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Bashez posted:Reports of heavy shelling at Tokmak are kind of confusing to me. That seems kind of deep on a front that's been relatively quiet. My understanding is Russia reinforced Zaporizhzhia to prevent the front from being cleaved in two so I'd put away an expectations of major offensives from Ukraine there. There is no functional railroad connecting the areas east of Tokmak to Russia proper without going through Tokmak. All supplies going to Mariupol, come either on a ship to Berdyansk and then continue on rail first north and then east, or go in a giant loop all the way through Crimea and travel through Tokmak. Ever since some of their landing ships got rocketed at Berdyansk, Russians have been shy about sending ships there.
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Sep 25, 2022 02:30
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fez_machine posted:Genuine question, if he had all the expertise and experience then why was Russian logistics so messy? Was it just corruption and poor strategic leadership in other areas? You need expertise and experience all the way from the dude in charge down to the drivers. Even if the dude in charge was a competent administrator, the last 6 months have led me to suspect that is not the case for the vast majority of Russian personnel. They're trying to move 1000s of tons per day of fuel, ammo, equipment, spare parts, troops, food, water etc into a country that keeps trying to blow their poo poo up. Different cargoes need to get to different locations depending on what their requirements are, and the supply/distribution hubs keep exploding. Every time one of those ammo dumps blows up there's a non-zero chance a competent quartermaster goes up with it and gets replaced with some gronk dragged out of his bed in Buryatia last week. It's a hugely complex task at the best of times, let alone in a warzone. They also need to coordinate traffic because too many vehicles on a single road may lead to traffic jams, which is likely to be a HIMARS magnet since Ukraine is receiving very much up to date satellite intel showing Russian movements. They also apparently have to deal with a lack of trucks and drivers, and one of the major railway routes into Ukraine has recently been liberated so all railway traffic now needs to be funneled along a single line in the SE. None of this is going to get any easier once there's an extra 300,000 mouths to feed, although I suspect this may only be a temporary problem.
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Sep 25, 2022 02:42
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Herstory Begins Now posted:9/23 There's probably several thousand troops bottled up in there so it would be a significant victory without even taking into account any strategic importance of the area.
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Sep 25, 2022 02:44
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So if Russians mobilization system produces such terrible soldiers whats the point of even having the system? Is it supposed to be something that a country would use if their existence was on the line and they just needed to get guys with guns on the Frontline in a last ditch attempt to save the nation?
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Sep 25, 2022 02:57
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Charliegrs posted:So if Russians mobilization system produces such terrible soldiers whats the point of even having the system? Is it supposed to be something that a country would use if their existence was on the line and they just needed to get guys with guns on the Frontline in a last ditch attempt to save the nation? I think it's a case of leadership breathing in their own farts. If you aren't a yes man, you disappear by falling down the stairs a few dozen times. Russia losing just meant there weren't enough pureblood Russians who have the art of war etched into their souls from birth. That and desperation.
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Sep 25, 2022 02:59
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Charliegrs posted:So if Russians mobilization system produces such terrible soldiers whats the point of even having the system? Is it supposed to be something that a country would use if their existence was on the line and they just needed to get guys with guns on the Frontline in a last ditch attempt to save the nation? Overwhelming numbers even with minimal equipment and training can still be effective with proper logistics.
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Sep 25, 2022 03:00
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Charliegrs posted:So if Russians mobilization system produces such terrible soldiers whats the point of even having the system? Is it supposed to be something that a country would use if their existence was on the line and they just needed to get guys with guns on the Frontline in a last ditch attempt to save the nation? If the enemy has no more soldiers and you have kinda bad ones you still win
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Sep 25, 2022 03:04
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Overwhelming numbers even with minimal equipment and training can still be effective with proper logistics. That's where the yes men silly poo poo kicks in. Overwhelming numbers assumes that your force is moving forward like mindless zerglings. Most of those numbers don't really want to be there and I highly doubt most will sacrifice their lives for a few more feet of dirt against an enemy that can kill them at any moment.
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Sep 25, 2022 03:09
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Charliegrs posted:So if Russians mobilization system produces such terrible soldiers whats the point of even having the system? Is it supposed to be something that a country would use if their existence was on the line and they just needed to get guys with guns on the Frontline in a last ditch attempt to save the nation? I think a lot of what we're seeing is little more than a cargo cult from the soviet years. They're keeping the headline numbers the same but since 1991 they seem to have lost the understanding of what went on under the hood throughout the cold war to turn those numbers on paper into something capable of winning a war at the drop of a hat. Corruption obviously plays a role too, but I think the bigger issue is simply the erosion of institutional knowledge - the pen pushers and number crunchers don't drive a tank, therefore they aren't contributing to the nation's defense, therefore expenditure on them is wasted.
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Sep 25, 2022 03:16
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Charliegrs posted:So if Russians mobilization system produces such terrible soldiers whats the point of even having the system? Is it supposed to be something that a country would use if their existence was on the line and they just needed to get guys with guns on the Frontline in a last ditch attempt to save the nation? The Soviets had a decent system in place. It's just been allowed to rot into irrelevance for the last 30 years
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Sep 25, 2022 03:23
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Charliegrs posted:So if Russians mobilization system produces such terrible soldiers whats the point of even having the system? Is it supposed to be something that a country would use if their existence was on the line and they just needed to get guys with guns on the Frontline in a last ditch attempt to save the nation? Well, yes in an existential war where the mobilised troops are motivated to defend their country, it can be kind of effective, see China's entry into the Korean war (there's major differences though of course). But no matter how internal propganda tries to present the current war, it isn't existential for the nation as a whole, only for its leadership. It should still be a decent stalling tactic for Russia to see how Putin's gamble on winter turns out.
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Sep 25, 2022 03:24
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Charliegrs posted:So if Russians mobilization system produces such terrible soldiers whats the point of even having the system? Is it supposed to be something that a country would use if their existence was on the line and they just needed to get guys with guns on the Frontline in a last ditch attempt to save the nation? I think the idea is that the USSR had the infrastructure to mobilize effectively (the military organization and the equipment, but also the bureaucratic ability to do something like "draft everyone who was conscripted in the last 5 years"). That fell apart for yachts, vacation homes in Antalya, and because the officials just prioritize cool recruitment videos of paratroopers wrestling rhinos over woke nonbinary soymilk things like keeping a centralized record of who's in the army reserve. What's left is like some feudal lord telling his vassals to raise an army. Ukraine mobilized at the start of the war, but they also trained their army and I don't think there were people going around grabbing 60 year olds off buses or drafting the entire male population of a village.
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Sep 25, 2022 03:36
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Some feudal lord telling his vassals to raise an army would be more functional because at the low level that still results in the local guy picking out like ten guys out of his hamlet and at least to some degree selecting based on actual fitness for the task.
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Sep 25, 2022 03:39
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Charliegrs posted:So if Russians mobilization system produces such terrible soldiers whats the point of even having the system? Is it supposed to be something that a country would use if their existence was on the line and they just needed to get guys with guns on the Frontline in a last ditch attempt to save the nation? I think there's an element of internal politics involved. It allows them to simultaneously appease hardliners by making a show of doing something and lock up a bunch of dissenters in military camps.
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Sep 25, 2022 03:55
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reignonyourparade posted:Some feudal lord telling his vassals to raise an army would be more functional because at the low level that still results in the local guy picking out like ten guys out of his hamlet and at least to some degree selecting based on actual fitness for the task. The thing is that this would actually be typically pretty well organised. I believe in Medieval France, towns would be required to provide able bodied men or money for mercenaries proportional to the perceived wealth of their settlement. Britain had a system where landowners would have to contribute specific skilled warriors like archers or actual men at arms proportional to their annual income. In just about all societies, no one wants peasants fighting because one veteran soldier is worth significant more unskilled and unmotivated warriors. This mobilisation seems nothing but ethnic cleansing, trying to create an excuse blaming the West for murdering good Russian citizens defending their homeland, and Putin trying to freeze internal criticism especially with the ramp up of salaries for police and internal security.
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Sep 25, 2022 04:04
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jeffreyw posted:The thing is that this would actually be typically pretty well organised. Also you want peasants making food.
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Sep 25, 2022 04:12
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Overwhelming numbers even with minimal equipment and training can still be effective with proper logistics. aphid_licker posted:If the enemy has no more soldiers and you have kinda bad ones you still win The problem is that you need a LOT more soldiers to make up for having lovely ones in order to be effective. And that just doesn't really exist. The 'LOT' would need a much bigger font size if this was actually a proper fully modern army that you're trying to overwhelm. Like Ukraine's tactics are pretty great and what little proper NATO tech they've been given has been a huge force multiplier. The question is: Does Russia have enough soldiers?
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Sep 25, 2022 04:19
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Kchama posted:The question is: Does Russia have enough soldiers? This is not the question. The actual question is: Can Russia sustain this many troops in the field? I suspect we all know the answer.
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Sep 25, 2022 04:33
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Another dawn is breaking in Kyiv, and it's still Ukranian.   
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Sep 25, 2022 04:49
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Kchama posted:The problem is that you need a LOT more soldiers to make up for having lovely ones in order to be effective. And that just doesn't really exist. The 'LOT' would need a much bigger font size if this was actually a proper fully modern army that you're trying to overwhelm. Russia cannot overwhelm Ukraine. The question has become: can Russia stiffen their lines enough to prevent Ukraine from overwhelming them and throwing them back to the de jure borders.
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Sep 25, 2022 04:57
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fez_machine posted:Genuine question, if he had all the expertise and experience then why was Russian logistics so messy? Was it just corruption and poor strategic leadership in other areas? One thing I want to point out in addition to what others have said - one key thing about Russian logistics is that it's designed around railways, and they have a particular department with its own staff and troops specifically set aside to manage rail logistics. This makes sense considering Russia's vast size - trucking troops and supplies from one end of Russia to the other would require an insane amount of trucks burning a loopy amount of fuel. My understanding is that Russian rail logistics is actually, on the whole, pretty good. The issue is that once they leave the rail lines and hubs, they start having problems - with the truck systems they have set up, they can go about 150 km away from their distribution points before their trucks start getting overstretched. This becomes kind of an issue when you're going on a vast, sweeping offensive to take and hold huge swathes of enemy territory while also bypassing major cities, i.e. the places where most rail hubs are set up. Their logistical system can theoretically work well if they're exclusively fighting for and defending their own rail hubs, but it's not really well-built for what they tried to do in Ukraine. To be honest, I sorta get the impression that the Russian army in general is designed primarily around defense, not offense. A hyperfocus on rail logistics means they operate best in their own territory with their own prepared rail lines and systems, and that focus on rail logistics is great at feeding vast low-mobility artillery batteries which, again, good way to pummel and punish invaders, and their army set-up and conscription system with in theory a hard core of skilled volunteers filled out by mobilized conscripts in times of war could work out if the conscripts were motivated by the prospect of a Great Patriotic War 2. But none of the systems really seem to be designed to function properly when invading an enemy country (especially without the conscripts bulking out the slimmed down armies), and Putin seems to have ignored everything his army is theoretically good at and sent it headlong onto a mission it wasn't designed for. Even if there was no corruption and everyone in the Russian army was motivated and knew what they were doing, it seems like they would have struggled with the task assigned to them. In contrast, the Ukrainian armed forces were built around one thing and one thing only: Defending against a Russian invasion. That focus is paying off now as they do exactly what they trained and prepared to do. It's something worth remembering - it's not merely a matter of whether an army is "strong" or "weak" or "good" or "bad" but about what kind of war exactly the army was designed to fight. You can have the best, most world-beating army in the world and you're still gonna have issues if you send it onto a mission it really wasn't built to accomplish - see for example, say, the US Army and Iraq.
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Sep 25, 2022 05:01
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A couple of times now I've seen news footage showing a Ukranian soldier with a Pikachu logo on their flak vest or uniform. Does this signify anything in particular, like a specific unit, or is it just some goofy stuff people enjoy having on their uniform?
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Sep 25, 2022 05:38
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https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1573728459808964608
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Sep 25, 2022 05:44
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For those wondering: in theory it would be in March 2024. I am strongly doubting that these take place in a proper manner, though The only way I could see that happen is if Putin dies in the meantime and the Kremlin has to prop up a worthy replacement and pretented that the population actually wants that person in charge. Who's next in line after Putin anyway?
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Sep 25, 2022 09:46
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Zwabu posted:A couple of times now I've seen news footage showing a Ukranian soldier with a Pikachu logo on their flak vest or uniform. Does this signify anything in particular, like a specific unit, or is it just some goofy stuff people enjoy having on their uniform? Just young people trying to have some humour in all of it. They have soldiers adopt call signs like Naruto or Yugioh too. cant cook creole bream posted:For those wondering: in theory it would be in March 2024. There’s no clear successor. That is so by design, to create an appearance of irreplaceability.
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Sep 25, 2022 10:08
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cant cook creole bream posted:
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Sep 25, 2022 10:09
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I've seen speculation that it would be Prigozhin  But really, in the unlikely event of Putin dropping dead it's impossible to say how it would shake out
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Sep 25, 2022 10:10
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cinci zoo sniper posted:There’s no clear successor. That is so by design, to create an appearance of irreplaceability. "After I'm gone, they will drown you like blind kittens."
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Sep 25, 2022 10:15
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cinci zoo sniper posted:There’s no clear successor. That is so by design, to create an appearance of irreplaceability. Legally, you are wrong, cinci, unless you meant "Putin has not designated someone to take the reins publicly", which is an issue of extremely secret talks and decisions until official declaration anyway quote:Article 92. So, the next in line in case that something happens to Putin is Mikhail Mishustin, former head tax man and current chairman of the Government (colloquially that title is called Prime Minister in Russia). If Kremlin decides to throw out the towel I expect him to be the face of Russia in all negotiations because I don't see Putin retaining his position through defeat or concessions and Mishustin at the moment is one of the people with least poo poo and blood on him. He was tasked with keeping the gears of economy running and since Russia is not in a freefall there, he is still in favor. 
fatherboxx fucked around with this message at 10:22 on Sep 25, 2022 |
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Sep 25, 2022 10:19
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https://twitter.com/ichbinilya/status/1573682608411664390?s=20&t=rTmukyPHrE8aMZfOTu0UfQ Kherson offensive is as rough as expected.
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Sep 25, 2022 10:22
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fatherboxx posted:Legally, you are wrong, cinci, unless you meant "Putin has not designated someone to take the reins publicly", which is an issue of extremely secret talks and decisions until official declaration anyway I wasn’t speaking legally, since I think it’s a bit comical to expect them all go “well the law says X” in that case. I meant that as in Putin having actively killed off all credible competitors for a presidential election, which was the context of the question. Edit: https://twitter.com/kevinrothrock/status/1574008118165618689 cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 13:42 on Sep 25, 2022 |
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Sep 25, 2022 10:37
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I thought it would be Nikolai Petrushev. He immediately comes to mind as Putin's successor.
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Sep 25, 2022 13:42
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For now, Putin’s succession remains firmly within the real of wishful thinking.
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Sep 25, 2022 13:45
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Did anyone foresee Putin himself as Yeltsin's successor before it happened?
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Sep 25, 2022 13:49
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yunichel posted:Did anyone foresee Putin himself as Yeltsin's successor before it happened? I can only hope that continues, but I'm sure it's a wish on a monkey's paw.
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Sep 25, 2022 13:53
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yunichel posted:Did anyone foresee Putin himself as Yeltsin's successor before it happened? Yes, he was explicitly groomed for the role by the likes of Chubais and Yumashev. There were other candidates, like Nemtsov, but Putin’s promotion to being a prime minister spelt the decision out rather clearly. Similarly as it was with Medvedev, who then hosed it all up as the president, from Putin’s perspective.
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Sep 25, 2022 13:56
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Yes, he was explicitly groomed for the role by the likes of Chubais and Yumashev. There were other candidates, like Nemtsov, but Putin’s promotion to being a prime minister spelt the decision out rather clearly. Similarly as it was with Medvedev, who then hosed it all up as the president, from Putin’s perspective. He hosed it all up? How so? Wasn’t Medvedev a useful crony that helped Putin dodge the term limit thing? Now he sounds like a real attack dog when talking about the war.
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Sep 25, 2022 14:56
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Crapilicious posted:He hosed it all up? How so? Wasn’t Medvedev a useful crony that helped Putin dodge the term limit thing? Now he sounds like a real attack dog when talking about the war. Reportedly, Putin did not like how Medvedev did not veto intervention into Libya and had his own ambitions that were quickly shut down close to the end of his term
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Sep 25, 2022 15:04
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Crapilicious posted:He hosed it all up? How so? Wasn’t Medvedev a useful crony that helped Putin dodge the term limit thing? Now he sounds like a real attack dog when talking about the war. Medvedev didn't veto the UN resolution on Libya, which Putin considered an unforgivable fuckup.
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Sep 25, 2022 15:04
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Crapilicious posted:He hosed it all up? How so? Wasn’t Medvedev a useful crony that helped Putin dodge the term limit thing? Now he sounds like a real attack dog when talking about the war. His barking about war is him struggling with alcoholism while trying to undo the reputation damage for re: posts above
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Sep 25, 2022 16:15
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