Cederic

The Daily Mail printed it. Of course. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11080531/Olga-Kursa-Kachura-death-Missile-strike-kills-Russias-senior-female-officer.html

(heck)

Journalists have moved on from tanks. (Yeah, I stole this - also, please, don't uptick me - save those ticks for the people adding real value on this thread)

Little propaganda piece with a nice hero story: https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/08/2/7361480/ Survives multiple grenades, calls in friends, Russians abandon their kit and flee. All very believeable. Sadly so is 'pretend to surrender then shoot them'. That's not conducive to civilised warfare. (That's not criticism. It's an observation.)

So go back to the actual term Clausewitz used: Will. Converting to your religion is imposition of your will. Achieving commercial goals through warfare is imposition of your will on those that would otherwise prevent your commercial success. Adding Ukraine to your empire is imposing your will on Ukrainians and on those that would see Ukraine retain its independence. Why does this matter? Because war is not about killing people. War is about achieving outcomes. Maybe two centuries later we can use business language instead of political language but you still need to understand what the person you're at war with is trying to actually achieve. You also need to really understand the outcomes that you want. Imposing your will on your opponent to achieve your outcomes doesn't even need to prevent him achieving his. What do Russia actually want from this war? That's complex as hell, as it includes their original reasons for invasion. What do Ukraine want? That's within their gift to articulate, understand and work to achieve. If they can achieve those goals through means other than direct warfare, they'd be stupid not to. Retaking Kherson is, unless you live there, irrelevant. The political implications of retaking Kherson however.. that's massive. If that causes Putin to lose face, leading to his removal by Russians in positions of power, that shifts the dynamics of the war but goes beyond that: It may lead to an end to the war. If the will of Ukraine is to have safe governance across the whole country then knowing what lets them impose that will on those that would thwart them (Russia and the separatists in Donbass) accelerates achieving their goal. Politics AND war both contribute towards that. (Sadly I too can't, you won't be surprised to find, articulate the appropriate metric for scoring war.)

Cossacks don't surf!

Hey, it was lethal back then, it's still lethal now. Don't be knocking the value of effective eccentricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Churchill

Added value to what/who? If they mean access to the natural resources - including oil, gas and coal - then that 80-90% could well be right. Russia don't care about the Ukrainians and don't care about building them a sustainable economy. They want the raw resources underneath and the ports on the Black Sea.

How dare a company with ongoing staff costs - not to mention the hosting costs for this forum - continue to sell their products at a time of high inflation without raising prices. What was that? They actually reduced prices? "Profiteering" by reducing prices is a new one on me, I must admit. Perhaps we should buy you a copy of the game - at whatever price point - so that you can explore the capabilities of the Russian armed forces if properly deployed and effectively used. Certainly the Russian staff should have tried that. I can't and don't speak for Battlefront, I'm merely sharing my own answer to the question posed. Personally I greatly look forward to playing a future iteration of the game that benefits from the events of this war, and the analysis of them.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/07/06/zelensky-criticises-top-general-imposing-restrictions-army-recruits/

Although the obvious interpretation at the time was that Belarus was transporting its artillery ammunition stocks to Russia to cover the losses from ammo dumps becoming smoke clouds, I did wonder if there was another angle at play: Crippling the Belarus military in case they rose against Lukashenko. Given Putin's comments this week about accelerating the 'unification' of Russia and Belarus, there's another tension at play: Is Russia intending to annex Belarus, in which case they don't want the Belarus army fighting Russian forces. My guess is that Putin's demanding Belarus join the war against Ukraine, Lukashenko is telling him "I can't, my troops just won't fight, they'll revolt against me" and the end game is that there's going to be a protracted bloody civil war in Belarus that becomes indistinguishable from war with Russia. So much like the Donbas.

I had the thought the other day, and this merely reinforces it: There's an opportunity to significantly help Ukraine and improve their overall maneuverability by merely providing large volumes of cheap SUVs. They don't need heavily armoured gun platforms to carry infantry around. They need something that can handle potholes at 80mph. The military alternative is a lightly armoured modern (faster) equivalent of a snatch Land Rover. It's not going to be front line capable, it's not going to be resistant to IEDs but it'll get troops in and out of front line areas with protection from shrapnel and long range small arms. If NATO wants to help Ukraine, buy six months production of Toyota 4x4s and rivet 1/4" steel plate to the wings and doors.

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You could as easily read that as the US provided the [weapons] systems to Ukraine. That would make more sense. There's minimal benefit and a lot of risk in giving Ukraine direct access to the US satellite network, especially when US analysts sat safely in the US can do the same target identification as Ukraine, and merely pass the results over. "There's an ammunition dump just here. Entirely up to you what you do with that information. Oh, btw, here are the precise coordinates."

Old sniper tactic. Shoot them when they're out of the trench taking a ****. People stop leaving the trench..

I firmly disagree. In that situation triple Vickers and a Browning .50 cal was, is and always will be the best solution. https://photos.stua.rts.co.tt/Holiday-pics/War-Tour/i-XW9jTGL/A

There are two conversations here. One is the extent to which wheeled self-propelled artillery has been a historic choice. WWI was a horse-drawn affair, so let's ignore that. Even in WW2 the German army was primarily horse-drawn, and the limited vehicle production geared towards front line equipment - Artillery supports the front line but (if things go well) shouldn't be _on_ the front line. But the equation works out at: Lose artillery through mechanical failure of its locomotive capabilities, or design it to be towed by whatever's working. It's an easy choice when mechanical failure is commonplace, so historically artillery has been towed. Even where you do choose self-propulsion, artillery tends to be quite heavy - those barrels are a lot of metal - and even heavier if you need to protect it against near-misses from counter-battery fire, aircraft and small arms (as you're being overrun). The traditional approach has been to put tracks on heavy equipment, not just for off-road capability but also to spread the load even on tarmac. Then there's the firing stability element too. Smooth driving over rough terrain (and roads are rough terrain on a battlefield) needs good suspension, and good suspension plays havoc with your recoil. I don't know, this is purely guesswork, but having lots of individual suspensions (and particularly a lot of intrinsic weight) makes it easier to handle the implications of suspension on accuracy - both the individual shots, and also the retention of where you're aimed. So a lot of factors support towed artillery (which explains why it's still very clearly a thing) and when not towing, sticking tracks onto the vehicle it's built into. Cost? Almost an afterthought. 20 guns that all miss or are just missing aren't going to add as much value as the one that's in the right place, and that hits the target.

Sounds hellishly expensive. Sidewinder missiles at three for a million make sense against a $400m manned aircraft but cost as much as the drone you're shooting down. Drop to options a third of the price, even Starstreak at $100k/missile still gets painful fast, because you can flood the battlefield with cheap disposable attack drones. Drop to another third of the price, around a tenth of a Sidewinder, and strap on several stingers. $38k a shot is almost affordable. But your opponent has those too, the skies'll be raining shrapnel and UAVs for the first few hours of a shooting war. At which point air attacks become as simple as they are now. CAS looks like it's now a drone game, but circle around the lines, go deep, take out ammunition dumps, fuel stores, HQs, rail yards, oil refineries.. air power has range and precision, and those just aren't going out of fashion. Even now Ukraine has too many miles of front to defend. Quite why Russia can't or haven't found the gaps in air defences at the borders and front lines and used those as channels to hit strategic targets is confusing. I think a NATO combined air assault on armed forces equipped/fighting as the two countries in Ukraine are would still succeed, and without supplies the artillery is just a heavy trailer.

There's still a role for helicopters. Lifting that truck to the front line and resupplying its ammunition..

I resisted posting this last week, but it keeps feeling relevant. Sorry, culturally brought up to taunt the French at every possible opportunity. Doesn't stop us bailing them out when Germany invade though..

An objective cynic might suggest that Ukrainian leadership can see the positive side of leaving the Donbas with no fighting age men: Makes the post-war era significantly simpler for a few years, especially if those years are used to, erm, change attitudes in the region. Again a cynic might suggest that half the population will want to move (return) to Russia anyway. But even beyond that: Why should Ukraine abandon its territory instead of educating those that live there? It shouldn't be too difficult to offer people a choice between helping Ukraine succeed and moving to some ****hole in Russia where they'll be despised and trained as expendable insurgents. Sorry, I may be lacking in sympathy for Ukrainians that have access to the Internet and don't see how ****ty Russia is towards them. Your father was killed by Ukrainian forces? No ****ing wonder, the Russians used him to soak up ammunition so that their own forces can survive a few days longer. The Ukrainians illegally shelled your village killing your mother? Fine, find a lawyer (I'm sure Russia, Amnesty International, whoever, will fund this for you) and sue them. Use their own laws against them. Your alternative is decades of hatred, and if that's your choice, I have no sympathy anyway. Because you can't expect Ukraine to just walk away and allow Russia to invade, allow the Donbas to revolt, allow its citizens to be killed, raped, deported. Ukraine needs to be seen to be acting in a judicial and reasoned manner, but beyond that, idiots in Donbas are exactly that: Ignorant stupid idiots. I would refuse to allow such people to steal land from my own country so can only support Ukraine in refusing to allow it to happen to theirs. If Ukraine misbehave then, well, my sympathies change. Stand up to your oppressor and all that. I just haven't seen evidence that Ukraine is systemically misbehaving. But even there: the objective cynic would observe that an authoritarian anti-humanitarian state would impose its will on a rebel province anyway, so there're still no reasonable circumstances in which Ukraine should or would accept the loss of Donbas. So a well-intentioned Ukraine helping its citizens move on from years of Russian aggression will seek to embrace and support the Donbas, and a spiteful malicious Ukraine will seek to subjugate the Donbas. Which Ukraine would walk away, writing off years of conflict knowing they've left their enemy poised to make further aggressions in eight years time? I just don't see it. Permanent? Until Russia invade again. Peter the Imbecile isn't going to stop - didn't you hear him proclaim the need for a new Russian Empire. No peace that relinquishes Donbas is worth the paper it's written on, you may as well surrender the whole of Ukraine at the same time. I can't see Ukraine retaking the whole of Donbas and halting Russian aggression without Putin being toppled. I can't see Ukraine accepting less than the whole of Donbas (for the reasons above). Ergo we need to consider Crimea post-Putin. I think taking and holding it will be far far more difficult than the Donbas but my arguments above have to apply. It may prove too large an effort for Ukraine to try though; there may be a halfway-house in which Donbas is fully re-integrated but Crimea is lost. I'm not sure how that can work for Ukraine though, unless the negotiated peace includes things like 'fully demilitarised Crimea' in which case Russia would have to agree to dismantle their naval base in Sevastopol. Taking it by force may be an easier task. I wrote all the above without posting it because I'm three pages behind. So it's nice to be able to agree with Steve on this We're back to Zelenskyy's referendum on any peace treaty. It was a genius move on many levels. I rest my case. (If anybody thinks this is off-topic or distracting from detailed tactical analysis of specific MLRS opportunities against depleted BTGs unwisely attempting contested bridge crossings while supported by artillery directing drones under attack from heroic low-altitude SU-25 pilots, I have only one comment: In Iraq and Afghanistan the people that won the war lost the peace.)

You say that, but from a highly educated and embedded position. The rest of the world needs frequently reminding - see my next post for a comment on why. I do like that comparison, and accept entirely that we've had two centuries of thought (and applied practice) since Clausewitz shared his impressive 'starter for ten'.