How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Maciej Zwolinski]

19 minutes ago, Lethaface said:

PS @Maciej Zwolinski it's not a western thing, your country seems to be infiltrated by Russian agents as well lol https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/ottawasigs

No, we get secondary infections from the West.

[Lethaface]

1 minute ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

I have smoked some of the Russian ones. 

 

Just now, Maciej Zwolinski said:

No, we get secondary infections from the West.

 I think I'm onto something here. 

[Maciej Zwolinski]

23 minutes ago, Lethaface said:

What's not to understand, because of these things and the horrible deaths people decided it would be better to not use them ever again and tried to get that into a treaty. 

How is that different from mortar bombs? I understand banning chemical weapons, because getting blinded is no fun and coughing up lungs is a particularly nasty way to go. But this? It is just chemical explosion under foot...as opposed to one occurring behind/in front/to the left/etc etc

[Butschi]

26 minutes ago, Bearstronaut said:

It kind of amuses me to imagine future historians writing about this war and having to write a footnote to their readers to describe what a "Zerg" is. 

*A Zerg is a fictional alien species from a computer game popular in the late 1990s known for attacking in suicidal wave attacks and ignoring casualties.

If future historians go about it the way current ones do, historians/archaeologists a few thousand years from now will say that a Zerg was probably some deity or mythical creature, anyway something with a cultic background. And/or there will be endless discussions about what kind of background in reality the Terran-Zerg conflict had and whether the Zerg were real creatures or people who just vanished. Noone will have enough imagination that it was just fiction. Just like with Atlantis or the Iliad...

[Lethaface]

Just now, Maciej Zwolinski said:

How is that different from mortar bombs? I understand banning chemical weapons, because getting blinded is no fun and coughing up lungs is a particularly nasty way to go. But this? It is just chemical explosion under foot...as opposed to one occurring behind/in front/to the left/etc etc

I don't think the main reason for the treaty is about the effect against combatants. The issue is that the main victims of anti personnel mines are non-combatants, years after the wars in which they were placed were over.  

[Maciej Zwolinski]

4 minutes ago, Lethaface said:

 

 I think I'm onto something here. 

If memory serves I even got to smoke filterless Belomory. That was potent stuff

[Maciej Zwolinski]

Just now, Lethaface said:

I don't think the main reason for the treaty is about the effect against combatants. The issue is that the main victims of anti personnel mines are non-combatants, years after the wars in which they were placed were over.

That I addressed in my previous post. Nevermind, we can go in circles like that for ages. Let's leave the subject.

[Seminole]

57 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Bring better arguments than drive-by Carlson/Buchanan retweets, mate. Otherwise, The American Conservative is over there.....

Which one of them do you think then Ambassador (and now CIA director) Burns was quoting in that cable?

Or was that just a poor deflection on your part?

[Lethaface]

6 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

That I addressed in my previous post. Nevermind, we can go in circles like that for ages. Let's leave the subject.

The treaty doesn't differentiate for 'own soil' or not (AFAIK, I haven't fully read it), probably for the wise. It was also before the Ukraine war so they could hardly keep it into account ;-). Agreed to leave the subject though. good weekend
 

Edited February 10, 2023 by Lethaface

[Fernando]

5 hours ago, BletchleyGeek said:

Let me kindly indicate you where Galicia or Galiza is, the Old Kingdom of the Suevii. SW Spain is the Alentejo.

And I would like also to remind everyone that between Morocco and Spain there is a significant body of water and the last large scale amphibious operation involving mechanised divisions happened in June 1944. Getting mothballed tanks out of storage is neither trivial or cheap. Monetarism and taking part in economic war with the Russian Federation aren't precisely compatible either.

It may not seem that way right now, or tomorrow, but "something" in the public consciousness is shifting. 

 

Alentejo is a Portuguese region. SW Spain is Andalucía (in fact Andalucía is the larger Spanish region and covers the entire south part of Spain, from east to west) and Extremadura

There is not a lot off water between Morocco and Ceuta and Melilla. They are Spanish cities in North Africa that Morocco claims they should be Moroccan. And the NATO treaty does NOT protect them. They are not NATO-protected territory.

Ceuta:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceuta

Melilla:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melilla

[Lethaface]

2 minutes ago, Fernando said:

Alentejo is a Portuguese region. SW Spain is Andalucía (in fact Andalucía is the larger Spanish region and covers the entire south part of Spain, from east to west) and Extremadura

There is not a lot off water between Morocco and Ceuta and Melilla. They are Spanish cities in North Africa that Morocco claims they should be Moroccan. And the NATO treaty does NOT protect them. They are not NATO-protected territory.

Ceuta:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceuta

Melilla:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melilla

All I know is that @BletchleyGeek is actually also Spanish. 

But I don't think stuffing a couple of hundred of Leo2s in those small enclaves is going to help stop Morocco from taking those area's if they really want to start a war about m, which I don't think they want. 

[kraze]

3 hours ago, Haiduk said:

Already in December I have seen the info that our losses around Bakhmut approached to the level of combat losses during 8 years of ATO. This is at least 3500 men.

The town still holding because of continous rotations of troops. Else we would be already lost several brigades there... 

yeah but then russians losing 3500 wouldn't make sense either, considering their losses in Soledar alone (which are about 13000 in total).

If AFU was losing as many men - no rotations would've helped. Unlike russians the "luxury" of throwing thousands of men into the meatgrinder is something Ukraine doesn't have.

Edited February 10, 2023 by kraze

[Fernando]

1 minute ago, Lethaface said:

All I know is that @BletchleyGeek is actually also Spanish. 

But I don't think stuffing a couple of hundred of Leo2s in those small enclaves is going to help stop Morocco from taking those area's if they really want to start a war about m, which I don't think they want. 

1. Any Spaniard knows Alentejo is not Spain, but Portugal. 
2. We would see if Morocco could take both cities. Some people also thought that Russia could occupy Ukraine in less than a month.

[Zeleban]

 

[Bearstronaut]

23 minutes ago, Seminole said:

Which one of them do you think then Ambassador (and now CIA director) Burns was quoting in that cable?

Or was that just a poor deflection on your part?

Get outta here with that neo-tankie crap. NATO was not a threat to Russia. Nobody was itching to drive on Moscow like it was 1941 or 1812. If the Russians had played nice instead of weaponizing their whole "Russkiy mir" concept the Europeans would have been perfectly happy to just sit there and buy cheap fossil fuels pumped in from Siberia. 

[Maciej Zwolinski]

10 minutes ago, Fernando said:

2. We would see if Morocco could take both cities. Some people also thought that Russia could occupy Ukraine in less than a month.

That's the spirit! Molon labe!

[Zeleban]

Russian telegram channels claim that Sergey Polyakov, commander of the 14th Special Forces Brigade, died near Ugledar

[The_Capt]

3 hours ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Sounds to me like lots of indifferently trained men under tremendoous stress walking or scrambling around -- maybe even being herded at gunpoint -- at night in shattered, rubbish filled, unknown no-mans land.

...Guys, this tactical problem was SOLVED -- or rendered massively more costly for the Stosstruppen -- over a century ago, with AP landmines. Blow off some legs, alerting everyone and driving the rest to ground, then plaster them with whatever is handy (rifle grenades, mortars, 155mm). Next wave faces the exact same problem in the exact same spot.

Post-Vietnam FASCAM and Bloc-equivalent air and artillery cluster munitions scattered across enemy tactical axes of advance (and in CI situations, supply lines) was a useful and highly lethal improvement, although leaving a deadly legacy for postwar populations (as noted). 

Sure, not a panacea, but it freeking helps.

So it's either Western norms fairy (sans total air superiority, for now), or the lives of your bravest sons, plus still more of your country churned into a wasteland.

Don't oversell AP landmines here. Having been in minefields and witnessed some of the carnage you describe personally - and a lot of years as a combat engineer, I think I can play the "expert" card here.

AP landmines were always designed to harass and attrit - both physically and psychologically.  The only ones that were approaching lethality level to be decisive are area systems like claymore or bounding mines (especially when in daisy chain...nasty).  So their utility in warfare is not zero but it is also 1) upside down and 2) backwards:

Upside down - like most engineer obstacles you are trading work for time.  A LOT of work up front to buy a few seconds minutes later.  Making those minutes second count is what all arms defence is all about.  AP mine as part of that overall system is a very junior player in the modern age.  The vast majority of AP mines simply are never detonated.  They do support force multiplication but pale in comparison to AT systems.  Main reason is that mechanized made modern warfare - we will see how long that lasts - so kill the vehicle and a modern army is back to WW1.  AP mines were there to make clearance of those AT mines difficult and to kill engineers.  In some conditions they were still used for final defence, but in order to really have an effect you have to employ a very high density.  Go read on the Falklands War accounts of the final attacks on the Two Sisters.  The Brits hit minefields on the assault, took hits and just kept on going.  So as the modern era progressed the amount of effort to put out enough density in AP became entirely secondary to the AT problem.  Back in training, before the Ottawa Convention, we would plan for a lone single strip in a massive AT minefield that was frankly an enormous pain in the a@@ and did basically nothing.  We did employ them for nuisance minefields but these were last on the priority list of engineer works.  AT, AT and AT was always the priority. 

So the value of AP outside of very narrow circumstances really began to drop to the point that when the landmine ban came up, we kind looked at it and went "meh".  We still retain the command detonated point defence systems, like Claymores, so the ability really mess people up is still there.  And boobytraps/anti-handling devices exist in a grey area so if we need to deny critical systems in a withdrawal scenario we still could.  The old AP mines - "toe poopers" - really kind became old-school extra work that we really did not miss.

Backwards - The other problem with the old dumb AP mines was the fact that they killed/injured more people after the war than they did in the war itself.  This drove the costs of these systems way outside the battlefield gains.  Cambodia was really the eye opener, and then the Balkans, Afghanistan etc.  We saw that the post-war impact was like GDP-level harming - the cost of removing these weapons, especially if they records are lost or never made, was orders of magnitude of the weapon system itself.  So from a military strategic perspective these were literally cutting off the nose to spite the face.  They were never going to be decisive on the battlefield, and the post-war costs were enormous as we were seeing large swaths of agriculture, tourism and development areas were totally denied for at least a century unless a nation in post-war recovery could spend millions on clearances that would take years. 

So frankly, AP mines do not make warfare economic sense.  They may feel good but Ukraine sticking its neck out on this one is not worth it.  They will kill a few more Russians, but not enough to balance the blowback or post-war impacts.  The RA has demonstrated a stunning ability to feed people into this thing, so they are simply going to ignore any AP minefields, accept the casualties and move on.

DPICM is fundamentally a very different problem.  The issue here is the "peace community" really functions by fund raising and to do that they need "wins".  The AP Convention was a big win, so they were searching for a high profile follow up - enter Lebanon 2006.  Israel in a bafflingly bad military operation - it basically killed the credibility of their famous design approach - decided to start lobbing old stockpiles DPICM at hybrid forces who were fighting from within communities...what could possibli go wrong?  Well the whole thing blew up in their, and our, faces...literally.  Old stockpiled DPICMs had embarrassing dud rates - although, reality check; those dud rates do not even come close to the numbers of AP mines employed in older conflicts.  More modern DPICM systems are seeing lower dud rates than the HE being tossed around the battlefield today...but if it looks like a landmine and can generate crowd funding like a landmine...

 So the Anti-Cluster munition thing was born.  We in military circles knew that it would really go nowhere because DPICM has far more battlefield utility and in many circumstances it could be decisive.  So they bolted together a convention but there are holes one can drive a truck through and all the major players simply refused to sign off - although the US made some hand over heart promises.  So what?  Well DPICM essentially takes HE and distribute it widely and more efficiently.  When shaped charge rounds are employed the lethality goes up as well - plenty of studies out there, and we read a lot of them for CMCW.  So unlike AP which is a nuisance to an attacking combined arms unit, DPICM can kill it.  For Ukraine, and the US, the employment of DPICM is entirely legal, even if it makes some people queasy.  Neither nation signed the thing in Oslo and can legally employ the weapon systems in accordance with the Geneva CCW.  Modern DPICM have extremely low dud rates as they are built to be self-neutralizing - we are talking 95% and above, far higher than standard HE.  Now as PGM enters the battlefield en masse, my bet is that DPICM will also go the way of AP mines.  If we need to kill 10 attacking vehicles, we fire 10 PGM systems.  DPICM cost/benefit will very likely shift- along with a lot of systems - after this war and into the future.  So the entire thing may become moot, but we are not there yet.

So DPICM will have political costs, but I think they are mitigatable and are outweighed by critical battlefield utility.  AP mines, no; DPICM, yes. 

 

 

Edited February 10, 2023 by The_Capt

[Lethaface]

5 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

That's the spirit! Molon labe!

I like the phrase, though I'm no part in the Morocco - Spain feud. But I do know those enclaves are really small, like 10-20 sq KM per enclave, mostly urban terrain. Not really tank brigade terrain. 

[cesmonkey]

Probably off-topic. (Hope it never becomes  a real part of the topic on Ukraine!)

https://www.matrixgames.com/game/nuclear-war-simulator

Quote

Nuclear War Simulator has been released

We’ve released Nuclear War Simulator. It’s safe to say this is our first-ever non-game. The developer, Ivan Stepanov, has created an in-depth simulation software that will be used in all sorts of professional places. It’s the epitome of what “games” can do to improve research and analysis in all industries, and we’re proudly presenting it to you with no strings attached. If you have a passing interest in the subject, I suggest you give it a try. Don’t expect missions, set scenarios, campaigns, or ultimate goals: just enjoy the unprecedented depth and research.

 

[The_Capt]

3 minutes ago, cesmonkey said:

Probably off-topic. (Hope it never becomes  a real part of the topic on Ukraine!)

https://www.matrixgames.com/game/nuclear-war-simulator

 

Man, talk about "cashing in".

Edited February 10, 2023 by The_Capt

[Maciej Zwolinski]

9 minutes ago, Lethaface said:

I like the phrase, though I'm no part in the Morocco - Spain feud. But I do know those enclaves are really small, like 10-20 sq KM per enclave, mostly urban terrain. Not really tank brigade terrain. 

I do not even know that there is a feud (is there? Maybe future material for CMBC - Combat Mission Berber Confrontation). I just admire the fighting words

[Beleg85]

6 hours ago, Lethaface said:

Every country needs a sufficient self defense. Show me a country that doesn't put it's own interest forward. Anyway I don't know but from some of your posts I get a hint of hostility about 'west Europe' and 'east Europe'. 

Every country needs a sufficient self defense. Show me a country that doesn't put it's own interest forward. Anyway I don't know but from some of your posts I get a hint of hostility about 'west Europe' and 'east Europe'. 
If we start about political elites creating a rift in Europe before the war, well I could point to some countries in the East as well. Including your own. But imo the war has caused some paradigmas to shift, mainly the view on Russia.

Whoa, I talked about NATO in context of UA access, not European Union. Which has whole separate range of issues, in which security ones are not at the front (yes, you are right PL gov. does a lot of terrible domestic policies in EU).

Btw. genunity of Zeitenweide is widely and critically discussed in German and European press as far I can tell, so nobody is pointing fingers at anybody here. Even with best intentions, such mental change take a hell lot of time, that's my doubts about stance of some countries. And there are myriad of additional factors here that I (as non-German) probably miss as well. We shouldn't discuss it because somebody is uncomfortable with it or "yours are also slightly to blame in other fields"? C'mon, no reason to quarrel here.

3 hours ago, Tenses said:

As a Pole, I can also confirm this. Democracies around the World needs to change in order tu survive. And the problem is as old as any goverment - too much power. From absolutism, through monarchy up to democratic republic there are just some things, which should be not allowed even with having majority in place. Good constitution can probably take care of it but the problems described in it should be taken seriously.

In regard to PL, I can only say that it is not any more uniform than other countries so current goverment doesn't have that much support as it might be looking like from abroad. And hopefully this will at least partially change in the nearest future.  

At the end of this year it is quite possible PiS loose elections. And voila, we can go back to pure, 100% legit Germany-bashing again, like Balts do.

But seriously problem of populsim is global and very much everywhere, connected to evolving technology (fast, attention-seeking media are killing  traditional view of political process), societal problems (alienation of humans in XXI cent. megalopolis- already explained in details by Oscar Spengler types), economical models and globalization itself. If some people thinks that we can neatly divide Europe into "3 regions" in which there are "reasonable" and "unreasonable" people, sorry to disturb you-your views are based on XIX cent. stereotypes. Better watch at US, UK, South Americas, Italy and growing similar movements in France, Scandinavia etc. Traditional democracy as system of balancing powers have visible problems everywhere. Perhaps simply entire montesquian division of powers system cannot catch behind fast-evolving, multiconnected world of XXi cent. I hope not, but there are many signs.

 

Todays' hunt of Ukrainian AA. 5 drones and 62 missiles...they seem to shot less every time.

 

Edited February 10, 2023 by Beleg85

[danfrodo]

10 hours ago, Sojourner said:

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer accompanied by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, arrive for President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol, Tuesday, Feb. 7

Gawd Damn you Mitch.  I keep wanting to hate you more and you keep making me hate you less.  Damn you.  

Meanwhile, yesterday I predicted the next big missile strike would be Feb 22, so Putin launches one today.  Note to forum members: never ever make a bet based on what I say.  The only good news is that the time between these strikes gets bigger after each one.  Anyone have any news on how many missiles got through vs how many launched?

 

 

 

[Kraft]

1 minute ago, danfrodo said:

The only good news is that the time between these strikes gets bigger after each one.

I've heard and read from several sources (that I totally forgot) that Russia is firing in line with the production rate, there are bound to be critical reserves in store but at least for now they are not touched.