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Tesseraction posted:Relatedly https://twitter.com/TheInsiderPaper/status/1580216571083259905 Unfortunately, shutting up is beyond what Elon is capable of.
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Oct 12, 2022 17:53
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It sounds like the next stage of the Ukrainian offensive in Kherson is underway. "Heavy fighting" being reported in the Mylove direction.
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Oct 15, 2022 18:27
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Phlegmish posted:Do you have a source? Just lots of Twitter/social media bullshit so far. Nothing credible enough on its own to repost. Ukraine hasn't been announcing these moves publicly so official confirmation will have to come after the fact.
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Oct 15, 2022 18:42
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Vox Nihili posted:Just lots of Twitter/social media bullshit so far. Nothing credible enough on its own to repost. Ukraine hasn't been announcing these moves publicly so official confirmation will have to come after the fact. Closest thing to evidence at this point is Russian milbloggers + FIRMS Data https://twitter.com/DefMon3/status/1581340698585931776
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Oct 15, 2022 19:00
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Phlegmish posted:Thanks! I think Def Mon has a bit of a pro-Ukrainian bias, but his reports have been reliable in the past. I certainly hope the Ukrainians are indeed about to launch a successful offensive. "A bit" is underselling it, he's about as far from a neutral source as you can get. But most of the minute-to-minute type reports are either from pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian diehards, so it is what it is.
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Oct 15, 2022 19:13
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FishBulbia posted:It's like the war version of that apocryphal space pen story Or any of 10,000 very real American defense contractor stories.
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Oct 16, 2022 23:31
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Phlegmish posted:With all this talk of Kherson, it makes me wonder if the Russians know something we don't. As far as I know, everything's been quiet on that front lately. True, the Ukrainians were talking about a media blackout, but I feel like we would have heard something from the other side by now. There is a major offensive unfolding now. Ukraine has requested a complete media blackout of the offensive, so we haven't been hearing anything.
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Oct 18, 2022 22:22
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Storkrasch posted:Kherson is ostensibly annexed Russian territory at this point though, it might be more difficult to claim that all the people there, 98% of whom voted to join Russia, are now nazis that must not be allowed to have electricity or heating. Somehow I don't think the obvious contradictions their previous obvious lies create are going to bother them a whole lot. They will simply make up new lies and continue with their day. There is just no regard for the truth at all, and no real additional consequences beyond what they've already incurred, either.
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Oct 23, 2022 04:26
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Putin is not invincible and the sheer audacity of annexing a region and then losing it less than a month later is how you become a laughing stock. Especially if you donate a shitload of materiel to Ukraine in the process. Losing or winning the war is what actually matters at that level. None of the accompanying rhetoric or proclamations have any substance or value, it's all varying degrees of propaganda, smoke screens, and chaff. If he continues to lose territory it will continue to hurt him whether or not that territory was formally "annexed" because he will be viewed as a loser. His core of support consists of nationalists, i.e., people who care about strength, not liberals, i.e., people who care about norms and rules.
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Oct 23, 2022 06:42
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khwarezm posted:https://twitter.com/AaronBastani/status/1584641718049464320 Pretty much everyone is projecting a down trend in Europe for the next couple years since that's what the numbers say. Germany and much of Western Europe in particular made an enormous strategic mistake by becoming so heavily reliant on Russian oil and gas. The new infrastructure necessary to pivot to other sources is costly and will take time to build. In the last few months Germany has been shuttering factories because the power required to run them is just too expensive. Most people are still unaware just how heavily reliant on fossil fuels the world economy is at every level. When you drag those price sliders upwards very bad things happen. That's not an ideological statement unless you want it to be one. Vox Nihili fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Oct 25, 2022 |
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Oct 25, 2022 01:48
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Discendo Vox posted:China's running propaganda cartoons targeting the "Russia sanctions are driving EU into ruin and benefitting the US" line, so it's likely the same's running through Russian media streams. China itself stands to benefit strategically from access to cheap Russian fossil fuel so of course they're projecting that on America.
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Oct 25, 2022 01:50
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Seems people in Russia are starting to get sick of the war. https://mobile.twitter.com/BBCSteveR/status/1586333785259671553
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Oct 30, 2022 23:34
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Owling Howl posted:Well the UK is actively demolishing its own economy to prove it's a Big Boy country that can go it alone while Russia is actively denolishing its army and economy to prove its still an empire. The Great Game did, in fact, end for them but they still need to work through some issues before they accept it. The Great Game is still happening but it has increasingly become a spectacle of pathos and regret, like octogenarians fist fighting.
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Oct 31, 2022 09:47
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Charliegrs posted:Can't Ukraine just HIMARS the hell out of the Russians on the other side of the Dnipro now? It's like 4-8 HIMARS systems versus hundreds of artillery tubes and MLRS systems. HIMARS isn't a trump card that makes the rest of the numbers totally immaterial.
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Nov 4, 2022 06:20
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Herstory Begins Now posted:2-3 times that number. Russia still has not managed to destroy a single one apparently. They aren't a trump card but they're incredibly destructive at every level from destroying expensive equipment to blowing up buildings being used as barracks to even strategically significant stuff, eg the Kharkiv collapse was directly brought about by a HIMARS strike against the regional headquarters that crippled Russian ability to respond to the Ukrainian offensive. I'm talking about the systems operating in the Kherson theatre. There are a bunch on the Eastern fronts as well. Also not at all clear whether any have been lost, Ukraine does a very good job of keeping its own losses under wraps and there is scant credible reporting out of Russia, so we get a very rose-tinted impression of things here. I'm sure they are protecting them diligently with their best anti-air and such, but poo poo happens in war.
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Nov 4, 2022 09:22
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Saladman posted:So what happened with the Russian "withdrawal" from Kherson? It’s been several days and it’s a huge city so there’s no way opsec can keep reliable news from leaking out. I guess Russian military forces have been reduced in the city, but that there was no complete withdrawal, and Ukraine doesn’t want to attack even a lightly-defended city since it would mean it gets smashed to rubble? It was largely disinfo or misinfo. Ukrainian sources have been confirming continuing Russian movement in both directions across the Dnipro and continuing Russian troop presence in Kherson. Russian doctrine calls for defense in depth (typically three levels of lines), so they are likely digging in both sides of the Dnipro in order to make Ukraine's advance as painful and difficult as possible in line with their policy. It is likely that their best troops are still concentrated in the region.
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Nov 7, 2022 01:23
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Charlz Guybon posted:The soldiers in WWI on both sides were generally ideologically committed to the war due to nationalism. The situation in this war is different because the Ukranians have that and the Russians generally don't. Nationalism is just another form of political ideology, and while it is the one ideology that is superficially allowed in Russia, Putin’s regime enforced apathy undermines that along with everything else. The idea that the Russian forces aren't generally nationalist is wild to me. Yeah a lot of the mobilized guys will be pulled from a broader spectrum but Russia is an extremely nationalist country, particularly among its armed forces and adjacent hangers-on.
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Nov 9, 2022 03:08
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spankmeister posted:https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1594763517625868293 I wonder if this is another set of mind games/feints/smokescreens. An actual push in earnest across the Dnipro at this point seems very unwise from a strategic/logistics standpoint.
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Nov 21, 2022 21:10
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Kraftwerk posted:So why is the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff setting low expectations for Ukraine pushing out the Russians? I imagine he's basing that opinion on his genuine view of the circumstances. Russia has held onto large swathes of Ukrainian territory since 2014, it will likely be extremely challenging to displace them from those positions.
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Nov 24, 2022 07:58
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Rad Russian posted:Based on Telegram posts of mobiks saying they were getting shipped out of Kherson en masse to Bakhmut front or to the Donetsk area, the most likely scenario is that Russia is confident Ukraine does not have the force available to threaten the front near Kherson for a few more months. They think the defensive positions they have there now are good enough for the winter. So they're redirecting all available cannon fodder power to Bakhmut so that they can get any sort of "win" to change the propaganda narrative back home. I fully expect Russia to take it for propaganda purposes to buy themselves some good press at home and then promptly lose it again in the Spring. 20k versus 7k per day is closer to parity than it used to be. I don't think Ukraine was ever close to matching Russia's tube artillery volume during their offensive and I doubt they will be at any point in this war.
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Nov 29, 2022 07:33
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Saladman posted:For anyone too lazy to click it, it says it will soon be 20,000 artillery shells/month, but not increasing much after - only to 40,000 month by 2025. So I guess Ukraine will have to figure out how to manufacture more, unless Europe starts doing something. Everyone in the article says it's normal to take 3 years to increase production of shells. Hilarious how accustomed we've become to industry being ossified to the point of being 90% dead in the US. Even the MIC is little more than a shambling zombie from which rent can be sucked at the maximum possible margin. Maybe China can ship us some!
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Dec 5, 2022 20:27
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Charlz Guybon posted:The US is the world's 2nd largest manufacturer by a large margin. We produce more than countries 3-5 combined (Japan, Germany and India). The US produces a lot of food, chemical products, paper products, single-use consumer products, and a decent chunk of high-end technology products and vehicles, as measured in dollars. In terms of manufacturing output in tons of durable products, the US outsourced as much of that as possible decades ago. We are basically on par with Russia in this regard, and with zero excess capacity. Steel, aluminum, etc. are largely gone. The grandchildren of the last people who worked in those old, defunct plants are being born in dead rust belt cities. We only recycle steel from scrap here now, for example, we don't make new steel. We are entirely reliant on brittle international supply chains for most products. The second there are issues in China or with shipping, as we've seen these past couple years, our entire supply chain instantly seizes up and shits itself. This is the price our industrialists happily paid to kill off labor. Now it apparently takes three years to even source materials and tool up lines to double shell production. China could probably do it in three weeks.
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Dec 6, 2022 01:31
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Rigel posted:The United States is the 4th-largest steel producer in the world. (5th if you grouped the EU all together) As for shipbuilding, the US Navy is massive, and we aren't importing warships. Yeah, the US steel industry is kept around on life support because it's enormously important for the defense industry and national security, but the US isn't remotely the sort of thriving industrial marketplace that it was 40 or 80 years ago. Industry heavy nations like Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Russia produce much more steel on a per capita basis, and China produces more than the rest of the world combined. The US mostly recycles scrap steel to meet our baseline annual usage. US heavy industry is totally hollowed out, stretched to maximum cost efficiency on skeletal staffing, and highly reliant on imports for anything beyond the baseline level of productivity. This is why big coastal infrastructure projects in the US are often made of Chinese steel now. Similarly, big military projects that rely on actual US steel and US industrial inputs and skilled US labor are stretched over years because we don't have the existing excess production capacity or the capability to grow that capacity to do much of anything at all in the short term unless we are willing to rely on imports. Viewed in this light, the US is very similar to Russia, just much wealthier. The core industries are decades old and falling apart as the oligarch owners seek to extract whatever rent they can from their assets without reinvesting a penny. Anyway, the takeaway is apparently that the famed US military industrial complex that we poured several entire generations worth of tax dollars into will now take three years to ramp up production of artillery shells, even with what amounts to a blank check waiting to be cashed on the table. I wonder what FDR would say?
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Dec 6, 2022 07:53
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Kraftwerk posted:I agree it’s a massive tragedy that the us can’t make a lot of the traditional industries like steel and shipbuilding. The US still makes its own military vessels, it's one of our best-protected industries (for obvious defense-related reasons) and helps prop up US steel. The US also still has plenty of working age people as a general matter, but yeah, the skilled industrial workforce is a ghost of what it was, which is more important than one might assume. A lot of those guys are in the latter portion of their careers, too. Heavy industry has gotten really good at running on smaller and smaller crews for gains in efficiency, but that's mostly just to keep the same handful of major plants running. No one is really designing new plants or building out capacity here, instead it's a fight to keep whatever is left rolling along. This was already the status quo before the pandemic-era labor shortages, I really have no idea how things look now but I assume it's worse since labor is suddenly less available and more expensive than it was three years ago (and labor costs were always the biggest driving factor for off-shoring). Maybe the latest efforts to encourage industry to invest capital productively here following the international supply chain shocks will succeed in bringing some of it back. One can hope.
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Dec 6, 2022 08:16
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Yeah you aren’t correct about most of this. The entire first paragraph is essentially indisputable, but I invite you to make an attempt beyond "nuh uh!" The second and third paragraphs are basically my subjective commentary, feel free to insert your own takes once you come to terms with the facts in the first paragraph.
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Dec 6, 2022 08:22
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Bar Ran Dun posted:First not all steel is the same. A coated sour service pipe is very different from a wire coil is very different from a large single casting is very different from a stainless cold rolled plate. Yes, but what is your point? Bar Ran Dun posted:Second the hollowing out of American industry was less hollowing and more consolidation and automation that shed an immense amount of jobs. It was, quite emphatically, both. We produce a fraction of what we once did on a per capita basis as well as a lot less on a raw number basis than say 40 years ago. What we do produce is made much more efficiently, yes, as capital demands. Bar Ran Dun posted:Third all production not just our production has globalized. The US led the way in globalization. We made those policy choices and worked to impose that vision on the world. It was no more inevitable than mercantilism was in its own era. That's not to say that we have it worse than any other nation; in many ways we have it much better than many. Most people do not want to work in heavy industry, all else being equal. And our domestic industrial base hasn't been nearly as thoroughly annihilated as, say, the UK. Bar Ran Dun posted:Fourth production, supply chains, are much much more complicated now and that drives the time it takes to produce things more than capacity. That's true, and it's a major downside of the deindustrialization/globalization policy choices we've elected. Supply chains worldwide are now demonstrably extremely brittle and we rely on geopolitical adversaries to provide us with basic inputs that we were once fully capable of sourcing internally. Also, in our hubris and in search of ever greater profits, we put the de facto world industrial center on the other side of the planet. China has most (not all, mind you) of those inputs and intermediary components at its proverbial fingertips. Bar Ran Dun posted:Fifth lol you think the recycling of scrap is abnormal or something most steel gets recycled as scrap. I am not in any way opposed to steel recycling. I think it is a great thing since it's much less carbon intensive. But the EAF plants that recycle scrap and make up 70% of US steel capacity are inherently limited by the amount of scrap input, and they only really do that one thing. We can (and do) import scrap (much of those imports actually came from Ukraine and Russia), but production from ore is far more scalable. You mine more ore and more coal and and make more steel as needed. EAF plants can't really scale on their own. They scale with the availability of scrap on the market; there is no source like an ore mine that will create a bunch more scrap for you if you need it. It's not an issue of too many EAFs specifically, it's the lack of total capacity due to the traditional steel plants dying off, leaving us with largely just a scrap recycling steel industry. Aluminum has gone the same way. The US used to produce 30% of the world's aluminum, now we essentially only recycle scrap aluminum. Good for our local environment, not so great geopolitically. Vox Nihili fucked around with this message at 09:40 on Dec 6, 2022 |
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Dec 6, 2022 08:56
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Herstory Begins Now posted:It's as much about China as it is Ukraine. They expect China to force the issue/start a war over Taiwan probably ~2025-2027 if present trends continue (possibly sooner if China perceives American ability to intervene in support of Taiwan weakening). That's what's at the end of basically all American conversations about deterrence. Like the US doesn't need a large stockpile of and ongoing manufacturing capacity for naval missiles for anything happening in Ukraine. What's the basis for the expectation that China will invade Taiwan in ~2025-2027? A source would be fine, I'm not looking to kick off a huge China slapfight here.
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Dec 7, 2022 22:23
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Saladman posted:I’m confused by this shopping list — 830,000 artillery shells for FY2023. That’s like 70,000/month. The article just a couple days ago said production would be 20,000/month in 2023 and 40,000/month for 2025. Was that just talking about like one factory or one specific subset of 155mm shells? The whole thing about this bill is that they're allowing multi-year contracting, which is a big departure from the norm. The ramp up to assemble all of these munitions alone will likely extend for years.
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Dec 8, 2022 00:30
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Coldbird posted:Leaving the country for any reason just seems like a bad idea. What’s the upside? It makes him look good in front of the US, sure, but that partnership wasn’t particularly at risk. It may be in the future once (if?) the R House manages to organize itself - but by that point his visit will too long in the past to matter. A big part of his job is in lobbying foreign governments, such as the US, for more resources. No one in Ukraine is going to mistake this trip for him abandoning the country, that's very silly.
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Dec 21, 2022 00:23
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MikeC posted:Re: green/trained/unit replacement/individual replacement. My understanding is that Ukraine has in fact been rotating units out, or at least reporting that such rotations are taking place, even in high intensity locations such as Bakhmut.
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Dec 31, 2022 00:43
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SaTaMaS posted:Ukraine doesn't need to worry about range unless they're attacking inside Russia, in which case they would need more expensive drones with longer range, which is what they've been building. There are Russian staging and supply areas within Ukraine that are over 100 miles from the front line. Range absolutely matters a ton, doubly so given that Russia has an enormous numerical advantage in tube artillery and can potentially wipe out your operators with conventional artillery strikes.
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Jan 3, 2023 01:16
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PC LOAD LETTER posted:Sure but decent for France and decent for Ukraine are probably 2 different things. Tank shells haven't really been subject to the same ultra high burn rate as artillery shells in this conflict.
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Jan 4, 2023 22:36
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U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday said that sending Bradley Fighting Vehicles to Ukraine was being considered to help the that country fight Russia's invasion. "Yes," Biden said when asked if the option was on the table. https://archive.is/UlyKG Bit more credible than the prior rumors on this.
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Jan 5, 2023 02:01
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Morrow posted:Russia frankly doesn't have the demographics for the human wave tactics they've been doing. The raw population numbers indicate that both sides do in fact "have the demographics" to fuel this war for years to come. Russia actually has an advantage over Ukraine in this regard, being a sprawling country with relatively vast numbers of people.
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Jan 24, 2023 02:36
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Mulva posted:None of that matters. Literally none of that matters. If Russia keeps sending it's men into stupid meat-grinders to accomplish nothing and Ukraine just...keeps letting them do that? What are you talking about? How are these advantages meaningless? Russia launches strategic bombers from out of Ukraine's reach. Russia ships in artillery shells by rail from its factories to the front that are, again, out of Ukraine's reach. Those things absolutely matter, because they vastly reduce Ukraine's capacity to strike at weak points in Russia's war machine, whereas Russia has the capacity to reduce almost any facility in Ukraine to rubble. The battles being fought now are very much the opposite of meaningless. Territorial control is being decided on a day-to-day basis. Tens of thousands of lives are at stake. Both sides are incurring enormous losses.
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Jan 24, 2023 06:20
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sexy tiger boobs posted:Citation needed... Russia doesn't have anywhere near that capability with conventional arms. For evidence - the entire war to this point. You kidding??? Those constant strikes that severely degraded Ukrainian power infrastructure have also been directed at strategic military targets. For example, the training locations outside of Lviv where foreign volunteers were hit early in the war. Ukraine has to constantly move and disguise its valuable assets because Russia can strike anywhere in the country with conventional, long-ranged munitions. This has been going on since the beginning of the war. There isn't a single location in Ukraine that's particularly safe from strikes, although Kviv now seems to have enough anti-air coverage to repel most of what is sent in its direction. It's bizarre to me that anyone would dispute this, particularly given the depth of coverage on their recent terror campaign. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/russian-strikes-kill-at-least-7-in-western-ukrainian-city-of-lviv-say-officials https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/06/ukraine-russian-attacks-energy-grid-threaten-civilians Vox Nihili fucked around with this message at 11:33 on Jan 24, 2023 |
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Jan 24, 2023 11:29
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Libluini posted:depleted uranium is only 5-10% better than tungsten carbide, and considering a Leo-2's KE-ammunition can break through up to 800mm armor, I'm not convinced it's necessary to poison Ukrainian soldiers and civilians by littering their land with depleted uranium A few thousand DU rounds would probably be among the least of their worries in terms of the health hazards and pollution being strewn across Ukraine.
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Jan 25, 2023 02:18
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notwithoutmyanus posted:Curious, is this an actual concern or even a hypothetical one for Ukraine in general at this point in the war? You mean health/pollution hazards or DU pollution in particular? In either case they're genuine and legitimate concerns, it's just that they necessarily take a back seat to winning and surviving what's essentially an existential war.
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Jan 25, 2023 02:40
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Dull Fork posted:Ah yes, nothing like a draft to calm german's fears of an authoritarian Germany rising again. But sending tanks was 'too unpopular' for scholz. Wild. Regular drafts aren't uncommon or quite so controversial outside the United States. 100% volunteer armies are more the exception than the rule.
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Jan 31, 2023 22:12
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steinrokkan posted:Were the Soviets capable of making high precision optical gear in general? Yes. Were they capable to manufacture it at scale to equip their tens of thousands of afvs, consistently and up to spec? That's a totally different question. And the answer is also yes. What happened in the 30 years following the collapse of the USSR is the issue for Russia. A lot of that capacity and knowledge base was hollowed out.
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Feb 2, 2023 23:25
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