danfrodo

Geez, I take time off the forum to go to the big city and see a show and y'all put 7+ pages of content. Took me most of an hour to catch up. Let's see if I can summarize what I saw: 1. Aragorn and Huba totally agree on one thing -- UKR needs more heavy weapons. And no one can seem to figure out WTF Germany is actually doing. Poland doesn't want to totally deplete its own army, but does have NATO behind it so not as risky as it first seems. But still not an easy decision for any army/govt. 2. RU seems to be making some progress in the north of the great salient. LLFlank provides good maps (thx) and shows that the terrain will probably work against RU going forward. 3. UKR needs more arty. more arty. and more arty. Need it desperately for defense right now, for offense later. 4. offensive officially announced by UKR in Kherson region. My pet theory is that Lyschansk salient's strategic purpose is to tie down and attrit RU forces in a relatively non-strategic sector so UKR can try to make gains in areas that matter more in their big picture. 5. this "NATO threat" bulls-t is out of hand. Every NATO country was free and not owned by the US. Every warsaw pact country was a wholly owned slave state of the USSR. E. Germany had to put up a fence to keep its own people from escaping. Hungary and Czechoslovakia tried to exert their own sovereign free will, and were attacked militarily. The US didn't forcibly occupy western europe, the soviets did (well, OK, we did occupy culturally, but y'all could choose to not go to McDonalds and Starbucks). And now RU wants to do it again. First saying because NATO was a threat and now saying that Putin is the new Genghis Khan (he aint, and those RU forces aint the golden horde) and RU has the right to take anything it wants. -- but hey, this is all because NATO is scary and threatening. yeah, right. RU is currently out of its flipping mind, it's a rabid dog. 6. Orville Peck is the greatest musician in america right now, bar none. What a show!

Both metric and imperial systems work and have lots of success to attest to this. Except that one is really f--ing stupid and the other is based on the number of fingers you have as well as being based on our actual base10 number system. While the other is based on things 12, 16, 60, 5280, and other nonsense. Two particularly stupid things that unfortunately are too baked in to ever change is our clocks (60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours??) and degrees (360?? wtf?). arbitrary, hard to work with numbers. We are so used to these that we don't realize just how stupid these are. If they were all some kind of base10 it would all be 10x easier to work with.

Interesting. Pressure multiple points and see what breaks. Much less risk since not massing forces. Hopefully some sectors will break. From the maps we see a little UKR movement, but not much, at least so far from what we know. I sure hope there's lots of low quality RU troops on that front. I wonder if there's any kind of highly mobile armored exploitation forces waiting behind the front for an opportunity.

speaking of artillery, here's a nice summary of what UKR actually claims to have rec'd. Author is ex-artillery soldier. LIBERAL SITE, ENTER AT OWN RISK https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/6/10/2103317/-Ukraine-Update-As-Western-arms-flow-to-Ukraine-they-do-some-accounting He's asking why US is not sending bradleys and he does very much understand the logistical side of things. I sure would like to see a brigade armed w bradleys & those Polish T72s running rampant on the Melitopol front sometime before the rain begins in ~october. Right now I suspect all our transport resources are already busy moving the M113s and artillery and ammo.

Back on the war: I now am hoping, based on some evidence, that Ukraine is using the Severodonetsk pocket as what has been called 'flypaper'. It's drawing in lots of RU units in areas that UKR can shell like crazy w excellent observation from the higher area of Lyschansk. Or I am just wishful thinking, in your minds? I was thinking UKR was just trying to tie down RU forces because was about to attack elsewhere, but maybe this is all there is -- a chance to kill russians and destroy their gear. Which aint bad if it can be done w 'reasonable' UKR losses. (each 'loss' being someone's life isn't a 'reasonable' thing, but unfortunately that's the situation)

steve beat me to it, nevermind

RU has had 20 years to make choices between military aggression, villainy, international crime & hostile political subversion versus peace, cooperation, and building trust. It has continually chosen the former. It's entire ruling class is an organized crime syndicate. And thinking about being a 'great power' is a century or more out of date. what difference does that make to whether RU is prosperous and stable and happy? NONE.

I think Kraze has been watching Peaky Blinders.

The only problem with this is that RU absolutely is a threat to its neighbors, while RU's neighbors couldn't possibly invade RU and win. So those neighbors want to join NATO to survive. This makes RU feelings feel hurty. Tough s--t. If RU wasn't a threat in the first place these nations wouldn't join NATO. So RU causes the problem then claims to be scared because of it. It's totally backwards thinking. If RU was a peaceful, trustworthy nation NATO wouldn't even exist. As has been said here a thousand times, if Lithuania/Estonia/Latvia weren't in NATO he would've attacked and annexed them long ago. Edit: PanzerMartin -- no disrespect intended, I totally get that you were presenting an RU view. Putin's aggressions over the last 20 years make it clear how distorted that view is.

Wow, we even have a historian of antiquities on the page now. Most excellent. I do love me some antiquities, often in the form of historical fiction, but it's a great subject. So as we look at UKR vs RU one thing to remember is that one big difference between the two is that RU's whole war is basically an effort by Putin to make sure Putin doesn't lose face. UKR is in a fight for the survival of a nation, a people, while RU is in a fight for one psychopath (and some of his entourage). RU propaganda puts a nationalistic spin on it but unlike UKR, one bullet in one person can change everything. Yes, Zelensky is important, extremely so, but he's not the reason for the war. Also, I am now of the view that Severodonetsk fight for UKR is about drawing in and destroying RU forces at minimal cost to UKR. Does anyone have any other views on this? Looks like UKR arty is hitting rear of RU lines, probably counterbattery. Is UKR trying to get RU arty into good place for destroying it?? (copied pic below from dailykos who copied it from somewhere else)

oh yes, the great threat of NATO attack on Russia. We all know how absurd that is. 1. NATO could never agree to anything that controversial in the first place, there'd be too many very powerful members who would say "are you crazy? no way! we're out!" 2. NATO is very much a threat. -- to Russian territorial aggression. Putin hates NATO because it puts an insurmountable boundary on his violent territorial ambitions. Must be very frustrating for him to be so thwarted, causing lots of emotional turmoil. Feelings of helplessness which in turn lead to rage. I am sure his therapist is helping him work through this. 3. NATO is very much a threat. -- to Putin keeping Russians in the dark about how badly his kleptocracy is running Russia By the way, what the heck is Germany up to? Is there lots of aid not making headlines? or are they really being this ridiculous?

Drunken fool gets in bar fight and is busy getting his faced pounded into the curb outside. But he still finds the energy to insult some other guy in the bar between impacts. That's really impressive, really. What an insane asylum of a country!

Hey Grigb, THANKS for your thoughts. I am really grateful for having an actual RU army veteran's opinions. And I sincerely hope they don't try to conscript you!

On the UKR side of the artillery war the question of maintenence has come up. Today Kos from DailyKos, ex-arty guy, says learning to shoot gun systems is much, much easier than learning to maintain them. LIBERAL SITE, ENTER AT OWN RISK: link is direct to the arty article https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/6/8/2102883/-Ukraine-update-Switching-to-NATO-weapons-isn-t-as-simple-as-people-think-it-is I wonder what solutions are possible for this? sounds like they are shipping some systems back to Poland for repair. I guess not realistic to put NATO arty repair teams on UKR soil. So maybe UKR can hire retired NCOs & maintenence techs as contractors w money provided by NATO? Artillery superiority seems to be the game changer going forward.

wow, that really is amazing. Nicely done.

Just about the stupidest thing I have heard in decades. I've been an engineer for over 3 decades and every time I get something in pints of pig blood or whatever imperial units are made of I immediately convert to metric. It's a completely idiotic system and US should've converted back when we were planning to in late 70s (Reagan canceled US conversion to metric). 5280 feet in a mile. Using fractions instead of decimals (1/8, 3/16, 5/32" etc). Degrees in some arbitrary nonsense farenheit scale that ties in w nothing physical. pounds-mass, pounds-force. And that's without even getting into energy & fluidics, which are a nightmare in imperial system. And cooking? everything is stupid for cooking - ounces, pints, cups, teaspoons, tablespoons. So snuck off right after work for early showing of Top Gun w my 21 yr old. The enemy is not explicitly named, could be china/NK/RU, so I just decided they were Russians and this greatly increased my enjoyment of the dogfight scenes. Heckuva fun movie, saw it in a 'theatre', which is a large room w chairs and a big screen -- weeeeeird. But back on topic, the official UKR press release guy said to be prepared for a very hard week ahead for UKR forces. Said they just don't have enough heavy weapons in the izyum/popasne/sloviansk areas and UKR will probably be losing some ground. I saw this in the Denys Davydov youtube video for today.

good analogy. My cincinnati reds are basically an excellent AAA team. And we even win sometimes. So once we take into account RU corruption and the rest of NATO, it must be more like a 20X advantage. For those who missed this when someone posted it earlier, it is worth the time. Especially in how as one goes down the chain of command there's greater and greater inequality in the monetary amount of corruption vs the damage to readiness and capability. For example, at the bottom of the chain of command, selling some fuel for a few thousand dollars can stop an entire BTG well short of its objective. Or selling $100 worth of copper wire ruins a $2M tank.

Totally worth it! the shattered cities Putin has conquered and all the oil & natural gas they can't get to are definitely going to make this whole thing turn a profit! On the "what military plan would've worked" I still go back to it never being a military plan. It was coup backed up by a military invasion via armored columns and airborne insertions. Once the coup failed it was a disaster no matter how he decided to run the invasion. He could've concentrated force in the donbas but Ukraine would've known that and moved their own forces accordingly. RU couldn't really advance very far due to the logistics mess. Reminds me of how I used to always like to visualize how Germany could've won during Barbarossa. As I got older and read more about the logistical end, I realized Germany needed Russia to give up by the time Germans reached Smolensk since they knew they'd have to stop to do major logistical pause (Paulus actually calculated this well beforehand and it's well documented). And sure enough, they made it to Smolensk then had to pause. So Severodonetsk does now appear to be a target of opportunity for tying down & degrading RU forces. Interesting and clever move.

Japan, 1930s? Over 30% of GDP for quite a while, at least that's what I'd read.

I wonder how (if) this will be covered in state TV? I'd say it was all faked and that Zelensky was actually in Lviv or even inside Poland because he's a spineless coward. I would've been saying stuff like that from the start. Enough of the brainwashed will buy it that it will take on a life of its own. Have a point of contact for all the pundit clowns to check in every day w the current message and repeat it ad nauseum on every show. It goes on all day, every day, in the US, and the talking point discipline here is really quite remarkable. Which is another odd thing: if Putin can tell the populace anything he wants, why does it actually matter how much of Donbas he controls? Who's gonna know? We keep hearing about how Putin needs this or that to get enough victory to go on the defensive, but really why does it even matter? He's got plenty and can simply claim whatever he wants.

well, like I've said. there's no longer any hiding that there's a mad dog next door. And right now can use the fact that the dog is busy to build a better fence. Dog won't like it but he's already got another dog biting his neck. Meanwhile China has decisions to make. Give in to nationalistic militarism, or continue to massively benefit from global trade. They can't afford folks moving production or getting suppliers elsewhere.

Yeah, makes one wish there was some kind of mechanism to limit the chance that Iran was building nuclear weapons. One with inspections and other safeguards built into it. Yeah, gosh, wouldn't that be a good idea. Oh, yeah, we had that. And it was unilaterally abrogated by previous US president. So Iran has since been full speed ahead on developing nukes. On another subject, I must admit that I was one of the folks that believed that countries that become economically interdependent are very unlikely to go to war or behave in ways that wreck their trade. So I thought RU pipeline was going to work -- RU needed the money, EU needed the energy, so RU would be hurting itself by bad behavior. I was soooooooooooooooo wrong. The only thing I was right about was that RU doing something aggressive that wrecked cooperation would hurt RU much more in the long run than it hurts EU. No one will trust Putin ever again in any business deal. Deals might get made but only if Putin pays up front and at a severe price disadvantage.

which proper news site? I'm interested to see what folks are saying. I am guessing it's lots of Russian SteamRoller stuff.

nice depiction of something that had been confusing me early in the war. There were sooooo many abandoned RU vehicles and I thought "why wouldn't they drive away w at least some armor between them and the UKR small arms". Someone of the forum said it was because they are terrified so ATGMs and artillery targeting the vehicles. And here's some nice proof. Simply running away instead of reversing and going back. I suppose the other nice bit of this is they can go back and say their vehicles were damaged/mobility-killed which might keep the crew out of the next few missions as they wait for some ancient replacement vehicle.

I would think it would be a hammer north of izyum to cut off that big salient. But popasna also certainly possible. Any day now we could see some bigger UKR action.