Rokko
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Posts posted by Rokko
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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:
I have no doubt that the picture is not what it seems to be. The easiest explanation is this is the Brigade HQ defense squad. I have no doubts that the Colonel in charge isn't being guarded by a bunch of disheveled mobiks armed with rusty AK-47s.
Steve
I like that explanation even better. So they are not only there to make the brigade look like a competent and capable military force but also to protect their colonel from said disheveled mobiks fragging him at the earliest opportunity.
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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:
I found a rather interesting Pro-Russian blog (Substack) from a link off of Ed's Twitter feed by the name of Big Serge:
https://substack.com/profile/102984907-big-serge
The analysis he does is fairly even handed and even insightful for the most part. He lets is political ideology slip through here and there, but in one section he derides both Macgregor and Kofman as being out of touch with reality; Macgregor because he's insane and Kofman because he's so optimistic about Ukraine and pessimistic about Russia. My guess is Big Serge thinks we're even more wrong than Kofman
In a way, Big Serge and Kofman are fairly similar in their outlook as both downplay Russia's deficiencies and highlight Ukraine's. Both believe that Russia can play the long game and win. Ironic that a critic of Kofman is making almost the same arguments.
The difference, though, is that Big Serge is inherently political and pro-Russian in his beliefs. He thinks Ukraine is a "failed state" acting as a puppet for NATO and that this whole war is NATO's fault. Yet the core of his analysis of the fighting isn't all that bad, in fact in some ways it's quite good.
In fact, some of his opinions are pretty much inline with ours here (i.e. Ukraine didn't retake Kherson, rather it obligated Russia to leave). He even admitted that he called the Kharkiv offensive incorrectly, though he gave himself credit for correctly calling out that Ukraine wouldn't be able to get much further than it did (he cherry picks a little about his mistakes, but still he admits making some).
For those who want an opinion that is pessimistic about Ukraine's military capabilities, yet isn't crazy deluded like Macgregor, I think it's a good read.
Steve
I remember reading a post by this guy and was also surprised by how relatively accurate it was. One thing I noted was his extremely low estimate for the initial RU invasion force, I think he even put it below 100k, which is way less than any other estimate I've ever seen, even after it became apparent how many RU units went into Ukraine extremely under strength, partially without their conscripts, etc. I assume this is to retroactively manage expectations and explain away the lackluster performance of the initial invasion force. If I remember right, he also has the usual lalaland estimates of UKR and RU casualties, like basically all pro-RU numbnuts. I suppose this is a required feature though, or else their world view would implode.
An interesting picture I saw a few days back. These exceptionally clean looking and well-equipped allegedly belong to the 155th NIB. Since they don't quite look like they belong to a unit that has been reconstituted 7 times and mostly consists of re-assigned Pacific Fleet sailors, that has been bashing itself against Vuhledar for the past weeks, I'd say I would dare to question this claim. Although I find the idea rather funny that the Russians have troupe of guys looking like RU wet dream of Speznaz for the purpose of dispelling rumors of extraordinary losses and assure people everything "is going according to the plan".
Another possibility might be, that even utterly trashed units manage to maintain a core (like a recon company) of veterans that are deliberately kept out of the typical human-wave meat assaults and retain some measure of combat efficiency.
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11 hours ago, The_Capt said:
I think it is actually more simple than this. If I could boil down the problem for the defender it is to become unsolvable. Every defence is a military puzzle whose biggest problem is human learning. If attacked, poked and probed enough, even the most vigorous defence can be solved given enough time. The game is to make the cost of solving it beyond the bank account of the attacker.
Even back in WWI the extensive trench systems, communications, rapid firing artillery and railways all conspired to make trench warfare unsolvable. Sides adapted, inventing airpower, tanks, tunneling and storm troops, all as way to solve for this defensive warfare. In the end one side simply was exhausted but someone would have solved for that type of defence eventually - we know this because the Germans did in 1940.
[...]
Within small wars we see this sort of thing "amongst the people", similarities between people and oceans are interesting. But unlike oceans, people appear to be able to suddenly freeze from the inside out as opposed to external factors. But this is another topic entirely.
As to Bakhmut, well currently the UA defence is still not solved. It is solvable, however, the question is how long and at what cost. The RA bizarre inability to learn is very much helping the UA right now, but no party last forever.
This is "puzzle solving" on a grand strategic, war covering, level, though. I am more wondering about what happens during the course of one, potentially very large attritional defensive battle over terrain that has no inherent strategic value spanning multiple months. To give an example, what happened between 1 July 1916, when the British Army suffered more casualties than on any other day in its history, and November 1916, when after the dust had settled, there was a roughly 1.4:1 casualty ratio (using Wikipedia numbers)?
Perhaps the puzzle analogy is useful on that layer as well, but the solving involves finding ways to move casualty ratios more in favor of the attacker until the defender is exhausted. There were some minor tactical innovations during the Somme, as well, such as placing troops well outside of their usual trenches and inside deep shell holes out in the open, which took the British some time to figure out (=solve this part of the defensive puzzle). But overall I would assume it always comes down to some combination of the factors I had outlined earlier and potentially others as well, i.e., destruction of fortifications, risky counter-attacks, growing attacker terrain and tactical familiarity/experience, etc.
QuoteSo in order to become unsolvable, a defence must become non-linear, adaptive and dynamic. Big problem in land warfare is that terrain does not work that way. Problem in air and maritime is that the physics of fluids work that way too well. I strongly suspect that unmanned systems, particularly ground systems could change this. Defence/Offence on land may start to look more like that in the sea - at best one can gain temporary control. Land warfare may be evolving towards denial of ground, the trick will be the right peice of ground at the right time.
This seems a bit vague, but probably points in the right direction. Although we may understand different things under non-linear, adaptive and dynamic. I would take it to e.g. include abandoning positions or parts of your defensive network once it can no longer be expected to allow you to inflict casualties to your enemy at a favorable ratio and instead move backwards into fresh fortifications and therefore "fresh puzzle territory" for the attacker, where he has to learn all the painful lessons again.
5 hours ago, Fenris said:Some more detail in this thread (I can't verify the accuracy of the details in the thread)
This being Russia, I assume the "calming" involved the use of strong sedatives?
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4 hours ago, The_Capt said:
The bottom line is that if you look at highly attritional battles against prepared defences losses ratios at the tactical level can get very high - the the opening of the Somme. However, over time those ratios tend to settle into around 2-1.5 to 1 losses agains attacker…until/if the attacker achieves break out, then the ratio will flip pretty fast. The major weakness of defence is that it is more rigid system, more tied to owning terrain in land battle. Once that system is cracked it can fall apart pretty quickly. However clearly the UA has not suffered this yet.
What would you say is the reason that loss ratios tend to become less favorable for the defender over time and what can be done to avoid or mitigate this?
A few hundred pages back I brought up the example of the Somme and gave my suggestions for the reasons to be roughly a combination of the following:
1. defensive fortifications degrade/get shot up and lose their effectiveness.
2. defenders have to (big question mark) have to conduct increasingly more risky and potentially desperate counter-attacks to regain shot-up positions which are then easily lost again
3. attackers gain familiarity and experience with the positions they are attacking, the defenders behavior, etc
My own - admittedly simplistic - thoughts on how to mitigate these would be to cede ground but slowly, a few kilometers at a time - unless you are fighting for some key terrain like Kyiv, of course, and not some generic part of french countryside (Somme) or some small city somewhere in Donbas. Instead of keeping on feeding reserves into an ongoing defensive battle and losing them at increasingly worse rates, use them to erect or reinforce new fortifications, a few fields/treelines/ridges to the back and force the attacker to assault fresh and unfamiliar terrain and defensive networks, thereby hopefully keeping your own advantages up.
Of course, giving up Bakhmut now (or even back in December) would mean to cede some rather favorable urban terrain, but as we have seen, most of the fighting of the last weeks took place in much less favorable, smaller villages and fields around the city itself - all fortified positions themselves, but generally not as good defensive terrain as a fighting for the city itself.
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Now this I found *very* interesting:
If true (that this is really their assessment) it would explain why the Ukrainians keep holding on to Bakhmut despite the enormous costs and risks. I think anyone would deem a 7-1 casualty ratio favourable under such circumstances. Whether this is actually accurate remains to be seen of course.
I have noted several times, though, that the Ukrainians often seem to release drone footage of flights which seem to have served no other purpose than to count mountains of dead Russians. Perhaps their baseline estimates are more accurate than we would think...
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1 hour ago, The_Capt said:
The Russians lost this fight in the first half hour, maybe less. It wouldn't matter what vehicles or tanks the RA had at this point. They were spotted and had beads all over them. Local UA forces have time to shift and react...the rest is pretty much adjectives.
Now this is clearly a probing action, but an assault in many way would be worse as it is more vehicles and many of them specialized. Which would bring down bigger and madder fires from the UA.
The the RA tries to manoeuvre, get watched while trying to do it...and gets killed. Repeat this all along the line for days and we start to see a pattern.
There seems to be not much that can be realistically done to counter this, no? From here on out, preventing the enemy from having small observation drones in the air is going to be impossible. So any assault is going to be spotted beforehand, more often than not. Suppressing enemy mortar positions seems more plausible, but for that you need your own observation drones and precision artillery (so at least impossible for RU in this war, for now). That may not help against this relatively new form of ultra-mobile long range artillery, though. But the mortars seem the greatest danger, simply due to their much greater availability and local response times.
It looks like Russians actually did find a counter: Keep sending more waves until the enemy is through their mortar ammo. Although this clearly does not scale/is not sustainable.
BTW, I don't really get why UKR keeps asking for fighter jets, it seems several trainloads of mortars plus ammo would benefit them much more and would be infinitely easier to achieve.
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On 2/7/2023 at 10:10 AM, Paper Tiger said:
You are my favourite person from now on. Thank you for making such a simple tool available.
I'm afraid I had a horrible computer crash a few years back and lost everything CM-related and now I can access all the campaign files and perhaps rework them.
Thanks
PT
Wow, stop making me blush! Your campaigns are works of art, by the way
21 hours ago, 37mm said:However, there's a few campaigns uncam doesn't seem to like including 'Hasrabit' which IIRC is one of yours (your first?). I could never get that one to uncompile (a shame as I wanted to do an SF2 playthrough & add a real stream to that first scenario).
Can you retry with the most recent version? I just checked with a file I found on this forum by googling and it got unpacked with no issue.
Or alternatively, send me the file causing issues, it may be a different version of the campaign than the one I found.
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39 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:
That is very interesting! Any explanation why the Russians have gotten better? Have they managed to obtain artillery advantage once more? Or are VDV/ Wagner tactics working?
30 minutes ago, kraze said:"Some volunteers" doesn't equal reliable.
If we suffered 1:1 losses - the town would've been lost by now.
It may be worse than what can be reasonably considered as acceptable for a defensive battle like this, though.
The way it seems to me, defensive battles become riskier and lead to increasing numbers of casualties for the defender over time, basically as prepared defenses, fortifications, etc. degrade and get progressively more shot up and therefore less effective.
Also, with deteriorating overall situation, individual positions probably get overrun more often (leading to high casualties), necessitating local counter-attacks, which is also riskier. In addition, the attacker has superiority in indirect fires (pretty much an established fact for Bakhmut), making *any* kind of movement riskier, i.e., especially these localized withdrawals and counterattacks.
The following are pretty much my own amateur conclusions and may well be off, but to me it seems the biggest mistake, so to speak, a defender can make is to stick in the fight for too long, fighting for too long to cling to or even recapture shot up positions, ruining the "exchange ratio" over time and messing up the attrition calculus, likely due to sunk-cost-fallacy. There are some harrowing descriptions in Storms of Steel from the Battle of the Somme that particularly stuck with me, of command sending company upon company into some totally untenable and destroyed position just to be smashed, either en route or on top of the previous occupants. Any resemblance of an effective defense from that point had long become impossible, as trenches had been smashed up, fields of fire altered by artillery terraforming, etc.
And this does not even include any form of operational collapse of defensive, as the enemy begins to bypass remaining strong points, as we may start to see in the near future or are already starting to see around Bakhmut.
EDIT: According to Wikipedia, casualty ratio for the entire Battle of the Somme was about 1.4:1, which seems pretty bad for a defensive battle and I'd wager that ratio much more favorable when the battle began in July and got progressively worse, as reserves were fed into counter-attacks and shot up positions
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Potentially noteworthy, 30th Mech apparently in action north of Bakhmut. Maybe it's old news but I've personally not seen this brigade mentioned in recent weeks, so it was possibly sent to reinforce this sector.
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1 hour ago, LongLeftFlank said:
Yes, as someone who called BS on the Devils Guard series from the moment I read it at age 16, that was my initial response too.
But if you want to persuade us this is fake, could you please (request, not an instruction)) skim the entire series of posts, starting from about April (it's about an hour of interesting reading), and then give us your sense as to why you conclude this is all an elaborate fabrication, and why.
No, really, skepticism is OK and I am genuinely open to being persuaded this is a highly sophisticated fake.
But my own (biased, flawed) gut is telling me that this Tennessee Academy dipdunk war whore is quite real, and while I suspect he won't survive this war given the brutal calculus in the SoF actions he is describing, I would love to shake his hand if he does.
So I skimmed through a few more entries and my alarm bells just kept ringing even harder.
There are zero specifics except for a few names of vague localities in Vietnam and Ukraine, except for a bunch of random weapon statistics. There isn't even a single picture in the entire blog I've seen. Not that selfies in airsoft gear like with that other goofball would make it believable, but even a random picture of a burning tank you can't find through reverse image search would make me drastically more inclined to believe any of this.
Also, guy is not only a 70-year old Vietnam vet still involved in active combat with SOF, he also fought in Syria with the SDF. A Thrice divorced, Russian speaking, steak loving badass, shooting Russians and ISIS guys at close range with his AK, call sign "lone wolf", it all reads like very cliché Call of Duty fan fiction.
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1 hour ago, LongLeftFlank said:
https://ukrainevolunteer297689472.wordpress.com/2023/02/05/the-rpgs-we-have-now-are-russian/
Old guy call sign AMAROK (lone wolf) is still dodging fate in the woodlands SW of Kreminna.
Appears they see a lot of potential for a general counterattack, which actually in some ways has been going on, depending on how you define it. Our space is a bit crowded right now.
The Russians are dispersing better than in the past and are trying to get tricky with their attacks. Seems they have some better guys on the ground now.
Tanks in front, infantry mostly behind and at the rear flanks. If they had been forward, it would have been a dubious task at best....
The Russians would be more effective if they placed their artillery in more confusing, staggered fire locations, but from what we have seen, at least, they tend not to do that. They also tend to keep their logistics close, at least in this forest, which increases the effectiveness of our counterbattery fire.
Is this guy even legit? The 70-year old Vietnam vet jogging around Eastern Ukraine writing a blog in his spare time bit just raises every red flag there is for me.
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16 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Further what is different about last summer is the lack of Russian artillery superiority. They used infantry assault then, but only after blasting an area into pulp with WW1 levels of guns.
From what I've seen and read in terms of estimates, we're still talking about a discrepancy of 5:1 of incoming to outgoing shells around Bakhmut. So the artillery superiority is not as crushing as last summer but still really bad. What's also different from summer is that now there is at least the possibility the Ukrainians may be deliberately holding back in favor of building up stockpiles for their own planned offensives.
Also, it looks like the ISW assessment of the Bakhmut offensive having culminated in December were premature. Serious cracks in the defense have been appearing since January and now, after almost eight months, I wouldn't be surprised too if the city itself falls by the end of February. I don't want to overstate the importance of this in the grand scheme of things, but to me it looks like the Ukrainians are in risk of having fought a months-long defensive battle with an ultimately unfavorable casualty ratio, if they stay in this particular fight too long now and risk their defense collapsing.
In other news, has this been covered here before? Russian "Marker" UGV being sent into Donbas for combat testing, basically an unmanned ATGM carrier by the looks of it.
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17 hours ago, akd said:
Some possible insight into "Wagnerian" tactics:
This all reads like Russia used its penal colony population as a kind of one-shot weapon to bludgeon its way through a fewer layers of defense around Bakhmut and to cause attrition to the Ukrainian defenders, with any exchange ratio of casualties being favorable to them, given that they're happy to be rid of them, anyways. Ultimately a successful measure from their perspective but short lived. Now even the dumbest prisoners have apparently wised up and the contracts of the remaining survivors are bound to expire. I wouldn't expect Wagner to honor these contracts at all, but even the threat of gruesome execution can probably motivate for so long without any other incentives for the cannon fodder, second class types.
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16 hours ago, Kraft said:
The city was pretty much encircled by day 3. So any orders at the time would have been to hold and make the Russians bleed on strongpoints as the real performance of Russias army was still overprojected.
Was thid really the case? I remember there being heavy battles for Volnovakha to the north well into March, which at the time seemed like the anchor of a potential escape corridor, if it could have been held.
I would also think any defensive plans for the Sea of Azov coast pretty much hinged on Kherson not falling in the very first days of the invasion and there may not have been any coherent contingency plan for the defense of Mariupol
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27 minutes ago, _Morpheus_ said:
It's definitely work as you describe, but I don't think russia has a lot of BMP-2 M versions (destroyed one by the unit on the video). I don't think russia give their best equipment for conscripts (there were not too many during Kharkiv operation).
They did equip the much vaunted 3rd Army Corps (which curiously has rarely been heard of since) with a good amount of T-90s and BMP-3s though, and that formation was apparently basically a collection of BARS battalions, manned by often old and barely trained volunteers in it for the cash. A part of that corps was also used during the Kharkiv offensive IIRC.
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13 minutes ago, Harmon Rabb said:
I'm interested if they are ethnic Germans or ethnic Russians with German citizenship.
From what I understand Germany has a sizable ethnic Russian community.
I've read an article conveying details, allegedly sourcing a German volunteer involved in translating during the interrogation of the two prisoners. One is supposedly a Russian-German with dual-citizenship, the other a formerly unemployed guy from Berlin with no prior military experience. Monthly pay is apparently around 7000 Euro, so quite expensive cannon fodder. I wonder, do recruited convicts paid as well or is amnesty after surviving 6 months the only incentive?
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On 1/10/2023 at 3:55 PM, Zeleban said:
Yes, in the original version of the video, you could hear their commander correcting their actions, counting the number of Russians in the trench, telling them where to throw a grenade.
I think increasing the grenade does not make sense. After all, even despite the fact that a person survived after a grenade explosion, he was still put out of action and could not continue active resistance. Increasing the size of the grenade will make it heavier and the throw range will decrease.
For grenades that are meant to be actually thrown, you are probably right. Although they're was an awful lot of bickering and back-and-forth back in HQ whether this or that grenade did actually kill the guy, or "is he still moving", which is probably also not great for the guys on the ground trying to press the attack, although in this case the Russians were so clearly outmatched that it didn't really matter.
For drone-dropped grenades, I've seen way too many videos of "missed opportunities", i.e. a grenade lands square in middle of a bunch of guys, but 4 out off 5 manage to scatter with minor wounds at best. But commercial drones dropping hand grenades is a crutch solution anyways implemented only for lack of any better solutions, that are actually available.
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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:
It is my hope that the reason we're not seeing a bigger effort to crush the Russians in the central Donbas front (Soledar/Bakhmut) is because there's something much grander in the works and Ukraine (correctly) doesn't want to get distracted by a bloody sideshow.
It is the second week of January and the weather is finally seeming like it will be stable for a while. Hopefully we will see if Ukraine is being sensible an taking some short term pain for a larger long term gain, or if there's something else going on that isn't as positive.
Steve
It seems that Ukraine has had a hard time stockpiling shells, HIMARS missiles, etc. before, so it would make sense to try and defend Bakhmut/Soledar on a "shoestring budget", even if that is a hard choice to make probably, trading lives for basically being able to save up shells and so on for later. I remember reading somewhere, e.g., that they had to kick of the Kharkiv offensive with only 1/5th of the stockpiled ammunition they had initially wanted for it. Also, back in July/August HIMARS were working overtime, when targets were juicy still plenty and the Russians were yet to take effective countermeasures. Now they appear to strike much more rarely. Curiously, most HIMARS strikes I've read about in recent weeks were roughly in the Melitopol direction. Maybe some "discrete" shaping operations are already underway?
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12 minutes ago, Zeleban said:
Shocking footage of the night assault on Russian trenches. Attention is drawn to the control of the assault group from the quadrocopter. They corrected the throws of grenades into the trenches. Also amazing is the fact that a person can survive a grenade explosion close to them (VOGs are much more deadly) GRAPHIC CONTENT.
This reminded me of another video, where two UKR soldiers can be seen clearing some busted trenches assisted by a drone for observation. One of them eventually goes down when a Russian throws 3 grenades at once out of his foxhole because they got too close. Back at the time I thought that it would probably make sense to practice drone-corrected hand grenade throwing for soldiers expected to clear trenches. It looks like they did that here to some extent?
Also, I wonder if hand grenades might have to the beefed up in size given the abundance and apparent effectiveness of body armor, although I dont know to which extent this is possible without becoming impractical for throwing/carrying.
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22 hours ago, Kinophile said:
They cant be in that dire straits that food rationing is a potential future thing...can they? I mean sure, sanctions are grinding in like dog **** into a white carpet, but Russia can feed itself.
I think?
I remember a post by grigb where he translated something said by "civilian Girkin" (Neyman or something?) about another consequence of Western sanctions being a lack of modern seeds for planting and the Russians, having neglected to develop any on their own, now having to resort to older types of seed with less yield. Maybe related?
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Just out of curiosity, I've played around with ChatGPT AI program today and at one point asked it the following question:
QuoteHow would a war in the not too distant future likely play out, in which Russia attempts to invade Ukraine?
Below is the answer it replied with. Note that this AI has apparently been trained exclusively on data available up until the end of 2021, so it knows nothing of what really happened during the current year.
QuoteIt is difficult to predict exactly how a hypothetical war between Russia and Ukraine would play out in the future, as there are many factors that could affect the course of such a conflict. However, based on the current state of military technology and geopolitical dynamics, it is possible to make some educated guesses about how such a war might unfold.
One potential scenario is that Russia would attempt to use its superior military capabilities, including its air and missile forces, to quickly overwhelm and neutralize Ukraine's military defenses. This could involve a combination of air and missile strikes, along with ground and naval operations, to isolate and destroy key military targets and seize control of key strategic locations in Ukraine.
Once Russia had established a foothold in Ukraine, it would likely attempt to use its superior military capabilities and logistical support to maintain control of the territory and suppress any resistance from Ukrainian forces. This could involve a combination of conventional military operations, irregular warfare tactics, and psychological operations to maintain control over the population and prevent the emergence of a united resistance.
In this scenario, it is likely that Ukraine would face significant challenges in defending against the Russian invasion. Ukraine's military is smaller and less well-equipped than Russia's, and it would struggle to compete with Russia's superior air and missile capabilities. Ukraine would also face significant logistical challenges in sustaining a prolonged conflict, and it would likely rely heavily on support from NATO and other international partners to help defend against the Russian invasion.
Overall, a hypothetical war between Russia and Ukraine in the not-too-distant future would likely be a complex and challenging conflict, with significant consequences for both countries and the broader international community.
It's basically a summary of the many and often incorrect assumptions and estimations about Russia's capabilities that were floating around before the war, although I do find it interesting that it accurately "predicts" how heavily Ukraine would have to rely on NATO support, especially since it was hardly guaranteed before the war that NATO would in fact end up supporting Ukraine as resolutely as it ended up doing.
Anyways, it's a fascinating tool and I encourage everyone to give it a spin:
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A Ukrainianism that slipped through translation? Fun fact: In WW1 times, mortars were also called "mine throwers" in German.
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Russians must be in awe of UKR organizational talent. Not only did they manage to capture a city that voted 99.99% to be annexed by Russia without a fight, they even managed to bring along hundreds of civilian crisis actors to cheer them on while they strut around in the place.
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How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
The rationale for holding on to Bakhmut continues to elude me. The only thing I might understand is to force the Russians to stay on the offensive, i.e. they can't give up the assault for political reasons and staying on the offensive forces them to continue wasting resources that won't be available for countering any UKR offensives. Had they taken Bakhmut a few months ago I would have suspected the Russians to happily start their next death grind towards Kramatorsk, but now they are probably "on edge" enough to stay on the defensive after Bakhmut falls.
On another note, I've been under the impression that Ukrainian CB has been rather weak around Bakhmut basically for the entire duration of the battle, unlike in other areas like Vuhledar, Avdiivka, etc. With RU artillery being apparently particularly concentrated around Bakhmut, I would have thought this area would be a rather obvious candidate for attriting RU artillery capabilities, or am I missing something/under some wrong impression?