AlexUK

For those interested, some trenchant comments on the 'end of the tank?' copy-pasted above from @JasonC over at BGG.
 

You think too humbly.
Putin set nothing up. Hatred towards Ukrainians is many centuries old. Russian whole "culture" is built to include it in the very same way muslims hate Jews.
Hatred towards Ukrainians can be seen in writings of all their "cultural" figures, who show little kindness describing victims of Russia to put it lightly.
Heck Dostoyevsky wrote a huge rant about how Ukrainians (among other enslaved Slavic people) are bad because we are so ungrateful of all the "gifts" Russia provides (naming absolute monarchy among them) and want to align with evil Europe.
So when a whole country has role models and culture rooted in imperialistic and, often, racist mentality - people in charge don't need to set anything up.
They just need to quote Bulgakov.
Remember - earliest known laws forbidding Ukrainian language go as far as 18th century. Clearly putin wasn't anywhere to be seen there.

Gonna be real, not too excited about the idea. I've got relatives and friends that lost everything because of this war. Lots of grief. Not sure I'd want to spend a lot of leisure time dwelling on it. I've been avoiding playing Black Sea, for the same reason. Although, I can sort of rationalize playing that one as an "alternate history".
I heard that BFC is postponing the Black Sea module until the fat lady sings. Hoping they shift focus to the Final Blitzkrieg. (Scheldt, anyone?) Looking forward to CM:CW stuff, too!

Yup, and the Russian Army culture where sergeants are selected (as in nearly all non-Western armies btw) for their ability to bully the ranks and act as toadies/bagmen for the officer capos.
The Phd tweetstorm Steve posted a few above seems to nail it.
When you have both an unrestricted mandate and obligation to obey orders without question, BUT you are also treated like the scum of the earth day to day by everyone above and around you, it leads directly to what we're seeing here.
No warmed over Austro-Hungarian phrenology spittle about Mongoloid forest primitives is required.
There are no evil races, only evil cultures. Or more accurately, cultures broken either by privation or to serve the designs of evil men. (Or the pure convenience of careless or self-deluded ones, which amounts to much the same thing).

This is a big bug... Playing the last CMBS shield of Kyiv campaign and it is exceedingly difficult with this bug. 4 hinds on call loaded with atgms. None hitting, all detonating off-map. Any chance of an Eta? Super frustrating to play at the moment. 

This is a big bug... Playing the last CMBS shield of Kyiv campaign and it is exceedingly difficult with this bug. 4 hinds on call loaded with atgms. None hitting, all detonating off-map. Any chance of an Eta? Super frustrating to play at the moment. 

This is a big bug... Playing the last CMBS shield of Kyiv campaign and it is exceedingly difficult with this bug. 4 hinds on call loaded with atgms. None hitting, all detonating off-map. Any chance of an Eta? Super frustrating to play at the moment. 

I admit to being kind of amused at these "Russia will do this and declare a ceasefire..."
You can't declare a unilateral ceasefire unless you are really in a dominant military position.  You can ask for one, but the other side has a say.  Ukraine will have a set of conditions for the ceasefire which they have already started establishing.  The key one being Russia recognizing the territorial integrity of Ukraine.  I don't think they will insist on Crimea beyond an internationally managed referendum there.  It will however mean the end of DPR/LNR.  I don't see Putin agreeing to that.  So the war will go on until Russia is simply unable to maintain their forces in the field either because of a military collapse or a political "transition" back in Moscow and a unilateral withdrawal.
The cracks are appearing for Putin.  Incidents of soldiers refusing to serve in Ukraine .  Too much of the army is being committed to this with potential risk of instability elsewhere.  Too many of the various power blocs now have a reason to consider a Russia without Putin.  The cost of the war which so far he has managed to hide will become apparent.  The butchers bill will come due.  Putin is in a situation where everyday things get a little worse and he is not in a position of controlling the narrative.

Hi guys, I've just come across this thread as I don't frequent this forum very much these days.
Firstly I'd like to say that I am very much still alive, the Union soldiers haven't caught up to me just yet!
Thank you for the appreciation of my AAR video's, it's really nice to hear how people have enjoyed them over the years. There are others out there producing great content, Usually Hapless has to be really commended for his commitment to the game and the high quality of his videos. I also enjoy the content of others, particularly Double's and some of the older channels like Rinald's, Ithikial's and his1ojd's.
So to give a bit of context to me, I started my own business in 2014 and it was a slow start which allowed me time to make AAR's of this amazing game. As you can probably guess it's a very time consuming process that took me around 2 months to play and edit each video. As time has gone on my business has taken off and in early 2020 it really started to take up more of my time to the point where I couldn't really commit to making vids. I've always really enjoyed war films ever since I was a kid, the main reason I played the game was to make the vids and recreate the battles from movies like A Bridge Too Far and The Longest Day. So as a result of not making the AAR's, I've also not played the game for 2 years.
I still believe that CM is one of the best games that has ever existed and I still follow it. I am still a member over at the Few Good Men but mostly play Field of Glory II & Medieval with some of the other members. The FOG games resolve much quicker than a CM battle and suit my current lifestyle better.
It's unlikely that I'll be able to make any more AAR's for the foreseeable future, maybe one day when retirement rolls around! (CM3 perhaps?)
So just wanted to say thank you and remove the mystery of what happened to me.
Have fun, and don't forget...War is Hell!!
 
 
 

Ah so a guy with a bookshelf of tank books and tank models thinks “tanks are fine”…not exactly surprising.  This is starting with a conclusion and going from there, a lot of bias from that start state.  “Not enough information to draw a conclusion, so the one I started with is safe”, is a conclusion.
I am not sure what is going on beyond there is something going on.  I get not being able to draw firm conclusions but this whole war has defied a lot of conventional logic.  Some of it is Russia performance but that under-assesses the performance of the UA.
For example, most Russian tanks on Oryx have been abandoned (and some towed), so one could argue that had nothing to do with smart ATGMs or UAVs.  However, if this occurred because Russian logistics were cut to pieces, by ATGMs and UAVs, the implication is that something is going on with logistics security.  A T90 is just as much a paperweight as an M1A2 if they are out of gas so, no “the tanks are not fine” if we now need to rethink our logistics concepts.
In short, something has occurred that impacted the entire Russian system causing it to fail in its objectives, stall, and now starting to fallback.  How much if that is Russian incompetence, and how much is being forced upon them by the UA methods and equipment is a really big unknown.  The role and value of the entire MBT capability is in question at the moment, at least until we can figure out what happened.  Same can be asked of fast air and mech infantry as well.  
The worst way to go into trying to understand impacts and implications when encountering a disruptive event is with pre-set conclusions.  This is a serious problem for military developers as one has to switch to inductive logic, something militaries are not really good at.  We start with a framework “a real war needs tanks to work”, make an observation “tanks did not work for Russia” and deduce “this is not a real war”.   Inductive logic builds a framework based on observation, the framework becomes negotiable and starts with “What the hell just happened?”

I agree tanks aren’t dead, nor IFVs. What will replace them that will provide infantry protection from artillery?
Aside from the mentioned Russian poor coordination, and combined arms, it’s also been mentioned that nobody really knows who in charge? It’s like 3 separate armies on 3 separate fronts doing their own thing and neither is coordinating with the Air Force which itself is off doing its own thing.
The switchblade drone has a range of 6 miles. The Javelins range is 3 miles. The small Switchblade has a 40mm grenade charge. Who wins that duel? 
 
The Merkava was and may still have a mortar on it. No reason why you couldn’t mount a Switchblade or 2 on a tank or IFV to hunt down ATGM operators.
Another huge weakness that I haven’t heard much regarding the Russians is piss poor reconnaissance of the battlefield something the US and Western armies excel at. 
 
Many of the ATGM and tank hunting infantry operating at will with little or no interference from Russian forces would face a much different opposition from well trained forces that conduct proper reconnaissance and use indirect fire, snipers and other means to suppress and kill tank hunting infantry.
It only takes killing some before word gets around and effectness drops.
Unlike the Russians the US/Western armies have good secure comms, JTACs, FACs (another aspect that seems to be absent in the Russian military) and ability to call down quick and effective fire from things like mortars, Paladins, MLRS, attack helicopters, drones and aircraft, before even sending vehicles into ATGM kill zones.

Low speed can be a problem for some systems. There is a real world anti-missile tactic of pilots called "going in to the notch" or "notching a missile", which basically involves turning to move at 90 degrees to the incoming missile and descending. This doesn't work against IR tracking missiles, but can be effective against radar tracked ones.
The reason this works (when it does) is because radar needs to filter out all of the crap in its field of view to decide which bit is the plane. One component of this is "Doppler filtering". This uses the Doppler effect, which is sensitive to the component of the objects speed along the line of sight. The idea is that all of the ground clutter (which is at a variety of distances, and so hard to filter on that basis) is all moving at the same speed relative to the plane (i.e. the ground is stationary). So everything that is moving at the same speed as the ground is filtered out, which in theory just leaves you the fast moving aircraft.
Except if the aircraft happens to be flying exactly across your line of sight, with no speed (relative to the ground) towards or away from you, when it also has the same Doppler speed as the background and gets filtered out, which makes it vanish as far as the tracking is concerned.
The reason to descend while doing this is so that the missile tracking you is above you, so that you are in front of the ground from its point of view. If you are above the missile, then the background to your aircraft is the sky, and that's not giving any Doppler return so the aircraft sticks out like a sore thumb. Obviously ground based radar isn't going to be too affected by this - all the aircraft are above it.
A lot of modern missiles use radar within the missile for the final approach to target - they may be guided by the launching aircraft or ground station for most of the flight, but often the missile's radar takes over for the last few seconds, during which Doppler filtering can cause it to lose its tracking.
So its certainly plausible that a slow moving drone could get itself lost in the Doppler filtering for radar tracked missiles, depending on the nature of the attacking missile system. Missiles that gain altitude to take advantage of the reduced drag to increase speed and range will end up above the drone and if the have terminal self-guidance they could lose the drone in the background. But its going to do depend a lot on the nature of the tracking and the missile flight profile.

So I gotta start by asking: are you honestly engaging in a discussion here and want to explore ideas?  Because you are coming across as a guy whose mind is made up and no amount of rational discussion is going to matter.  I am honestly going to try here, you get exactly one shot based on your tone so far:
1 - Absolutely true, plans definitely do not survive contact, as old as warfare.  However, what is important is how fast one can re-plan and pivot.  In this the Russians have not demonstrated an ability to come up with a "new plan" and re-org to it.  They have had a pregnant pause which has allowed their opponent to organize/mobilize, arm up, dig in, dominate the narrative, and access billions in military support.  And then there is the quality of that initial plan.  Failing to establish some key operational pre-conditions (e.g. why does the internet still work for Ukraine?) is also not a very good sign. So let's see the quality of the second (or third) plan and then we might now better what is going on.
2 - You said "The Russians have taken losses, but they remain free to operate combat aircraft and helicopters over most of the country." That is not true, in fact it is very not true below about 10k feet.  The fact that Russian forces did not set the basic pre-condition of gaining air superiority is a demonstration of their problem, not Ukraine's.  Plenty of evidence of Ukrainian UAV strikes online to demonstrate that we really are in more of an airpower stalemate and that is bad for an invading force.
3 - The Russian Navy is definitely still a factor.  They have sea control and are hitting with missiles but 1) like everything else the Russians are doing, there appears little integration between naval, air and land power at this point and 2) the Russian amphibious capability is in serious question. If for the sole question, "why have they not used it yet?  that said sea control will likely not be decisive, nor has it been decisive so far.
4- Evidence of defeat (https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html), so that is coming up on 24 BTGs of tanks, look at the logistics vehicle, coming up on 485...that is bad.  But even if you refuse to believe this, then one has to ask "what losing looks like".  Over to you as you asked the question.  However, it is a layered issue.  Political defeat, military defeat, economic defeat - if we are talking military defeat, well then an inability to influence or shape negotiations in the direction of national interest is near the top for me.  And as we watch the bubble slide on the Russian side of the table, it is not looking good, but I will give you that the jury is still out. 
5- Well backwards, as on a map, is kind of a one dimensional view to be honest. The primary way Russia has "gone backwards" is in the will of the Ukrainian people.  This is not about terrain, it is about their willingness to fight.  I think if Russian had one a quick and fairly clean fight that will might have stayed relatively dormant; however, that "plan did not survive" and now the entire nation is galvanized in an existential fight...that is definitely "backwards" from a Russian perspective.  Economically, narrative and just about any other non-military metric you want to apply Russia has gone backwards severely and let's not even start on the diplomatic front as it has been a complete disaster.  But if you only want to measure ground, then I guess we have to see.
So we have discussed a lot on forces and comparisons.  Right now, conservative estimate is that UA and Russian manpower is pretty near parity in theatre.  Russia does have equipment advantage but it has failed to be able to really leverage that.  Why?  Well that is a million dollar question.  What we have seen is that Russian mass is not working, if it was that map would look a lot different.  I suspect it is either because the Russian war machine simply is not setup for this complexity and has fallen under its own weight, and the Ukrainians help them along with that.
You are correct on one point, this is coming down to Will.  The Russians can keep pouring men into this fight, even if they are dismounted and have no ammo or food but if they have the Will that is an option.  What you seem to be sidestepping is the other issue, the Ukrainian Will to fight.  They see this as existential and are acting as such, so that is a problem right there for the Russians, unless they want a decades old resistance blowing up in their face but frankly I can't even seeing them getting that far as that would mean the Russians actually have to control the entire country and not about 15% of it.  Until then arms and support will flow in from the west and Russians will bleed...but we will see who blinks first.
 Lemme just close with a very important point - this is not an internet argument that anyone can "win".  I know the reflex is there to play forum games and try to "out argue each other" but that is not what is happening here.  For the most part no one really has a full picture of that is going on so we are sharing information and trying to build the best picture we can.  So the usual internet argument games do not apply here.  If you have a different assessment based on information you have, present it and we can all get a better picture.  This is a real war and people are dying in droves, so I frankly do not care who is "right or wrong" on a given Thurs because the situation is too dynamic.  But if you honestly want to contribute then do so, but this is not a contest...it is a really violent and scary puzzle.  Finally, there are people posting here who are actually in range of all those guns so let's also try and keep that in mind.

Kind of curious about how you feel the about how well Drones / UAV's are represented in-game currently and their supposed  extreme vulnerability to AA fire  as mention in the manual .  I have been getting the impression from a lot of the footage that  the drones can be seen / heard  but not too many of them are getting shot down ? . Will be interesting to see  an after action report on this whole part of the battle space .
 
Also of course ....adding TB2  and anything seen in the conflict .

I think the whole thing about who has javelins and who has tanks is not really so important... drone missile strikes and drone guided artillery strikes are probably what's causing the most damage.
From the videos I've seen, it looks to me as if the Russians don't even realise drones have been invented.
They park their vehicles closely together inside forests or dug into the ground as if they think the important bit is to not be spotted horizontally, when the real danger is hanging above them.

Not sure I agree with this:
- First, the average citizen is not seeing what we are, a total shambles of a Russian military operation that will ring out across the ages.  They see that Russia attacked it neighbor, blew up a lot of buildings that look like where they live and killed a lot of people that look like them.  The public have short attention spans but once something gets stuck in the collective brain-pan it is very hard to get out.  We are already seeing shifts in public opinion and that drives politicians.
- Second, it is not in any NATO nations military interest.  We need a bad guy, a boogie man in order to create political will to arm us.  We are going to play up the Russians as dangerous and a proven threat that we need to really worry about.  Assessments will get slowly ratcheted up from the obvious sh*tshow we see today, towards "the Russians have learned and teamed up with the Chinese!"  It is no secret that larger deployments to Eastern Europe a la Cold War are on the table.
- Third, no matter how badly the Russians did here...and it is bad...collective non-military deterrence failed.  We threatened sanctions, mean looks and strong language, Russia said "screw it" and went anyway.  That means hard power is back on the table one way or the other.  We have entered into a season of Mars (something most of the MENA already knew) and that is going to change the calculus (already has).  We are already getting sweaty questions on the Arctic and NORAD.
- Fourth, crazy bastards still got the bomb.  No matter how ridiculous Russian performance has been, they are sitting on enough nuclear boom-boom to re-set civilization, so we are likely going to see BMD and its like go nuts.
The only thing that makes this all go away is a total regime change in Russia that puts a moderate centrist in power, all the while embracing open liberal democracy...like by Saturday.  I think the Russian have a better chance of a Ukrainian surrender than that happening, so here we are in crazy town.    

I don't see how this is going to work. While it looks like you are right and many Russians do want to have a "strong man" at the top who somehow restores Russia to its former glory, how can you force them to change their mind? There is no historical evidence that punishing a people for their government ever worked (correct me if I missed something). There are a bunch of countries which had sanctions imposed on them for decades like Cuba, Iran, North Korea. Did they overthrow their government? No, on the contrary isolation help the respective regime to tighten its grip.
As a German I'd say let's look at what we can learn from history: As Steve pointed out, after WW1, Germany was isolated and severly punished. What good did it do? It only served to give the Germans a deep feeling of humiliation combined with growing resentment towards democracy. The latter because a) they actually stuck to the Versaille Treaty and paid the reparations and b) since democracy really has to be learned, the democratic parties grew quite detached from the people and often only served their own needs. Added to all that came worldwide economic crisis of 1929 which struck (as far as memory serves) Germany the hardest in all of europe. Enter Hitler, the "strong man" who gave the people a feeling of "being someone again", improved the economic situation (doesn't matter that hald of it was based on plans of the previous government and the other half was indebting the country like there's no tomorrow, what counts is perception). By contrast, after WW2, the (western) Allies helped Germany and after a relatively short time Western Germany was welcomed back to international community (again, doesn't matter that this in large parts wasn't kindness but needing the Germans agains the Soviet Union and the Marshall Plan helped the US at least as much as it helped Germany, again, what counts is perception).
So, now there is Russia. After the fall of communism what happend? In Russian perception democracy just meant a weak and always drunk Boris Jelzin who stood by and watched while corrupt oligarchs together with "Western" capitalist companies plundered Russia. This in combination with seeing how the once mighty Soviet Union was now, as Russia, only called a "regional power" by western politicians that could do nothing to prevent the former enemy (USA = NATO = EU (perception...)) from encroaching on their borders. Enter Putin. And I fail to see how this would change with further isolating Russia after a hypothetical regime change.
That said, I'm no Russia-Apologist, it doesn't justify attacking another country. Still it would be a grave mistake not to see that pattern and to draw the necessary conclusions from it.

Can we stop bringing up the "shot down" transport aircraft loaded with VDV until at least THE FIRST piece of evidence that this actually happened is turned over? Seriously I'm all for being proven wrong--show me the evidence--but I resolutely believe in observing some simple standards about this sort of parroting. Haven't seen any video/pics, remains, flight radar data to support it, obituaries, corroborating witnesses... anything, except for a claim by the group(s) that would stand to gain the most from such a morale victory, particularly in the opening hours of war. Would love to get to the bottom of this "big if true" claim.

I hate seeing a bunch of conscript kids being killed & wounded, but that's what  it's come down to.  Either russian conscript kids die or a free, independent democratic nation dies, along with lots of its citizens. 
Every destroyed convoy warms my heart.  And if the drivers escaped in panic back to their own lines to lower morale and cause more panic, that's a pretty good outcome w/o lots of dead russian kids.

See that's where I am not seeing a lot of info posted - How much exactly Does the Russian Army have left outside of the Ukraine and how much if any of it can be moved ? They presumably still need to maintain forces blocking NATO  , China ,  Turkey and anyone else on their Borders . How many forces do they have remaining to feed into the Ukraine Meat grinder ?

After so many years with asymmetrical conflicts, it's intresting to see just how vulnerable aircraft and tanks are to a determined enemy armed with modern weapons.
I've speculated before that the main battle tanks have already become obsolete, but that nobody had noticed yet because wars were against poorly armed insurgents.
It's of course also possible that the main lesson of this war will have more to do with lack of planning, logistics, and morale.

This has always been the Russian way of waging war. Blundering their way through with masses of troops and material. But they usually achieve their goals. And they will learn from this. WW2 began for  them with Suomussalmi, but ended in Berlin. Personally I don't underestimate the stamina and strength of  the Russian army. That sort of wishful thinking brought us here. One look at the map shows that there's little to be optimistic about. The Russian home front isn't nearly as divided as we hope either.
Apart from that they can station Putins mother and her dog on the border with NATO and send the entire army to Ukraine, since they know that we won't dare to make one step forward.

There was no rush to invade now though.  Putin could have just waited until 22 June if he wanted to

After my Army service the rest of my career was in the nuclear engineering field (just recently retired). 3 degrees in nuclear engineering and 34 years experience in reactor plant testing, reactor plant design, radiation protection, and nuclear non-proliferation.
In the case of these plants not only have safety features improved, these particular plants are a completely different design than Chernobyl. The Chernobyl "explosion" (it was steam and hydrogen, not a nuclear explosion), was caused by a variety of factors including a rather bizarre design, and operating the plant in a dangerous manner, and then when things went wrong, operators not understanding how the plant would react. EVERY action they took made the situation worse and fed right into the design flaws.
A VVER reactor like the ones being fought over is a pressurized water reactor with up to the current standard safety features, and a robust containment building (Chernobyl didn't have a containment, and Russia had ironically justified that as their design and careful operation not needing it). To cause a serious problem you'd have to cut the off-site power to the plant, while also damaging/destroying all the backup diesel generators or their infrastructure that gets the power to the plants. What do they need power for? Cooling. Even a shutdown reactor needs continual cooling, and how much depends on the power history - how long operating at what power level before shutdown. Spent fuel is stored in cooling pools which also require water cooling. These are inside the containment. This is what happened at Fukushima - the Tsunami swamped the diesel generators and knocked out all electrical power to the region, so they got hot. The explosions seen at Fukushima were from hydrogen buildup in the containments. The sparkers that are designed to safely burn it off actually caused the explosions (old design). The containments at Fukushima were very old, dated designs.
It appeared from the feed that the fighting was going on around office buildings adjacent to the actual containment. These would be engineering, admin, labs, that are part of the plant. 
In short, while having a battle on the grounds of a nuke plant is generally a very bad idea, the potential for serious problem is certainly there, but not on the scale of Chernobyl or even Fukushima.
Hope that helps. Also, it seems this morning that the Ukrainians withdrew and Russians are controlling. Don't know what that means about operators, but the shooting stopped, thank goodness.
Dave
 

It seems to me the most brutal bombardments of civilians are taking place in Mariupol... this could be a sign that the Russian Army has been ordered to break through there as fast as possible at any cost.
This might be an indication that Russia is hoping for a fast land grab of key areas before negotiating for peace?
Basically saying "ok, we'll withdraw from the entire north of Ukraine if you'll let us keep the east, Crimea, and the connecting corrridor..."