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Kraftwerk posted:The point is they are woefully unprepared to fight a war with Russia who's been training and preparing for one the entire time with battle tested troops who've seen action in Syria. So what I'm saying is I'm not sure all these volunteer militias the Ukranians have been raising who are using their own money from a middle class lifestyle will be much use in a serious war as this is turning out to be. your information is vaguely correct circa 2014-15 but the situation in the Ukranian military has changed quite a bit
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Feb 24, 2022 16:24
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OwlFancier posted:I uh... do not think that it necssarily could, or that this would stop the russian invasion as much as escalate it into a world war... The CBG thing is just insane fantasy. Ignoring the extremely relevant and practical realities of both the Montreaux convention and the inherent escalation involved with putting the US Navy in the midst of the shooting, Russian naval aviation spent decades attempting to solve the "how do I kill a CBG?" problem and I wouldn't bet against them having some pretty decent concepts worked out.
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Feb 24, 2022 20:08
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Pablo Bluth posted:Presumable at this point just shelling the runway to the point that fixed wing landings become impossible would be a gain for Ukraine? Destroying a runway is surprisingly difficult, they're pretty easy to fix in a matter of hours. The thing that is making fixed wing landings difficult is the fact that the airport is a battlefield. If the Russians succeed in holding the field and establishing a perimeter that would permit fixed wing aircraft to land, they'll likely be able to make the runway usable. If they can't do the former, the condition of the runway doesn't matter. So basically, Ukranian artillery shelling the runway only matters to the extent that it keep the airport contested and helps push the Russians off it. The rest is incidental.
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Feb 24, 2022 20:50
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i am a moron posted:Agreed. And that age range is insane, what’s a 60 year old man gonna do? Just let them flee every over age reservist you can push in to driving trucks or uncrating weapons or working the sign out sheet at your local "come get your gun" depot is a 30 year old that you can put on the line to fight
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Feb 25, 2022 01:18
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CommieGIR posted:Yeah those are jet engines. They hit either a transport plane or a fighter. If they hit a plane there's a really high chance it's blue on blue. The Russians have a lot of standoff munitions for this kind of stuff and they wouldn't risk aircraft low and slow over the city. edit: that's what I get for leaving a reply open
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Feb 25, 2022 04:37
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ummel posted:They're flying Russian flags though? the post wasn't explicit but the Kadyrov Chechens are fighting on the side of the Russians in Donbas already. this is just an extension.
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Feb 25, 2022 14:07
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Nenonen posted:That's a lot of meat to grind, then. Russia can just surround the city, cut electricity, gas and water and bombard them to submission. It's going to be just like Stalingrad, except Ukrainians are the surrounded 6th Army. when has it ever actually gone like this in urban combat? edit: to be clear, when you are able to surround the city and bombard the defenders in to submission. usually you have to dig them out block by block.
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Feb 25, 2022 14:34
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OwlFancier posted:That was, to a degree, how it was done at stalingrad after the russians encircled the sixth army. They did fight them block to block, but compared with the preceding months of fighting over the city, it went very quickly because the defending army was completely cut off and surrounded, and had no supplies left. Encirclement was also the preferred method of capturing urban areas during the majority of the second world war, it was only when there was no other option that armies resorted to actually attacking cities directly, often because the city was a major port or on a river front and could not be completely encircled and cut off. Stalingrad was the easternmost point of advance at that latitude, located on the volga and had a major rail station, and hitler was an idiot and demanded that it be taken by force, Leningrad is on the baltic and was constantly (if less than ideally) supplied by sea. Same with Sevastopol. The major urban sieges that failed were all because the defenders could not be cut off. ah yes merely incurring tens of thousands of casualties on both sides after encirclement
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Feb 25, 2022 14:47
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OwlFancier posted:Compared to the almost two million total, yes. Which illustrates very well how much more effective it is. i don't think tens of thousands of casualties on each side in kyiv is really all that palatable to either side
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Feb 25, 2022 14:52
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OwlFancier posted:Does it count as air superiority if they have a sufficient ground based air defence network that the enemy air force can't operate effectively? that just means that the airspace is contested and neither side has air superiority
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Feb 25, 2022 16:57
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TulliusCicero posted:My question continues to be where the hell is Ukranian air landing? Poland? very doubtful as I don't think Poland/NATO are all that keen on further provocations Repairing airfields is not super difficult. Closing an airfield is easy temporarily but requires persistent attention and bombing to keep it closed.
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Feb 25, 2022 17:14
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Zero_Grade posted:Kyiv being so close to the Belarus border is not doing them any favors, but it's not like they weren't aware of that. From a US/western european perspective that airspace is no where near permissive enough for either side to put up a lot of planes without first putting forth massive effort in SEAD, but most countries air forces don't expect to gain and win aerial supremacy on Day 1 (or ever), so it's probably just pretty normal war planning for both sides. Agree it favors the side with fewer air assets.
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Feb 25, 2022 17:17
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Concerned Citizen posted:the terms are fairly mild. it creates a state totally unable to defend itself against russian aggression but is otherwise independent. that's pretty much cold war finland. i don't think ukraine really has much of a choice, it's that or extinction. I don't think it's reasonable to say that Cold War Finland couldn't defend itself. Yes, Cold War Finland could be successfully invaded by the USSR, but they would be able to extract a price on the invaders. That is very different from a state "totally unable to defend itself"
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Feb 25, 2022 17:45
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TheRat posted:Nobody is sending war ships to the black sea Freedom of navigation is a pretty big deal.
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Feb 25, 2022 18:24
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Josef bugman posted:Nothing is worth dying for. There are a million things worth living for, but I am a bit weirded out by how many people seem so blasé about their own and other people's lives. this is an interesting position. you'll debase yourself to any extent to preserve your own life? not really a commonly held one. where those lines lie for individuals vary a lot, but most people throughout human history would identify at least a few things they would be willing to die for.
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Feb 25, 2022 19:17
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the popes toes posted:Commendable however, that Germany didn't require week-long mandatory classes on proper treatment of military hats, toward certification. you don't know this isn't coming
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Feb 25, 2022 20:21
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:I'm sorry I didn't realize the law of thermodynamics ended in 1939. Tank still gets hot if it's in flames. And your air supply becomes a little dicey with smoke. it's useful if you can get the flaming stuff on to the tank. getting the flaming stuff on to the tank has gotten a lot harder since 1939.
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Feb 25, 2022 20:39
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Inner Light posted:Is that really MRLS though? Why are the explosions so tiny, like tinier than 1 frag grenade each? The US MLRS rocket launchers primarily fire rockets that contain several hundred small submunitions, I presume the same is true of the Russian systems.
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Feb 25, 2022 20:47
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Elyv posted:https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1497387915168694275 the BfV got coopted by neo-nazis and also comprehensively dunked on by Al Qaeda, so the BND is trying to reclaim the incompetence crown
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Feb 26, 2022 03:37
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Telsa Cola posted:They just approved shipment of 1k ATGMs and 500 Stinger AA missiles. Which is fairly impressive amount. the one constant of every war is that everyone burns through fancy weapons way faster than anticipated. It's probably ten day's worth of materiel.
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Feb 26, 2022 23:30
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steinrokkan posted:Yeah, it isn't much, but keep in mind that Russia is running through their stockpiles as well. The EU thoroughly depleted their whole aerial stocks bombing Libya for about week, for example. I doubt Russia, for all her posturing, is much better supplied. For sure, there's been some speculation that Russia is running low on TBMs and anti-radiation missiles and that the latter in particular is helping Ukranian air defense survive. The Russians did like to keep relatively large stocks of munitions for various eventualities, but I suspect that's mostly huge quantities of small arms, tank, and dumb artillery / rockets.
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Feb 26, 2022 23:41
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Budzilla posted:The Ukrainian government have been building licensed TB2 Turkish drones for a while now but I haven't heard anything about them in this war. Are they saving them for when things get very dire? It's unclear how many they actually have in service, and the Russians hit their home base in the early batch of strikes. There have been a few pictures of destroyed vehicles that could have been hit by MAM-Ls, but the Ukranians are not posting a lot of gun cam stuff to social media.
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Feb 26, 2022 23:57
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KitConstantine posted:Apparently Russia is digging some vehicles out of mothballs. Can any tank guys verify the ids in the tweet Lee knows what's up with hardware so his identifications are almost certainly correct.
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Feb 27, 2022 00:35
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Dapper_Swindler posted:i can sorta believe some of it but I am unsure. source seems reliable. It's likely to keep Belarus in line, because there's no actual incremental strategic value to putting nukes in Belarus. Anything you can accomplish with a nuclear weapon launched from Belarus you can do from Kaliningrad or Russia proper. only purpose is to bind Belarus closer to the Putin regime.
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Feb 27, 2022 02:48
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The less sexy stuff is probably the most useful. Logistical support like fuel, water, MREs, trucks, field hospitals, blood plasma, etc that requires zero training to use or is interoperable / commoditized is very useful. Just basic load bearing equipment, canteens, helmets (lol) and soft body armor are all in short supply with the militia and that kind of gear makes a difference. Other high tech gear that is easy to train on is also useful: night vision devices, secure communication devices, etc. Plus intelligence support.
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Feb 27, 2022 03:02
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I'm pretty sure that Gepard thing is KMW trying to get some built vehicles that had canceled orders sold and disposed of. I don't see how they would be all that useful to the Ukranians during the current conflict - although the Ukrainians have similar tracked multiple autocannon systems, the details of how they work is totally different and it would take at least weeks to convert a trained AAA crew, when that trained AAA crew could be manning and using a Ukranian system to shoot down Russian helicotpers. The man-portable stuff is very much more useful as you can train a dude off the street to functionally shoot a infrared guided man portable missile in a couple days.
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Feb 27, 2022 03:10
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ZombieLenin posted:I don’t know about that. This whole debacle has shown that the Russian Armed Forces are orders of magnitude less capable than those available to NATO. All militaries are incompetent, it's just a matter of degree.
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Feb 27, 2022 03:13
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ZombieLenin posted:No, I get what you are saying. I also get how events on the ground change the strategic calculus of nation states. This is generally the problem with replacement systems - even if like for like, either you a) don't have trained crews for incremental systems that get sent, because usually you have enough trained crews and experts to cover the number of systems you have and not a bunch of extra, or b) you need the replacement system because the original got blown up or disabled, in which case there's a decent chance the crew manning the system were killed or incapacitated. Now if Ukraine has a bunch of old man Fulcrum drivers twiddling their thumbs that's a different story, but I kind of doubt that's the case. that makes for a good movie but isn't realistic anyway.
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Feb 27, 2022 03:30
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Pook Good Mook posted:They'll have retired pilots that are no longer nominally active duty that can fly them. The limitation will be the planes, not pilots. you are severely underestimating estimating the amount of time you need to be flying a combat aircraft to maintain proficiency
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Feb 27, 2022 03:31
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cinci zoo sniper posted:I don't think Russian Central Bank will be able to "well actually" American investors about their money. The exchange can prohibit specific sell orders at the cost of any kind of credibility going forward. Of course, the "credibility going forward" ship has already sailed around the world and crashed on some rocks.
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Feb 27, 2022 23:27
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Yeah I meant the latter, I should’ve expressed myself clearer in the post - this is me saying that such flailing won’t save them even for a week. They might as well try, all of the potential tit-for-tat consequences have already been put in place earlier via sanctions. Granted, it won't actually achieve anything incremental except maybe damaging the exchange's credibility in the eyes of its domestic customers, but whatever. Plus, you'd figure that a bunch of oligarchs would be looking to pick up pieces of various Russian enterprises on sale. Maybe they should let the orders go through?
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Feb 27, 2022 23:35
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Raenir Salazar posted:Looking back but it seems like maybe Russia trying to hold onto its sphere of influence in the aftermath of the cold war was a huge mistake. If they hadn't attempted to take Crimea and instead negotiated with the more liberal government in good faith (afterall the Sevastopol naval base wasn't under any kind of immediate threat of being repatriated back to Ukraine); they could've made partnerships with Ukraine to improve their military modernization with access to skilled Ukrainian firms. IMO one of the turborealist facts that turborealist Putin forgot was that a sphere of influence exists as a result of being a great or major regional power. Striving for a sphere of influence (or striving to maintain a deteriorating sphere of influence) does not make you a great or regional power.
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Feb 27, 2022 23:37
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Fill Baptismal posted:https://twitter.com/phildstewart/status/1498060945070956551?s=21 It destroys the credibility of the exchange. All exchanges have rules to halt trading but they tend to be mechanical. Preventing specific categories of people from trading on the exchange without a specific reason is suicide for the exchange. Foreigners will not buy Russian securities as a result of this unless the regime changes, essentially. Or Russian securities at some point look like a good deal even with an insane "highly untrustworthy" risk premium priced in.
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Feb 28, 2022 00:01
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the popes toes posted:How much is something worth if you can't sell it? It's worth nothing. I mean it destroys the credibility of the exchange as an institution or mechanism, not that it destroys the value of individual holdings (which it also does, but that's a lot less important in the long run.) Business and finance are based on trust and credibility.
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Feb 28, 2022 00:07
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Kraftwerk posted:I don’t understand how much more in the way of supplies Ukraine can actually field in combat before the noose tightens completely around Kyiv. At some point isn’t NATO just handing sophisticated arms over to Russia to be captured, studied and countered? This isn't HoI, you don't have to trace a supply line from the capital to all of your forward units. Even if Kyiv is encircled and it's difficult to get weapons to Kyiv, you can still distribute weapons to the various formations throughout the country. You drive poo poo forward on a truck same as it always was since the invention of a truck. The planes are a different and slightly more challenging issue but I am sure they will land, fuel, and arm at whatever distributed bases the UkAF are currently using. The entire air force is not based in Kyiv. NATO is not distributing anything all that sophisticated. There's some value in being able to examine captured gear but the Russians have equally good ATGMs and MANPADs organically, and have certainly studied captured or acquired samples, as well as done battlefield assessments. The thing is, it's basically impossible to counter a tandem top-attack munition (ATGM) without making significant compromises (a hard kill system like Arena or Trophy that works really well at intercepting the missile, but also killing any poor legs that are nearby). It's also both simple and difficult to counteract UV and IR passive guidance on MANPADs.
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Feb 28, 2022 00:13
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I do think MikeC is providing useful commentary about why Putin is doing what he is doing and some of the historical context, but I do think a lot of the generic conversation about "missed opportunities by the West" can get pretty close to apologia. I would be interested to hear about actual, specific, missed opportunities. I'm not really interested in hearing about post-facto ~vibes~
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Feb 28, 2022 00:19
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Blitz of 404 Error posted:How is this not uh, like an alliance? I assume it's much like US military aid, where it's in-kind aid and the Poles fly a couple of Migs over the border, they quickly paint over the Polish AF roundel, and then Brussels pays the Poles. Maybe Kryzystof "resigns" from the Polish AF and "volunteers" to join the Ukranian AF. This is usually how you run it so there's some kind of deniability. If they're owned by an EU member state, operated by an EU member state's uniformed military personnel, that is uhh a provocation for sure.
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Feb 28, 2022 00:28
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Mokotow posted:It’s “Krzysztof “, thanks. Ugh I knew I spelled it wrong. I know a Krzysztof in real life, he's a good dude. You are, too.
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Feb 28, 2022 00:33
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Vietnom nom nom posted:Matthew Perry got Ukraine invaded! that mother fucker
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Feb 28, 2022 00:38
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steinrokkan posted:Frankly I don't even believe the donor countries even had any significant number of these planes un-mothballed and in full working order, just ready to go. I'll believe it when I see those planes in Ukraine. The Poles, Slovaks, and Bulgarians all have a non-zero number of MiG-29s ready to roll. I wonder if AUSA still has a couple.
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Feb 28, 2022 00:44
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