Centurian52

You just saved 32 minutes of my life. I don't know who Scott Ritter is, so I had opened the video in another tab to get to later (that tab has since been closed). I will gladly trust your word that he isn't worth my time.

You are probably right. But someone had posted RUMINT that the targets were the residences of Russian intelligence officers. It seemed like an interesting suggestion to me, and is one scenario which would make sense of the apparent lack of explosives on the drones. Perhaps being unarmed would make it possible for the drones to precision strike the apartment of a single intelligence officer, without risking serious collateral damage to the neighboring apartments in the same building.

That is interesting. That might explain the small or absent explosives in the drones. The kinetic energy of a drone smashing into a VIP's apartment might be enough to kill the occupant while minimizing the risk of unintended victims in neighboring apartments getting killed.

I wouldn't mind if you did exactly that. I'm learning a lot.

yes also yes

I don't think NATO has lost its advantage in night combat. But Ukraine is not NATO (yet). I have no idea how much night fighting equipment has been sent to Ukraine (more than zero). They clearly have some night fighting equipment, but they also clearly do not have NVGs or thermals on the same scale as a NATO army would. NVGs don't seem to be something that every last Ukrainian soldier can take for granted just yet.

Apologies if this has already been posted (I'm still a few pages behind), but I was excited to see this as the first sentence in this morning's ISW report: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-5-2023

I think even the 2022 invasion was meant to remain in the grey zone. Putin just miscalculated. He thought he could subdue Ukraine in a matter of days. The invasion was meant to be over before the West could implement any sort of decisive intervention. And once it was over there would have been no point in a decisive intervention. When that failed he found himself in a very non-grey situation that he hadn't planned for.

This would fit all too perfectly with the decentralized mafia picture that Steve's been painting.

I love it! It gives the SPG-9 some much needed mobility, while keeping a lower profile than a truck. In fact it's almost as low a profile as just the gun with the tripod alone. I remember from CMSF that the SPG-9 can be a pain in the ***, even for a modern army. Small and concealable, and hard hitting enough to threaten everything up to IFVs.

I haven't read the article yet, but I really don't get how anyone can claim that the Soviet Union made Ukraine. There was clearly a Ukrainian national identity before the Soviet Union existed, because I specifically remember Ukrainian forces in the Russian Civil War failing to achieve independence where Polish forces succeeded. The outcome of a few battles in the Russian Civil War are the only reason that Ukraine spent the 20th century as an SSR while Poland spent it as an independent country. But I suppose the important thing that Putin is really missing is that it doesn't matter when Ukraine came into existence or how. Whether or not a country existed in the distant past doesn't give it any more or less right to exist now. I don't think any reasonable person could argue that the Roman Empire (was a country 2,000 years ago) should be brought back at the expense of all the countries currently in its place, any more than any reasonable person could argue that the United States (wasn't a country 300 years ago) should be dissolved. Ukraine is a country now, and that's the only thing that matters. That's a fun bit of irony

I wouldn't count the UK military out just yet. It may not be able to stand on its own anymore. But it can still provide valuable capabilities to plug into a larger NATO force.

Well this just has "it's not long now" written all over it. It also has my blood pumping to kill some Russians. I'm gonna go play some CMBS.

My feeling is that the most significant implication of Russian nukes in Belarus, is that those nukes basically become a tripwire to guarantee that Russian forces intervene in a Belarusian revolution. Of course the Russian forces already training in Belarus were already a tripwire, and I cannot answer the inevitable "what additional forces could they intervene with?". So they may not even be significant in that respect.

Gosh, I wonder why criminals aren't considered to be desirable recruits in most armies?

Yeah, I was thinking of dive bombers when I made that statement. Any medium or heavy bomber would have to be incredibly lucky to achieve even that, Operation Jericho notwithstanding.

Training certainly helps. There is certainly no doubt that my accuracy would have been better if I put as many hours into flight sims as I have into Combat Mission. But from what I've read and heard (and I think either Military History Visualized or Military Aviation History made a video on bomber accuracy in WW2) my experience in the flights sims gave me more or less the right impression. And that impression was that, in an era before PGMs, bombing is something you do to areas, not to specific points. When a WW2 bomber was described as accurate, that probably meant that it could reliably get its bombs to land inside a football stadium, not that it could snipe tanks.

I never said they weren't intellectually advanced. Didn't I say that they modelled our government on the best political science available in their era? They were very intelligent individuals.

I have a couple of questions about Ukrainian Leopard 1s. 1. Can they take ERA or is the spaced armor too thin? I can imagine ERA being a bit counterproductive if it just ends up blowing massive holes in the spaced armor. 2. When the Ukrainians inevitably cover these things in ERA regardless of the answer to #1, what should we call the resulting Leopard 1 variant? Would it be the Leopard 1A5U (similar to how the Polish are calling their local variant of the K2 the K2PL)? Or would it be the Leopard 1A5V (following the 1980s Soviet naming convention of adding a V to a tank's designation when it is given kontakt-1 ERA)?

The Soviets did have significant intelligence capabilities. But let's be careful not to attribute them with superpowers. Both sides had very capable intelligence, and very capable counterintelligence. Both sides knew a lot about the other, but neither side knew everything about the other. They definitely knew a lot about our capabilities. They probably knew that, through most of the Cold War, they were probably strong enough to fend off a NATO invasion. But if they were strong enough to withstand a NATO invasion, it was because they had been spending enough on defense to maintain a military which was a match for NATO. More importantly, in order to know whether or not they need to maintain a military that is strong enough to withstand a NATO invasion, they would have needed to assess more than just NATO capabilities. They would have needed to assess NATO intentions. They may have had an intelligence apparatus that could give them a pretty accurate picture of NATO capabilities. But intentions are far more difficult to assess than capabilities. Which gets back to The_Capt's point. We knew that we had no intention of ever invading them. But did they?

This brings up a couple points that I think are relevant to this war (strictly about tanks, I'm sorry I reopened the A-10 discussion, I made that post before reading that Steve had closed further discussion about the A-10). 1st. Not just Shermans, but tanks of all kinds on all sides were lost in very large numbers in WW2. Large numbers of tanks being knocked out just seems to be a feature of any war that involves large number of tanks. That's one reason why I haven't bought into the latest "the tank is obsolete!" craze (my T-64s shredding about half a dozen BMP-2s in the last CMBS scenario I played is another (full admission that that was enabled by my infantry having already ambushed and destroyed the Russian T-72s)). 2nd. Crew survivability vs platform survivability. Now that Ukraine is operating large numbers of western tanks, we will soon see images of large numbers of destroyed western tanks. That is inevitable. Equipment get destroyed in war. But, except for the Leopard 1, all of those tanks have much better crew survivability than the Soviet-type tanks that the Ukrainians have been using until now (even the Leopard 1 will be no worse than Ukraine's old tanks in terms of crew survivability). After this offensive is over, there will be a lot of tank crew who will have gained valuable experience, and who will still be alive to use and pass on that experience for the next offensive.

Point taken. It figures the post that I put the least thought into, with the position that I was least committed to, based on youtube videos I saw years ago, would be the one to get the most replies (recently). I should be more careful going forward.

Having played the occasional flight sim (with extra hud assistance turned off) I wonder how anyone ever hit anything with unguided bombs

I think his point was that there was no increase in spending. US spending increased, but there was no increase in Soviet spending. And then The_Capt added that they couldn't have increased spending even if they wanted to. Their spending was already as high as it was because they had to compete with all of NATO throughout the entire Cold War. It was already at unsustainable levels and there was no way it was getting any higher when you factor in the other problems they were having. I think the gist I got from their two posts combined was that NATO defense spending outcompeting the Soviets was a big part of why the Soviets collapsed. But it wasn't specifically the US/Reagan, and it wasn't specifically in the 80s.

So between your post and Huba's it looks like there were at least two USV attacks on Russian ships recently. In at least one attack the USV struck the Russian ship. And in at least one attack the Russians were able to hit the USV with machine gun fire before it hit the ship.