kimbosbread

Please, Putin straight up did his previous land grab in 2014 under the current guy’s old boss (both of whom I think are decent people and have done decent jobs). I think Trump absolutely gave people pause just due to sheer uncertainty and capriciousness of his presidency. And then, just as Trump leaves office, Spring 2020 rolls around with a giant kick to everybody’s collective nutsack. And then maybe Putin, sensing his own mortality, decides to roll the dice again, since the US just backed out Afghanistan, and the guys who let 2014 happen are back in town. And it’s not just the US. Look at France, where the traditional political parties collapsed over the last decade. Or England.

I think defense is less risky, but you bring up a good point that even small but important offensive successive can help. A Ukrainian offensive will get bogged down at the same defensive line as before, presumably, and then just get hammered with glide bombs unless there is a good story on stopping those. Seems to me like Krynki is the best bet as it’s at the longest part of the Russian logistics tail. Personally, I would fortify the other areas and goad the Russians into attacking if they get shy, and focus all offensive effort on the bridgehead.

That is my impression from afar as well. I think digging in and preserving manpower and destroying Russia’s oil assets and war machine is the best strategy. If Ukraine cannot muster enough manpower to hold the line, assuming the west provides sufficient weaponry, then obviously it’s a moot point. The real question is can Russia continue like this for more than a year, especially if all refineries and oil depots and substations within 500km of Ukraine are destroyed.

When you say use drones offensively, what are you thinking? Small groups of infantry moving forward, and deploying the drones like they would, say, a mortar, and attacking positions with them as part of a combined infrantry-drone assault (along a larger front)?

This does seem like a good reason, unless Russia is playing some form of 5D chess that I cannot comprehend. Why not all of the above? There isn’t exactly a giant missile shortage though, just a shortage of missiles we feel like giving to Ukraine. That said, I do agree that given a finite (but large) supply of missiles, there are better targets until Ukraine is actually in a position to cut the land bridge. Like refineries, oil depots, ports, power plants, factories, locomotives, etc.

It would also force movement on the railroad, and the landing ships, and thus open those up to strikes.

If we get access to the new KGB archives, it will be very interesting to see which politicians and parties were directly supported. I think we can safely guess some of them, but I bet there would be some interesting surprises.

I don’t get it either, unless the idea is to get the Russians to turn around and stop the war, which I understand but is obviously pretty stupid. Can someone who spends more time around modern governments shed light on this?

To be fair, Trump also definitely has some dementia going on. RFK though, well, I see his campaign (and his likely role as a spoiler) as definitive proof that we’ve entered an alternate timeline that is far more entertaining and ridiculous than the regular one. But we weren’t going to go to Mars in the regular one, so it’s win win all around I think.

Flamethrower dogs are cool, but I think the minaturization of flying drones is undervalued in terms of a terror weapon the battlefield. I wonder if we could go quite a bit smaller, maybe not mosquito sized but certainly a quarter or less the size of one of the DJI minis, and put a very small warhead on it, maybe thermite, maybe connected rod. I’m thinking 5-10g HE (plus some aluminum powder) and a coil of magnesium wire around it, and do machine vision based crotch dection. You could call it “The Eunuch Maker”. EDIT: Or if small enough, land on a soldier or vehicle and deposit a radio beacon.

If I’m Putin, I want to grab as much territory as possible, at whatever the short-term cost. Putin knows tanks + apcs likely won’t be of much use in defense, and is betting that mobiks and mines and trenches and drones will maintain the defensive, just like last year. The calculation he is making is that however costly it is to obtain this territory, it will be costlier for Ukraine to take it back. In addition, it is better to get this territory before US supplies arrive, making offense much costlier. Also, in order to reverse-Maidan, it needs to happen April-May-ish. With these conditions, he hopes to break Ukraine and the West’s will, and thus force negotiation or withdrawal of support. The way his calculus fails (IOM) is as follows: Ukraine can maintain it’s attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure, crushing the Russia economy and logistics and thus the ability to attack Ukraine is able to mass sufficient drones to deny defense on a sufficiently large front (say 40km wide) that it is able to not only clear lanes through minefields, via drones or otherwise, but also clear trenches with minimal boots-in-trench.

I dunno, what about this?

Yeah but it’s windy: https://windy.app/spots/Ukraine. Seriously, even a few km an hour is gonna disperse that smoke fast, plus moving troops are gonna be exposed while to move to the cover of the smoke. I think the little EW robots Russia is working on are probably a better bet, but that will merely accelerate the anti-radition-cheapo-drone development.

I think the bite and hold strategy and then bite some more is not a bad strategy, given Russia’s constraints (apart from the whole economy imploding eventually and throwing away lives). However, let’s say Russia is able to get a bit further, grab a few more towns. What are they going to do once glide bombs become less tenable, and the ground hardens up? I think the defensive trench and minefields situation is going to be extremely different this year; Ukraine has apparently made big leaps in small drones and their production, and I feel like that applied to a concentrated front is going to make defense very difficult (along with Russia’s ongoing artillery range issues). We’re seeing small drones routinely applied to individual soldiers, so one could imagine that being done on offense too, to clear a trench at a time (assuming Ukraine can throw several drones per soldier at a position). If there’s no artillery within range due to counterbattery threat, then over a few days it should be possible to completely wipe out a line of positions on a smallish front, especially with thermal. I wonder if flamethrower drones would be useful to clear out bunkers (like the one on youtube for the wasp nest)?

If each mortar bomb weighs 4.5kg, and each drone weighs the same, and the drones have some basic last-mile autonomy (which we already seeing), is there any reason to belive the drones can’t deliver the same volume of fire, but with much more accuracy and range, but a much smaller logistical footprint?

Yeah that’s fascinating. I guess the tradeoff for an 80mm mortar (M252) goes something like this: Mortar Mortar itself weights 40kg Bombs weigh 4.5kg Max range is 6km Crew of 5 Big boom on firing FPV drone Juicy version has 1kg HE (plus LIPO juicyness); other version has a couple of AGL grenades or whatnot. ~4kg total weight 10+km range Crew of 1-2 Very precise No noise on launch EM signature Seems pretty clear cut. I wonder how the equation changes for a mortar hauled around by an UGV. Does that make the extra weight worth it? Presumably precision mortar bombs cost more than an FPV too. EDIT: This is without relays and/or some form of autonomy. With those, range goes up and signature goes down. You gotta also differentiate between propulsion: Propellor, turboprop, turbojet, turbofan, solid-fuel rocket etc, and/or combo with glide phase. Each of those are pretty different in terms of how to detect them. On the power source you also have fuel cells, which sound very cool, but are less practical than batteries IMO.

One possibility is that enough Russian artillery officers have been killed that they just can’t coordinate as before, even if they wanted to. More questions in the same vein: What proportion of pre-war artillery crews has Russia lost? What is the training of current crews? What kind of range/accuracy/reliability do the current gun/ammo combos offer?

Traditional laws of logistics do not apply to America! But yes, modularity would be good in general, unless it makes the whole system 10x more expensive. As an aside, it’s gonna be interesting if we adopt suborbital rockets as rapid logistics; one wonders how the weapons systems will have to be adapted to handle Musk’s rather interesting landing profile.

Here’s a question: Of the truck-based artillery, which is better, Caesar or Archer? Archer sounds great from the whole shoot and scoot perspective and automation (and thus less injuries carrying stuff and TBI), but Caesar appears to cheaper and lighter.

Well, I am red-green colorblind, and I have a lot of family there.

The silly picture that kept being posted in the thread.

In what universe is Switzerland not considered to be a “Full Democracy”? It’s literally a confederation with direct democracy, and has been for longer than most countries have even had the concept of elections. EDIT: I also do wonder about Japan being considered more democratic by some numeric ranking than the US, when Japan is basically a one party state.

If you have a lot of wire, make a bunch of fake positions too. Plus some old school booby traps with Punji sticks, if all else fails.

What’s with the reports of the Krynky bridgehead being expanded? That seems like a bright spot of good news.

What the extreme fringes do and say affects regular people, at least in rich coastal cities. It’s certainly not just idiots screaming at each other online. One ridiculous example of this is hosptials at least where I am no longer can say “mother”, but have to use the word “birthing person”. Remember the Stanford guide for acceptable words? It does bleed into our lives. More practically, at my previous employer, a major software company, anything but the most progressive political stance was unacceptable to voice- and that stance was voiced quite a bit- much to the befuddlement of all the foreign employees. This is not atypical at large, well-paying software companies.