How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[cesmonkey]

And this is good, too:
https://www.economist.com/syrsky-interview

[Maciej Zwolinski]

9 hours ago, billbindc said:

The general point I'm trying to get across is that looking back and saying "USA suxxxx!!!" or "the West betrayed Ukraine!!!!" or "Ukraine had it coming!!!" is absurd. Countries act within the envelope of what they can reasonably accomplish under given political, military and economic constraints.

To be fair, Ukrainians are complaining not about not getting help which cannot be reasonably given under existing constraints, but about not getting stuff which can be reasonably given but is withheld very unreasonably.

I mean the German excuse "We will not give Leopard 1s, because tanks = Hitler", or the US refusal to provide ATACMS because it can be used to hit Russia proper - while the Ukrainians have successfully hit proper Russia with their own devices, and moreover, there is nothing wrong with hitting Russia proper in the 200th day of high intensity war with Russia. These do not make sense, so it is no wonder that people fighting for their lives are angry about getting nonsense answers and suspect that they are being lied to.

I think some of those publicly presented arguments are indeed false, e.g. the real reason for not giving F-16s to the Ukrainians is that the small number of aircraft which can reasonably be donated to Ukraine would quickly get destroyed for no effect. If that is the case, it should perhaps be more honestly stated.

 

[Seminole]

12 hours ago, billbindc said:

Are we pretending now that PNAC was within miles of the Obama administration's foreign policy apparatus in 2014?

Really?

(pro tip: that's a ridiculous assertion)

How many miles was Victoria Nuland from 'the Obama administration's foreign policy apparatus in 2014'?

(pro tip: she was handing out cookies and money in Ukraine)

What does Victoria Nuland have to do with PNAC?

Nuland's husband, Robert Kagan, is a historian, foreign policy commentator at the Brookings Institution, and co-founder in 1998 of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC)

The PNAC crowd follows power, not party.

Indeed, the likelihood of a neocon/Democrat reunion long predates Trump. Back in the summer of 2014 — almost a year before Trump announced his intent to run for president — longtime neocon-watcher Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in the New York Times, predicted that “the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.”

Noting the Democratic Party’s decades-long embrace of the Cold War belligerence that neocons love most — from Truman and JFK to LBJ and Scoop Jackson — Heilbrunn documented the prominent neocons who, throughout Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, were heaping praise on her and moving to align with her. Heilbrunn explained the natural ideological affinity between neocons and establishment Democrats: “And the thing is, these neocons have a point,” he wrote. “Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war; supported sending arms to Syrian rebels; likened Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to Adolf Hitler; wholeheartedly backs Israel; and stresses the importance of promoting democracy.”

One finds evidence of this alliance long before the emergence of Trump. Victoria Nuland, for instance, served as one of Dick Cheney’s top foreign policy advisers during the Bush years. Married to one of the most influential neocons, Robert Kagan, Nuland then seamlessly shifted into the Obama State Department and then became a top foreign policy adviser to the Clinton campaign.

As anti-war sentiment grew among some GOP precincts — as evidenced by the success of the Ron Paul candidacies of 2008 and 2012, and then Trump’s early posturing as an opponent of U.S. interventions — neocons started to conclude that their agenda, which never changed, would be better advanced by realignment back into the Democratic Party. Writing in The Nation in early 2016, Matt Duss detailed how the neocon mentality was losing traction within the GOP, and predicted:

Yet another possibility is that the neocons will start to migrate back to the Democratic Party, which they exited in the 1970s in response to Vietnam-inspired anti-interventionism. That’s what earned their faction the “neo” prefix in the first place. As Nation contributor James Carden recently observed, there are signs that prominent neocons have started gravitating toward Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But the question is, Now that the neocons has been revealed as having no real grassroots to deliver, and that their actual constituency consists almost entirely of a handful of donors subsidizing a few dozen think tankers, journalists, and letterheads, why would Democrats want them back?

The answer to that question — “why would Democrats want them back?” — is clear: because, as this new group demonstrates, Democrats find large amounts of common cause with neocons when it comes to foreign policy.

[dan/california]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/world/europe/bakhmut-ukraine-russia-war.html

Did I mention the NYT is doing better?

 

[Kinophile]

1 hour ago, cesmonkey said:

And this is good, too:
https://www.economist.com/syrsky-interview

Paywalled ;/

[Kinophile]

26 minutes ago, Seminole said:

How many miles was Victoria Nuland from 'the Obama administration's foreign policy apparatus in 2014'?

(pro tip: she was handing out cookies and money in Ukraine)

What does Victoria Nuland have to do with PNAC?

Nuland's husband, Robert Kagan, is a historian, foreign policy commentator at the Brookings Institution, and co-founder in 1998 of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC)

The PNAC crowd follows power, not party.

Indeed, the likelihood of a neocon/Democrat reunion long predates Trump. Back in the summer of 2014 — almost a year before Trump announced his intent to run for president — longtime neocon-watcher Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in the New York Times, predicted that “the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.”

Noting the Democratic Party’s decades-long embrace of the Cold War belligerence that neocons love most — from Truman and JFK to LBJ and Scoop Jackson — Heilbrunn documented the prominent neocons who, throughout Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, were heaping praise on her and moving to align with her. Heilbrunn explained the natural ideological affinity between neocons and establishment Democrats: “And the thing is, these neocons have a point,” he wrote. “Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war; supported sending arms to Syrian rebels; likened Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to Adolf Hitler; wholeheartedly backs Israel; and stresses the importance of promoting democracy.”

One finds evidence of this alliance long before the emergence of Trump. Victoria Nuland, for instance, served as one of Dick Cheney’s top foreign policy advisers during the Bush years. Married to one of the most influential neocons, Robert Kagan, Nuland then seamlessly shifted into the Obama State Department and then became a top foreign policy adviser to the Clinton campaign.

As anti-war sentiment grew among some GOP precincts — as evidenced by the success of the Ron Paul candidacies of 2008 and 2012, and then Trump’s early posturing as an opponent of U.S. interventions — neocons started to conclude that their agenda, which never changed, would be better advanced by realignment back into the Democratic Party. Writing in The Nation in early 2016, Matt Duss detailed how the neocon mentality was losing traction within the GOP, and predicted:

Yet another possibility is that the neocons will start to migrate back to the Democratic Party, which they exited in the 1970s in response to Vietnam-inspired anti-interventionism. That’s what earned their faction the “neo” prefix in the first place. As Nation contributor James Carden recently observed, there are signs that prominent neocons have started gravitating toward Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But the question is, Now that the neocons has been revealed as having no real grassroots to deliver, and that their actual constituency consists almost entirely of a handful of donors subsidizing a few dozen think tankers, journalists, and letterheads, why would Democrats want them back?

The answer to that question — “why would Democrats want them back?” — is clear: because, as this new group demonstrates, Democrats find large amounts of common cause with neocons when it comes to foreign policy.

Neeaaah US Thinktanks & Politics...always makes me want to wash my eyes afterwards...

 

 

with acid.

Edited December 15, 2022 by Kinophile

[Huba]

I'll be late to work, there's a HIMARS on the road again!

Edit:

Also, here's an interview with Ben Wallace. He gets explicitly asked if UK is considering delivering Storm Shadow to Ukraina if RU attacks on civilian infrastructure continue. He does not give a straight answer of course, but strongly hints that all options are on the table and UK will send new weapon systems there if Putin keeps this up. 
There's also talk about ammunition procurement and other interesting topics, I recommend the whole thing.

 

Edited December 15, 2022 by Huba

[Splinty]

I just watched David Letterman's interview with President Zelensky on Netflix. It's quite good.

Edited December 15, 2022 by Splinty

[Kinophile]

8 minutes ago, Splinty said:

I just watched David Letterman's interview with President Zelensky on Netflix. It's quite good.

Yah pretty blunt.

Have any of our Ukrainian friends seen it? In amongst the rolling blackouts, stupid russian invasion and whatnot....

[holoween]

11 hours ago, The_Capt said:

The German Army? You were told you were a trained tank crewman on the Leo 2 in a week, by the German Army?  And you were told a tank platoon is ready when the crew are basically capable of not running over each other?

Well if this is true then maybe Germany should be scared witless by Russia because their troop quality/training may be worse than the RA by now.

Gotta love how youre not even bothering to read or understand completely.

1 week is for taking a ukrainian tanker and retrain him on a leo2.

As ive written 3 weeks drivers course and 3month loder/gunner course . Qualifying a unit for deployment takes 6 month on top.

Those times include a lot of downtime and non tank related stuff which could be cut down.

NCOs and officers would take far longer to train from scratch but even here simply cutting out all nonessentials cuts down the required time a lot.

 

So ultimately the question is does a tank unit equipped with western tanks need to be trained to 100% the same training standard as a NATO tank unit for deployment. Id argue getting them to 80% is easily enough to have a massive impact so cutting corners to get them to that point quickly is far more valuable and has a higher impact overall. That also how it was done with Western artillery given to ukraine. It didnt take a year for pzh2000 to be in use and that system is certainly not less complex compared to a leo2.

[cesmonkey]

30 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

Paywalled ;/

If you register for a free account, you will get a limited number of free articles to read per month.

[FancyCat]

https://www.economist.com/zaluzhny-transcript

Pulling quotes from it, y'all will be happy to hear Commander in Chief Zeluzhny strongly supports your view, the objective is killing Russians.

Quote

And the most important experience we had and the one which we have practised almost like a religion is that Russians and any other enemies must be killed, just killed, and most importantly, we should not be afraid to do it. And this is what we are doing.

 

Quote

The Economist: What distinguishes you as a commander?  VZ: The Soviet Army welcomed and enforced one concept: the commander. But being a commander and being a leader is not the same. With all due respect to Mr Surovikin [the commander of Russian forces in Ukraine], if you look at him, he is an ordinary Petrovite commander from Peter the Great’s time, shall we say, a derzhimorda [a brutal martinet in Gogol’s “The Government Inspector”].  You look at him and understand that either you complete the task or you’re ****ed. And we had long realised that this does not work. And we had particularly realised this in 2014, when 21-year-old lieutenants came to command men who were in their 50s and 60s. Of course we had our own derzhimordas who tried to keep order with their fists and biceps, but it does not work 100% in the Ukrainian army… It is always possible to be normal. To be normal means to remain human in any situation—that is the most important thing. To remain human, to become a leader. To be smarter, to be stronger, to be more talented and in that case try to manage people. That is a religion I practised.

A General shot himself, how Soviet of him.

Quote

TE: Does this mean that you listen to your officers and encourage their initiative?  VZ: I trust my generals. Since the start of the war I fired ten of them because they were not up to it. Another one shot himself. I trust Syrsky [General Oleksandr Syrsky, commander of Ukraine’s land forces]. If he tells me he needs another brigade, it means that he really needs another brigade. I certainly don’t think I am the smartest one here. I must and do listen to those who are in the field. Because the initiative is there.

He believes Russia is set for the long haul, including new offensives.

Quote

The Russians have been garnering their resources for a long time. According to my calculations it must have been three and a half or four years that they built them up intensively: people, equipment, ammunition. I think they had three months’ worth of resources to achieve their goals. The fact that they have exhausted these resources and wasted their potential without achieving practically any result, shows that their position was chosen incorrectly. They now have to think again about how to get out of this situation.  They wanted to take Kyiv. Militarily this was the right decision—the easiest way to achieve their goal. I would have done the same. I know Gerasimov [the head of Russia’s armed forces] well (not personally, of course). There was no way out for him. He concentrated on Donbas to preserve whatever resources he had left. As of today, the situation in Donbas is not easy. But strategically it is a no-win situation for the Russian army.  So most likely they are looking for ways to stop [fighting] and get a pause by any means: shelling civilians, leaving our wives and children to freeze to death. They need it for one simple purpose: they need time to gather resources and create new potential so they can continue to fulfil their goals.  But they are working on another task in parallel, they are doing everything possible not to let us regroup and strike ourselves. This is why you are seeing battles along the 1,500km frontline. In some places more intense, in some places less intense, but they are constraining our troops in order not to allow us to regroup. The fact that they are fighting hard now is very bad, of course. But it is not a solution to the strategic problem. It simply wears down the armed forces of Ukraine.  That’s why, just as during the second world war, I have no doubt about it, it is most likely that somewhere beyond the Urals, they are preparing new resources. They are 100% being prepared.  Ammunition is being prepared, not very good stuff, but still. It won’t be the same resources as it could have been in two years of ceasefire. It will not be like that. It will be lousy, and combat potential will be very, very low, even if he enlists a million more people in the army to throw bodies, like Zhukov [a senior Soviet commander during the second world war] did, it will not bring the desired result anyway.

Interesting, just plain states Ukraine is prepping for a new offensive and is thereby holding stuff in reserve instead of feeding it for the current frontline. Nvm, preparing for new Russian offensives, building a reserve to counter it when it comes.

Quote

Our second strategic task is to get ready for this war which can happen in February. To be able to wage a war with fresh forces and reserves. Our troops are all tied up in battles now, they are bleeding. They are bleeding and are being held together solely by courage, heroism and the ability of their commanders to keep the situation under control.  The second, very important strategic task for us is to create reserves and prepare for the war, which may take place in February, at best in March, and at worst at the end of January. It may start not in Donbas, but in the direction of Kyiv, in the direction of Belarus, I do not rule out the southern direction as well.  We have made all the calculations—how many tanks, artillery we need and so on and so on. This is what everyone needs to concentrate on right now. May the soldiers in the trenches forgive me, it’s more important to focus on the accumulation of resources right now for the more protracted and heavier battles that may begin next year. I’ll be talking to Milley [America’s top soldier] about this [later today].

Quote

I will tell him how much it is worth, how much it costs. If we don’t get it, of course we will fight to the end. But as a movie character said, “I don’t vouch for the consequences.” The consequences are not hard to foresee. This is what we have to do.  There is also a third, very important task for us, a third strategic task, which, unfortunately, is connected with the first (holding the lines and positions) and with the second (accumulating resources). This is missile defence and air defence. In my personal opinion, I am not an energy expert but it seems to me we are on the edge. We are balancing on a fine line. And if [the power grid] is destroyed…that is when soldiers’ wives and children start freezing. And such a scenario is possible. What kind of mood the fighters will be in, can you imagine? Without water, light and heat, can we talk about preparing reserves to keep fighting?  TE: Do you need to conduct another wave of mobilisation?  VZ: We are already conducting it as it is. We have enough people, and I can clearly see what I have. I have enough. I don’t need hundreds of thousands more.  We need tanks, we need APCs [armoured personnel carriers], infantry fighting vehicles. And we need ammunition. Please note, I’m not talking about F-16s right now.  TE: Have the Russian forces adapted to HIMARS [American-made multiple rocket launchers]?  VZ: Yes. They’ve gone to a distance the HIMARS can’t reach. And we haven’t got anything longer-range.  TE: Can we talk about air defence?  VZ: Now we have a ratio of 0.76. Russians are using this 0.76 coefficient of efficacy when they plan their attacks. This means that instead of 76 missiles, they launch 100. And 24 get through and reach their target. And what do two missiles do to a power station? It won’t work for two years. So it has to be built up.  NATO specialists know everything, absolutely everything, down to the last detail. Calculations are done and thank God it all has moved on. We already have some NASAMS [Norwegian-American air-defence systems]. Not enough, but some. IRIS-T [a German air-defence system] are already in use. Not enough, but some. They just need to be ramped up. We need dozens of those.  TE: Are your allies holding you back in any way from advancing on Crimea?  VZ: I can’t answer the question of whether they are holding back or not. I will simply state the facts. In order to reach the borders of Crimea, as of today we need to cover a distance of 84km to Melitopol. By the way, this is enough for us, because Melitopol would give us a full fire control of the land corridor, because from Melitopol we can already fire at the Crimean Isthmus, with the very same HIMARS and so on. Why am I saying this to you? Because it goes back to my earlier point about resources. I can calculate, based on the task at hand, what kind of resource is needed to build combat capability.  We are talking about the scale of World War One…that is what Antony Radakin [Britain’s top soldier] told me. When I told him that the British Army fired a million shells in World War One, I was told, “We will lose Europe. We will have nothing to live on if you fire that many shells.” When they say, “You get 50,000 shells”, the people who count the money faint. The biggest problem is that they really don’t have it.  With this kind of resources I can’t conduct new big operations, even though we are working on one right now. It is on the way, but you don’t see it yet. We use a lot fewer shells.  I know that I can beat this enemy. But I need resources. I need 300 tanks, 600-700 IFVs, 500 Howitzers. Then, I think it is completely realistic to get to the lines of February 23rd. But I can’t do it with two brigades. I get what I get, but it is less than what I need. It is not yet time to appeal to Ukrainian soldiers in the way that Mannerheim appealed to Finnish soldiers. We can and should take a lot more territory.  TE: What do you make of Russia’s mobilisation?  VZ: Russian mobilisation has worked. It is not true that their problems are so dire that these people will not fight. They will. A tsar tells them to go to war, and they go to war. I’ve studied the history of the two Chechen wars—it was the same. They may not be that well equipped, but they still present a problem for us. We estimate that they have a reserve of 1.2m-1.5m people… The Russians are preparing some 200,000 fresh troops. I have no doubt they will have another go at Kyiv. ■

Whatever, it's paywalled so you get the whole interview bar a bit.

https://www.economist.com/syrsky-interview

I'll pull the quotes as well below.

Quote

In a rare interview, the general explains that the Russians are changing tactics under their new commander, Sergei Surovikin. They are attacking using smaller, well co-ordinated detachments on foot, he says: costly in terms of soldiers’ lives, but that has “never been Russia’s highest priority”. General Syrsky thumps his chest. “I feel any loss right here, in my heart.”  Born in Vladimir, Russia, 200km east of Moscow but living in Ukraine since the 1980s, General Syrsky has managed most levels of the Ukrainian army, from platoon upwards. Before becoming head of Ukraine’s land forces in 2019, he was the ground commander for military operations in the east, and he played a prominent role in many of the key battles of the then-undeclared war with Russia.

Quote

Not unusually for his generation, General Syrsky went to school with many Russian commanders. He graduated from the Higher Military Command School in Moscow, the Soviet Union’s equivalent of America’s West Point. But that is largely where the similarities end. His own command style departs starkly from Soviet and Russian hierarchical practice. He preaches NATO principles of decentralised command, and stresses the importance of morale. The modern commander needs to stay connected, he says. He gets 300 messages a day from soldiers. “You must feel the spirit of the army,” he says.  General Syrsky’s command style emphasises the elements of deception and surprise, using them to compensate for Ukraine’s obvious disadvantage in firepower. In Kyiv, where at one point Ukrainian forces were outnumbered by 12 to one, he cobbled together makeshift battalions from military-training institutes, and then used partisan groups to pick off a 64km-long supply convoy as it attempted to steamroll its way towards Kyiv. It was a close-run thing, he says.  In the Kharkiv region General Syrsky used light, mobile groups that he built by picking out small units from existing brigades. His most ambitious objectives—overrunning two crucial Russian logistical hubs in Kupyansk and Izyum—were fulfilled by day five. The commander says he was as surprised as anyone by the speed of progress. Rather than stick to the plan and switch to defence, he ordered his troops to pursue fleeing Russian forces as far as they could go, which turned out to be 50km in three days.  There might well have been a more severe collapse of the Russian front in the nearby northern Luhansk region near Svatove and Kreminna had the general been able to call on reinforcements. But forces were tied up in battles near the Lysychansk oil refinery to the south, and the Russians were eventually able to stop the offensive by using thousands of newly mobilised soldiers. “You are always short of troops. We’ve practically been fighting this war with reserves the whole time,” the general says.  What the Luhansk experience showed, he suggests, was that Vladimir Putin’s conscription drive can work. Reasonably well-prepared soldiers are now appearing en masse all along the eastern frontlines, some arriving from “from the depths of Russia, including…from the eastern districts and the Urals”. That is a concern, the general says, but an even more pressing worry is keeping up Ukraine’s arms supplies. Ammunition is being consumed at a rate that is comparable to that during the second world war. Battles are being won by whichever side gets shells delivered to guns quickly enough.  Asked what victory looks like, General Syrsky repeats the maximalist mantra of his president, Volodymyr Zelensky. “We’ve won when the enemy is destroyed and we are standing on our borders,” he says. His sobering assessment of the current predicament suggests that he isn’t convinced that will happen any time soon. For the immediate future Ukraine will offer what he describes as “active defence”. But the commander’s record suggests that he may have something more ambitious up his sleeve. He remains coy. “All I will say is we are studying the enemy closely. And every poison has an antidote.”

Okay, I lied it's the whole interview. Hmm. I've been worried about Russia mobilizing, about the lack of pushback on mobilized being shoved into Ukraine, the idea that Russia is defeated is not coming true and certainly Ukraine's leading commanders aren't operating under that assumption. The west needs to react accordingly or risk Ukraine being pushed back even.

Edited December 15, 2022 by FancyCat

[billbindc]

2 hours ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

To be fair, Ukrainians are complaining not about not getting help which cannot be reasonably given under existing constraints, but about not getting stuff which can be reasonably given but is withheld very unreasonably.

I mean the German excuse "We will not give Leopard 1s, because tanks = Hitler", or the US refusal to provide ATACMS because it can be used to hit Russia proper - while the Ukrainians have successfully hit proper Russia with their own devices, and moreover, there is nothing wrong with hitting Russia proper in the 200th day of high intensity war with Russia. These do not make sense, so it is no wonder that people fighting for their lives are angry about getting nonsense answers and suspect that they are being lied to.

I think some of those publicly presented arguments are indeed false, e.g. the real reason for not giving F-16s to the Ukrainians is that the small number of aircraft which can reasonably be donated to Ukraine would quickly get destroyed for no effect. If that is the case, it should perhaps be more honestly stated.

 

Oh, I'm sympathetic with the argument made out in the world that you are making. I was reacting to some of the vituperation on this board. I would only say that it's much harder to navigate domestic German or American political issues while taking into account the dangers of escalation that it appears from the outside. Biden especially has been playing a not-so-great hand so skillfully that it's easy to underestimate the difficulties he faces getting arms to Ukraine. Scholz not so much.

[The_Capt]

27 minutes ago, holoween said:

Gotta love how youre not even bothering to read or understand completely.

1 week is for taking a ukrainian tanker and retrain him on a leo2.

As ive written 3 weeks drivers course and 3month loder/gunner course . Qualifying a unit for deployment takes 6 month on top.

Those times include a lot of downtime and non tank related stuff which could be cut down.

NCOs and officers would take far longer to train from scratch but even here simply cutting out all nonessentials cuts down the required time a lot.

 

So ultimately the question is does a tank unit equipped with western tanks need to be trained to 100% the same training standard as a NATO tank unit for deployment. Id argue getting them to 80% is easily enough to have a massive impact so cutting corners to get them to that point quickly is far more valuable and has a higher impact overall. That also how it was done with Western artillery given to ukraine. It didnt take a year for pzh2000 to be in use and that system is certainly not less complex compared to a leo2.

Gotta love how you are pulling numbers out of thin air without references or declaring your expertise.  I guess an internet connection is all anyone needs these days.

So you are talking about bringing up tank crews trained on the T-72s and converting them to the Leo 2 in a week?  And cold training new crews in 3 weeks for drivers and 3 months as gunner loaders?  So you came from a TDO position in an armored school? Which one?

Sure you could compress training on conversion but risks go up dramatically.  For example a driver with a weeks training is not going to have time to know how to handle mine ploughs and rollers, so first hillock taken to fast is going to knock out minefield breaching capability.  Then there is river crossing/snorkeling - that is a major hurdle and training bill not to get crews drowned...but there are no rivers in Ukraine...no problem.  As to your logistical plan of "send back to Poland", if the drivers and crew are lightly trained that is going to happen a lot more often because they will not know 1) how to avoid damaging the vehicle and 2) how to do first line repairs.  And then there is the "how do you train maintainers?" issue but why confuse the issue with facts?

The Pz2000 took about a solid month to get them out in ones and twos: https://eurasiantimes.com/german-monster-pzh-2000-breaking-down-in-fight-against-russia/  And of course we have reports of them breaking down along with a lot of the other western kit we sent in - not all of this is going to be crew training issues, as war is a contact sport, but it likely is not helping.  The Pz2000 and other artillery were critical system that were thrown into the fight over the spring and summer, not the formed formations one would need to turn western armour and IFVs into to really make a difference.

To take 100 Leo 2s and turn them into a coherent fighting force e.g. a Regiment or Battlegroup, that can do what everyone here wants them to do, from crew training, through troop and squadron, to combat team and battlegroup and finally in a formation context is going to take 6-12 months at best, if you do not want the thing flopping around the battlefield breaking itself.  OR, here is a crazy idea...we give the UA the equipment it is already trained on and organized to fight on as a priority.  We then pepper in critical systems that provide immediate payoff and can play to the ISR strengths we are also providing and give the critical range extensions - e.g. HIMARs.  We will take risks with some systems but wholesale re-tooling of the UA ground force while it is in contact in the middle of a war is a very dumb idea.

 

[billbindc]

Ri

1 hour ago, Seminole said:

How many miles was Victoria Nuland from 'the Obama administration's foreign policy apparatus in 2014'?

(pro tip: she was handing out cookies and money in Ukraine)

What does Victoria Nuland have to do with PNAC?

Nuland's husband, Robert Kagan, is a historian, foreign policy commentator at the Brookings Institution, and co-founder in 1998 of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC)

The PNAC crowd follows power, not party.

Indeed, the likelihood of a neocon/Democrat reunion long predates Trump. Back in the summer of 2014 — almost a year before Trump announced his intent to run for president — longtime neocon-watcher Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in the New York Times, predicted that “the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.”

Noting the Democratic Party’s decades-long embrace of the Cold War belligerence that neocons love most — from Truman and JFK to LBJ and Scoop Jackson — Heilbrunn documented the prominent neocons who, throughout Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, were heaping praise on her and moving to align with her. Heilbrunn explained the natural ideological affinity between neocons and establishment Democrats: “And the thing is, these neocons have a point,” he wrote. “Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war; supported sending arms to Syrian rebels; likened Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to Adolf Hitler; wholeheartedly backs Israel; and stresses the importance of promoting democracy.”

One finds evidence of this alliance long before the emergence of Trump. Victoria Nuland, for instance, served as one of Dick Cheney’s top foreign policy advisers during the Bush years. Married to one of the most influential neocons, Robert Kagan, Nuland then seamlessly shifted into the Obama State Department and then became a top foreign policy adviser to the Clinton campaign.

As anti-war sentiment grew among some GOP precincts — as evidenced by the success of the Ron Paul candidacies of 2008 and 2012, and then Trump’s early posturing as an opponent of U.S. interventions — neocons started to conclude that their agenda, which never changed, would be better advanced by realignment back into the Democratic Party. Writing in The Nation in early 2016, Matt Duss detailed how the neocon mentality was losing traction within the GOP, and predicted:

Yet another possibility is that the neocons will start to migrate back to the Democratic Party, which they exited in the 1970s in response to Vietnam-inspired anti-interventionism. That’s what earned their faction the “neo” prefix in the first place. As Nation contributor James Carden recently observed, there are signs that prominent neocons have started gravitating toward Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But the question is, Now that the neocons has been revealed as having no real grassroots to deliver, and that their actual constituency consists almost entirely of a handful of donors subsidizing a few dozen think tankers, journalists, and letterheads, why would Democrats want them back?

The answer to that question — “why would Democrats want them back?” — is clear: because, as this new group demonstrates, Democrats find large amounts of common cause with neocons when it comes to foreign policy.

Ah, the association game. How fun. 

You should look up CNAS where Nuland was actually writing and working. Pretty much the opposite crowd. 

Also, you may assume women must be nature share the opinions of their husbands. I don't and there's plenty of evidence she didn't. 

[billbindc]

5 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

  OR, here is a crazy idea...we give the UA the equipment it is already trained on and organized to fight on as a priority.  We then pepper in critical systems that provide immediate payoff and can play to the ISR strengths we are also providing and give the critical range extensions - e.g. HIMARs.  We will take risks with some systems but wholesale re-tooling of the UA ground force while it is in contact in the middle of a war is a very dumb idea.

This, this, this, this!

(Sorry, couldn't help it.)

[sburke]

4 minutes ago, billbindc said:

Also, you may assume women must be nature share the opinions of their husbands. I don't and there's plenty of evidence she didn't. 

I'm telling your wife.  She very definitely stated that you were to only espouse positions she had declared cleared.

[danfrodo]

13 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

To take 100 Leo 2s and turn them into a coherent fighting force e.g. a Regiment or Battlegroup, that can do what everyone here wants them to do, from crew training, through troop and squadron, to combat team and battlegroup and finally in a formation context is going to take 6-12 months at best, if you do not want the thing flopping around the battlefield breaking itself.  OR, here is a crazy idea...we give the UA the equipment it is already trained on and organized to fight on as a priority.  We then pepper in critical systems that provide immediate payoff and can play to the ISR strengths we are also providing and give the critical range extensions - e.g. HIMARs.  We will take risks with some systems but wholesale re-tooling of the UA ground force while it is in contact in the middle of a war is a very dumb idea.

OK OK OK OK, Mr "I'm right because I actually know things"    I have come around to your thinking on this.  Keep feeding in stuff they can use now.  It's not the best but it doesn't have a 6-12 month lead time and is still really effective.  And there's an actual war going on right now that could be decided in 6-12 months w more supply of the tools that are in the system already.  After the war can upgrade UKR army so that if RU tries this again in 5 years, it would be a heaping mess of burned out armor before it went 10km.

It's kinda like sherman tanks & TDs in WW2 -- not the best but for a whole host of manufacturing and logistical and reliability and training and maintenence reasons it still made the most sense to keep using them.  Upgrades ongoing as were deemed possible w/o disrupting the 4000 mile long supply chain.

(emoji translation:  that was a compliment)

[FancyCat]

7 minutes ago, billbindc said:

This, this, this, this!

(Sorry, couldn't help it.)

But how much of this stuff is left in reserves or mothballed? The West has been cutting military budgets for a long time, including scrapping old hardware, shutting down production, one of the biggest productors and maintainers of Soviet hardware post cold war is Ukraine itself, as reported, only one S-300 battery has been sent to Ukraine, it doesn't exist elsewhere. What if we are reaching the point of exhaustion of Soviet equipment?

This war is not ending anytime soon, the interviews from Ukraine's commanders indicate so, so the idea of tailoring our expectations for a year remaining of conflict seem foolish now.

[billbindc]

15 minutes ago, sburke said:

I'm telling your wife.  She very definitely stated that you were to only espouse positions she had declared cleared.

That's not a chill down my spine. I swear.

[Huba]

The rather infuriating thought is that IF we started in May or April, given 6-12 months minimum needed for new armored/mech unit to be actually useful, as outlined by The_Capt, we'd be almost there now. Reactive vs. proactive approach, with all the benefits of the latter.

It will be even more infuriating when we'll be repeating exactly the same regret 6 months from now.

Edited December 15, 2022 by Huba

[billbindc]

5 minutes ago, FancyCat said:

But how much of this stuff is left in reserves or mothballed? The West has been cutting military budgets for a long time, including scrapping old hardware, shutting down production, one of the biggest productors and maintainers of Soviet hardware post cold war is Ukraine itself, as reported, only one S-300 battery has been sent to Ukraine, it doesn't exist elsewhere. What if we are reaching the point of exhaustion of Soviet equipment?

This war is not ending anytime soon, the interviews from Ukraine's commanders indicate so, so the idea of tailoring our expectations for a year remaining of conflict seem foolish now.

All good concerns which I think are pretty much state secrets at this point so I can't address them in detail.

In general, we should be providing Ukraine with what is most effective, most immediately in a military and logistical sense while keeping a wary eye on escalatory dangers. That's what we've been doing so far and....Ukraine is winning. Can or should we expand the range of systems we are giving them? Sure and we are and we will continue to. Have we been slow? Well, this war is less than 10 months old. By government standards, we've been moving at light speed.  

[billbindc]

4 minutes ago, Huba said:

The rather infuriating thought is that IF we started in May or April, given 6-12 months minimum needed for new armored/mech unit to be actually useful, as outlined by The_Capt, we'd be almost there now. Reactive vs. proactive approach, with all the benefits of the latter. One can only sigh....

But with a logistical cost that Ukraine may have not been able to bear without damaging other aspects of its warfighting capability. Also...isn't this the forum that's been pretty clear on the idea that the tank is not what it was on the modern battlefield? And doesn't Ukraine have *more* tanks now of Russian vintage than it did at the start? Why the fetish for Leopards that won't materially change the war? What am I missing? 

[Kinophile]

27 minutes ago, sburke said:

I'm telling your wife.  She very definitely stated that you were to only espouse positions she had declared cleared.

...Behind every Great Man is a woman - rolling her eyes... "

[Twisk]

It seems to me that the best support for Ukraine is continued ISR support and precision weapons. Do you need a tank when you can drop a PGM on them?

More and better drones and more and better PGM. Re: ATACMs I think there are significant portions of occupied Ukraine which cannot currently be hit. They would offer a chance for Ukraine to make the danger zone the entirety of occupied Ukraine. (I believe the M14 highway is out of range for example).