to hold them in place. Then another 1km before they can really touch defensive positions properly.
They could do it at night, but Bradleys there have thermal so even more disadvantage. According to the marks there, they tried to cross on foot too and received drones.
That assessment assumes that the Russian's one BTR was actually trying to assault Berdychi and needed to cross the entire length of the Sadowa street to Centralna street (BTW Polish names on the map are very helpful) to debus on top of Ukrainian positions.
I on the other hand assume that the single BTR was recce'ing (bcause it was single) and the Russians would actually do a better job at that infiltrating on foot e.g. along the trees of Sadowa or even going just through the fields, getting some MGs to unmask as per your example, and calling artillery on their positions.
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1 hour ago, The_Capt said:
What is interesting is what was missing (or at least I did not see any): mortars or artillery. And they really did not need them. I guess FPVs are basically flying mortars with cameras now.
On the Ukrainian side, they were not necessary. Bradley was shooting up the BTR first, then the soldiers hiding behind it. Even the bombing by the drone was superfluous - in a couple of minutes the Brad would have chewed up the Russians anyway
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41 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
This just shows how bad Russian training is. The SOP for coming under fire like that should be to disperse in different directions and seek whatever cover is available, then somehow consolidate when it's less 'splody.
Why did they even attempt this death ride in a BTR of all things? Particularly In the absence of UKR artillery they would be better off scouting on foot
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1 hour ago, Zeleban said:
Poor farmers in Poland. I always remember their emaciated, exhausted faces from malnutrition during rocket attacks on Russia. At these moments I feel a little better - it turns out there are people on earth who suffer more than me.
They are not emaciated, and they should not be. Poland was willing to transfer a very significant part of our military equipment, accept a huge number of refugees, pay for Starlink terminals, act as one of the most active diplomatic supporters of the Ukraine, etc. We even took an Ukrainian SAM which killed 2 Poles and desperately tried to pretend it was Russian missile until we could not pretend anymore. But why gut a significant part of agricultural industry? That is unnecessary and a step too far.
Especially since - as far as we know - in the Ukraine the grain export is a business of equally not emaciated and well nutritioned oligarchs and multinationals, who would like to make a better margin through cutting transportation costs and dumping the goods immediately after crossing the border. That is not a very appealing cause.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
But my point is that not only liberal democracies should be allies against a country which uses a war of aggression as means of policy and wants to upset the political balance. First things first - let's fight the aggressor together with everyone who wants to protect the status quo and principle of peaceful resolution of international disputes, and then the EU can drag the Ukraine over the coals over fulfillment of accession criteria. They are different things.