How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Artkin]

12 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

See how long this video lasts. 

 

Thats a pretty clean looking trench. I guess it was dug by a machine? It would have been smart to send trench diggers last year. 

[chuckdyke]

2 minutes ago, Artkin said:

Thats a pretty clean looking trench. I guess it was dug by a machine? It would have been smart to send trench diggers last year. 

We don't see all of the network looks like a communication trench looking at the length of it.

[paxromana]

45 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

WWho,  the intergalactic lizard people?

Alien Space Bats!

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

It's a long time since I hung out of soc.history.what-if ... 

[paxromana]

22 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

We don't see all of the network looks like a communication trench looking at the length of it.

Even Comms trenches should zig-zag for the same reason fighting trenches should.

[Battlefront.com]

6 hours ago, kevinkin said:

That's just math and not geostrategy or geopolitics. Are we treating the landscape of this war as if if were a checker board? This war will not be decided by incoming and outgoing bombs; but by fallible humans at the top who decide where best to place their resources. The destiny of Ukraine and Russa is outside their own control. They are not checker pieces, but pawns in what has developed into a global proxy war that involves so much more than kinetic warfare. Realignment of supply chains; feeding the southern hemisphere; keeping the US military complex fed. Its amazing what societies will do when sanctions get in the way. And your Georgetown rent goes up. Gun to my head; India comes out on top if we could fast forward 7 years. 

Yeah, but the point I was addressing was math based.  Someone decided to make a math based argument that Russia can rebuild its military capacity within a meaningful timeframe, so I made a math based response.  Anything beyond that is not relevant to this particular point.

Steve

[billbindc]

8 hours ago, kevinkin said:

https://news.yahoo.com/turkeys-kilicdaroglu-exits-erodogans-shadow-061337781.html

Erdogan out. 

There are some pretty smart folks out there who think Erdogan doesn't honor the result if he loses. Powder dry on this one.

[billbindc]

6 hours ago, kevinkin said:

Demographics. 

Demographically, India passed China this year.

[Battlefront.com]

3 hours ago, womble said:

It's obvious that Russia is in the toilet, demographics wise, and China will certainly have problems. India's demographics problem is more that they're just going to have more poor people. Yay!

Watched a TV show repeat last night and a (~2015) it was pointed out that 80% of Indians have cellphones, but only 50% have access to modern sanitation in their homes.  Demographics is an important factor in assessing power and capabilities, but I would posit that there's more to it than that

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

2 minutes ago, billbindc said:

There are some pretty smart folks out there who think Erdogan doesn't honor the result if he loses. Powder dry on this one.

An ego maniac who has clearly demonstrated autocratic tendencies and has the backing of a radicalized minority fearful of change and everything around them might not conceded an electoral defeat and allow for a peaceful change of power?  Surely this wouldn't happen in a long established democracy like Turkey!

Steve

[Vanir Ausf B]

India has surpassed China in population but it's economy is structured very differently. It's manufacturing sector is relatively small, which means it can't follow the cheap labor/massive export- driven growth model. It's female workforce participation looks more like Middle Eastern countries than China or the west.

[billbindc]

 

The Putin directed theatrics are over for now...again.

[The_Capt]

18 minutes ago, billbindc said:

 

The Putin directed theatrics are over for now...again.

Help me out here.  How does this make Putin look strong? His dog threw a public temper tantrum and threatened to walk away from a military offensive and take his troops with him.  The guy gets pulled into Kremlin and promised whatever he wants, essentially giving into blackmail.

Why on earth would Putin “stage” this? The optics are terrible.  Like what is the angle here?

[Beleg85]

Muscovite video with YPR-765 hit by Russian fire. Fortunatelly, everyone seem to bail out.

 

[sross112]

4 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Help me out here.  How does this make Putin look strong? His dog threw a public temper tantrum and threatened to walk away from a military offensive and take his troops with him.  The guy gets pulled into Kremlin and promised whatever he wants, essentially giving into blackmail.

Why on earth would Putin “stage” this? The optics are terrible.  Like what is the angle here?

Externally to us it looks like a sh*tshow, but it's not about the external view. Internally it shows father Putin in control of his squabbling underlings. These stunts also give him the "evidence" that the failure lies on MOD when the UA wins this. It appears to me that Wagner is seen as an extension of Putin so he gets to be seen as the guy with the best troops, that made the most progress, and would have won if not for the bumbling MOD. These "incidents" can later be used to prove that Prig, and by extension Putin, did their upmost, but were harried at critical junctures that made them fail. This is just Putin getting the narrative laid out in advance for all the finger pointing that will certainly happen when it all falls apart. 

Others on here have a much better grasp of the internal politics in the Kremlin, but this is how I see it as a move to make Putin look strong in the chaos that follows.

[womble]

2 hours ago, Artkin said:

Well India is poised to overtake China in population soon if not already.

And? Total population is a very secondary measure of anything except, well, population.

[kevinkin]

1 hour ago, billbindc said:

Demographically, India passed China this year.

At least by raw numbers anyway. I think if you look into the numbers, India has advantages even without having just more people. And depending on other factors, more people can poise challenges too. 

[womble]

40 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Why on earth would Putin “stage” this? The optics are terrible.  Like what is the angle here?

He's playing power games between Prig and the MoD. It's never been Putin who choked off the supply of ordnance (etc), it was the wicked MoD, and Prig is a Good Dog , he is Putin's dog and deserves rewarding for his efforts around Bakhmut. And the MoD better do as Vlad says.

[kevinkin]

5 hours ago, womble said:

Love the detail. Thanks for enlightening me. Were you marked out of half in all your maths tests?[/sarcasm]

It's obvious that Russia is in the toilet, demographics wise, and China will certainly have problems. India's demographics problem is more that they're just going to have more poor people. Yay! They win the population game! Are you saying this will instantly (7 years is an eyeblink) turn India into the largest world economy? The strongest military force?  What are you saying India will parlay its young potential workforce into? Other than malcontents being played off against each other in religious and ethnic power games so that (like everywhere else) the 1% can live like rajahs?

I think relative to the rest of world as it was when we entered 2022, India will come out stronger (not the strongest). It will benefit the most from the changes coming about because of this God awful war. This has nothing to do with largest or strongest. Just which country, in relative terms, becomes the winner over the next decade.  That outcome is not certain. That's why I said gun to my head - a gut feeling. 

[The_Capt]

7 minutes ago, womble said:

He's playing power games between Prig and the MoD. It's never been Putin who choked off the supply of ordnance (etc), it was the wicked MoD, and Prig is a Good Dog , he is Putin's dog and deserves rewarding for his efforts around Bakhmut. And the MoD better do as Vlad says.

Man that is pretty Rube Goldberg.  So how is this going to somehow convince MoD to get back in line, seems a bit stretched?  Also, so which is it?  “Putin has iron clad control of the military so Prig is boxed in” or “The military keeps pushing out of lines so Putin is using Prig and Wagner as a counter-ploy?”

I mean I have heard both narratives on this.  If Putin has iron clad control of the military then simply order them to give over the ammo.  If he does not have iron clad control of the military getting a merc to publicly shame them could just as easily blow up in faces.  Even internally this makes Putin look weak - especially against the military, which may or may not be out of line. Anyone think that Putin is not a master-chess player after all?  Maybe he is actually just flailing here trying to keep everyone happy and his control is maybe not as tight as we thought?

 

[womble]

6 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Man that is pretty Rube Goldberg.  So how is this going to somehow convince MoD to get back in line, seems a bit stretched?  Also, so which is it?  “Putin has iron clad control of the military so Prig is boxed in” or “The military keeps pushing out of lines so Putin is using Prig and Wagner as a counter-ploy?”

I agree, it looks stretched. But I think Putin probably is a bit stretched at the moment. Either way you look at it (Putin giving in to a pet's tantrum, or Putin using a pet to publicly put the MoD in their place) it looks pretty hooky; maybe it's something else. But the whole Russian edifice is a clown car, anyway, so there's no reason it has to make sense in anyone's head but Putin's. Just look at their propaganda, flip flopping around like a dying fish. Maybe it's the sheer confusion induced by the randomness that's the goal, like Drunken Master kung fu?

[chrisl]

2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Watched a TV show repeat last night and a (~2015) it was pointed out that 80% of Indians have cellphones, but only 50% have access to modern sanitation in their homes.  Demographics is an important factor in assessing power and capabilities, but I would posit that there's more to it than that

Steve

Some time ago I worked with a company that was going to get stuff manufactured in India.  It was moderately high precision machining and polishing and then some processes that are also moderate precision for anybody in the semiconductor industry, but a major stretch for people outside that world.  It was stuff that I could go to multiple companies in the US for each process and get competitive bids that I could count on them being able to deliver.  The work was going to India because it was an international project where each country that was putting in money expected to spend most of it in their own country.  So this process went to India.

The only way they could do it there was like the old robber barons - the owner of the company that was doing it had to basically provide everything to the people doing the work: new facility, machines, education, transportation, on down to clothes and shoes.  They did make some nice prototypes, but I dropped off the project after that and later it sounded like they were struggling with reliable manufacturing.  It was probably very labor intensive and craft-style production, which makes repeatability tough, where in the US most of it would be been done in shops where a couple people would be running 5 or 6 heavily automated machines at a time.

China went through all that many decades earlier with manufacturing and tech production.  A lot of it is still robber baron style (Foxconn City), but the scale of it has become enormous and for a lot of things you can outsource the whole process, from engineering through production and even shipping.  India is nowhere near that yet, as far as I can tell.  

[Artkin]

47 minutes ago, womble said:

And? Total population is a very secondary measure of anything except, well, population.

We learn something new every day don't we?

"Then you say India will come out on top,  because...numbers! Ignoring the huge structural problems that India faces, and we could easily point to just physical infrastructure as an example,  who does India come out on top of? Ze Germans? And in what spheres of human activity?"

In population very obviously. Nothing else was stated. A country is limited by its geography and India's is not really favorable for the amount of people they have. Their city layouts are a perfect example of this.

[womble]

13 minutes ago, kevinkin said:

I think relative to the rest of world as it was when we entered 2022, India will come out stronger (not the strongest). It will benefit the most from the changes coming about because of this God awful war. This has nothing to do with largest or strongest. Just which country, in relative terms, becomes the winner over the next decade.  That outcome is not certain. That's why I said gun to my head - a gut feeling. 

So what you meant to say was "India will weather the storm better than other nations." Which is vastly different from "coming out on top". If the West stay the course, and facilitate Ukraine's victory, they will remain "on top", where they started. If "we" "fail", the existing order will be greatly disrupted, and China will be the prime beneficiary. Nearly everyone else will be losers, India included (even if the autocrat Nationalist Modi, who's as narcissistic as the next wannabe dictator thinks that India is some unstoppable powerhouse, and so would rather chip away at the existing power structures rather than clamber upon them), as "The West" withdraws its stabilising influence from the wider world.

That said, you reckon China, who're vastly less dependent on Russia, but will be able to get their energy at rock-bottom prices while no one else is buying, will do less well out of this than India, who're being stiffed on defense contracts and have pretty much entirely lost a geopolitical counterbalance to China, in the withering of Russian influence?

So long as China refrains from dropping the hammer on Taiwan (which is a whole 'nother kettle of fish to fry), they're much better placed to benefit from Russian misadventure than India over the next 7 years, whether they manage to freeze the conflict or if they get humiliated.

[Beleg85]

14 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

I mean I have heard both narratives on this.  If Putin has iron clad control of the military then simply order them to give over the ammo.  If he does not have iron clad control of the military getting a merc to publicly shame them could just as easily blow up in faces.  Even internally this makes Putin look weak - especially against the military, which may or may not be out of line. Anyone think that Putin is not a master-chess player after all?  Maybe he is actually just flailing here trying to keep everyone happy and his control is maybe not as tight as we thought?

The most logical explanation is simply dividing power between different security branches. The more they quarrell, the better- it's natural tendency of all autocrats to saw divisions and uncertainity. It's also  logical manifestation of Tsarist power from its very beginnings- to rise up from chaos, so it could be tamed by central authority, as opposed to social contract theory that underlines political order in Western countries.  So more Warhammer 40k rather than Hobbes/Rousseau/Locke. Putin himself additionally is somebody with history like that, so perhaps it could be (in his view beneficial) to create again some small chaos in controled conditions.

That being said, there are probably very real discussions in muscovite top about ammo usage and rationale behind Bakhmut head-walling as well. @billbindc is right that Prig is doing public drama, bacause he feels he can and have boss backup.

[danfrodo]

11 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Right, but the West is providing Ukraine with most of its combat power.  The combined industrial output of the West dwarfs that of Russia AND that's just on quantity.  Quality makes it vastly worse for Russia.

Let's say that Russia fully cranked up can make (totally inventing numbers here) 100 tanks, 25 aircraft, 1000 ATGM rockets, and 1m rounds of artillery ammo each year.  Let's also say that the West can donate half of that to Ukraine, but a significant amount of the artillery is PGMs and all of the rest of the stuff is superior to Russia's.  Which side would you bet on given the course of this war so far?

The point here is that Russia had a stupidly huge advantage over Ukraine in every single category of military capacity at the start of this war.  They lost almost all of it and whatever they are able to replace with new production is inferior to what was previously lost.  Sure, a BMP3 is superior to a BMP1, but it is inferior to the BMP3s already in the fight and those are being lost faster than they can be replaced.

Again, the notion that Russia can fix this problem is unsupported by any reasonable assessment of the facts.  However, if Western support weakens to the extent that new Russian production (with possible help from China) is able to keep up with losses, while also inflicting losses on Ukraine, then there could be problems.  But even then my money is still on Ukraine winning this regardless.  I have been saying since before this war started that a frozen conflict, with no shooting, is not something Russia can sustain long term.  The regime will not survive a weakened and humiliated state indefinitely.  For sure it won't survive Putin's departure, which even without a push from someone could happen at any minute because mortality ends whenever it ends.

Steve

On top of the material issues, RU suffers from the soft factors:  morale, will to win, training.  Also basics like quality/quanity of food, medical care, rotations, gear, officer quality, officer concern for men, men's trust in officers, etc.