How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Eddy]

1 minute ago, Haiduk said:

Second time for three days explosions heard in Mariupol.

I was literally just reading about the previous attack on The Drive Mariupol Strikes Raise Questions About Possible New Ukrainian Long-Range Weapons (thedrive.com) They also raise GLDSB but provide no evidence wither way.

[Haiduk]

Bakhmut, human waves, MG-3

 

[danfrodo]

2 minutes ago, Haiduk said:

Bakhmut, human waves, MG-3

 

that gun has some kick!  shoves him backwards.  Maybe wasn't well braced to start?

[DesertFox]

Tomorrow we will know more, but appears to be some Stridsvagn 122 (Leo 2A5 variant) might find their way into Ukraine.

Quote

On Friday, the government is expected to present a new support package to Ukraine. According to information to TT, it contains, among other things, tanks and air defenses.

Uppgifter: Sverige skickar stridsvagnar till Ukraina - DN.SE

[Kinophile]

https://breakingdefense.com/2023/02/evolving-plans-ukraines-m1-abrams-tanks-could-come-from-us-stockpiles-official-says/

Good if true. 

@Haiduk where are the human waves in that vid? Just guy shooting his mg... 

[Vacillator]

1 minute ago, danfrodo said:

that gun has some kick!

An MG42 derivative I think?  Quite something...

[Haiduk]

1 minute ago, Kinophile said:

where are the human waves in that vid? Just guy shooting his mg... 

Just WW2 associations ) On the writing "Machine-gunner fires at enemy positions on outskirts of Bakhmut" 

[billbindc]

5 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

The NY Times ran an article a couple of days ago (paywall, sorry!) about how Putin is using this war to get what he wants at home... Soviet Union 2.0.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/19/world/europe/ukraine-war-russia-putin.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20230222&instance_id=85972&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=77867169&segment_id=125948&te=1&user_id=06eb42ecc9056dd32ea63af0c30707b6

Here are some excerpts:

And this one is worthy of singling out:

Malofeyev is making the case that in order to crush all hope Russians might have had for a better society, they had to be cut off and scared that they might lose everything.  Now it's full on autocracy, including single sourced information, entertainment, arts, and of course education:

 

The most frightening thing about all of this is that Putin might want the unsuccessful war in Ukraine to drag on so he can declare total victory in the war to form a full autocratic state at home:

Once again underscoring the importance of not just having Ukraine win back its land, but ensuring that the Putin regime falls even at the risk of everything else.  Because leaving his regime intact is not a good option for anybody, including the Russians.

Unfortunately, the youth of Russia is being brainwashed.  That's going to stick with us for another generation even when this regime falls.

Steve

I really don't buy Malofeyev's line of thinking. Putin has never tried to recreate a Soviet style Stalinism because it simply isn't possible in current conditions. The Stalinist state was highly mobilized throughout each layer of the systema with multiple layers that proactively worked to reinforce the primacy of the Boss without any need for direct control. Putin's Russia is based on demobilization with very direct control because there isn't any proactive aspects to it whatsoever. In fact, the current systema sees proactive engagement as a direct potential threat to the current order.

The ersatz Stalinism you are seeing now is certainly frightening and upsetting but it's the fallback, not the Pinochet model Putin was attempting to cement.

[DesertFox]

14 minutes ago, Vacillator said:

An MG42 derivative I think?  Quite something...

Yes, NATO MG3 (german successor 7,62x51, of the WW2 7,92x57 MG 42). If you do not lean with your full weight into the bipod, that happens.

Edited February 23, 2023 by DesertFox

[Battlefront.com]

4 hours ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

On the other hand, Russian soldiers who go to the front in the Ukraine seem already halfway convinced they will die because of the stupidity of their commanders, lack of supplies, defective weapons, etc. which they consider a fact of life with which they are not particularly bothered.  

This is the precise reason my pre and early war predictions have not panned out.  Yet.  My theory was that even the average, uneducated, generally pro-regime minded Russia had access to enough information to get them at least mad at the regime for wasting their lives.  Previous generations of Russian cannon fodder didn't have such opportunities to know the truth ahead of time.  This forewarning, I thought, would translate into resistance to the war simply because they didn't want to become cannon fodder.

The thing is we DID see some of that at the beginning of the war with the "refusniks" and the ample evidence of Russian soldiers abandoning their equipment/positions and walking back to Russia.  We even saw entire units refuse to fight, at least on the attack.  The most dramatic defection being the battalion from South Ossetia that walked out of Luhansk and hitch-hiked rides back home because Luhansk commanders were mistreating them.  We also saw LPR and DPR units refusing to fight outside of their home turf.  Then there were the videos/images/stories of Russian soldiers kept in basements as punishment for refusing to fight.  Lastly, we had even a few detailed reports of Russian soldiers killing their officers.

These early war results gave me more confidence that my theories were correct and that it would get worse.  However, something changed.

It seems to me that the early defeats emboldened a certain type of Russian male citizen to, I dunno how to characterize it... be useful?  Show themselves tougher than the weakness being demonstrated on the battlefield?  More patriotic than the next guy?  Something like that, I think.  And whatever this something is, it's strong enough to overcome their knowledge of how bad things are.

Nothing typifies this more than the mobiks who were roughly rounded up, dumped in abandoned and unheated barracks with personal kit they bought for themselves, then shipped out to the front without training or even proper weaponry.  Their complaints weren't about being treated like pieces of garbage most likely destined to die without doing much of anything.  Nope, for the most part they just complained about material shortcomings, such as money, food, clothing, etc.  When they complained about leadership it was always with the tone of "we don't like it, but we'll put up with it because that's what good Russians do".

I didn't think Russia could find 300,000+ suicidal brainwashed drones in one go.  This is where I got things really wrong. 

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

19 minutes ago, billbindc said:

I really don't buy Malofeyev's line of thinking. Putin has never tried to recreate a Soviet style Stalinism because it simply isn't possible in current conditions.

I don't think Malofeyev really cares about the details of how the Russian Empire gets rebuilt, only that it does.  And the only way that can happen is with the destruction of liberalism, as he puts it.  If that can happen without recreating the NKVD and having mass murder take place on the streets, I'm sure he'd be all for it.  The important thing is winding up with a monolithic backwards looking state where he is at the top of the pecking order.

Steve

[akd]

@sburke @Kinophile

Lt. Col. of Artillery Aleksey Serenko killed in Grad strike on his camp on Feb. 23, 2023.  However, it seems he was dismissed from service in 2017, so not clear if he was again a serving officer, or a volunteer:

 

[Fenris]

5 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Sadly, I am coming to agree with this perspective more and more as the war drags on.

Before and just after the war started I had higher expectations for dissent within Russia AFTER things got really bad (I had no illusions that there would be mass protests against the war without that).  Part of my thinking was that Putin had showed himself to be pretty uneasy about internal stability.  So I don't think I was wrong to think as I did, even if it turns out the threat to Putin's regime was not as strong and his ability to counter dissent more effective than expected.  For all we know Putin is also surprised!

A week or so ago I summarized my assessment of where my own evaluation went wrong.  In brief:

1. "westernization" of Russian thinking was far weaker than I had expected.  Even in the major urban areas it seems the average Russian was more fond of Western products and services than ideas.
2. since 2011 those who have really latched onto Western concepts of governance and standards of living tended to leave Russia and not return to it willingly.
3. after February 2022 the exodus of westernized Russians was profound, thus taking a mindset already in short supply and draining it nearly completely from Russian society.
4. deference to authority, complacency, and willful ignorance are not unique to Russia, however it does appear that Russia continues to suffer far more from this than other nations.  Especially because those who could challenge traditional Russian society opted to leave (two points above).
5. coupled with #4 and Russia's tradition of brutality towards dissent, the regime's police state apparatus is functioning very effectively.
6. the primary hope I had was that economic hardship would be enough to compensate for most of the above.  I still hold this to be true, however the amount of hardship that's likely needed is far greater than I thought.  Russia's love of Western style standard of living is apparently less important to them than I had expected.
7. the losses so far, as spectacular and undeniable as they are even to the Russian people, just aren't bad enough at one time to shake people into action.

Add to this Putin's apparent effective counter attack against challenge from various "elites".  I had expected some amount of public unrest plus unhappy elites would have produced a noticeable change in the Kremlin.  Not necessarily an outright replacement for Putin, but something that pushed him to end the war instead of doubling down on it.

Steve

 

Regarding the RU home front I'll repost this (think it was posted up thread) - I think it demonstrates the complete control of the narrative that Moscow has over rural russians.  Giving someone a dove with with a Z on it is some real cognitive dissonance, imagine giving someone a cardboard dove with a swastika on it.

 

 

 

[Haiduk]

Khodakovskiy about dead end of Russian urban warfare and cities seizing tactic.

 Why such [terrible] consequences of our offensive in the same Mariupol? That's what we were taught and then we taught tactic of urban warfare and not even - we were taught to capture buildings, advance along corridors, burst into rooms... Nothing of this doesn't work in conditions of war, not anti-terror operation. More - when I see, how "near-instructors" teach mobilized soldiers to advance in assault orders in composition of group - I want to line up these would-be instructors and chase them under fire in beautiful formation of dense group toward hospital, in order they at least one time tested on themeselves, that in composition of group is enough one mine [or he meant "mortar-shell"] to kill them all. 

Because of this we demolish in front of us everything , that the enemy can use as shelter and because of this we have such consequences. Experience of warfare in Mariupol showed, that enough a pair of properly organized platoons to delay a battalion. In order to enter into the building and mop-up it - we need to approach to this building. The enemy mows down assaulters with a fire on approaches and there is only one solution - to demolish this building to the fu...g mother with anything. Now this "subtown" [wrote in the same sense like "untermensch"] Ugledar [Vuhledar in Russian writing] demonstrates once again that I'm right. I remind, that in first day of decisive offensive on Sevastopol, Germans wasted 4000 tons of shells. If we want to capture Ugledar we have nothing left, except to demolish everything in front of ourself. But with what? Until we demolish - to lay down dead our personnel in unsuccessful attacks in attempts to capture at least a сhuck of territory - this is wrong.   

Edited February 23, 2023 by Haiduk

[Letter from Prague]

[Haiduk]

1 minute ago, Letter from Prague said:

You're late too ))) Somebody posted this several days ago )

[Letter from Prague]

4 minutes ago, Haiduk said:

You're late too ))) Somebody posted this several days ago )

Oh damn, I must have missed it.

[Fenris]

Don't hear a lot about this stuff, although I'm sure it's going on.

 

[Vacillator]

Hope I'm not repeating anything, but I like this Latvian MP, says it how it is:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-64748349

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, billbindc said:

I really don't buy Malofeyev's line of thinking. Putin has never tried to recreate a Soviet style Stalinism because it simply isn't possible in current conditions. The Stalinist state was highly mobilized throughout each layer of the systema with multiple layers that proactively worked to reinforce the primacy of the Boss without any need for direct control. Putin's Russia is based on demobilization with very direct control because there isn't any proactive aspects to it whatsoever. In fact, the current systema sees proactive engagement as a direct potential threat to the current order.

The ersatz Stalinism you are seeing now is certainly frightening and upsetting but it's the fallback, not the Pinochet model Putin was attempting to cement.

Putins pre war model of "government", if you can call it that, was based on demobilizing the populace completely, so the regime could steal the the place blind. Putin is now being forced into a crash mobilization of the whole society based on blood and soil nationalism.

I would argue it owes more to Mussolini's methods than Stalin's. The Soviet model had a great deal of formal structure that did not tolerate improvisations like Wagner. It also had a least a hint of of succession planning. Where as near as I can tell, nobody has a clue who or what comes after Putin.

To the extent the Soviet model survives it mostly seems to be a form we pretend to work, you pretend to pay us. This is perhaps best illustrated by the way the mobilization system rounded people up absolutely at random, instead of with vague attempt to get people more fit to serve.

How long this hodgepodge of a system can clatter along is anybodies guess, it has already held longe than I thought it would. Ukraine just has to keep killing mobiks until they get the hint. And NATO needs to build munitions plants like it means it.

42 minutes ago, Fenris said:

Don't hear a lot about this stuff, although I'm sure it's going on.

 

This picture seems very odd to me. The metal seems to have failed in a brittle fracture mode, and there is little or no blackening any where. Also they were not competent enough to run a wire around the break to confuse the continuity tester if the track has one. The picture themselves are lousy, so I may be overthinking all of this.

[The_Capt]

6 hours ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

I have a couple of comments.

1. Maybe at this stage it would be helpful to specify what is meant by MC/DC at the particular command level under discussion to avoid talking about different things. Twitter discussion sparked by a post of Tatarigami_UA mentioned the problem of "senior officers" micromanaging deployment at platoon, company and battalion level. UKR do not fight in divisions, so he may have been talking about a brigade commander or brigade chief of staff telling a company commander where to place his platoons and company support weapons. Referring to that example specifcally - how likely is it that the  brigade staff will have a better picture of the action at the appropriate level to do this better than the company commander? I think it is quite unlikely, even with the modern communications. Even if e.g. the brigade commander has some information from drones etc. it is still more likely to work better if he shares this with the lieutenant on the ground rather than take the decisions himself. So I think MC should be preferrable at this level of fighting, unless junior commanders are known to be incompetent. 

2.  Ukrainian commentators themselves seem to be complaining about too little MC and too much DC. Although they may be wrong, I would give them the benefit of the doubt.

3. An interesting example pertinent to the DC/MC debate came to light a couple of months ago when discussing Wagner tactics. It was related to the the lowest tactical level, showing individual fire team leaders of Wagner's penal battalions being directed by way of drones flying over their heads to move literally a few metres in this or that direction. They had movement routes planned on a tablet with an overhead map looking like a video game screen (so maybe this was not "Mission Command" but "Combat Mission Command"). Paradoxically, I think that at such a low level a directive style of command has a lot more sense than brigade command moving individual platoons/companies on the battlefield. Here, a junior officer or NCO looking at the battle from an overhead drone indeed has much more information than a fire team leader and is not distracted by the enemy fire.

 

 

Ok and @Kinophile can jump in on this one too.  So we are muddying up some stuff here, so to clarify:

- The original point on MC vs DC was to point out the cultural constipation of conventional services and how they are nowhere near as innovative or open to disruptive thinking as is often sold.  Over the military generations, military doctrine becomes dogma and counter-thinking in an organization that literally exists to create uniformity in behaviour is not well accepted.  We in the west have built a democratic myth of "empowerment and gumption" but it really does not translate well into actual military reality.  We can debate this but I know what I have lived for the better part of 3.5 decades. 

- The UA is a hybrid mix of Soviet and Western schools, and for them I think this was a major advantage.  It was not because we peppered them with western doctrine and training, it was because they had both worlds to pull from.  If we had an all western force in this thing, with the same restraints/constraints and capabilities as the UA, my hypothesis is that we would have done worse because we would have tried to apply an all-western approach.  I can definitely see in Phase I where this would have gotten us into a lot of trouble.  The UA is already outside of boxes and pulling in so much from the civilian side so quickly also helped in breaking doctrinal group-think and creating whatever this has turned into.  As to which school MC or DC, that the UA employs I do not think we have a clear idea but it is also likely a hybrid - which was how the entire thing was actually designed to work.

- MC vs DC schools of thought.  Ok, this is a whole other thing.  Mission Command is a essentially (and I will just use my own descriptions, feel free to go look up others) is essentially empowered command.  It arms subordinates with context and intent, "why we are doing this and here is what we are looking for".  This, plus allowing them to exercise initiative to exploit opportunity - the alignment of circumstance, context and capability, theoretically provides a force with higher potential for tempo advantage.  The thinking goes that empowered tactical commanders can see opportunity well before formation level and as such if they exploit it without waiting to be told the entire force can OODA faster than an opponent.  This is a cornerstone of Manoeuvre Warfare which is really a strategy of Annihilation through Dislocation.  We seriously bought off on all this and drank the Kool Aid on it about 40 years ago, to the point it became so dogmatic that it left little room for counter thought.

DC is one of mission control being held at higher levels.  Subordinates are empowered to do a task (The terms are actually derived from the Germans largely because Depuy and Starry really were hot for German warfare - Auftragstaktik and Befehlstaktik, The first meaning "mission tactics" the second "detailed orders tactics").  They then wait for further direction before exploiting opportunity.  They can still execute initiative in execution of the task but not the overall mission. 

So was born the Great American Military Myth (and frankly almost every western nation jumped onboard).  We were a democratized military built on "good ol 'merican innovation and initiative."  Further this All-Yankee Doodle (sorry but we really got beat over the head on this one back in the day) approach is very economic as it yields quick nearly bloodless wars.  The Persian Gulf became the poster child for this type of warfare, but more than few put up their hands and asked if it wasn't a false-positive.  The Gulf War was highly attritional and mostly driven by air supremacy - the land battle of mission command and manoeuvre warfare was basically executed against an already beaten foe, and one crushed by far more Detailed Command approaches of the Air Force. (This brings up the other problem with the Kool Aid, it really does not work for either the Navy or Air Force - and does not work enough for SOF, kinda).  

The truth is far more complicated.  The largest problem with Mission Command is that while it is great in theory it runs into serious problems in full execution because of all those pesky enablers.  Tactical commanders can run all over the place all empowered but there is only so much ISR, artillery, engineers and logistics to go around.  So what really happens is far more control in practice.  The Main Effort gets a lot more empowerment but if you are on a side gig, well you might very well get held back because the boss simply does not have the stuff to support you if you go all manouvrey.  Detail Command it far to restrictive and you get into micromanagement, so in reality neither systems works in extremes.

The future.  Well the problem was seen coming way back during the RMA days.  "What happens when a higher level commander knows more than a tactical one?"  I suspect if the UA has created a sort of ad hoc JADC2 system then this has already happened.  If a higher formation commander knows more than the tactical level, then DC starts to make a lot more sense.  And then what does Manoeuvre Warfare turn into? Well a form of Corrosive Warfare is one option apparently.  There is a lot of sense to this, we already do it with unmanned systems, which are going to expand in use not contract.  Detail Command that controls the battlespace like a production line and not a jazz band is not totally out of the question.  

So at one end we have "lets go all DC because higher can see all".  While at the other end we have "remove higher command entirely."  This is hyper-Mission Command, or self-synchronization.  Here tactical units are loaded up and basically command themselves with their peers - this gets a lot of traction in SOF circles. They then share enablers in a hand-off system where "higher" is really coordination and not command and control.  Here we get into military effects clouds and inverted command systems.  This also makes some sense but many are shy as to human nature.  How are enablers going to be shared?  This is always a friction point, and higher commanders are the referees.  What happens if we get rid of them.  Some have suggested AI does the job as it can calculate requirements far faster than a human can, or a human AI pairing because human can do context.

So in the end there is no "answer".  We should continue to try both, and maybe have a C2 system that can swing wildly from one to the other based on good ol human art of war.  But service cultures and equities already get in the way.  This is way tanks got resisted, the machine gun and even unmanned systems.  We make idols of our history and sometimes it gets in the way of evolution.  Experimentation and paying attention to wars like these are absolutely critical as we can start to get some idea of where things are going and then plan to adapt at a better rate than an opponent.      

[sburke]

These 6 countries sided with Russia in UN vote on Ukraine war (yahoo.com)

Quote

The six countries to vote against the resolution were Belarus, North Korea, Syria, Eritrea, Mali and Nicaragua.

The 32 countries that abstained from the resolution on Thursday included China, India, Pakistan and South Africa.

Putin has got to be a little peeved at China.

 

[kevinkin]

https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-2-23-23/h_22f64310e6c80ce8e0a0470ab42d5e7a

Don't stay up all night for this one. 

[LongLeftFlank]

On 2/23/2023 at 8:48 AM, LongLeftFlank said:

That said, I have been worried from the beginning that Chinese support will allow Russia's 1940s dumb army to hold the field far longer and kill far more Ukrainians than it otherwise would.

Worrisome....

Xi'an Bingo has reportedly agreed to manufacture and test 100 ZT-180 prototype drones before delivering them to the Russian Defense Ministry by April 2023. Military experts believe the ZT-180 is capable of carrying a 35- to 50 kilogram warhead.

These things appear to be Shaheed equivalents, buzzbombs launched against a point target. They have yet to prove effective as battlefield weapons.

However mass production of Lancets could be another matter....

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2022/12/01/russian-loitering-munition-racks-up-kills-but-shows-limitations/

Supplying these things in bulk could allow RU to conduct behind the lines interdiction against UKR guns and LOCs that their air force has failed to provide to date.

Especially if they became cheaper per unit than the Manpads and AAA needed to counter them.

And even with huge defect rates, Chinese industry can crank out thousands of such weapons without breaking much of a sweat.

So Western industry is likely already in a race against the mass produced knockoffs all time world champion.

And I don't take much comfort in the threat of Western sanctions to prevent all this. I'd expect a certain amount of secrecy, obfuscation and denial; and then some acrimonious debate in the West, since the effects of sanctions cut both ways due to our continued dependence on Made in China. 

****

Also interesting.

 

[Sojourner]

16 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Especially if they became cheaper per unit than the Manpads and AAA needed to counter them.

That's fallacious reasoning, the cost of MANPADs and AAA should be weighed against the cost of what the drone is targeting, .