How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Harmon Rabb]

Some news for the hockey fans around here.

[kevinkin]

Lots of questions and observations with no answers provided. We used to say at work "don't hide behind the data". This means even though the experiment was run to perfection and you showed beautiful graphs and tables, it's your data, you are the expert, now give us your interpretation. Don't hide behind your data. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/03/23/questions_without_answers_about_ukraine_149020.html

So I will cut in and say that speed is the answer. A lot of the trends and questions posed will be answered by the rapid defeat of Russia via retaking captured land so as not to let the situation in the Spring of '23 become the status quo. A status quo that the world might see as a small victory for evil at the cost of so many Ukrainian lives. But here is a question: why did we let the stabilizing effect that nukes had for generations all of a sudden become destabilizing?Answer: paralysis by over analysis.     

[riptides]

14 minutes ago, kevinkin said:

But here is a question: why did we let the stabilizing effect that nukes had for generations all of a sudden become destabilizing?Answer: paralysis by over analysis.

A simple answer to that would be the grey area of mutual security guarantees or vetted alliances.

I think the war has shown one has to join" into and be a "part" of an alliance to keep nukes off the table.

 

[kevinkin]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/93k588/will-vladimir-putin-be-arrested-in-south-africa

South Africa has fallen foul of its ICC duties in the past. In 2016, judges at the ICC condemned South Africa for failing in its obligations to arrest the then-wanted Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir when he attended an African leader’s summit in 2015. 

--

A bit on weapons procurement and how just in time manufacturing is not right for items like N95 masks and things that go boom. 

https://breakingdefense.com/2023/03/up-our-game-the-pentagons-3-strategies-to-shore-up-munitions-stockpiles/

For example, who is left paying for the new tooling if demand does not live up to expectations? 

--

More of America's strategic ambiguity:

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/ukraine-victory-analysis/

“We keep saying, ‘We’re going to give them everything it takes,’ – everything it takes to do what?” Breedlove told Task & Purpose. “We’re going to be there as long as it takes – as long as it takes to do what? As a military commander, if someone gave me those as directives, I would have no idea what they were asking me to do.”

“I don’t why they can’t say: ‘We want Ukraine to win; our goal is for Ukraine to win, and here’s what that means, and here’s why it’s important to the United States,’” Hodges told Task & Purpose.

Edited March 23, 2023 by kevinkin

[billbindc]

 

Apparently, Seymour Hersh's super duper secret source in the Deep State is....Joe Biden. 

Where angels fear to tread...

 

[Battlefront.com]

OK, so if I'm understanding this correctly...  Hersh claims that Biden and Scholz had a Top Secret, off the books, no records kept meeting to jointly plant disinformation in the media to cover up the fact that the US blew up Nordstream 2.  And that Hersh had access to someone with access to the records that did not get kept from the Top Secret, off the books, no records kept meeting.

Er, did I get that right?

Steve

[The_MonkeyKing]

Finland doubles it's Leo2 mine plow vehicle commitment to 6 in total.

Also confirmed in the official DoD announcements(13th and 14th packages):

https://www.defmin.fi/en/topical/press_releases_and_news/finlands_latest_defence_materiel_package_to_ukraine_includes_three_leopard_2_mine_clearing_tanks.13423.news

https://www.defmin.fi/en/topical/press_releases_and_news/finland_donates_defence_materiel_assistance_to_ukraine_including_more_of_mine-clearing_leopard_2_tanks.13477.news#9ab3a2b5

[Ultradave]

15 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

OK, so if I'm understanding this correctly...  Hersh claims that Biden and Scholz had a Top Secret, off the books, no records kept meeting to jointly plant disinformation in the media to cover up the fact that the US blew up Nordstream 2.  And that Hersh had access to someone with access to the records that did not get kept from the Top Secret, off the books, no records kept meeting.

Er, did I get that right?

Steve

You forgot the massive eyeroll!

Dave

[Astrophel]

Nordstream 2 is not actually blown up, at least not entirely.  50% of its capacity is still intact and Russia offered to supply Germany via this remaining pipeline in October.  Germany refused - again.

It always struck me as a strange coincidence that NS1 should be comprehensively destroyed while NS2 - the pipeline Germany had been refusing to bring into service for several months - somehow survived miraculously.

 

[Yet]

53 minutes ago, billbindc said:

 

Apparently, Seymour Hersh's super duper secret source in the Deep State is....Joe Biden. 

Where angels fear to tread...

 

suuuuuure, well, in that case some people at the CIA will get fired, worst cover story ever. 

 

[Harmon Rabb]

1 hour ago, billbindc said:

 

Apparently, Seymour Hersh's super duper secret source in the Deep State is....Joe Biden. 

Where angels fear to tread...

 

I'm surprised Hersh did not claim this guy was his source. I heard this man has been serving the deep state for decades. 

In other news, Medvedev is still mad at the ICC.

 

Edited March 23, 2023 by Harmon Rabb

[danfrodo]

deleted

 

Edited March 23, 2023 by danfrodo

[Lethaface]

1 hour ago, kevinkin said:

A bit on weapons procurement and how just in time manufacturing is not right for items like N95 masks and things that go boom. 

https://breakingdefense.com/2023/03/up-our-game-the-pentagons-3-strategies-to-shore-up-munitions-stockpiles/

For example, who is left paying for the new tooling if demand does not live up to expectations? 

Just-in-time manufacturing is largely about process optimization in a world where total cost of ownership and time-to-market are key in global competing industries. If we both manufacture X, but you are continuously stuck with a large stock of deprecated parts and paying for a lot of warehousing those, while I am able to deliver the required parts 'just in time' as the production facility requires them; I win.

If suddenly some stuff happens which disrupts the supply chain of parts and you still have that big warehouse of parts and can keep selling the previous year generation of products, while my 'just in time' factory is running dry because of no parts; you 'win'.

Those aren't zero sum games though, it's not like one can't come up with a way to have the means of production of 'parts' redundant or in control so that no global supply chain issue can affect it (or limit the affect). Producing large quantities of everything 'just in case' is one way to address the issue, not necessarily the brightest way imo.

The problem was more that 'we' lost track of what critical capabilities we allowed to be outsourced/offshored and thus have became dependent on complex global supply chains over which we don't have control. 

It was rather ironic to read folks on twitter (and here) go all out on Germany for being so stupid having become dependent on Russian gas (which was stupid), but failed to see the big elephant in the room that isn't limited to Germany and is more critical compared to gas.

It's not necessarily about 'just in time', it's about actually doing competent risk analysis and looking at redundancy / dependency from a pov of critical thinking. Instead of (out)sourcing things on the cheap / profit maximization and not looking beyond the length of ones nose.

Edited March 23, 2023 by Lethaface

[Battlefront.com]

ISW's report from yesterday (March 22) noted that Russia is withdrawing offensive resources from Bakhmut and moving them to the fight for Avdiivka.  They speculate this is designed to draw away Ukrainian resources from Bakhmut and allow the Russians to try again to take Vuhledar.

One thing seems to be pretty clear is that Russia is concentrating its very limited offensive resources on taking ground in Donetsk instead of Luhansk.  For sure there are still small scale attacks going on from Kreminna northward, but that's all there is and no signs of being reinforced.

In case I forgot to post it, ISW recently pointed out that Wagner is going to see a sharp decrease in its manpower soon as 6 month prisoner contracts are expiring.  Prig seems to have had the bulk of his recruiting success early, therefore the 6 month period ending will lead to a disproportionally large part of his prisoner personnel dropping.  That said, these guys face pretty bleak prospects for meaningful lives back at home so maybe a sizeable number will renew their contracts in the near future.

Steve

[A Canadian Cat]

18 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Trying to engineer a nation is extremely hard, but that is what this is looking more and more what is going to be required in order to secure Ukraine and ensure Russia does not completely fly apart and make everything worse.

Do we have examples we can look to for such engineering - successfully? I suppose Germany and Japan circa 1945 come to mind but Hati, Iraq, Afghanistan have all been failures and pretty big ones.

[A Canadian Cat]

1 hour ago, Ultradave said:

You forgot the massive eyeroll!

No, no, he did eye roll - I heard it from hundreds of miles away.

[kevinkin]

26 minutes ago, Lethaface said:

If suddenly some stuff happens which disrupts the supply chain of parts and you still have that big warehouse of parts and can keep selling the previous year generation of products, while my 'just in time' factory is running dry because of no parts; you 'win'.

Thank, that's what I was referring to. Certain products don't belong within a just in time model. The analysis is over which products and how much inventory to hold in reserve. Can you make 65% of the finished good and finish it at a latter date? This is used to take unstable raw material and place them into a form with a greater shelf life. Pharma uses this since many compounds are liable. No one want to hold any inventory unless the deal they get pays for it and more. Forecasting is a specialty engineering field.

[Haiduk]

Hm... Somehing strange. General Staff claimed Russian troops abandoned Nova Kakhovka. Some Russian milbloggers posted some unclear messages like this

 

9/11/2022 Kherson, Russia. Surrendered. Evening...

23/03/2023

Novaya Kakhovka, Kherson oblast, Russia

That's all. By good will

 

But locals didn't confirm this information. Strange PsyOps...

[The_Capt]

Just now, IanL said:

Do we have examples we can look to for such engineering - successfully? I suppose Germany and Japan circa 1945 come to mind but Hati, Iraq, Afghanistan have all been failures and pretty big ones.

Maybe South Korea?  To be honest there are a lot more bad examples - post WWI Germany, same for Russia after 1917.  We have a bushel of failures in Africa.  Maybe Israel too...kinda...depending who you ask.

[The_Capt]

2 hours ago, kevinkin said:

Lots of questions and observations with no answers provided. We used to say at work "don't hide behind the data". This means even though the experiment was run to perfection and you showed beautiful graphs and tables, it's your data, you are the expert, now give us your interpretation. Don't hide behind your data. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/03/23/questions_without_answers_about_ukraine_149020.html

So I will cut in and say that speed is the answer. A lot of the trends and questions posed will be answered by the rapid defeat of Russia via retaking captured land so as not to let the situation in the Spring of '23 become the status quo. A status quo that the world might see as a small victory for evil at the cost of so many Ukrainian lives. But here is a question: why did we let the stabilizing effect that nukes had for generations all of a sudden become destabilizing?Answer: paralysis by over analysis.     

Or maybe a bit more to it?

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/russia-s-security-chief-blasts-west-dangles-nuclear-threats-1.6325742

The deep problem with nuclear deterrence is that it only works between rational actors.  So before we go all "here is how it is going to happen boiiii!" We probably need a good idea of just how rational Russia is or is not.  We have been around this tree a few times and are not going to answer it here but I am pretty sure the current US Administration is all over this question.  It is too easy to shout from the cheap seats and score political points (the author in this peice appears to be doing just that), it is another to be in the chair and having to deal with the daily realities.

 

[Battlefront.com]

3 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Maybe South Korea?  To be honest there are a lot more bad examples - post WWI Germany, same for Russia after 1917.  We have a bushel of failures in Africa.  Maybe Israel too...kinda...depending who you ask.

I can think of no examples of re-engineering a country without militarily occupying it.  WW1 Germany and post-1990 Russia are good examples of unsuccessful attempts to influence things positively from the outside.  Much of the rest of the world's troubled countries also have pretty poor results to show for themselves.

The record is pretty clear that creating good, stable peaceful states under direct military occupation is a mixed bag, non-military occupation is pretty decidedly not positive.  The lesson here is that the best chance of success comes from countries where the people within fully sign onto positive change, they lead the pursuit of change themselves, and they voluntarily seek good outside partnerships to get them there.  I see no hope of Russia being one of those states any time soon if ever.

Steve

[Billy Ringo]

24 minutes ago, kevinkin said:

Thank, that's what I was referring to. Certain products don't belong within a just in time model. The analysis is over which products and how much inventory to hold in reserve. Can you make 65% of the finished good and finish it at a latter date? This is used to take unstable raw material and place them into a form with a greater shelf life. Pharma uses this since many compounds are liable. No one want to hold any inventory unless the deal they get pays for it and more. Forecasting is a specialty engineering field.

Did someone say supply chain???

The challenge is not just what "products don't belong within a just in time model", but what products go into the products that make up the products....especially as it relates to machine, industrial, automotive, trucking, etc. parts.

Most parts/components wholesalers don't operate on Just-in-Time and carry inventory bolstered by safety stock, (based on lead time variations and demand fluctuations).  That inventory lasted about 6-9 months before the real effects of Covid/supply disruptions of 2021-2022 hit.   After that, they were jumping through all kinds of hoops to source anything they could from anywhere.  (Even buying assembled products to dis-assemble into in-demand components.)

All it takes is one component of a semi-complex assembly to stop the entire production line.  (Automotive, transmission, HVAC, industrial supply, etc. wholesalers may stock between 20,000 to 250,000 different products/SKUs in a single location.) 

As a side note, this is why I still think Russia is going to crash at some point as enough critical parts/components used in transportation/manufacturing will finally become unavailable, shutting down production lines.

Edited March 23, 2023 by Billy Ringo
Russia, being Russia....

[womble]

2 minutes ago, Billy Ringo said:

(Even buying assembled products to dis-assemble into in-demand components.)

At one stage, we were cannibalising already-built machines sitting in the "shipping yard" for parts to get further machines off the assembly line. 

[Vanir Ausf B]

8 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

This guy (from Twitter) seems to live in the 1950's where vehicles were only vulnerable at close range. 300m? Ukraine can easily whack tanks at several kilometres. I don't see how these mine clearing vehicles can ever do the job they are designed to do.

Full text from the "guy on Twitter".

_________

I'll start by praising our military engineers who created the BMP-3. God bless you all! Great car, I can't imagine what could be better.

Now about the UR-77.

An absolutely useless machine for the declared demining actions. Imagine a typical for the Donbass field between "zelenki". As a rule, it is 500-700 meters, or even more. "Serpent Gorynych" makes a passage 6 meters wide, up to 100 meters deep. As planned by the designers, he should reach the enemy at a distance of 300-200 meters and start all these manipulations? How do you imagine it? Can you imagine the battlefield at all and what is happening there?

It is clear that there are few suicides among the military, so they decided to throw the UR-77 remotely. You unhook the hoses with explosives from the ropes and shoot ... Well, firstly, the machine is not designed for such things, so accuracy, to put it mildly, suffers. Secondly, this thing often simply does not explode or only one sleeve explodes. Why so, I don't know. I'm just telling you what I saw on different sectors of the front. Yes, of course, if all these sleeves with plastite arrive at the enemy opornik, then his personnel will fly into space, but I repeat, the UR-77 was not created for these purposes.

I read that in Syria, "Gorynych" successfully dismantled some street barricades. Perhaps that's the whole point of this machine.

MOST of our destroyed equipment from Avdiivka to Zaporozhye is the result of mine explosions. If the Russian Army had an effective demining tool, then the battles were already going on at least near Dnepropetrovsk.

Many schizophrenics and people simply far from the earth are looking for some backstage games and conspiracies in the events at the front, but the reasons for the failures are so simple that many refuse to believe in them. For example, the fact that the Russian Army does not have effective means of mine clearance.

In justification, I can say that there are no such funds either in the Armed Forces of Ukraine or in NATO. We just have to spare no mines and NATO will not go anywhere, if anything ...

 

 

 

[JonS]

2 hours ago, Astrophel said:

It always struck me as a strange coincidence that NS1 should be comprehensively destroyed while NS2 - the pipeline Germany had been refusing to bring into service for several months - somehow survived miraculously.

It shouldn't strike you as strange. This wasn't a natural disaster or random freak accident. It was a deliberate act to create an effect and to send a message. Leaving 2 intact is presumably part of that message ("be a shame if something happened to your *other* pipe", perhaps).