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How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?


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23 minutes ago, danfrodo said:

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. 

IMO has zero effects. The sanctions and threat of siding with a pariah nation has far more effect.

Look at China. You think they could care less about siding with a war criminal?

No it’s the threat of sanctions and cutoff of trade with the west that is keeping them at bay. Russias economy is tiny and even if China went full bore in trading with Russia it would be just a fraction of trade with Europe and America. 
 

People who know Putin the best have mentioned he will become more dangerous if cornered.

If he was a leader that didn’t have nukes that’s one thing, unfortunately he has plenty of them. 
 

Maybe Putin is bluffing and has no intentions of using nukes if cornered, but if he’s not…

 

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2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Tactical combat drives operational results which in turn determine the strategic picture.  Having the best strategic or operational sim in the world means nothing if the tactical modeling for them isn't reasonably accurate.  My sense is that the people making these higher level sims don't appreciate that as much as they should. 

I suspect the modeling found in higher level games is deliberately aimed at producing "average" results, not exceptional ones.  This might be OK if the generalized assumptions for each force are more-or-less correct, but if not then it produces "abnormal averages".  That's garbage out.

As mentioned earlier, every CM player knows that attacking with an inferior quality force over difficult terrain against a high quality and well armed defender is not easy even with superior numbers.  And even with superior numbers, a victory generally means lots and lots of friendly losses.

You are quoting Maréchal Lannes there, Steve. There may be earlier people recognising this but I am not aware of them.

One factor to keep in mind is that professional wargaming often is conducted "manually", the players must be the "computers" executing the game rules. So you can't really ask from people to be switching between "compute shortest path" think mode to "design and evaluate courses of action for a formation of units". Back in the day there were minions moving pieces and doing the menial work, but I think that nowadays things are more democratic as in "everybody gets to do fun things".

So if humans are the computers, there is a strong incentive towards "streamlining" to speed up play and get player's focus on "what matters". Following up the @TheVulture comments, the designers then have to choose what factors and interactions to keep and which ones to drop to avoid exceeding the "computational complexity budget". As with narrow AI, this process of "making ends meet means" most often leads to games/models to be very sensitive to changes in the "conditions" and "task", as you say.

Interestingly, nowadays you get computer based wargames that are split between having black box abstractions that boil down units to a few numbers (average is 3 or 4) or games that pretend to be "white box" abstractions where units are modelled down to every element but the data used to describe them are often a "best guess" or an ill defined concept (e.g. "ROF", "accuracy"). I think both approaches are dead ends, for different reasons.

It is interesting that in the 1960s there were interesting middle grounds being explored. Look up an old RAND Corporation war game called TACSPIEL.

 

Edited by BletchleyGeek
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13 minutes ago, DerKommissar said:

"falling" out of a fifth-floor window is known to a have a serious detrimental effect on your heart.  If I were Shoigu, I'd have been on one of those flights to UAE.

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Worth noting that this move will have one pretty bad effect for Moscow: it will potentially annul gas/oil contracts with EU nations who will refuse to resign for similar sized contracts at the same rates. Classic example of short term gain for long term self sabotage.

 

 

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8 minutes ago, sburke said:

 @Haiduk any info on this guy?
Major Viktor Maksimchuk

I posted about him... He got lost 6-7th of March near or in Mariupol. Russian media claims he was regimental commander, but I doubt because his rank is too low for this. Probably one of deputies of regimental commander, or battalion commaner.

Artilce in Russian media: https://ngs.ru/text/world/2022/03/15/70509359/

Edited by Haiduk
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1 hour 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 ?

Schröder was Chancellor from 1998 to 2005, followed by a certain wife and since 10/2021 Scholz is Chancellor. The problems with german energy politics are all rooted between 2005 and 2021 involving decisions to completely exit nuclear energy until 2022 due to Fukushima (2011) and total exit of coal generated energy (2020) until 2035.

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4 minutes ago, DesertFox said:

Schröder was Chancellor from 1998 to 2005, followed by a certain wife and since 10/2021 Scholz is Chancellor. The problems with german energy politics are all rooted between 2005 and 2021 involving decisions to completely exit nuclear energy until 2022 due to Fukushima (2011) and total exit of coal generated energy (2020) until 2035.

Yeah my bad  - I caught the capital "S" and assumed

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26 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Pretty soon Ukraine will issue ATGMs to arm pensioners in wheel chairs simply because everybody else over 18 already has one:

 

Steve

This is same AT4 we have in CMBS, yes?  Not my favorite weapon but pretty good in a pinch.  Seems it works well against light armor but not MBTs, correct? 

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Picture of a Russian supermarket somewhere along the Finnish border.  OK, we saw some similar (though not as dramatic) pictures in the West as the initial pandemic panic hit (we had people driving 2.5 hours away to shop at our grocery store), but here's the difference... Russia has been completely cut off from replacements for some of the food items.  I suspect the closer a store is to a border the more affected it will be as I'm sure they have a higher percentage of cross border products than, say, a supermarket in Tashkent.

 

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1 minute ago, Battlefront.com said:

Picture of a Russian supermarket somewhere along the Finnish border.  OK, we saw some similar (though not as dramatic) pictures in the West as the initial pandemic panic hit (we had people driving 2.5 hours away to shop at our grocery store), but here's the difference... Russia has been completely cut off from replacements for some of the food items.  I suspect the closer a store is to a border the more affected it will be as I'm sure they have a higher percentage of cross border products than, say, a supermarket in Tashkent.

 

So next decade they will eat only Borschtsch and Okroshka?

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7 hours ago, DesertFox said:

Seems like they hit a jackpot with this one:

 

 

DesertFox,

Will it arrive gift wrapped with a thank you note from Zelensky for all the goodies the US has provided, or did we have to pay for it so Ukraine can buy even more items it needs on the open market? To be clear, we're getting the C3ISR processing part only, the command van, but not the combined jamming and receiving portion. Krasukha-4 is a dire threat to Bayraktar TB2. Armenia lost nine TB2s to this system in a week!
 



Regards,

John Kettler

Edited by John Kettler
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5 minutes ago, DesertFox said:

So next decade they will eat only Borschtsch and Okroshka?

This could get to be fun in a hurry.  Food riots. 

Hopefully the west can weather the inflation and other shortages, which are all much much less than what will hit Russia (I hope).  They need us a lot more than we need them going forward.

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Two very interesting articles in The Economist.

This one is about the current state of diplomatic negotiations.  In short, Ukraine is willing to yield to some demands but Russia doesn't appear interested in doing the same.  So we're where we were weeks ago:

https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/03/23/ukraines-government-is-willing-to-make-big-concessions-to-end-the-war

Ukraine's Foreign Minister talks about the loopholes and "half measures" embedded in some of the West's sanctions and armaments.  An interesting tidbit in there is that the Russian negotiators spend quite a bit of time talking about sanctions, the lifting of which is part of Russia's "peace deal" talking points:

https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/03/22/ukraines-foreign-minister-warns-of-faltering-european-resolve

Steve

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Watched a BBC report. Poles are enlisting into the military at a high rate and across Europe enlistment is up 7%.

Also speculation that a large multinational European force once proposed but never really acted upon may become a reality.

A few think eventually Germany may become a big military power again….

Edited by db_zero
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