TheOldGuy @TheOldGuy@qoto.org
I am a Democrat who supports Ukraine in their battle against The Russian Z fascist invaders.
I am a 73 year old Covid hermit who
lives on 10 acres in a sparsely populated area of the Ozarks. I heat with wood that is leftover by the lumber industry. When cutting oak for lumber only the trunk is used.
The largest town is population 2992. The county is 13k people scattered over 713 square miles.
Joined Dec 2022
The Russians are plodders…
It suits their style of rigid command and planned assaults. They just keep at it. If Ukraine is going to win it needs equipment and resources to break that mould and regain the initiative. None of which it’s scheduled to get.
Russia is worried about its manpower issues and its economic situation is stretching it thin. But its allies seem to be relishing the chance to have a go at Ukraine - not because it’s Ukraine but because it would humiliate the West - especially America. That plays well for China, DPRK and Iran, all of whom have good reason to take the opportunity to get at their primary opponents as they see it.
This grinding war is being fought at a strategic level too. The relentless Ukrainian attacks on oil refineries (which have stopped and so have Russian attacks on electricity generation in Ukraine- has there been a secret agreement, it was on the cards?), then the attacks on ammunition depots and supply points has been crucial. The attacks on airfields have forced Russian aircraft back and further back, making the use of glide bomb attacks far harder.
The Russians use a formalised and more rigid approach to their supply chain whereas Ukraine’s is more like a distributed supply system with few if any major depots.
Both sides are under immense pressure and it’s getting to them both. The difference is Russia brooks no dissent and no discussion of dissent. As another mil blogger complaining about shell starvation has just found out, whisked off to court for defaming the Russian army.
Putin feels he is winning - and he is, and his allies are happy to commit more as they see that fact too.
We in the West are letting Ukraine survive but not win. We should be ashamed of ourselves for being so cynical.
I was raised to believe that if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. We are not doing well. And we are not doing the right thing. We’re only half way there. Are we all in are we just pretending?
‘The Analyst’ MilStratOnX
Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦!
MILITARY & STRATEGIC:
THE STORY OF VUHLEDAR
In essence this is as much about a lack of western aid as anything else.
Problem one for Ukraine is that the 72nd Brigade defending the town was the only one that was fully mobile, and the rifle brigades that flanked it, were non-motorised infantry.
The aid that is arriving is being consumed in the Pokrovsk salient for the most part, but valuable units that could have helped in such a wide and open area of territory, such as the British supplied Challenger-2 were being wasted in Kursk defending nothing important.
The Russians wanted to get around Vuhledar and cut it off, capturing the defenders. They tried to cut off the last road out of the town but were unable do so, though they did have a high degree of fire control over it, which they failed to use properly.
Instead they were forced to fight their way through the forward defences and urban zones suffering incredibly high casualties because of the mines and fortifications.
By the time they reached anything of significance the Ukrainians had gone, leaving booby traps and rubble in their wake.
To break into the town the Russians used relentless amounts of artillery, newly trained Spetznaz special forces accompanied infantry assaults to ensure they finally broke through - all supported by heavy drone attacks.
Because of the close nature of the fight aerial bombing wasn’t viable.
It was not an easy withdrawal.
Drones harassed and destroyed multiple vehicles but for the most part the escape out of the town was a success thanks to the resistance of the flanking forces which prevented the Russians from closing the pincers.
Part of the Russians problem was they had no metalled roads for supply and their nearest supply points were 18-30km behind the lines. This caused a sort of stop-start as fuel and ammo was brought forward - lulls in fighting the Ukrainians used to their advantage.
There was never going to be some sudden Russian breakthrough because the town fell. The area is vast and rural, with hundreds of square kilometres of fields, gullies and hilly ridges before meeting any settlement. There are no roads other than the one to Vuhledar.
I’ve heard it described as a Phyrric victory for the Russians, but that’s not fair or true.
A Phyrric victory is where the cost of a successful attack is so great that you have no means whatsoever of pursuing the benefits of that victory and nor can you find enough forces to defend what you have won. Kursk is such an example for Ukraine.
The Russians will take their time but they will consolidate and eventually move forward at Vuhledar.
Ukrainian strategy is to give land for the maximum price they can extract from the Russians.
It’s a process that works but the Russians seem to be quite happy to have the crap beaten out of them over and over again, rendering the strategy of wearing them down almost impossible to accomplish.
Both sides have cracks appearing in their ability to wage this war. The Russians have made a vast effort this year and despite our general derision for their methods, which are deserved, they have still made major and significant advances - don’t measure it in terms of square kilometres but in terms of strategic points taken.
The victory at Avdivka - in the end wasn’t just lost because of a lack of aid to Ukraine - that was a factor - but the Russians tactically undermined the fixed defences and the use of underground tunnels broke key positions.
Ukraine handed them victory at Ochertyne through bad comms and poor command, then continued to let the same crap commanders run the show as Russia pushed them further and further back.
Yes Ukraine has caused huge losses in men and material and Russian forces are still not winning decisive victories.
What we have to remember is they don’t expect to win such victories- that’s not their strategy. They have accepted it’s a long slow grind and that’s exactly what they are working for. So you have one side trying to make it a long slow and expensive grind, while the other accepts that’s exactly what it is and doesn’t care.
The numerical superiority of Russian forces over Ukraine on the battlefield will likely begin to decrease by the end of this year, according to American military analyst Michael Kofman.
Kofman believes that while the Kremlin continues to pressure Ukraine, suffering high levels of attrition, it is now beginning to struggle under “very significant constraints.”
“Battlefield advantage is likely to diminish as we enter this winter and look toward 2025,” said Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
However, he cautioned against expecting Russia to run out of equipment or personnel soon. Still, he believes Moscow will not be able to sustain its current pace of attack for long.
Kofman’s first explanation is that Moscow is replacing significant losses of equipment with Soviet-era weapons, but even these reserve stocks will not last indefinitely.
“Russia is depleting its Soviet-era assets, and the production rate of new equipment is quite low compared to the battlefield losses. This means that the Russian military is increasingly forced to adapt tactics to minimize losses, which also reduces their ability to achieve any operationally significant breakthroughs,” says the expert.
High payments to contract soldiers in Russia indicate that recruitment efforts are under pressure, he points out. Kofman believes that the Russian government will struggle to maintain the surge in bonuses and benefits it offers to new recruits.
“It’s clear that, at this rate of losses, Russia’s contract recruitment campaign will not be sustainable. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Russia will face a manpower shortage soon, but it’s evident they are encountering difficulties,” Business Insider quotes Kofman.
For instance, the British Ministry of Defense has estimated that the Kremlin will lose 1,000 soldiers daily during the coming winter, after suffering record daily losses in May and September.
The slow and costly pace of hostilities has consequences not only for the front lines in Ukraine but also for Russia’s wartime economy. It remains unclear how long Moscow can continue increasing its war budget.
CONTINUES….
The tank has had to play a secondary role - often operating alone or with infantry support rooting out enemy trenches and dugouts in tree lines.
When they have had the opportunity to be mobile - as has happened in Kursk lately, they’ve come as a nasty shock. The Challenger-2 proving quite effective. But they operate in ones and twos, often as fast ambush attacks because they simply can’t hang around and wait for enemy drones to get them.
There have been low points. The Russians recently captured a fully intact and working Leopard-2A5 and made a big deal of making sure we knew it.
These things happen in war but rarely do they change anything short term. We have captured Russian equipment and missiles and drones just as they have, unless they gain some encrypted information and how to access communications it’s going to take months to analyse a tank that’s not even the latest version.
Is the tank here to stay - especially what we see as the main battle tank?
I’m not sure it’s dead but it certainly needs to evolve. They’re too big and unwieldy and they need speed and a different kind of protection.
We seem to be employing what we have in ways to make them useful - just as the gun armed super dreadnoughts were used as land bombardment platforms in amphibious invasions. They existed so we found a use for them but we don’t build new ones. They passed into history.
I think the Main Battle Tank has had its day but, clearly, smaller lighter vehicles like the Bradley and the CV-90 have proven to be highly effective against even a T-72/80/90, so a new generation of IFV with anti-drone weapons and defences, fast, mobile, multi-purpose hulls and equipment options looks to have a more positive role going forward.
The generals will be hard pressed to give up on the MBT completely- yet clearly the concept is struggling to justify itself on the modern battlefield.
The age of mass armour seems to be over because ironically we don’t have enough of it to make it a mass that works.
1 MBT is 1.6 IFV’s in rough cost terms. When you have so few -
for example the UK will have just 143 Challenger-3’s and they’re based on massively overhauled and upgraded Challenger-2’s, is there really any point at all?
We use them because we have them. Ask yourself if you were posed the question ‘design me a vehicle to support troops, destroy enemy APC’s and IFV’s, defend and defeat drones, counter helicopters and help the crew survive if things go badly’, what would you build? I’d bet it wouldn’t be an MBT. Most likely a flexible hull that splits the roles of drone defence and anti-air, networked to protect others of the same hull with different modular load outs would be far more useful.
Let’s see what time provides us.
‘The Analyst’ MilStratOnX
Slava Ukraini
A T-72 turret is blown 75m into the air - believed to be a record just a week or so ago. It weighs almost 3 tons.
MILITARY & STRATEGIC:
TANK WARFARE HAS CHANGED
The first tanks were deployed in WW1 in 1917. They were developed to break the stalemate of trench warfare. With nothing to counter them except a direct hit from heavy artillery - something more likely to happen by accident than design, in the end they were critical in upending the war and winning it. They restored mobility.
In WW2 the tank truly came into its own as the very focus of military operations - Blitzkrieg was predicated on the armoured spearhead slicing its way behind enemy lines and cutting off infantry armies, placing them in pockets that were in some cases vast in size - especially in Russia. Several examples of infantry as large as 250,000 men being captured provided staggering victories for Nazi tank armies led by imagination and daring.
The tank dominated land warfare.
By 1988 the end of the Iran-Iraq war which became remarkably static occasionally broken by Iraqi tank raids that usually ended badly, created some doubt. The US invasion of Iraq a couple of years later and again in 2003 proved that a disciplined combined arms tank based war was still viable. In many ways it was text book but its weakness was its overwhelming nature, that led to a view that nothing could surpass it.
Ukraine has changed the whole concept of the tank. Military forces around the world are wondering how their expensive tanks are going to fare in a world of drones and wide use of ATGM’s.
The loss of the T-72 series to single hits that cook off the ammunition in the autoloader sending one recent turret 75m into the air has undermined the value of such weapons.
The M-1 Abram’s suffered so many losses - partly because it became a high bonus payment target for Russian troops - that Ukraine withdrew them from use. 15 of 31 were destroyed. Some of the imagery shows them properly destroyed - weakness around the tracks and rear engine compartments were quickly identified by drone operators. Crews lauded the fact they survived which is more than can be said for T-72/80/90 operators.
The M-1 has now reentered service with specially designed mesh net frameworks over the rear of the turret, full length armoured side skirts and a heavy coating of Kontakt-1 exploding bricks designed to stop some anti-tank weapons.
There was much concern over the value of the 1960’s designed Leopard-1A5 long stored in warehouses in Germany. It was designed in the early 1960’s to counter the Russian T-62/64 but was outclassed by the T-72 which had thicker armour and longer ranged guns.
Yet it’s proven to be quite useful once crews worked out how it could be employed.
Some use it as mobile artillery and that’s something the ancient T-55 has been used for by the Russians.
Others have found that its long range optical sights, fast rate of fire, speed and manoeuvring skills completely outclass the T-64 and other armoured units and it can pick them off at long range and scoot off. Just don’t let drones get to it.
Another way tanks are being used rather than as spearheads is to come in and back up infantry during trench and tree line clearing operations. They have to race in, do a fast job and get out again before the enemy drone operators get a grip of the situation.
The tanks then retreat quickly back out of range often under smoke.
There have been almost no scenarios where the use of armour as spearhead has been possible. Neither side has the numbers and on the few occasions there are not trenches and minefields established in depth - such as the flanks of the Pokrovsk salient, even as the opportunity to use mass armour presented itself, there was neither the quantity or manpower to make it viable.
The Ukrainians urged on by the allies attempted a combined arms operation in the summer of 2023. It was initially a disaster. Leopard-2A6’s were seen burning and spearhead tactics obliterated. It should never have been attempted because the key element missing was air power. Without that no spearhead these days can advance against heavy networked and mined defences.
The lesson was learned the hard way. CONTINUES…
Russian Lukoil Adds 25 Old Tankers to Its Shadow Fleet — Financial Times
Journalists discovered that each of these tankers was purchased by a separate offshore company, which was linked to one or even several other firms.
The ships were operated by Dubai-based companies owned by a Pakistani shipping entrepreneur who is currently facing prosecution in British courts for defrauding investors.
All purchases were financed by Dubai’s Eiger Shipping DMCC, which belongs to Litasco Middle East DMCC, the Middle Eastern branch of Lukoil’s oil trading division. Eiger provided upfront funding by pre-chartering the vessels being prepared for acquisition.
Journalists estimated that Lukoil spent over $700 million on these tankers.
Since their purchase, the vessels have been used almost exclusively to transport Russian oil, with 82% of the shipments being Lukoil oil, totaling around 119 million barrels. At $60 per barrel, this amounts to nearly $7.2 billion.
A key figure in this scheme was British accountant John Ormerod. His firm, Ormerod Allen & Co., has provided financial services to the shipping industry since 1990.
In total, Russia’s shadow fleet consists of more than 400 tankers. Despite increasing efforts by Western countries to target individual vessels through sanctions, oil companies shield them behind so many shell firms that it is extremely difficult to prove their connection to Russia.
Having endured 14 months in brutal Russian captivity, kidnapped Journalist Viktoria Roshchyna has reportedky died in Russian prison.
Authorities have confirmed that she was among those to soon be exchanged and was “expected to be home soon.”
“Her return had been agreed upon, and the last known information was that she had been transferred to ‘Lefortovo’ in preparation for her return home,” Yusov said, yet the circumstances of her death are still unknown.
Roshchyna had gone missing during a trip to the occupied territories but later revealed to have been taken prisoner by the Russians.
📢 Subscribe to Kyiv Post
I sort of suspected
⚡️ Journalist Roshchyna, who died in Russian captivity, held in 'one of the most brutal detention centers,' NGO says.
Viktoria Roshchyna, a Ukrainian journalist who died in Russian captivity, was held in Russian detention centers where torture is used against the prisoners, the Media Initiative for Human Rights said on Oct. 11.
81% of Ukrainians believe in victory
Now human animals are threatening FEMA workers.
https://open.substack.com/pub/joycevance/p/hurricane-rumor-response?r=70k1h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
I thought he was completely batty when he started talking about movie characters as if they were real.
https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/donald-trump-goes-completely-batty/58482/
He should be charged with a whole bunch of counts of manslaughter
I am a Democrat who supports Ukraine in their battle against The Russian Z fascist invaders.
I am a 73 year old Covid hermit who
lives on 10 acres in a sparsely populated area of the Ozarks. I heat with wood that is leftover by the lumber industry. When cutting oak for lumber only the trunk is used.
The largest town is population 2992. The county is 13k people scattered over 713 square miles.
Joined Dec 2022
TheOldGuy's choices:
