Forum    Search    FAQ

Board index » Chat Forums » Political Opinions and Opinionated Posts




Post new topic  Reply to topic  [ 105 posts ] 
 
Author Message
 Post subject: Ukraine has troubles.
 Post Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2022 12:09 pm 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
Who knew, right?

But currently they're doing well enough on the battlefield (sufficiently so that they're making the Republicans look bad). Will that continue after things slow down because of mud and Russian cannon fodder starts showing up? We'll find out, one supposes.

Oh, and once again there's discussion of nuclear weapons. They remain a terrible idea for the Russians to use; but that characterizes the whole operation, so we'll see.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2022 9:12 pm 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
One quick nuts and bolts note: the northern half of Luhansk now can only be reached from Russia, by rail, down a single road. That road crosses a bridge in tube artillery range of the Ukrainian army, and sits literally less than 50 meters from the border (on the Ukrainian side) so it can be hit with a GLMRS without political repercussions. If anything were to happen to it, then the fight in the north will take a rather decided turn for the worse for the Russians.

This is probably not a good time to underwrite a policy on that bridge.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 8:06 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
The staggering incompetence of the Russian military has been a sight to behold. I am far from well informed in military strategy, but is throwing a couple hundred thousand untrained, ill-equipped guys at the problem going to serve Putin's objectives in any way whatsoever?

The only thing they're remotely good at is shelling cities indiscriminately, but that doesn't sound like a load of conscripts would help with that. They're probably not going to show up with more artillery pieces, and they wouldn't know how to use them. They're not getting any better at logistics.(1) I'm not even sure what exactly the use of cannon fodder is. They're still going to get shot and it does not sound like they will have either the skills or the equipment to much inconvenience Ukraine's forces in the process. This looks to me like sending a traffic jam of bumbling fools out to die or get captured. But what do I know? I'm just a civilian.

(1) I think I read somewhere that the entire Russian army's logistics strategy is built around shipping stuff by rail, and then short distances by truck to the front. Which I guess is fine if it were Russia being invaded, but uh... you can't invade someone else's country using their own railroad. All they'd have to do is blow it up while retreating.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 3:14 pm 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
The Russian army, as currently set up, was intended to be a defensive one. To that end they don't have anything like enough infantry lying around to fill up their units, and they don't have enough trucks to really sustain an offensive (the entire Russian army had about 2/3 of the trucks of the US Marine Corps back in the beginning of February, at least on paper). It's much cheaper that way, and in a pinch they can call up reserves to fill out the units with the missing riflemen if tensions rise enough that it looks like they'll be attacked.

Then they attacked a near peer state that's rather more than 500km across with the intent of simply seizing everything on the march rather than fighting for it. So the tactic best suited to their army, which is bite off chunks up to 100km deep then fix the railroads up to the front, was largely precluded until the initial battle was lost.

On top of that, because they did not mobilize they could not field 9 battalion tactical groups per division; they barely had enough men to field 6, and those only had about half the infantry they're supposed to. To say the least, this led to several serious problems when trying to cover a front over a thousand kilometers wide.

Now the current mobilization could, in a few months, make good a lot of the missing infantry problems; but they've already lost so many vehicles that there's only so much that can do. In the nearer term they'd be little more than speed bumps. And all of this is without discussing the crippling problem they've got with institutional corruption, which doesn't exactly bid fair to go away any time soon (unlike 1.5 million uniforms, which do seem to have gone away already).

Oh, and one other little detail; there isn't a single cargo pallet to be seen in any picture of Russian logistics. Everything is moved by hand and/or crane like it was still the 1930s, which means their supply moves very slowly and with immense amounts of wasted manpower compared to an army with palletized logistics (like, say, the Ukrainians). Not helpful for an army badly short of manpower, which is something I'd never have thought I'd have to say about the Russian army. It also means that their already too limited truck fleet spends way too long sitting around at both ends being loaded or unloaded, further limiting the number of tons a day that can be moved up.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 11:11 pm 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
So what you're saying is that they initially tried to do blitzkrieg with an army that's structurally set up for slow attrition, so no wonder it went badly?

And what do you mean the Russians have no cargo pallets? The threeish foot wide cheap wooden platforms used for stacking things in trucks that are so commonplace that I routinely find them lying around on the sidewalk? Surely they get used in civilian Russian shipping?

That's even more bizarre than the revelation that the Russian army didn't use socks until a few years ago. They were still doing 19th century foot wraps, but in that case there were some valid reasons to keep them, i.e. they are cheaper and dry out faster. There's no reason to be lifting boxes individually like your college buddies helping you move house.

The state of Russian trucks looks fairly terrible too. I read that the Ukrainians have been capturing 50 year old rust buckets because most of their newer vehicles already got wrecked.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2022 5:23 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Sun Jun 15, 2003 12:00 am
Posts: 1005
Location: Belgium, the true land of the french fries (no its not the france, trust me)
Here is a few rather entertaining video explaining the different dysfunctionality Russia has to deal with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf5C644ftyY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPBU_MX1fYE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNEtlMSCiCI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT_ljkO3adY

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2022 12:01 pm 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
The Russian army has always considered conscript labor to be found money; to the extent that they can solve a problem by using that instead of cash it's their first choice. But beyond that there's the problem that we're dealing with an Army, not a civilian company; in peacetime they don't get graded based on how things function as much as how they look. No one has ever held a parade of green painted forklifts, so they're not something the politicians are going to think about unless the generals stress it (and in Russia they think doing it manually is fine).

Now yes, the Russians have been in combat since WW II; but they were always wars of choice against non-peer adversaries. It didn't matter how inefficient their supply system was because they were the ones setting the pace, and their logistics were essentially safe from enemy action. Thus nothing visible blatantly went wrong because of their supply system itself, so there was no obvious need to fix it. And given the Russian institutional tradition of lying to your superiors about problems, it's entirely likely the folks on the top were blithely unaware of the unobvious problems.

As for the attrition: that's not actually what they're supposed to do. In theory they do blitzkrieg for 50-100km, wait for the supplies to catch up, rinse, repeat. But between the corruption, the incompetence, and the very stupid choices Putin made they found themselves with very few options but buying the pot with shells. That sort of worked when the Ukrainians were low on or out of their own 152mm shells, but now that they're better equipped with NATO standard guns and 155mm shells it's more problematic.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2022 6:46 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
That's not much of a blitzkreig then, if you can only do it in maximum 100km chunks. That's like a 2 hour drive at urban arterial speeds. Did they think the enemy wouldn't fight back while they're waiting around for their supplies to catch up? And isn't Kyiv way more than 100km from the border? I suppose nobody thought it was a problem because nobody expected Putin to order them to invade Ukraine.

Anyway, I followed up with Trent Telenko (Twitter's go-to truck logistics opinionator) and the key thing seems to be that the Ukrainians are now capable of precision bombing supply depots further away than a Russian truck's typical delivery range. Which means they have to put their depots even further away from the front, which makes their logistics even slower. So they're trying to compensate by having their troops rock straight up to railway sidings to resupply directly from trains, which are much easier to bomb because they're big and obvious and you can destroy a lot more stuff at at time than trying to wreck a convoy of trucks.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2022 4:00 am 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
Using a Russian fuel train to close the Kerch straits bridge would be downright sneaky of the Ukrainians, or utterly incompetent on the part of the Russians. Gosh, I wonder which it is?

That said, the idea of grabbing land by 100km bites was not supposed to be efficient. It's not supposed to be an offensive army, so that's merely the best option they've got assuming the other side fights back.

Ok, about that bridge. It looks like Russians have restored some very limited car traffic on the bridge, and claim to have successfully driven a short and empty train over the track next to the burned one.They've also restarted the ferry service across the Kerch Strait, and may route some cargo onto larger ships to bring it to Sevastopol. But all in all it's a vastly less efficient setup than one they had, and it's anyone's guess how long it will be before they can manufacture the pre-cast concrete and steel elements they'll need to do the repairs properly.

Long story short, the Russian troops in the Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts are going to have a golden opportunity to do less with less for a while.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2022 10:15 pm 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
The other side of this is, how did the Ukrainians get so competent so quickly? After they gained independence from the Soviet Union, they were also a poor country with the same old Soviet junk, fighting methods, and corruption. It appears that while the Russians sat on their arses, the Ukrainians went through an epic training montage.

I did read that the US has been training their troops for the past several years, and they are getting better equipment from NATO, but considering that they are also fighting with a lot of barely trained very recently former civilians, they're doing remarkably well.

I have seen almost no estimates of Ukrainian military casualties vs the Russians in the media, I imagine the Ukrainian government wants to keep that quiet. Do you think they're taking losses fast enough for the Russians to wear them down?

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2022 11:44 pm 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
Ukraine was very motivated in the training department after they were humiliated in 2014, and the US was more than happy to teach them how to do better than their old Soviet style system. A great deal of it was simply creating a body of non-commissioned officers worth anything, while teaching the officer corps to think for themselves rather than refer everything up the chain. Which is a heck of a change, and would have been resisted on a lot of levels; but losing Crimea and two half-oblasts was a heck of a motivator.

Now the Ukrainians have a large cadre of veteran trainers, help training from the West, and more importantly spent 6 months from the initial mobilization training the men and women they called up before they deployed them (and let's hear it for the territorials who held the line long enough to let them do that). That let them both give the recruits a refresher in individual military skills (which they all learned the first time they served), and let them train as units so they could actually fight worth a damn on a level higher than squads.

Contrast that, btw, with the Russian call-up; the absolute best possible outcome for them is 8 weeks of refresher training then being thrown in as lightly equipped replacements. Most will never attain that ideal of either 8 weeks of useful training or proper equipment; Russia sent most of the trainers to the front, and is too corrupt to have much decent gear. Heaven help the ones sent in as new units, btw; they won't have a clue how to fight together.

As for the losses wearing down Ukraine first, probably not. Ukraine now has a much bigger army than Russia, and is losing rather fewer troops. They're also getting a lot more of their wounded back; wounded Russians tend to die because they don't get much medical care, but the Ukrainians are a lot more proactive about that. To the point where it sounds like overall the Ukrainians who were hit so far are roughly one dead to four wounded, while the Russians are roughly one dead to 1.6-2 wounded. For perspective, in WWII most major power armies suffered one dead to 3 wounded.

And then there's the matter of national morale; Ukrainian men tended to leave the country with their families in February then come back alone to fight, while Russian men generally abandoned their families and fled (assuming they could afford it) when conscription was announced. That doesn't make it look like the Ukrainians will be the ones worn down by casualties first.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2022 12:56 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
I've seen some reports of Russians who were never in the military being conscripted, plus people who are sick and elderly. Also, anti-war protesters being taken to jail and given their draft papers directly. The first three categories are screwed; and I assume the fourth will desert at the first opportunity. So Putin falls back on what Putin knows best. Random missiles.

Closer to home, I'm hoping Russia's debacle has put Xi off wanting to start any wars anytime soon.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2022 11:50 am 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
The random missiles finally seem to have found a useful target; the electric grid. If they can bring it down it will hurt local militarily useful industrial and agricultural efforts. But whether they can is anyone's guess at this point.

As for Xi? It has probably given him some food for thought; but there's always the question of how much he's addicted to happy dust about how competent the PLA is, and how everyone else will just casually let him monopolize the world's microchip production industry by force and then lay claim to half the Pacific.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2022 9:44 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
I was under the impression that Russia has a limited supply of smart missiles since the sanctions are severely impeding their ability to import the parts to make more. That's why they're resorting to buying Iranian weapons. Bleeding edge of technology there. Which means Ukraine should be able to hang tight and ride out the parts of the Russian arsenal that can actually aim. Is this correct?

As for the prospect of war in my backyard, ageing presidents-for-life are famous for their membership in the reality-based community. How competent is the PLA anyway? I figure they probably have similar problems with institutional inflexibility and lack of combat experience, but doubt they're as terrible at vehicle maintenance as Russia. For that matter, how competent are they compared to the Taiwanese?

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2022 4:30 pm 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
The Ukrainians are certainly adapting to the drones. I suspect it'll be painful but not crippling going forward, barring the Russians can somehow massively increase their efforts along those lines (the proverbial drone swarms). But as long as the Russians can keep knocking out their own electrical systems (as in Belgorod), the Ukrainians may not even need to reply in kind.

Top 
   
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
 
Post new topic  Reply to topic  [ 105 posts ] 

Board index » Chat Forums » Political Opinions and Opinionated Posts


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest

 
 

 
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to: