Where Do Things End With Vlad? (h/t romad1)

[romad1]

Ukraine has had a very good 48 hours in the war. 

 

[Jim Cowan]

1 hour ago, romad1 said:

Ukraine has had a very good 48 hours in the war. 

 

Breaching is good unless you then get flanked, correct?  What is your sense of whether this is a sustainable breakthrough?

[romad1]

6 hours ago, Jim Cowan said:

Breaching is good unless you then get flanked, correct?  What is your sense of whether this is a sustainable breakthrough?

From what I understand the "best" unit in the breech of this breakthrough is the 76 Guards Air Assault Division which is the unit that committed the Bucha atrocities.  So, basically its a red flag to the bull or whatever other metaphor you like.   The other units are very denuded or mobilized with indifferent quality troops.

Edited August 31, 2023 by romad1

[romad1]

Apparently Russia has the mobilization of the next wave of troops planned

 

[romad1]

Not bad

[romad1]

Yeah, seeing lots of Russian-driven talk about Ukraine's casualties as if they had a choice to fight. 

[gehringer_2]

6 hours ago, romad1 said:

Yeah, seeing lots of Russian-driven talk about Ukraine's casualties as if they had a choice to fight. 

If you grew up with siblings you'd know the basic answer in Ukraine to "why not peace?" is "He started it." 

[romad1]

2 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

If you grew up with siblings you'd know the basic answer in Ukraine to "why not peace?" is "He started it." 

For sure.  For all the troglodytes who roll out George Orwell as a hammer against any form of collectivization, his writings on the folly of pacifism were incredibly poignant.   He knew the stakes if the Totalitarians and the Fascists got away with things at the expense of democracy.   He also knew how much it served the bad guys for these people to get away with their facile arguments unchallenged.

Edited September 1, 2023 by romad1

[romad1]

Noticed while chasing something that was "trending" on the twitter platform.  Yeah.  Russia is an intelligence organization supporting a bunch of oligarchs but once you expose that they are an empty house.  Not that their friends in the West don't cause all sorts of mischief.

[romad1]

So, we can DEFINITELY trust Putin with any negotiation. 

 

 

[romad1]

https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1697926162108805264?s=46&t=76Y1aNflZsD8yrwQrvLC2g

King says nay

[1984Echoes]

Ukraine will win.

One man's opinion:

(From the Telegraph):

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-war-turning-ukraine-favour-050000203.html

[Motor City Sonics]

Putin and Kim are going to meet.   A well-placed explosive would be nice.   

[Motor City Sonics]

On 8/30/2023 at 10:42 PM, romad1 said:

Ukraine has had a very good 48 hours in the war. 

 

Very difficult to win a war when the troops don't have any reason or really want to fight.     Most of those Russian troops don't even know why this is happening (like the US in Vietnam).       Trying to put the Soviet Union back together ain't so easy if the other countries (now that they've had 30 years of freedom) don't want it.  

[romad1]

17 minutes ago, Motor City Sonics said:

Very difficult to win a war when the troops don't have any reason or really want to fight.     Most of those Russian troops don't even know why this is happening (like the US in Vietnam).       Trying to put the Soviet Union back together ain't so easy if the other countries (now that they've had 30 years of freedom) don't want it.  

There was a very interesting tweet the other day showing the home provinces of all the casualties suffered by the Russians.  Not surprising was that Moscow and St. Petersburg were the lowest and the lower-status Tuva province was at the highest end by a lot.  Putin's center of gravity are the elites and he doesn't want to send their kids or them (the conscription age is quite high) to war. 

[gehringer_2]

9 minutes ago, romad1 said:

There was a very interesting tweet the other day showing the home provinces of all the casualties suffered by the Russians.  Not surprising was that Moscow and St. Petersburg were the lowest and the lower-status Tuva province was at the highest end by a lot.  Putin's center of gravity are the elites and he doesn't want to send their kids or them (the conscription age is quite high) to war. 

He's ordered 200K more conscripts be called up. Dream scenario is the he depletes his army to the point where the provinces tell him to sod off and he finds he can't do much about it. Prolly not likely but we can always hope. Then again, it might only take one to start something....

Edited September 5, 2023 by gehringer_2

[romad1]

12 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

He's ordered 200K more conscripts be called up. Dream scenario is the he depletes his army to the point where the provinces tell him to sod off and he finds he can't do much about it. Prolly not likely but we can always hope. Then again, it might only take one to start something....

Russia is sending these mobilized troops in with limited weapons and almost no training.  That is not how you win.  That's how you delay defeat.   OTOH, Ukraine's best units and most motivated troops are getting over the 200 days of combat that combat mental health experts say is the "breaking point".

Quote

One truism about the stress of continuous combat is that every soldier, no matter how well trained or how experienced, has a breaking point. “There is no such thing as ‘getting used to combat,’” wrote a group of psychiatrists in a 1946 report titled Combat Exhaustion. “Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure.”

In some situations, such as the fierce and sustained fighting on the beaches and in the hedgerows of Normandy, fully 98 percent of those who were still alive after 60 days of fighting became psychiatric casualties. In less sustained fighting, the breaking point is typically reached between 200 and 240 days on the line. In the British Army in Europe, it was found that a rifleman could last for about 400 days, but that was attributed to the fact that the British relieved their troops for four days of rest every 12 to 14 days. American troops remained in battle continuously with no relief for as long as 80 days at a time.

The 1946 Combat Exhaustion report concluded, “Psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds…. The general consensus was that a man reached his peak of effectiveness in the first 90 days of combat, and that after that his efficiency began to fall off, and that he became steadily less valuable thereafter, until he was completely useless.”

Combat Fatigue: How Stress in Battle was Felt (and Treated) in WWII (warfarehistorynetwork.com)

I hope Ukraine has been able to provide the same sort of rotation system.  

[romad1]

Well, the Russians appear to be trying other things as well

 

[romad1]

Then there is this

 

[chasfh]

On 9/5/2023 at 7:08 AM, Motor City Sonics said:

Very difficult to win a war when the troops don't have any reason or really want to fight.     Most of those Russian troops don't even know why this is happening (like the US in Vietnam).

And yet, the people of Russia overwhelmingly support the war. There has never been any meaningful anti-war movement in that country, not just because Russia outlaws it, but also because they simply have no history of nor inclination toward anything like that. What Russia does have a history of is throwing millions of men into the meat grinder in an attempt to win their wars by attrition. The Russian people expect that and accept it, and actually romanticize their history of it. It’s fundamentally different from how we Americans, with our own history of and expectation of personal freedom and liberty, view our own wars.

[romad1]

Sadly, this is jive.  The objective was to get to the Black Sea coast and liberate Crimea.   The problem was that Ukraine lacked Air Superiority and Russia was able to build defenses in depth enough to prevent this before the end of Summer.   This offensive is a harbinger of Russia hitting a breaking point due to superior precision weapons destroying all their weapons systems but Ukraine needs to win decisively before changes in governments in the West eliminate their funding.   I don't think the publics in the West are thinking along those lines but that is Ukraine's center of gravity as much as its population. 

Ukraine appears to be on the right track but a lot of people will die before they get their victory. 

[chasfh]

This article is fairly instructive about the current state of the war for Russia: 

I find this part the most interesting, and it supports the meat grinder observation because if there’s no sharing of information or learning due to lack of trust, what other way is there for them to win besides attrition through advantage of sheer numbers?

Despite the notable changes and improvements over the past year, there are still many areas in which Russia’s military continues to perform poorly or is failing altogether. The Russian armed forces still cannot horizontally integrate their command and control, nor can they communicate commanders’ decisions and share information across different units in real time. As a result, Russian units deployed in proximity cannot effectively communicate with one another if they belong to different formations. Often, they cannot support one another because they have separate chains of command. 

This is not a technical glitch or a bureaucratic barrier. Rather, it is a deep structural problem that is unlikely to be solved without a systemic overhaul of Russia’s military and perhaps even its political system. Military command-and-control culture boils down to trust, and the militaries of authoritarian regimes such as Russia’s frequently have rigid and fragmented command-and-control structures because the political leadership does not trust the military leadership, and the military brass does not trust the rank and file. Such systems fail to successfully share information, discourage initiative, and prevent battlefield lessons from informing strategy or being incorporated into future military doctrine.

These structural deficiencies are part of the Russian military’s DNA. They help explain why some of the hardest lessons Russia learned in other conflicts—in Chechnya, for instance, about the difficulties of urban warfare, and in Syria about the benefits of flexible and responsive command and control—are being learned anew in Ukraine after staggering losses in personnel and equipment. The Russian military is learning and adapting in its own way, but it remains to be seen whether it is capable of real transformational change.

Edited September 7, 2023 by chasfh

[romad1]

1 hour ago, chasfh said:

This article is fairly instructive about the current state of the war for Russia: 

I find this part the most interesting, and it supports the meat grinder observation because if there’s no sharing of information or learning due to lack of trust, what other way is there for them to win besides attrition through advantage of sheer numbers?

Despite the notable changes and improvements over the past year, there are still many areas in which Russia’s military continues to perform poorly or is failing altogether. The Russian armed forces still cannot horizontally integrate their command and control, nor can they communicate commanders’ decisions and share information across different units in real time. As a result, Russian units deployed in proximity cannot effectively communicate with one another if they belong to different formations. Often, they cannot support one another because they have separate chains of command. 

This is not a technical glitch or a bureaucratic barrier. Rather, it is a deep structural problem that is unlikely to be solved without a systemic overhaul of Russia’s military and perhaps even its political system. Military command-and-control culture boils down to trust, and the militaries of authoritarian regimes such as Russia’s frequently have rigid and fragmented command-and-control structures because the political leadership does not trust the military leadership, and the military brass does not trust the rank and file. Such systems fail to successfully share information, discourage initiative, and prevent battlefield lessons from informing strategy or being incorporated into future military doctrine.

These structural deficiencies are part of the Russian military’s DNA. They help explain why some of the hardest lessons Russia learned in other conflicts—in Chechnya, for instance, about the difficulties of urban warfare, and in Syria about the benefits of flexible and responsive command and control—are being learned anew in Ukraine after staggering losses in personnel and equipment. The Russian military is learning and adapting in its own way, but it remains to be seen whether it is capable of real transformational change.

They lack the ability to do dynamic targeting.  That's due to deficiencies in training, systems and leadership.   They never had low level leadership and the one organization that had any was Wagner and they just ripped the heart out of that outfit. 

[romad1]

So, this is supremely unsatisfactory. 

[gehringer_2]

Ukraine attempting drone attacks on Rostov-on-Don last night, Russian Southern Military HQ. Maybe too well defended to hit but that's probably the point; keep some Russian air defense capabilities tied down there.