How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[LongLeftFlank]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Boris Johnson was pretty blunt in his criticism of TC's interview:

 

Maybe BoJo should /sarc embrace the whole Global Criminal Mastermind shtick to fuel his political comeback.  Comedians seem to be playing well in politix these days, after all 

One day leading black hooded SAS speedboat commandos to hit the nuke plant, the next 'sploding the Nordstream pipeline from the deck of his luxury yacht.

...Maybe post some TikToks while stroking a Persian cat.

[JonS]

37 minutes ago, danfrodo said:

I actually hope they'll spend this money on drones.  Maybe one version would be like one seen here recently, that can carry a person-sized payload.  Comes in, delivers a soldier or ammo or food and leaves w wounded soldier.  ~100kg payload should do it.

By the by; 100kg probably isn't enough for a soldier and their equipment. It's /probably/ enough for a wounded soldier, on the assumption they're stripped of weapons, webbing, helmet, & armour before being loaded in 'the coffin.'

A 200kg max load would give an adequate performance margin in most circumstances I should think, or possibly 150kg if you're prepared to accept failure more often (because hot and high, or "just one more" AT4 stuffed in there, or etc).

But otherwise I quite like the idea of the flying coffin as a platoon mule. As Syd Jary once wrote, bring back my carrier (talking about bren carriers at the platoon level).

Edited February 10 by JonS

[Harmon Rabb]

40 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

...Maybe post some TikToks while stroking a Persian cat.

I did some quick research on Google, and found out Boris Johnson is way ahead of us.

Edited February 10 by Harmon Rabb

[dan/california]

2 hours ago, NamEndedAllen said:

Oregon Dan’s (or was it CA Dan?) wish comes true. Update on impact of Ukraine War on USA high profile and $$$ military program:

https://www.twz.com/air/cancelling-the-future-attack-recon-helicopter-was-the-right-move

“The news that the U.S. Army is cancelling one of its highest profile aviation programs, the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA), with two competing prototypes already constructed, was a shock to many, but it really shouldn't have been. As the Pentagon is stacking its chips on the possibility of a high-end fight in the Pacific, and seeing the results of helicopter combat operations in Ukraine, the relevance of the FARA program had to be deeply questioned, and the assumptions of future aerial warfare it was based on needed serious re-examination too.”
 

It was me. 

One of the greater outbreaks of sanity in Pentagon history. The tech has simply left manned helicopters behind. There are smart people working frantically on phased array radars that can tell real sparrows from the carbon fiber version that is coming to kill you, You simply can't hide a full size rotor blades anymore.

Edited February 10 by dan/california

[FancyCat]

Zelensky honored Zaluzhny and Budanov with the Hero of Ukraine, and Zaluzhny initiated 2 hugs with Zelensky. Does not seem to indicate hard feelings to me at least.

 

[Harmon Rabb]

I think most of us here are familiar with the 3rd Assault Brigade, with some of the incredible combat footage we have seen them in.

Looking forward to seeing them put Bradley IFVs to good use.

Edited February 10 by Harmon Rabb

[Harmon Rabb]

Quote

Russian Telegram channels reported that the interview with Carlson and Carlson himself was not to Putin's liking, and the interview itself was considered a failure:

"The Kovalchuk clan sharply criticizes the idea of an interview with the American journalist Carlson. They say that the problem is the unpreparedness of the interview arrangement - it was Gromov's and Peskov's mistake. Putin should have talked about conservative values, the creation of a conservative alliance, and moving on - but he went into history and platitudes about Ukraine. Naryshkin, who allegedly planted ideas with documents of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi and nonsense with Poland, also played a negative role here. He set Putin up to the fullest. Medinsky would not allow such a thing."

According to reports, Putin didn't like Tucker Carlson - "a snob and a useful idiot who got a meaningful fee, but was lazy and lacked creativity."

Kovalchuk family believes they could have done better with Tucker Carlson, but "everything was wasted." There's a wave of complaints in the Kremlin.

As @Haiduk thought me a long time ago, I should not trust everything that Anton Gerashchenko says. But if this is true, I guess Putin should have kept the message simple. Instead of going into esoteric historical details.

Disappointment in the interview from Russia's elites?

 

Edited February 10 by Harmon Rabb

[chuckdyke]

A useful idiot who is not useful even for Putin.

[dan/california]

18 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

A useful idiot who is not useful even for Putin.

My opinion of Carlson is unprintable, but he would have helped Putin do a vastly better job of this if he had been asked/allowed. The boring and idiotic rant Putin just subjected everyone on too was his own world view, in agonizing detail. 

Putin's problem is dictators syndrome, it has been so long since anyone was willing to give him honest advice, much less criticism, that he probably thinks he was fascinating for the whole multi hour spiel. This is of course also how he wound up launching a completely unnecessary war with grossly inadequate forces, lousy logistics, and one of the worst plans in human history.

Edit: ...in the mud season.

Edited February 10 by dan/california

[Offshoot]

1 hour ago, Harmon Rabb said:

Disappointment in the interview from Russia?

Maybe, but what it does show is one of two things: the power plays among the Russian clans/factions continue; or Gerashchenko is trying to stir up trouble between the clans.

[Zeleban]

33 minutes ago, Offshoot said:

Maybe, but what it does show is one of two things: the power plays among the Russian clans/factions continue; or Gerashchenko is trying to stir up trouble between the clans.

https://ria.ru/20240209/simonyan-1926316813.html

Not only Gerashchenko. Margarita Simonyan, one of the main Russian propagandists, complains that Tucker Carlson did not start a conversation with Putin about conservative values (after all, this is the main idea of Carlson’s viewers). Thus, even loyal Putin propagandists criticize this interview.

Be that as it may, even Carlson himself said that he was not yet ready to comment on this interview. Which indicates his negative impression.

Edited February 10 by Zeleban

[Offshoot]

23 minutes ago, Zeleban said:

https://ria.ru/20240209/simonyan-1926316813.html

Not only Gerashchenko. Margarita Simonyan, one of the main Russian propagandists, complains that Tucker Carlson did not start a conversation with Putin about conservative values (after all, this is the main idea of Carlson’s viewers). Thus, even loyal Putin propagandists criticize this interview

That article is certainly more credible than the unlinked Telegram sources mentioned in Geraschenko's tweet. Assuming what Geraschenko said about the Kovalchuk clan is correct, neither them nor Simonyan blame Putin for the flawed interview; the Kovalchuk clan blame Gromov and Peskov (and Carlson a little bit) and Simonyan blames Carlson wholly. This makes even less sense if Putin himself is unhappy with the interview. He was in the chair and could have talked about any subject he wanted but preferred to dither on schoolbook history.

[poesel]

Wrt to Scholz meeting with Biden: it's a bit funny that Germany, who was scolded for its pusillanimity, seems to have become one of the main driving powers behind the support of Ukraine. How the tables turn.
Even inside Germany, there is no real opposition against that support. There is an ongoing-heated debate here about the funds for the fiscal year of 2024 with, amongst others, huge farmer protests. But no one (important) has proposed to cut the funds for Ukraine. That has surprised me TBH.
But then it is very German to take a long time to get around to one thing, but then we stick to it forever (for better or worse).

[Carolus]

Russian Starlink not just in occupied territory, but directly on the zero line too.

 

 

[The_Capt]

19 hours ago, Fernando said:

 

1. WWI: was NOT just a war where armies slaughtered other armies from their trenches. This is a very simplistic, , western-front-centered  oversimplification. WWI was much more than the Western Front. In fact it was won by the Allies OUTSIDE the Western Front, by collapsing all other enemy fronts. It was also a war of movement indeed.

• In 1914 it was a war of movement in the east and west. Russians broke the A-H front and took most of Galitzia in the East.Germans annihilated two Russian armies in East Prussia and Poland. It was also a war of movement in the west until the front got stabilized after the race to the sea.
• In 1915 Germans and Austrian broke the East Front in Gorlitze-Tarnow then advanced hundred of kilometers. Bulgaria entered the war, so Serbia was defeated and occupied. Turkey invaded the Sinai.
• In 1916, Russians launched the Brusilov offensive. In the best Russian tradition it was a incredible carnage, but there were larger advances and Austria-Hungary was on the verge of colapse. Romania entered the war on the Allied side. It was attacked and mostly occupied in a lighting campaign by the Central Powers. 
• In 1917 Russia collapsed and the Central Power armies advanced hundreds of kilometers inside Russia. The Caporetto offensive almost crushed the Italian Front, so Italy was on the verge of colapse. The Allied offensive captured Sinai and started the campaign which ended with the capture of Palestine and the final Turkish defeat.
• In 1918 the Italians won Vittorio Venetto battle, a general Allied advance in Italy started and A-H began its process to colapse. The Salonica front also collapsed leaving Bulgaria out of the war. Austria-Hungary had NO forces to cover the new fronts and the collapsing Italian front so eventually it surrendered. Then Germany, after Bulgaria, Turkey and A-H surrenders, had no forces to cover the Western Front and the whole Italian+Balkan front. 

In WWI case it was not exhaustion which made Germany surrender. All belligerent countries were as exhausted as Germany. Germany realized it was going to be check mated in three movements, so rather to fight to the grim end conceded defeat and signed an armistice. ALL countries were exhausted, including France, which had some mutinies in 1917, Italy and UK, not only Germany. 

2. At this point in the war I don't believe in a Russian colapse. Perhaps in three of four years, but I am not sure Ukraine will be able to wait for it and avoid collapsing itself. I am afraid that at present, time is more on the Russian side than the Ukrainian one. BTW I support Ukraine with no reservations. 

3. South Korea was a stalemate, not a South Korea-NATO victory indeed. SK survived, but North Korea survived too. Did both sides win? Did both sides lose? The fact is both countries are not even in peace yet. They have just signed an armistice.

4. Do are Stalingrad, Gettysburg and Waterloo examples of winning a campaign by just defending? First of all. They were BATTLES, no campaigns. The whole campaign including maneuvers where the side which took the offensive finally lost. If after those victories the defender had sit in his/her butt, doing nothing, but defending their defensive positions, there had been no results. In fact, in Gettysburg case there were no results. Meade didn't advance for weeks. Then finally, when it finally did it, it was too late, so it was defeated by Lee.

5. I already said an old Spanish saying "Quién no se consuela, es porque no quiere". which could be translated as "The person who does not console himself is because he does not want to do so". If there is no total, decisive victory, each side may claim they won in some degree. If Russia and Ukraine signed an armistice today,  Ukraine would survive as a nation. That would be a victory. However 20% of their territory and perhaps more population (including people who left the country and will not return) would be lost. That would be a defeat, wouldn't it?. Would it be 20% victory and 80% defeat, 80 victory and 20% defeat, or something in the middle?  I left it up to you. 
 

WW1 - you are confusing outputs with outcomes.  Of course there was movement in WW1 but none of it was decisive.  There was plenty of defence in WW2 but none of it was decisive either.  All war is a combination of each, however, which form of warfare that is decisive in creating outcomes shifts overtime.  I do not debate that offensives happened in WW1, I debate the idea that any of them created decisive outcomes.  WW1 was an attritional and positional war in the majority. Not decided by manoeuvre - even if it was happening in a bunch of sideshows.  To try and force that war into an offensive primacy lens is to attempt to bend the facts to fit a perception/dogma, not the other way around which is how it is suppose to be done.

Gettysburg.  Lee broke his military in that battle and never recovered.  His entire campaign buckled and collapsed after that fight.  He decisively lost a Union defensive battle.  What is so hard about this?  It happens all the time in war.  The consequences of Gettysburg were significant.  European sentiment toward the Confederacy went cold, Southern force generation started to fail and Lee’s gilding was tarnished.  That battle set the conditions for a Southern defeat - this is not really debated (except here).  But because it was a defensive victory and does not fit this strange offensive-cult mindset we are going to dismiss it?

Victory.  I have provided numerous historical examples but somehow the idea that most military “victories” are negotiated endstates that neither side can declare total continues to elude.  Turn your binary equation around, “If Ukraine can only achieve 80% of its political and strategic objectives…this is a defeat?”  

Here is another English saying for you “take the f#cking win you can get”.  If Ukraine pursues a blind “total victory or death” strategy here they could easily wind up with the latter.  They could break themselves on those southern minefield belts while western support grows cold.  They could kill hundreds of thousands of their own people until domestic support grows cold.  That could easily set conditions for that 80-20 ratio to flip violently.

Grown ups do not think this way.  They realize the stakes are much higher.  All war is a violent negotiation.  Victory is not some simplistic binary calculation.  It is linked broader political objectives, some which do not become clear until after the war is over.  This war will very likely end much like the majority of wars have, with a mixed outcome where both sides will declare victory for themselves and defeat on their opponent.  Then the wrangling will continue to try and use that as a foundation for what comes next.

I think what you, and other purists, find offensive is the idea that war is not a decisive political tool.  Well I hate to be the one to break it to you but the evidence of this is pretty overwhelming.  Wars rarely are the “last argument of kings” without becoming the first argument for what happens next.  All victories and defeats are messy human affairs.  Anyone seeking clear and definitive results due to warfare is chasing fantasy.  In fact this is the central flaw in all Clausewitzian thinking - war is not rational, nor is it decisive. Or at least very rarely so. So rarely that when looking through a long lens, all wars are in fact largely indecisive.  Nazi Germany was totally defeated, yet Germany is the major power in the EU.  We won the Cold War and are living with this. The North won the Civil War but the seeds of discontent never really went away.  

This war is not going to end in total Russian military defeat. Ukraine is not going to march on Moscow or remove Russia as a threat on its eastern border.  So we had better start figuring out how to live with whatever the outcome of this thing is and stop treating it like the skewed historical fictions we have created.

 

[The_Capt]

18 hours ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

Most of the statistical studies of urban combat confirm that the loss ratio between the attackers and the defenders goes towards 1:1 or even favours the attacker. 

Guys, c’mon.  If we are going to keep even a veneer of semi-pro analysis/assessment we are going to need to post citations for stuff like this.  I honestly don’t have a problem with Wikipedia deep even.  But we are just tossing stuff out right now.

I have never heard of these sort of ratios, most ratios go 1:1.5-2 against the attacker over time.  In fact in urban combat doctrine still calls for higher attacker advantage ratios - I have never heard “we can attack this city with a numerical disadvantage…huzzah!”

3:1 has been beat up a lot but we still look at these ratios, along with modifiers/multipliers in any planning.

[JonS]

On 9/21/2022 at 10:39 PM, JonS said:

All wars end. This war will end, and at the end of this war Ukraine and Russia will still be neighbours sharing about 2,000km of border. Think about what that means for a while. And as you're doing that consider similar examples like France and Germany, Poland and Germany, the Balkans generally, Israel and everybody, and which examples provide for actual long term peace and stability.

@The_Capt from over a year ago ...

Edited February 10 by JonS

[The_Capt]

3 minutes ago, JonS said:

@The_Capt from over a year ago ...

Ah Kraze and his genocidal shenanigans…it was a simpler time back on page 1389.  Whatever happened to that angry guy?  

[pintere]

3 hours ago, Zeleban said:

https://ria.ru/20240209/simonyan-1926316813.html

Not only Gerashchenko. Margarita Simonyan, one of the main Russian propagandists, complains that Tucker Carlson did not start a conversation with Putin about conservative values (after all, this is the main idea of Carlson’s viewers). Thus, even loyal Putin propagandists criticize this interview.

Be that as it may, even Carlson himself said that he was not yet ready to comment on this interview. Which indicates his negative impression.

In this sense we can call this a positive development. The idea of the interview was probably to garner sympathy from US citizens to the Russian POV after all. This is just a theory, but I like to think that your average curious individual in the US would’ve started to watch this interview and then gotten so bored by Putin‘s history lesson that they stopped watching before the half hour mark. 

[The_Capt]

8 hours ago, Harmon Rabb said:

As @Haiduk thought me a long time ago, I should not trust everything that Anton Gerashchenko says. But if this is true, I guess Putin should have kept the message simple. Instead of going into esoteric historical details.

Disappointment in the interview from Russia's elites?

 

You know we North Americans are often told that "we don't get Russia", or most of Europe for that matter.  What is clear from this fiasco is that cluelessness cuts both ways.  So the best PR guys Putin had all settled on the idea that the best way to shift US public sentiment was a detailed history lesson on Eastern (fine, Central) Europe?  Oh ya, all of our modern culture speaks to our deep reverence for European history minutia, claims and counter claims.

Here is what the US (and Canada to a large extent) really think. 

"We won and some Europeans tagged along - Tom Hanks really won WW2.  We have English/French/Some 'Old Country' grandparents, so there is that.  The world is - 'Us, Them and The Rest.'  We really do not care about King Uteslav or whatever, unless someone makes a cool movie about it.  Why are White people killing each other in Ukraine?  We are used to Brown people killing each other, or us killing brown people...but this is weird.  We are spending how much on all this?!  Have you seen how much bananas cost these days?!  It is sad when kids die...now I feel bad.  They are still shooting each other...now I am getting bored.  Oh dear election time again and my XYZ is now the most important thing in the entire history of our species - if that guy is for/against it, he is worse than Hitler (who we all know was really bad...see Tom Hanks)."

I am not sure what Putin's best play here was, but it sure as hell wasn't what happened.  As to Carlson...welcome to your legacy...

 

Edited February 10 by The_Capt

[Maciej Zwolinski]

20 hours ago, sburke said:

what combat situations are those statistics based on? - For example US forces versus Sunni and Shiite irregulars in Iraq would be heavily one sided but hardly relevant to Ukraine.

My immediate reference for this is "The Stress of Battle" by David Rowland. The book was published in 2006, but I think the underlying analytic work was manly done in the Cold War period, so the counterinsurgency wars of XXI would not influence the findings.

[The_Capt]

2 hours ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

My immediate reference for this is "The Stress of Battle" by David Rowland. The book was published in 2006, but I think the underlying analytic work was manly done in the Cold War period, so the counterinsurgency wars of XXI would not influence the findings.

Ok, a quick glance at this and I have a couple issues.  This body of work was largely on Operational Research (OR) done in exercises during the Cold War.  There are WW2 references but a lot of this research was conducted in what were largely canned exercises, which come with obvious issues:

https://www.cold-steel.org/2013/stress-of-battle-part-2-op-research-on-urban-battles/

For example - on exercise the surrender calculus is fundamentally different than the real thing.

The one real urban fight we have in this war was Mariupol - although one cannot discount Bakhmut or Adiivka, which had urban elements.

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

Mariupol highlights something that most of these narrow body count studies completely miss - attrition of time.  Mariupol looks like it comes in at 1:1.5 for the UA defenders on body count (I am not going to believe Russian figures for a second) which matches most mainline studies for high intensity warfare.  But what that number does not show is context or temporal attrition. 

The thing urban is most costly for is not manpower as much as it is time.  Urban combat, if one does not want ridiculous losses, must be deliberate and sloooow.  Unless a defender decides to simply not dig in and fight (see Bagdad in '03)  an urban fight attrition is time.  The RA forces tied down at Mariupol (which come to 5-10% of the overall invasion force) were not available on those axis of advance and critical fights around Kyiv and Kharkiv.  They were tied down for 3 full months fighting for inches.  Manoeuvre in urban terrain is very hard, and slow compared to open terrain.  This means tempo is hard to build, let alone sustain.  

Any battlefield commander will tell you that time is a critical resource.  Wasting it on street fights can hurt a campaign more than enemy artillery.  In this temporal dimension the attacker is normally far more vulnerable.  The attacker is trying to sustain momentum and has timetables to meet in order to dislocate an opponent.  Urban terrain acts as an incredible friction multiplier which almost always favours the defender. This is the real threat of urban operations.  Even in low intensity warfare - the longer an insurgency can make it look like the force in power is not really in control, the better.

Edit:  As to Bakhmut - no one really knows.  We have a pretty good idea that RA/Wagner losses were insane.  UA losses are not public and subject to rumor.  My bet is that the loss ratios fall firmly against the RA based on the reckless tactics.  The vehicle and equipment losses were almost definitely in the UAs favor.  Beyond that we simply do not know.  A lot of factors go into loss ratios - training, logistics, C4ISR, context.  My guess is that the UA stayed because the ratios favored them but we will likely have to wait until well after this war to find out.  Kinda puts WW2 into perspective.  We look back at the mountains of information and study, but while it was happening people knew next to nothing beyond what the news told them and lines on a map.

Edited February 10 by The_Capt

[Maciej Zwolinski]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Guys, c’mon.  If we are going to keep even a veneer of semi-pro analysis/assessment we are going to need to post citations for stuff like this.  I honestly don’t have a problem with Wikipedia deep even.  But we are just tossing stuff out right now.

I have never heard of these sort of ratios, most ratios go 1:1.5-2 against the attacker over time.  In fact in urban combat doctrine still calls for higher attacker advantage ratios - I have never heard “we can attack this city with a numerical disadvantage…huzzah!”

3:1 has been beat up a lot but we still look at these ratios, along with modifiers/multipliers in any planning.

Happy to oblige.

David Rowland, "The Stress of Battle. Quantifying Human Performance in Combat", published by TSO, London, 2006, page 74. "Before moving on to the external trials, we conducted some initial historical analysis into WW2 urban combat in North-West Europe and Italy to provide a comparsion with field trials. It simply compared attack an defence casualties and yielded a surprising result, which is shown logarythmically in Figure 4.2 [MZ- will upload later]. Attack casualties were on average 0.28 of those of the defence"

The chapter on statistical analysis of urban combat has 30 pages, so I can't post them all. If anyone has access to the book, it is very interesting, attempts to introduce variations such as type of prevailing cover, experience of troops etc. 

[Maciej Zwolinski]

5 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

 

David Rowland, "The Stress of Battle. Quantifying Human Performance in Combat", published by TSO, London, 2006, page 74.
"Before moving on to the external trials, we conducted some initial historical analysis into WW2 urban combat in North-West Europe and Italy to provide a comparsion with field trials. It simply compared attack an defence casualties and yielded a surprising result, which is shown logarythmically in Figure 4.2 

[Maciej Zwolinski]

36 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

The thing urban is most costly for is not manpower as much as it is time.  Urban combat, if one does not want ridiculous losses, must be deliberate and sloooow.  Unless a defender decides to simply not dig in and fight (see Bagdad in '03)  an urban fight attrition is time.  The RA forces tied down at Mariupol (which come to 5-10% of the overall invasion force) were not available on those axis of advance and critical fights around Kyiv and Kharkiv.  They were tied down for 3 full months fighting for inches.  Manoeuvre in urban terrain is very hard, and slow compared to open terrain.  This means tempo is hard to build, let alone sustain.  

No disagreement on that. I am fully convinced that the impression of urban combat as particularly difficult comes from it being so very slow and resource consuming for the attacker in terms of artillery, explosives, other ammunition. The fact, that the attacker does not suffer commensurately huge casualties in terms of human lives is the counter-intuitive outlier

Edited February 10 by Maciej Zwolinski
clumsy fingers