Centurian52

So we COULD admit that the only likely opponent for a land war in Europe is currently wrecking itself in eastern Ukraine, and send Ukrainians everything they actually need, so they can finish wrecking it without losing a whole generation of fighting age men. What they need is about a third of the hardware in Europe. If the Russians leave Ukraine just beaten they are not coming back for a while. So unless you anticipate shipping most of your army to Taiwan sometime soon, The only real limit on how much hardware you can send them is how much you have. And if the Russians do completely lose their minds and attack Poland or the Baltics, it is Pretty clear their air force wouldn't last a day, and the rest of their army wouldn't last two more when GBUs started raining down in quantity. There is just no rational reason not send the Ukrainians everything they can physically use. Starting with the entire artillery park.

So Kosovo and Libya have been brought up a couple times now as examples of “NATO aggression” and some weird theories on the US somehow “using NATO” to do its bidding.  This is not how things worked, nor how things work.  Both Kosovo and Libya were conducted under UNSC resolutions as Chapter VII missions, not by an edict from the White House. In fact every NATO intervention over the last 30 years has had the backing of the UN Security Council, of which both Russia and China are permanent members.  (the only exception may be immediately after 9/11 when the US invoked article 5).  
In fact NATO as an alliance is not supporting the Ukraine (technically) it’s member states are bilaterally.
NATO is a massive military alliance, trying to make it to do anything is very hard and the idea that the US can “order NATO” is laughable.  NATO having a history of unilaterally invading nations and so Russia is somehow justifiably pushing back is nonsense.  As to NATO expansion, it has been 1) bureaucratic and 2) driven by Russian aggressiveness to its neighbours.  Narratives to the contrary are misinformed at best.

For full granularity the Russian forces would need 16 different tanks (T64BV, T72A, T72AV, T72B, T72B Obr. 1989, T72BA, T72B3, T72B3 Obr. 2016, T80BV, T80U, T80UK, T80UE-1, T80UM2, T80BVM, T90A, and T90M), while Ukraine would need 14 different tanks (T64A, T64B, T64BV, T64BV model 2017, T64B1M, T64BM, T64BM2, T72 Ural, T72M1, T72A, T72AV, T72B, T72AMT, and T80BV).
But if you just want to represent 90% of the Russian tanks you just need the 8 most common tanks (T72B, T72B3, T72B3 Obr. 2016, T80U, T72B Obr. 1989, T80BV, T80BVM, and T64BV). And if you are fine with getting 80% of the Russian tanks than you only need the 6 most common tanks (T72B, T72B3, T72B3 Obr. 2016, T80U, T72B Obr. 1989, and T80BV).
For the Ukrainians if you just want to represent 90% of their tanks you only need the 5 most common tanks (T64BV, T64BV model 2017, T80BV, T72B, and T72AMT). And if you are fine with 80% of the Ukrainian tanks then you just need the 3 most common tanks (T64BV, T64BV model 2017, and T80BV).

For full granularity the Russian forces would need 16 different tanks (T64BV, T72A, T72AV, T72B, T72B Obr. 1989, T72BA, T72B3, T72B3 Obr. 2016, T80BV, T80U, T80UK, T80UE-1, T80UM2, T80BVM, T90A, and T90M), while Ukraine would need 14 different tanks (T64A, T64B, T64BV, T64BV model 2017, T64B1M, T64BM, T64BM2, T72 Ural, T72M1, T72A, T72AV, T72B, T72AMT, and T80BV).
But if you just want to represent 90% of the Russian tanks you just need the 8 most common tanks (T72B, T72B3, T72B3 Obr. 2016, T80U, T72B Obr. 1989, T80BV, T80BVM, and T64BV). And if you are fine with getting 80% of the Russian tanks than you only need the 6 most common tanks (T72B, T72B3, T72B3 Obr. 2016, T80U, T72B Obr. 1989, and T80BV).
For the Ukrainians if you just want to represent 90% of their tanks you only need the 5 most common tanks (T64BV, T64BV model 2017, T80BV, T72B, and T72AMT). And if you are fine with 80% of the Ukrainian tanks then you just need the 3 most common tanks (T64BV, T64BV model 2017, and T80BV).

Nato just needs new production lines for artillery shells, and actual artillery pieces, GMLRS too. We don't want to lose this war or the next one because skipped on the simple stuff. Hard to be more interested in the fancy bits than I am, but there is a real chance that in an even fight all the fancy stuff gets neutralized on both sides. All the countries yelling about maintaining a war reserve need to look around. If you aren't shipping it to Taiwan TODAY, you should be shipping it to Ukraine TODAY, because the chances of a truly serious fight elsewhere just doesn't seem that high. If the Russian army finishes killing itself in Ukraine there really isn't a second country threatening a general European war. And yes I include the U.S. in that.

Oh this is gonna be good.  Let's get Mongolia involved....

Love that humour:
 
 

They have a right to desire whatever they want. They do not have a right to do whatever they want in order to actualize that desire. They are allowed to want to be a great power. They are not allowed to invade a sovereign country to make that happen.

I think we can make some generalizations and conclusions. But I think you are right in that we should be careful about what generalizations we make, and how confident we are in the generalizations we do make. This is a decent sized war that should provide a decent sample size of battles and engagements from which to draw conclusions. But there are some limitations, and things that we haven't seen a whole lot of. Russia's ability to make effective use of combined arms is severely hampered by their shortage of infantry, meaning we have a limited number of engagements to observe in which effective combined arms forces met effective combined arms forces. Our observations of air warfare are limited by the low number of Ukrainian airframes. Also, I suspect there may just be a certain amount of variation from war to war (differences in terrain, climate, force density, force structures/doctrine of the opposing sides, different plans being put into action, varying levels of competence among commanders, etc...), even among wars fought at the roughly same time with roughly the same technology (look at how much variation there was between different fronts and campaigns just in WW2).
The next war will certainly be very different in a lot of ways. But when we see in what ways it is the same, then we can start drawing some fairly confident conclusions about the nature of modern war. Admittedly of course, while it would be great for military science, all else considered it would probably be best if that next war doesn't happen.

It did create some alarm in the US that Orange Putin was alienating our allies though.

It did create some alarm in the US that Orange Putin was alienating our allies though.

They have a right to desire whatever they want. They do not have a right to do whatever they want in order to actualize that desire. They are allowed to want to be a great power. They are not allowed to invade a sovereign country to make that happen.

It did create some alarm in the US that Orange Putin was alienating our allies though.

It did create some alarm in the US that Orange Putin was alienating our allies though.

It did create some alarm in the US that Orange Putin was alienating our allies though.

They have a right to desire whatever they want. They do not have a right to do whatever they want in order to actualize that desire. They are allowed to want to be a great power. They are not allowed to invade a sovereign country to make that happen.

Javelin team gets a missile off, then comes under fire.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/v8qoiq/the_fgm148_javelin_operator_hits_an_enemy_target/
Few things I thought were interesting:

They get spotted real fast- looks like the missile might have a bit of a vapour trail (don't think Javelin usually has one, so could be the local conditions?)

There are at least two Javelin teams.

Hard to tell, but they don't look like they're bugging out as soon as the missile is fired. In theory they should be able to due to the fire and forget capability- so maybe they think it's safe enough to hang around, maybe they need to keep the AT capability up or maybe it's really hard to *not* watch your missile hit the target.

I think NATO can afford to be a little more self-critical. Afghanistan, while indeed officially defensive was at least controversial. NATO and/or the USA were not attacked by the nation Afghanistan but by a terror organization with their home base in Afghanistan. To make that a case for article 5 was at least stretching things a bit. Making not handing over the leader of an organization a legal casus belli is also a really slippery slope.
Anyway, I don't think all this whataboutism is doing much good. What Russia is doing is really evil and it doesn't get better by pointing out that other countries are doing evil things, too. What annoys me, though, is that this way we are handing the really bad guys around the globe cheap justifications. (Nowadays everyone justifies every military intervention with war on terror, for instance.)

One of the most important observations of an NCO or Staff NCO has to be that complaining and grumbling are normal for any “good order” units. What you look for and pay attention to is when they stop complaining. That means that they’ve given up any hope of anything being changed. That’s when there’s trouble brewing and you have to correct the root causes.

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. 

So, the thing about Russia (and by extension pro-Russia proxies) is that they like to project their own thoughts and weaknesses onto NATO and the West, that the West is no different from them. So they do genuinely believe that the West is as corrupt as Russia is and that Western governments blatantly lie all the time too. That is why they so fervently believe NATO is a Western Warsaw Pact.

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?

New poster, but have been lurking for a while and have found this forum's posts the most useful on the 'net ... I have a background in History and knew that a lot of the stuff posted by regular news outlets was, much more often than not, complete rubbish based on an almost total lack of relevant knowledge ... but this forum has been great to read!
Two things ... 
Artillery Ammunition: There has been some mention of Ukraine having shot off a lot (perhaps most) of their Pact calibre stuff which is why it is so important that they get as many NATO compatible artillery pieces as possible ... and can therefore draw down on NATO artillery stocks. And some suggestions that Russia may be running out of some calibres themselves.
Thing is, while there have been comments about Russian shortages of 'high tech' warfighting gear and, more recently, of some artillery calibres, but I believe that there may be an underestimation of just how hard it is to ramp up the production of artillery shells.
Consider WW1 - all sides soon shot off their pre-war stocks very quickly in 1914 and it took them a year for production to be brought up to a level to meet actual combat usage/demand.
Inded, one of the several reasons that Hitler went with Blitzkrieg tactics for WW2 was that he was informed that German industry would take a like time to tool up to produce the amount of ordnance a WW1 style war would require .... and that there wasn't enough 'fat' in what was left of the *uncommitted* German economy to manage it in peacetime.
So, at the rate the Russians are shooting of artillery shells, at some point they are going to have to ramp up production - and it is almost certainly going to be a bigger drain on their sanction ridden economy than they can probably afford ... indeed, sanctions may make achieving the production levels needed virtually impossible. 
So, even allowing some miraculous mass conscription which isn't squandered in insane and pointless mass casualty events ('offensives') will they be able to sustain a war that goes on for more than a few more months?
Ukraine, on the other hand, can draw on NATO and Western Allied stocks and their economies ... with (as another poster pointed out) 20 times or more the size of Russian military spending. If the war lasts long enough the Russians will be hurting for artillery ammo ... and that doesn't even consider their probable lack of ability to recondition their increasingly clapped out artillery pieces (as someone else suggested).
Railroad Gauge: Converting Russian 5'3" to Standard 4'8.5" is actually not all that hard. Despite the 'received wisdom' of German experiences in WW2 the actual conversion was a doddle. Just some guys with hand tools moving one rail in 6.5" closer to the other .. took very little time at all.
THAT wasn't the problem. The ACTUAL problem was that Soviet RR infrastructure was designed to service much larger locomotives ... so watering points (vital for steam trains) and coaling points were roughly twice as far apart as what German locomotives needed.
Likewise, Steam Engine and general Maintenance Facilities were roughly twice as far apart as well. The real problem was that most of the gear required was special order only ... it wasn't available off the shelf and the Germans had little or none stockpiled (they planned to use captured Russian locomotives and Rolling stock ... but it turned out that German Landsers just *loved* shooting locomotive boilers full of holes) and they didn't have a lot of slack in their economy to produce what was needed on the scale that was needed (in fact, they had a shortage of rolling stock for the entire war, and that often had negative effects on their military efforts).
Theoretically, if you really wanted to run a single track line from Ukraine to the west you probably could for most of its length - it would only be where tunnels, bridges, cuttings etc were not wide enough for the wider rolling stock ... and, of course, converting Switching Yards (needed to change consists) over would be nontrivial. You could possibly even do it for double tracked lines with careful scheduling (which would be a nightmare, I would guess).
Of course, if the Turks manage to re-open shipping from Odessa this is less of a problem (and, as the Ukrainians are now saying, RR transport wouldn't be enough anyway)
Just some thoughts.

So this is interesting.
First, the war at the tactical level is an energy-exchange view and as such rarely reflects the system view.  For example further down the line I am sure there are UA forces dug in and bored as hell because they have not seen any action in weeks.  While a few kms further we have units that are terrified and getting hammered.  One needs to see system-level phenomenon to make conclusions, that or trends at the energy-exchange view that are consistent across a broad set of sampling. 
Next, what is being noted about the Russians appears to be a more in line with a systemic trend as it has been brought up before.  The Russians appear to have abandoned manoeuvre warfare at the front entirely.  This is attrition-to-manoeuvre warfare, and it appears that like the UA the RA has adopted a hybrid approach as well.  If valid, those are enormous firepower overmatch ratios, and given Russian doctrine not that surprising.  The Russians have also integrated UAS into their tactical battle in what has become a series of Find-Fix-Finish-Advance tactical actions.  This tracks against the shift in losses from armor/mech to artillery as well.
Interestingly the RA is not having much success on the offence either.  This is slow, grinding and incredibly costly warfare, akin to WWI.  I suspect the Russians are missing a key metric (as is Freeman) - smartness.  Again, this is how well an operational system can generate and employ knowledge.  Within this concept lies precision, which based on the Russian use of massed firepower is also lacking.  Once again "dim-mass" is not working on the offensive or at least working at a glacial pace, no matter how many UAVs one rubs on it.  Why are the Russians lacking in smartness?  Not sure to be honest.  There has been a lack of C4ISR integration on their side throughout this war tactical-to-strategic.  Considering the rot in the Russian system with respect to material, it should not be too surprising that it also exists within the cognitive sphere.   
I keep coming back to the idea of smart-mass and massed precision in a attrition-to-manoeuvre-to-attrition cycle.  This may seem minor but if one does the math, one has to ask "is manoeuvre warfare as we know it, dead?"  How does one achieve conation shock, leading to physical collapse when your opponent can see everything you are doing well in advance? [aside: JasonC has to be loving this] 
Ukraine did not do this in the opening phase of the war, they instead they used a form of corrosive warfare that led to the physical collapse of an already conative-fragile Russian system.  My point to the Freeman hypothesis is "look under the hood as to why there is something going on between mass-firepower-manoeuvre".

Ukrainian General Staff issued a statement on Western weapons deliveries. A very interesting read as a whole, some especially juicy bits below:
- Ukraine's stockpile of 155mm ammo is already 10% bigger than initial stockpile of Soviet calibers from the start of the conflict
-  Soviet type ammo provided by the allies equals 75% of what Ukraine had at the beginning of the war
- As far as tube artillery is concerned, Ukraine's initial requirement for NATO types is already fulfilled - of course as Soviet types are withdrawn, the need for 155 pieces will grow.
And for the most interesting part. Since March there is some training being done in advance, with weapons that were not yet pledged. 1500 Ukrainian soldiers is training abroad or will begin the training shortly. IMO this is a hint that in the future, western aircraft for UA are being considered.
In overall the whole piece reads very optimistically.
Link to the original FB post