How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Battlefront.com]

6 hours ago, OldSarge said:

Just about the same as any other tracked vehicle.

 

Ha!  I haven't seen that video in a while.

An old CMer, and former Abrams tank battalion CO, once sent me a picture of an Abrams that was so "hull down" you couldn't see the hull.  It wasn't his tank (so he says!), but he was there for it. And damned if I didn't lose track of that picture (in my defense he sent it to me something like 14 years ago).

Steve

[kevinkin]

Yes, tongue and cheek for sure. Piecing together my posts this past week or so, you would see we agree that the US and NATO could end this thing conventionally. We also agree that without CAS, new and used Ukrainian tanks can't reach their potential unless a new operational concept is invented on the fly. That part is interesting. Without CAS, this new NATO equipment might just amount to a trophy wife dressed to the nines for show - and watch you don't mess up her hair BTW. But seriously, perhaps the new stuff amounts to an issuance policy short term if the RA is foolish enough to leave their trenches. If the RA just stays put, we might see offensive UA ops almost as tests for something larger - maybe in the Fall. If the RA has any strength left, it lies in its dreadful mass of humanity sitting on a huge third rate road block. Attacking into that without  guaranteed success would be ill advised. The battlefield needs to be shaped for that and it may come down to longer range missiles to kind of replace the lack of a/c that would normally go after RA LOC.  

[Twisk]

7 hours ago, Huba said:

Quite graphic video, so be warned, but a rather rare example of what havoc can one of these larger drones wreak upon immobilized troops in the open:

I saw this tens of posts ago at this point. But what I find more surprisng than drones is that apparently an entire Russian BMP company attack was stopped, pinned, and then destroyed in detail. Was this multiple attacks over the same ground or a full on attempt by the entire company that saw the whole thing get destroyed?

Sorry for the white spots but I had to reduce image complexity to get it to fit under the file size limit.  But along this road there are 8 BMP (1s?) in frame with infantrymen hiding behind the vehicles and laying down in line between two of them in the leftmost side of the image.

[Shady_Side]

4 hours ago, JonS said:

Just learning to operate a modern, digital, encrypted radio is a weeks long process. And that's for trained signallers who already know how to talk to each other on a military network (if they don't add a few more weeks just for that. Speaking on a mil network is NOT like talking to your mates on a cellphone)

The radio is a tiny - but critical! - part of a tank. There are many other equally complex elements.

 

4 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

And then they have to be so good at it that they can do it while doing a bunch of other things simultaneously while under fire.  It's absolutely mind boggling what goes on in that big tin can on tracks.

Steve

 

4 hours ago, The_Capt said:

And of course there is training people up to a level of proficiency that they do it on zero sleep while someone is trying to kill them part.  And then training them to not kill each other by accident. And kill the other guys well in a disciplined manner.  A lot of this is pure muscle memory which does not immediately translate from one platform to the next.  Last thing you want is a crewman to react as if they are in a T72 while in a western tank.

Ok guys I understand they will be getting a big upgrade in their capabilities. And I understand that a battlefield is not exactly the right place for a little on the job training. I understand that starting with a freshly enlisted man it will take a very long time to teach him to be a soldier, before you even begin trying to teach him to be an armored soldier. Then teach him to drive a tank, shoot it's cannon, hit what he is shooting at way more often then not, making sure what he is shooting at is never a friendly, teach him to communicate inside his tank, teach him to communicate with other tanks. If our tanks are going to come with a radio system it will take a month to teach him how to use, how about unplugging that one and putting it on the shelf for the time being and putting their radios or something similar to in it's place and get these tanks into the war a month sooner.

It just seems logical to me that operating tanks would have more similar things then they would have things that are wildly different. For an overly simple example my old Ford Escort I learned to drive in has a lot of basic things in common with supped up Dodge Charger. I would need some time to learn how to get the most out of that Charger but I dont need to learn to drive all over again do I?  I understand learning how to use newer better optics will take some time and with those new better optics might come a new tactical trick that is not currently available. But at the end of the day it is still a large heavy metal box that they will be driving to the best location he  can find that allows him to look into his much improved optics adjust a set of crosshairs onto an enemy and pull a trigger. I know that is grossly oversimplified but these  are not cavemen we will be teaching how to use this fancy new stuff were going to let them use. They are veteran tank crews that I am sure already know a couple things about modern armored combat. I know there will need to be some training done that will take some time  but the timeframes I hear just don't make sense to me. And if it truly does take this long to train them on this new equipment then we should have started the training process months ago. Every day the war can be shorten is one less day of Russians doing god knows what to some civilian unlucky enough to have been occupied to long already, one less day some Ukrainian POW spends in some crappy Russian jail under at least the threat of torture or execution. One less day of all the miseries this war shown us seems like something to strive for.

This is a subject I am very interested in but don't know anything at all about using any of this stuff outside of a video game (which Battlefront assures me if very realistic ).  So if none of the skills I learned for fighting a T72 are useful in training me how to fight in an Abrams why is that?  Respectfully guys, can I get an answer with a little more depth to it. If the answer is really just our stuff is so complicated it takes a year for a veteran soldier to use properly then I think a good argument could be made for giving me the older simpler equipment and I will overrun your whole country while your troops are redoing boot camp.

 

 

 

 

[The_MonkeyKing]

"It's good news that NATO members will provide modern tanks to Ukraine. Tanks remain a critical component in ground warfare, and Ukraine has the most experienced tank crews in the world. However, we should be realistic about what these deliveries mean.

Ukraine's goal is to retake all of its territory occupied by Russia. Breaking through well-prepared defensive lines (and exploiting success) is difficult without significant combined arms advantages, and Ukraine is unlikely to have air superiority.

Challenger 2, Leopard 2, and Abrams are more survivable and have better optics and fire control systems. That will give Ukrainian tankers an advantage in tank-on-tank fights and other engagements, and tank crews will be more likely to survive (and keep fighting).

These new tanks also open up a new line of ammunition available to Ukraine, which is critical since they have been using tanks as artillery. Procuring 3 new types of tanks will be a logistical headache, but it will also give them more options for replacing future tank losses.

Tanks will undoubtedly play a key role in Ukraine's future offensives as in Kharkiv and Kherson. The new tanks will increase Kyiv's chances for success but not guarantee it. They are just one component of combined arms, and can only partially compensate for other weaknesses.

Personally, I think deliveries of new IFVs and APCs, like the Bradley and Stryker, are more significant than tanks because Ukraine lacks enough IFVs/APCs and the relative improvement of a Bradley/Stryker over BMP-1/MRAP is even greater than Leopard 2 over many Ukrainian tanks.

The question is whether the decision by NATO to provide tanks signals that the alliance may be willing to consider other systems needed by Ukraine in the future. These tanks are also another step in the Ukrainian military being equipped with NATO weapons.

So this is good news, but NATO tanks are not a silver bullet. If NATO's goal is to help Kyiv so that it can retake all of its territory, this will likely need to include other systems like fighters and ATACMS to improve Ukraine's combined arms capabilities even more.

This is particularly true if continued attrition in Bakhmut and elsewhere along the front weakens Ukrainian units that will need to be available for offensives later this year. "
 

[Butschi]

2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Some might ask if I'm simply saying this because I am American and I have blinders on.  I don't think so.  What I have a deep understanding of this war combined with a deep understanding of how the US fights and what it fights with.  And I had better since, I simulate this stuff for a living

And still it is "only" simulation.

This kind of talk always give me headaches. At the end of the day the US fought their last peer to peer war in WW2. Korea if we are very generous and that didn't end so well. The same is true for all other western armies. Vietnam was the last war a western army had to face significant losses. Vietnam also didn't end so well. Desert Storm while surely large in scale was nowhere near peer to peer.

We simply don't know how much advantage our technologically superior equipment and our doctrine would give us simply because it was never evaluated in live conditions. 

Really no offense meant, you do simulate that stuff for a living and if we all didn't love it we wouldn't be here. But as someone who's PhD was about evaluating the difference between simulation and reality (albeit in a totally different area) let me tell you that simulation is always only an abstraction that has limited predictive power. And the hard part is understanding what those limits are.

At the end of the day you may be right with what you say. But currently this prediction is based on a theory that you can't support with data and only with simulation that covers but one aspect of war. That is far better than nothing, sure, but not the whole picture.

[JonS]

10 minutes ago, Butschi said:

The same is true for all other western armies

Falklands was peer-to-peer

[Butschi]

4 minutes ago, JonS said:

Falklands was peer-to-peer

I don't think Argentina was really on par with UK, but fair enough. But for the sake of this discussion it hardly qualifies for land war experience that would be useful for making predictions how a western army would fare in Ukraine.

[JonS]

9 hours ago, Shady_Side said:

f our tanks are going to come with a radio system it will take a month to teach him how to use, how about unplugging that one and putting it on the shelf for the time being and putting their radios or something similar to in it's place and get these tanks into the war a month sooner.

 

 

Look, you can take all the fancy pants stuff out of a Leo/Chally/Abrsms, and ram some old Soviet crap in there. Sure. Of course, you'll need to add that to the delivery timeline - fabricating and installing new brackets and connectors and power supplies. On every tank to be delivered. Before training can commence.

But ... what's the point? You've just taken a top end VW Touareg, ripped out all the stuff that makes it a Touareg , and replaced those components with ****ty leftover parts from a 1950s Lada. Yay? You've got all the disadvantages of a modern Western tank Including insane weight, super complex logistics chain, and high fuel consumption, and you've just taken all the good stuff out.

What, exactly, is the benefit you think you've gained here? Can you explain that to me, because I continue to get confused with every weekly repetition of this "just take all the complex stuff out" argument.

Last week it was the Apache because 'Ukrainians are smart!' and 'they don't need all the capabilities anyway!' ... umm, oookay then. But, tell me: why would they want Apache, then?

Next week some clown will no doubt reccomend taking the ACOG off of donated M4s in order to 'get them to the frontline YESTERDAY! They'll be GAMECHANGING!'

Oh snap. I think I just sprained an eyeball from rolling it so hard.

Edited January 26, 2023 by JonS

[JonS]

12 minutes ago, Butschi said:

I don't think Argentina was really on par with UK

True - a lot of the Argentinian kit was better than what the Brits had.

[Bulletpoint]

3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

The US would choose a specific area to attack, have the USAF *HAMMER* that sector of front while artillery would be employed to get anything the Airforce didn't hit.  Then, and only then, would the ground forces move forward and would do so in a coordinated manner at scale.  No one or two tanks, whole f'n companies. 

There would be no significant coordinated defense left and what was left would face overwhelming, disciplined, combined arms solutions.  US losses might not be zero, but they would be light in absolute terms and embarrassingly so in relative terms to the Russian losses.  Either dead, surrendered, or retreating... they would not hold their ground in any meaningful sense of the term.

3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Bottom line here is I do not think the "tank is dead" right now when it is used with NATO doctrine air support, with NATO combined arms concepts, and full NATO combined arms formations.

 

This seems to me to be more a question of the resources available to the US Army than about the tactical merits of the tank.

If you have the luxury of being able to completely bomb the enemy into submission then you wouldn't even need tanks to break their lines.

Sure, if you have tanks, they will work well. If you have APCs they will also work. If you have just leg infantry, they will work, too. And if you really have the total air advantage, you might not even always need those. During Desert Storm, we saw the first cases of troops surrendering to drones.

I suddenly get the feeling that 500 years ago, people might have been arguing the same thing about the armoured mounted knight:

"Despite muskets, the knight is not dead yet, because a mounted charge still works - if you have enough infantry to completely surround the enemy force, and if you have an absolutely massive archer and crossbow support to hammer the enemy line and then send in huge numbers of knights to crush the disordered opposition".

 

[Butschi]

11 minutes ago, JonS said:

True - a lot of the Argentinian kit was better than what the Brits had.

Those Super Etendards did have Exocets...

[Zeleban]

7 hours ago, JonS said:

Just learning to operate a modern, digital, encrypted radio is a weeks long process. And that's for trained signallers who already know how to talk to each other on a military network (if they don't add a few more weeks just for that. Speaking on a mil network is NOT like talking to your mates on a cellphone)

The standard communication system in Ukrainian T-64 BV 2017 tanks for 5 years now has been American Harris Falcon 3 radios, which, as far as I know, are standard equipment in American armored vehicles. An official representative of Harris has been operating in Ukraine for a long time. Standard Soviet radios, even in the old (non-modernized) types of T-64 BV, have not been used for a long time. When transferring tanks to the troops, they are immediately replaced with Harris or ukrainian Libid K-2RB (which is a licensed copy of the Aselsan Turkish army radio stations). In my opinion, radio communications will be the least problematic place when switching to Western armored vehicles

[Combatintman]

4 hours ago, Shady_Side said:

Respectfully guys, can I get an answer with a little more depth to it. 

You've had answers of the required depth from people who've been there and done it and here's one from another 'been there done that guy' - short of putting on a green suit and trying it yourself what has been posted here is as good as its going to get to convey the message.  From the information and analogies in your posts, it is clear you are focused on each individual tank and its operation by the crew in complete isolation.

You seem to be in rather a hurry and the reasons you articulate for that are sound but, the weather and ground conditions are iffy for large scale mechanised operations so the time is better spent training rather than rushing that kit to the front line.  History is replete with examples of how rushing stuff to the front line causes problems, British tanks at the Somme in 1916 and Tigers and or Panthers at Kursk being two vaguely comparisons relevant to the situation now.  Time spent in training and rehearsal is well-spent and lots of people here have rightly criticised the Russian military for launching this operation in a half-bottomed manner and equally criticised the quality of the troops that have turned up as a result of the mobilisation.  It would be unwiser than an unwise thing for Ukraine to adopt exactly the same courses of action as its never time for amateur hour in warfare.

[Combatintman]

@Shady_Side - to add to my previous post and to provide a documented example of converting from one armoured platform to another, the British Army until fairly recently used to do a thing called 'Arms Plotting' which saw regiments re-role every few years - in the case of infantry from light role, to mechanised, to armoured infantry and in the case of the Royal Armoured Corps from formation reconnaissance to armour.  To give a flavour of what it takes to as you put it "they will be starting with crews that already know the fundamentals of armored combat" the links below will take you to the Regimental Journal of the Life Guards for 1980 and 1981 which describe the regiment's conversion from formation reconnaissance to armour.  Bear in mind that this regiment used to change roles about every six years so anybody in the regiment with longer time in than that would have been familiar with Chieftain rather than jumping straight into one from scratch, a luxury Ukrainian tank crews will not have.  Now I accept that the timescales to convert the regiment would be longer back then because of the demands of peacetime soldiering such as: handing over the old camp and equipment; taking over the new camp and equipment; booking training areas; letting soldiers go on leave; area cleaning; site guards; and, marching up and down the square but the bottom line is that the Life Guards took about a year to convert properly to Chieftain to the point where the regiment was capable of fighting effectively as an all-arms Battlegroup.  According to the 1981 journal, B Squadron took four months to fully convert to the point that it was capable of fighting effectively as an all-arms Squadron Group.

Acorn 1980 by LGregsec - Issuu

Acorn 1981 by LGregsec - Issuu

[The_MonkeyKing]

46 minutes ago, Combatintman said:

@Shady_Side - to add to my previous post and to provide a documented example of converting from one armoured platform to another, the British Army until fairly recently used to do a thing called 'Arms Plotting' which saw regiments re-role every few years - in the case of infantry from light role, to mechanised, to armoured infantry and in the case of the Royal Armoured Corps from formation reconnaissance to armour.  To give a flavour of what it takes to as you put it "they will be starting with crews that already know the fundamentals of armored combat" the links below will take you to the Regimental Journal of the Life Guards for 1980 and 1981 which describe the regiment's conversion from formation reconnaissance to armour.  Bear in mind that this regiment used to change roles about every six years so anybody in the regiment with longer time in than that would have been familiar with Chieftain rather than jumping straight into one from scratch, a luxury Ukrainian tank crews will not have.  Now I accept that the timescales to convert the regiment would be longer back then because of the demands of peacetime soldiering such as: handing over the old camp and equipment; taking over the new camp and equipment; booking training areas; letting soldiers go on leave; area cleaning; site guards; and, marching up and down the square but the bottom line is that the Life Guards took about a year to convert properly to Chieftain to the point where the regiment was capable of fighting effectively as an all-arms Battlegroup.  According to the 1981 journal, B Squadron took four months to fully convert to the point that it was capable of fighting effectively as an all-arms Squadron Group.

Acorn 1980 by LGregsec - Issuu

Acorn 1981 by LGregsec - Issuu

Very interesting information!

Then we come to the point of "good enough". Lets take into account mass, skill and tech-quality.  If it would be equation: combat effectiveness = quantity x skill x tech-quality. This would mean we can live with smaller value on skill part when the other two are compensated enough to account for this. We also are compromising on the skill part to get better timing strategically. It helps that Russian equation is not looking good at all especially in the skill part. 

Also there is the "on the job" training and the commanders can take this into account by starting with operations with a really stacked deck in Ukrainian favor.

Edited January 26, 2023 by The_MonkeyKing

[Maciej Zwolinski]

47 minutes ago, Combatintman said:

he British Army until fairly recently used to do a thing called 'Arms Plotting' which saw regiments re-role every few years - in the case of infantry from light role, to mechanised, to armoured infantry and in the case of the Royal Armoured Corps from formation reconnaissance to armour.

Why on Earth did they do this?

[Combatintman]

@Maciej Zwolinski - to give a varied career in terms of postings "Join the Army, see the World" (which was very much a thing then) and all that.  With most mechanized and armoured units based in Germany it meant that, in the case of the Royal Armoured Corps, units would swap between BAOR and the UK and the UK-based units would cover other commitments such as UNFICYP and Belize with everyone getting a Northern Ireland tour thrown in.  Likewise for the infantry, light role was mainly UK-based but also got Gibraltar, Cyprus, Belize, Hong Kong and of course Northern Ireland.  All of the armoured and mechanised types would be in Germany with Northern Ireland thrown in as well.

From an efficiency/role specialisation and treasury point of view it was hugely wasteful .... guess why the arms plot ended?  Bottom line though, it worked well enough and it was useful having units with experience in all of their likely disciplines and it stood officers of those regiments in good stead as they moved on in their careers to do staff jobs and command formations because of the more rounded experience they had gained.

[The_Capt]

8 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

If the US moved forces into Ukraine, right now, they would not move forward until there was air superiority and CAS readily available.  The US would choose a specific area to attack, have the USAF *HAMMER* that sector of front while artillery would be employed to get anything the Airforce didn't hit.

In Ukraine against the Russians, very likely but when we are talking US/NATO next-war, this little shindig in Ukraine is the “sampler”.  You are basically describing the western doctrine that got us through the last 30 years of dominance.

Question is, “is that doctrine over?”

Problem #1 - Air superiority.  The war in Ukraine is what massive air denial looks like and it is very likely to get worse not better.  Against another nation or coalition with significant ISR (space to ground networks) and dispersed cheap air denial systems gaining air superiority is the lynch pin we may very well get stuck on.  If the answer is “we will never ground attack until we have air superiority” then we have just highly incentivized opponents to develop and field air denial capabilities.  And then there is the “air superiority below 2000 feet” problem.  The direction of things is favouring swarming autonomous systems capable of lethal effects.  Against that our current doctrine is weak as traditional air superiority means less, and massed conventional force is the opposite direction one wants to go.

Problem #2 - Our tanks need gas too.  Our western doctrine of conventional mass requires enormous effort to secure its LOCs under the old rules.  We saw insurgents cripple our supply lines for short periods of time.  Against a peer opponent our current LOCs are extremely vulnerable because we are massing and burning a lot of energy to achieve overmatch.    Take Problem #1 and project it into our rear areas and we might simply run out of gas before we can crush anything.

Problem #3 - We still think and act linearly.  I am getting the sense that against an opponent wired the same way we are, enabled the same way we are, we are in fact at a disadvantage.   The issue is that our doctrine still looks at the problem sets as linear manoeuvre problems.  Against an opponent that creates and projects a force that is fighting along a non-linear game plan we already know we are vulnerable - we saw this in COIN.  However when that opponent is a peer force, well it changes the game in ways we are not well set up for.

Problem 4 - Will.  The elephant in the room is not even a military problem.  Right now in police forces we don’t know who to trust if the problem at hand is along a divisive fault line.  And I am not talking about the US here, I am talking about Canada.  This is bigger than How We Fight but is directly going to impact both the inputs and outcomes.  So if we get into a peer war, I am not convinced our internal integrity will hold longer than theirs.  This is a precondition more important than air superiority and we do not even think in these terms while our opponents do.

So as an example to pull this all together in your western crushing offensive - in the East somewhere in ten years NATO/US face off against an unnamed peer adversary who counters your entire scenario with -

Ubiquitous ISR built on a backbone of space to sub-surface networks integrated into civilian architectures with enough ambiguity to make us pause and argue on legalities of hitting them.  They can see us, all of us better than we can see them because we are all formed up enmasse while they go a different way.

Air denial on a scope and scale that makes air superiority impossible.  The air space becomes a Wild West.

Employs fully autonomous systems (air/ground) with no human-in-loop while we are going to be stuck within our legal frameworks.  Swarming lethal unmanned clouds pollute the battle space.  

Focuses on deep system attacks going back through our LOCs, SLOCs and all the way back to industry.

Employs non-linear hybrid and dispersed warfare - we are the snow, they are the fog.  Think 21st century Mongols while we continue to fight in blocks and squares.

Has built in trapdoors and poison pills so deeply in our backfield that we funded the blind spots.  We start taking casualties and the cracks widen on the first day.

Russia is nowhere near playing at this level.  All it has is the nuclear equation, which is so last millennium.  However I can think of one nation that is heading in this direction, and it literally wrote the rules on on some of this over two thousand years ago.

[The_Capt]

26 minutes ago, The_MonkeyKing said:

combat effectiveness = quantity x skill x tech-quality. This would mean we can live with smaller value on skill part when the other two are compensated enough to account for this.

Actually in this equation when one of those factors is less than zero it starts to drag down the rest.  So if one rolls out with skill as 0.5, you have just shot quantity and tech-quality in the foot.

As to “more in depth”, look guys the resumes of some people sharing here could (and do) charge a hefty fee for this stuff.  If you want a complete breakdown of conversion training from Levels 1-7 we are beyond the scope of an Internet forum discussion.  In fact some of our peers are getting paid a lot to set this up for the UA right now.  You can trust us, or it is a big internet out there with a lot of manuals and training stuff lying around.

[A Canadian Cat]

21 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

BTW, it seems that Reddit has turned off the super annoying autoplay for embedded links.  I am putting that to the test with my previous post.  I am not seeing autoplay, how about you guys?

Steve

It sure did! As soon as I started scrolling after reading a post on the page I heard the tell tail audio of a video I was not watching and had to scroll further down to find it and shut it off. Sorry Reddit did not fix / change it.

Edited to add Win 10 Firefox

Edited January 26, 2023 by IanL
Add browser / platform

[Seminole]

5 hours ago, JonS said:

True - a lot of the Argentinian kit was better than what the Brits had.

How did the WW2 cruiser vs SSN turn out?

[Battlefront.com]

5 hours ago, Butschi said:

And still it is "only" simulation.

Yup, but this is the same simulation I used to form an opinion that Russia would get its arse handed to it.  That and 30+ years of deep study of warfare itself which I have had to break down into component pieces to create the simulation.  The two together allowed me to call this war correctly and the ones who have more impressive academic and/or military credentials.  I put it to you that the simulation is a big part of why I got it right while so many others got it terribly wrong.

5 hours ago, Butschi said:

This kind of talk always give me headaches. At the end of the day the US fought their last peer to peer war in WW2. Korea if we are very generous and that didn't end so well. The same is true for all other western armies. Vietnam was the last war a western army had to face significant losses. Vietnam also didn't end so well. Desert Storm while surely large in scale was nowhere near peer to peer.

Right, but if that's how you analyze warfare then of course you're going to get a headache.  It's not the correct way to think about war when trying to assess specific scenarios.  For example...

5 hours ago, Butschi said:

We simply don't know how much advantage our technologically superior equipment and our doctrine would give us simply because it was never evaluated in live conditions. 

This is factually incorrect.  The doctrine and equipment that the US would use against Russia has been tested over and over again at various different points in time since 1990, sometimes more and sometimes less in a particular situation.

For Desert Shield/Storm the US employed weapons that it had never used before against one of the most dense air defenses outside of the Soviet Union and China.  The doctrine and weapons worked as advertised on the US side, the weaponry on the Iraqi side did not.  The attack on Yugoslavia/Serbia was similar in that air defenses were well established and failed to impede NATO strikes.  Although insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as ISIS, didn't have air defenses they were precisely targeted thousands of times from the air.  We've also seen the Ukrainians successfully using their limited air based weapons with great success too. 

Look for the common factor here... equipment.  Both sides have basically the same stuff they had in 1990 in terms of raw capabilities.  What's changed is the US equipment has improved dramatically from an already high level.  We know this.  It is fact.  On the other hand, the Russians are mostly using the same stuff they were using 20+ years ago.  And I do not mean "similar", I mean the same exact equipment.  The Russians have made very little advances in their systems since 1990.  Their stuff, unlike the NATO stuff, has not been tested.  However, we have seen ample evidence that Russian systems do NOT function as well as they claim they do.  This does not mean they are totally inept systems, it just means they aren't as good as advertised and even their advertised capabilities have questionable utility.

As for doctrine, it's pretty clear that the NATO doctrine works at both small and large scale.  NATO trains for this as well.  Russia, on the other hand, has neither the doctrine to meet this challenge nor does it train to it.  In short, Russia doesn't even have a theoretical capability to match NATO's known capabilities, and in this war has demonstrated that is not a flawed analysis.

5 hours ago, Butschi said:

Really no offense meant, you do simulate that stuff for a living and if we all didn't love it we wouldn't be here. But as someone who's PhD was about evaluating the difference between simulation and reality (albeit in a totally different area) let me tell you that simulation is always only an abstraction that has limited predictive power. And the hard part is understanding what those limits are.

Very true.  And if I didn't have the 30+ years of studying warfare to help guide me, and all I did was play Combat Mission, I would agree with you.  Sims are a tool and in the right hands they are a useful tool.  I look at the experts that got this war all wrong and what I see is someone who didn't use the right tools.

5 hours ago, Butschi said:

At the end of the day you may be right with what you say. But currently this prediction is based on a theory that you can't support with data and only with simulation that covers but one aspect of war. That is far better than nothing, sure, but not the whole picture.

Of course it isn't the whole picture, but you are very much wrong about there being no data.  There's plenty of it.  The trick is interpreting it correctly.  As I have pointed out time and time again... that's how I arrived at the conclusion that Russia would get slaughtered in this war while so many others thought Ukraine would be overrun within days.  Either I made a lucky and wildly successful guess or my analysis was overall better.  As someone who refuses to gamble because even 50/50 odds don't go in my favor, I am pretty confident I didn't make a wildly lucky guess 

Steve

[The_MonkeyKing]

Just now, The_Capt said:

Actually in this equation when one of those factors is less than zero it starts to drag down the rest.  So if one rolls out with skill as 0.5, you have just shot quantity and tech-quality in the foot.

As to “more in depth”, look guys the resumes of some people sharing here could (and do) charge a hefty fee for this stuff.  If you want a complete breakdown of conversion training from Levels 1-7 we are beyond the scope of an Internet forum discussion.  In fact some of our peers are getting paid a lot to set this up for the UA right now.  You can trust us, or it is a big internet out there with a lot of manuals and training stuff lying around.

Indeed, that is why "good enough", haha.

Good enough would be probably little less than what the Finnish military gets in training. That is 6 months for mech infantry (3months basic how to be soldier and 3 months of mech infantry training).

12 months for tankers (3months basic how to be soldier, 3 months of tank equipment course and last 6 months of how to fight as mech force)

In UKR case you can leave out the "3months basic how to be soldier" part from both and when you leave out all the peace time stuff and holidays you can get both down at least by third.

[DesertFox]

Combined arms next level coordination...