Centurian52

I think we've established that starving the Russians in Crimea isn't an ideal way of defeating them, since that starves the civilians too. In fact it might be worse for the civilians, since the Russians will probably steal food from the civilians before starving themselves. But once Crimea is cut off the Russians won't just be cut off from food resupply, but from ammunition resupply and reinforcements as well. Their ability to resist a determined push will be decidedly finite. It might still come to starving them (if that's what it takes then that's what it takes), but for the sake of keeping civilian suffering to a minimum I don't think that should be plan A.

I assume the constant raiding across the Dnipro is about keeping up a constant pressure, so that the Russians either have to maintain forces to prevent a river crossing or suffer the Ukrainians actually conducting a river crossing. I seriously doubt they have any major river crossing operation planned beyond being ready to conduct an opportunistic crossing if the Russians ever move too many units away. As for an amphibious invasion of Crimea, I don't think it's even on the cards. Amphibious invasions are extremely risky and difficult (complicated to supply and reinforce, and failure could mean the loss of the entire invasion force). Historically they are only conducted when success is virtually guaranteed. Air and naval superiority are also generally considered prerequisites for any amphibious invasion.

No one wants peace more than an invader. Invasions would go so much more smoothly if people just stopped defending themselves.

Hmmm, this is the first time I've caught a tournament announcement while signups were still open. Having never fought a human opponent before, I expect to do poorly. It should be fun nonetheless.

I don't think economic blackmail would be particularly effective. They already tried withholding gas in the winter of 2022/2023, and it didn't work. For all the natural resources they have to sell, the outside world just isn't as dependent on Russia as Russia is on the outside world (and the countries that buy the most Russian resources aren't the ones that Russia would want to escalate against). While the Russian economy is in a downward spiral, there isn't really any such thing as rock bottom (at least until we're talking about going back to the literal stone age). So they can still do more harm to themselves than they do to anyone else. However far their economy is on track to crash, it is always possible for it to crash further. However bad things are likely do get for Russia if they don't completely cut off exports, they will be tangibly worse if they do cut off exports. There is a big difference between their economy crashing back to the 19th century C.E. and it crashing back to the 19th century B.C.E.

I think he meant what can they do as far as escalation. And I think when it comes to escalation the only things they can do are exactly what The_Capt said. They can mobilize, and they can go nuclear. I think mobilization (at least another partial mobilization, if not full mobilization) is only a matter of time regardless what the west does, simply because they will eventually have no choice. So it's not really a viable "we'll do this in response to something you do" sort of escalation. And going nuclear means WW3 by definition, which they definitely don't want any more than we do, so it's not really credible. So I think the reality is that they have precisely zero escalation options.

Are those Leopards among the 135 Leopard 1s that Oryx lists as already pledged?

deleted, as interesting as some of these sidebars can be I should probably stop getting so off topic

Special military operations?

My own feeling on the soldier/warrior discussion is that I always felt that "soldier" felt more professional. Both warriors and soldiers do more or less the same thing. But a "soldier" is a member of a formalized organization, called an army. Political units which don't have formal armies fight their wars with warriors, not soldiers. This is not to say that a soldier is necessarily better than a warrior (you could conceivably frame it as meaning either that a soldier is more professional than a warrior, or as meaning that a warrior is freer than a soldier). I mean nothing further than: Soldier: Member of a formal organization Warrior: Not a member of a formal organization

We won't know for certain until we send some test subjects* for some long duration experiments. But my feeling is that a mix of bioforming and clever habitat design may be necessary. *colloquially known as "astronauts".

Not just Prussian (German by this point) regulations. This is how every army worked pre-WW1. And it's mainly about maintaining command and control. There are no radios or modern NCO corps yet, and no one can shout loud enough for orders to be heard along the entire length of a company or even platoon that has deployed into skirmish line (squads exist at this point in time, but they aren't independent maneuver elements yet). And it isn't really considered possible to change direction while in skirmish line (you can try to make a company sized skirmish line turn, but it's gonna be ugly (just imagine 200 men in an extended order line trying to conduct a 90 (or 45, or any number) degree turn, especially when no one on the flanks as even heard the order)). So you march to your start line for the attack in close order, get faced in the right direction, and then deploy into skirmish line to conduct the attack. Once a unit has deployed into skirmish line they can only move forward. Once they have made contact with the enemy they are now the "firing line" and the higher level commander has effectively lost all command and control over that unit until it has finished its attack. So the only further influence the commander has over the battle is in committing reserves to the firing line. Those reserves may be held back behind the next terrain feature in close order, or following a few hundred meters behind (in close order if it is considered safe enough, or in extended order if enough fire is still reaching them). It is considered preferable to commit the reserves to the flank of the existing firing line, making it longer and preventing units from getting mixed up. But the limited frontages available for the attack usually meant that it was more practical to merge the reserves into the existing firing line from behind. The downside to merging the reserves in behind the existing firing line is that there is no way to prevent the units from getting mixed up. After the attack is completed everyone needs to be called back into close order so they can be reorganized and reoriented for their next orders. I conceptualize it as being pretty similar to how we use mechanized infantry (can the order get any closer than being crowded into the back of an armored vehicle?). Only "move mounted and fight dismounted" becomes "move in close order and fight in extended order". But, while in theory you should always fight in extended order, in practice a unit moving in close order may get surprised, or a commander trying to keep his unit controllable "just that little bit longer" may misjudge how far it is safe to stay in close order. Everyone with any sense (and not everyone had any sense) has figured out by this point in time that units are extremely vulnerable to fire while they are in close order, so should always be shaken out into extended order before making contact. But no one has figured out a system of command and control that can entirely dispense with close order formations just yet. I think the problem was that existing maneuver elements were just too big to be controllable or maneuverable while in extended order. Light machineguns will give squads enough firepower to be a useful maneuver element (10 men with bolt action rifles can't really generate enough firepower on their own to be useful), and the forging of a modern NCO corps gives armies a high enough density of leaders to make squads useable maneuver elements. Once the squad has become a useable maneuver element you finally have a formation that is small enough to easily change direction and hear the shouted commands of its leader while in extended order. But I digress. There is a whole other thread for this.

Yeah that's a fair point. The US military may or may not be intended for defense. But it certainly isn't for self defense.

Those numbers seem plausible. 15-20% is an embarrassingly high number of T-55/T62s.

One thing is certain. It is always going to be harder to make another planet's environment livable than to fix this planet's environment. Colonizing other objects is about expanding our total amount of available real estate, not about escaping our current world's problems (one of many reasons why there is no point in rushing colonization (it would probably take centuries for a colony to grow to self sufficiency anyway, so it would do absolutely nothing to save us from anything that might destroy us this century or next)). Unfortunately that does rather ruin the plot of Interstellar.

Colonizing Mars isn't insane. The insane part is that he thinks it can be done in a decade or two (he has absolutely no sense for what sort of timescales these things take place on). But, as an Isaac Arthur fan, I do think we'll colonize every planet, moon, asteroid, comet, and grain of dust in this (and every other) solar system eventually (assuming we don't blow ourselves up first, but I'm feeling optimistic).

One of my favorite shows as well

Everything you mentioned, and the offensive is in the south where the mud doesn't get as bad (which is not to say that it won't be a problem at all). From what I recall being told last year, the northern regions of Ukraine tend to get hit the worst by the mud seasons. Assuming the Ukrainians have the resources to sustain the offensive for that long, I don't think the weather is going to force it to stop (it might slow it down a bit though, and right when things should start really speeding up).

I used to think so. But I am more and more convinced that Musk isn't actually all that smart. Just rich enough to hire smart people. The man renamed Twitter (one of the more recognizable names in the world) to X (a single letter which is impossible to trademark and which is literally used as a placeholder).

Fair enough. That was not one of my better thought out comments. And I think some of the downsides of the BTR, such as cramped conditions for the dismounts, are things which tend to get missed by Combat Mission.

I think that is part of the package of being out of touch with high intensity, peer vs peer, conventional warfare (modern or otherwise). We have forgotten what kind of casualties can be realistically expected in this kind of warfare. I think even if we learn all of the right lessons from Ukraine, and do everything right in the next war, our casualties will still be far in excess of what is considered acceptable under current doctrinal guidelines. Because acceptable casualties under current doctrinal guidelines are calibrated for either high intensity, asymmetric, conventional warfare (Desert Storm, Iraq 2003) or low intensity, asymmetric, unconventional warfare (Afghanistan, Iraq). Yeah, in retrospect it was probably always unrealistic to expect Ukraine to be able to seamlessly pull off NATO doctrine without NATO enablers. I think Richard Iron put it best when he said that, without the support of the US Air Force, no army on Earth could have done much better, including the US Army.

I don't think the T-55s were for making up tank numbers. Based on Covert Cabal's counts they never had very many T-55s to begin with, and they still have thousands of T-72s in storage (based on the last count). The most plausible theory I've heard is that the T-55s were the most suitable platform the Russians had for firing the 100mm artillery ammunition they got from North Korea. Apparently they don't have any 100mm artillery pieces of their own (lots of 122s and 152s, but no 100mm guns), making the T-55 their only platform capable of firing 100mm ammunition.

I think the advantage of computer wargaming is that it can have way more rules. It's just that the human player doesn't need to learn any of them, because the rules are being read and executed by a cpu instead. It takes a lot of very complex rules to properly model reality. I think one of the biggest limitations of any tabletop game is that you are very limited in how many rules you can have before you start to overwhelm the human players with the complexity.

Oryx only counts the visually confirmed losses. We know for a fact that the Oryx numbers are an undercount, because they work hard to ensure that their numbers are an undercount. The real figure being a little over twice the Oryx figure seems entirely plausible to me. Even so, overclaiming is a real issue in almost every war. It is hard to be sure exactly what you've destroyed*. Frankly I'm amazed that number of tanks that Ukraine is claiming to have destroyed is only a bit over twice the visually confirmed number. That suggests to me that they are being pretty restrained in what they are claiming. They may have some good systems in place to cut down on overclaiming. Or perhaps it's simply easier to be sure of what you've destroyed on the modern drone filled battlefield. *As an example, Allied pilots in WW2 often thought they had destroyed a German tank, when in reality it was completely unscathed. Missed bombs would kick up a large cloud of dust that would obscure the tank, making it look like it had been hit (especially to a pilot who needs to focus on flying, and may only be able to look back for a few seconds). As far as I know overclaiming was usually the result of this sort of fog of war, not the result of deliberate lying. But nonetheless the claimed number of aircraft shot down or tanks destroyed was usually many times higher than the real figure.

To your credit, you did not say anything about forcing anyone to do anything. But, it definitely seemed like you were implying that the world would be a better place with fewer people of certain demographics (people from the 3rd world). That is a very unsettling implication.