Forum    Search    FAQ

Board index » Chat Forums » Political Opinions and Opinionated Posts




Post new topic  Reply to topic  [ 105 posts ] 
 
Author Message
 Post Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2022 1:29 pm 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
While I'm rarely slow to insult Russian logistics, it wouldn't be fair to give them too much grief about that one. The only good port available for the sort of cargo ships they'd need to supply Crimea by sea is also in range of enemy attack (Sevastopol). It's not much fun to bring in full sized ships full of explosives or fuel when the enemy can hit them right at the dock with various kinds of drones or missiles.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2023 6:38 pm 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
So right now the Germans are promising a reinforced mech battalion (a company of Leopards and a battalion of Marders). The Americans are promising a heavy mech brigade (a regiment of Bradleys and a battalion of Abrams). God knows when it all will arrive and be ready for use.

The rest of the Leopard using community seems to be looking to contribute about two battalions of them, with the British contributing one company of Challengers. So all told the Ukrainians will be getting about 1/3 of the 300 tanks they asked for, and in three distinct types with no commonality of supply (except, perhaps, fuel).

The Ukrainian logistics troops are probably not best pleased. But I think they'll somehow make the best of it.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2023 4:55 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)
weremensh wrote:
(...)
and in three distinct types with no commonality of supply (except, perhaps, fuel).
(...)

Actually, Abrams run on Jet Fuel.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2023 5:43 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
I read that the American tanks aren't going to show up for many months (probably not until 2024) and will be the most difficult for Ukraine to maintain, and therefore the least useful on the battlefield. They were offered mainly to goad Germany into sending some freaking Leopards already. Supposedly Ukraine can make more immediate use of those? Or something. How is Ukraine going to get spare parts for all this stuff? Have the allies committed to providing tech support?

Ukraine has obviously decided that they need to drive Russia out on the conventional battlefield. Drone trolling and IEDing them until they give up and go home a la Iraq is not an option because they'll bomb the whole country to rubble first.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2023 9:10 am 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
GUIGUI wrote:
weremensh wrote:
(...)
and in three distinct types with no commonality of supply (except, perhaps, fuel).
(...)

Actually, Abrams run on Jet Fuel.

They do most of the time, but it's not needed. Just change the fuel feed routine in the computer and they can burn the diesel fuel all the rest of the tanks use. That was one of their selling points back when: they're multi-fuel vehicles.

Regarding spare parts and such, yes, they're getting those for all of their western equipment. They just don't tend to generate sexy headlines. In fact, if you saw any of the videos of Bradleys on a train in Poland in the last few days, you might have noticed that among the 28 IFVs were three recovery vehicles that never made any of the news stories.

As for Abrams: the training cycle for their maintenance crews is rather longer than a couple of months, yes. That can be finessed in a pinch once the tank crews are trained, though. They could outsource the maintenance to the depots in Poland by shipping the tanks back there (by rail) for anything significant. It's expensive and inefficient; but it would let the Ukrainians use them for a few days in an offensive to punch a hole through the Russian lines for their Russian style tanks to exploit, while at the same time their Abrams maintenance crews keep learning their jobs. Yes, that kind of silliness is clearly only a wartime expedient; but there are persistant rumors that they happen to be at war.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2023 4:54 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
Apparently Ukraine will have to wait months for the American tanks to be built from scratch? Who knows why the US won't just ship them some of their existing tanks and then replace those with new ones.

Anyway, how much of a difference do you think this western hardware will make? Is this war-ending material or just make Putin's life significantly more unpleasant material?

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2023 10:18 pm 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
Depending on how long it takes for the new ones to be made, it might not make much difference. It'll be months before they can use them anyway.

As for the western gear: it's not war ending, but it may well be war winning. It'll give the Ukrainians the opportunity to achieve their war goals (crush the Russian army and get back their land, the former being more or less inseparable from the latter). But what it won't do is force Putin, or his successor, to admit defeat.

I suspect that's part of why the West has been so hesitant, quite aside from the consideration of nukes. Not so much giving a damn about the Russian refusal to admit defeat, but the prerequisite functional destruction of their army. If the Russian army is functionally destroyed, what holds Russia together? And what happens when it breaks up? There must be all sorts of interesting contingency plans floating around, some of them even serious.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2023 9:56 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)
weremensh wrote:
(...)If the Russian army is functionally destroyed, what holds Russia together? And what happens when it breaks up? There must be all sorts of interesting contingency plans floating around, some of them even serious.

Most likely, the federation of Russia will break ups into his many states that constitute it. Some, including the Moscow oblast will turn toward Europe and keep the name "Russia", other toward central Asia and its more Islamic culture while other will turn toward china.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2023 10:20 pm 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
Doesn't Russia have the ability to chuck bombs at Ukraine pretty much indefinitely, even if its ground troops no longer have any ability to take territory?

I think that's the medium-term scenario. Russia's army becomes too weakened to do much of anything but Putin refuses to quit and keeps lobbing poorly aimed missiles at Ukraine. From inside Russian borders if he needs to. He'll try to keep Ukraine in a perpetual state of emergency until such time the Ukrainian leadership implodes from some combination of exhaustion, infighting, and corruption. (Whether or not it works is a separate issue; point is he won't quit inflicting pointless pain.)

And if this style of "warfare" is sufficiently cheap to the Russian military, they lose the urgency to get rid of Putin.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2023 12:51 pm 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
I'm dubious that the fragments of Russia would neatly become law abiding, rules oriented states. Especially not Russia itself; there's nothing there that might lead to that.

The idea of a static war of trading missiles isn't a good one for Russia: ultimately time is not on it's side. Just as a for instance: every month thousands of Russian rail cars are destroyed without Ukraine lifting a finger because Russia simply can't maintain them (and since the life of rail car parts is defined by use, this just hastens the loss of the rest). Road freight's a joke, and air freight is evaporating. So how do they even keep their industrial sector running, much less tool up for a war, when their transport sector is imploding? And this is only the most obvious of their long term sanctions related problems.

Sure, they can get plentiful cheap and obsolescent electronic parts from the West on the black market for use in a few dozens of moderately reliable 80s-90s tech missiles a month. But sophisticated machine tools and specialized industrial supplies are much harder to come by on the black market; and they're essentially impossible to get at the scale needed to keep things going for a long war of harrassment. Over time Russia will lose the ability to keep their industrial and agricultual sectors afloat even if it still can harrass Ukraine; and at that point, like it or not, they're done.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2023 1:50 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
Putin wouldn't be the first tyrant to opt to be king of the ashes. And the lackeys often (though not always) stay loyal as long as they remain privileged relative to the rest of the increasingly desperate population. I reckon he's deep into the pit o' sunk costs. He's politically finished if he admits defeat, so he's gonna keep digging, one way or another, even if he has to mortgage Moscow to Beijing. Sanctions don't have a particularly good record of dislodging dictators. I mean, say hi to Assad.

I mean, in the long run, Putin's dead. The man's 68 and frequently rumoured to be in ill health. But in the medium run he's gonna be a huge pain in the arse.

Edit: anyhoo, how's Russia doing on the Stupid Bombs? If Putin just wants to fire a bunch of idiot-shells full of explosives out of some very big artillery guns and doesn't particularly care where they land, how long can they keep that going for?

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2023 1:51 pm 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
They could kill a few people in the border regions for a while, but aside from the occasional small town or village there's nothing the guns can reach. Artillery rockets could go farther, but they make easier counter-battery targets. And depending on how good Ukrainian counter-battery gets, the Russians could eventually wind up losing a gun and its crew for every borderland Ukrainian they manage to kill; that kind of thing would not be cost effective.

Of course the Ukrainians would be shooting back; supply dumps, truck parks, military bases, POL facilities, war production facilities, rail bridges, and etc within 150 km of the border would go boom with depressing regularity. That would get expensive fast for a nation that can't even replace all the stuff that's wearing out peacefully.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2023 6:15 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
Guess that's why the Wagner mercenaries have been throwing convicts at the front lines. Scraping that barrel. There's some rumblings of a renewed offensive in the works, that's where all the newly mobilized men are going. And then Putin might draft even more.

That sounds like pretty much every Russian war in history ever. Throw wave after wave of disposable troops at the enemy.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2023 1:05 pm 
Moderator of DOOM!
Moderator of DOOM!
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Thu May 30, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 15851
Location: Yes.
It does: but do recall that they've lost all but one of their peer/near peer wars, and that one required the US to bail them out of their vast shortcomings in logistics and production.

So Biden went to Kyiv on Railforce One (according to the fellow who runs the Ukrainian Railroad, anyway). His speech wasn't terribly inspiring, but the location really said it all.

Putin's speech the next day put his own people to sleep, and might as well have started 'once upon a time...' as far as being a realistic appraisal of Russian prospects and resources. But to be fair to Putin, he's trapped; there's no way for the Russians to win (conquer Ukraine), very little way to keep what they've taken so far, and an excellent prospect of breaking up in the next few years. So for Putin, reality is the real prospect of falling 15 floors to his death in his underground bunker. Needless to say, he doesn't care for it.

Top 
   
 Post Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2023 12:21 am 
User avatar
Offline
Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12406
Location: The things, they hurt
Isn't that why Putin keeps Prigozhin around? To let everyone know that if they take him out, they could end up with a psychopath like that in charge?

Classic supervillain move, that.

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: Majestic-12 [Bot] 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: