(Thread IKs:
fatherboxx)
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Cross-posting this because I so rarely have a professional connection to any of this stuff. Attended a virtual meeting today that had speakers from SUCHO (Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online). It's a pretty cool initiative that started with providing data backups and has expanded into digitization support. https://www.sucho.org/ But there's more! They're creating a meme archive (https://memes.sucho.org/) and you can contribute images. One of the archivists who presented is the "Meme Coordinator," which is a way cooler job title than anything I'll ever have.
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Jun 20, 2023 22:37
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I guess the Hungarian government doesn't have to say anything about the POWs released, comments on twitter show the Hungarian narrative pretty clearly. Non English comments from top to bottom: "Go Hungarians! But this flag...  ""These are not Hungarians, but dicksucking Ukrainians." "They can be sacrificed again."
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Jun 20, 2023 22:46
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us mic is so mind bogglingly large we can apparently lose mid-ten figures in the couch cushionsquote:The Pentagon announced Tuesday that the accounting error revealed last month was significantly more than previously stated and aid provided to Ukraine was overvalued by $6.2 billion rather than $3 billion. what do you know, right as congress really seems set to deadlock for the near future. complete shot in the dark, but my suspicion is that military procurement administrators and movie studio accountants could have a lively conversation with each other
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Jun 20, 2023 23:00
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:us mic is so mind bogglingly large we can apparently lose mid-ten figures in the couch cushions The US might be in deficit on this conflict now, but just wait until it releases in Blockbuster and we make it all back on VHS rentals. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 20, 2023 23:07
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/worl...76be19be2&ei=18 So, apparently the new thing in Russian Warfare isn't tanks OR drones, it's Tanks AND Drones! (as in remote piloted tank) I really gotta wonder what depths the Russian tactical folks are facing in the counter offensive. What does it take to get to "take an old tank, refit it to be piloted remotely, fill it with explosives and then send it rolling at the opposition, hoping it gets through the mindfield or even someone with a RPG to blow up?"
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Jun 20, 2023 23:38
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SirFozzie posted:https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/worl...76be19be2&ei=18 Yeah that's about the video I saw and un-posted. I figure they had a tank that still drove but had some other parts in such a bad state that they felt using it as a VBIED was better bang-for-buck. Still kind of surprising since it could have been used for spare parts instead. But Russia's in year 2 of what was supposed to be a 3 week war and they've been losing ground for over a year, so desperate times call for stupid measures.
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Jun 20, 2023 23:58
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Orthanc6 posted:Yeah that's about the video I saw and un-posted. I figure they had a tank that still drove but had some other parts in such a bad state that they felt using it as a VBIED was better bang-for-buck. Still kind of surprising since it could have been used for spare parts instead. But Russia's in year 2 of what was supposed to be a 3 week war and they've been losing ground for over a year, so desperate times call for stupid measures. If I remember correctly I believe Russia has been using ancient tanks like T55s for this. So this is actually probably the best use for them. Apparently one of them got pretty drat close to a Ukrainian trench before it got blown up and the blast was so huge I'm sure it hosed up whoever was in that trench. Honestly I'm surprised Ukraine hasn't started doing this. I believe they have a bunch of old T55s and other ancient Soviet armored vehicles they can use. It's pretty wild to see the mighty Russian military use a tactic that was popular with ISIS.
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Jun 21, 2023 00:02
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Yeah, I'm pretty sure the mechanics for the other tanks and just swore. "We've been jerry-rigging our tanks for over a year now in the field, without regular maintenance, and you send this thing across the lines? Do you know how hard it is to keep tanks in the field for over a year?" edit: Not to mention the cost of transporting all this heavy metal (literally) from Russia into the Ukraine? I know I'm getting very close to dril "You don't actually have to hand it to them", but imagining the job that the technicians/mechanics would have to do to get them there, and to set them up, well, I dislike them slightly less. SirFozzie fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Jun 21, 2023 |
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Jun 21, 2023 00:03
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I wonder if the US accounting error was an intentional way to get more funding for modernization. "We gave Ukraine 10 gajillion dollars of old equipment. We'll replace it with 10 gajillion dollars of new, cutting-edge equipment." Then, "Whoops! Our bad...heh heh. Welp, purchase orders are already cut. I guess we'll have to keep all this new kit. Wouldn't be fair to back out of those contracts now."
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Jun 21, 2023 00:05
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Charliegrs posted:If I remember correctly I believe Russia has been using ancient tanks like T55s for this. So this is actually probably the best use for them. Apparently one of them got pretty drat close to a Ukrainian trench before it got blown up and the blast was so huge I'm sure it hosed up whoever was in that trench. Ukraine has made a thing of capturing any and every tank that can reasonably be repaired. Considering their shortage of armor, which is still much greater than what Russia faces despite historic losses, even if a tank can't be made to shoot it can still be a decent APC. And it's worth the time and effort to make it shoot again if it's at all possible. Plus optics aren't great if they blew up their own "working" tank and then turned around to ask for more tanks.
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Jun 21, 2023 00:10
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SirFozzie posted:https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/worl...76be19be2&ei=18 ah, so they did learn something from the syrian civil war
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Jun 21, 2023 00:10
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Ynglaur posted:I wonder if the US accounting error was an intentional way to get more funding for modernization. "We gave Ukraine 10 gajillion dollars of old equipment. We'll replace it with 10 gajillion dollars of new, cutting-edge equipment." I thought this reads more like a way to drive down how much money was given to Ukraine which does matter for things like Presidential Drawdown which is limited by dollar amount. Ex: 2023 Provides: quote:$19.8 billion in authorities and associated funding to arm and equip Ukraine and So that's a few billion more in PDA they can give this year. CNN reports something similar: https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/20/politics/pentagon-ukraine-accounting-error/index.html The actual accounting is all government fun bucks because how the hell do you value military stock with 0 free market price discovery?
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Jun 21, 2023 00:14
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yeah, it's pretty much what WarpedLichen said. Some of the things we sent was old and likely would have been decommissioned, so not only is using it in this circumstance good in that we'll get some use out of it (by sending to Ukraine to help them defend themselves), we'll also not have to pay the costs of decommissioning and storing the remanant.
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Jun 21, 2023 00:18
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https://www.ft.com/content/d8fe8941-3703-433d-ac7a-dab9ba500481quote:“I personally saw how, during our assault, the enemy [fighter jet] aircraft immediately fired on our advancing troops using laser guided bombs from a far distance,” said Stas, a soldier with an elite drone surveillance unit helping infantry regain lost territory in the south of the country. It was not an isolated incident, he said. There is a method to the madness with the Russian strikes on Ukranian infrastructure.
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Jun 21, 2023 00:20
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Bad news for Russia - Ukraine still has in reserve 10 out of the 12 new battalions prepared for the counter-offensive, with much of the new western weaponry yet to be deployed. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/20/casualties-mount-as-ukraine-forces-inch-south-hamlet-by-hamlet by Daniel Boffey in Velyka Novosilka, Donetsk Tue 20 Jun 2023 15.45 BST ... The clearest progress in Ukraine’s two-week-old counteroffensive has been here, 75 miles north of the devastated and occupied coastal city of Mariupol, in a normally sleepy jumble of farming communities sitting on the meandering Mokri Yaly River. ... But the price of progress on this road to Mariupol and elsewhere has been high, as British military intelligence confirmed in one of its recent updates. ... Earlier that day at 4.20am, Ruslan Tymchuk, 27, and comrades in Ukraine’s 420 shooting battalion had come under heavy shelling in a forest about 2 miles north of Bakhmut, further east in the same Donetsk region. Two of his comrades, one of whom Tymchuk said would certainly lose his hand, had been badly injured from the first flurry of shells. He had been using his tourniquet to try to save one of them when another missile came in. “I was thrown by the wave of the explosion,” Tymchuk said, his lip trembling. In some ways, he got away lightly. Tymchuk had strained his back, taken a heavy knock to the head and the eyesight in his right eye was blurred. Asked whether he had lost many friends, he became silent. “I would rather not say,” he said. “But a lot.” Yevhen Udovyehenko, 37, a commander in an assault group in the 122 battalion of the 81st brigade, was lying on his back in the ambulance, his heavily bandaged foot resting up on a khaki-coloured bag. He lost the back of his right foot at 2.30pm on Monday after his freshly dug trench in Bilohorivka, further east again, was struck by Russian mortar fire. ... It was not Udovyehenko’s first injury. He rolled up his sleeves to show a deep scar on his left shoulder and a smaller one on his right collar. “I lost 12cm of flesh there, and that one was from artillery shrapnel. I have saved people, carried them from the battlefield, who had asked me to kill them because the pain was too bad.” “The situation is not good,” he said. “We don’t have enough weapons and armoured vehicles. We were almost encircled in Bilohorivka, just one way in and out.” “We need better training,” he added. “I tell the recruits that they must pee in a bottle and then they leave the trench and are shot dead.” Asked whether the offensive was making progress in Bakhmut, Tymchuk again went quiet. “I don’t know, 50:50,” he whispered. ... Back in Kyiv, where the Ukrainian capital’s air defences had shot down two dozen Iranian drones overnight, the Ukrainian MP Serhii Rakhmanin, who sits on the parliament’s defence committee, appealed for patience. Just two of the 12 new battalions prepared for the offensive were yet in battle, he said, with much of the new western weaponry yet to be deployed. In a statement on her Telegram channel, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar wrote that the “biggest blow” was yet to come. Speaking to the Guardian, she further disclosed that Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of the ground forces of the armed forces of Ukraine, and widely held responsible for both the successful defence of Kyiv and last year’s sweep through Kharkiv, last week brought his commanders together in the combat zone to assess the situation on the ground. “They made a full in-depth analysis of their actions and based on this analysis they created tasks for themselves,” Maliar said. “People expect the speed of a movie in this war. It seems to us that this is editing. But there is no editing in life.”
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Jun 21, 2023 00:21
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WarpedLichen posted:I thought this reads more like a way to drive down how much money was given to Ukraine which does matter for things like Presidential Drawdown which is limited by dollar amount. Yeah, I read it as they were doing both. Use the big number to get new equipment; use the lower number to justify sending more (and then getting new equipment). fizzy posted:Bad news for Russia - Ukraine still has in reserve 10 out of the 12 new battalions prepared for the counter-offensive, with much of the new western weaponry yet to be deployed. I'm not sure how much credibility I'd give a new organization who doesn't report the number of units prepared that is anywhere close to what many, many other analysts have reported. Maybe they're referring only to Western-trained battalions, which might be around a dozen? I've seen some estimates that Ukraine has over 30 brigades prepared for this, albeit many are mobilized light infantry or motorized infantry. I think at least 6 brigades have Western IFVs/APCs and/or tanks. Thomas Theiner on Twitter had a pretty good breakdown a few weeks ago. Mainstream media hasn't been good at reporting on military matters in my lifetime, I feel. Were they any better before the 1980s?
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Jun 21, 2023 00:31
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Ynglaur posted:I'm not sure how much credibility I'd give a new organization who doesn't report the number of units prepared that is anywhere close to what many, many other analysts have reported. Maybe they're referring only to Western-trained battalions, which might be around a dozen? Yes, that's exactly what they're referring to, as corroborated elsewhere (most outlets have been hedging by saying 9 of the 12 new battalions are still in reserve--two have definitely been confirmed in action, there seems to be some uncertainty about a third.)
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Jun 21, 2023 00:43
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It’s probably cheaper to hand the old poo poo over to Ukraine to get used than to store and dispose of it properly. Or at least near enough that it doesn’t matter. And if you factor in all the intel and knowledge gained it’s probably way to our benefit.
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Jun 21, 2023 01:19
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:us mic is so mind bogglingly large we can apparently lose mid-ten figures in the couch cushions Most of this stuff getting handed over is from old Cold War stockpiles, things in storage waiting to be scrapped, etc so valuing it is going to be really hard. For example how do you value the ~500 M113s the US sent, some of which date back to almost the Vietnam war? The price when they were made in the 70s or 80s? The price the army would probably get for them today (as scrap or collectors items)? The zero dollars they'd get if they donated them to police departments? Some arcane depreciation formula that only the federal government uses? This whole process must be keeping an army of accountants busy trying to figure out the lowest possible value they can give to a lot of this junk. saratoga fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Jun 21, 2023 |
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Jun 21, 2023 01:52
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saratoga posted:Most of this stuff getting handed over is from old Cold War stockpiles, things in storage waiting to be scrapped, etc so valuing it is going to be really hard. For example how do you value the ~500 M113s the US sent, some of which date back to almost the Vietnam war? The price when they were made in the 70s or 80s? The price the army would probably get for them today (as scrap or collectors items)? The zero dollars they'd get if they donated them to police departments? Some arcane depreciation formula that only the federal government uses? This whole process must be keeping an army of accountants busy. My guess is $0 cost for the equipment and then whatever the shipping cost is goes against the president's spend authority, with a discount recorded for the cost savings from lack of ongoing storage fees.
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Jun 21, 2023 01:55
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Bel Shazar posted:My guess is $0 cost for the equipment and then whatever the shipping cost is goes against the president's spend authority, with a discount recorded for the cost savings from lack of ongoing storage fees. There is generally really strict rules about writing off the value of things (to keep people from writing things off and then keeping them for themselves), so for most of this stuff they probably cannot do that. Not sure about the military, but usually things have to be valued according to some process.
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Jun 21, 2023 02:08
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Bel Shazar posted:My guess is $0 cost for the equipment and then whatever the shipping cost is goes against the president's spend authority, with a discount recorded for the cost savings from lack of ongoing storage fees. This GAO report (about past PDAs) details what is supposed to happen to execute a PDA. The DOD is not authorized to say that the equipment just costs $0; that would be unlawful. They also cannot count the cost of shipment against the PDA; that comes from O&M money, unless a new contract is cheaper than shipping it on DOD assets. How much depreciation is applied, if any, I don't know. I also don't know other ways that the accounting might get weird (for example, an M113 purchased in the 1980s and counted in 1980s dollars is way "cheaper" than building a new one at current inflation and refurbishment rates). PDAs do not require computing the cost to replace the items; in many cases, there will be no replacement. In other cases (Javelin, 155mm, Stinger, etc), I bet the US just eats the inflation and production line cost (new Stingers cost waaay more than we bought them for, even accounting for inflation). https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-17-26.pdf E: Pentagon clarified that in some cases the services were calculating cost based on cost to replace the item with a new replacement. By counting costs to replace with new vs net book value, that overestimated the cost of some PDA drawdown items. mlmp08 fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Jun 21, 2023 |
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Jun 21, 2023 02:09
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Ynglaur posted:I'm not sure how much credibility I'd give a new organization who doesn't report the number of units prepared that is anywhere close to what many, many other analysts have reported. Maybe they're referring only to Western-trained battalions, which might be around a dozen? I've seen some estimates that Ukraine has over 30 brigades prepared for this, albeit many are mobilized light infantry or motorized infantry. I think at least 6 brigades have Western IFVs/APCs and/or tanks. Thomas Theiner on Twitter had a pretty good breakdown a few weeks ago. I heard 9 Brigades with Western equipment a few days ago, but do not put it past a reporter/editor getting brigades and battalions mixed up.
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Jun 21, 2023 05:38
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:us mic is so mind bogglingly large we can apparently lose mid-ten figures in the couch cushions The US was not alone in not using book value. It's why the IfW aid tracker had some major asterisks everyone seemed to gloss over when comparing numbers.
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Jun 21, 2023 08:11
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My reserve unit still actively use our M113s. We got notified to fix them up to "10-20" standard - basically as new as we could make them - to get shipped to Ukraine. I can't tell you the dollar value on the equipment but I can say that it's still kept up with. The U.S. has something called a MEL, the maintenance expenditure limit. It calculates the age of the equipment and the cost to repair. Once a certain piece hits a dollar value threshold to maintain, it goes "beyond MEL" and is either disposed of or evacced to a depot for refurb. My really roundabout point is, not all the equipment being sent is written off stuff that has been sitting in storage. It was actively used and now we have to replace it with something.
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Jun 21, 2023 12:51
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It's like if you have a twenty year old Ford F-150, rusty but it's been repaired over time and still runs. You decide to give it as a birthday present to your daughter who just got her license, and go buy a new F-150 for yourself. Then you brag to your buddies that you just gifted your kid a car worth $50,000. Dirt5o8 posted:The U.S. has something called a MEL, the maintenance expenditure limit. It calculates the age of the equipment and the cost to repair. Once a certain piece hits a dollar value threshold to maintain, it goes "beyond MEL" and is either disposed of or evacced to a depot for refurb. Zelensky could ask for the Zumwalts?
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Jun 21, 2023 13:41
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Finnish OSINT team posts a refresher on what to expect when Ukraine eventually reaches the proper defensive lines on the Zaporizhzhia front. Brady Africk on Twitter has posted a lot along the same lines about defensive positions throughout the front, but like Emil notes in his thread, the Zaporizhzhia side is the most heavily fortified. Even if the 10 battalions are real, Ukraine has their work cut out for them. https://twitter.com/emilkastehelmi/status/1671399475028414465?s=20 Emil et al. get regular retweets from people like Michael Kofman and Def Mon, as well as being a staple in all the credible Finnish media outlets, so you can probably trust their analysis here.
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Jun 21, 2023 14:13
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TK-42-1 posted:It’s probably cheaper to hand the old poo poo over to Ukraine to get used than to store and dispose of it properly. Or at least near enough that it doesn’t matter. And if you factor in all the intel and knowledge gained it’s probably way to our benefit. I really doubt that it's cheaper. Or it depends. Munitions I agree are expensive to dispose, but vehicles have great scrap value and there's a lot of electronics, optics and such that you can reuse. And whether it's been mothballed or been in active use, vehicles need maintenance work before you can hand them over. Plus tanks and such are not cheap to haul across the continent. But it's a cost that western armies can afford, and there is political will to do it.
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Jun 21, 2023 16:32
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Rumours are now spreading that the last person to go down in that trench clearing video was actually Russian milblogger Wargonzo.
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Jun 21, 2023 18:30
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Kraftwerk posted:Rumours are now spreading that the last person to go down in that trench clearing video was actually Russian milblogger Wargonzo. Yeah I saw a clip of a man very much resembling the guy getting killed at absolutely point-blank range in a trench. Shooter/cameraman got a very clear view of the face before shooting. If it wasn't him it was an extremely close look-alike.
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Jun 21, 2023 18:41
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To add a bit more content, an Ukrainian unit released a trench clearing video where a red-bearded Russian is shot and killed. There is undeniably a similarity, but whether it was actually him, no idea. The video isn't exactly high quality. His Twitter account posted a supposed proof of life afterwards, that, uh, raises more questions than it answers. https://twitter.com/wargonzoo/status/1670879191913340928?s=20 Again, I don't know whether he's dead, and to be honest, I don't really care.
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Jun 21, 2023 18:46
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Orthanc6 posted:Yeah I saw a clip of a man very much resembling the guy getting killed at absolutely point-blank range in a trench. Shooter/cameraman got a very clear view of the face before shooting. If it wasn't him it was an extremely close look-alike.
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Jun 21, 2023 19:20
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that guy... was me... drat... (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 21, 2023 19:54
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Kraftwerk posted:Rumours are now spreading that the last person to go down in that trench clearing video was actually Russian milblogger Wargonzo. If this was true the Ukrainian special forces that shot the video would have presented him as a trophy.
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Jun 21, 2023 19:58
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fatherboxx posted:If this was true the Ukrainian special forces that shot the video would have presented him as a trophy. Assuming you could recognize him from all the other bearded people. I mean, I have goon face-blindness but it seems that aesthetic is pretty common from all the videos I've seen.
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Jun 21, 2023 20:19
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Probably needless to say, but please don't go search for that video unless you're in a mental/emotional place where you're okay with seeing people get shot at point blank range. It is very much  and  .There's arguably some educational value for understanding how trench clearing works in practice, but none if you're just following the war at an operational or strategic level.
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Jun 21, 2023 20:19
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It still amazes me that "We put a gopro on a trench clearing team in a European war" is actually a thing. Anyway, they probably have better things to do than retain encyclopedic knowledge of Russian milbloggers so they can retrieve their bodies if they accidentally stumble across them.
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Jun 21, 2023 20:28
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I know it's not news on the big scale but on a lighter note!- my wife's best friend's brother who lost his leg fighting for Ukraine is up to being able to sprint on a new prosthetic. Hell yeah. Not that long ago docs didn't know if he could ever even walk again.
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Jun 21, 2023 20:36
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Mr. Apollo posted:One thing I was wondering, is trench clearing pretty much "shoot anyone walking towards you?" With all the smoke and dust in the confines of the trench, it's hard to make out anything more than vague human shaped silhouette most of the time. Edgar Allen Ho posted:I know it's not news on the big scale but on a lighter note!- my wife's best friend's brother who lost his leg fighting for Ukraine is up to being able to sprint on a new prosthetic. Hell yeah. Not that long ago docs didn't know if he could ever even walk again. 
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Jun 21, 2023 20:52
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double post
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Jun 21, 2023 20:53
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