How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[billbindc]

2 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Vital US interests, until they aren't.

https://www.duffelblog.com/p/u-s-tells-kurds-its-just-going-out-for-a-pack-of-cigarettes

But we're kind of going sideways here, so maybe let's agree to disagree on analogies.

....Speaking of Vietnam, it's occurred to me that the mechanics for one of the few hex and counter wargames I still play, Nick Karp's brilliant Vietnam 1965-1975, might be well suited for representing the current conflict, with the essential combats at battalion level.  Thinking less of the Pursuit or Pacification factors than the use of reinforcement points and commitment levels. 

Perhaps even a riff on the SVN command 'Effectiveness' chart, applied initially to the Ukes and then to the Russians.

But ah well, if I only had the time.

But that's just it...US interests in Ukraine are entirely tangible. There's no "Mission Accomplished" banner and a slightly embarrassed backing away from carrying this war forward. If America does not, it and its NATO allies...and Taiwan, Japan, etc...will suffer accordingly in terms of security costs, trade, etc. Anyone smart enough in American politics to look a couple years into the future knows it...which is why our GOP friends in the Senate are completely on board as well.

Also, I had that damn game. Amazing but impossible to find anyone to play against.

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, billbindc said:

Actually I was and I've spent a fair amount of time there...including a bit up in the mountains around the Hmong. No intention to be harsh but I feel like the point is one that is often missed: the Russian invasion of Ukraine is *not* like other conflicts post-WWII and the Ukrainians are not in the position of the folks you mention above because Putin managed to both challenge the vital interests of NATO and the West without giving himself any easy path to back down. That fact changes the analysis rather profoundly and I think is the essential flaw in the arguments made by several folks above. 

Just the fact of a border with secure rail connections to multiple NATO countries is transformational compared to any post 1945 conflict. It is both why we can win, and why we must.

[dan/california]

 

Quote

https://bbcrussian.substack.com/p/criminals-wagner-fighting-in-ukraine

BBC article on Wagner, nothing we haven't discussed, but a LOT of detail on prisoner recruitment and pardons. Prigohzin appears to be keeping his promises.

[Battlefront.com]

There's good reason to be cautious about the future in terms of how Ukraine wins this war.  For sure it has not lost it.  Even if it succumbs and has to knuckle under to some sort of Minsk 3 type deal, it did not lose.  Russia lost even if it gets Ukraine to yield some concessions.

However, taking the wrong lessons from the wrong conflicts is no better, and perhaps worse, than presuming Ukraine "has this in the bag".

It is true that America does have a history of calling it quits when the costs get to be too high and the rewards not good enough to justify them.  Vietnam and Afghanistan come easily to mind.  Yet the those two conflicts are similar in nature to each other and neither are similar to this war.  On top of that, in this war the US has no draped coffins or damaged (mental or physical) service personnel returning home year after year.  Huge difference there. 

The financial investment in Ukraine is also "cheap" compared to either of these conflicts.  The numbers for the total costs for Vietnam is about $250b a year (conservative from what I saw) and about $100b a year for Afghanistan.  This includes costs such as veteran expenses during the years of conflict.  So far the US has sent somewhere around $50b.

The other thing to consider is that Vietnam and Afghanistan were mostly about the US' interests.  With Vietnam those interests were pretty weak to start with and for Afghanistan arguably satisfied as best they were going to get within the first year.  Neither war showed significant improvement in securing US interests years and years into the conflict.  The present war is more vital to US interests than any war it has fought since WW2 and there is every indication that securing them is still very much on the upswing.

On top of this, the US was willing to accept casualties and financial costs for 7 years with Vietnam and 20 years with Afghanistan.  This indicates the US could be willing to go MUCH longer if the costs in its own lives is ZERO and the financial costs 1/2 to 1/5th as much as those two conflicts for core national interests that are still being positively secured.

Oh, and the US is not the only country with vital national interests at stake here.  Which is why nations other than the US are contributing to Ukraine's success in very impressive, if not shocking, ways.  The US has a lot of company with its efforts to aid Ukraine that it didn't have in Vietnam or even Afghanistan.

Lastly, the US was willing to do all of this even when there was very little hope of fortunes turning around and giving the US what it wanted.  So far, all indications are that Ukraine will achieve what the US wants to get out of this conflict.

The lesson I take away from Vietnam and Afghanistan is that the US' patience with Ukraine has about another 10-20 years before it wears thin, even if Ukraine suffers setbacks.

 

The US politician I spoke to a couple of weeks ago relayed a story to me about a US general that said "if someone told me 2 years ago that giving up $50b of our defense budget would reduce Russia's military arsenal by 40 years of production, I'd have said that's the best investment we could ever make".  Or something like that, as it is a third hand story

Steve

[Kinophile]

Supposedly not  "just" ODS versions, further upgraded but not quite current Army either.

[Kinophile]

3 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

The US politician I spoke to a couple of weeks ago relayed a story to me about a US general that said "if someone told me 2 years ago that giving up $50b of our defense budget would reduce Russia's military arsenal by 40 years of production, I'd have said that's the best investment we could ever make".  Or something like that, as it is a third hand story

Steve

Is there an AAR of that meeting coming?

[Battlefront.com]

17 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

Is there an AAR of that meeting coming?

Between tightly scheduled meetings I had a chance to speak 1 on 1 with only a staffer present.  We spoke for 5 minutes, which honestly was more than I expected.  It was a good exchange and I got the sense he would have skipped the next meeting and talked Ukraine with me instead   Ukraine has some solid and powerful friends in this country, that is for sure.

Handed over materials for review as discussed here.  As I said at the time we talked about them, I have no expectations it will amount to anything.  At most I'm hoping that something we said reinforces existing thinking as our perspective is from outside the Beltway.  "I'm being told this by insiders and outsiders, so let's get this done!" kind of thing.

Steve

[chuckdyke]

https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/sites/default/files/Spotlight_Brief_3_22_Russo-Ukraine Lessons Learnt_accessible_reduced.pdf

Feel free to download.

Edited February 1, 2023 by chuckdyke

[dan/california]

920 killed or badly wounded, the Russians are paying by the square centimeter.

[Yskonyn]

NRC news (dutch) reports about (further)integration of dutch army elements into german army.

Division ‘Schnelle Kräfte’ has the 11th ‘Luchtmobiele Brigade’ (aparently already since 2014)

1. Panzer Division gets 43th Mechanized Brigade

10. Panzer Division gets 13th Light Brigade

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2023/01/31/nederland-en-duitsland-bundelen-hun-landmachten-a4155834

As I read it due to funding cuts and staff shortage the idea began as a win win to ‘plug holes’ in both armies, but the project has expanded in scope over time and ambition for the future, but support units like engineers, medical personel, etc as well as special forces will not be part of the integration.

 

Edited February 1, 2023 by Yskonyn

[_Morpheus_]

Assault on enemy positions by `3rd separate assault brigade` (Azov)  in Bakhmut.

 

[Kraft]

3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

the US' patience with Ukraine has about another 10-20 years before it wears thin, even if Ukraine suffers setbacks

Under current leadership that is, as Julia Loffe said in the interview I posted, her biggest fear is this war outlasting Bidens presidency.

While it probably doesnt spell an immediate end, the isolationist tendencies in one of the freedom parties give Putin a reason to drag this war for as long as possible. I am unsure how much of the long term help is already written down and cant be changed but I doubt a creature similar to Trump would feel obliged to respect any written agreements.

Im not from the US but I hear opinions on Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are very negative.

Edited February 1, 2023 by Kraft

[Taranis]

"Ukrainian soldiers fire a Pion artillery system at Russian positions near Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Friday, December 16, 2022. LIBKOS / AP"

[poesel]

3 hours ago, Yskonyn said:

NRC news (dutch) reports about (further)integration of dutch army elements into german army.

...

IIRC the Netherlands and Germany were the first countries after WWII to abolish border controls, which led to Schengen in the end. Let's hope this leads to a European army.

Btw, none of this made the mainstream news here. Hmmm....

[Chibot Mk IX]

From CM player perspective this video clip is worth of discussion. 

I haven't got a chance to find the same video from twitter so I copied bilibili link 

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1eR4y1b7RY/?buvid=XY5FC3654A1646D6EF2C73FDD90CE9A765583&is_story_h5=false&mid=1e7Wxy4i%2BelStWrnrPJPqg%3D%3D&p=1&plat_id=116&share_from=ugc&share_medium=android&share_plat=android&share_session_id=8f78bb08-b075-429b-847e-7b3f547b4396&share_source=COPY&share_tag=s_i&timestamp=1675221751&unique_k=1rm0U09&up_id=28913404&vd_source=9ded9aba3a3b27b709ba58b402f0157a

 

Looks like a UKR mech company team assembling , their original plan was try to advance through open using two parallel roads. Unfortunately, there is one RUS tank took an ambush position 1-1.5km from the low right corner. The RUS UAV is likely directly guide the tank so RUS side has good situation awareness. And he is shooting UKR assembling area from behind. 

It looks like 2-3 YPR-765 + 1 tank were destroyed. 

IMHO, UKR side's reaction is good. After the left column took a beat, they quickly maneuver to the right side of the field and avoid further loss.   

 

[Zeleban]

25 minutes ago, Chibot Mk IX said:

From CM player perspective this video clip is worth of discussion. 

I haven't got a chance to find the same video from twitter so I copied bilibili link 

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1eR4y1b7RY/?buvid=XY5FC3654A1646D6EF2C73FDD90CE9A765583&is_story_h5=false&mid=1e7Wxy4i%2BelStWrnrPJPqg%3D%3D&p=1&plat_id=116&share_from=ugc&share_medium=android&share_plat=android&share_session_id=8f78bb08-b075-429b-847e-7b3f547b4396&share_source=COPY&share_tag=s_i&timestamp=1675221751&unique_k=1rm0U09&up_id=28913404&vd_source=9ded9aba3a3b27b709ba58b402f0157a

 

Looks like a UKR mech company team assembling , their original plan was try to advance through open using two parallel roads. Unfortunately, there is one RUS tank took an ambush position 1-1.5km from the low right corner. The RUS UAV is likely directly guide the tank so RUS side has good situation awareness. And he is shooting UKR assembling area from behind. 

It looks like 2-3 YPR-765 + 1 tank were destroyed. 

IMHO, UKR side's reaction is good. After the left column took a beat, they quickly maneuver to the right side of the field and avoid further loss.   

 

This is an autumn video, as far as I remember, from the Kherson region. We have already discussed it before, but we only saw a small fragment of this video and then we decided that this was the work of Russian artillery

[Zeleban]

 

[billbindc]

4 hours ago, Kraft said:

Under current leadership that is, as Julia Loffe said in the interview I posted, her biggest fear is this war outlasting Bidens presidency.

While it probably doesnt spell an immediate end, the isolationist tendencies in one of the freedom parties give Putin a reason to drag this war for as long as possible. I am unsure how much of the long term help is already written down and cant be changed but I doubt a creature similar to Trump would feel obliged to respect any written agreements.

Im not from the US but I hear opinions on Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are very negative.

This is the major legitimate worry...that Trump or someone like him gets into office in 2024. Yes, the Senate will remain on board for helping Ukraine but execution of the policy is entirely up to the White House. If you get a rank isolationist, Russia gets to try and turn this into a frozen conflict. That said, the pressure on any President to hang in there with Ukraine is going to be intense. Don't be surprised if one of the Trumpist alternatives gets in and decides to stick with it.

I would not spend much time considering this war in the same terms as Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq for the many reasons that Steve mentioned above. There are no body bags coming home and the cost/benefit analysis is just too dramatically and obviously in America's favor to bear the comparison. This is what Americans call a "good war".

[The_Capt]

11 hours ago, LongLeftFlank said:

There's no hyperventilation here, mate.

Know your enemy and know yourself, and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.

Notice there's two sides to that aphorism, and swapping Western for Ukrainian agency is the kind of paternalistic thinking that has been at the root of the previous Western failures.

@Maciej Zwolinski made the critical point above; full marks to Zaluzhny and UA command for Ukraine's operational successes to date! but the conditions that made those possible cannot be relied upon going forward.

So coming back to this part.  What makes this war very different is the whole “paternalistic” part.  In this war the direction has gone the other way.  In almost all of our wars of intervention or proxy we have had to do the pushing and shoring.  We have pushed partners to our tempos and timelines because they have become more about us than the people fighting them.

In Ukraine the entire thing has gone the other way.  Ukraine is leading the dance on this thing. They are the ones pulling us into their tempo and timelines - they are shoring us.  We are not pushing them, we are barely keeping up.  In fact the major concern now is that they may accelerate away from us into escalation. That is fundamentally different than just about every other morass we have been pulled into as we try and solve for humanity in the 20th and 21st century.

So if that has been the trend in this war so far then why cannot we rely on the “conditions that made those possible” going forward?  This is the crux of issue, what has fundamentally changed?  How have the operational conditions changed to the point we should begin to doubt the UAs ability to successfully prosecute this war?  How have the strategic conditions changed to the point our interests in this war are misaligning or shifting?  

This is a free and open forum, moderated to be sure, but anyone can come here and challenge or push back on the main if they so choose.  However, we also try and keep this to evidence-based facts in any assessment.  What a lot of these crisis of faith feel like is random panic attacks as opposed to detailed assessments of the situation.  Now if we start seeing some actual indicators of Ukraine or western resolve beginning to fail or evidence on the battlefield of UA beginning to lose, that would be a point where we could start to try and unpack what is going wrong.  But so far, other than what is clearly an operational pause, I think we are at risk of jumping at shadows.

I think Sun Tzu missed the back end of his little axiom -  “…and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.  But don’t overthink it or psyche yourself the f#ck out in the process…sometimes it is just a damned spoon.”

Edited February 1, 2023 by The_Capt

[Butschi]

8 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

This is a free and open forum, moderated to be sure, but anyone can come here and challenge or push back on the main if they so choose.  However, we also try and keep this to evidence-based facts in any assessment.  What a lot of these crisis of faith feel like is random panic attacks as opposed to detailed assessments of the situation.  Now if we start seeing some actual indicators of Ukraine or western resolve beginning to fail or evidence on the battlefield of UA beginning to lose, that would be a point where we could start to try and unpack what is going wrong.  But so far, other than what is clearly an operational pause,  I think we are at risk of jumping at shadows.

I mildly disagree on this part. During the last several months we've had a lot of "Bwahaha Russia sux so bad, Ukraine has already won, lol!" here. I remember you being rather vehemently against this approach. There have been a few pro-Putin trolls here and IMO in the aftermath more cautious voices have sometimes been put somewhere in the pro-Putin or defeatism corner.

You are right, of course, so far UA seems to have been successful and there is no evidence to the contrary. On the other hand I think we have to acknowledge that we no only part of the equation. We get a lot of info on Russian losses and the state of the Russian army. We get almost nothing from the Ukrainian side, though. And while past operations were successes, in the absence of solid numbers, we have also no real evidence that these success are sustainable. In fact some experts (though that word has become rather meaningless of late, it seems) claim that the increasing vehemence of Ukrainian demands of ever more modern and powerful equipment indicates that the current rate of attrition isn't sustainable.

Now I for one don't claim any expertise in that area, so all I want to say is that I think LLF is right in pointing out that a Ukrainian victory is not an automatism and by no means assured.

But please correct me if I'm wrong.

[LongLeftFlank]

Yes, thanks to both of you guys (and others who have chimed in), end of a long work day here.

In the end, as nobody here disagrees, the UA has got to break in and dismantle prepared Russian defences to liberate their lands and end the war in a 'sustainable' way. Their record to date in doing the former has been spotty (and the Russian record is WAAAAAY worse)... I expect they will indeed solve for it and have my own views on how.

It seemed in the fall however, that they were training up and husbanding a new offensive force, described variously between 60k and 150k strong; this was long before Free the Leopards, or even UberBradleys, took over the discussion. Kind of a '1941 Siberian army out of nowhere' in reverse, these guys would unleash a winter storm. Maybe it's still sitting there, waiting for the hard freeze.

But it does seem that a chunk of that reserve has had to be cycled in to relieve badly chewed up units on the Donbass front. Hence anecdotal comments from the more reliable OSINTers I follow about green UA troops having trouble coping with the high intensity combat. And visible (though small in the grand scheme) losses of positions that the UA would clearly rather hold.

So it leads me to ask broader questions about the extent of that attrition, and the actual level of development and effectiveness of that new force.  Again, this is independent of what kind of tanks they ride: I find that only marginally useful.

Edited February 1, 2023 by LongLeftFlank

[Zeleban]

11 minutes ago, Butschi said:

We get a lot of info on Russian losses and the state of the Russian army

 

Do you have information about the state of the Russian army? I would like to take a look at this, I think the Western intelligence agencies will pay you well for this information

[The_Capt]

13 minutes ago, Butschi said:

I mildly disagree on this part. During the last several months we've had a lot of "Bwahaha Russia sux so bad, Ukraine has already won, lol!" here. I remember you being rather vehemently against this approach. There have been a few pro-Putin trolls here and IMO in the aftermath more cautious voices have sometimes been put somewhere in the pro-Putin or defeatism corner.

You are right, of course, so far UA seems to have been successful and there is no evidence to the contrary. On the other hand I think we have to acknowledge that we no only part of the equation. We get a lot of info on Russian losses and the state of the Russian army. We get almost nothing from the Ukrainian side, though. And while past operations were successes, in the absence of solid numbers, we have also no real evidence that these success are sustainable. In fact some experts (though that word has become rather meaningless of late, it seems) claim that the increasing vehemence of Ukrainian demands of ever more modern and powerful equipment indicates that the current rate of attrition isn't sustainable.

Now I for one don't claim any expertise in that area, so all I want to say is that I think LLF is right in pointing out that a Ukrainian victory is not an automatism and by no means assured.

But please correct me if I'm wrong.

No that is fair, we do not have the full information set.  Ukraine has tightened up its information control pretty significantly since the early days, which is in itself a sign of control.

Does this thread get out of control and start smoking its own supply, absolutely.  We have lived thru "Russia sux, lols" and the Tankfest 2023 waves, and will no doubt see more spontaneous eruptions.  Of course I think we tried to hold them to the same standard as the counter-narratives put forward by LLF - tried, and maybe failed more than we should have.

We just had an Open Source trend analysis on the UA losses over time, lemme see if I can dig it out.

[The_Capt]

Here we go, 100 pages ago...yeesh.

https://github.com/leedrake5/Russia-Ukraine

Ain't perfect but likely the best we are going to get from open source - they built these off Oryx apparently.

As you can see the UA is not on the edge as far as we can tell.

A whole lot on this page but the trends pretty much show that the UA is sustaining (and maybe growing) while the RA is on a pretty much downward trend - but they had deeper pockets to start with of course. 

[Fernando]

Spain will send from 4 to 6 Leopard 2A4 at first (but I don't expect a lot more).

It will take about two months to refurbish them. About 10 tank crews and maintenance personnel will be trained in the Spanish CNAD (National Training Center) in Zaragoza for two months and a half. It has dynamic simulators for the Leopard, to reproduce the movements of the armored vehicle in full gear, and four tower simulators from the Spanish firm Indra that allow the simultaneous training of a complete section of tanks. In addition, it has several Leopard 2A4, such as those that will be supplied to Ukraine, with which it is planned to carry out real exercises in the neighboring maneuver field, of more than 300 square kilometers.

https://elpais.com/espana/2023-02-01/espana-planea-un-primer-envio-a-ucrania-de-entre-cuatro-y-seis-tanques-leopard-rehabilitados.html

BTW, that's interesting: 
[...]Last Thursday, a first meeting of the coalition of countries willing to supply Leopard tanks to Kyiv was held, by videoconference, convened by the new German Defense Minister, Boris Pistorius, in which his counterparts from Canada, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands and Finland. Surprisingly, Poland was not present at the meeting, the country that pushed the most to supply the Leopards to kyiv and that threatened to deliver a company (14 tanks) even without the permission of Berlin, a country that has the license and must authorize any re-export.[...]

Edited February 1, 2023 by Fernando