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radmonger posted:Paper numbers for Russian military are something like 2 million. So in theory they could entirely lose their current forces, invade with double the numbers, entirely lose that second force, and send a third with double the numbers of the second. You are correct, but using those two million would require Putin to visibly go back on what he’s telling domestic audiences about only sending in the “contract” soldiers. On top of that, we’ve seen how capable Russian conscripts are—not at all—and if Russia has difficulty supplying the 190k they ear marked for the invasion, how are they going to supply 2m soldiers in combat conditions? Which is why I keep saying the predictions of the soon to be Ukrainian Army crushing Russian power seem wildly optimistic assessments of Russian capabilities.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:25
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Eric Cantonese posted:I think the details in that NY Times story make sense and are pretty believable. yeah i easily believe it, these areas fell/surrounded before the EU decided to play hard ball and the weapons started flowing in. so i doubt these dudes are heavly armed. the south east is loving grim place. FishBulbia posted:When my friends were going from Kyiv to Odesa, they saw columns of smashed poo poo on the roads, in places Russia hasn't reached. I think its important to realize you're getting a curated image of the fighting here. this too. we are definitely getting a skewed view of Ukranian losses especially in the first couple days.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:28
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Often Abbreviated posted:Putin might be willing to fight on until everyone is dead and Ukraine is a wasteland but I don't think Russia has the time. Unless China decides to underwrite the cost of the war they've got a period of months before total economic meltdown. Once the reserves are up that's it, there'll be no paper the Russian government can write that holds any value. No salaries for the civil service, no paychecks for the army, no paychecks for the police, nothing to keep the trucks moving and the army firing. At that point they'll be lucky to avoid civil war. That's plenty of time for them to Gronzy a couple cities to dust. There's no hope of them actually occupying Ukraine with the forces they have, no real possibility of a puppet government lasting more than a fortnight. I can't see a way out of this situation that isn't very grim. How will Ukrainians feel after Putin warcrimes them to oblivion while NATO watches? "Our hands are tied, we can't risk escalation!" is of little comfort to someone who's watching their cities get leveled and civilians getting murdered. What was the sentiment among the British towards America pre-Pearl Harbor?
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Mar 8, 2022 15:29
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radmonger posted:Paper numbers for Russian military are something like 2 million. So in theory they could entirely lose their current forces, invade with double the numbers, entirely lose that second force, and send a third with double the numbers of the second. I mean their active ground forces are like 280,000, with 190,000 or something committed to Ukraine. Their entire BTG doctrine is based on staffing brigades with only enough active soldiers to roll out a reinforced battalion unless they do a mass call-up, which would take forever and has no sign of being attempted yet. Also I imagine spinning up those BTGs to brigade strength would be problematic since they're all stuck in the mud in Ukraine being shot at as we speak. Meanwhile Ukraine went on a total war footing IMMEDIATELY. They have a lead time spinning up their theoretical 900,000 reserves or whatever too, but they have a head start and are...already in Ukraine. The big X factor in Russia's favor was supposed to be the sheer volume of heavy weapons, not in having unlimited RUSSIA STRONK conscripts to human wave steamroll the place. Problem is they all got bogged down instantly an have been getting roasted by Javelin/NLAW ambushes and drone strikes, so that advantage keeps eroding. Maybe more to the point, the Russian army has shown no aptitude for actually bringing this firepower to bear in combined arms operations; everything is piecemeal and uncoordinated so the theoretical firepower just keeps being wasted. The only thing they can mass fire on seems to be civilian buildings, and even then there has been a lot of bizarre scattershot "missile hits random apartment, shells hit playground, nothing adds up to anything but random murder" going on.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:29
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Speaking of domestic audiences, there is absolutely zero chance I'm going to watch more than a minute of this video myself, but the tweet I swiped it from claims that the host of this show is a notorious war hawk in Russia who expresses disappointment and bafflement at the apparent lack of success and motivation of Russian forces and question the point of the invasion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2Em7pUCWi8 I skimmed over it, seemed accurate enough to post.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:29
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Dapper_Swindler posted:yeah i easily believe it, these areas fell/surrounded before the EU decided to play hard ball and the weapons started flowing in. so i doubt these dudes are heavly armed. the south east is loving grim place. The weapons started flowing in a long time before the war started.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:31
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I'd just like to comment that the predictive value of war games is vastly overblown, and I'm very happy that they are only a small part of the information and advice provided to decision makers. I'm not targeting anyone in this thread, because I've only seen pretty reasonable references to war games, but elsewhere I've seen a lot of "war games predict that doing X has Y chance of leading to nuclear war therefore it is an unacceptable course of action" or even dumber appeals to war games as an authority on the future. If a room full of mastermind analysts and psychologists working from woefully incomplete information and an absurdly complex context were truly capable of these prodigious levels of prediction the world be a very different place. The world is unpredictable and humans are anything but rational actors. Trying to predict the irrational is itself irrational. Not that doesn't mean war games aren't useful as part of the greater body of advice for decision makers and the public. But it's not some kind of scientific method to predict the future. Now this isn't supposed to be clancychat, so I'm not arguing for or against any specific outcome or trying to steer this into a discussion of potential escalation scenarios. I am just voicing an opinion that just like economists should inform, but not dictate, fiscal and monetary policy - war games should not dictate security and military policy. And they certainly should not dictate foreign policy as in diplomacy, because that's an entirely different ballgame of crazy and unpredictable. So let's just remember all remember that military analysts have historically gotten quite a lot wrong. The number of military conflicts with an unexpected outcome or even some kind of paradigm shift is legion. I am much more interested in listening to those analysts who're commenting on and looking at events as they're unfolding than those who seem want to talk only about what they expected to happen and what they expect will happen next. And that's where a lot of the 'Russia will inevitably win' comes from. It's an invasion - of course Ukraine can't 'win'. Even if they sent the invaders packing tomorrow, the tragedy which has already occurred won't be erased. Digressing a bit, I also don't get the weird insistence many people (including analysts) have on trying to deflate any sense of optimism on behalf of Ukraine. Yeah, we know, social media is full of propaganda, partial truths and downright lies. Yeah, we know, there is a multitude of things which can go wrong for Ukraine. But, and I hope you will forgive the soccer analogy because this is war and not entertainment, it feels like people are telling the fans of the underdog team which is ahead 2-0 at 30 minutes that they're absolutely haven't won yet, and that they will likely lose, so don't get your hopes up. No thanks, I'd rather not give in to pessimism - even though Covid taught us well in that regard. I'll cherish every bit of hope that perhaps Ukraine has a chance at not being demolished and/or annexed by a vile, bloodthirsty and tyrannical regime. It's not going to be any less devastating to watch helplessly if Ukraine falls, if we let pessimism take hold already. At least not for me. Optimism is necessary to get through and to mobilize international support. I'd rather not think the world is throwing support at Ukraine simply to delay the inevitable. No, the future is yet to be written, and every dawn Kyiv is Ukrainian is a good dawn. As an observer, willfully blind optimism is better than sour pessimism in this case. The lovely timelines are going to carry plenty punishment on their own, no need to start living mentally in them yet. The people making decisions and fighting this war on the ground need to consider every possible outcome, including the awful ones, and I don't envy them. I'll enjoy the optimism I'm indirectly gifted by their sacrifice.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:31
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TulliusCicero posted:That's what I'm saying Surely NATO has been observing Russian military exercises all these years? I know the Russians observe ours. Have they only had heavily scripted exercises under ideal conditions or something?
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Mar 8, 2022 15:32
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In other news the UN has decided to get mealy mouthed about exactly what kind of situation Ukraine and Russia are involved in https://twitter.com/NaomiOhReally/status/1501195568592441345?t=Vt3e6ob0ot8pzboZv3T33w&s=19
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Mar 8, 2022 15:33
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RBA-Wintrow posted:Have they only had heavily scripted exercises under ideal conditions or something? Definitely. As a side note, US exercises I participated in back in the 1990s  at the big maneuver training center in Germany tended to be designed so the bad guys usually murdered everybody and you re-fought them several times. Following those, you'd think the US Army could never beat anybody lol
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Mar 8, 2022 15:34
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I think the key takeaway is that each axis is fighting a different looking war. In front of Kyiv and Kharkiv the Ukranian AF has stood its ground and fought the Russians to a standstill. At Kyiv we have a logistics disaster and a stalled attempt to encircle the city, at Kharkiv it looks like the Russians have space to go wider. Inbetween the two at Chernihiv it looks like a Ukranian tank brigade has been fighting hard but slowly being enveloped. Around the LNR and DNR god knows what's going on, the Ukranians are getting hit but they also don't appear to be giving much ground. In the South Russia has made the most progress. Ukraine has clearly concentrated forces on defending the capital, and kept air defence in the West of the country to save it from any risk of being overrun and to try and protect its remaining air assets and the capital. From an armchair perspective that's probably the right call given you have to assume that anything east of the Dnieper is at risk of being overrun, but it means anyone fighting in the South or East of the country is probably having a really rough time.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:36
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RBA-Wintrow posted:Surely NATO has been observing Russian military exercises all these years? I know the Russians observe ours. Have they only had heavily scripted exercises under ideal conditions or something? Training and doctrine don’t matter if you go to war with zero operational planning because your political leadership didn’t bother to tell you about it.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:37
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Alchenar posted:I think the key takeaway is that each axis is fighting a different looking war. In front of Kyiv and Kharkiv the Ukranian AF has stood its ground and fought the Russians to a standstill. At Kyiv we have a logistics disaster and a stalled attempt to encircle the city, at Kharkiv it looks like the Russians have space to go wider. Inbetween the two at Chernihiv it looks like a Ukranian tank brigade has been fighting hard but slowly being enveloped. i am curious whats going on in the western areas of the country like Lviv, i assume mobilization?
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Mar 8, 2022 15:38
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RBA-Wintrow posted:Surely NATO has been observing Russian military exercises all these years? I know the Russians observe ours. Have they only had heavily scripted exercises under ideal conditions or something? Some NATO countries have military exercises where they don't even use blanks as they're too expensive, so they say "bang" instead. I think the idea of conserving material and ammunition to keep down costs as much as possible is so widespread, that it probably seemed perfectly normal to have exercises being done with weird substitutions and omissions. Half of NATO can't field a functional army due to skimping on supplies and key parts of their military having useless equipment. The difference is that those countries don't line up for an invasion with junk armies, keep the invasion plans secret from most of the army while dealing with lies folowing up and down the chain of command about how perfect everything is. Well they do sort of, but not on this scale. The US is special because it can actually project power in an effective fashion - most militaries can't do this, but because they're all either being carried by the US or haven't fought anyone but insurgents or extremely poor and small nations, noone has noticed that most nations have dipped deep into the peace dividends and can't actually do what they claim on paper.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:39
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Two ways of saying, "That's some nice gas we're sending you, Germany/Europe. Be a shame if something... happened to it." https://twitter.com/KevinRothrock/status/1501037711481843715?t=J3-DTpJ4Qa4ZunJjObqTJA&s=19 Article:https://ria.ru/20220307/spg-1777092664.html And from the UK Russian embassy again https://twitter.com/RussianEmbassy/status/1501185799949324297?t=9_Y29qJ8vhZEYfwQ0oLkOw&s=19
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Mar 8, 2022 15:40
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a podcast for cats posted:Speaking of domestic audiences, there is absolutely zero chance I'm going to watch more than a minute of this video myself, but the tweet I swiped it from claims that the host of this show is a notorious war hawk in Russia who expresses disappointment and bafflement at the apparent lack of success and motivation of Russian forces and question the point of the invasion. Yeah, it’s been noted here previously by others - Russian armchair McCains are not happy at all with how this is going. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Mar 8, 2022 |
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Mar 8, 2022 15:40
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PederP posted:It's not going to be any less devastating to watch helplessly if Ukraine falls, if we let pessimism take hold already. At least not for me. Optimism is necessary to get through and to mobilize international support. I'd rather not think the world is throwing support at Ukraine simply to delay the inevitable. No, the future is yet to be written, and every dawn Kyiv is Ukrainian is a good dawn. As an observer, willfully blind optimism is better than sour pessimism in this case. The lovely timelines are going to carry plenty punishment on their own, no need to start living mentally in them yet. The people making decisions and fighting this war on the ground need to consider every possible outcome, including the awful ones, and I don't envy them. I'll enjoy the optimism I'm indirectly gifted by their sacrifice. I can't speak for everyone, but for me its less pessimism and more "don't get complacent from early victories and positive twitter posts'. If the public sentiment is that Ukraine is successfully holding the Russians off, that leads one to conclude that stronger supportive actions may not be necessary. It might be just 'fine' to sanction and provide arms at the level we're at. I'd prefer if there was as much pressure as possible on the politicians.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:40
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TheRat posted:The weapons started flowing in a long time before the war started. Not quite. Majority of MANPAD shipments were only beginning to arrive when the invasion began.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:41
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PederP posted:Some NATO countries have military exercises where they don't even use blanks as they're too expensive, so they say "bang" instead. To be fair, blanks basically just make a bang sound. There’s not much difference in terms of training value.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:41
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Also the troops attacking from Crimea are probably in a higher state of readiness, due to their "frontline" status. The same as us troops in Germany during the cold war would have a higher readiness then troops in the states.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:41
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Right now my personal wild rear end guess is that the northern offensive around Kiev will fail but the south and southeastern offensives might no, especially if you count "turn whole cities to rubble and withdraw afterwards" as "success" Razing cities worked in the past  This whole thing is a depressing loving nightmare and my wife wants to hear nothing of it because it stresses her out so bad. I don't blame her...but much like COVID in early 2019, I can't ignore it.Russia has to know their terms are untenable. That's why they keep pushing the same exact line over and over - it's a solid no that Ukraine will accept it, and it gives Russia an excuse to continue this farce.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:42
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Not quite. Majority of MANPAD shipments were only beginning to arrive when the invasion began. But there were reports of them having a solid stock of Javelins before it started
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Mar 8, 2022 15:42
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mightygerm posted:I can't speak for everyone, but for me its less pessimism and more "don't get complacent from early victories and positive twitter posts'. If the public sentiment is that Ukraine is successfully holding the Russians off, that leads one to conclude that stronger supportive actions may not be necessary. It might be just 'fine' to sanction and provide arms at the level we're at. I'd prefer if there was as much pressure as possible on the politicians. Fair point. But there's such a horrific humanitarian crisis going on that even if one is hyper-optimistic about the military aspects there's no lack of good reason to help on an individual level. But I certainly agree that decision makers need to take a cynical view of the possible outcomes and not get blinded by optimism.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:42
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Yeah, it’s been noted here previously by others - Russian armchair McCain’s are not happy at all with how this is going. Strelkov is especially pissy but his solution is just to throw more bodies at the problem
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Mar 8, 2022 15:43
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Am I the only one who gets the feeling this will end with Russia taking some territory from Ukraine in the east and south but being forced to recognize the sovereignty of the rest of Ukraine? (Which will then go on to join the EU and NATO) AKA: Winter War 2: Electric Boogaloo.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:44
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KitConstantine posted:Two ways of saying, "That's some nice gas we're sending you, Germany/Europe. Be a shame if something... happened to it." i dont think we hit that high. its clear the US is trying to get Venezuela and Iran out of the Russian camp and opening up their oil, probably other places too. so that will probably staunch some bleeding mid/long term.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:45
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I am becoming curious as to what a good, realistic best case peace deal would look like for Ukraine. Twitter has a 20 minute ABC interview with Zelensky and it seems he is open to ceding Crimea, the pirate states of Donetsk and Luhansk and NATO ambitions in exchange for non-NATO security guarantees. At that point, it seems like both Russia and Ukraine are worse off than they began with, but it's not the worst possible outcome.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:45
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Antillie posted:Am I the only one who gets the feeling this will end with Russia taking some territory from Ukraine in the east and south but being forced to recognize the sovereignty of the rest of Ukraine? (Which will then go on to join the EU and NATO) AKA: Winter War 2: Electric Boogaloo. probably. i suspect it will be "we reconize crimea/possibly donbass" and thats the line.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:46
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mrfart posted:https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/08/russia-ukraine-war-possible-trajectories I don't really see a scenario where NATO would countenance the idea of letting an armed Ukrainian resistance use, say, Poland as a staging area/safe haven. Proxy war is one thing but letting the equivalent of mujahideen camps pop up on NATO soil would edge us way too close to belligerence. And it's not like NATO would even need to, right? I mean, it's not really plausible for Russia to occupy Ukraine to the point that there wouldn't be big swathes of the country controlled by continued Ukrainian resistance which NATO can just keep supplying on their own soil?
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Mar 8, 2022 15:46
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D34THROW posted:Razing cities worked in the past When?
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Mar 8, 2022 15:46
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PederP posted:I'd just like to comment that the predictive value of war games is vastly overblown, and I'm very happy that they are only a small part of the information and advice provided to decision makers. Typically, no professional strategists war game for predictive value. They game to create conditions for which they can develop a response, or to uncover problems that may be unanticipated. War gaming is to create flexibility, and a tool kit of answers, not to predict.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:47
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Antillie posted:Am I the only one who gets the feeling this will end with Russia taking some territory from Ukraine in the east and south but being forced to recognize the sovereignty of the rest of Ukraine? (Which will then go on to join the EU and NATO) AKA: Winter War 2: Electric Boogaloo. For the sake of Belarus, I hope it ends with some kind of Russian military collapse (I don't wish for a dissolution of the Russian, just some kind of miracle coup) - otherwise they're going to be stuck as a vassal for who knows how long, and that is not what the people want. The elections showed pretty clearly they wanted a different kind of future.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:47
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a podcast for cats posted:ceding Crimea, the pirate states of Donetsk and Luhansk and NATO ambitions in exchange for non-NATO security guarantees. I don't know why Ukraine would trust any 'security guarantees' on paper after the Budapest memorandum.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:49
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Antillie posted:Am I the only one who gets the feeling this will end with Russia taking some territory from Ukraine in the east and south but being forced to recognize the sovereignty of the rest of Ukraine? (Which will then go on to join the EU and NATO) AKA: Winter War 2: Electric Boogaloo. I think it'll probably end up like this too. Russia won't be able to take more than that in a peace deal without fully conquering the entire country and with western support that seems unlikely. At some point they'll have to throw in the towel due to sanctions and that seems like an obvious line to draw. Essentially the status quo as it was before their invasion, Ukraine immediately joins NATO and gets huge funding to rebuild and Russia is left wrecked by sanctions.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:50
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mightygerm posted:I don't know why Ukraine would trust any 'security guarantees' on paper after the Budapest memorandum. They might not be able to "trust" anything, but Ukraine also has to have some way out of this war too.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:50
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alex314 posted:I was searching more info about fuel consumption and logistics for the armoured/mechanized units. It looks something like that: Military trucks carry more like ~20K liters.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:51
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sweek0 posted:Saw this in the map thread and thought it was worth posting here. Seems like a good excuse to crosspost this from the TFR thread. 
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Mar 8, 2022 15:52
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Chalks posted:I think it'll probably end up like this too. Russia won't be able to take more than that in a peace deal without fully conquering the entire country and with western support that seems unlikely. At some point they'll have to throw in the towel due to sanctions and that seems like an obvious line to draw. Essentially the status quo as it was before their invasion, Ukraine immediately joins NATO and gets huge funding to rebuild and Russia is left wrecked by sanctions. For Putin, you can fight until the Democrats get wiped out in the US midterm elections later this year. The GOP will tie Biden up in so much red tape and obstruction, you'll have taken out the US as an effective adversary for a while. Call it a win. Maybe rearm and get back to shenanigans later.
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Mar 8, 2022 15:52
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Re: Chinese news that was linked. The channel was Phoenix News, which is as close to honest as Chinese mainstream media is allowed to get. Reporter was waved at by some Russian troops who looked reasonably cheerful and interviewed a local who said “it sucks to be in the middle because we get hit by Ukrainian shells too.”
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Mar 8, 2022 15:55
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Eric Cantonese posted:For Putin, you can fight until the Democrats get wiped out in the US midterm elections later this year. The GOP will tie Biden up in so much red tape and obstruction, you'll have taken out the US as an effective adversary for a while. Call it a win. Maybe rearm and get back to shenanigans later. I feel like Russia keeping this up for eight months is a big ask. Especially with everything else.
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