Centurian52
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Posts posted by Centurian52
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17 minutes ago, billbindc said:
Russia isn't employing a military strategy when it hits Ukrainian civilian targets. It is employing a political strategy. Domestically, it provides evidence to the mass of Russian hardliners that there is no length that Putin won't go to win. In Ukraine, it sends the message that Russia will relentlessly attack in all ways without remorse until Zelensky submits. This isn't mass bombing in the style of WWII or even Vietnam. It is communication.
Politics are central to warfare. Saying it's a political strategy doesn't make it not a military strategy. Saying it's political only specifies what level of warfare we are operating on (the strategic layer, not the operational or tactical layers). And how do you think the theory behind the terror bombings of WW2 and Vietnam worked? They were trying to send exactly the same message to the Germans, Japanese, and Vietnamese that the Russians are trying to send to Ukraine.
The problem with this sort of messaging is that the message that people receive is usually not the message you thought you were sending. You think you are sending the message "the only way to end this suffering is to give up", but the message people are actually receiving is "the perpetrator of this attack is a monster who deserves no sympathy or remorse".
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double post
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16 hours ago, Kraft said:
But nobody can be dumb enough to think terror bombing ever worked
Now that I've cooled down a bit, I think I can address this. Basically, Russian military thinking is behind the times.
Back when long range bombing first became a thing it was not immediately obvious that terror bombing couldn't break peoples' will to fight, and it certainly wasn't obvious that it would actually harden their resolve to fight. Everyone (not just the Germans, but the Americans and British too) thought that you could potentially break a population's will to fight with terror bombing (although even back then you would think that the moral imperative of not killing civilians should have been enough). It took far longer than it should have for the United States to figure out that terror bombing not only doesn't work, but is counter-productive.
There should have been enough data for us to figure that out in WW2, but ineffective bombing campaigns seem to have been something of a blind spot for us. It didn't help that Japan surrendered shortly after getting nuked (even in that case, some fresh perspectives are shedding light on the possibility that it wasn't the nukes that convinced them to surrender). We kept conducting terror bombing through WW2, Korea, and even as late as Vietnam. In the Gulf War we finally made a concerted effort to avoid hitting civilians, with the only civilians killed in bombings being from high profile accidents.
The problem today is that Russian/Soviet military history is not our military history. They didn't fight the same wars we fought, or were on very different fronts, and their officers didn't hang out with our officers very much to share experiences. So they didn't learn the same lessons we learned, in the same order, or in the same way*. And we weren't exactly eager to share lessons with the Soviets during the Cold War. Their thinking on bombing has advanced, at most, to about the point we were at in Vietnam.
* Another example of this is that we figured out back in WW1 that decentralized control (what we call 'mission command') was the correct approach to C2 in modern warfare. Meanwhile the Russians still use a more centralized (almost Napoleonic, but with radios) style of command, in which the word of the commanding officer is law.
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49 minutes ago, danfrodo said:
I will stop because all I can do is type strings of violence-tinged expletives......
You are a better person than me. Perhaps I should have followed your lead.
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49 minutes ago, Haiduk said:
This morning at 5:20 we had missile strike attempt on Kyiv, but 11 missiles were intercepted on approaches. Terrible tragedy in Uman' town, Cherkasy oblast. The town was hit with two missiles, one hit some store facility, other hit directly at 9-storey residential building. One section of it collapsed completely. In present time 23 bodies are recovered from ruines (among them 4 children), 18 injured, 17 resqued
Also one missile destroyed private house in Dnipro city, young woman and her little doughter were killed.
After a year of war and at least tens of thousands of deaths, this really shouldn't get to me as much as it does. But it is taking every ounce of my willpower to contain my rage right now. At this moment I want nothing less than the blood of every single Russian. I want Putin's head on a pike. This was not a military target. It wasn't a barracks, or a communication station, or even any sort of critical infrastructure. This was a residential building. This wasn't an act of war. This was an act of terrorism.
And I know this isn't the first time this has happened. It's just another example of a long pattern of Russian crimes. I know that events like this are behind every report I read of continued Russian missile attacks. Not to mention that mass graves have been found in every single liberated area, complete with clear signs of torture.
I understand in theory why we don't want Russia to collapse completely. But right now I just don't care. I want Russia to be destroyed.
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2 minutes ago, Probus said:
Does Ukraine have to cut Crimea off with a drive to the Black Sea in order for their offensive to be considered a success or is there more that the UA needs to accomplish?
The trouble with defining success is that in the real world success is a spectrum, not a toggle. The question isn't "will it be a success?", but "how successful will it be?". Ukraine is certain to retake some territory and inflict some casualties, just as it is certain to take some casualties. But it all comes down to how much of each. If they just manage to retake a handful of towns and inflict a few thousand casualties, but lose tens of thousand of soldiers in the process, then it will be a dismal failure (like the Russian winter offensive). If they manage to drive the Russians out of Ukraine entirely, effectively destroy the entire Russian army, and only lose a handful of men, then it will be a crushing victory. And there are a million variations in between those two extremes, each more successful than some possible outcomes, and less successful than other possible outcomes.
For my part I'm hoping to at least see a chunk of territory retaken on par with the Kherson or Kharkiv offensives, with enough strength left in the Ukrainian army to follow it up with at least one more offensive before the year is out. If it can accomplish something of strategic value, like cutting the Crimean land bridge, then that's even better. An even better outcome would be to not only take everything up to the neck of Crimea, but to retake Crimea as well all in one go. And in my wildest dreams I even imagine this thing collapsing the whole Russian frontline.
Of course the media is going to report the outcome as a position on a toggle, not a position on a spectrum (success or failure, not a degree of success). Whether it will be reported as a success will be determined by whether the results exceeded or fell short of public expectations. So it would seem that the best way to get PR victories in a war is to keep public expectations as low as possible. Kharkiv was playing this game on easy mode, since it came completely out of the blue, with no public expectations at all. Does anyone have any feel for what the public expectations are for this offensive? Are people expecting it to drive the Russians completely out of Ukraine or to just move the needle a bit?
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7 hours ago, hcrof said:
Related: a lot of talk here like the whole operation is going to be easy and the Russians have learned nothing/are terminally incompetent.
Last year I cautioned on a few occasions that the Russians might learn from their mistakes (afterall, the Soviets started WW2 as an absolute tactical mess, but they definitely got a lot better by the end). And yes, they seem to have learned some lessons. But I think Russia faces several obstacles to learning.
First, war is a two player game. It isn't enough to learn from your past mistakes. You need to learn faster than the other side. And the Ukrainians have proven that they are much faster learners than the Russians. The competence gap has gotten wider, not narrower, despite evidence that the Russians have managed to learn some lessons.
Second, the Russian military seems to have a lot of deeply ingrained problems which actively resist efforts to get the organization as a whole to learn, even if its individual members learn. This video touches on one of those issues, combat compliance.
With a combat compliance problem as bad as Russia's even a very talented tactician may not be able to employ his formations in a tactically proficient way. A lot of tactics which would be more effective simply cease to be options. And this is just one example out of many issues in the Russian army (the difficulty in transferring lessons between multiple parallel organizations that don't like each other is another). These are the sorts of problems that need to be solved before actual tactics can even begin to improve.
7 hours ago, hcrof said:2. The Russian defensive trenches, mines and anti tank ditches are a formidable obstacle
This is absolutely true. The outer crust of Russia's prepared defenses will be the hard part. They also don't have to worry as much about combat compliance, training, maneuver, and other issues while all they are asking their men to do is hold a trench. But that outer crust will not hold forever. Sooner or later Russian forces will have to maneuver, or fall back under pressure, and I have serious doubts about their ability to do that.
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Just now, chuckdyke said:
The present Russian regime is a regime with which no decent person can do business with.
Also this. ISW has repeatedly assessed that Putin will probably never relinquish his maximalist goals for Ukraine. We can never change his mind. We have to force Russia out of Ukraine, we cannot negotiate Russia out of Ukraine.
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22 minutes ago, billbindc said:
I disagree. All we should be discussing with Russia right now is how and when they are going to end the war, leave Ukrainian territory and in the meantime what steps we are going to take to avoid any sort of accidental direct conflict that could escalate it. America setting conditions on a future Russian government muddies the water and affirms the Russian claim to the rest of the world that the US is meddling in their internal affairs. Call it a 'color revolution by other means' if you will. In addition, it is not at all clear that articulating those conditions now will actually help any would be revolutionaries as it would make it simple for the regime to then label any and all American stooges.
Eyes on the prize...arms to the UA and support until they win the war. That's all and it's more than enough.
I think there should be some conditions placed on Russia, or whatever we call the country that Moscow is at the heart of at the end of all this. Them ending hostilities and leaving all Ukrainian territory is all well and good. But there are still war crimes that need to be addressed. Sanctions should not be lifted until Moscow agrees to cooperate in investigating suspected war criminals, arresting and prosecuting known war criminals, and returns forcibly deported Ukrainian children. If they refuse, then we should have no qualms about permanently shutting Moscow out of the international community.
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16 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
Agreed, except that I think we can see cracks. They just aren't in the people as much as the structure. The economy, for example, is a significant crack that is getting worse.
Speaking of cracks, I just remembered a video released by Polymatter a couple weeks ago about the importance of pensions to Putin's hold on power.
Pensions which require the very money which is being rapidly drained by the war. It really makes me wonder what happens to Putin when that money runs out.
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20 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:
That's the official line, but I think it's more the other way around. If you wanted Kyiv to take a peace offer, they wouldn't have much choice but to accept. At least if the alternative was no more weapons.
This makes the mistake of assuming that there is a single decisionmaker somewhere who could cut off the supply of all weapons. But there isn't. You would have to get every single western country to agree to not send any more weapons (good luck convincing Poland, for example, to stop sending weapons). No one country, even the United States, has the power to force Kyiv to accept any peace deal that they don't want to accept.
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22 hours ago, kevinkin said:
Investigative reporting almost always has an agenda.
I don't put a whole lot of stock in mainstream reporting. But I always try to remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Everyone has preconceptions and bias which may color their analysis if they aren't careful. That isn't the same thing as having an agenda (though I'll admit that some extreme right organizations, like Fox, may have an agenda).
The problem with mainstream reporting isn't that they have an agenda. It's that they aren't very good at their jobs. To be more precise, they are good at their jobs, but the incentive structures of their jobs do not encourage good reporting. One problem is that they are generalists, not specialists. They try to report on every subject, and that means they are almost never specialists in the subject they are reporting on. I am willing to trust ISW's reports so much because I know they specialize in the subject they are reporting on. They get very good at reporting on one subject, and they never attempt to report on subjects that they do not specialize in. So specialization over generalization may be one key to good reporting.
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4 minutes ago, CarlXII said:
Far longer then what the actual war took i would guess. I doubt you will survive such a project
I will admit, being able to finish this project depends heavily on Isaac Arthur being right about a few things
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I am not playing CMBB at the moment, although I am playing CMx1. I have 1,873 files in my CMBB scenarios folder, of which I have sorted 1,020 in chronological order and am slowly working my way through the rest. I am currently playing through around 765 CMAK scenarios in chronological order, and I will start playing CMBB in parallel with CMAK when I get to June 1941 (I should have all of my CMBB scenarios sorted by then). Right now I'm in November 1940, fighting the Italians in East Africa. This is going to take a while.
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On 4/25/2023 at 10:56 AM, Battlefront.com said:
The survivors should have retreated and tried again later. It's like CM's AI carrying on with a plan because that's what it was scripted to do, not because there's some reason to think it might work.
I'm starting to think the CM AI is pretty realistic when it is controlling Soviet, Syrian, or Russian forces.
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On 4/25/2023 at 9:51 AM, dan/california said:
The Chinese are going to shove full autonomy into drones as fast as they physically/technically can. They idea that they will have moral qualms about it is laughable. At some point we are going to have to have a conversation with the lawyers, or just lose. Not that big an issue for this war, but it is going to loom rather large in the next one.
I do think war is headed towards fully autonomous systems. But I don't think we are going to see it anytime soon. Even 6th gen fighter programs are only going as far as manned-unmanned teaming. I think fully autonomous systems are still another two or three generations down the road. AI just isn't there yet.
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On 4/25/2023 at 7:34 AM, paxromana said:
It would be even better if the crew would simply run away from the Ukrainian summer offensive and the Ukrainians could have it parade in the streets of Kiev on world news ... and see the Russians try to spin that ...
My gut tells me that the Russians will never deploy T-14s to Ukraine. They can't get them out of the prototype stage, which tells me that they are either too expensive to go to full production, or there are still too many unsolved problems with the design to move out of the prototype phase. That means they are probably either too expensive to risk in combat, or there are too many unsolved problems for them to be effective in combat. But a part of me really wishes they would deploy them. Capturing a T-14 would be fantastic. I'm sure we'd get some great intelligence out of it, although I'm sure we'd also find that it isn't quite as capable as the Russian's claimed (which would be great for propaganda value).
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On 4/25/2023 at 3:28 AM, The_Capt said:
I strongly suspect that the US is working very hard to engineer a just-soft-enough landing for Russia in this war.
I wonder if this strategy might backfire. I don't think there is any possibility of a soft landing for Russia. But the longer this war lasts, the more casualties Russia takes, the more Russian equipment is destroyed, the longer sanctions remain in full effect, the more time other countries have to adapt to new trade relationships that exclude Russia altogether, the harder the landing will be for Russia.
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On 4/24/2023 at 1:26 PM, Jiggathebauce said:
To quote a summary of the speech given by a user who shared this to me originally:
"It appears a Russian Naval officers mutiny is being announced, with the intent of restoring a true Tsar to succeed Putin. An assembly of Russian officers said that if their leader comes to power, there will be fundamental changes.
The points:
"personnel revolution";
lustration of the enemies of the people;
"degreasing" the oligarchs;
severing diplomatic relations with all hostile countries;
an end to all immigration
the abolition of the free circulation of the dollar and the euro;
growth of the population of the Russian Federation to one billion.
While this may not lead to internal war or conflict right away, it is certainly seditious. The new Supreme Ruler of Russia and future candidate for President of Russia 2024 has been nominated from within the Officers' Assembly: Captain Ivan Otrakovsky.
Otrakovsky has a long history of membership in far right nationalist groups and associations with breakaway sect of the Orthodox Church. If he doesn't find a window big enough in the coming months, with the help of what looks to be significant military backing, this could very well be the new Tsar of the most horrifyingly dystopian country on the planet. Brace for impact."
Sounds far right to me
This is incredible. What exactly do they intend to feed those 1 billion people after they've cut off diplomatic relations with every country on Earth except for Iran, North Korea, and China? Does anyone know how many calories are in an average clump of Russian dirt?
I don't doubt they can reach a billion people after cutting off immigration and returning their economy to the stone age. In a scenario this dystopian I assume they have Krieg style cloning vats.
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On 4/22/2023 at 10:15 AM, dan/california said:
If only we had a good simulator to test some of these ideas in? Anybody have any leads?
Considering the range of most of these systems an operational sim would probably be more appropriate than a tactical sim.
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On 4/21/2023 at 3:51 PM, danfrodo said:
Part of ceding was hoping I could do my little part to make the discussion go away
. And I wasn't going to take the time to see if his data was any good, so was throwing in the towel because there's bigger hills for me to die upon.
Meanwhile, I am wondering how the forum breaks down into UKR spring offensive camps. I see two main camps in the world of internet opinion:
1. UKR offensive will be big, sudden surprise attack on (mostly) one axis and we will know it's the real deal and will come late spring.
2. UKR will conduct increasingly aggressive corrosion plus some attacks of small-ish depth, like 5-10 kms, in multiple areas to shape the battlefield and completely confuse Putin as to where to put his reserves. Then will strike later in summer in a much bigger way and we will then know that's the real deal.
I am believer in #2
I don't pretend to have any idea how Ukraine will conduct their offensive. But I'm beginning to form a picture of just how ill-prepared Russia is to receive it. ISW's April 23 report suggests that all, or nearly all, Russian units are committed to the frontline. That means they have no reserves. Apparently they have been seriously demechanized, and many units may be relegated to moving on foot. They are short on both personnel and equipment. Their units are fragmented and staffed by undertrained personnel. They haven't demonstrated an ability to coordinate large multi-brigade maneuvers in months.
It all adds up to a really dire situation for the Russians. Basically, I don't think they have the strength to hold their outer-crust of defenses, I don't think they have the level of multi-unit coordinated to give ground in a controlled manner, they don't appear to have the reserves to counter a breakthrough, and if they try to counter a breakthrough by stripping units from other fronts they are likely to open themselves up to opportunistic offensives on those other fronts, such as what happened at Kharkiv. I really don't want to overhype the Ukrainian offensive, because I know the more we drum up expectations the more likely Ukraine is to fall short of those expectations. But this really looks like a recipe for a total collapse of the Russian frontline.
Russia has been reduced to a static army, and I believe Ukraine intends to make a return to maneuver warfare. Historically, static armies are pretty helpless in the face of maneuver warfare.
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42 minutes ago, Da_General said:
Does anyone know how many new campaigns this expansion is going to net us? New missions as well?
I think we traditionally get at least two new campaigns with new CM modules, one for each side (maybe three if more than one new force is introduced). I know in the WW2 titles, whenever a new module introduced new Allied armies, we'd get a new Allied campaign for us to see what it's like fighting with the new armies, and we'd get a new Axis campaign for us to see what it's like fighting against the new armies.
I'm going to guess that we'll get three campaigns. A British campaign, a Canadian campaign, and a new Soviet campaign in which we will be going up against the British. I'm also going to guess somewhere in the range of 10-20 new standalone scenarios, based on what seems to be typical for a new module. -
25 minutes ago, Sublime said:
Oh I didnt say it was irrational at all
Looking back I can see why it looks like I was saying that. The intended function of my opening sentence was actually to agree with you, not to contradict you. Its intended meaning would have been retained if it were replaced with the sentence "Yeah, that makes sense".
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6 hours ago, Fenris said:
More Bradley pics
Looks good. I have a feeling that this is what the Bradley models will look like in CMSU.
. And I wasn't going to take the time to see if his data was any good, so was throwing in the towel because there's bigger hills for me to die upon.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
If Turkey hadn't closed the Bosporus strait to military traffic, that would be a legit possibility