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Sashimi posted:Considering the AFU is already operating an enormous mishmash of equipment from dozens of countries, I'd wager they'll be able to handle the differences between Leopard variants. Does anyone have a tally on how many western MBTs have been confirmed as Ukrainian aid? Oryx list titled 'answering the call' has (so far) all the promised deliveries + those deliveries that have currently made it to Ukraine itself. https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/04/answering-call-heavy-weaponry-supplied.html
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Feb 25, 2023 13:18
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psydude posted:Russian sailors get fresh bread thrice a day. I still find it kinda funny that that claim (among others) was how I ended up posting around here to begin with.
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Feb 25, 2023 13:25
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Tomn posted:I still find it kinda funny that that claim (among others) was how I ended up posting around here to begin with. Is that some part of military lore?
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Feb 25, 2023 13:28
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Hello fellow vets, I'll try not to poo poo post but forgive me if I slip too much.
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Feb 25, 2023 13:36
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orange juche posted:L/55 guns are higher caliber, longer barrels (55 calibers vs 44 calibers, so higher muzzle velocity) but otherwise they fire the same round. The L/55 was designed specifically to deal with the T-72 but the M1A1 Abrams was quite capable of killing T-72s with its licensed reproduction of the Rheinmetall L/44 gun in Desert Storm. The thing that will matter more is probably the length of the penetrator in the APFSDS rounds that they'll be using. Same caliber but longer barrels, surely? (Both are 120mm, so that makes the barrels 5.28 and 6.6 meters long, if I'm not entirely mistaken)
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Feb 25, 2023 13:36
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Tai posted:Hello fellow vets, I'll try not to poo poo post but forgive me if I slip too much. This, too.  (I do actually have a year in a cozy Norwegian army office back in my past, but that feels entirely irrelevant.)
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Feb 25, 2023 13:38
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Computer viking posted:Same caliber but longer barrels, surely? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliber#Caliber_as_measurement_of_length
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Feb 25, 2023 13:40
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steinrokkan posted:Is that some part of military lore? No. At the beginning of (actually it might have even been prior to?) the war, some ex-GiPer-turned-tankie was stanning for Russia's military capabilities in CSPAM and posted an analysis document of Russian doctrine that described how the Russian ration plan dictated that troops be given fresh bread twice a day. It achieved GiP meme status when reports surfaced that Russia was moving mobile crematoriums into place. It's one of the stupidest things I've ever seen on SA and I hope that person feels bad. psydude fucked around with this message at 13:44 on Feb 25, 2023 |
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Feb 25, 2023 13:41
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psydude posted:No. At the beginning of (actually it might have even been prior to?) the war, some ex-GiPer-turned-tankie was stanning for Russia's military capabilities in CSPAM and posted an analysis document of Russian doctrine that described how the Russian ration plan dictated that troops be given fresh bread twice a day. It achieved GiP meme status when reports surfaced that Russia was moving mobile crematoriums into place. There was also a captured field kitchen truck that was a dirty mess filled with nothing but bags of onions.
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Feb 25, 2023 13:43
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Xakura posted:There was also a captured field kitchen truck that was a dirty mess filled with nothing but bags of onions. Excellent point. I'd like to point out that it was like - no poo poo - 20 bags of just onions.
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Feb 25, 2023 13:44
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That feels like a "we're both right" thing - it's the same caliber (diameter) and different caliber length.
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Feb 25, 2023 13:46
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psydude posted:Excellent point. I'd like to point out that it was like - no poo poo - 20 bags of just onions. Un seul oignon frit à l'huile, Un seul oignon nous change en Lion, Un seul oignon frit à l'huile, Un seul oignon, nous change en Lion
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Feb 25, 2023 13:46
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It also showed just how badly things had gone off the rails for the Russians in the early days of the war. If you're abandoning field kitchens, a great many things have had to have gone wrong.
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Feb 25, 2023 13:46
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I'd like to go on the record as stating that I was just as convinced as everyone else on the morning of February 24th, 2022 that Russia had a competent, professional military. This immediately went out the door the moment they did that unsupported air assault to try to capture Hostomel Airport. It was to the point where I was extremely confused because even a junior officer (which I was when I got out of the Army) knows you wouldn't attempt an airfield seizure without a multitude of things - none of which the Russians had - in place prior.
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Feb 25, 2023 13:50
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I remember the first few days of the war, when videos started coming out of Russian soldiers, stranded and out of gas, and civilians drove by mocking them. I remember thinking, "Surely this must just be an isolated incident! There's no way that Russia would just let all of their vehicles run out of gas!"
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Feb 25, 2023 13:51
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psydude posted:Russia had a competent, professional military. I would imagine they used to get paid when it was more manageable yes
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Feb 25, 2023 13:51
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psydude posted:Excellent point. I'd like to point out that it was like - no poo poo - 20 bags of just onions. I remember when Ukrainian soldiers looted an abandoned Kadyrovite camp and reviewed some of the rations they got. By comparison to the rotten and expired and just plain poor quality rations most of the rest of the Russian army had, the Ukrainians said that those rations the Kadyrovites were using were good enough that they compared them favorably to their own, and that they wouldn't mind eating them given the chance.
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Feb 25, 2023 13:52
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How about the video of the Russian convoy coming under fire and all of them running over behind a berm and just sitting there wondering what to do next. I remember screaming "loving return fire!" at my laptop in utter disbelief. I'm sure most of them died trying to carry washing machines back to Belarus.
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Feb 25, 2023 13:54
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zone posted:I remember when Ukrainian soldiers looted an abandoned Kadyrovite camp and reviewed some of the rations they got. By comparison to the rotten and expired and just plain poor quality rations most of the rest of the Russian army had, the Ukrainians said that those rations the Kadyrovites were using were good enough that they compared them favorably to their own, and that they wouldn't mind eating them given the chance. I guess that indirectly says something about how much Russia is willing to pay to keep Chechnya - they pour enough money into it that their pet dictator/commander can give his troops notably better gear and consumables than their own. Then again, it may be better to compare the Kadyrovites with OMON - they're mostly there to pacify the local population, not to invade the neighbors. And I suspect OMON has decent food.
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Feb 25, 2023 13:56
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Re: the economist article: a single person can use this link so if you're fast you can get it for free (please one per customer) https://econ.st/3Y1IxrV combat https://econ.st/3SvVVTW basic training I actually liked the basic training one better. It had a lot more emotional reasonable for me. Also, I didn't realize that you could post here even if you never served. I just hope y'all never find out I was both in the peace corps which, similar to the military, is dumb as gently caress and worked as a non commissioned police officer for the DOD driving around the desert jiggling locks on test bunkers at 3 am.
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Feb 25, 2023 13:57
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psydude posted:I'd like to go on the record as stating that I was just as convinced as everyone else on the morning of February 24th, 2022 that Russia had a competent, professional military. This immediately went out the door the moment they did that unsupported air assault to try to capture Hostomel Airport. It was to the point where I was extremely confused because even a junior officer (which I was when I got out of the Army) knows you wouldn't attempt an airfield seizure without a multitude of things - none of which the Russians had - in place prior. One could have felt that they would have learned something from what happened in Chechnya. Serdyukov getting kicked out to be replaced by Shoigu was most certainly an indicator that something worrying was afoot before the war, but nobody anticipated the kind of clown shoes the Russian army walked into Ukraine on.
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Feb 25, 2023 13:57
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Computer viking posted:I guess that indirectly says something about how much Russia is willing to pay to keep Chechnya - they pour enough money into it that their pet dictator/commander can give his troops notably better gear and consumables than their own. At the beginning of the war they were sending OMON/Rosgvardia (other police forces) ahead with the other main bodies and they were all getting slaughtered. I guess they found out the job kind of sucks when they aren't just beating and arresting unarmed protesters.
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Feb 25, 2023 13:58
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Computer viking posted:I guess that indirectly says something about how much Russia is willing to pay to keep Chechnya - they pour enough money into it that their pet dictator/commander can give his troops notably better gear and consumables than their own. Yeah, in the current Russian army they're mainly there in the capacity of OMON rather than actually do much of the fighting. Most of the voenkors don't rate them very highly on the battlefield and Strelkov's gone out of his way to make fun of them a few times.
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Feb 25, 2023 14:00
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I knew the Russians were poo poo, but I assumed they were leveraging their mass to fix Ukraine's reserves while going for a big envelopment of the East, followed by a frontline stabilising on the Dnieper and peace talks with Kyiv under Russian guns on the East bank. You don't have to be good as long as you fight around the amount of firepower they had going on.
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Feb 25, 2023 14:01
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psydude posted:At the beginning of the war they were sending OMON/Rosgvardia (other police forces) ahead with the other main bodies and they were all getting slaughtered. That probably ties into the entire "they'll welcome us as liberators" thing? If they genuinely believed that (lol, lmao etc), it makes sense to have a good amount of police/security troops in the initial wave.
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Feb 25, 2023 14:03
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Computer viking posted:That probably ties into the entire "they'll welcome us as liberators" thing? If they genuinely believed that (lol, lmao etc), it makes sense to have a good amount of police/security troops in the initial wave. This tracks. There was an ISW update a while back (not gonna bother digging it up) about how Ukrainian resistance fighters had been systematically assassinating Rosgvardia members in Melitopol, and it had gotten to the point where they needed to surge additional police officers. Was a real feel-good piece.
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Feb 25, 2023 14:05
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Russia got some major logistics hubs dunked on yesterday that link Rostov to Donestk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTl35HP2VcM
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Feb 25, 2023 14:05
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Computer viking posted:That probably ties into the entire "they'll welcome us as liberators" thing? If they genuinely believed that (lol, lmao etc), it makes sense to have a good amount of police/security troops in the initial wave. It was indeed what they believed, according to the captured documents and testimonies of POWs. They genuinely thought that there would be minimal resistance, if that. The mobile crematoriums were mainly for 'disappearing permanently' any parts of the population that were resisting or had the potential to resist occupying sources.
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Feb 25, 2023 14:05
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It worked for them in Kherson, where the defenses were sabotaged by Russian moles. They absolutely expected the same to happen everywhere, but their agents flipped on them
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Feb 25, 2023 14:06
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RUSI still has the best report on this: https://rusi.org/explore-our-resear...ruary-july-2022quote:Russia planned to invade Ukraine over a 10-day period and thereafter occupy the country to enable annexation by August 2022. The Russian plan presupposed that speed, and the use of deception to keep Ukrainian forces away from Kyiv, could enable the rapid seizure of the capital. The Russian deception plan largely succeeded, and the Russians achieved a 12:1 force ratio advantage north of Kyiv. The very operational security that enabled the successful deception, however, also led Russian forces to be unprepared at the tactical level to execute the plan effectively. The Russian plan’s greatest deficiency was the lack of reversionary courses of action. As a result, when speed failed to produce the desired results, Russian forces found their positions steadily degraded as Ukraine mobilised. Despite these setbacks, Russia refocused on Donbas and, since Ukraine had largely expended its ammunition supply, proved successful in subsequent operations, slowed by the determination – rather than the capabilities – of Ukrainian troops. From April, the West became Ukraine’s strategic depth, and the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) only robbed Russia of the initiative once long-range fires brought Russian logistics under threat. e: direct link to the full report, because it's a really good piece of work: https://static.rusi.org/359-SR-Ukraine-Preliminary-Lessons-Feb-July-2022-web-final.pdf Other juicy bits: quote:A critical weakness of the Russian strike campaign was battle damage assessment. First, the Russian military appears to have presumed that if an action had been ordered and carried out then it had succeeded, unless there was direct evidence to the contrary. Evidence of success appears to have disproportionately relied on three data points: confirmation from pilots that they hit their target; confirmation from Russian satellites that a site showed damage; and confirmation from signals intelligence (SIGINT) that Ukrainians reported a strike and damage to their equipment. Russian satellite reconnaissance proved very limited, even though Russian survey space reconnaissance of Ukraine has been conducted since at least 2012, and detailed reconnaissance, in the interests of invasion planning, since mid-2021. A probable reason for this may be the insufficient number of satellites in the orbital grouping of the VKS and the overestimation of their technical capabilities. Indirect confirmation of this explanation is provided by the fact that the AFRF began buying additional satellite images of the territory of Ukraine and individual military facilities on the world market in April 2022. One of the visible failures of satellite intelligence is the inability to detect on time a significant volume of strategic railway movements by the UAF, which, in March 2022 amounted to three–four echelons per day. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 14:16 on Feb 25, 2023 |
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Feb 25, 2023 14:09
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12:1 force ratio and failed to achieve any of their objectives. That's gotta be on par with the Winter War, no?
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Feb 25, 2023 14:12
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psydude posted:12:1 force ratio and failed to achieve any of their objectives. That's gotta be on par with the Winter War, no? By this point, the farce Russia has presented to the world has surpassed their bungling during the Winter War, in all relevant ways.
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Feb 25, 2023 14:14
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steinrokkan posted:Is that some part of military lore? Nah, early in the war I was scouring the forums for places to find out about what the hell was going on. I looked in the forbidden forum and found one guy furiously arguing "Russia can't possibly be having logistical issues, and I have a bunch of dense military analysis papers explaining why." I tried reading through the excerpts he was posting but it was pretty thick stuff for technical experts so I thought I'd bring it over here to let veterans take a look to double-check that I was understanding it right. They tore it apart, and zeroed in on the claim that Russian soldiers benefited from field bakeries making fresh bread twice a day. The funny bit is that leaving that aside, the basic claim the guy was making was "The Russians HAVE a logistical doctrine therefore they can't possibly have logistical issues, QED." But a closer look at what the papers was actually saying actually predicted the logistical issues - it mentioned that the Russians relied heavily on rail for their logistical network and had limited truck logistical assets when away from rail loading stations, and the paper's prediction on how far their truck logistics would stretch past the railheads managed to line up almost exactly with how far Russian was actually able to penetrate past Ukraine's borders. Dude was a master of throwing up reams of source articles and information without correctly applying it to the situation. There was also a bit during the rasputitsa last year where he was arguing that mud was going to gum up the Ukrainian military and posting excerpts from military history books about the effects that the rasputitsa had on Operation Barbarossa to explain how bad it was, without apparently twigging to the fact the Russians, being the attackers, would be the ones hindered by the mud this time around. You can find the logistical excerpts yourself by checking my posts in this thread if you're really curious.
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Feb 25, 2023 14:24
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Yes. The Winter War was one where they made colossal fuckups but still managed to force Finland into suing for peace after a bit more than three months. For all the bloodshed they are far from the success they had there.
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Feb 25, 2023 14:35
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Ataxerxes posted:Yes. The Winter War was one where they made colossal fuckups but still managed to force Finland into suing for peace after a bit more than three months. For all the bloodshed they are far from the success they had there. Ukraine is very lucky that it's the largest European country with population that is 1/3 of Russia. If Finland had enjoyed the same advantages, the winter war would have gone very differently.
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Feb 25, 2023 14:38
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I still have trouble with the sheer human cost of their failed invasion. I think a lot of us got used to the (relatively) low US casualty numbers in Iraq/Afghanistan, where there was a spike here and there for a really lovely event that made headlines (landing an RPG in a chinook full of SEALs, for example), but not the sustained meat grinder where that number of casualties might happen at a multiple fighting positions at the same time. It still boggles my mind that ~200k Russians are dead/wounded (per NYT). I haven’t seen an estimate for dead/wounded Ukrainians in a while, but I assume it’s pretty loving dire as well.
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Feb 25, 2023 14:44
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Borscht posted:Also, I didn't realize that you could post here even if you never served. I just hope y'all never find out I was both in the peace corps which, similar to the military, is dumb as gently caress and worked as a non commissioned police officer for the DOD driving around the desert jiggling locks on test bunkers at 3 am. We love different backgrounds here, civilian or military. Sometimes you find yourself gobsmacked by the expertise in arcane areas that comes out of left field during a thread.
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Feb 25, 2023 14:48
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Tai posted:Russia got some major logistics hubs dunked on yesterday that link Rostov to Donestk Ah, the Small Diameter Bomb familiarization course has been completed by the Ukrainian artillery corps.
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Feb 25, 2023 14:49
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GD_American posted:We love different backgrounds here, civilian or military. Sometimes you find yourself gobsmacked by the expertise in arcane areas that comes out of left field during a thread. This is my favorite thing about SA: no matter the field, there is someone on this website that has PhD-level knowledge, years of experience, or both in whatever field you’re asking about. No matter how niche or specialized, at least one person here knows it every which way it can currently be known.
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Feb 25, 2023 14:51
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Icon Of Sin posted:I still have trouble with the sheer human cost of their failed invasion. I think a lot of us got used to the (relatively) low US casualty numbers in Iraq/Afghanistan, where there was a spike here and there for a really lovely event that made headlines (landing an RPG in a chinook full of SEALs, for example), but not the sustained meat grinder where that number of casualties might happen at a multiple fighting positions at the same time. yeah after the first month or so we thought they were speedrunning soviet losses in afghanistan but they were actually speedrunning us losses in vietnam
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