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Orthanc6 posted:According to this: https://www.csis.org/analysis/united-states-running-out-weapons-send-ukraine the issue of small-arms ammo seems to be fine for Ukraine, at least for now. 26 million rounds being less than 1% of US production. I'm not surprised, given the ludicrous expansion of gun culture in the US. Honestly I'm a bit surprised there were issues in the mid-2000's, I'd guess the Cold War draw down in the 90's was to blame. spankmeister posted:Wasn't that just because the chuds were hoarding it all because they thought Obama was gonna take their guns? No. Obama was elected in late 2008. Ammunition shortages of 5.56mm were acute far before then. All that said, I agree Ukraine doesn't seem to have issues any more with small arms ammunition. The issue for is ammunition for indirect fires systems and anti-aircraft systems. OSINT has very little insight into Ukraine's ammunition supplies of anti-aircraft missiles. Ukraine seems to have a fairly high intercept rate against Russian cruise missiles, but at what cost in terms of ammunition expenditure? On his podcast "The Russia Contingency", Michael Koffman recently conjectured that supplies of SA-8 and similiar, mid-ranged anti-aircraft missiles were probably the most likely "weak link" in Ukraine's air defense. They have plenty of MANPADs, but those are really only effective at low-flying aircraft and cruise missiles and maybe drones. If a ground attack craft with precision bombs sits at 12,000 feet a Stinger isn't going to do much for you, and that's where you need larger air defense systems, but not necessarily something as large as an S-300. Ukraine needs enough anti-aircraft ammunition, or the Russian air force could become a meaningful threat again. MikeC posted:A consequence of budget cuts and Pentagon choices. Things like Stinger missiles which proved so useful for the UA to shut down Russian airpower apparently had their production lines shut down back in 2008. Raython says production won't start up until 2023 after a contract back in May was tendered to them. Yeah, some sub-components of the Stinger aren't being manufactured anymore and the tooling of those sub-components has long-since been repurposed. Raytheon is needing to do some redesign to use newer components which are actually available.
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Dec 8, 2022 14:35
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Charlz Guybon posted:But why? Why here? Sounds like the only place they’ve had any successes? Or maybe Wagner is pulling some strings to get reinforcements
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Dec 8, 2022 14:39
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Charlz Guybon posted:But why? Why here? There was nothing terribly strategically valuable about Waterloo, Gettysburg or the town of Passendale. Both sides determined it was a good place to fight their enemy. Clearly both sides here see some value in this fight as a place to degrade their adversary.
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Dec 8, 2022 14:50
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Charlz Guybon posted:But why? Why here? Russia and Wagner have spent so much time, lives, money, material and effort to try and take it that they have invested so much they can't stop now. Russia has been pushing on it since what July? They have likely lost 70k+ and a couple hundred vehicles and heavy weaponry. Any sane leader would have pulled back months ago. It has been a colossal waste of man and material. As you said there is no value gained if they do finally take it outside of some propaganda which I would be unsure of that value at this point since Russia media had been parroting that it was going fall back any day in the summer. That is like saying Alf is back in POG form in 2022.
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Dec 8, 2022 15:17
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FishBulbia posted:There was nothing terribly strategically valuable about Waterloo, Gettysburg or the town of Passendale. Both sides determined it was a good place to fight their enemy. Clearly both sides here see some value in this fight as a place to degrade their adversary. Passchendaele lies on the last ridge east of Ypres, 5 mi (8.0 km) from Roulers (now Roeselare), a junction of the Bruges-(Brugge)-to-Kortrijk railway. - Rail junctions are key in WWI on the western front
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Dec 8, 2022 15:18
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Gettysburg had a shoe factory the Confederates wanted to plunder.
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Dec 8, 2022 15:24
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Charlz Guybon posted:From Wikipedia - Akschually.... Waterloo was also significant in that Napoleon had to pass it to get to the Low Countries and deal with the British before the other Allies (especially Prussia) could link up and make the odds even more signficant against the French. After Ligny and Quatre Bras, Waterloo was the obvious path to Brussels, and blocking it was a thousand times more strategically valuable than storming Bakhmut with mobiks and penal mercs in december 2022.
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Dec 8, 2022 15:29
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Right but it would pretty silly to say that those battles were fundamentally about taking the towns. It was about the opportunity the ground provided. Ukraine clearly also sees Bakhmut as a place worth holding and as a place where they can degrade their enemy.
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Dec 8, 2022 15:37
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Djarum posted:Russia and Wagner have spent so much time, lives, money, material and effort to try and take it that they have invested so much they can't stop now. Russia has been pushing on it since what July? They have likely lost 70k+ and a couple hundred vehicles and heavy weaponry. Any sane leader would have pulled back months ago. It has been a colossal waste of man and material. As you said there is no value gained if they do finally take it outside of some propaganda which I would be unsure of that value at this point since Russia media had been parroting that it was going fall back any day in the summer. That is like saying Alf is back in POG form in 2022. Oh cripes, they've been hit by the biggest case of ''The Sunk Cost Fallacy'' i've ever seen. 
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Dec 8, 2022 15:40
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Hey, I'm hearing news that biden managed to get Brittney Griner freed from russia in a prisoner swap, supposedly in exchange for Viktor Bout
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Dec 8, 2022 15:47
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Kavros posted:Hey, I'm hearing news that biden managed to get Brittney Griner freed from russia in a prisoner swap, supposedly in exchange for Viktor Bout It’s true Biden made the announcement early this morning with her wife in the Oval Office.
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Dec 8, 2022 16:08
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Just Another Lurker posted:Oh cripes, they've been hit by the biggest case of ''The Sunk Cost Fallacy'' i've ever seen. MacMillen in his heavily misquoted speeches early in November made the point that there was a point late in the first year of ww1 where the stalemate had already effectively taken hold and losses were about a million people. Towards the end of the year there were competing political pushes to cut losses and negotiate and to double down and keep fighting. The latter prevailed and the war went on to take ~20 million more lives and ended with the destruction of multiple empires.
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Dec 8, 2022 16:27
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Kavros posted:Hey, I'm hearing news that biden managed to get Brittney Griner freed from russia in a prisoner swap, supposedly in exchange for Viktor Bout Yeah I find this interesting. I hear a lot of speculation about it and I honestly don't know enough to contribute meaningfully to the speculation. So for the more on top of it folks in the thread: Is this a normal exchange? Unreasonable/good/bad? I recall Griner being somewhat a casualty of crappy circumstances in how she was captured.
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Dec 8, 2022 16:52
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notwithoutmyanus posted:Yeah I find this interesting. I hear a lot of speculation about it and I honestly don't know enough to contribute meaningfully to the speculation. So for the more on top of it folks in the thread: Yeah i'm also interested in the potential repercussions of Bout returning to the scene for this conflict in particular (if any)
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Dec 8, 2022 16:53
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notwithoutmyanus posted:Is this a normal exchange? Unreasonable/good/bad? I recall Griner being somewhat a casualty of crappy circumstances in how she was captured. It exchanges the most notorious post-Soviet arms dealer for a basketball player who had hash oil in her carryon bag, so, yeah, pretty crappy. The Russians refused to include Paul Whelan, another prisoner, in any deal because they claim he's actually a spy. aBagorn posted:Yeah i'm also interested in the potential repercussions of Bout returning to the scene for this conflict in particular (if any) All the stuff he used to sell (old Soviet weapons) are now in the hands of your random Ukrainian farmer, so probably not really!
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Dec 8, 2022 16:55
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notwithoutmyanus posted:Yeah I find this interesting. I hear a lot of speculation about it and I honestly don't know enough to contribute meaningfully to the speculation. So for the more on top of it folks in the thread: it's kind of bullshit and a case could be made that letting russia just kidnap americans to kangaroo court to get people back is a dangerous precedent, which tbf it is. Previous negotiation efforts were for a 2:1 exchange as a tacit gently caress you for turning Griner into a political pawn. I guess Biden decided that it was worth it to get her back and the reasoning there is certainly relatable plus there is zero reason to think that Putin would ever stop using her as a political pawn, so might as well just get it over with. It's not an ideal outcome, but also the entire point of Russia detaining Griner was to put the US and Griner into a situation where there is no good outcome
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Dec 8, 2022 17:13
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He's been in one prison or another for the last 14 years (I think 2 of those years don't count towards his US sentence, he served 12 out of 25 so almost half). I imagine any contacts, ability to acquire and sell weapons, or resources he may have once had are now long gone. He's probably harmless wrt the war, and "should" remain in jail because that was his sentence and he supposedly deserves it according to us. So, he was mostly a political bargaining chip at this point, and we spent it on Griner.
Rigel fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Dec 8, 2022 |
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Dec 8, 2022 17:16
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cinci zoo sniper posted:She wasn’t a top leader of any sort, where do you even get something like that from? She’s got literally nothing public to her name, besides being a rank and file member of “DNR” “parliament” running a crappy blog. http://en.kremlin.ru/catalog/keywords/24/events/70041 quote:The President signed the Executive Order awarding the Order of Courage (posthumously) to member of the People’s Council (parliament) of the Donetsk People’s Republic and volunteer Maria Pirogova for selflessness and courage displayed in the line of duty.
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Dec 8, 2022 17:26
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notwithoutmyanus posted:Is this a normal exchange? Unreasonable/good/bad? I recall Griner being somewhat a casualty of crappy circumstances in how she was captured. The arms trader in question is probably irrelevant as an arms trader now, because his networks and knowledge are already a decade out of date even before you count the massive disruption of both his sales base and his supply by the Ukraine invasion. So he gets out in "just" 12 years in exchange for getting Griner out instead of letting her rot for a decade herself, which I was desperately hoping was not going to happen.
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Dec 8, 2022 17:42
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Yeah, and the best that he can look forward to is being bad boy celebrity in Russia, maybe he'll get a spot on one of lovely discussion shows. At worst he'll get defenestated. Definitely a good exchange.
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Dec 8, 2022 17:53
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alex314 posted:Yeah, and the best that he can look forward to is being bad boy celebrity in Russia, maybe he'll get a spot on one of lovely discussion shows. At worst he'll get defenestated. Definitely a good exchange. Tbh he’ll probably get hosed for selling off all the stuff Russia is sorely missing right now. It’d be a interior propaganda win to hold him up as a scapegoat for why the war isn’t going as well as planned. Sucks for that guy but gently caress him.
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Dec 8, 2022 18:11
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FishBulbia posted:There was nothing terribly strategically valuable about Waterloo, Gettysburg or the town of Passendale. Both sides determined it was a good place to fight their enemy. Clearly both sides here see some value in this fight as a place to degrade their adversary. I am going to be a bit pedantic here but at least for Gettysburg (as I undrestand) it was more both armies kinda maneuvered into a position where they started to skirmish and it just escalated from there. Both armies were trying to find a better place to engage but that's what most of what warfare was (is?) trying to fight the enemy on your terms.
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Dec 8, 2022 18:18
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In the US, we say that our legal system is designed with the idea that we'd prefer to let a guilty person go free than wrongfully imprison an innocent person. Our implementation of that ideal is often horribly flawed--just look at the number of young black men who have gone to prison for marijuana compared to the number of young white men convicted of the same crime--but if we're serious about it, then releasing one guilty prisoner who is no longer a threat is worth saving one innocent prisoner.
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Dec 8, 2022 18:20
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Can someone give me a TLDR of the significance of the US going to this multi year munitions manufacturing contract deal thing? I don't understand how going year-to-year for X number of munitions versus multiple years times the same amount of munitions is functionally any different?
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Dec 8, 2022 18:23
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Mooseontheloose posted:I am going to be a bit pedantic here but at least for Gettysburg (as I undrestand) it was more both armies kinda maneuvered into a position where they started to skirmish and it just escalated from there. Both armies were trying to find a better place to engage but that's what most of what warfare was (is?) trying to fight the enemy on your terms. Gettysburg was the junction of 8 major roads. In the era of the corps system if there was going to be a major battle in the region, it was going to be in Gettysburg.
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Dec 8, 2022 18:25
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cr0y posted:Can someone give me a TLDR of the significance of the US going to this multi year munitions manufacturing contract deal thing? I don't understand how going year-to-year for X number of munitions versus multiple years times the same amount of munitions is functionally any different? Going to guess delivery dates.
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Dec 8, 2022 18:28
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cr0y posted:Can someone give me a TLDR of the significance of the US going to this multi year munitions manufacturing contract deal thing? I don't understand how going year-to-year for X number of munitions versus multiple years times the same amount of munitions is functionally any different? If arms industries know they have guaranteed multi-year profits, they're much more willing to invest in long-term production capacity.
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Dec 8, 2022 18:31
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cr0y posted:Can someone give me a TLDR of the significance of the US going to this multi year munitions manufacturing contract deal thing? I don't understand how going year-to-year for X number of munitions versus multiple years times the same amount of munitions is functionally any different? Long term planning, mostly. The US feels like this will be a multiyear engagement and wants to up their arms making capacity. Instead of going year to year with orders and improvising or freeing funds for R+D its saying, we need more of this stuff because we feel Ukraine (or other engagements) are going to go long and we need a stockpile. Pook Good Mook posted:Gettysburg was the junction of 8 major roads. In the era of the corps system if there was going to be a major battle in the region, it was going to be in Gettysburg. Ah, see I was wrong!
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Dec 8, 2022 18:31
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cr0y posted:Can someone give me a TLDR of the significance of the US going to this multi year munitions manufacturing contract deal thing? I don't understand how going year-to-year for X number of munitions versus multiple years times the same amount of munitions is functionally any different? Should be significantly cheaper for all involved.
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Dec 8, 2022 18:35
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The right-wing is seizing on the Griner news in just the most predictable and disgusting way. Reminds me of the reaction to Bergdahl.
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Dec 8, 2022 18:39
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cr0y posted:Can someone give me a TLDR of the significance of the US going to this multi year munitions manufacturing contract deal thing? I don't understand how going year-to-year for X number of munitions versus multiple years times the same amount of munitions is functionally any different? It mostly reduces the risk for the manufacturers for setting up their factories. For most companies there is the risk that the government will suddenly decide to allocate $0 in funding the next year without warning. This makes it harder to justify the initial investment to setup factories and plan for the future. Realistically, this is mitigated somewhat by constant backroom communication between company board members and military higher ups/Congress, but the element of uncertainty is always there. In theory, this lets the MIC know that there is at least this much business for the next X years so that they can better understand how big of a factory they need and how long they need to staff it for. Whether there will be any actual savings, who knows, but at least there's some on paper by taking away some of the risk, making it easier to secure credit and so on.
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Dec 8, 2022 18:45
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cr0y posted:Can someone give me a TLDR of the significance of the US going to this multi year munitions manufacturing contract deal thing? I don't understand how going year-to-year for X number of munitions versus multiple years times the same amount of munitions is functionally any different? It represents the beginning of a commitment to buy ammunition and weapons on a more regular basis than before and allows MIC vendors to commit more resources to expand production capacity for these items. These vendors will now theoretically have the security of a multi-year contract to invest in capital expenditures so that they can meet the demands set out by the contract due to high overhead and initial startup costs. Previously on a year to year procurement system, a vendor will be conservative in capital expenditures because the military is the only buyer for their products and build only enough capacity to build a modest number of weapons since if the procurement orders dry up the following years due to cuts or new weapon systems that supercede your own, you are left hung out to dry having spent tons of money on capacity but no orders to fill. Whether this the political will to sustain this trend holds in the long term remains to be seen but in the short term, everyone is scrambling to replace what it gave to Ukraine and to build up a bigger buffer for potential future wars (not necessarily vs Russia). E:FB
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Dec 8, 2022 18:48
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This is a literal “than u 4 you’re service” non-award that he has to give as a matter of decorum.
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Dec 8, 2022 18:58
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Pook Good Mook posted:Gettysburg was the junction of 8 major roads. In the era of the corps system if there was going to be a major battle in the region, it was going to be in Gettysburg. And the same can be said of Bakhmut.
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Dec 8, 2022 19:31
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FishBulbia posted:And the same can be said of Bakhmut. Even it's value as a road junction is really limited given that both sides will have it under continuous artillery fire no matter who controls it. Not going to move much through those roads either way. It makes sense that the Ukrainians want to make the Russians bleed themselves white attacking into a heavily fortified city. Less clear is what exactly the Russians plan to do with a ruined city that leads into an artillery killzone.
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Dec 8, 2022 19:42
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To kind of get away from the grisly talk of a targeted artillery assassination (skill of the Ukrainian artillery men notwithstanding), if it's okay to talk about what seems like a likely outcome in the near future, what happens when Ukraine retakes Donetsk or Luhansk cities? They're the capital hotbeds of separatism and Donetsk is what, 40ish km from the frontline? Retaking these major cities is within sight based on Ukrainian operations recently. Would losing a center of separatism make the Russian collapse happen faster? Would it complicate things by Ukraine having to do anti-insurgency occupation work while also fighting a frontline war? It's not something I thought we would have to be thinking about if you had asked me in February. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 8, 2022 19:45
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saratoga posted:Less clear is what exactly the Russians plan to do with a ruined city that leads into an artillery killzone. Because it's where they can fight their adversary? I'm not saying that the Russian commander is some tactical genius, that capturing it is feasible, or that the costs outweigh the strategic value, but if the city had no strategic value, then Ukraine would not be throwing so much at its defense. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/30/trenches-endless-mud-and-death-the-battle-of-bakhmut.html The story of an independent Wagner initiative is compelling, but at this point, deaths have been so high, that there has to be something on the line there. FishBulbia fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Dec 8, 2022 |
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Dec 8, 2022 19:48
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HonorableTB posted:They're the capital hotbeds of separatism and Donetsk is what, 40ish km from the frontline? Retaking these major cities is within sight based on Ukrainian operations recently. Would losing a center of separatism make the Russian collapse happen faster? Would it complicate things by Ukraine having to do anti-insurgency occupation work while also fighting a frontline war? It's not something I thought we would have to be thinking about if you had asked me in February. They also have nearly a decade of entrenchment. Both sides have been locked in a bitter stalemate in the suburbs for half a generation, and the total invasion hasn't changed that
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Dec 8, 2022 19:54
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Loved ones have power and internet again. I can't wait to read about the heroics of the Ukrainian electrical services some day.
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Dec 8, 2022 20:00
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WarpedLichen posted:It mostly reduces the risk for the manufacturers for setting up their factories. For most companies there is the risk that the government will suddenly decide to allocate $0 in funding the next year without warning. This makes it harder to justify the initial investment to setup factories and plan for the future. That's only part of it, it also vastly simplifies procurement and allows for long-term agreements with sub-tier suppliers who can then turn around and make long-term agreements with their suppliers.
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Dec 8, 2022 20:02
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