Hapless

Re: the sub images: I love how someone went to all the trouble of pixelating the background.

@BFCElvis Thanks very much ! Though to fair, I just recorded the footage, someone else cut it down to size and stitched it back together for the trailer. @dkchapuis Here you go, this is the start of the CM chunk of the live event: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1923663906?t=00h48m50s

It's gonna happen one day. I can't see KA-52s being close to the front, especially behaving so apparently nonchalantly, so this is a really good illustration of just how deep drones are getting.

Obviously Zelensky is getting a bit tired of people asking him how much of Ukraine he's willing to give up:

A couple of thoughts re: mines: Whatever happened to military herbicides? What's going to happen to all those surface mines in the muddy season or the winter?

Looks like they have been hitting the Kerch birdge with naval drones:

Cluster munitions in the second video- hard to say if they were on target given the quality, but a big stringy blob of dismounted infantry fleeing under DPICM isn't exactly an indicator of success.

Haven't seen one of these for a while. What I'm finding more interesting is the way the Ukrainians are hounding it (assuming that it's the same vehicle being hit, then recovered). This really speaks to FPV drones as munitions, a 'permissive drone environment' (ie. no obvious countermeasures) and an ISR capability that allows tracking of individual vehicles. I'd love to know the strike mechanics: is there a taxi-rank of FPV drones assigned to an ISR drone waiting for targets or do they launch them individually? Does a single team operate both, or are there separate hunter and killer teams that need to co-locate?

Meanwhile, in Russia: That is a chunky, visible, photogenic mushroom cloud.

Now with first person view:

For a different perspective: If the USA invaded Mexcio to enact regime change and instead suffered a string of embarrassing defeats, lost an aircraft carrier, was forced to rely heavily on Blackwater only for them to attempt a coup and had lost it's military reputation along with international influence, narrative control and huge numbers of men and military hardware... I don't think anyone would think the US was winning because they were squatting in the northern half of Chihuahua. They've still lost, incurring significant all-spectrum damage in the process. Of course, Mexico might be unable to regain it's international borders and a frozen conflict might develop... but that isn't going to make the US less crippled and Mexico less undefeated.

As a guess: the 88 spotted and engaged the Sherman in the second pic but missed it and the round went through the building and hit the Sherman you lost. An 88mm AP shell shouldn't have too many problems going through a building (range dependent, obviously) and it's not going to damage the building that much- it's only going to leave an 88mm sized hole after all. But hard to tell without the save file.

It would make defence more complex for the Russians- for example: ATACMs flies on a ballistic trajectory while Storm Shadow is a cruise missile, so one of each fired at the same target presents two different air defence problems at the same time (fast but telegraphed ATACMs vs slower but stealthier Storm Shadow). Mix in decoys, Storm Shadows changing direction etc and things can get real confusing real fast. This might prompt the Russians to concentrate more air defence on more important targets, leaving other (still important) targets less well defended. There's also the EW game- the Russians are inevitably going to get their hands on some kind of salvageable internals from whatever weapons are used, at which point they can dig into the systems and figure out how they can jam or spoof them. They've already apparently gotten hold of a Storm Shadow, so from here on out there's a possibility that Storm Shadow strikes can be degraded by EW effects. Having more different types of weapons in the mix keeps things fresh (as it were), so there's always something up Ukraine's sleeve that the Russians haven't developed a counter to yet. At the same time, depending on the specifics, even if the Russians have worked out how to jam ATACMs and Storm Shadow, they might not be able to jam both at the same time because EW cna be finicky, or if they can, they might need more rare, expensive EW assets concentrated to do so. Stuff like that.

At this point, it's usually a worry that trigger happy soldiers will splurge all their ammunition if left unsupervised. Aside from the fire control element, some military rifles around the turn of the century had magazine cut-off devices, which mechanically prevented the use of the magazine and forced soldiers to load and fire one round at a time. The concept was that the cutoff could be disengaged on order when rapid fire was necessary. I can't find a link to the Brit's "Infantry Training, 1914" but a couple of interesting snippets about the attack (original bold): Immediately followed by (more original bold): Leading to the, surprisingly modern (my bold this time): A quick, generalised guide to infantry attacks in this period is that they consist of waves: 1. The first wave advances and- at some point- is forced to stop by enemy fire. They go to ground, form a firing line and return fire. 2. Following waves reinforce the firing line, increasing the number of rifles and thus weight of fire until the attack gains fire superiority. 3. At this point, the line resumes the advance, this time by short rushes with supporting fire, until they reach the enemy position and can get stuck in with the bayonet. This is not a million miles away from something like a current section attack (right down to fixing bayonets and fighting through). The tricky part is how you mass and control firepower when all you have is riflemen. The more riflemen you have in the firing line- ie. the denser the firing line is- the more, better controlled firepower you can put out and the better chance you have of achieving fire superiority. Right until you get shelled or you can't win fire superiority, or you can't spot/engage the enemy riflemen effectively, at which point things start to go all Spion Kop.

Only with the right editing. https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/blue_peter_noakes_CSO/zwb9vwx

Quick Galeotti take:

Couldn't resist: Also, fascinating to see at least one voice on Twitter insist that the MoD will win because it has more soldiers, more tanks, more etc than Wagner. Seriously? Have people not been paying attention to the last year and a half? Also also, looks like Wagner is going on all in and upgrading from mutinty to coup:

Living a couple of days longer? Going down fighting? Hoping that Putin will see the truth those nasty MoD types have been hiding from him and then back him up? Who knows. He still seems to be posing as the loyal Boyar force to take things into his own hands by the disloyal lying other Boyars.

Rename it Prigozhingrad, declare himself mini-Tsar and start charging the MoD to use the railways? Jokes aside, if what he wants is leverage to force the MoD to back off and get himself into a position of critical importance, he's going for the right place. The MoD have a choice between cutting a deal or trying to dig him out- or alternatively, Putin has a choice between cutting Shoigu and Gerasimov out or watching the war collapse.

Obviously totally impossible to confirm as of yet:

One problem to bear in mind looking up British doctrine/manuals etc from the time is that the British army was out doing Empire things most of the time. So the concept of peer-to-peer industrial scale war on the continent had to take a seat alongside colonial policing, punitive expeditions and general engagements against sub-peer opponents (comparisons to the recent emphasis on COIN anyone?). A year before running into magazine-rifle equipped Boers firing from trenches, the Brits were standing shoulder-to-shoulder repelling massed infantry charges at Omdurman, a year after they were sending raiding columns out into the mountains of the North-West Frontier. For the Germans though, Balck's Manual from 1911 is pretty comprehensive: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64927/64927-h/64927-h.htm (the WW2 Balck's dad). I don't know whether it's in the original or this translation, but this version also includes notes on how other armies do things, which is very helpful. Include gems like this: And a good quick overview of the then open vs close order debate: The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command by Andrew Gordon is a good deep look at Jutland and how the Royal Navy in the preceding 50-60 years, with a significant emphasis on signalling and how unwieldy it was having to rely on increasing combinations of signal flags. Hand-in-hand with that is the thread of naval command and control as some elements of the RN tried to adapt to either simplifying the signalling system or giving individual captains more freedom to act (including the tragi-farce of the HMS Victoria sinking- potentially an example of "Here's a stupid order, let's see if you're smart enough to not do it"). In general though, there was probably more continuity in tactics at sea than on land. The ranges are greater, but there was no 'devolution' of command in the same way as there was in No Man's Land: where a platoon commander in WW1 goes from being an unthinking cog in a battalion-sized machine to being an independent actor, the captain of a ship at Jutland is still the captain of a ship the way he was at Trafalgar. Battles were still fought in lines of ships trying to destroy one another with fire, just at much greater range.

Relevant (if blatant) self-promotion, but if anyone wants 4 hours of my take on where modern warfare came from: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYvL90uFbwhO_2-ULfOsTR8EIz7VxbA27 Obviously this is a big topic and there's a lot to unpick, but it's always worth bearing in mind that the militaries of the time were big chunky organisations with plenty of variation in thought. The Cult of the Offensive was absolutely not a myth... but that doesn't mean that there were no officers or factions in the mix pushing for armies to adapt to (supposed) lessons of the Boer War, Russo-Japanese War and Balkan Wars. 'Tactical fashion' ebbed and flowed over time, with attempts to adapt waxing in the aftermath of certain conflicts and waning as naturally conservative military establishments reasserted themselves. If WW1 had kicked off in 1917 and the lessons of the Balkan Wars had had more time to bed in, the opening phase could have been very different. It's also worth noting that the historical record is not exactly crystal clear: the British might have struggled at first in 1899, but once they deployed a more 'continental' level of force they crushed the Boers. Grant beat Lee because he was the first Union General to go up against him and just keep coming, no matter how many casualties he suffered from battle to battle. The French lost the Franco-Prussian War because the Prussians went faster and harder. And there are, of course, massive game changing technological developments in firepower over the same period that may- or may not- be changing the dynamics... but the victors in all those wars arguably won because they were able to sustain heavy losses. Not to mention the obvious fact that no-one ever won a war without attacking. RE: Close order massacres/ the offensive-defensive balance... Bussaco and Waterloo anyone? Column vs Line? If we really want to pull the thread we could maybe argue for Crecy and Agincourt, all the way back to the Thebans getting pelted with roof tiles in the streets of Plataea. I think the issue isn't simply one of firepower vs mass, but the ease with which one side can create the tactical conditions necessary for the other's failure. Wellington was famously a master of exploiting reverse slopes- using the terrain to mask his force, manoeuvre to block incoming French columns and then break them with the shock action of massed firepower at close range. Fast forward a century and while those factors are still important, all it takes is one machinegun team in the right place at the right time to achieve the same thing. Another century later and... we're looking at WW1 pumped up on steroids stood around wondering whether it's still relevant while a 100km deep, satellite, EW and drone enabled corrosive warfare campaign rages on overhead.

We're in macro-masking/tactical deficit country again! Like in WW1, this war has revealed (or confirmed, or reiterated, take your pick) that the factors influencing success in base tactical interactions did not align with the pre-war expectations of the belligerents. So officers have been ordering units around with an inaccurate concept of what they're capable of achieving in the prevailing conditions. This happens all the time, the tricky part is figuring out what has changed and whether those changes are going to be important or applicable in the future... something people from a wide array of boxes typing in a wargame forum might be able to process better than a collection of people all sitting in the same military career box. Or we can at least be wrong in original and unexpected ways!

It is a weird thing to capture on drone footage, unless the blocking detachment is using drones to find and follow friendly troops that run. Source provenance aside (looks like it's been taken down now, which is interesting in and of itself); the behaviour seems pretty coherent to me: The blockers might be screaming at them to stop all the time- that's not going to be clear without audio. The runners are... running, so they have to physically confront them. Then the blockers fire in the air. The two closest guys try to run, then the blockers shoot them. Not as clear if they start shooting everyone else, but it's on the cards. Worth noting that the two guys who get shot are themselves armed: that's a real danger for the blocking troops. Obviously they weren't taking any chances.