How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[mosuri]

4 hours ago, keas66 said:

Germany uses gas for more than just heating purposes though - There is a lot of industrial use of natural gas - so cutting off gas supplies will mean shutting down of  parts of the German industry and all the subsequent knock on effects that come out of that .

All the more reason to have more than one supply then. Apparently Germany doesn't currently even have a LNG terminal for shipborne imports? Great planning there.

Schröder must have got an absolutely massive bribe. Or he's a massive idiot. Or both.

[dan/california]

8 minutes ago, danfrodo said:

 

The capture of personnel or equipment from a unit like this seems to indicate that UKR is operating behind RU 'lines', does it not?  How does this guy or his unit get close enough to front to be captured?

They are probably pushing them way forward in attempt to limit the damage drones and or signals intercepts are doing. Forward is not a safe place around the UKR army. And the Russians are really stung out in lots of places. The pincers around Kyiv have at most one and a half safe sides. There is a lot o forward out there .

[Kinophile]

26 minutes ago, Bil Hardenberger said:

I love you too Warren.

Autodoxing!

[Kinophile]

@sburke do you have a spreadsheet going?

[akd]

Interesting article on current “education” effort in Russia:

https://theins.ru/en/society/249545

[womble]

10 minutes ago, dan/california said:

They are probably pushing them way forward in attempt to limit the damage drones and or signals intercepts are doing. Forward is not a safe place around the UKR army. And the Russians are really stung out in lots of places.

Or they could have been safely behind the lines, until the lines got pushed back, and they couldn't retreat due to lack of fuel...

[db_zero]

1 hour ago, kraze said:

Eh, the majority of belarusians fully support Lukashenko and this war.

Sure there are very few of them that covertly oppose the war unlike russians that have no opposition to war at all - but it doesn't matter when there's zero overt opposition.

When missiles and planes that murder our people fly from the territory of Belarus and they aren't exploding before launch - that means belarusians might as well be launching/flying those themselves.

Interesting I've seen reports that something like 93% of the Belarussian people are against getting involved and the army is dead set against it and that's why they aren't moving in. They also said the Belarussian people know and like Ukranians. and have zero desire to fight them.

Getting an accurate feel for how people as a whole feel about things is difficult enough in an open society. In a closed society its even more difficult.

I watched a report last night from someone who is very knowledgeable about Russia and Putin and wrote books on him and from the sound of her it sounded like the majority of Russians are in favor of the war, because that's what state media feeds them and that's pretty much all they've known...

At this point who knows who to believe.

[sburke]

4 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

@sburke do you have a spreadsheet going?

a text file.  Spreadsheet?  pshaw! Next you'll want a PPT deck!

MG Andrey Kolesnikov, Russia’s 29th Combined Arms Army commander
Andrei Sukhovetsky, Deputy Commander of the 41st Combined Arms Army
Major General Vitaly Gerasimov, First Deputy Commander Of The 41st Army
Major-general Oleg Mitiayev, commander of 150th motor-rifle division
General-Lieutenant Andrey Mordvichev commander 8th CAA 
Major-General Tushaev (Chechen)

Guards Colonel Konstantin Zizevsky commander of the 247th Guards Air Assault Regiment 
Colonel Yuryi Agarkov, the commander of 33rd motor-rifle regiment (Kamyshyn, Volgograd oblast) of 20th Guard motor-rifle division
Colonel Alexander Vladimirovich Zakharov, 6th tank regiment commander
Colonel Sergei Porokhnya commander of the 12th separate guards engineering brigade
Colonel Sergey Sukharev, commander of 331st Guards Airborne Regiment (of the 98th VDV Division)
Colonel Igor Nikolaev Commander of 252nd Motor Rifle Regiment, the 3rd Motor Rifle Division.
Colonel Alexei Sharov, commander of the 810th Marine Brigade
Colonel Sergey Savvateeyev, Deputy commander of Rosgvardia SOBR
Colonel Nikolay Ovcharenko, the chief of engineer troops of Western Miliatary District.
Commander of the 45th Engineering Regiment a part of the 1st Guards Tank Army
Captain of 1st rank (=colonel) Andrei Paliy Deputy of Black Sea Fleet commander, 

Lt Colonel Denis Glebov, Deputy Commander of the 11th Separate Airborne Assault Brigade
Lt Colonel Dmitry Safronov, Commander of the 61st Separate Marine Brigade
Lt.colonel Alexei Khasanov, deputy commander of 31st Fighter aviation regiment
Lt Colonel Mikhail Orchikov was deputy commander of a motor-rifle brigade 19th motor-rifle division
Lt.colonel Alexandr Pazynich, the regimental comamnder deputy for human resourses of 14th Guard Fighter Aviation Regiment
Lt.colonel Renat Gaisin
Lt.colonel Ilya Piatkin, 38 years  SOBR
Lt.colonel Roman Ryabov, 50 years  SOBR
Lt.colonel (likely) Mikhail Rodionov, 46 years   SOBR
Lt.colonel Alexey Sharshavov, commander of 171st separate air-assault battalion (Feodosia, occupied Crimea) of 7th air-assault division (mountain).

Guards Major Burlakov Andrei Petrovich, Deputy Chief of Intelligence Staff - Chief of Intelligence Regiment
Major Sergey Krylov deputy battalion commander from the VDV's 331st Airborne Regiment
Major Alexey Osokin, the commander of the VDV's 31st Air Assault Brigade's 1st battalion
Major Ruslan Petrukhin deputy battalion commander in the 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade
Major Dmitry Toptun motorized rifle battalion commander 488th Motor Rifle Regiment, 144th Guards Motor Rifle Division
Major: Oleg Patskalev, deputy battalion commander, 331st Guards Airborne Regiment, 98th Guards Airborne Division.

Deputy mayor Alexandr Fiodorov 103 missile brigade (Iskander-M) that Russian Iskander unit met with our SOF...

Captured
Lieutenant Colonel Maxim Kryshtop: Deputy Commander of the 47th Aviation Regiment 
Lt. Colonel Astrakhov Dmitry Mikhailovich:from SOBR
Lt.colonel Alexandr Koshel Claimed he is the chief of PsyOps counteraction group of 58th CAA His documents says he is mayor, serving in m/u 21250 - 212th Training center of tank troops (Siberian Military district). He can be promoted to lt.colonel and appointed lately on the duty of PsyOps in 58th CAA and hadn't time to change own military ID.   

Sacked
General Roman Gavrilov of Rosgvardia
General Vladislav Ershov, commander of 6th Army

Fragging incidents - okay maybe just a rumor but a fun one!
37th Guards Separate Motor Rifle Brigade commander Col. Yuri Medvedev, hospitalized in Belarus after being intentionally run over by one of his own soldiers

[womble]

14 minutes ago, mosuri said:

All the more reason to have more than one supply then. Apparently Germany doesn't currently even have a LNG terminal for shipborne imports? Great planning there.

Schröder must have got an absolutely massive bribe. Or he's a massive idiot. Or both.

Chair of Rosneft is pretty hefty. I suspect ferocious optimism that including the Russians in the web of commerce would tame the bear was at least a partial motivation for overlooking the downsides of such relationships. He wasn't alone.

[db_zero]

15 minutes ago, mosuri said:

All the more reason to have more than one supply then. Apparently Germany doesn't currently even have a LNG terminal for shipborne imports? Great planning there.

Schröder must have got an absolutely massive bribe. Or he's a massive idiot. Or both.

Unfortunately Germany is caught in a bind some of which was the result of Merkles policies of trying to win over Russia with trade-obviously a grave mistake in retrospect.

Problem now is shut down the energy imports and risk a recession or worse and this is at a time when you're trying to increase defense spending dramatically.

[Kinophile]

7 minutes ago, sburke said:

Next you'll want a PPT deck!

I'm not a pyschopath!

Hold on, Imma gonna digest this info and vomit out an excel file.

Edited March 23, 2022 by Kinophile

[db_zero]

Correction-Looks like the US has formally declared Russia has committed war crimes. Good political theater, but I don't think it was a smart move.

Now Putin has nothing to lose. I think we better hope that someone or something internally deposes Putin and from what I've heard -which is not going to be 100% reliable, the odd of Putin being offed or overthrown is very minimal.

Edited March 23, 2022 by db_zero

[Sequoia]

8 minutes ago, db_zero said:

Unfortunately Germany is caught in a bind some of which was the result of Merkles policies of trying to win over Russia with trade-obviously a grave mistake in retrospect.

Problem now is shut down the energy imports and risk a recession or worse and this is at a time when you're trying to increase defense spending dramatically.

I'm thinking it wouldn't have been a bad strategy if you weren't aware you were dealing with a guy obsessed with thoughts of some grand destiny of his, and cutoff from reality by his own doing.  Just like old Adolph it sounds. 

[Battlefront.com]

30 minutes ago, BeondTheGrave said:

Another vital issue, one that I see a lot, is what paradigm of war you choose as your model. If you assume a WWII European model, most of the 'turning points' were operational in nature.

A very good point.  Not only getting them wrong, but assuming that they are symmetrical.

We all are very used to Combat Mission's asymmetrical victory conditions, but I'm not sure if that's the gold standard for these big sims.  Maybe?  I have a feeling that they might not be.

If you combine a misunderstanding of how to measure success (generally) and also get wrong what each side needs to achieve victory, then it is difficult to see how the results of the strategic analysis can turn out valid results.

This war boils down to Russia needing to rule over Ukraine as a vassal state.  This involves a complex set of objectives that all have to go Russia's way more-or-less perfectly.

Ukraine, on the other hand, simply needs to kill a lot of Russians and to retain the ability to kill even more Russians.

If Russia were to take over all of eastern Ukraine, including Kiev, but Ukraine racked up a huge body count in the process and continued that trend after Russia secured it's intended objectives, then it is likely that Ukraine would still win.

Steve

[Commanderski]

7 minutes ago, db_zero said:

Correction-Looks like the US has formally declared Russia has committed war crimes. Good political theater, but I don't think it was a smart move.

2 hours after that statement the State Dept. said "State Department unable to confirm that Putin will be held accountable after declaring ‘war crimes. The U.S. government on Wednesday officially declared that Russian forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine but could not confirm whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would be held accountable."

[akd]

13 minutes ago, db_zero said:

Now Putin has nothing to lose.

Nonsense.  Nothing happens because of the declaration.  Likely it just allows Justice to open a formal investigation.

[keas66]

50 minutes ago, mosuri said:

All the more reason to have more than one supply then. Apparently Germany doesn't currently even have a LNG terminal for shipborne imports? Great planning there.

Schröder must have got an absolutely massive bribe. Or he's a massive idiot. Or both.

Well Schroder has only just become Chancellor . I imagine a large part of the blame for this state of affairs rests with the Last Chancellor ?

[danfrodo]

The positive side of declaring Putin a war criminal (hopefully also designated a terrorist) is that it can be used to dissuade countries and companies from doing business w Putin.  It's not the best optics to have folks posting that one is doing new deal w war criminal. 

[womble]

1 minute ago, keas66 said:

Well Schroder has only just become Chancellor . I imagine a large part of the blame for this state of affairs rests with the Last Chancellor ?

Or he was referring to good old Gerhard, the Chancellor-before-last. The current, newish Chancellor is Olaf Scholz. He can't really be very heavily blamed for all this...

[Thomm]

Re. Kinzhal.

I come up with crazy numbers for the kinetic energy.

500 kg warhead traveling at 12300 km/h (Mach 10):

    0.5 * 500.0 * (12300./3.6)**2 = 2.918403e+09

M1 tank (70 t) travelling at 70 km/h:

    0.5 * 70000.0 * (70./3.6)**2 = 1.323302e+07 J

Arleigh Burke-class destroyer (8300 t) travelling at 30 kt:

    0.5 * 8300 * 1000 * 15.9**2 = 1.049162e+09 J

So the equivalent of the Kinzhal missile warhead in terms of kinetic energy would be:

• 220 Abrams tanks travelling at full speed
• 2.8 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers travelling at flank speed

Does this make any sense?!

On the other hand 1 kg TNT has the equivalent of 4.184 MJ, so this kinetic energy corresponds to 697.5 kg TNT. Which sounds more plausible than 2.8 destroyers at flank speed.

Best regards,
Thomm

 

[acrashb]

1 hour ago, mosuri said:

Schröder must have got an absolutely massive bribe. Or he's a massive idiot. Or both.

Dependency on Russian energy is a massive geopolitical miss.  But it isn't Schröder, it's the whole European system that used magical thinking to determine that, in the face of all evidence, Russia was a reliable energy partner.

FYI Germany has just concluded several deals for energy with UAE.  This war has blown up all sorts of presumptions and create a tremendous amount of forced innovation.  Now if only Canada would get its act together regarding pipelines and LNG terminals, it would be a reliable energy  supplier to the world (undercutting places in the Middle East, like UAE, that have high risk profiles).

If not for energy dependence, Europe would have much greater options in its response to this war.  Which was all part of Putin's plan, making him look smart until a few weeks ago.

Edited March 23, 2022 by acrashb

[BletchleyGeek]

3 hours ago, TheVulture said:

 

So often it isn't about predicting the future, it is about determining which the critical parameters are in your model, and what information you therefore need to be able to find out in order to make any kind of relevant prediction at all. It is about identifying the critical factors and understanding how they interact with each other.

We've all seen factors in this war that probably wasn't in many military models before, or were only just starting to be appreciated. The willingness of Russian troops to abandon important equipment. The ability of light infantry with modern ATGMs to be able to hit high value targets. The use of drones in reconnaisance, fire control and as weapon systems. Crowd-sourcing intelligence from a friendly population. Modelling can (hopefully) be used to figure out how important each of these are and how they interact with each other.

That was a great post.

Also, MultiVAC isn't going to happen... We were looking forward to Rosie the Robot and we got instead Roomba. Which is useful and saves us time and effort but if your dog makes a mess on the carpet be sure Roomba doesn't get close to it.

We have pretty good and steadily improving narrow AI: pick a task T under X conditions and we can come up with a program (by hand heuristically or via automatic optimisation with guarantees) that is very good at T. Change T to to a very similar yet different T', and X to X + d, d a small change, and the performance of the program will degrade. To design an effective AI program, as @TheVulture says, you need to "identify the critical factors and understanding how they interact with each other".

[Vacillator]

7 minutes ago, Thomm said:

Re. Kinzhal.

I come up with crazy numbers for the kinetic energy.

500 kg warhead traveling at 12300 km/h (Mach 10):

    0.5 * 500.0 * (12300./3.6)**2 = 2.918403e+09

M1 tank (70 t) travelling at 70 km/h:

    0.5 * 70000.0 * (70./3.6)**2 = 1.323302e+07 J

Arleigh Burke-class destroyer (8300 t) travelling at 30 kt:

    0.5 * 8300 * 1000 * 15.9**2 = 1.049162e+09 J

So the equivalent of the Kinzhal missile warhead in terms of kinetic energy would be:

• 220 Abrams tanks travelling at full speed
• 2.8 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers travelling at flank speed

Does this make any sense?!

On the other hand 1 kg TNT has the equivalent of 4.184 MJ, so this kinetic energy corresponds to 697.5 kg TNT. Which sounds more plausible than 2.8 destroyers at flank speed.

Best regards,
Thomm

Without too much checking, I like your calculations and the huge Mach 10 speed squared obviously takes the day.

Fun stuff in a non-fun setting .

Edited March 23, 2022 by Vacillator

[TheVulture]

2 minutes ago, Thomm said:

So the equivalent of the Kinzhal missile warhead in terms of kinetic energy would be:

• 220 Abrams tanks travelling at full speed
• 2.8 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers travelling at flank speed

Does this make any sense?!

On the other hand 1 kg TNT has the equivalent of 4.184 MJ, so this kinetic energy corresponds to 697.5 kg TNT. Which sounds more plausible than 2.8 destroyers at flank speed.

Our intuition regarding kinetic energy isn't that great, particularly when dealing with things of very different mass - we tend to visualise things more in momentum terms. The Kinzhal may have the same KE of 220 Abrams at full speed, but it has the same momentum as 1.25 Abrams at full speed. Which comparison is more relevant depends a lot on what exactly you are considering.

 

[Vacillator]

3 minutes ago, TheVulture said:

Our intuition regarding kinetic energy isn't that great, particularly when dealing with things of very different mass - we tend to visualise things more in momentum terms. The Kinzhal may have the same KE of 220 Abrams at full speed, but it has the same momentum as 1.25 Abrams at full speed. Which comparison is more relevant depends a lot on what exactly you are considering.

 

Without too much checking I also like that.  So it would not be much better to be impacted by 1.25 Abrams at full speed than it would be by a Kinzhal .  Not sure about the destroyers, you may bounce off if you're lucky.

Anyway I feel we digress .