How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[JonS]

24 minutes ago, poesel said:

answered by Stoltenberg that this is Germany's decision.

I strongly suspect that the US would have a big piece of input to that decision, assuming the Patriots were acquired under FMS. And, heck, even if they weren't - the original manufacturing country tends to maintain a lot of say over how systems are disposed of.

Edited November 25, 2022 by JonS

[Armorgunner]

On 11/8/2022 at 1:49 PM, LongLeftFlank said:

1. For those keeping score at home, the Winnah!  Our Holy Thread, page 10. Day One.

2. Honourable mention to @CHEqTRO though, who was skeptical and posting tweets of RU bungling from very early on. And @The_Capt was like, 'wtf is Putin thinking of here, if he doesn't pull out some insider KGB coup angle, he's actually quite hosed', starting Day 2.

Our host didn't participate, at least not on this thread, until page 29 (Day 3). But his second post (page 30) did not mince words.

Ukraine doesn't have to defeat 190,000 Russians, it only has to significant degrade the first line forces in the initial attack. If it can do that, the Russian attack will ultimately fail....

I expect this war will be decided by tomorrow at the latest. The war, however, will last only so long as Putin keeps it going or he is deposed by someone who will end it.

Steve

... and outright called it on page 32 (same day).

Especially if Russia starts turning Kiev into Grozny.  Which, I'm afraid, is what is planned now that the ground war has pretty much failed. 

For the record!

Thx, I hope the winning price is the total defeat of Russia?

[JonS]

10 minutes ago, dan/california said:

the Argentinian side. They did not have the SOP, leadership, and gear to prevent rampant trench foot among other unpleasantness. I am assuming that both the Ukrainian winter environment, and the mobiks situation is at least as bad.

We've been told that the gents mobilised have predominantly come from the poorer and more remote oblasts, instead of the populous and prosperous ones like Moscow and St Petersberg.

I would tend to believe that farmboys and yokels would have a more-than-passing understanding of how to look after themselves in poor conditions.

[acrashb]

2 hours ago, Huba said:

As an trained, though not practicing archaeologist, it is my (non-)professional opinion that the most important of the early human's inventions was a pointy stick with which he could kill larger animals and defend himself, also from other humans.

If we shift "pointy stick" to "weapons generally", was this to defend against / take resources from everyone, or just from other social groups (tribes) aka "the Other"?  If it was from everyone, then you get one big Thunderdome / crabs in a bucket / etc.

 

I think it would have been mostly from the Other, which is quite different, no longer Hobbesian, and appears to be how societies evolve.

Every social group / tribe has criminals, but most are defensively- and offensively-oriented outwards.  At least I think so, I'm not a trained anthropologist, just a guy who reads a lot.

[JonS]

I'm not sure what I enjoy more about that poster; the typo, or the wildly inappropriate anthropomorphism.

[Huba]

1 hour ago, acrashb said:

If we shift "pointy stick" to "weapons generally", was this to defend against / take resources from everyone, or just from other social groups (tribes) aka "the Other"?  If it was from everyone, then you get one big Thunderdome / crabs in a bucket / etc.

The only answer that IMO makes sense is that we don't and can't know - we're talking about times so far away that there are hardly any sources to establish anything about the "culture" of these pre-people. A reasonable assumption would be to say that all the possible approaches and behaviors were tried and tested at some point. It would also be unreasonable to assume that what constitutes a behavioral norm was homogeneous across various groups - on the contrary, the more "primitive" people are, the more fragmented their culture is, as a rule of thumb. Even animals show behavioral differences depending on the group they live in, even though they might might be biologically identical.
Murder as an act, motivated by personal gain or whatever surely predates its intellectual conceptualization and an ability to describe it with language -  by millennia, perhaps by millions of years. So do some forms of war. As for killing being an organized, group undertaking directed inwards, why say a group wouldn't kill and eat the weakest, or otherwise chosen member in times of dire need, and have this behavior normalized (and we didn't even mentioned religion/ spiritualism...)?  Just an example, and of course oat the end of the spectrum the crabs in the bucket behaviour would lead to a group's swift disappearance - pure evolutionism. 
I'd say that philosophical deliberations about the intricate human nature are quite hard to fit in the narrative built on the basis of archaeological/ anthropological sources, especially if one would like to invoke classics who obviously couldn't be applied directly. At least I feel absolutely out of my depth here.

Edited November 26, 2022 by Huba

[The_Capt]

4 hours ago, acrashb said:

Which leads us to the slippery slope.  The angle and length of that slope would, I think, depend on the starting point.  Further, if humans are natural born killers, more would shoot during combat. Modern training leads to a higher active rate in modern armies, but during WWII it was three out of ten doing the shooting, even after becoming combat veterans.

Rather than being natural born killers, isn't it reasonable to say that the horrors of war brutalize away natural restraints?  If the horrors are worse and the starting point worse, the slope is short and steep.  Perhaps Russian society pre-brutalizes residents. 

If the horrors are moderated (through training, medevac, micro-social structures aka "band of brothers", etc.) then the slope would be longer and shallower - allowing more time to catch soldiers before they slip right off the slope.

Or I'm talking out of my butt; but I like to think that my neighbours aren't ready to kill me because I don't cut my grass regularly.

Wow that took a hard left turn from your emoticon heresy.

Personally I think humans stand poised between the Hobbesian and Rousseau -ian (?) we are able to swing to either pole based on a set of really complicated factors.  However when threats become stark and existential, and we are given license I think we have a default setting that is pretty savage.

The famously quoted statistic from WW2 is not without pushback : https://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldiers-fired-weapons-vietnam-war/. And from experience the problem in a firefight is to get the troops to slow down and exercise fire discipline rather than all opening up at once - I saw little aversion to violence but that is just me.  

Regardless pre-civilization research is showing that we were in fact quite violent (see Lawrence Keeley’s work) with something like 60+ percent of all adult males experiencing human violence and/or death based on wound evidence.  And this jives with other primate behaviours which can be extremely violent - Azar Gat has some interesting analysis of this as monkeys go to war too.

So that is the bad news - killing in fear appears very much baked into us as a species.  The good news is that we have worked very hard at social frameworks to try and control and limit that reflex.  The reason is not really all that altruistic as one cannot stick 20000 chimpanzees into a hockey stadium but you can with humans…because social frameworks.

To your point, it is very much a slope.  In my experience it becomes normal pretty fast even coming from a peace loving society.  We employ military discipline and culture to keep it from getting out of control and taking the effectiveness of a cohesive fighting unit with it.  As to how this applies to the common Russian soldier is really unknown - I have no doubt there are strong opinions (some have been repeatedly expressed here ) but I am not sure how accepting Russian society is of brutality in war and then how that translates to the brutality of its soldiers.  My sense is that it is definitely a factor - the average Russian soldier is likely on a less steep slope than say a US one.  But how much have we seen is a lack of discipline and training, and how much is baked in?

My experience is that there is a dark animal in all of us - what may differ is what it takes for that animal to see daylight.  Some is societal macro and micro, and some is just individual wiring I suspect.  In time we may evolve out that darkness, or maybe we can better control it - cool science fiction idea there…but I think it has been done.  

[The_Capt]

6 hours ago, sburke said:

Your argument gets undermined when you use the written language improperly.  Corrected that for you.  Now hold out your hand so I may smite your knuckles with this ruler.  (My 3rd grader teacher actually did that)

So if those little jaundice emoji bastards are the ushers to illiterate hell, autocorrect is operating the film projector.  Your egregious child abuse experience pales in comparison to the deep shame I am feeling that I dropped an “ed” - some may also notice that I sometimes drop “s”s, not sure why.  Likely old stubby fingers on an iPad keyboard.

Regardless the point stands.  If ”danfrodo” (seriously sounds like the hobbit who mans the front desk at the DMV) had simply prefaced his post with - “Sardonically speaking…” then he would be able to avoid the steady slide into the two finger texting hell all human communication is doomed to become.

[The_Capt]

48 minutes ago, JonS said:

wildly inappropriate anthropomorphism.

Vocabulary!!!

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, JonS said:

We've been told that the gents mobilised have predominantly come from the poorer and more remote oblasts, instead of the populous and prosperous ones like Moscow and St Petersberg.

I would tend to believe that farmboys and yokels would have a more-than-passing understanding of how to look after themselves in poor conditions.

Yes but at home they do it by getting out of the wet hole in the freezing ground, building a fire, and or going inside somewhere warm, at least intermittently. You can withstand things for twelve hours that will render you dysfunctional in 36. All of these fixes will get you killed in the mile or three closest to the front line. You just HAVE to have some combination of shelter and rotation.

[Kinophile]

38 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

into the two finger texting hell all human communication is doomed to become.

Two?!! 

Well lookee lookee at Mr.  Fancy Pants College Boy. 

Edited November 26, 2022 by Kinophile

[JonS]

54 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

ushers to illiterate hell

Come, join the illiteratai.

We have cookies.

[sburke]

57 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

So if those little jaundice emoji bastards are the ushers to illiterate hell, autocorrect is operating the film projector.  Your egregious child abuse experience pales in comparison to the deep shame I am feeling that I dropped an “ed” - some may also notice that I sometimes drop “s”s, not sure why.  Likely old stubby fingers on an iPad keyboard.

Regardless the point stands.  If ”danfrodo” (seriously sounds like the hobbit who mans the front desk at the DMV) had simply prefaced his post with - “Sardonically speaking…” then he would be able to avoid the steady slide into the two finger texting hell all human communication is doomed to become.

do as I say not as I do.

[The_Capt]

2 minutes ago, sburke said:

do as I say not as I do.

 

[Armorgunner]

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. 

No, you are very out in the blue 

[danfrodo]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

Regardless the point stands.  If ”danfrodo” (seriously sounds like the hobbit who mans the front desk at the DMV) had simply prefaced his post with - “Sardonically speaking…” then he would be able to avoid the steady slide into the two finger texting hell all human communication is doomed to become.

One would think a commentary on the war being due to some kind of RU laundry culture that included phrases like "soiled peaceful relations" and the "stain of tyranny" would suffice to show it was parody.  But next time I will just preface with a sledge hammer emoji marked "THIS IS COMEDY".   

And no, I don't work in a f-ing DMV.  I am actually the Head Goblin at Gringott's Bank and the LOTR name is a cover.  Or maybe my actual name actually sounds something like 'danfrodo' and it really has not greater meaning than that.

Edited November 26, 2022 by danfrodo
addition

[Armorgunner]

On 2/24/2022 at 9:21 PM, Armorgunner said:

But I really belive, in the possibility of a Ukrainian victory! They probably will lose some ground. But Russian losses will be so big, that they have to stop. And it will be a frozen war, for a long time. With Putin always with a hand in front of the face, in every TV appearance. In shame, of the loss. That he refuses to admit!

So it was not a funny game "betting", I wanted to do. I was dead serious!  

And I have to adress @LongLeftFlank for seeing my strongly belives at the day of attack 24/2, come true, so far anyway! 

Edited November 26, 2022 by Armorgunner

[G.I. Joe]

16 minutes ago, danfrodo said:

One would think a commentary on the war being due to some kind of RU laundry culture that included phrases like "soiled peaceful relations" and the "stain of tyranny" would suffice to show it was parody.  But next time I will just preface with a sledge hammer emoji marked "THIS IS COMEDY".   

Maybe the successor to "liberal site - enter at your own risk" needs to be "sarcastic post - read at your own risk..."

[JonS]

2 hours ago, dan/california said:

You just HAVE to have some combination of shelter and rotation.

Eventually. But some basic competence will take you a long way. There are numerous examples from WWII of troops with no or limited rotation and very limited shelter beyond what they dug sticking it out for extended periods. There are the blokes around Bastogne, for example, or up in the Vosges, or the Italian mountains.

Ive seen it go the other way too (anecdote alert!), although granted on an exercise. Now, I'm a city boy, you understand, born and bred. I've seen farms, of course, as we speed by on the highway, but I've never lived or worked on one, and only really got into tramping quite late in life. However on one particularly long exercise mumble years ago we were wandering around in the hills as one of the FO parties in a battalion advance. The battalion halted for the night astride a road and anchored on a couple of hills. For whatever reason, we were given an old 2,000# crater in a saddle between a couple of hillocks to hootchie up for the night in. 2000# makes a pretty big dent at the best of times, and the dirt up on the volcanic plateau is really easy digging, so this crater was massive - probably 80-odd metres across, and 10m deep. I looked at our home for the night, looked at the sky, and promptly started digging a shelf up near the lip of the crater, ending up with the top of the hootchie level with the ground around the crater. That night it persisted down. Hard. All night. I was snug as a bug in a rug though, and my space was big enough that in the morning I had enough room to pack up and prep breakfast without going out into the still falling rain. I also had enough room to take in a couple of strays. That was lucky, because a couple of the guys had - despite some pretty direct advice - had opted to occupy a couple of old slitties. And, to be fair, they were set up for the night long before I'd finished digging my shelf. And really, the only problem was that the slitties they inherited were right at the bottom of the crater. I have never seen a more miserable or bedraggled pair of puppies as those two the next morning, literally wringing water out of their sleeping bags. The next night was just as bad, although there was a brief respite around dusk which gave me long enough to dig a space in the area we'd been given, complete with drainage channels to divert water around my hole. After another snug night, warm and dry, I got to watch even more drowned rats emerge from their poorly conceived holes. There was a lot of experiential learning going on that exercise.

Anyway, the point here is that staying warm and dry isn't voodoo magic. The longer you're out, the harder it gets. The wetter it is (wet water, not snow) the harder it is, and of course being shot at really really limits your options, but it isn't impossible. Even for city boys.

Edited November 26, 2022 by JonS

[dan/california]

44 minutes ago, JonS said:

Eventually. But some basic competence will take you a long way. There are numerous examples from WWII of troops with no or limited rotation and very limited shelter beyond what they dug sticking it out for extended periods. There are the blokes around Bastogne, for example, or up in the Vosges, or the Italian mountains.

Ive seen it go the other way too (anecdote alert!), although granted on an exercise. Now, I'm a city boy, you understand, born and bred. I've seen farms, of course, as we speed by on the highway, but I've never lived or worked on one, and only really got into tramping quite late in life. However on one particularly long exercise mumble years ago we were wandering around in the hills as one of the FO parties in a battalion advance. The battalion halted for the night astride a road and anchored on a couple of hills. For whatever reason, we were given an old 2,000# crater in a saddle between a couple of hillocks to hootchie up for the night in. 2000# makes a pretty big dent at the best of times, and the dirt up on the volcanic plateau is really easy digging, so this crater was massive - probably 80-odd metres across, and 10m deep. I looked at our home for the night, looked at the sky, and promptly started digging a shelf up near the lip of the crater, ending up with the top of the hootchie level with the ground around the crater. That night it persisted down. Hard. All night. I was snug as a bug in a rug though, and my space was big enough that in the morning I had enough room to pack up and prep breakfast without going out into the still falling rain. I also had enough room to take in a couple of strays. That was lucky, because a couple of the guys had - despite some pretty direct advice - had opted to occupy a couple of old slitties. And, to be fair, they were set up for the night long before I'd finished digging my shelf. And really, the only problem was that the slitties they inherited were right at the bottom of the crater. I have never seen a more miserable or bedraggled pair of puppies as those two the next morning, literally wringing water out of their sleeping bags. The next night was just as bad, although there was a brief respite around dusk which gave me long enough to dig a space in the area we'd been give, complete with drainage channels to divert water around my hole. After another snug, warm and dry night I got to watch even more drowned rats emerge from their poorly conceived holes. There was a lot of experiential learning going on that exercise.

Anyway, the point here is that staying warm and dry isn't voodoo magic. The longer you're out, the harder it gets. The wetter it is (wet water, not snow) the harder it is, and of course being shot at really really limits your options, but it isn't impossible. Even for city boys.

Warning, further antecdata. It also depends on how active you have to be. One of the less pleasant things that can happen at a ski resort is when the grips on a high speed speed quad ice up over night. You literally have to stand at either the terminal entrance, or the closest tower and beat the ice off with a soft tipped hammer. it can easily be three hours of hard dangerous work on a worst case morning. Even wearing the best Black Diamond mountaineering gloves money can buy, you literally had to wring the water out of them and find a heater to lay them on and your spare pair. Alternatively your hands would just freeze to the snowmobile grips. You can't wear a lighter glove that will make you sweat less, because of the spray of ice and slush off of the grip will freeze you even faster. You just have to have dry gloves available.

And yes it is water that matters,not dry snow. It is a hundred times easier to stay warm at a Colorado Resort, than one In the Sierras. Colorado is colder and much higher elevation. But slushy snow, and icing conditions outweigh all of that.

[LongLeftFlank]

He doesn't give a source for this info, but it does not beggar belief given other Russian tactics observed in this and past wars.  Science fiction being put into practice?

 

Galeev alludes to this mindset as well.

 

 

Edited November 26, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[kevinkin]

First I read this source:

https://bnn-news.com/sab-change-of-power-in-russia-due-to-putins-failing-health-or-coup-is-unlikely-240352

In the current situation an uprising against the regime has too many risks for the elite. To avoid putting their own positions and access to resources at risk, the elite is forced to adapt to the existing situation, including consolidation around Putin. These members of the lite may change their mind if the Russian army suffers defeat on the battlefield, since they don’t want to be among the losers. The Russian elite may be influenced by rapidly declining health of the president, which would undermine his ability to manage the country. However, SAB stresses that AT THE MOMENT THERE IS NO REASON TO ASSUME PUTIN’S HEALTH IS POOR ENOUGH TO THREATEN THE STABILITY OF THE REGIME.

They are also highlighting Russian elites. So the center of gravity, in their view, is Russia's military in the field. So it's not "what bleeds leads" (journalism)  it's "what leads must bleed". The task for the West is not clearer. 

[cyrano01]

6 hours ago, dan/california said:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3750324/

This is an article about cold related injuries on the British side in the Falklands campaign. I worked in the ski business for over decade, and my standing joke is that I froze to death for a living, so I have paid a fair bit of attention to this issue for a long time. To complement the the above study on the British side in the Falklands, I also went to truly fascinating talk once by the U.S. Amies senior cold weather researcher. Quite a lot of his EXTREMELY unpleasant slideshow was from soldiers on the Argentinian side. They did not have the SOP, leadership, and gear to prevent rampant trench foot among other unpleasantness. I am assuming that both the Ukrainian winter environment, and the mobiks situation is at least as bad. Now if I was on the Ukrainian General Staff I would spend a fair bit of resources and energy checking that assumption, but in the absence of the ability to understand Russian radio intercepts without translation software, and deploy recon teams, I think it a pretty good assumption. It obviously needs to be checked against more data as it becomes available.

 

I looked for some actual data on the Argentinian side, and I couldn't find any with a few minutes googling.

So, that was a fascinating paper in its way. I had no idea that experiencing cold injury symptoms in the past could heighten your sensitivity to them and pre-dispose you to being rendered ineffective in the future.

Also interesting, although not necessarily that relevant to fighting in Ukraine was the historical table entry for cold casualties in during WW2.

Western Europe: British 500; Americans 91,000
Italian campaign, winter 1943–1944: British 102 cold injurycasualties (ratio 1:45);Americans 4,560 (ratio 1:4)

I can understand differences in national approach but these are two armies with quite a lot in common yet an order of magnitude difference in Italy and two orders of magnitude in NW Europe? Surely there has to be some sort of data capture or definition mismatch here.

 

Edited November 26, 2022 by cyrano01

[G.I. Joe]

56 minutes ago, cyrano01 said:

So, that was a fascinating paper in its way. I had no idea that experiencing cold injury symptoms in the past could heighten your sensitivity to them and pre-dispose you to being rendered ineffective in the future.

Also interesting, although not necessarily that relevant to fighting in Ukraine was the historical table entry for cold casualties in during WW2.

Western Europe: British 500; Americans 91,000
Italian campaign, winter 1943–1944: British 102 cold injurycasualties (ratio 1:45);Americans 4,560 (ratio 1:4)

I can understand differences in national approach but these are two armies with quite a lot in common yet an order of magnitude difference in Italy and two orders of magnitude in NW Europe? Surely there has to be some sort of data capture or definition mismatch here.

 

Pure conjecture, but I would have to agree that a mismatch on data capture or definitions seems like the most plausible explanation. Two things that stand out to me are: a) WWII U.S. forces were generally considered better equipped than just about anyone else (some exceptions of course), particularly with regard to personal equipment, and b) I'm guessing U.S. troops in that era would probably have had a noticeably higher percentage of personnel from rural areas and/or climates colder than the UK (though if the British figures include personnel from elsewhere in the Empire/Commonwealth, the difference might be less pronounced), both of which would seem to suggest the disparity would be in the opposite direction. More to the point, as you say, the two armies' training and equipment were similar enough that such a stark discrepancy seems... highly anomalous.

Edited November 26, 2022 by G.I. Joe

[JonS]

57 minutes ago, G.I. Joe said:

WWII U.S. forces were generally considered better equipped than just about anyone else

So, US GI uniforms in WWII were, AIUI, primarily manufactured from cotton. Really nice and snappy uniforms, but ... cotton is known as the thief-of-heat for a reason. British Battle Dress was manufactured from wool. Wool when it's wet is super uncomfortable but retains heat. Cotton does not.

Anecdata: McDonald, in Company Commander describes being fed with hamburgers. In the Ardennes. In January. And that was a treat as fresh cooked meals were irregular. British infantry units received stews and casseroles routinely. Unappetizing stews, perhaps, but more nourishing and warming than an occasional cold hamburger.

The British learnt a LOT during WWI about maintaining mind and body in the field in terrible conditions. I'm not sure the US really had the same opportunity to learn from first hand experience, given that US ground forces didn't really enter battle in significant numbers under their own command - and logistics - chain until spring/summer 1918.

Also, in NWE at least, the US and UK occupied very different terrain. During the particularly severe winter of 44/45 the British occupied a broadly coastal area, from Liege up to the English Channel, while the US occupied higher alpine-ish terrain in the Ardennes and Alsace-Lorraine. So, on the one hard the British were occupying lower terrain with average temperatures moderated by proximity to the ocean, but their AO was notoriously damp. The US meanwhile was occupying higher, drier terrain, but dealing with significant snow and the raw cold that came with it.

Plus, of course, the US ground forces in NWE were somewhere between 2-3 times the size of the Commonwealth forces, much more if you just count UK formations.^ That alone would account for a marked divergence in raw numbers.^^

I think you are undoubtedly correct that there is a data capture and classification mismatch - how could there not be when dealing with very different national medical systems? - but nevertheless I can credit that there was a marked difference in cold weather outcomes and NBI-rates between the US and the UK.

 

^ although I suspect that the medical data will be from the Commonwealth forces overall. Although 21AG included Canadian, Polish, Czech, etc, forces, and was highly heterogeneous from that perspective, from the perspective of equipment, organisation, and logistic (incl medical) support they were extremely homogeneous.

^^ Comparative force sizes in Italy were much more balanced - again as long as the Commonwealth forces are counted in toto, and not just UK formations.

Edited November 26, 2022 by JonS