How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Haiduk]

13 minutes ago, Harmon Rabb said:

Exclusive: Ukraine’s special services ‘likely’ behind strikes on Wagner-backed forces in Sudan, a Ukrainian military source says (CNN)

War expands to the African continent? Hey @Haiduk, since you are our local expert on the Ukrainian military have you heard anything about this?

You can remember articles in US media how GUR had secret negotiations with one of Syrian fractions to attack Russian and Wagner bases and how this concerned US, so after talks between US and Ukraine representatives this intentions were canceled. 

So no any impossible. Budanov is very dare guy  How it said "Deeper and deeper" 

Not only Sudan, by the way - you can find in news how Wagner troops suffered heavy losses in Mali several days ago. Who knows?..  

Edited September 19, 2023 by Haiduk

[Haiduk]

Russian TG claims HQ of 7th air-assault division was struck during planning. Reportedly many officers were killed and wounded. As if this confirmed Yevgeniy Khanin - chief of veteran organization of 7th division. But Russian source says it happened on "left bank of Dnepr in Kherson oblast". It's strange, because division operates in more than 200 km from this place. 

UKR sources today reported about missile strike on Melitopol, so maybe it was there. 

 

[Haiduk]

Exellent 3D projection of southern Bakhmut flank from Poulet Volant. Obviously seen next objectives of UKR forces - to seize ridges and reach the road. After this lowlands will be on direct LOS. 

In present time Russians are conducting desperate "meat attacks" on "useless ruines". Obviously "big HQ bosses" were very angry by lost of two villages and new mobs of mobiks and Shtorm Z were directed to die. Though, they reportedly achieved some local successes yesterday. Their manpower advantage forced UKR troops to abandon two positions south from Andriivka and one in Kurdiumivka area. All attacks on Klishchiivka were repelled. 

One Russian TG complains that reaction of Russian command on the loss of villages is "hysterical" and this caused next waves of unprepared "meat assaults" with bad coordination, with poor artillery support, which again will grind reserves, so through some time a moment will come, when nobody will left to defend the road and this can cause crash of the front.

 

Edited September 19, 2023 by Haiduk

[Letter from Prague]

Wait if Ukraine is also fighting Russia in Africa, did this just became a world war?

[Centurian52]

1 hour ago, Haiduk said:

It's claimed 1A5DK. The same tank from previous photo, but in camo net.

I've read today Ukriane rejected to take 10 Leo 1A5 from Germany, becausae they were in very bad technical conditins. Also reportedly several Leo 1A5, which came to service already have broken down.

Hmm. Regrettably that actually makes a lot of sense. Leopard 1s have been out of production for quite a while (Wikipedia says production ended in 1984, so even the newest one is 39 years old). However reliable they might have been back when they were brand new, any equipment gets less reliable as it ages. I had hoped that the 100+ (now nearly 200) Leopard 1s pledged to Ukraine would be a boon (not as good as Leo2s sure, but at least the Leo1s were being pledged in more meaningful quantities). But it won't do any good if none of them are in working order anymore.

[kluge]

16 minutes ago, Letter from Prague said:

Wait if Ukraine is also fighting Russia in Africa, did this just became a world war?

No. A world war is a conflict that directly involves most if not all of the world's major powers.

Which is a separate concept from two nations at war with one another in multiple locations across the world.

[Centurian52]

22 minutes ago, kluge said:

No. A world war is a conflict that directly involves most if not all of the world's major powers.

Which is a separate concept from two nations at war with one another in multiple locations across the world.

Personally I like the definitions offered by Steven Pinker.

Small war: Deaths in the thousands

Medium war: Deaths in the tens of thousands

Large war: Deaths in the hundreds of thousands

Historically large war: Deaths in the millions

World war: Deaths in the tens of millions

No definition of a "world war" will ever be perfect (largely because any definition is obliged to include WW1, which was almost entirely a European war, not really a global war). But the advantage to defining it by the scale of the carnage, rather than by the number or size of the countries involved, is that it neatly prevents a skirmish between all the world's major powers over a desert island which results in two guys getting wounded from being called a world war.

[NamEndedAllen]

2 hours ago, Letter from Prague said:

Wait if Ukraine is also fighting Russia in Africa, did this just became a world war?

Well, we are definitely far from “World Peace”.
And not to forget millions of refugees having fled, in Europe and the Middle East.
And Cyber War in and out of the Shadows. 

The classic labels of war may have gotten a lot squishier since last we applied them. Squishier still, the divisions between one war and another and the next. Historical analogy in retrospect: some historians consider “WWII” as a continuation of “WWI” with a bit of a pause.  

[The_Capt]

1 hour ago, Centurian52 said:

Personally I like the definitions offered by Steven Pinker.

Small war: Deaths in the thousands

Medium war: Deaths in the tens of thousands

Large war: Deaths in the hundreds of thousands

Historically large war: Deaths in the millions

World war: Deaths in the tens of millions

No definition of a "world war" will ever be perfect (largely because any definition is obliged to include WW1, which was almost entirely a European war, not really a global war). But the advantage to defining it by the scale of the carnage, rather than by the number or size of the countries involved, is that it neatly prevents a skirmish between all the world's major powers over a desert island which results in two guys getting wounded from being called a world war.

So is a Solar System war = Deaths in the hundreds of millions?  I never really found these weird metrics useful to be honest.  Deaths are part of war but there are a lot of other dimensions: duration, scope, scale and impact/imprint.  One could argue that the war between Christianity and Islam has been going on at some level since the First Crusade.

At the end of the day a war is a large as the collision of certainties that is driving it.  Those certainties can be measure in #s of people, however, they can also be measured in how deeply embedded a certainty is within a people.  War is a deeply human expression and as such trying to pin down hard metrics is very hard and in some cases counter-productive: “oh this is a small war”, well which thousands of people died…how did they die, why did they die?   These are far more important factors in conflict management than raw body counts.  Even historically, a vicious small war can tell us more than a long drawn out slog.  Finally all wars are huge for those fighting them.  So even if one is in a “small war” the cultural impact can be significant and imprint it leaves on a society significant.

Not to beat up on Pinker but war is never simple or reducible - like any other collective human expression it is a non-linear soup of emotion and memory.  

[LongLeftFlank]

29 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Not to beat up on Pinker but war is never simple or reducible - like any other collective human expression it is a non-linear soup of emotion and memory.  

It's perfectly ok to beat up on Pinker.

https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf

In his [2015] book The Better Angels of Our Nature, psychologist Steven Pinker made the case that everything from slavery and torture to violent personal crime and cruelty to animals has decreased in modern times. He presented masses of evidence. Such trends, it would certainly seem, are highly unlikely to be reversed. Nassim Taleb criticized Pinker’s arguments a few years ago, arguing that Pinker didn’t take proper account of the statistical nature of war as a historical phenomenon, specifically as a time series of events characterized by fat tails. Such processes naturally have long periods of quiescence, which get ripped apart by tumultuous upheavals, and they lure the mind into mistaken interpretations.

[The_Capt]

1 hour ago, LongLeftFlank said:

It's perfectly ok to beat up on Pinker.

https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf

In his [2015] book The Better Angels of Our Nature, psychologist Steven Pinker made the case that everything from slavery and torture to violent personal crime and cruelty to animals has decreased in modern times. He presented masses of evidence. Such trends, it would certainly seem, are highly unlikely to be reversed. Nassim Taleb criticized Pinker’s arguments a few years ago, arguing that Pinker didn’t take proper account of the statistical nature of war as a historical phenomenon, specifically as a time series of events characterized by fat tails. Such processes naturally have long periods of quiescence, which get ripped apart by tumultuous upheavals, and they lure the mind into mistaken interpretations.

My largest issue with his entire argument was reducing war to statistical deaths.  War is violent but on many levels and more often the psychological scars on an entire society can leave impacts far beyond body counts.  Vietnam had an enormous impact on the US collective psyche well out of proportion of deaths compared to WW2…and then we have Blackhawk Down.  

Pinker misses the relativity of war on a micro-social and then how that can spread to macro.  So his entire thesis - we are getting more peaceful is not only statistically weak when looking on a broad scale, it also misses the trees for the forest on a smaller scale.  There is an entire slice in the social and political sciences that bought into the idea that war was a disease we could be cured of a temporary phenomenon that sprung from upscaling civilization.  In reality mankind has been violent with each other from pretty much Day 1.  It is an impulse that is baked into us and will be very hard to remove, if ever.  In the end Hobbes and Rousseau continue to wrestle for our souls…when in reality I think they were both right and wrong.  We are creatures who have always lived on the margin. Suspended between order and chaos, thriving and self destruction.  

This war is no exception.  It is the most wasteful and useless war in a long time.  Russia was not running out of X.  Ukraine was not an imminent threat to Russian survival (at least not that we can figure).  This war hardly even counts as “policy by other means”, it is too personal and irrational to make that much sense.  We just lived through a Great Peace and now it looks like it is over.  Hard military power as a means of diplomacy is back on the table.  Irrational and personal causes of war are back (they never really went anywhere) and we are leaning back to Rule of the Gun on a global scale.  Or maybe that is just how it looks on a Tuesday.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

9 hours ago, akd said:

Wait, did ZOKA turn at some point, or is this parody?

If I recall correctly, his identity was revealed a few weeks back and he deleted his account soon after the backlash hit. A fella went "thank you very much" and took over the free real estate and is running it as a pro Ukraine account.

Edited September 20, 2023 by Elmar Bijlsma

[dan/california]

48 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

 Or maybe that is just how it looks on a Tuesday.

The task of course is to prevent it from becoming rather worse by Thursday.

[Carolus]

As someone who works in the area of electronics assembly and cable harness manufacture (not defense specific, but sometimes as a sub-supplier for defense contracts), there are now a lot of open tenders for F-16 parts from the NATO procurement office.

Might be just a coincidence. But last year I saw increased tenders for HIMARS and PATRIOT parts going online, always around the time the deliveries got announced publicly. I think they are really bust getting the vehicles ready for the next weeks and months.

The war is noticable on the industrial front, but still rather small numbers.

Edited September 20, 2023 by Carolus

[Kraft]

14 hours ago, akd said:

Wait, did ZOKA turn at some point, or is this parody?

 

Zoka's real, pathetic, identity and current whereabouts were found by some passionate people who offered him the chance to deleate all his propaganda social media, to not be doxxed and get aquainted, in real life, with even more passionate people.

Such is the story of the little rat who yapped on social media

The current "zoka" accounts are from Nafo people who quickly snatched the name rights

Edited September 20, 2023 by Kraft

[Bulletpoint]

8 hours ago, LongLeftFlank said:

It's perfectly ok to beat up on Pinker.

https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf

In his [2015] book The Better Angels of Our Nature, psychologist Steven Pinker made the case that everything from slavery and torture to violent personal crime and cruelty to animals has decreased in modern times. He presented masses of evidence. Such trends, it would certainly seem, are highly unlikely to be reversed. Nassim Taleb criticized Pinker’s arguments a few years ago, arguing that Pinker didn’t take proper account of the statistical nature of war as a historical phenomenon, specifically as a time series of events characterized by fat tails. Such processes naturally have long periods of quiescence, which get ripped apart by tumultuous upheavals, and they lure the mind into mistaken interpretations.

He's still not really been proven wrong though, because his argument is about the amount of people dying in wars compared to the total population size. You can definitely criticise that approach, but that's the crux of it.

The war in Ukraine, horrible as it is, is still a relatively small war, if you look at it in a cynical way and compare to the population sizes of the countries involved.

I think it's this cynicism that triggers a lot of people about Pinker. And of course that he has big, curly hair and called his book "The Better Angels of our Nature".

[SteelRain]

17 hours ago, Centurian52 said:

Darn. And I was so looking forward to seeing some Leopard 1A5Vs

As far as i understand it, the problem could be caused by the armor layout and not the capability to carry more weight.
The currently delivered Leopards have the late box type turret. It consists of an outer and inner thin steel plate with a filling of air or some kind of plastic.





Source of the images:
https://ndb51.wordpress.com/2019/08/12/thu-vi-xem-xe-tang-leopard-1a3-trong-tinh-trang-bi-cat-doc/

My guess is that the outer steel plate can't withstand the energy produced by the explosion of the ERA Brick.

The Canadians demonstrated that the Leopard 1 can handle a lot of weight by adding MEXAS NERA add-on armor kits while deployed to Kosovo and MEXAS + mine plows or dozer blades while operating in Afghanistan.
 

 

 

Edited September 20, 2023 by SteelRain

[poesel]

15 hours ago, Haiduk said:

It's claimed 1A5DK. The same tank from previous photo, but in camo net.

I've read today Ukriane rejected to take 10 Leo 1A5 from Germany, becausae they were in very bad technical conditins. Also reportedly several Leo 1A5, which came to service already have broken down.

Yes, all of this happened and made some waves in the media here. It is quite a bit of an embarrassment but it looks like they forgot to train technicians and supply spare parts. 

The 10 ‚new‘ tanks they wanted to deliver were used in the training of Ukrainian soldiers and are thus in need for maintenance. Same as the 10 already delivered which were obviously tested, too.

Now everyone is in a rush to fix this issue. 

 

 

[Lethaface]

On 9/15/2023 at 8:06 PM, JonS said:

Well, clearly that isn't a requirement, but while we're making the game boring; can we add a fire-planning interface in there too?

Having some form of engineering, for instance AFVs with rollers/dozer blades in the modern CMx2 games, wouldn't mean the simulation has to go balls deep into the engineering subject/specialization. A limited set of eng capabilities could make the 'things go boom' more fun and allow one to sort of simulate/portray the RL problems we see on 'the news'. At the moment there is no real way to clear minefields in CMx2 modern. 

The same goes for fortifications; I wouldn't enjoy a 'dig your own fort' simulation but the current modelling of fortifications in CMx2 limit the amount of tactical battles one can setup up decently enough. 

I guess some improvements could also be made to fire-planning in order to keep everyone on board ;-P. I was already happy to have learned that the modelling of artillery effects against AFVs is going to be improved.

Anyway I thought you both have a valid point and that there is some fruits in the middle. 

[Lethaface]

On 9/16/2023 at 3:10 PM, LongLeftFlank said:

...I suppose the general idea is that we must regretfully put a Russian Home Front Collapse (((((Dolchstosslegende)))) in the 'nice to hope for, and not entirely outside the realm of the possible, but I wouldn't bet on it', category of causative dei ex machini for an early cease fire. Until it happens, sure.

Adam Tooze is pretty sound; no particular ideological brief I can discern in a decade of reading him, and his historical work on Weimar/pre-WW2 Germany political economy alone makes his views on these topics well worth considering... IMHO. But sure, he has no better direct line to Gawd than any of us mortals. YMMV.

@billbindc (our go-to for the Permanent Establishment Party line ) Tooze is fair dinkum by you, amirite?

FWIW I always find his understanding/theories very interesting and well thought out. However even the brightest mind can't fix 'garbage in, garbage out'. 

It's not unheard of for think tanks, academics, researchers etc to work with the data that is available to them and make the best of it. Even if that data ought to be tossed out the window Russia style.
Not saying Tooze is directly guilty of that in this instance, but how did he get the data he uses and how does he know that it's 'good'? 

[Eddy]

Quote

— 30,000 shells 155mm
— ~ 3,800 shells DM125 (smoke) 155mm
— 105,000 shells for 120mm (different versions)
— 480 M26 (AT2) missiles
— 200 MRAPs
— Mine clearance systems
— Pionierpanzer 2A1 Dachs AEV
— Bergepanzer 2 or 3 ARV
— 50 Unmanned surface vessels
— Winter Clothing
— Power and heat generators
— Spare parts packages for already delivered systems
— Material for explosive ordnance disposal

More donations announced from Germany.

M26 (AT2) are not the cluster munition variant but variant carrying anti-tank mines. 'Different versions' for 120mm means normal, smoke, illumination apparently.

I wonder what the 50 unmanned surface vessels are.

Edited September 20, 2023 by Eddy

[LongLeftFlank]

1 hour ago, Lethaface said:

FWIW I always find his understanding/theories very interesting and well thought out. However even the brightest mind can't fix 'garbage in, garbage out'. 

It's not unheard of for think tanks, academics, researchers etc to work with the data that is available to them and make the best of it. Even if that data ought to be tossed out the window Russia style.
Not saying Tooze is directly guilty of that in this instance, but how did he get the data he uses and how does he know that it's 'good'? 

I am just a poor boy though my story's seldom told
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles, such are promises
...All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest

Look, it's the same bloody macroeconomic data everyone uses, with all its limitations.

Decent sliced and diced historical sets for countries are available at UNCTAD; I use them myself for work, and they are quite interesting for certain purposes (trends in aggregate supply and demand, energy intensity, etc.). Yes, some data could be falsified or misclassified, but even USSR or Mao's China didn't go to extreme lengths.

...And what it's telling Tooze is not to count on the Russian consumer blowing a whistle in the event of a 'long war' cuz too many guns and not enough butter are crimping his lifestyle. Which makes reasonable intuitive sense to me, unless China decides to side with the West or sumfink.

He makes no claims though regarding the long term ability of the Russian economy to sustain the war machine.

I don't get what people are so torqued about here.

Edited September 20, 2023 by LongLeftFlank

[cesmonkey]

Rybar had this interesting telegram post about Ukraine's tactics for launching storm shadow missiles against Crimea:
https://t.me/rybar/52150
 

Quote

️ Combined attack of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on Crimea

A few hours ago, Ukrainian formations launched another missile strike on Crimea . 11 Su-24M bombers took off from the Starokonstantinov airfield, five of which were carriers of Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles. Having flown to the border of the Odessa and Nikolaev regions, the groups of aircraft split up: nine remained in approximately the same area, and a pair went south to Ochakov . Eight Storm Shadows were launched around 12 o'clock in Crimea .

At the same time, reconnaissance groups of the Bears PMC noted that two Su-24M , passing at a low altitude of about 40 meters above the water , launched from the Black Sea . And before this, Ukrainian planes fired three AGM-160 MALD decoy missiles to mislead air defense systems.

Crews of the Pantsir-S1 air defense missile system of the 31st Air Force and Air Defense Division shot down five cruise missiles over Cape Tarkhankut and the Belbek airfield . Three Storm Shadows fell in the Verkhnesadovoye area - the target was likely a former military facility near the village.

A few hours before the attack fromA reconnaissance drone of an unidentified type took off from Kherson , which, rounding Cape Tarkhankut, occupied a patrol area west of Kachi and directed aircraft. It is highly likely that he was shot down by air defense systems.

This attack demonstrates a slight change in cruise missile tactics. Previously, such massive raids were carried out at night or early in the morning, but not during the day. And the flight of bombers at extremely low altitude is something that Ukrainian crews have been practicing for many months, trying to exploit gaps in air defense detection systems.

High resolution map

English version

#Crimea #Russia #Ukraine
@rybar

 

[Centurian52]

14 hours ago, The_Capt said:

So is a Solar System war = Deaths in the hundreds of millions?  I never really found these weird metrics useful to be honest.  Deaths are part of war but there are a lot of other dimensions: duration, scope, scale and impact/imprint.  One could argue that the war between Christianity and Islam has been going on at some level since the First Crusade.

At the end of the day a war is a large as the collision of certainties that is driving it.  Those certainties can be measure in #s of people, however, they can also be measured in how deeply embedded a certainty is within a people.  War is a deeply human expression and as such trying to pin down hard metrics is very hard and in some cases counter-productive: “oh this is a small war”, well which thousands of people died…how did they die, why did they die?   These are far more important factors in conflict management than raw body counts.  Even historically, a vicious small war can tell us more than a long drawn out slog.  Finally all wars are huge for those fighting them.  So even if one is in a “small war” the cultural impact can be significant and imprint it leaves on a society significant.

Not to beat up on Pinker but war is never simple or reducible - like any other collective human expression it is a non-linear soup of emotion and memory.  

It was supposed to be a very rough definition, which is why it was just going by orders of magnitude. Pinker is well aware that there are far more dimensions to war than just body count. But he needed a model to help explain what he was talking about to the reader, and this one was good enough (I seem to recall that he was talking about scale invariance in this chapter, and using this model he was able to point out that the ratio of small wars to medium wars was the same as the ratio of medium wars to large wars and so on (with the somewhat terrifying implication that no matter how large a war gets, there is a constant probability of it getting even larger)). He was not trying to denigrate the experiences of people who fought in smaller wars. In fact he did not even begin to imply that their experiences were less valid than the experiences of people who fought in large wars (is the experience of someone who survived a gang war which killed a few dozen people any less traumatic just because the incident was tiny compared to an interstate war?). He was not trying to reduce all of warfare to this one concept. This was a tiny footnote in a big book.

Deaths in the hundreds of millions would almost certainly be a nuclear war. And if you want to extend the scale into the billions, that would just be the last war (though it's generally a bad idea to try to extend models beyond their intended scope (all models break down eventually)). This scale obviously will not work in the far future when the size of the human population is very different from what it is today.

I like the definition because when we are talking about whether or not war X qualifies as a world war, we really don't need to account for every dimension of warfare. The scale of the war is the only dimension that matters for answering that question, because ultimately what we mean by a "world war" is a "really goddamn big war". It is only defining one dimension, scale. It is perfectly fine to refer to one dimension at a time. In fact it may even be necessary to be able to talk about one dimension at a time to allow us to go into greater detail. Dimensions I've found myself discussing lately include but are not limited to duration, intensity, relative capabilities (peer, near peer, asymmetric), and whether a war is a conventional war or a guerilla war (sometimes called an unconventional war or an insurgency/counterinsurgency). So I'm well aware those other aspects exist. But they don't need to be taken into account when you're just trying to define scale. Not every concept about war needs to capture every other concept about war. It would be impossible to discuss any one concept in detail if that were the case.

Edited September 20, 2023 by Centurian52

[Kinophile]

Just to give some topographical sense to those village names near Bahkmut we're hearing about lately (many thanks to @Haiduk for the Poulet Volant connection!)

Basic GMap view:

Satellite view

Basic GMap terrain layer:

Note Odradivka on the dominant N-S ridge...

Poulet Volant's tactical map

Klishchiivka originally, looking North-West (3d view)

https://www.google.com/maps/@48.5277713,37.9579843,3a,75y,311.84h,90.5t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipO2PHVOcznzIZyPRktdiN_mlnoDQl42dkYzqBxf!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipO2PHVOcznzIZyPRktdiN_mlnoDQl42dkYzqBxf%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-20-ya3.0000002-ro-0-fo100!7i8192!8i4096!5m1!1e4?entry=ttu

Looking East

The liberation photo was taken at that corner, marked red

No GMAP photos available near Andriivka but we do have this from  previously:

 

Edited September 20, 2023 by Kinophile