Maciej Zwolinski

No disagreement on that. I am fully convinced that the impression of urban combat as particularly difficult comes from it being so very slow and resource consuming for the attacker in terms of artillery, explosives, other ammunition. The fact, that the attacker does not suffer commensurately huge casualties in terms of human lives is the counter-intuitive outlier

Happy to oblige. David Rowland, "The Stress of Battle. Quantifying Human Performance in Combat", published by TSO, London, 2006, page 74. "Before moving on to the external trials, we conducted some initial historical analysis into WW2 urban combat in North-West Europe and Italy to provide a comparsion with field trials. It simply compared attack an defence casualties and yielded a surprising result, which is shown logarythmically in Figure 4.2 [MZ- will upload later]. Attack casualties were on average 0.28 of those of the defence" The chapter on statistical analysis of urban combat has 30 pages, so I can't post them all. If anyone has access to the book, it is very interesting, attempts to introduce variations such as type of prevailing cover, experience of troops etc.

My immediate reference for this is "The Stress of Battle" by David Rowland. The book was published in 2006, but I think the underlying analytic work was manly done in the Cold War period, so the counterinsurgency wars of XXI would not influence the findings.

Has that battle concluded though? During the 2023 summer offensive there was extensive fighting around Bachmut, with sufficient Ukrainian successes initially, that there was talk of Ukrainians encircling the city. Surely it should be included when discussing Bachmut and the consequences of defending it for as long as it was defended. And if we include that, then the fighting in the Bachmut direction in parallel with the Avdieyevka offensive until a couple of weeks ago, when Russians were taking back the Ukrainian summer 2023 gains should also be included, as it is also a direct consequence of the decision not to abandon Bachmut. So I don't think a comprehensive calculation of the gains and costs of the Bachmut battle can be made yet

Most of the statistical studies of urban combat confirm that the loss ratio between the attackers and the defenders goes towards 1:1 or even favours the attacker.

I noticed one response to this interview coming today from some US twitter users. They compared favourably Putin to Biden just on pure physical ability to sit and speak for long time, without getting physically exhausted and losing track of what he was saying. They did not even comment on the nonsense he spoke, just on the appearance. Obviously this reflects badly on the people who think in such superficial terms, but this is a fact: people who have insufficient knowledge to look to the merits of the message, see the US through the lens of its physically frail president. That is very unfortunate.

Of course. Has been done once, can be done now. I do not mean a full blown exchange between MAD capable countries. But let's assume a different scenario - e.g.NATO falls apart, the nuclear umbrella along with it and 20 years from now there is a war between Russia and one of non-nuclear capable East European countries. If that war goes badly for the Russians, a single nuke to the other country's capital would turn that into a Russian win. For example, I look at my compatriots, and I do not think we would have the stomach to keep fighting in irradiated ruins of cities. One nuke goes off and we would almost certainly surrender. Or some Muslim country finally managing to get the will and the means to nuke Israel. It is such a small country that it probably would not recover.

Technically speaking, this is incorrect at least since significant number of nuclear weapons has been produced. Winning a war through atomic bombardment is possible, and it would be a purely attritional action.

And with the defence/denial domination, the other presumption of mobile defence is also weakened - you cannot count on getting back the land you retreated from. For the Ukrainians, in the time period between the Kherson counteroffensive and today most of the tactical retreats have turned into permanent loss of land. The Russians have a better record of recovering lost ground but only because they are willing to waste an infantry brigade conquering a small village.

Ukrainians have not been shooting at Donieck proper for a long time. Nothing can be gained by that, it would be pure waste of ammo.

I am not seeing that contradiction actually. Zaluzny in his Economist interview stated the need for more troops, precisely speaking he identified as one of his 5 priorities creation of the ability to train and manage new troops. Nowhere did he contrast that with Zelensky's policy or declared his opposition to some idea of Zelenski. Similarly Zelensky has never publicly declared he does not want to extend conscription, with which Zaluzny's ideas could be contrasted. As far as I see, the entire perception that Zelenski and Zaluzny are at loggerheads re conscription comes from the commentariat. It would be different if Zaluzny said something which openly crititcised Zelenski's policy. But I see a different story - each time Zaluzny says pretty much anything, we hear a murmur of commentary: He is criticising Zelenski, he is against Zelenski. This could be Russian dezinformatsia for all we know.

Hang on, are those posts not a bit contrary to each other? Either the Ukrainians have cut off Russian forces which infiltrated into Avdiivka (in which case Avdieevka is one of the sides of the Kessel), or Avdieevka is being slowly conquered by the Russians. I mean, if Russians are physically in Avdieevka but are cut off they are not doing the conquering, they are doing all-round defence.

Could you specify what public statements by Zalushny brought you to that view?

He might have admitted that mistake, and of course he made mistakes we do not know of, but as I wrote, I do not think he is being blamed for any of them in particular by the public opinion. In other words, his mistakes seem to be excusable. Roughly at the same time as the interview, the Economist published two good opinion pieces about the Summer offensive which showed at least a part of the decision process and how the Ukrainian staff navigated between the options, resisted pressure from the US advisers to make a massed conventional mech attack, etc. - generally, that it was an extremely difficult if not impossible job. I think his mistakes are considered par for the course. Actually, I have trouble finding "public statements about what should be done in opposition to the administration he serves" by Zaluzhny. Could you specify which ones do you have in mind? I only remember Zelenski's administration throwing a fit about the word "stalemate" in the Economist interview, but that hardly qualifies as a reason for bona fide criticism.

I think this analysis overcomplicated. To me the conflict looks like more simple- just classic political jealousy on part of Zelenski and his trying to cut down a potentially more popular figure after he himself started loosing popularity. During the first phase of the war they worked very well together with Zaluzny directing the military and Zelenski taking care of morale on the homefront and in particular working the circuit of Western capitals bringing back pledges of support. Now Zaluzny continues to more or less deliver on his part (I do not think he is blamed much for the failure of the Summer offensive), while Zelenski has had no recent successes in his diplomatic efforts. He has also done some significant missteps, where he got into needless spats e.g. with the British. Zelenski is constantly conscious of his popularity or lack thereof. BTW I have not seen evidence of Ukrainian army displaying too much independence of civilian control, if anything shades of the reverse - Zelenski's govt micromanaging military objectivs for propaganda purposes, e.g. Bachmut's no retreat policy.

Mortars are not in the same range bracket. They do not do 20-40 km deep bombardment missions. Therefore, they can't be far from the front line and do not have a hope of avoiding counterbattery by range. Unless self-propelled, they usually have less sophisticated gunsights and are not breech-loaded: hence the weight of the round is limited to what the crew can manually hoist up in their hands and slide in through the muzzle. For all those reasons, mortars are not good candidates for a gun/howitzer substitute - they are extremely useful and usually in huge demand, but they supplement, not supplant what the proper arty does. Rocket artillery AFAIK nowadays Western rocket artillery has reached sufficient accuracy to do whatever gun artillery can do - but more expensively. Rockets are more pricey than rounds.

If it is an AI which is supposed to understand us better than we do ourselves, then by definition we would have no way of saying if it does well or not, if it indeed understands us better than us, or even if it understands us at all. We would have to go it on pure faith. I think religion is a better analogy than Foundation by that stage.

Well, as far as my knowledge of Marxist literature goes (and it is very patchy), that is exactly what Marx wanted to guarantee. The impulse for his theory of planned economy AFAIK was the desire to avoid the uncertainity and the crash-boom cycle of capitalism. So on the other hand, we have a previous negative experience of someone promising end of poverty, recessions and depressions, and we got a cure much worse than the disease. It is a good reason to be skeptical if an AI-provider can necessarily achieve better results with his software. Especially because a decision to turn over the economy to AI may well be irreversible without reversing back to subsistence agriculture.

Tatarenko killed in Crimea. How apt.

I do not see that coming. Wars are existential affairs for people and may be for the whole nations. They belong to the class of events which may induce people to give up their decision power pretty much in everything if they are really scared for their lives or personal security. Including appointing an AI as dictator. But all economy? Would people see it as desirable? Using a popular cliche, if my local terminal of the wise and benevolent AI tells me to "eat bugs and be happy" because it calculates that the resultant savings at the overall economy level can be repurposed for health service and it statistically extends my life expectation by half a day, I would tell it to F.O and pour a bucket of water into it just to be sure. Would a US president be more inclined to give up the choice of e.g. lowering taxes in a pre-election year? Or Stalin the possibility of tactically inducing starvation in some regions? I would think not. AI-controlled economy could be the basis for the ultimate planned economy, Marx' wet dream. Geographically and historically, in most cases though people tend to reject "strong" planned economies and prefer to retain a significant degree of economic freedom. Would AI superhuman management ability change that? I doubt so.

Gentlemen, I hate to repeat myself but when the drone discussion comes back again and again I cannot withstand the voices in my had screaming "it is in the book! It is in the book". https://www.everand.com/audiobook/636867143/The-Invincible Hard SF from 1964, so give it some slack - there are some typically anachronistic scenes, e.g.landing a spaceship looks like a cross between landing a Jumbo Jet and docking a ship. But otherwise brilliant. Link to audiobook, because English online bookshops for reasons unknown contains spoilers.

To be fair, it is objectively difficult to distinguish between a Russian airfield and a construction waste dump.

On a unrelated note - some of the footage of FPV drone attacks on tanks show the tank moving, making evasive maneuvers, being hit by one drone, still moving, hit again, and again and finally catching fire. It reminded me of something, but I could not define it. Today I found it: the footage of Prince of Wales and Repulse at Cape Kuantan, 1941. After similar experiences, US battleships were developed largely into the direction of floating AA batteries, with secondary shore bombardment role. Maybe that is the direction where the tank will develop as well - a platform with anti-drone weapons, which potentially can shoot up the enemy with a big cannon if it makes it as far the direct LOS.

An actual example. Ukrainians taught urban combat by the English complained that they were trained in accordance with the most recent experience of the army of His Brittonic Majesty, which is Afghanistan. The drills were very careful and would be perfect for a search of a house suspected of having a cache of weapons hidden among the civilians. In the Ukraine, the preference is to demolish a bulding with HE without clearing it at all. If this is not possible and the building has to be cleared, the first visitor to any room is a frag grenade. If the Brits tried to be tactful the above way, that would certainly make them less effective.