Livdoc44

A New Dig Has Revealed Bodies From a WWII Massacre in Ukraine
New Lines Magazine

Reconciliation of old wounds in an honest and open manner is vital in progress to true friendship. It sounds pat, but it's true.
I say this as an Irish boy who grew up in the shadow of a vicious sectarian war to the North. I remember vividly when someone explained "kneecapping" to me - and why the IRA had been done it to a boy of 15, the same age as me. Later as a young adult I observed the slow, tortuous and seemingly intractable process towards peace. For the longest time it was deemed impossible by a huge majority and yet here we are - the IRA functionally dead, the British Army gone and an actual democratic system in place (however dysfunctional it can become).
Shifting eastwards and backwards in time and place, I learned about the end of WW2 in eastern Europe, a shadowy and unspoken coda of horror that echoed the greater horror in a fractal manner - smaller but perfectly replicated in its violence and vileness.
One thing that always struck me was how Soviet Russia made a point of turning Polish & Ukrainians violently against each other, fanning the flames of ethnic hatred in an utterly cynical and brutal manner. My Ukrainian-born mother-in-law (although she now identifies as equally Polish) has told me of what her father went through, how the Russians stood aside or stepped in as it suited them to the murderous detriment of families on both sides of the "border".
The key take-away from this article is in the fourth paragraph: 
And the last few:
Russia loves when its victims fight each other. Denying that is an act of power.

Yes, but at the moment I am guided by the 0.7 liters of Madeira I drank. Rain outside the window, live concert of Depeche Mode 1993. And the lack of obvious successes of the Ukrainian armed forces. 
Many of my childhood friends are afraid of this call. But I think. that this is the duty of everyone who lived carefree in the 90s

We will try and negotiate with it.  The threads of this negotiation are already there.  The narratives of “Silly Ukrainians, Silly Russians” are all basically saying “well sure, in Ukraine…but we would do it better”.  This sort of collective denial will be subtle and deep, at a cultural level.
Then as evidence mounts we will try and take these new technologies and bolt them onto our existing systems and doctrine.  In the west, our military tactics and units have not really changed that much since WW2.  The TF/BG concept has had all new tech bolted onto it and Unmanned will be as well.  We will spend billions on counters to try and protect that old concept.  But as you note we won’t be able to, the shifts are too big.
Next, we will get all “out of the box” and create experimental units and doctrine that looks good on the surface but in reality is designed to fail.  This will validate that the old orgs and doctrine were right all along.  We normally do this by half-measures - we do not build a complete coherent experimental system.  We just take away the old stuff.
Then we will hit a forcing function.  A real world disaster that we cannot negotiate with or ignore.  It will cost a bunch of teenagers their lives.  Then we will scramble to try and realign.  It will be expensive and brutal.  After that, well the whole thing becomes a dice roll.  It didn’t have to be, but this is where sunk cost fallacies get you.
Air-Land warfare has changed.  More, it is continuing to change.  It isn’t just the pace, it is the depth.  Fundamentals and foundational principles are challenged (eg Surprise, Concentration, Mission Command).  This is not simply “a better tank killer”, this is stuff that breaks force ratios, tempo, and basic utility of what we thought was combined arms.  The death of how we used to do minefield breaching ops is just the latest in a very long line of doctrine that look more and more obsolete.  I strongly suspect that joint warfare as a whole is shifting under our feet.  RMA has finally landed with a big enough bang to get our attention.
What will follow the Russo-Ukraine war will be a decade long argument.  But in the end, everyone in charge will have come up in the old system.  Further, we do not really promote radical Tesla-type disruptors to be GOs in modern militaries.  So we are looking at a pretty conservative bunch steeped in a conservative military culture and doctrine.  Oh, and with a trillion dollar defence industry tooled for stuff we had for the last 80 years.
Not a good start.

You are baiting me, right?  “Why they fail” is because this guy has zero idea what he is talking about.  Maybe less than zero.  As in, people lose knowledge just by watching his video.
Starting with the flail is the first hint.  A flail is for admin and rear area clearances.  I know some militaries still have them on assault vehicles but everyone in the business agrees they are dumb.  On the modern battlefield the flail is suicide anywhere but clearing parking lots for Bde HQ.  
Minebots - IED work, not for combat clearing.  At least not yet.
Rollers.  Ok, these are not designed to work in isolation.  In fact it is his entire problem.  Minefield clearing is a team sport.  This guy is pointing to player positions and trying to figure out which one is best at “playing football”.  Plough and rollers are the primary breaching systems.  Rollers are designed to 1) detect a minefield, normally through a strike, and 2) prove a minefield after a plough tank has done a breach.  
Every plough tank can only clear a safe lane “that every one must follow”.  Sorry bald YouTube guy we have yet to invent an area clearance plough.  Ploughs are at the center of mechanical breaching.  But they are also tricky and terrain dependent.  Ploughs and rollers are designed to work together in a team.  With their friends, explosive breaching and engineering vehicles.
So opposed minefield breaching is one of the hardest operations to pull off.  Right next to amphib on the difficulty scale.  You normally have multiple breach lane attempts that use the mechanical and explosive systems. Explosive systems still need to be proven after the breach, normally by rollers.  And engineer vehicles for complex obstacles like AT ditches or dragons teeth in the middle of a minefield.  Adding more systems ups the complexity a lot requiring a lot of training and skill to pull off in the time windows needed to be successful.
Breaches fail when the breaching teams fail.  However that is why multiple breaches are done…we expect half to fail from the outset.  Further based on density and cover, one has to scale the number of breaches to try and get a single success.  In Ukraine the densities are so high we are likely talking double NATO doctrine: so Cbt Teams are likely shooting for 4 lane attempts instead of 2.  
Of course this violates concentration of mass restrictions we are seeing on the modern battlefield.  So one either goes small platoon bites and infantry infiltration.  Or establish conditions for a major breaching op, and risk most of one’s breaching assets.  Establishing those conditions has proven to be the hard part.
Minefield breaching operations as we define them in NATO are failing because the battle space is denied to concentration of mass.  RA ISR can even pick up large concentrations of forces and pick out the breaching vehicles.  We have not created the defensive bubble to fix that.  So minefield breaching is not failing because of individual systems.  It is failing because land warfare as we know it is kinda broken right now.  Until we either fix it, or figure out a new way to do these things…we are kinda stuck.

This is a primer on how to defeat us.  We are going to be limited to the wars where we can establish air superiority…and that is damned hard wrt UAS.  
It wasn’t the artillery in that video that was the central problem.  It was the video itself.  That entire RA armoured attack was butt naked to the sky and detected probably a zip code away.  Dropping the sky on it from a bunch of different systems was just the finish.  
I am not sure how to build a bubble around that assault in the modern era.  Even if, especially if, it was one of ours.  

Ukrainian version:
Russian version:
 

Another interesting one:
Raises some questions to me:
Have people started painting the top side of drones yet? That Zala was ridiculously easy to spot and would have been less so even if the topside was just matt green or something. Are drones so expendable it's not worth it? Is the EW capability there to allow the use of friendly drones but jam the enemy? Does the profusion of COTS drones on both sides prohibit that because they all share similar frequencies? How easy are drones to operate? How easy should drones be to operate? Assuming the operator/team was destroyed in that shack, how easy are they to replace? Are they specialists that need specific training, or can you grab anyone who played a modern games console? Or... does someone in the Russian army consider a drone, operator and team eating a precision munition an attritional win for them? Either way... someone should probably explain that counterbattery rules apply to them too. I can remember plenty of videos of Ukrainian drone operators being very careful about retrieving their drones. It would be interesting to find out how the Ukrainian drone was in the right place at the right time to pick them up. It could be sheer chance, but did they chase the Zala? Intercept it after getting information it was heading in x direction? Were they lurking in anticpation based on SIGINT?

Replace the pole with a tree and in CM it would hit every time! lol

Now this is a solid demonstrator for the advantages of cluster munitions over conventional.
 

Guys, gotta get out of your own heads. 
Russian strategic aims:
- Full subjugation of Ukraine, pulling it in as a puppet state a la Belarus. 
- Division and weakening of NATO in order to give breathing room within Russia sphere
- A united greater Russia under a new Czar
I don't care if Poppy Orange gets in and cuts off the taps - that up there is not going to happen without the entire world abandoning Ukraine, and whole lot more to be honest.  Could we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?  Sure, but it is a reach to see things failing that badly.  Even if we do abandon Ukraine, it is a country of 44 million and really...really...p$ssed off right now.  They will dig in and fight like badgers because they have seen what the alternative looks like. 
After Bucha et al, Ukraine is never going to embrace Russia.  NATO has secured unity and defence spending for at least a couple decades because now there is a threat that isn't a few idiots in white Toyotas in countries we didn't even know existed.  And Russia is a mess, and will likely remain one.  There will be no western normalization with Russia after this, or if there is, shame on us.
US Pol is not the driving factor in Russia achieving its strategic objectives (stated or unstated) in this war.  It is a driving factor in how badly they lose it.

Oh my someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed today.  I was more playfully talking about the pearl clutching and hand wringing "the half empty glass is breaking!!" sentiment, which appears to be spreading.  Long list of posts with that tone have your name at the top going way back, hence why I "pulled you in"...and you never disappoint!
So we have moved from the monolithic invincible Russia specter, to "how long can Ukraine possibly hold out?!"
As long as they want/need/have/can?  I sense you, and many others, are really struggling with the unknowns in all this.  Welcome to war.  It is a collision of certainties that create massive uncertainty.  The RA is a "shattered shell" of what we feared on 21 Feb 23 - you can debate that one all day but it is done.  It will take a decade or more to rebuild what they were shooting for back in the 10s.  They broke it all over Ukraine last year; talk about bad decisions.  But they can Defend - as the old Prussian also said, that part is easier, but it does not get the business done.
So how long can Ukraine "last" really depends on what they are doing.  Can they freeze this conflict in place - yeuup, the RA suicide-fest last winter proved that one.  Can they re-take all of former Ukraine...well, jury is still out.  Can, as a nation, they sustain a war longer than Russia?  Well we will see.  Are we talking low-intensity "we are all dug in and raiding now and again"?  Sure.  Are we talking insanely high intensity combat - well probably not, no one really can.
My main point is that just because you can't get answers you want does not automatically mean the worst is happening.  Based on what I can see (not imagine I am seeing, like fully functioning Russian rail systems pouring thousands of tons of supplies onto fat happy Russian defenders), the West is committed through the Winter at least.  If Ukraine can pull off a breakthrough and regain some momentum, they have a good chance at some serious gains- as we have seen in this war, no one cracks like the RA.
If no breakthroughs happen and all we get is very expensive leg humping, then I expect some difficult political conversations are on the table late-Winter, early-Spring.  Maybe we call it where it stands and everyone wins/loses.  Putin can claim the "greatest Russian victory since Bagration" as he retains an extra 6% of now-blasted and mined wasteland, that cost them 100k lives.  Russia can go back and lick its wounds while trying to figure out who to fend off NATO, who scored Finland and Sweden out of this deal - Russia got a pretty weak China...and the big stuffy animal filled with asbestos that is Iran.  Oh and lets not forget the BFF of North Korea - like being best friends with that weird kid who tortures bugs at recess while touching himself, and everyone tries not to notice.
Ukraine gets to stay Ukraine, starts laying mines - hey look they can do it too! And we wind up with a Korean solution.  Maybe Ukraine does not even get to enter into NATO or EU, but money and alliances will be created because containing Russia matters now - South Korea made it work pretty well and their capital is under gun range of one of the craziest MFs since his Dad.       
https://datacommons.org/place/country/KOR/?utm_medium=explore&mprop=amount&popt=EconomicActivity&cpv=activitySource,GrossDomesticProduction&hl=en
To my mind, that is about as bad it will get, at least as things stand right now.  If the West - especially Europe, cuts Ukraine lose entirely, then this whole show was a complete waste of time as Ukraine will not be able to survive for long without a massive reconstruction/investment effort - we let that happen, well we deserve what happens next. 
I know this is not the war you ordered, sir, but it is the one we got.

Russia really has been playing both sides down there.  They were pretty “ok” with Israel too, a lot of people with Russian family roots in Israel - ironic, they left because life was so crappy in Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel–Russia_relations
There is also the whole “anti-Nazi” thing.  But at the same time Russia has sided with al-Assad in Syria and played footsie with Hamas and others aligned with Iran.  It seems pretty complicated.
I honestly think there is daylight between these two wars on the Russian side of the equation.  It will likely have an impact on the Westerd side but I am betting it was a surprise to Russia and they are basically going to try and stay neutral.  Hamas is a tiny militant group by conventional warfare standards - something like 40,000 at the upper end.  Their capabilities are not zero but no AirPower or Seapower.  They are very likely to loom at the lessons of Denial in Ukraine and types to apply them but it is a very different dynamic.  
I mean the world is a crazy place so if hard evidence linking this latest Hamas action directly comes it will be surprising - given Russian history of strategy-stupid.  But I really do not expect it.  Iran, definitely.  That is the shoe to drop on this one.  Gaza is screwed.  Ground invasion and house cleaning is almost guaranteed.  Hell, Israel might go so far as forced deportation but then Egypt gets weird.  But if Israel decides to make an a example with Iran we could see a repeat of something like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera
Gonna need a bigger forum if that happens.
 

This whole thing is so ill-conceived it might have been dreamed up in Moscow.

New anti-Ukraine talking point on Twitter.
As someone who has been following this war for almost two years and his lost count of how many videos I have seen related to war in Ukraine. I politely disagree with Donald Trump JR.
 

Waiting for more details myself, but if confirmed this feels like Groundhog Day.
 
 

Very petty, that.

Going to speak out of school a bit - I have other jobs than just military faculty at a staff college.  I few years I came out of some higher level meetings with my boss - she is a simply brilliant civilian international lawyer type who is destine to run this country one day.  She had just got into her new job in our outfit so we were still getting to know each other.
The topic of discussion is not for here but it centered on how dangerous the world was becoming and how antiquated our Canadian theories of how it all worked were in the face of it.  Me and another military guy in the shop were going round and round on the unsolvable riddle that is Canadian Defence and Security.
Our boss broke in and said straight-faced "We should think about a strategic nuclear weapon program."  I think I peed my pants a little bit.
The old rules are buckling.  New ones will be needed.  The use of hard power, military power, as an extension of diplomacy is back on the menu, and that is not a vegan dish. 

I just finished listening to a long interview with Andrei Kozyrev, Russia’s first foreign minister from 1990-1996. He was pretty interesting to listen to. Two things that he said are interesting to mention:
He actually ordered his staff to search the archives from the previous years looking for any evidence for an agreement or treaty or even a discussion about an agreement or treaty with NATO to prevent or restrict its expansion.

No surprise to anyone here, there were none. At the time it was just not seen as a pressing issue to discuss. The story that one existed is made up out of whole cloth. But we knew that.

I know that's boring I just thought it was interesting hearing from an insider.
  He said the West is needlessly tying itself in knots over escalation. Not pushing hard and committing to promises risks escalation. Giving Ukraine what it needs does not. I'm not sure how perfect his analysis of that is but I have to respect his point at least some what.

He said we should not back Ukraine for as long as it takes to win but instead back them so they win as soon as possible! It was a super line. His point is that Putin wants the war to drag on and for Western support to waver. Instead we should get more weapons systems in their hands faster and push harder to give the Ukrainians everything they want and need to get this job done as quick as possible. You can listen to the interview here:
https://www.aei.org/podcast/the-insiders-perspective-with-minister-andrei-kozyrev/

Simply put, control of just over 1/2 of 1/3rd of the US government isn't really enough to stop what the rest of it wants. There  will be some delays in votes and some bumps along the way buy what has happened in the House is ultimately a good thing for Ukraine. The Putin wing of the House GOP caucus just tried to shut down the government, overstepped politically and failed. This coming week, there will be a motion to vacate the Speaker's chair and Democrats very likely step in to save McCarthy as there aren't really the vote in the GOP caucus for anyone else would take the job if they won it.
The price of that action will be aid to Ukraine. Finis.

Absolutely brilliant video.
Personally I enjoy cooking, I know how to make a pretty damn good steak. But when you go to cooking instruction videos on YouTube you don't generally see comments like this, because most people can admit they don't know everything there is to know about cooking.
When it comes to anything to do with the military/war, in my experience those videos attract a certain internet tough guy type, who being an internet tough guy knows everything their is to know about warfare. Because maybe he played Call of Duty or even watched Black Hawk Down 10 years ago. I'm not even talking about the obvious paid Russian trolls here.
Thank goodness for resources like this forum, where informed people can actually help people understand the situation on the battlefield.
And this is coming from someone who the closest they came to war was playing DCS and Arma on my PC. 🙂
 
 

I have been of this view since mid 2022. This labels me as a pessimist on this forum, although I have very badly wanted the Russians to hit their 'Uncle' point first, and quit, as they did in A'Stan, then Eastern Europe and then the USSR itself.
Unfortunately, the Arsenal of Democracy doesn't exist any more. There are probably as many or more cheerful Ukrainian Vikings capable and interested in becoming skilled machinists (or CAD draftsmen) than North Americans today, at a 10x population delta.  (And those in N.A. who do try to go into these fields are overwhelmingly Asian immigrants).
...The frat boys I went to uni with in the '80s who (unlike me, no I was the 'smart guy', too clever for all that) went to the elite banking jobs on Bay Street/Wall Street, and then on to private equity. Pretty much everyone else in our age group who chose a different profession has either struggled to prosper in a world shaped by these sh*theads, or basically become one of them, or served them. Time has done the rest, most of the folks who could recreate and manage the world we lived in as of Desert Storm 1991 are retired or dead.
And they shipped all that Making Lotsa Stuff Better Faster Cheaper capacity and knowhow offshore, piecemeal and then in huge chunks, first to Mexico and then to China, the moment e-commerce made it possible to do so (c. 1998-2003, depending on sector), with the active support of pretty much ALL political parties. Took them about 15 years to bleed out the industrial base of the US of A (of which Canada is merely region 5 or 6 on most corporate logistical maps).
Short of a mortal danger (i.e. invasion!) to North America, that capacity ain't ever coming back, no sense dreaming about it. Why would the finance bros give a rats, still less tolerate all the dot.Gov meddling, if they can't model 15% EIRR, with exit margin compression door-to-door returns of 24% within 2 years of FID? Lame!
So we must pray that our Ukrainian brothers can maintain their qualitative edge long enough to break that "Russian Will", before waves of cheap-and-cheerful-made-in-China clones of last-year's tech takes 2024 to a Passchendaele level of bloody for both sides.
I would love someone to convince me I'm wrong about any of the above, cuz I haven't found anyone, here or elsewhere.
So I'm left praying for Russian weakness, or some hidden reserve of common sense, reasserting itself and ending this thing.

Lavrov talking about stalemate and being "ready for talks." Makes me think there's something to the breakthrough rumors.

Japan is, as usually, ahead of the game:

Apologies if this has already been covered but if so I missed it (not unlikely). 
What we are seeing in Ukraine is pretty much the first widespread and numerous usage of drones, both for observation and for attack - sniping really, even if the sniping is dropping a grenade down a turret hatch, which is pretty impressive to me.
What we aren't seeing is the widespread deployment of drone countermeasures.... yet. Of course there are many types of drones, but most have some characteristics in common, such as optical sensors, a datalink, and an operator on the ground. And by their nature the smaller ones require the operator be reasonably close and not say, in Las Vegas, like some of the US UAVs.
Once a force devises and deploys some countermeasures on a wide scale, this drone effectiveness/tank replacement argument may well die down a lot, with drones becoming another complementary weapon system. 
Could an autonomous system be developed to track and then laser blind small drones that could be mounted on a vehicle, or even small enough that individual AFVs could carry their own? A laser powerful enough to actually disable the drone might require a dedicated vehicle. Don't know - not up on my laser technology. EW capability that could scan for the drone signal (you know it's emitting VERY close to you), and jam it. And yeah, I know all about frequency hopping transmissions, but that doesn't mean there isn't an effort to follow or counteract that, at least enough to disrupt, if not negate the transmission.
Can Russia develop and deploy systems like this in the midst of this war, in enough concentration to be very effective? I'm very doubtful of that. Could other countries already be working on solutions like this for the next conflict? Probably.
Like tank and anti-tank weapons, it will become an another arms race, with more capable and resistant drones and more effective countermeasures against them.
There is a constant similar race in the submarine world (which I'm more familiar with). Sound detection capabilities get better and better, and noise silencing technology gets better and better in order to better hide. Silencing technology is the US submarine world's most closely guarded secrets. 

Dave