BletchleyGeek

Good question - the US deployed 2 (?) batteries of Patriot to Rzezsow a few days ago. That is about 60 kms west of Lviv as the crow flies. The PAC-2 has a range of up to ~190 kms, so it is possible, in principle, to open the "umbrella" and cover at least Lviv. Yet I am not confident those range numbers I dug up are very reliable. Effective range would definitely be the kind of attribute you would want an adversary to not know precisely at all.

Some folks figured out that you can get a reasonably good idea of military activity in Ukraine using NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System On the thread a link is provided to the NASA web app, so you guys can take a look too.

Very interesting... and terrifying! The lining with round fragments tells you what this drone is about. As far as I understand these UAVs are not autonomous like the Turkish Kargu (basically a flying mine that homes onto whatever looks like a "designated target"). That little one is more like a cheap miniature cruise missile, and it has also an image based target designation mode. It could likely be the case that someone was guiding it into the target. BTW @Haiduk, are you still in Kyiv? Are the Ukraine security forces there still engaging Russian Armed SOF infiltrated in the city?

Those guys really like to live large.

And this. I was "light infantry" and our AT weapons were M40 105mm recoilless rifles. We would have been stamped over like bugs. I am old too.

That video was one of the most interesting coming up the last 24 hours. Those drones are the Piper Scout of the 2020's

I find really weird that these kind of incursions keep happening. Seems like a rather risky way of trying to infiltrate, piecemeal, platoon sized units.

Just read this, from a panelist in a talk @Battlefront.com posted a few days back https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/strategy-west-needs-beat-russia/626962/ "Freedom from fear"

I guess that's why the Russian armed forces are using armored trains to run supply to Melitopol. Somebody read a history book and a light bulb went blink!

Somebody has put a lot of effort into integrating many sources. Not sure how accurate it is

Fair point re: analogies. A more similar situation would be that of the Line of Control in Eastern Ukraine right until this war started (thinking of the rump Donetsk and Luhansk rump republics to be a fait accompli of a similar nature as would be land bridge in the south). I am not super familiar with the particulars of that stalemate though, and in this case the perimeter of that "bridgehead" looks significantly longer than the 2014 ones.

Hmmm, I don't know man. I reckon that Zhukov was very much the type that @The_Capt describes as "cutting your limbs and throw them at the enemy". The Berlin campaign (and Operation Mars before that) don't strike me as "masterworks of the operational art of war".

The first and most distinctive feature of the wars in Vietnam was its terrain: hilly and densely forested. I can't see those characteristics there. What you describe in terms of defence - with the obvious technological differences - is pretty much what the Germans used in WW2 in the Eastern Front (and lots of mines). EDIT: sorry, the terrain and the skill of NLF and NVA forces to take advantage of it.

This @The_Capt you should totally getting a Twitter account and put up a picture of you in a dapper suit and see if you can get some nice gigs as resident military pundit as well Regarding the Russian forces digging along their land bridge, I see that unlikely unless they advance all the way to the Dnepr. It's like 150 kilometers of a country much like northern France between Enerhodar and Volnokhava. That's a lot of trenches, positions and mines... The German army used 20+ divisions in roughly the same area to contain the Red Army in late summer 1943 and they failed, having to fall back to the Dnepr and abandon a substantial force in the Crime to its own devices.

A bit of a tangent but relevant to this conversation: there's plenty of footage of helos dropping flares to evade MANPADS and being hit. We don't get to see or hear about the countermeasures that actually work. This inherent bias in the sampling of events needs to be kept in mind. I tend to agree with your take on this matter, @Rinaldi. There are explanations of why we don't see say, a more even distribution of T-90s in the "semi-verified" attrition statistics such as "they keep the good stuff in reserve because of overoptimistic planning" or "keeping them close to Moscow in case a Tiananmen happens", that just do not cut it for me. Those would be like considering the notion that in 1991 the US Army marching into Kuwait with M60s mostly, that were "good enough" to deal with the export T-64 and T-72 of the Iraqis. There maybe something cultural in play here, as in the Western militaries being so averse to casualties that they tend to overestimate adversary capabilities, so rather than going for plans that require the minimal amount of resources that have positive probability of success, they go for plans that no matter the amount of resources do maximize the probability of success. But this also feels to me phony, like I am telling myself something I want to believe. What it does cut it for me are explanations based on the sampling being biased. It could be that less T-90s have been lost by the Russian Armed Forces just because the "first class" BTGs using them are caught up in that traffic jam north of Kyiv, for instance. Or perhaps there just didn't happen to be nearby someone from the Ukrainian TDF with a phone to make a video for youtube. Perhaps there is some Russian commander doubting whether to commit them or not. Perhaps they're in Belarus, waiting for an order to cut Ukraine from Poland, too. Or they maybe do not exist at all, and existing figures that were used to make the assessment when CMBS was made stated overly optimistic projections of how efficiently and quickly those weapon systems became available and those readiness levels reached. Or they could well be deployed to counter a threat that does not exist (e.g. NATO forces with an offensive posture in the Baltics). I am listing these options in the order of their "likelihood" from my point of view. Over the course of the last 2 or 3 days more "next gen" equipment has appeared on the attrition lists. Also, have anybody seen any footage of Javelins in action? I haven't yet, but I do not think the Ukrainians are keeping them as a surprise. Probably it's just that it is super dumb to be fiddling with a smartphone while engaging enemy armor (and probably any NCOs around would kick your a**).

Hmmm, like waiting for the two armoured divisions chockers with Abrams and Leopards that obviously NATO has already deployed to the Baltics while nobody was looking? Nah, I reckon those numbers were expressing a goal rather than a fact.

Will get back to you over private convo - this thread is already hard to make sense as it is!

Great analysis by @The_Capt - the best counter against little killer drones (e.g. flying mines) are... drones (and trained eagles/hawks, and I am not even kidding about it). The keyword to look for @BeondTheGrave is "Technology Readiness Level" to separate what exists only in the realm of imagination, from what has been actually tested as minimally reliable. I think it is fair to say that the debate that we've seen about certain platforms (e.g. F-35) have been skewed by fairly romantic depictions of air power. Truth be told air power is an essential support tool providing observation (or ISR more generally), interdiction (introducing friction on supply and logistic systems) and security (preventing the adversary from observation and interdiction). If one look at any campaign where air power has been extensively used you'll only see significant results in those three areas, almost never significantly nullifying adversary combat power in a direct way, but contributing to its steady erosion. A good example of this is the role of US Army artillery observation aviation in 1944 and 1945, and what enabled those little planes and the spotters flying them to do their job. From a strictly professional standpoint what I can say that in a scale from TRL 0 (e.g. "hard" science-fiction) to TRL 5 (e.g. light UAVs for arty observation and "loitering munitions"), UCAVs (and their ground counterparts) are most definitely at TRL 2-3. In normal conditions, this could mean anything to 10 to 25 years to get fully developed. In the current conditions, these systems will reach high TRL way earlier than that. Russian has zero capability to develop this kind of technology as far as I know, unless they can steal it from somebody else (or somebody else makes them participant of the R&D effort).

They have, but just imagine floating that idea in a brewery in Prague circa 1943. You may have ended in the river... You raise a good topic of discussion, that this is not just a test of wills, ideologies, means, etc. but also a battle of myths. The Ukranian myth will go on since many Ukrainians have chosen to fight rather than roll over. One of the causes of this war is the Russian myth of cultural, military and political hegemony over all the lands east of the Vistula. This mythical dimension is strong for both sides in this war.

Those "budget" drones seem to be real value for money.

A well-written and cautious summary of developments (in Spanish) https://www.revistaejercitos.com/2022/03/01/guerra-de-ucrania-dia-6/ of most interest for folks here are the three situation maps shown in the article: the first one which comes from a Russian source and looks very optimistic, another from the Institute for the Study of War which seems to underestimate the progress of the Russian Armed Forces along the coast of the Sea of Azov, and the third one, which neatly interpolates the 2nd with clear reports of Mariupol having been encircled (and fierce fighting around the city). Also very useful to make sense of the stream of videos and photos is this website https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html that works quite hard to geo locate videos/photos/claims and cross-reference all that data. A few days ago I was wondering about where was the "top-end" Russian kit, and it does seem that is starting to appear in the lists of confirmed destroyed vehicles. I am with @LongLeftFlank and other OSINT people that these supply raids and interdiction may snowball and become a very important factor in how things play out over the next few days. What we're seeing is very much in line with the analysis of the article from War on the Rocks that I (and probably others, this thread is a monster) shared a few days ago. From that analysis the most sensible strategy was to avoid a "decisive" engagement in the frontiers and go for the supply lines, and it seems that is precisely what the UKR forces are doing for the moment. The other very significative thing that many of you have raised is that there's seemingly a lot of open radio comms that are being snooped by radio aficionados from around the world. I look forward to see if someone can make sense out of all that Russian armed forces radio chatter. There are also several reports of equipment being just... abandoned. I am also very much horrified by seeing the effects of Russian artillery on civilian areas, again, after what transpired in Aleppo (or with less means, in Sarajevo, going back in time). I have no words for that. To all the Ukrainian friends here, please take care of yourselves if you have not already joined your army. To all the peace-loving, decent Russian friends here, I am not going to ask impossible stuff. I just remember this quote from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste

No worries @sburke

Google gave me this as the first hit for that sentence https://www.vox.com/22954833/russia-ukraine-invasion-strategy-putin-kyiv All Hail our New Overlords, the Stochastic Parrots!

I would say that all armies start bad until they eventually "git gud" or are defeated. I will try to look up those keywords.

By early Day 2 of this war it looked to me that the Russian armed forces were doing a "reconnaissance in force" in the North and Northeast, something that has been part of their operational thinking since the 1930s. But the - now it is very clear - failed airmobile operation did not seem consistent with a recon in force. You don't leave stranded high quality troops like that if you don't plan on relieving them, and doing so quickly. Quite surprisingly, given the very poor results obtained by Soviet airborne ops in World War 2, the Soviet Union retained a quite massive airborne force (like 4 times the size of the US one, where WW2 paratroopers were in positions of very high influence). So those guys are probably considered to be elite, and given a lot of institutional clout. This great essay with the title When Failure Thrives is quite a good read for historical context https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/WhenFailureThrives.pdf On the other hand, it is well documented that Russian airborne forces train very often for drops of not just light infantry, but also light artillery and armoured vehicles via helicopter. Of which we haven't seen any evidence of having been part of the aidrop (we have seen plenty of BMD-1 fighting around Irpin and Bucha, NW of Kyiv, but those came overland not via aerial ferry). So either the airborne op was probably a recon in force, something that seems to me run against the concept of vertical envelopment and conservation of force, or it was a part of plan that was relying on achieving strategic results via "shock and awe", and a bit of Special Forces bullsh*t (if Chechen mercs can be considered special forces). The original plan seemed to be relying on two twin double envelopments: of Kyiv in the West, and of the UKR forces on the Line of Control in the Donbas. The former, seemingly done with inadequate forces, to obtain a political decision, the second one to achieve a fait accompli, and seemingly the strongest along what should be the easiest axis (southern Ukraine is like Kansas... not very good terrain for defence, as both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht found the hard way in 1941 and 1943). I think that we can't help idealizing the planning and execution of military operations, and our preconceived notions muddle our ability to analyze what is going on.