Generation Internet posted:

Interesting twitter thread from a Ukrainian officer about Wagner offensive tactics how Ukraine's Soviet legacy can still hinder operations.

https://twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1628289157461078018?s=20

Artificer posted:

How do you defend against an attack like that? What are some typical options to consider?

psydude posted:

It sounds like the Wagner group just bought a bunch of copies of FM 7-8 and are running classic battle drills, because that's exactly how the US army is taught to attack a bunker or fixed position with a platoon-sized element.

Fragrag posted:

Isn't this basically the same tactics used in the Brécourt Manor Assault?

Icon Of Sin posted:

Neuter the numerical advantage with crew-served weapons, with overlapping fields of fire and good range cards*
“Registering” mortars/artillery, aka pre-planned fire missions on known/suspected/likely avenues of approach, and your final position (“drop it all on me, I’m taking one last swing at these shitheads on the way out”)
all the loving concertina wire, everywhere, forever
Claymores set up as a final defense line, since they’re command-detonated and the wires are never that long. Keeping track of which one is connected to what wires is important!
Obstacles in general. C-wire, claymores, trenches that aren’t straight, foxholes, berms, anti-tank trenches dug beforehand, literally whatever you can manage to slow down someone trying to get close to you. Obstacles are near useless if nobody is watching them and shooting at whoever is getting slowed down (complicating the matter further).

*range card: drawing/representation of some sort that details avenues of approach, obstacles, distances, etc of your given field of fire, so that you can still semi-effectively cover your assigned area even if it’s dark/smoke screens are up/can’t see for whatever other reason.

e: this is if you want to hold the place. If not, “discretion is the better part of valor” is a saying for a reason.

bulletsponge13 posted:

This.

You need hardened positions to withstand the incoming. After that, you want to put as many inconveniences into the hemisphere as you can. Another tactic is false trenches- manned positions that are there to draw attention. When assaulted, the force might put up a very token defense and fall back to prepared positions for the counter attack. In WW1, these trenches would often be preplotted for fires, and booby trapped all to hell. The key in trench warfare is control- if you lose a position, the idea is to counter before the enemy has a chance to set security. You can find some lovely accounts of this type if thing in Bernard Fall's 'Hell In A Very Small Place' about the siege and fall of Dien Bien Phu.

I just want to add one of my favorite defensive measure interlocking fields of grazing fire- guns emplacement to shoot through a crawling man, and take the legs out of any dancers that want to encore.

In the simplest terms, you always need 3 things to win a fight. Speed, Surprise, and Violence of Action. If you lose one, you drat well better double up the other two. You can complicate it with a lot of details and esotera, but at the muzzle, that's the breakdown.

Fragrag posted:

Isn't this basically the same tactics used in the Brécourt Manor Assault?

edit: minus the pre-assault artillery barrage

Alan Smithee posted:

https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1628389824875966464

noob question, since these things require such extreme precision, would spent shells even be useful to keep around?

Alan Smithee posted:

https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1628389824875966464

noob question, since these things require such extreme precision, would spent shells even be useful to keep around?

Generation Internet posted:

The stories that are going to come out of Ukraine after the war is over will be wild. Tweet below contains a video of a Czech company delivering inflatable decoys to Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/TarmoFella/status/1628373216740737024?s=20



I have to wonder how effective these are in a drone-saturated environment, and how the dummies relate to Russian MOD claims to have destroyed more HIMARS than have been delivered.

Artificer posted:

How do you defend against an attack like that? What are some typical options to consider?

bird food bathtub posted:

If the piece I read is to be believed Ukraine went quite a bit further than inflatable decoys for their HIMARS launchers. Full scale working trucks with wooden launcher-shaped boxes on the back covered with a layer of sheet metal and, for some reason, a heat source inside the box.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

The heat source would be to simulate the heat signature of the actual launching equipment, I assume.

IPCRESS posted:

On Western munitions:

At what point do Western governments say "This Vladimir guy certainly thinks it's the cold war again. Maybe we should take him as a man of his word this one time. 3 shifts/day, 6 days/week, top off the magazines"?

Is there some truly terrifying sunk cost to spinning up production? Or is it already happening but that headline doesn't get clicks?

IPCRESS posted:

On Western munitions:

At what point do Western governments say "This Vladimir guy certainly thinks it's the cold war again. Maybe we should take him as a man of his word this one time. 3 shifts/day, 6 days/week, top off the magazines"?

Is there some truly terrifying sunk cost to spinning up production? Or is it already happening but that headline doesn't get clicks?

Artificer posted:

How do you defend against an attack like that? What are some typical options to consider?

Generation Internet posted:

The stories that are going to come out of Ukraine after the war is over will be wild. Tweet below contains a video of a Czech company delivering inflatable decoys to Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/TarmoFella/status/1628373216740737024?s=20



I have to wonder how effective these are in a drone-saturated environment, and how the dummies relate to Russian MOD claims to have destroyed more HIMARS than have been delivered.

Tuna-Fish posted:

... The shells that are hard to make turn into a few tens of thousands of supersonic fragments when the HE charge in them goes off (hopefully) near the target. 155mm artillery doesn't have casings, which is what you are probably thinking of. Loading a gun consists of one guy tossing the shell in the breech, and then someone pushing bags of powder to follow it.

Midjack posted:

In my head I'm hearing "Inflatable HIMARS" to the tune of "Detachable Penis".

IPCRESS posted:

On Western munitions:

At what point do Western governments say "This Vladimir guy certainly thinks it's the cold war again. Maybe we should take him as a man of his word this one time. 3 shifts/day, 6 days/week, top off the magazines"?

Is there some truly terrifying sunk cost to spinning up production? Or is it already happening but that headline doesn't get clicks?

Artificer posted:

How do you defend against an attack like that? What are some typical options to consider?

Godholio posted:

We're not spinning up advanced major weapons systems production. As far as terrifying costs...the F-22 was killed at the point that economies of scale were about to kick in. The F-35 fortunately survived beyond that, but those production lines probably don't have a lot of room to ramp up.

Action-Bastard posted:

In recent news:

https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1628545672386420738

The fuckers cannot stop slamming their dick in a drawer.


Here's some hot Thermoberic action:

https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1628259323691380736

psydude posted:

It sounds like the Wagner group just bought a bunch of copies of FM 7-8 and are running classic battle drills, because that's exactly how the US army is taught to attack a bunker or fixed position with a platoon-sized element.

GD_American posted:

question- are drone operations integrated that thoroughly now into US infantry SOP? Like down to platoon/squad level?

psydude posted:

"Conduct a reconnaissance" has always been a part of the Troop Leading Procedures. Whether you're using a drone, maps, aircraft, or the naked eye is really up to whatever resources you've got available at the time.

Action-Bastard posted:

Here's some hot Thermoberic action:

https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1628259323691380736

Force de Fappe posted:

We've been using Black Hornets for a while now, and they are loving amazing. Mailorder drones are nice, but thermal imaging and microsized drones that are barely detectable *chef kiss*

mllaneza posted:

mllaneza posted:

By this point in the Ukraine SMO, I'd expect any self-respecting US Army infantry platoon has at least passed the hat to order a quadcopter from Amazon. For a couple of hundred bucks you can get good quality visible-light video with a range of several km, that's huge. Based on five-star reviews, thermal imaging is $3k or so, maybe less. The ability to have something with thermal imaging hovering 100m over your command squad is a sea change in infantry tactics. Military grade is more capable and more expensive, but COTS is on the front lines right now. This kind of as hoc employment of a new system is going to feed the development of doctrine and therefor procurement for years.

quote:

DONETSK REGION, Ukraine — The two men lay on the dirty tile floor of an empty office, still in their bloodied combat fatigues and bandages. One dozed without a pillow under a blanket; the other stretched out with a tourniquet strapped above the knee of his blood-soaked pants.

The men were two of three Russian fighters with the Wagner mercenary group who had been captured a few hours earlier in a northern section of the embattled city of Bakhmut, according to a Ukrainian officer with a sidearm on his hip, who was the only other person present. The third, more seriously injured, had been taken to a hospital, the officer said.

The men had injuries that appeared to be battlefield shrapnel wounds. One had his hands tightly bound with green tape; the other was not bound and accepted a cigarette from the officer.

“Do you want to smoke? Water?” the officer asked in Russian after a group of Washington Post journalists entered the ground-floor room with clearance from Ukrainian officials. “They want to interview you.”

Over the next hour in the predawn dark of Monday, after being questioned by Ukrainian intelligence and while they waited for another unit to pick them up for further medical care and administrative processing, the two captives gave a rare detailed account of their experience as Russian ex-convicts recruited by the mercenary group and rushed to the front lines.

As President Vladimir Putin’s raging war on Ukraine has decimated his regular army — with up to 200,000 killed and injured, according to British military intelligence — he has scoured jails and prison colonies for new fighters. Promised pardons in exchange for fighting, convicts make up an estimated 80 percent of Wagner’s force of 50,000, which has led a fierce months-long assault on Bakhmut.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine sent shockwaves around the world as millions of refugees fled the country, grain shipments were delayed and Russian gas curtailed. (Video: Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)
Roughly half of the group’s prison recruits have been killed or injured, according to the British estimate. Fewer have been captured.

These two, just hours from the battlefield, were by turns contrite and defensive. They said they believed what they had been told in Russia about “the horrors” being inflicted on Russian-speaking Ukrainian civilians by the Ukrainian military — one of the Kremlin’s main justifications for the war. But they said that they cared more about wiping clean their criminal records with a six-month contract as Wagner fighters, and that getting out of jail was worth the risk of the immediate death penalty Wagner said it would impose if they failed to fight on command.

“I didn’t even have to think about it,” one said of the chance to leave his cell for the battle lines of a country he had never visited.

Thousands of civilians fled Ukraine’s front lines. These people returned.

In interviews, they gave firsthand confirmation of reports of Wagner’s brutal terms of compliance, which they said included being shown videos of Wagner enforcers beating the hands and heads of reluctant fighters with sledgehammers. One of the men said he watched a friend taken off to be shot — or “zeroed”— by a Wagner enforcement team for protesting deployments that sometimes led to hundreds of fighters a day being killed in and around Bakhmut.

The two said the assassination policy had eased in recent weeks as Wagner lost shocking numbers of fighters in combat. The interviews also offered some of the first direct testimony by ex-convicts sent by Russia to fight in Ukraine. One Wagner fighter has sought to defect to Norway, but there have been few firsthand accounts of the group’s recruitment or its battlefield practices.

A Ukrainian official facilitated the interviews in response to a request by Post journalists to speak with surrendered or captured Wagner fighters. There were no preconditions set, and the meeting was consistent with Ukraine’s efforts to document the nature of the Russia’s invading forces, including by granting journalists access to prisoner of war detention centers. Unlike those sessions, prearranged by Ukrainian officials in Western Ukraine, this meeting was hastily organized at the front within hours of the men being taken into custody in the combat zone.

The Washington Post was able to independently verify key parts of the two captives’ accounts in Russian public databases, including birth certificates and criminal records of two men with the same first and last names, which were consistent with their stories. Other assertions could not be independently confirmed.

The Post is withholding their last names and not showing their faces in photographs because of the risk of reprisal and to respect the Geneva Conventions, which call for prisoners of war “to be … protected against insults and public curiosity.”

During the interviews, the armed Ukrainian officer guarding the men remained within earshot in the next room. He occasionally came to interject his own questions for the prisoners or to share information he said they had provided during interrogation. Each man said he was willing of his own accord to answer questions about his experiences.

“Nobody forced me to be here,” one of the men, Mikhail, 35, said of his presence fighting in Ukraine. “I made my own choice.”

For Mikhail and the other captive, Ilya, 30, their transformation — from convicts to combatants, prisoners to prisoners of war — began in the penal colonies where they were serving sentences for alcohol-related deaths.

Ilya, 30, a tree cutter with two daughters from the Smolensk Region, said he had been serving six years for “drunk driving” after wrecking his motorcycle while intoxicated and killing his brother, a passenger. Court records in Smolensk confirm that someone with his name was convicted of “driving a motor vehicle while intoxicated … which negligently caused the death of a person.”

Mikhail, who said he never held a regular job, said he had drunkenly beaten a man to death in a fight in his home near Chita, in Russia’s Far East. Records from Chita regional courts confirm a July 2021 conviction in his name for the “intentional infliction of grievous bodily harm, negligently resulting in the death of the victim.”

He was less than two years into his nine-year sentence last October when inmates known as “goats,” who cooperate with the guards, ushered dozens of convicts into the prison yard of Penal Colony No. 7 in time to see a helicopter descending on the grounds.

As Russians inch forward near Bakhmut, Ukrainians dig fallback defenses

Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group emerged and came to address the assembled crowd. It was shortly after Ukrainian’s autumn counteroffensives had pushed Russian forces from much of Kharkiv and Kherson regions, and the Kremlin was desperate for new fighters.

Prigozhin told the prisoners that he came with President Vladimir Putin’s offer to “wipe the slate clean” of criminal convictions for anyone signing up to fight.

Mikhail also heard Prigozhin promise that anyone who ran away from the front would immediately “go to zero,” the Wagner term for assassinating its own men. Within 10 days, he was on a flight to western Russian, far from his wife and four children in the East, and by November he was in occupied eastern Ukraine.

Ilya arrived in Ukraine a month later, after other Wagner recruiters came to his prison. In addition to erasing his conviction, he expected to be paid more than $1,300 a month as an infantry man, and up to $1,200 more in bonuses for taking out an enemy position or blowing up a vehicle.

Before taking up his Kalashnikov assault rifle, Ilya went through a short stint of infantry training in a stretch of occupied Ukrainian forest with Wagner professionals who had fought in Syria and Africa. Neither he nor Mikhail saw any sign of regular Russian military units in their time fighting with Wagner.

Ilya was one of the fighters responsible for locating Ukrainian troops. But with one drone for his entire unit and no other targeting gear, his only option was to advance under fire until he sighted the enemy with his own eyes. Most days were a slaughter, he said.

On one occasion, more than 400 of his fellow fighters were killed over 72 hours while trying to storm the village of Krasna Hora, he said, with many of the corpses left lying in the snow. Ilya said he ran past several dead men that he recognized.

When some fighters complained, punishment was swift. One of Ilya’s friends from the Smolensk prison, a 24-year-old known by the nickname Kozan, was one of 10 fighters pulled aside after joining in a riot over conditions.

“The written contract could not be violated,” said Ilya, who said he was shown videos of Wagner officers hanging alleged defectors from balconies, breaking their hands or battering them to death. There have been numerous videos, consistent with his description, posted on social media.

“I had thoughts of running away, but they have information about my family, my children,” he said.

Mikhail had similar experiences, being moved frequently to fight around Bakhmut and the Donetsk region that Putin has reportedly pledged to conquer by the spring.

The only significant change, he said, was an apparent loosening of the kill policy that Wagner inflicted on rule breakers as the demands for soldiers continued to soar. Starting just before the New Year, those caught using drugs or alcohol had their contracts extended by several months with no additional pay. Even deserters got a reprieve, Mikhail said.

“Zeroing was canceled,” he said. “Probably because there weren’t enough people.”

Mikhail and Ilya did not fight together, but found themselves in the same push to gain ground on Sunday. Mikhail reached a Ukrainian trench and jumped, only see a red flare go off when one of the Russians hit a trip wire.

Within minutes, a drone flew overhead and dropped a grenade. A second explosion knocked him unconscious, and he was picked up by Ukrainians soon after his head cleared.

Ilya said he was caught in a mortar attack after being ordered to storm a tree line concealing Ukrainian fighters. He was hit in the upper rear thigh. Other Wagner fighters fled, he said. Ukrainian soldiers provided first aid after taking him into captivity. Thick bandages covered the wound at the time of the interview.

Prigozhin earlier this month announced on a Telegram messaging channel controlled by his company, Concord, that Wagner was no longer recruiting fighters from Russian prisons, without giving a reason. Ilya said he would advise other convicts not sign up. For one thing, he said he has never been paid.

“I personally did not receive a single ruble from my salary,” he said