War in Ukraine

I'd also argue if Russia wants a spy in America and other countries, they can probably just call up home-grown Russian Sympathizers. They don't really need to import their own.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Also we vet people for hostile sympathies all the time. It shouldn't be too hard to root out someone on the FSB's payroll if they're coming as anti-war refugees.

It actually is pretty hard when you're doing it at scale. That's why asylum seekers who came to the US from places like Afghanistan, Nicaragua and even Hong Kong have to wait years for their applications to be processed.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Jan 24th 2023 at 4:47:56 AM

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

Which makes it pretty ridiculous when that asylum seeker is someone who helped the US in Afghanistan by acting as a translator or giving information on Al-Qaeda or the Talibans...

Part 5: Divided Ranks.

• There are various fighting forces not directly connected to the Russian military but answer to Putin, such as Wanger, the Russian National Guard, and the Chechens. There is no unified command structure for these forces and coordination with the Russian military is limited.
• These other groups' leaders publicly and loudly blame Russian military leaders for the failures in Ukraine. Friction between them is incredibly high and bleeds down the ranks.
• "After a battlefield argument in the Zaporizhzhia region over the summer, a Russian tank commander drove his T-90 tank not at the enemy but toward a group of Russian national guard troops, firing at their checkpoint and blowing it up."
• Wagner in particular has made itself distinguished. Years of secretiveness and downplaying its existence by Prigozhin, Wagner's leader and former caterer for the Kremlin, were reversed five months into the war and instead he went out of his way to get into the spotlight and brag about Wagner's accomplishments.
• Prigozhin's connections to Putin allow Wagner access to Russia's latest weaponry, "including tanks, fighter aircraft and thermobaric rocket launchers," and they are prioritized before much of the Russian military.
• Despite the equipment, Wagner has been unable to take the city of Bakhmut. Prigozhin acknowledged the strength of the Ukrainian defenders. "The Ukrainians are offering dignified resistance. The legend about Ukrainians running away is just that, a legend. Ukrainians are guys with steel balls just like us. This isn’t a bad thing. As Slavs, we should take pride in this."
• Wagner has lost hundreds of troops and several of its jet fighters in the war. Convicts recruited from prisons are used primarily as cannon fodder.
• The convicts are given little instruction and left for days without food or water. Many desert, leading Wagner to take extreme actions to scare the remainder to stay loyal.
• Yevgeny Nuzhin was serving 20 years in prison for murder when he was recruited by Wagner. He deserted after spending several nights collecting dead bodies. He was exchanged in a prisoner swap and then executed by sledgehammer by Prigozhin for denouncing the war to Ukrainian media while he was a POW.

According to German news the USA has agreed to send Abrams to Ukraine and thus Germany will now also be sending Leopards. The official press statement is dated for later today.

Who would have guessed that poorly trained, inadequately equipped conscripts and a military so uncoordinated and lacking in a more stringent and competent hierarchy that its factions are only barely more concerned with their enemies than their rivals (and in some cases, not even barely), does not an effective and powerful war machine make

Edited by Angelspawndragon on Jan 25th 2023 at 2:37:17 AM

Chain an angry nature god at your own peril.

A video from Perun detailing how politics can hamper the effectiveness of military:

Thought it would help the discourse about glaring weaknesses and shortcomings of Russian army.

I will become a great writer one day! Hopefully...

It is like Putin is trying his hardest to replicate what Hitler did with Nazi Germany, down to giving the SS the best Germany could offer only to find out that just a handful of SS units were close to being competent and the rest would just die in droves or just commit war crimes all over.

Down to souring the relationship between the formal military units and the party's paramilitary units.

Inter arma enim silent leges

Once again, Yoshio Mori (former Japanese PM) has to open his mouth and voice support for Russia.

I wish someone would shut his yap.

let me guess,a nationalist?

New theme music also a box

He's known to support/like Putin.

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 24, 2023

EDIT: Assuming that Ukraine does indeed receive modern western tanks. How long will it take to retrain the crews ?

Edited by Risa123 on Jan 25th 2023 at 5:27:40 PM

Somebody should try asking him about the Kurils.

Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen.

I understand that it can take several weeks to several months to train a soldier to operate an Abrams tank at a basic level, depending on the trainees prior training and experience.

Wouldn't be surprised if a number of International Legion members conveniently turned out to have been former tank crewmen.

I will become a great writer one day! Hopefully...

The US Army armour course is about 5 months long. You can theoretically shorten it for experienced crews, but I don't think that would be the case here. The optics of sending Western tanks and their Ukrainian crews to die because of insufficient training would be pretty awful. There are numerous accounts, for instance, of Iraqi and Saudi Abrams getting totalled at the hands of ISIS and the Houthis because their inexperienced crews jammed open the ammo compartment blast door to load rounds faster — so when the ammo compartment got hit by an enemy rocket (a near-inevitability when tanks enter close combat without a strong infantry screen), the explosion killed the whole crew instead of being stopped by the blast door.

First off, the Washington Post is reporting that the US isn't taking operational tanks from its inventory, but ordering them from the manufacturer, General Dynamics. Abrams tanks aren't actually built from scratch anymore: they're recycled from old hulks plucked out from storage, a process that nonetheless still costs a lot and takes 2-3 months to complete. I think the tank plant in Lima, Ohio could process a dozen or so tanks at the same time when the article was written; it was higher at the peak of Abrams production in the late '80s, and might be different still now. In any case, I think it's safe to say that we're months away, minimum, from seeing operational Abrams tanks in Ukrainian hands.

The Abrams handles very differently from Soviet-pattern tanks: not necessarily simpler or more complex, but certainly different. For example, the driver uses a steering wheel, which is more intuitive than the old-school sticks in the latter tanks; but they also need to learn how to handle the more finicky controls of the gas turbine engine. The Abrams has a four-person crew with a human loader, rather than a three-person crew with a mechanical autoloader like Soviet tanks have — again, not the most complex thing in the world, but requires a break from existing SOPs. It's roomier than Soviet tanks, but weigh over 20 tonnes heavier as a result, so Ukrainian officers accustomed to planning things out for lighter tanks would have to rethink which routes and obstacles they could or couldn't navigate.

And then there's the supporting systems to consider. Tanks don't operate alone: at the level the US is planning to send (31 tanks, the size of a Ukrainian battalion), they're going to be accompanied by a lot of enablers. They'll need trained mechanics to maintain and repair them, and a small fleet of fuel trucks to sustain their high fuel consumption. These things go through fuel and spare parts at a fairly high rate — you don't want to leave a trail of broken-down and out-of-fuel Abrams on the road for the Russians to pose with on TikTok.

At the US Army battalion level, they'd also be accompanied recovery vehicles to tow them if they're stuck and crane heavy parts in and out during repair, as well as bridging vehicles to help them navigate obstacles — which means, you guessed it, the US would need to come up with these vehicles and train the Ukrainians on them as well. The Ukrainians, for their part, have the Soviet equivalents of these vehicles, though I don't think they're designed to work with 65+ tonne tanks.

The repair part is particularly important because if the tank's gas turbine engine develops significant problems on the field, you're not going to be able to fix it by tinkering with individual parts. You'd have to pull out the 1-2 tonne engine, replace it with a new one and send the problematic engine to the rear (or straight back to the factory, if necessary) for repairs. I've seen footage of the Russians doing this at field repair facilities, but I don't know if the Ukrainians can do it as well — I've only seen news articles on them loading up broken-down tanks on flatbed trucks to have their engines replaced in cities far behind the frontline.

Lastly, as the old adage goes: the team that works together, twerks together. If the US wants the most bang for its buck, then it's not going to aim to train individual crews — it'll want to train a whole unit. All the US hardware being marked for delivery (including Bradleys and Strykers) amount to 1-2 heavy mechanised brigades of around 4,000 troops each; so ideally, once they're done training the crews of individual vehicles, they'll want those crews to train to work together, moving up in unit size until they carry out full brigade-size exercises with armour, infantry and artillery working together in complex maneuvers. This is going to take time and resources, but it's how you net the best results in the long run. A good team of mid-skilled players will beat a mediocre team of highly skilled players, every time.

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

I guess we'll see the Abrams unit in action in May at best.

Potential, and extremely unlikely, side benefit is that in the interim, Russia all of a sudden loses the territory its gained since 2014 and the war ends, but in the event they ever tried to do it again, Ukraine now has a few battalions of modern armor and they know how to use them effectively.

Chain an angry nature god at your own peril.

I've seen it discussed that the Abrams' won't be ready till late in the year. That they're not intended to take part in the spring offensive, but were announced to get the ball rolling on the Leopards, which actually will be ready for spring.

Some days ago, I found a You Tube channel run by an Ukrainian detailing each day about the progress on the war. He showed the numbers of Russian losses, and I’m not sure if I can believe them:

• Russia’s personnel losses - approx. 493.320
• Killed - approx 123.080
• Wounded - approx 369.240
• P.O.Ws - approx 1000

That number includes today’s losses at Vulhedar, which are approx 3640. I am not sure what to think of this. Is this real, or inflated numbers. I just don’t know anymore. Or, I don’t know if I should approach this Ukrainian’s videos with a bit more skepticism.

I will become a great writer one day! Hopefully...

I don't think that can be right. The most optimistic reports by Western agencies say that Russian casualties are under 200K, so to claim that they're almost 500K sounds fanciful.

Just to be clear, that total losses number would round up to be five hundred thousand, correct?

Because if that's that case then this channel is claiming that Russia has lost a number equaling the number of troops it invaded with and the number of reinforcements it conscripted last year.

That’s why these numbers felt off to me. Unless Russians sent more troops than the initial forces plus those 300k mobiks, there is something fishy here.

Also, under 200k? Would that mean according to those more optimistic Western reports, Russia more or less lost during this war their initial invasion force?

I will become a great writer one day! Hopefully...