How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[acrashb]

8 hours ago, Elmar Bijlsma said:

It might not be .50 BMG, it's still .50 cal.

But is it?  The fabled - and fun to shoot at long range - .50 BMG isn't itself .50 cal (.500 of an inch).  The bullet is .510" in diameter; the ".50" comes from the land-to-land diameter of the barrel.

Okay, so if the 12.7x108 bullet is the same as the .50BMG (12.7x99) then we can still call it, colloquially,  a "fifty" - but it isn't the same.  The bullet is .511" diameter, which, if stuffed into a .50BMG case would cause serious overpressure and likely barrel / breach failure immediately or soon.

Is there a cartridge with a bullet that is actually .500"?  Yes - at least the .500 S&W Magnum and .50AE, both pistol cartridges.

 

[Harmon Rabb]

Perun getting his feet wet.

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Haiduk said:

For those, who havn't own twitter account and can't see a video - Russian Su-30 crashed in Irkutsk. It has fell on two-storey building, but without losses among civilias. Both pilots are dead. The jet belonged to Irkutsk aircraft plant and reportedly was under test flight.

Thanks for posting the unprotected versions.  It sounded like the engines were still active right to the point of impact.  Which gets me wondering...

If this jet was newly produced, I wonder if the reasons for its crash are systemic or just a problem of it being built on a Friday.  Is there a component critical for the avionics that led to them to employ a less viable alternative?  That would be ideal because it will mean more crashes.  Were Russia's already low quality control standards lowered even more to rush new aircraft into service to replace losses?  That would be good too, but not as good as a component problem.

Steve

[danfrodo]

10 hours ago, chuckdyke said:

The real invasion was by Coca Cola and everything what comes with it Burgers, Fried Chicken etc.

hang on ChuckDyke, you can disparage carbonated sugar bombs & fast food, but fried chicken is a gift from Gawd that is one of the few things making life worth living

Any news on the RU ferry operation?  How many vehicles per hour/day I wonder?  It's a risk to hit it because of the human shields but letting all those troops escape to fight another day is not good either.  It's also  important to have large bunch of prisoners & loot to broadcast to RU populace to get the water hotter for Putler.

[Battlefront.com]

9 hours ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Come on, our Echo Chamber is the Best Echo Chamber!

Indeed!  Not our fault that the Russians give us so much fuel for the fire:

 

[Battlefront.com]

Adding to Elmar's comments about the cargo cult analogy, this is from Belarus.  However, could just as easily be Russia or some of the ex-Soviet republics:

Someone said "we need tough soldiers" and this is what they came up with... a macho clown act.  Because nothing says "tough soldier" like dancing around whacking each other with pre-weakened pieces of wood and bits of plaster.  Imagine what these "tough soldiers" might do with at least some military training! 

Steve

[Beleg85]

14 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Indeed!  Not our fault that the Russians give us so much fuel for the fire:

 

Whoever added Bee Gees to this was a genius.

https://twitter.com/Artur_Micek/status/1584105219465441280

Bakhmut direction- not even 1% of the town in Wagnerite hands. Ukrainians hold Asphalt factory, Garbage Dump, Zaitseve, Vesela Dolyna, crossroads of M03 with T0504 and M03 with T1302. Vershyna and Kodema still constested, but road Bakhmut-Soledar is free of muscovites. Lachowski also adds in comments that he has inf Ukrainians expanded slightly at Soledar and repelled heavy Russian counterattack. In other words, Ukrainians regained most terrain dirlewagnerites captured with blood...from August if not July.

Of course they still throw tons of Grads at city and its sorroundings.

 

 

Edited October 23, 2022 by Beleg85

[Battlefront.com]

7 minutes ago, Beleg85 said:

Whoever added Bee Gees to this was a genius.

https://twitter.com/Artur_Micek/status/1584105219465441280

Bakhmut direction- not even 1% of the town in Wagnerite hands. Ukrainians hold Asphalt factory, Garbage Dump, Zaitseve, Vesela Dolyna, crossroads of M03 with T0504 and M03 with T1302. Vershyna and Kodema still constested, but road Bakhmut-Soledar is free of muscovites. Lachowski also adds in comments that he has inf Ukrainians expanded slightly at Soledar and repelled heavy Russian counterattack. In other words, Ukrainians regained most terrain dirlewagnerites captured with blood...from August if not July.

Of course they still throw tons of Grads at city and its sorroundings.

 

 

One Twitter poster put it in simple terms... Ukraine took back in 2 days what Wagner took in 2 months.  It's Kharkiv all over again, but at a tactical level.

The RU Nat bloggers are definitely headed into a really bad week of reporting, that's for sure.

Steve

[Haiduk]

12 tankriders of Georgian Legion attack Russian trench with 3-4 defenders

 

[Beleg85]

2 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

The RU Nat bloggers are definitely headed into a really bad week of reporting, that's for sure.

Steve

They indeed are. This week is very bad for Russian propagandists and Russian planes...:

[Haiduk]

15 minutes ago, Beleg85 said:

Whoever added Bee Gees to this was a genius.

https://twitter.com/Artur_Micek/status/1584105219465441280

Bakhmut direction- not even 1% of the town in Wagnerite hands. Ukrainians hold Asphalt factory, Garbage Dump, Zaitseve, Vesela Dolyna, crossroads of M03 with T0504 and M03 with T1302. Vershyna and Kodema still constested, but road Bakhmut-Soledar is free of muscovites. Lachowski also adds in comments that he has inf Ukrainians expanded slightly at Soledar and repelled heavy Russian counterattack. In other words, Ukrainians regained most terrain dirlewagnerites captured with blood...from August if not July.

Of course they still throw tons of Grads at city and its sorroundings.

 

 

That guy, who posted about winery retaking lately posted this map, but said real advance of UKR troops "slightly more leftward"

Edited October 23, 2022 by Haiduk

[Battlefront.com]

Russia's failure to cut off communications between occupied and free Ukraine is one of the most important failures, yet least talked about (even here, and we talk about damned near everything!).  Add to this Ukraine's AMAZING demonstrated ability to utilize this advantage in realtime.  Here's a prime example as to why this matters so much:

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarRoom/comments/ybevh2/in_recently_liberated_arkhanhelske_kherson_a/

Pensioner knows Ukraine is close.  Somehow Ukrainian military gets in touch with him.  He helps organize boats and safe routes for a Ukrainian recon platoon to poke around, then gets them safely back across the river.  Then he rides his bike around noting where the Russians are and calls up his daughter in free Ukraine, who then passes the information to the Ukrainian military facing the village.  They send up a drone, not to do recon work, but to spot for targeting of specific locations they already have knowledge of.

Amazing.

Steve

[kevinkin]

More stage setting rhetoric:

 https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2022-10-23/russias-shoigu-warns-of-uncontrolled-escalation-in-ukraine-conflict

BTW, would blowing the Kakhovka dam and subsequent flooding be a WMD?

 

[Letter from Prague]

48 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Thanks for posting the unprotected versions. 

Just so you know, if you replace twitter.com with nitter.net in the URL (but keep the rest), you can go to alternate site that gets data from twitter and neither hides things for being 18+, nor asks you to create account if you scroll.

I assume Twitter will block them eventually, but for now it works.

[The_Capt]

23 hours ago, Elmar Bijlsma said:

Not at all. That, to my knowledge, implies a fancy facade where the the actuality is much less impressive. But it's still a military, just weaker then expected.

Cargo cults, for those that don't know, are a Pacific island phenomenon where the natives build imitation airfields and the like in the hopes of inviting back the bountiful supplies the US Army, Navy and Air Force dumped on their islands during WW2, who built similar bases. They don't really understand what airfields do, but they build something shaped like one.

 

And that is why I prefer to use cargo cult.

The Russian Armed Forces seem to have build something akin to what won them the Great Patriotic War in the quasi-religious hopes that victory returns to them, without fully understanding what it is they are supposed to do with it.  Push onwards to Kiev, because that is what Zhukov would have done. Mass artillery bombardments because it worked for Rokossovsky. Logistics? Stalin never paid attention to that either.

They have this thing called an army but they don't really understand how it works and how to use it. Hence, cargo cult.

Very interesting analogy but not quite there to my mind.  The cargo cult as you outline is an emulation without actual capability behind it - it looks like an airfield built by people with no idea how an airfield works.  I do not believe the Russian military is in this camp…well at least not at the start of this thing.

The Russian military has capability and capacity but they appear to be set up to prosecute a war from the 1990s or even the Cold War.  Their military doctrine, training and even metrics of success are all from a bygone era.  Take this military and drop it into 1991 and we are talking a very different outcome.   The UA would not have access to real time full spectrum C4ISR or digitally supported targeting…no one really did.  Even in the Gulf War only about 10% of munitions were PGM.  No HIMARs, no UAS, ATGMs definitely last gen, so maybe TOW but that system was not going to dominate the battlefield.  No, if this was 30 years ago we would likely be supporting an insurgency across the Polish border.

We see videos of training goons hitting each other and calling it training, Google some old Marine corp training videos from the 80s, we were not that much more sophisticated at times.   No, the issue isn’t that Russia does not have military capability or is pretending, it is that is not learning fast enough what modern warfare actually looks like.  Further it keeps doubling down on old metrics of success - mass, terrorizing civilians and holding territory.  It keeps building for that and fighting for that.  This is very similar to the deadlocks of WW1 where “just one more push” and we will win.  We mock but we saw this same logic in places like Iraq and Afghanistan - “if we kill just one more XX leader, they will fold”.  So we are by no means immune.

I do not think Russia is a cargo cult (which is a brilliant piece of history btw), I think they are a military fighting for the wrong war.  The narratives we have heard for months coming from Russia social media reinforce this…they cannot see it, they do not understand why they are losing.  Mobilization was supposed to cure everything by throwing more mass at the problem, when it is clear that will not work.  Then tac nukes, which won’t work even if they do use them.  Oh wait, “stop the restraint” and conduct a blitz terror campaign against Ukrainian civilians like it is 1940.  Even those obstacle belts - which look professionally constructed btw- are an old way of thinking that I am not even sure will work even if they build enough of them.

 These are all symptoms that Russia simply doesn’t not even know what it doesn’t know at this point.  Better news is that they appear wed to their doctrine so learning will happen very slowly.  What is very important is that Ukraine and the West do not give them time to learn.  I suspect it is too late to be honest, and has been since early days.  The learning that needed to happen was 5 years ago so that they could invest in a competitive C4ISR system instead of retooling an old one and blowing money on T14s and hypersonic-whatever-those-BS-systems-were-supposed-to-do.

It is interesting that this war is not just a collision of wills, it is a collision of collective learning.

Edited October 23, 2022 by The_Capt

[Beleg85]

23 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Pensioner knows Ukraine is close.  Somehow Ukrainian military gets in touch with him.  He helps organize boats and safe routes for a Ukrainian recon platoon to poke around, then gets them safely back across the river.  Then he rides his bike around noting where the Russians are and calls up his daughter in free Ukraine, who then passes the information to the Ukrainian military facing the village.  They send up a drone, not to do recon work, but to spot for targeting of specific locations they already have knowledge of.

Amazing.

Steve

Very interesting indeed. Imagine if in WWII partisants had internet, phones and drones like today.

26 minutes ago, Haiduk said:

That guy, who posted about winery retaking lately posted this map, but said real advance of UKR troops "slightly more leftward"

Ok, so perhaps crossroads of M03 and T0504 is in Russian hands still. Or in contested zone, as maps at this scale should (but rarely do) acknowledge existence of "no-man's land". Anyway, Russian did get a bloody nose there.

[pavel.k]

4 hours ago, akd said:

POV: getting hit and ejecting at low altitude.

Is pilot suppose to see this after the ejection? He had a huge luck i guess.

 

[sburke]

11 hours ago, chrisl said:

Wasn't everybody in America washing and re-using their TP in the spring of 2020?

No.  My cat demonstrated how to limit TP use....  Too much information?

Edited October 23, 2022 by sburke

[chrisl]

4 hours ago, cyrano01 said:

Just a reminder that amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logs...or something like that.

Indeed.  Those are the maintenance logs from the aircraft repair depot in Belgorod and a key indicator of Russian equipment management.

[Seminole]

2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Thanks for posting the unprotected versions.  It sounded like the engines were still active right to the point of impact.  Which gets me wondering...

If this jet was newly produced, I wonder if the reasons for its crash are systemic or just a problem of it being built on a Friday.  Is there a component critical for the avionics that led to them to employ a less viable alternative?  That would be ideal because it will mean more crashes.  Were Russia's already low quality control standards lowered even more to rush new aircraft into service to replace losses?  That would be good too, but not as good as a component problem.

Steve

The plane clearly noses further down right before it makes impact.

Maybe they lifted Boeing's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, but I think they're having trouble sourcing parts for their fly by wire systems.

[MOS:96B2P]

3 hours ago, cesmonkey said:

I don't remember if this article from the New Yorker has been discussed here yet, but it's a good one:

Inside the U.S. Effort to Arm Ukraine
 

Thanks for the link.  Good article.  It lays out the time-line of the major events and some of the thoughts/reasons things were done or not done at a given time.  Below are just a few selected parts from the article. 

 

Zaluzhnyi told Milley that Ukraine had almost no fighter jets left. Milley insisted that Ukraine still had plenty. The two did not speak for more than a week. 

 

the assessment was also that, in the end, Putin could be deterred. A senior U.S. intelligence official said, “It’s not like he wants World War Three, either.”

 

Reznikov is certain that such deliveries are inevitable. “When I was in D.C. in November, before the invasion, and asked for Stingers, they told me it was impossible,” he said. “Now it’s possible. When I asked for 155-millimetre guns, the answer was no. himars, no. harm, no. Now all of that is a yes.” He added, “Therefore, I’m certain that tomorrow there will be tanks and atacms and F-16s.”

 

[Holien]

1 minute ago, MOS:96B2P said:

He added, “Therefore, I’m certain that tomorrow there will be tanks and atacms and F-16s.”

Not if the political landscape changes...

I do think it is great that America (and Europe) has helped Ukraine but the sooner this is done the less chance the political landscape will change..

Also less Ukrainian deaths and destruction and the world can try and recover sooner!!!

I hope any Americans reading this write to their Congressmen and Senators to try and impress on them this is a once in a life time opportunity to defeat Russia with a just cause, without risking American lives!!!

Meanwhile in the UK we are waiting for the next liar to take office...

 

 

[Huba]

3 minutes ago, Holien said:

Not if the political landscape changes...

 

I do think it is great that America (and Europe) has helped Ukraine but the sooner this is done the less chance the political landscape will change..

 

Also less Ukrainian deaths and destruction and the world can try and recover sooner!!!

 

I hope any Americans reading this write to their Congressmen and Senators to try and impress on them this is a once in a life time opportunity to defeat Russia with a just cause, without risking American lives!!!

 

Meanwhile in the UK we are waiting for the next liar to take office...

 

 

 

I'm hardly qualified to make predictions about future US political landscape, but there clearly are somev(important?) voices in GOP that are way more hawkish than Biden's administration:

 

[NamEndedAllen]

14 hours ago, sburke said:

Jewish space lasers.  

Now with Einsteinian Wormholes Option!

[Artkin]

If we aren't sensitive to letting things like Javelin fall into Russian hands, why not just send Ukraine high end thermals to slap into their current MBT fleet? That would solve the whole "heavy equipment" problem. The javelin looks like it has pretty good thermals already.

If I'm not mistaken high end digital optics use extremely tiny mirrors to reflect singular bits of information to draw up a larger image. That's how they get such great resolution... with the number of mirrors reflecting tiny bits of light.

Edited October 23, 2022 by Artkin