How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Machor]

Harmon Rabb already posted this, but undersold it - CB is a bitch:

 

[Armorgunner]

.

Edited June 4, 2022 by Armorgunner

[Machor]

Just in time for Pride Month - 'Questioning'

 

[Armorgunner]

On 2/24/2022 at 8:52 PM, Armorgunner said:

The most interesting part. Is that the Russian Armys Elite: The 1st Guards Tank Army, containing: 4th Guards Kantemirovskaya Order of Lenin Red Banner Tank Division, 2nd Guards M. I. Kalinin Taman Motor Rifle Division, 6th Separate Tank Brigade, and 27th Separate Guards Sevastopol Red Banner Motor Rifle Brigade. Attacking Charkiw, has been halted by dead hard resistance!!! Can Ukrainian troops stop the 1st Guards Tank Army, they can stop everything Russia can throw at them 

 

On 2/24/2022 at 8:55 PM, Aragorn2002 said:

I don't think that's realistic. This will be over in a couple of weeks. 

 

On 2/24/2022 at 8:58 PM, Armorgunner said:

You want to make a bet?

 

On 2/24/2022 at 9:01 PM, Aragorn2002 said:

That would not be very tasteful. Let's just agree to talk again in two weeks.

Is it time to talk now?

 

[danfrodo]

Maybe someone already posted it but Zelensky posted a video at day 100 similar to that first selfie he did w his advisors in the first days of the war.  Honestly brought a tear to my eye. 

SEND MORE WEAPONS!  SEND MORE AID!  This war only ends when Russia decides to give up and go home.

[Machor]

11 hours ago, Kinophile said:

@Machor interesting articles, and echoed by others, ref the Western narrative of purely Russian incompetence. Yet the Ivan is still there and fighting. 

Ref "how could the elite Wehrmacht lose to the Russians if they were so elite", well, um, two(plus)-front war with equiv+ peers? Im fairly sure a Germant with no western/southern combat commitments or distractions could at the very least have fought the RA to a stalemate. This isn't a WW2 thread so I want to be clear my point is that this, to me, was such a significant and well known reason (among others) for the Nazi defeat that to not acknowledge or include it undercuts some primary points in his reasoning. Im curious why it wasn't even mentioned.

But overall a good discussion, thank you for it.

 

11 hours ago, Huba said:

And on top of it, it was to a large degree US industrial might they were fighting on the eastern front, not Russia alone. Now it's the other way around. 

 

9 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Another interesting parallel not mentioned is Putin's refusal to put Russia on a full war footing.  Germany didn't do this across the board until 1943.  Until then it was running the war along peacetime practices, though of course with larger than usual defense spending and activation of conscripts.  Even with the horrendous losses in 1941 and 1942 Hitler held off because a) he didn't think it would be necessary (victory right around the corner) and b) thought the German population would grumble too much.  Sound familiar to the situation we're seeing now?

If Hitler had ordered full national mobilization in 1940, for example, the war would have turned out differently in some way.  Probably still a loss, but likely not in the same way (e.g. way more Allied casualties, another year of fighting, etc).  For sure if Putin went with full mobilization this war would look vastly different.

Steve

@G.I. Joe

Bagration alone would be enough to drive the author's point; there's no excuse for the way the German forces folded there.

And I hope I will one day have the time - and health - to apply myself fully to CMRT; it's the CM title that I look forward to learning the most from after CMCW. 

With insight from The_Capt's and Steve's commentary, however, I think the article loses focus as it intentionally conflates the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. For example, there's also no mention made of the fact that Cold War planning anticipated a drawn-out war inevitably going nuclear. I guess it's what most forum members have to live with if we cannot afford to do a PhD in military history.

[sburke]

another fire

Huge blaze breaks out in Moscow business centre | Watch (msn.com) 

[MikeyD]

I don't see the day 100 Russian death count posted yet.

https://twitter.com/mhmck/status/1532686976872226817/photo/1

[sburke]

5 minutes ago, MikeyD said:

I don't see the day 100 Russian death count posted yet.

https://twitter.com/mhmck/status/1532686976872226817/photo/1

for some reason that reminds me of the old McDonald's signs that had an actual number served until eventually they gave up and just went with a generic figure.

[Kinophile]

ISW is heavily quoting Boytsovyi Kot Murz. I'm curious why they'd relate so much from a single source, without mentioning or indicating supporting/corroborating sources. Is that BKM is very reliable? Or that theres no other equivalent OSINT source? 

Tbh that kind of limited sourcing always makes me a bit leery of the conclusions reached. Its ISW so I'm certainly more trusting but, still - hmmm...

Also, anyone notice that theres now three, distinctly identified, in-operation partisan zones? Melitopol, Kherson and Kremina (west of Rubizhne). Two are in areas that are not the current RUS priority. Even so, Kremina didn't take long to get marked as partisan (after capture), and I'm curious if any lessons from supporting Melitopol are now being applied in a more effective manner, and if there was a deliberate "stay behind" op to build that partisan base more quickly.

Melitopol has been going the longest and has steadily, if slowly, grown. Kherson is active but I suspect limited by the heavy RUS presence.

Kremina is a "wait and see" for me. But its interesting in that its awful close to the front line, whereas Melitopol and Kherson are both much further back.

The expansion v. contraction of these zones should be useful indicators of available (or lack of) RUS rear guard forces to counter the guerilla work. Inability to suffiently protect rear areas is often a good indicator of erosion of resting/refitting reserves and an inability to provide for anything but the primary front line force.

Here's hoping...

Edited June 4, 2022 by Kinophile

[Aragorn2002]

4 hours ago, Armorgunner said:

 

 

 

Is it time to talk now?

 

It is and I was wrong, I'm happy to say.

Fortunately my Mother taught me  not to gamble.

Edited June 4, 2022 by Aragorn2002

[dan/california]

17 minutes ago, Aragorn2002 said:

It is and I was wrong, I'm happy to say.

Fortunately my Mother taught me  not to gamble.

Well said!

[Rokko]

I am not sure if it has been mentioned before, but this channel does regular interviews, mostly with Muscovite(?) zoomers and millenials, but I thought it gave some valuable insights into a certain subsection of Russian society, i.e. young urbanites, so definitely not representative of the whole country.

What these videos show particularly well is the utterly destitute state of Russian civic culture, with standard answers like "I'm apolitical", "these things are decided at the top", "we have no say in it", etc and a general disconnect from reality ("the rest of the world is envious of Russia's wealth and resources").

Some other interesting videos are the somewhat regularly posted (every few weeks or so) "are you affected by sanctions yet?" videos, which most people tend to answer with no, even if all acknowledge issues such as severe price increases.

This one answer I found particularly funny:

 

Edited June 4, 2022 by Rokko

[G.I. Joe]

5 hours ago, Machor said:

 

 

@G.I. Joe

Bagration alone would be enough to drive the author's point; there's no excuse for the way the German forces folded there.

And I hope I will one day have the time - and health - to apply myself fully to CMRT; it's the CM title that I look forward to learning the most from after CMCW. 

With insight from The_Capt's and Steve's commentary, however, I think the article loses focus as it intentionally conflates the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. For example, there's also no mention made of the fact that Cold War planning anticipated a drawn-out war inevitably going nuclear. I guess it's what most forum members have to live with if we cannot afford to do a PhD in military history.

I had to skip ahead (The Thread has been taking up most of my reading time since early March) to see what he has to say about Bagration. He does indeed make a strong case that the defeat of the Luftwaffe (not in a definitive sense of course, but a tipping point was reached) in the west earlier that year was the key factor: Luftflotte 6 had 100 single-engine fighters to cover Army Group Center, of which 40 were mission-capable and even they did not have adequate fuel. There were 600 Luftwaffe fighters (single- and twin-engine) on the entire Eastern Front when Bagration began, and against this the V-VS were able to deploy 5,417 aircraft, 2,528 of which were fighters, along the fronts taking part in the offensive. German commanders interviewed by the Allies after the war generally considered this to be the point where Soviet tactical airpower went from being a nuisance to a decisive factor.

Hope time and health do permit that for you soon, CMRT does look very interesting to get into.

[dan/california]

4 hours ago, Kinophile said:

ISW is heavily quoting Boytsovyi Kot Murz. I'm curious why they'd relate so much from a single source, without mentioning or indicating supporting/corroborating sources. Is that BKM is very reliable? Or that theres no other equivalent OSINT source? 

Tbh that kind of limited sourcing always makes me a bit leery of the conclusions reached. Its ISW so I'm certainly more trusting but, still - hmmm...

The sources you have, and the sources you can admit to having are not always the same.

 

Edit- Who knows who Steve will admit to knowing someday...?

Edited June 4, 2022 by dan/california

[G.I. Joe]

19 minutes ago, dan/california said:

The sources you have, and the sources you can admit to having are not always the same.

 

Edit- Who knows who Steve will admit to knowing someday...?

A couple of his offhand comments have made me feel like I just walked straight in to an episode of Archer... 

[Fenris]

Next interview with US ex-serviceman James Vasquez.  The 'take no prisoners' comment from the last interview is the first thing they discuss.  From some of the comments it sounds a bit like his unit was working autonomously without being an integrated part of the UKR forces, buying all there own gear, getting and acting on their own intel, maybe there's just not enough details to make that assumption.  Not a channel I'd normally watch, the interviewer is a bit too much of something for me, interesting to hear the first hand account tied to pics I've been seeing over the past couple months on his twitter.  There's a bit where he's at that BRDM(?) monument that got shot up by passing BTRs early on in the invasion too.

 

[Ultradave]

2 hours ago, dan/california said:

The sources you have, and the sources you can admit to having are not always the same.

 

Edit- Who knows who Steve will admit to knowing someday...?

Several times in my career (well, two different careers), it was brought home to me how much can be determined with a few pieces of information from varied sources, when presented to subject matter experts. And we have some of that here as well - a number of people who have real life experience at certain aspects, in which I include a comprehensive knowledge of history, military or otherwise.

In the Army we routinely and on "special occasions" got intelligence briefings on things. Sometimes it was political/military situations in general because being in the 82d always meant you were on call to be sent to the next hot spot, like, this afternoon if necessary, so we were briefed a lot on what was going on in the world. Some general, some classified. Then there were briefings on new equipment. One time in particular we got a picture of a new Russian tank in a factory. Someone mentioned seeing the exact same picture in Newsweek. But what the Newsweek pic didn't show was the factory. The tank was on a white background. Including the factory would have given a clue (maybe pointed right at) WHO took that picture. Sources. We got to see the assembly line. Newsweek readers saw the tank.

At Electric Boat (US nuclear submarine shipyard for those not familiar) I had occasions to participate in some studies for the Office of Naval Intelligence. I can't say a lot about these but let's just say we were trying to reverse engineer new Russian sub designs from bits and pieces of data the ONI would feed us. We could ask questions too, and sometimes in a week or two we might get an answer, sometimes they'd say not available, use your judgement. What was impressive was that when you put 20 experienced submarine design experts from various fields together, and with just a scattering of facts provided how scary close you can get to the answer. And we know how close because several years later we could compare our "guess" to what we could see of the real thing from open sources. My part was determining the reactor shield design, which is a significant weight account. Had to do this using what we knew from Russian naval reactor designs, and some assumptions on what Russia allows for radiation exposure (more than the US/UK and I assume France). But I designed reactor shielding for a living. Physics doesn't change and there are limited materials that are useful.

That in particular emphasizes how easy it is to have something compromised by just feeding a few bits of good info to real experts and having them analyze and collate.  And many times individual facts are not classified, because they don't show the whole picture. But given enough individual facts you can find the big picture, which makes you think that more facts should be classified  .

Bottom line is that even data from open sources, put in the right hands or group of hands, can come remarkably close to classified secrets.

Dave

[chrisl]

9 minutes ago, Ultradave said:

What was impressive was that when you put 20 experienced submarine design experts from various fields together, and with just a scattering of facts provided how scary close you can get to the answer. And we know how close because several years later we could compare our "guess" to what we could see of the real thing from open sources.

A few decades ago I got to do sort of a controlled experiment to test that.  I was responsible for overseeing four teams of  the top scientists in a particular flavor of space research and engineers from four big aerospace companies.  30 to 40 people per team. They were all given the same amount of money and about two years to come up with all the possible ways to do a particular thing in space (totally unclassified, but not really relevant here), and essentially no constraints, and they were all kept firewalled from each other except for one review in the middle to present all their ideas and one review at the end of detailed studies of the top few.  I got to see them all throughout.  More than 95% of what each team came up with was duplicated by all the other teams, and there were really only one or two unique-ish ideas on each team.  They all narrowed it down to the same two basic distinct concepts, and we ended up with two groups each detailing versions of those.  Because as you say, physics is the same for everybody, so if you ask a bunch of different experts how to to do the same thing, or what's possible given certain information, everybody is going to come up with similar answers.     The situation in Ukraine is more complicated than physics, but there are also a bunch of people with relevant backgrounds trying to figure it out, and it helps that CM is heavily oriented towards being a quantitative model that gets a lot of testing against historical data.  

[chuckdyke]

Russian army should be running short of toilet paper. Here is a common sense solution from a veteran.

 

[kraze]

4 hours ago, Rokko said:

What these videos show particularly well is the utterly destitute state of Russian civic culture, with standard answers like "I'm apolitical", "these things are decided at the top", "we have no say in it", etc and a general disconnect from reality ("the rest of the world is envious of Russia's wealth and resources").

What westerners, most of whom are very conscious people (hence why you don't live in totalitarian states, no matter how much smoothie-sipping leftists like to whine about it), fail to understand about people living in totalitarian states they themselves built - is their thought process and why they say things they say.

(also the sole fact that these interviews happen is just another proof Russia isn't a place where you get insta-executed for asking questions or answering them - and not because there's some kind of "freedom of expression").

You see - when a person in a totalitarian state says "I'm apolitical" - it literally translates to "I'm more than happy with and fully endorse current politics - thus they don't bother me, hence I have nothing more to add". And that's why when asked further, more precise questions - they suddenly become very "political" and you learn about Murica Bad, West Evil, Zpecial operation Good.

And when somebody they elected* and/or highly support - cocks up royally - they reply with "we have no say in it". What it literally means "we thought that guy will do what we want right, but he effed up, so it's his responsibility, not ours, we hoped he will finish Ukraine in 3 days, why should we pay for his mistakes?".

*Because, again, living in the West it's hard to understand how totalitarian states work. Totalitarian state isn't when some single guy decides how things should be and everyone follows blindly (even if it may seem so to a people who is used to democracy and personal freedoms from outside) - totalitarian state is when people in their vast, absolute majority, almost unanimously give a single person so much power and support - that it seems like a single person is running the show.

What really happens is that dictator, for having the privilege of getting every luxury he desires, has to follow the wishes of his people to a letter - otherwise he will seem weak and get dethroned. It's why putin hasn't mobilized yet - if there was the "movie dictatorship with poor people who are afraid of one guy" - what would he be worried about?

Democratic leaders require 51% support to stay in power. Dictators require 95%.

Edited June 4, 2022 by kraze

[Holien]

5 hours ago, Rokko said:

What these videos show particularly well is the utterly destitute state of Russian civic culture, with standard answers like "I'm apolitical", "these things are decided at the top", "we have no say in it", etc and a general disconnect from reality ("the rest of the world is envious of Russia's wealth and resources").

I am not so sure it really shows that, if the same was done in a "Western Country" you would hit upon a similar set of comments.

Nice to see a few folk understood the Orc question just by their response.

The reason why we keep having issues in this world is that it is made up of people and people are basically the same.

Sure in a country where you are beaten up for expressing a political view opposite to the ruling party folk will on the whole decide they prefer not to be beaten up....

You will get % some folk that get into power and use whatever tools they can to stay in power and pevert power for their own ends and tell people BS to justify it.

You then get a smaller % portion of powewr crazed folk that decide that their version of the truth needs to be imposed on others outside their country....

Anyway thanks for posting and it gave me an interesting insight to "modern" Russia.

43 minutes ago, kraze said:

Democratic leaders require 51% support to stay in power. Dictators require 95%.

Hmmm that is not always the case but not really for a debate here...

Right now back to lurking mode and stop myself from asking ARE WE THERE YET!!! (for when Russia is kicked out of Ukraine)... June has just begun.....

 

Edited June 4, 2022 by Holien
Smelling

[chuckdyke]

Democratic system in Australia. ScoMo just got voted out, his pension? AUS$328,162 annually. The world is not coming to its end when you lose an election in Australia. Russia keeps us baffled. 

[Taranis]

Oh my god, stupid orks... 

 

[slysniper]

well, Just been thinking, plenty of effort to give military aid by sending all the weapons to ukraine.

but there is a lack of effort to get the grain that will start going to waste within the country out to the rest of the world that will suffer a food crises without it. The grain silo's are full presently from last years harvest and this years havest starts in a month.

The food stocks should be used to pay for all the support given.

I just saw how they are talking about the russian navel blockade preventing it from leaving the country. 

if weapons are getting in by land, food should be getting out. 

Once again, the political leaders are not addressing some real simple world needs in this crises.