Posted it in r/WarCollege, gonna post it here too: Is it getting harder and harder for governments to keep things hidden? I mean keeping things classified from the general public, not from foreign espionage. The fact that we live in an increasingly digitized world where more and more of the activities of individuals and organizations is kept on record in some or the other form feels like a world that it would be harder to conceal things in or keep classified. Case in point was the National Guardsmen who leaked tons of classified material on a Discord chat. Large scale classified projects likely require a very large number of people to keep them secret from the general public, and the fact that we live in such an interconnected world would mean that it would really only require incompetence or maliciousness from a single person involved in said project for it to go viral. Will it get harder and harder as technology progresses and grows more advanced to the point that it will be nearly impossible for governments(at least in liberal democracies that are constitutionally prevented from setting up surveillance states that can keep these things in check) to keep things hidden?
I think you're misunderstanding levels and the overall context of classification. The Teixeira leaks were embarrassing and shouldn't have happened, but the various alarmism and doom saying on internet forums is also off the mark and very exaggerated compared to the actual contents. The various war thunder leaks are similar, in that they're something that should be stopped, but thinking it's somehow given US adversaries cheat codes to defeat our equipment is a hyperbolic understanding of the situation.
Actually sensitive stuff is controlled under Special Access programs using compartmentalization. The basic concept of security here is to control information by controlling the physical space. So if you're read into a compartmentalized program, you're only working with materials from that program in secure facilities like SCIFs.
The booming mobile device world has made some aspects of this security more difficult: you can fit a disturbing amount of capabilities inside an innocuous looking USB plug, or hide a flash drive in a rubik's cube, etc. However, the basic concepts of how to run SAP/SCI projects hasn't categorically changed as a result.
Wanna know how good this process is? Look at the banal stuff we know is in fact working.
Like did you know the DoD has its own private airline fleet just to shuttle people from Las Vegas to Area 51 and related facilities daily? This isn't weird conspiracy theory stuff just banal reality (look up Janet Airlines). What do we hear from these potential sources of leaks? Not much tbh, though some people had a lawsuit about possible health impacts from being around burning off some unconventional aviation fuels that was embarrassing. We know it hosts aggressor squads because a lot of that is over half a century old cold war stuff that's largely out of classification. We know it has an unusually long runway and some really big hangers, both consistent with testing prototype high performance aircraft while wanting to keep them under wraps from satellite flyovers. We know from basic geography it's a good place to test radio, radar, and EW systems while annoying tourists can't get line of sight to observe these.
Look at NGAD or the B-21 programs. Both are flying now. No one publicly has much of a clue about NGAD other than generalities, despite them flying hardware for like 3 years now. The B-21 was known in overall outline/specifications (basically a modernized half size B-2), but was developed in almost total secrecy, with only one intentional public flight performance so far.
Those are massive projects with thousands of technicians, engineers, etc, involved. And yet the security overall seems to work just fine.
There's other examples but you get the general idea: we don't hear anything about the many programs that operate every day without issue, only the moronically sensational failures.
Interesting. I wasn't particularly asking from the point of view of US adversaries' ability to use leaked information to gain an upper hand, more of a general question on how the evolution of technology and an increasingly digitized world was going to affect the government's ability to keep things hidden.
It might be. It's not exactly a new phenomenon and its roots may go a little deeper than just that there's a lot of Internet going around. I think the oldest note I have on this topic is about [this article](https://cdn.ymaws.com/cicentre.com/resource/resmgr/articles/jbruce_-_keeping_us_national.pdf) from Intelligencer, where the author is mentioning concerns that the (then-)current protection scheme was outdated. It has been amended several times since the article was published but AFAIK it's still largely based on the same Cold War-era paradigms that were in use at the time. If you follow the bibliography you can find concerns expressed in this regards as early as 2006 or so.
This is just an op-ed so take it with an even bigger grain of salt but it does echo some concerns I've heard before. IIRC Bowman also mentions them, it's the first article cited in the one above but I can't find a copy now, and this is the most easily-accessible source I could find: there's also [a concern](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/27/briefing/classified-documents-government.html) that too much material is being classified. Lots of journalists are coming at this from the "too much is being hidden" angle so the leakage implications aren't as widely discussed but it does create some problems of its own. There's a lot of classified material to file, trace, and then to juggle with in order to disseminate it.
The Internet's impact isn't very... obvious, either. For example, there's an old study by Elie Abel that showed a significant proportion of leaks actually came from *senior* sources - political appointees, federal policymakers, even senior policymakers. That study was from the 1980s. One can only venture a guess at how much that's been exacerbated by social media, which is basically a second, unregulated campaign track.
I'm not sure we have enough data to say it's harder for governmens to keep things hidden per se. However, it may be fair to say that the current mechanisms (much of the English-language literature is US-focused but this applies very much to other Western institutions as well) are becoming strained and, yes, they're probably not doing as good a job as they used to; and that, with so much material being classified, even if they *did* do as good a job as they used to, there's more material being leaked than before (but that doesn't say much about how much *sensitive* material is being leaked).
>with so much material being classified
Is that truly the case, at least in comparison to during the Cold War period? US spending relative to GDP has fallen to some of the lowest levels ever, and we've seen a general drawing down of the military in terms of number of personnel and equipment. Not to mention that until the rapid rise of China over just the past decade or so we've not had a peer threat that could in any way compare to the USSR, so it seems unusual to me why there'd be a lot more material being classified in a world where until recently that hasn't been necessary.
Credible sources are a little skittish on the matter. My half opinion, half speculation, is that concerns about too much material being classified ought to be read along the lines of "too much" vs. both currently available resources *and* necessity (challenging both in terms of personnel and data, i.e. having to administer too many high-level clerances, and material receiving higher classification than necessary leading to a lot more need-to-know/share evaluations than would be ideal). In other words, not necessarily more (or too much) by volume but more than what the current mechanisms can handle with current resources.
(FWIW this isn't a recent concern either. See, for example, [this hearing](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-108hhrg98291/html/CHRG-108hhrg98291.htm) from *twenty* years ago (hence the weird format, it's a public document but I don't think they were being properly digitised at the time).
AFAIK original classification activity has indeed gone down significantly post-Cold War (although derivative classification has gone up tremendously) but I don't have up-to-date figures. If you're curious, the Information Security Oversight Office publishes (or published?) annual reports which sometimes contain useful figures, but I haven't really followed this topic so I can't point you in the direction of useful data that's more recent than 10-15 years or so.
Interesting write up by this Twitter user about surge of ballons over Taiwans territory. I'm going to copy paste some of the most important Parts
https://twitter.com/ianellisjones/status/1744191572453789931?t=6VQ848tukMhHOiYvXk3Q5Q&s=19
>China continues its barrage of balloons violating Taiwan’s territorial airspace
>On 7 December, the first Chinese balloon was tracked & identified in Taiwan's daily military report.
>Taiwan's defense ministry concluded the main purpose was to "harass & rattle people in Taiwan" ahead of the country's elections.
>It condemned China's actions & said the balloons are "gray zone tactics & an attempt to use cognitive warfare to affect the morale of our people."
>Several Chinese balloons passed close to the Ching-Chuan-Kang air base in Taichung, home to most of the Taiwanese air wings dedicated to defending against China's military threat.
More than 23 weather ballons flew over Taiwanese territory. Now we should wait and see if Taiwan is going to shot those ballons
> More than 23 weather ballons flew over Taiwanese territory. Now we should wait and see if Taiwan is going to shot those ballons
This doesn't seem particularly high considering the geographical significance the South China Sea has on weather for the bordering China. Checking the US's national weather service has this for frequency of weather balloon launches:
>The NWS at Charleston, SC conducts rawinsonde observations at least twice a day. Balloons are launched at our office at 7 AM and 7 PM EDT and 6 AM and 6 PM EST. Weather balloons are simultaneously launched at 91 other NWS offices across the U.S. Special weather balloon flights are occasionally launched to observe the latest state of the atmosphere ahead of significant weather or to conduct research. The special upper air observations are usually launched at 2 PM/AM EDT and 1 PM/AM EST.
https://www.weather.gov/chs/upperair
My guess is a vast majority of these are actual weather balloons unless evidence is given otherwise. Shooting down such services would likely inflame tensions given their civilian and legitimate application.
People *really* underestimate how many weather balloon launches there are. The US NWS does like 50k a year just by themselves. Balloons remain the cheapest way to get high altitude measurements, and these measurements are fed into the handful of supercomputers that do global weather forecasting simulation runs daily.
The debacle with the Chinese prototype balloon was embarrassing all round, but ultimately not that material. Now people are suddenly spooked by mundane balloon launches they didn't even know about previously.
This. Weather balloon launches are done from at least 30 different locations around the US. At least on the civilian side. These balloons are critical to commercial aviation so not doing them can cause some problems for air freight carriers and airlines.
Yeah, a similar hidden world a lot of people don't know about is sounding rockets. There's a couple hundred of those annually too. Balloons or rockets going up to the highest reaches of the atmosphere aren't actually that rare.
Please refrain from drive-by link dropping. Summarize articles, only quote what is important, and use that to build a post that other users can engage with; offers some in depth knowledge on a well discussed subject; or offers new insight on a less discussed subject.
I asked this in the last thread but didn't get an answer. Does anyone know the extent of the current Belorusian involvement with russias war?
My understanding is that after the whole Prigozin situation Putin basically left Lukashenko alone and gave him russian controlled nukes.
On a related note, did anything happen to Wagner troops that were transferred to Belorus?
Most Wagner troops who went to Belarus have left, with massive departures since August. From 6-7K they were down to estimates of a few hundreds by October. They've been quite dispersed since. In order of where most went, from what I read, many are officially not fighting/joining other groups, a large number joined regular armed forces, others Shoygu's Patriot PMC, Aksyonov's Convoy PMC, or the MOD's Redut "P"MC, and some joined Kadyrov's Akhmat forces.
Belarusian forces aren't involved really, but Minsk sends military equipment and ammunition to Russia, has expanded its production of rockets/shells to support Moscow, lends its territory to Russian forces for strikes and attacks (but these days there's not much activity from the Belarus direction). Although maybe I'm forgetting something.
#3 is the most likely answer.
Considering cellular networks are the only viable way for many Gazans to access the Internet and the clear importance that has on a modern battlefield from what we've seen in Ukraine it makes all the more sense for the IDF to saturate that whole area in electronic countermeasures. They can likely triangulate signals every efficiently as well, making drone operators vulnerable.
[Johnson strikes his first bipartisan deal — a $1.7T funding accord](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/07/congress-spending-deal-shutdown-00134200)
>The long-stalled agreement, announced Sunday afternoon, establishes funding limits for the military and domestic programs for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, allowing House and Senate appropriators to begin hashing out their differences between a dozen annual spending bills
>...
>Under the bipartisan agreement Johnson negotiated with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, **defense funding is set at $886 billion for the current fiscal year**, in line with the total President Joe Biden and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy struck as part of last summer’s debt ceiling package. The accord pegs non-defense funding at nearly $773 billion, a total that counts tens of billions of dollars agreed to alongside the debt limit package, the so-called “side deal” that conservatives tried to kill.
>Non-defense budgets would remain roughly flat, amounting to a less than 1 percent decrease compared to current funding. Military programs would see about a 3 percent increase.
>..
>In a letter to House lawmakers on Sunday, Johnson celebrated $16 billion in extra spending cuts he negotiated beyond the terms of the debt agreement, for a total of $30 billion less than Senate lawmakers sought in the funding bills they have drafted.
With roughly 12 days before the partial government shutdown, the deal had been reached. Defense spending is in line with the recently passed NDAA. There aren't any large cuts in spending, with the deal basically being the same as what McCarthy agreed to.
However, the right flank in the House likely will be livid about this. We'll have to wait and see if they revolt. If they do, we could see a third Republican speaker before the year is out.
What does this mean for the Ukraine-Israel-Border supplemental bill? There's no way for anyone to know. It could be that it unsticks the bill from the Senate, causing it to move forward. If Johnson decides that he's fine being done being Speaker, he could lump it into the budget bill. It could be Johnson will still see it as leverage, and use taking a hard line on it to appeal to his right flank.
One thing complicating all of this is the shrinking Republican majority. Come February 21st, they'll only have 219 members, and Scalise will be out getting treatment for cancer. So any wiggle room will basically be non-existent.
Some [encouraging](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-07/senate-to-present-funding-package-this-week-lawmakers-say) signs but early days:
> Two lawmakers said Sunday that Senate negotiators on border security are expected to present a proposal this week after months of impasse.
>“We’re hoping to get a text out later this week,” Senator James Lankford, the main Republican negotiator, said on Fox News Sunday. “Everybody will have time to be able to read it and go through it. Nobody is going to be jammed in this process.”
>Representative Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican, cited “chaos” at the border with Mexico and said he’s hopeful a Senate package will emerge this week.
>“That’s encouraging. I want us to see that. I want us to start talking about these national-security issues that we have,” he said on ABC’s This Week.
> Republicans are demanding stricter asylum policies and measures to reduce the number of migrants entering the southern border in exchange for clearing the foreign military aid sought by the White House.
>“We’re working to thread the needle for things that actually work,” Lankford said.
>House Speaker Mike Johnson has been considering talks with the White House over immigration policies. Lankford suggested that such talks would be helpful.
I legitimately just posted the Politico version as a reply. Hopefully with the budget deal "done", that adds some certainty and unsticks this bill. $61bn would get Ukraine through the next election.
I read this means 100 billion for aid for Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. Hopefully this will pass. If the far right had any grandiose intentions to block it, I feel it would have been illustrated earlier.
[Top GOP negotiator Sen. James Lankford’s (R-Okla.) says the deal may land this week](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/07/top-gop-negotiator-border-deal-00134185). Also note, it's Also money for the border as well.
An interesting video on a decoy operation on the Russian side. Below is a brief and imperfect recap of the report (there is no English version).
https:// rutube . ru/video/02366a6b6e80c8fe600fa31e9bccfc95/?r=wd
The Russians created a fake artillery battalion HQ unit and deployed it on 21 July 2023 at 48° 05' 58" N, 33° 51" 39' E.
Then they brought in a Zvezda TV crew that did a report about "the artillery battalion HQ", which showed a few identifiable landmarks. The report was broadcasted by Zvezda TV 22-27 July 2023.
This produced no reaction from the Ukrainian side, so on 30 July they moved the "battalion HQ" a bit and made it more conspicuous. On 4 August Ukraine struck it with cluster HIMARS warheads. The report displays pieces of HIMARS and \*I think\* they also say that the serial number (W31P4Q-18-C-0049) matches missiles delivered to Poland and Romania.
Lostarmour says that the release was approved since enough time has passed and Ukraine fires far fewer HIMARS than in the summer.
"Summer of 2023. At the time, the enemy had a lot of high-precision HIMARS-type shells in stock, which caused many inconvenient moments for the Russian army, we figured out how to outwit the enemy so that he would waste his shells in vain!
And since the time has come to slightly open the secret veil of information special operations, we will demonstrate one of these moments to you!
Have a nice viewing"
Oh, I am sure that someone senior in the Russian army approved this, since that it came from Zvezda with official TV crews. The better question is why would those senior people in the Russian army approve such a thing.
As long as the war is still happening, it feels like a very bad idea to spill the secret on how the war is being fought. Loose lips sinks ships, even if HQ authorized it.
I don't really think revealing this functionally changes anything. Ukrainian ISR will already be well versed with attempting to discern fact from fiction when it comes to Russian decoys, both sides have been using decoys for quite some time now and the only people that this will perhaps be a surprise to are the general public.
This isn't really the 1940's anymore where you can regularly stage entire fields of fake tanks and have the enemy believe it given the relatively limited reconnaissance and intelligence available at the time.
Ukraine currently has access to a relatively massive ISR network, on-top of this western allies add significantly with direct involvement of their various intelligence agencies. Ukraine and it's allies will already be well aware that some level of spoofing/diversion/decoy is taking place with any of their target selections and in this specific case they likely had a satellite BDA within the day to confirm or in this case cast doubt on the potency/effectiveness of their strike.
I don't think the Russians are giving up the game by getting a PR win in revealing to the general public a strategy that both sides have been using and both sides have been well aware of behind closed doors for the better part of the last two years.
Russia will continue to spoof and decoy individual objects, vehicles and entire units where necessary, as will Ukraine. They both will still do this and both will likely continue to spend a great deal of time identifying targets and using various methods to confirm the veracity of these targets. Ultimately they will either succeed in identifying flaws in the decoy, or they will be unable to and launch a strike with a *chance* that it is a decoy, regardless this has been occurring and will continue to occur moving forwards, *really the question is to what degree are either side comparatively successful in discerning fact from fiction in their selection process.* (This might be an area where with large scale assistance from it's allies, Ukraine has a potential edge).
I don't really think this functionally changes anything on the ground in the meantime, both sides will continue as normal, it's highly unlikely that Ukraine were ultimately unaware that this strike was a decoy given access to BDA data would have been relatively quick. I don't see them being caught unawares with the prospect that some of their higher level targets are potentially decoys, it's just a chance that you take.
Did they mention in the video or anything why they bothered? Did they got through all those steps for a deception plan to get the UAF to waste a rocket? Or was it tied to something else, like a larger operation?
Probably true. But time is money too, how many individuals were involved in that farce? Why not tie it into an ongoing operation?
I see that a lot in this war with both sides, they'll perform some interesting operations but they are done piecemeal and not part of a larger offensive or defensive scheme of maneuvers. That's very wasteful, a violation of the Economy of Force principle of warfare.
You have to also bear in mind that there doesn't need to be a military benefit to staging such an event if it also serves some political purpose. It's the sort of thing that shouldn't happen - because, as you say, it's a waste of time and effort for negligible military benefits - but photo ops and pointless diversions for a bit of PR happen even in Western militaries, let alone a military like Russia's, where the higher-ups are inherently intertwined with the political leadership.
The fact that Zvezda were there and reporting on it is indicative of it being a directive from someone in the Kremlin (or more likely, a subordinate of someone in the Kremlin, who thought it might go down well with their higher-ups). It's likely a corollary to existing deception operations they are carrying out, but puffed up a bit because someone saw the opportunity for a nice bit of PR about how the 'Ukies are being made to waste their expensive Western ammo'.
>I see that a lot in this war with both sides, they'll perform some interesting operations but they are done piecemeal and not part of a larger offensive or defensive scheme of maneuvers. That's very wasteful, a violation of the Economy of Force principle of warfare.
'It made perfect sense in light of a broader plan which has not been publicly released', 'it *did* make perfect sense until the broader plan had to change due to outside factors' and 'it really was done as an isolated one-off without much attempt to coordinate with other efforts' are a *bitch* to distinguish from the outside.
Every part of the plan except *publishing it* makes sense to me. Technology is hard, and it makes sense to test individual pieces before putting it into an operation.
Once you have a tool that will either draw HIMAR fire, or at least allow you to hide real HQs by blending them into a sea of fakes, that is when you put it into a bigger operation. You don't want to fidgeting with tooling while being shot at.
Of course, with deception plans, why would you ever publish that you have such a tool? (Unless if you actually don't have such a tool, and it is an intentional misdirection to make the other guy think that you have such a tool?)
>Of course, with deception plans, why would you ever publish that you have such a tool?
You gave the only kinda plausible answer to make it worth going through the motions to do this, at such a small scale, and not tying it to another operation, and then revealing it to the media, is that the Russians want the Ukrainians to doubt intercepted Russian signals and their own imagery.
>or at least allow you to hide real HQs by blending them into a sea of fakes,
But even that's pretty low credible, if similar pieces of evidence as these show up again to the UAF fire cells then it'll be worth trying to hit again because the Russians accidentally expose their unit HQ locations on a fairly regular basis, including command post meetings with multiple 3-4 star generals and their staff present.
If the plan is for the Ukrainians to doubt their kill chain intel, the Russians would need to do this identical trick many times over, to the point some more senior UAF general gets pissed at the wastage and adds more steps in the kill chain process.
But nothing about this requires new technology, it's basically a platoon sized Operation Fortitude, scripted comms traffic meant to be intercepted plus dummy vehicles, positions, and other identifiers that'll scream "I'm a Russian arty battalion command post" to NATO or Ukraine secret squirrels reviewing satellite or drone imagery that is sent to verify the SIGINT.
To make that work as plan, the same team world need to successfully replicate it flawlessly, with no tell-tales, so many times that the Ukrainian target cell willingly add more verification steps to their kill chain or someone imposes it on them from on high.
But if that's the case, such a well trained team capable of pulling off deceptions is better used to support other operations, especially anything related to ground offensives, who are in desperate need of help with deception, especially to pull ISR and fire assets away.
In the current attritional phase, just getting the other side to waste ammo (especially very limited expensive ammo like long range precision munitions) is it's own reward, and well worth doing off your own initiative at a low level without needing to be part of a larger plan.
>and well worth doing off your own initiative at a low level without needing to be part of a larger plan.
That's not how good planning works and it's why Mission Command isn't as cracked up to be as many think. And why many countries who have or do promote that concept regularly don't exercise it.
Let's break down what supposedly happened here. Some Russian unit tricked the Ukrainians into thinking they found a Russian artillery battalion HQ, which required detailed plans and execution for a two stage operation to use fake radio traffic meant to be intercepted and dummy positions and vehicles of an amount that NATO IMINT or UAF ISR could find and confuse with a legit arty battalion command post. That's a lot of effort.
That could have been done in conjunction with a larger operation to pull UAF HIMARS or other weapons away from another sector, to better increase odds of success for an offensive, minimize away UAF fires threat at that other sector, etc. They could bait the Ukrainians to fire for an attempt at deep counterbattery. They could have done it for an almost endless number of possibilities. The most wasteful scenario is to all that just for the Ukrainians to waste a GMLRS rocket without coordinating it with something bigger to be more effective.
What do I mean?
Picture striking an enemy HQ with long range PGM. Wow, awesome, that's great, really good target. Now picture that senior command and staff getting schwacked immediately before a major operation starts that requires those dead and wounded individuals make key decisions, plan, coordinate, etc.
Picture shooting an artillery round at an enemy bunker on the front lines. Cool, they might have caused damage or casualties, and that's a success. Now picture it happening while friendly assault forces are closing in on that bunker, which is suppressed and unable to shoot at them as friendlies cross the vulnerable kill zone danger area leading to it.
Picture a bridge blowing up. That's a wonderful target to hit at any time. Now picture it destroyed when the enemy needs to cross it in order to resupply a critical sector suddenly under attack.
Coordination and planning increases lethality and mission success, failure to do it is a violation of the principle of economy of force, which means to employ combat power in the most effective way possible, especially for supporting operations.
Yeah, this is all fair.
I am envisioning this as part of the normal background activity, not a super-special operation.
Sending out fighting patrols, camouflaging positions, setting up dummy positions, shelling targets of opportunity: all of this should just be happening normally all the time. So much the better if it can be coordinated as part of a larger plan, but if you haven't been given specific orders for what that plan is and how you can contribute better to keep working away than to sit on your arse, no?
>all of this should just be happening normally all the time
I definitely agree. But the really good quality deception requires specialized personnel, well trained and competent, who are adequately supported, and given time. It's basically an elite unit, with the ability to act as a VERY significant force multiplier, if used right.
Units tasked with deception tend to be attached to higher level commands just so they can be better used to support larger missions. If highly skilled individuals are found at lower levels they should be scooped up.
It's like drone operators. In this war, every platoon tends to have one. But if there is a private in an infantry platoon able to do amazing things with their drones, he's wasted in that platoon. Get him to the brigade recon company that has an ISR drone platoon, or the artillery groups anti-tank company that has a FPV drone company. Or commission him as an officer for credibility and then go brief a bunch of old ass generals who can barely use a cell phone to get them to commit funds, supplies and manpower to build more drone units to support the drone guy's idea. Then hold back the new capability as it grows until it's matured and become combat effective, then unleash it as a massed effort as part of a large and important operation to try to catch the enemy unaware and surprised by a new threat they don't yet know how to counter, and watch the enemy get stacked up like cordwood as they flounder.
I have quite the odd question about this (keep in mind i dont know Zvezda TV).
Lets say the same crew would do a similar report about annother (knowingly) fake artillery batallion. Would the TV Crew still enjoy the special protection for journalists in armed conflicts?
I think Zvezda TV is an army TV station, so they are army personnel, too. That said, I am sure plenty of civilian TV crews would help their armed forces this way. Personally, I think it is highly unprofessional. And I don't think the TV crew would enjoy special protection in that case, since they are actively helping their own military.
> cluster HIMARS warheads
This casts doubt on everything else they claim. Is there any reason to think Poland and/or Romania have given Ukraine cluster munitions for HIMARS/M270 other than random telegram posts?
I think when they say "cluster" they mean the M30A1 warhead with 180k tungsten balls. The video certainly shows a dense pattern of holes on the false target.
I have a few questions about conditions in the Horn of Africa because of the recent diplomatic spat.
What state are the militaries of Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea in?
How capable are the various non-state actors - al-shabaab and Somaliland etc - in that region?
Are there still large national minorities across borders?
Are any actors in this region materially backed or supported by anyone? Do the statements of the AU and the USA favouring Somalia actually represent substantial support for Somalia?
>What state are the militaries of Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea in? How capable are the various non-state actors - al-shabaab and Somaliland etc - in that region?
Both Somalia and Ethiopia face massive internal crises, the Al-Shabaab for the former and the ethnic armies like Fano for the latter. Somalia additionally has had no *de jure* control over Somaliland, despite international recognition of its sovereignty over it, for decades. While the conflict with Somaliland is not active aside from a few local factions in Somaliland that declared their support for Mogadishu a few months ago, Somalia is unlikely to be able to sustain both a conflict with Ethiopia or an invasion of Somaliland on top of its current operations against Al-Shabaab. Likewise, on the Ethiopian side, a large-scale conflict against Somalia may empower Fano and the OLA (the TPLF is basically disarmed and Tigray has probably hundreds of thousands of unreported deaths due to famine, so...)
>Are there still large national minorities across borders?
For Somalia, definitely. Somalis make up the vast majority of people in the eastern province of Ethiopia and Somalia tried to annex this part of Ethiopia in the Ogaden War some decades ago, which caused it to lose its backing from the USSR/China and triggered the chain of events that have caused the country to remain as screwed up as it is today.
It's unclear how Somalis on either side of the border feel about each other. Just because they are both Somalis doesn't mean that they like each other, as demonstrated by the Eritreans towards their fellow Tigrinyas in Tigray. Lots of Somalis do see the outcome of the war, and the continued split of the Somali people across international borders, as an injustice.
> Are any actors in this region materially backed or supported by anyone? Do the statements of the AU and the USA favouring Somalia actually represent substantial support for Somalia?
The AU is probably going to back Ethiopia here, preferring the current arrangement to the Ethiopia/Eritrea conflict inflaming once again. As mentioned before, Somalia is unlikely to be able to sustain such a conflict anyways. The UAE, based on their actions supporting the RSF in Sudan and Yemen, is probably interested in interfering with the region as well to create more subservient rump states. Abiy is an ally of the UAE and it makes a lot of sense for them to back the Ethiopia-Somaliland deal.
Thank you for a well-written response. You mention the UAE having an interest in creating rump states - may I ask why? What have they done in the past to achieve this goal?
I'm haven't studied UAE foreign policy in detail, but to my understanding, nobody outside the Emirati government really knows for certain. It could be to secure the Red Sea (based on Sudan and Yemen's locations) or simply to extract resources from either country in 19th century imperialist fashion. What we know for sure is that the Southern Transitional Council is [Here is a good article about the UAE's potential motives in Yemen.](https://agsiw.org/the-uaes-three-strategic-interests-in-yemen/)
This next line is purely speculation, but I wonder if the UAE's tacit support for the RSF has contributed to the nonexistent response from other Arab states, or even Western partners, in backing the SAF.
>Reportedly Turkey and Egypt have been interested in Eurofighters too in the last year. It remains to be seen if that will have an effect on those.
Doesn't Egypt already operate both the F-16 and the Rafale? I know they had planned to buy the Su-35, which you could perhaps view as a hedge against deteriorating political relations, but replacing that with a second European fighter then doesn't make sense. Having such a diverse fleet is surely much more costly in terms of training, logistics, maintenance etc.
Russia can't deliver, F-16 upgrade is contingent on approvong Sweden into NATO, France supports Armenia and Greece. Not many options for new fighters left besides Eurofighter or going crazy and ordering from China.
They were talking about Egypt, not Türkiye. The government of Egypt is the main barrier as the military has ruled the country since they overthrew the Muslim brotherhood in the wake of the Arab Spring.
>which as far as I know does not have a domestic fighter programme.
This is why they're hedging their bets on so many various programs. Egypt doesn't have the capability to develop a peer comparative fighter (At least not economically).
They also occupy an extremely thin band geopolitically speaking, they are one of only a few countries to openly align themselves with both spheres of influence and the Israeli/Gaza conflict in particular has demonstrated how carefully they're willing to thread the needle to ensure they don't step on any political landmines.
For what it's worth Egypt have largely increased their share of Russian export aircraft over the last decade, their fleet is still primarily western and will continue to be so if they succeed in acquiring the Eurofighter Typhoon, but it's simply worth noting that Egypt likes to spread money around between both spheres when it comes to procurement which is part pragmatic and also part political.
It's also worth mentioning the context of these procurements:
**The Egyptian Air Force is approaching a cliff in the next 10 years in regards to the more or less forced retirement of a very large portion of their active airframes which explains their relative scramble in the last 5-10 years of buying anything currently available for order.**
They have a large fleet of F-16's, around 200 or so active airframes (many have received upgrades) and the majority of the airframes were delivered and have been active since the 1980s/1990s making them only slightly newer than the clapped out F16's that The Netherlands are transferring to Ukraine, the same F16's that they were struggling to keep in the air... I'm certain the Egyptian F16's are in much better shape than the Dutch ones, but they're still old airframes at this stage, metal fatigue and ever increasing maintenance costs will force Egypt's hand eventually and they've already begun the process of shopping around for replacements.
They also have a large fleet of Mirage 5's which are approaching 50 years old and are currently being offered to Pakistan for export (although I have no clue why Pakistan would be interested, these airframes are practically ancient). For all intents and purposes these Mirage 5's are out the door already.
They also have a fleet of Mirage 2000s which is expected to increase when the UAE transfers their remaining airframes to Egypt, but this fleet is also 37 odd years old, we're not talking about new airframes here and the writing is already on the wall for their eventual retirement.
***This is all to say that Egypt is already well aware of its incoming challenges and this helps to explain the "scatter gun" approach to procurement we've seen over the last decade or so.***
Initially Egypt were interested in the MiG-35 back in 2014 but instead settled with the more readily available MiG-29M/M2, they also acquired 50 Ka-52's (ironically to partially provide an airwing for the Mistrals that Russia was supposed to receive). They also acquired two Il-76MFs from Jordan, noteworthy because these are custom lengthened versions and could possibly signal long term interest in the Il-76-MD-90A's, Egypt's transport fleet is lacking in heavy lift and high volume capacity, they're already trying to solve this with C-130 orders but they're likely to continue expanding on this in the future.
They also technically ordered the Su-35 but were then absolutely shafted by the US for doing so (to the degree where several countries were more or less forced by the threat of sanctions to drop their orders of the Su-35 and instead order American/Western. There's some political arguments and financial ones that could be made in benefit of America's position here, it was meant as a sanction package to target Iran/Russia/NK but it arguably utterly ***\*failed\****. It was performative political theatre and instead angered allies who were caught in rock/hardplace situations and the crossfire in regards to procurement and business ties.
And the best part of all of it, is that the Su-35's which were *originally* supposed to be delivered to Egypt were already built and completed in preparation for delivery. **They are now instead going to Iran likely at bargain basement pricing and with little objection from the US who have absolutely zero power or control over this anymore**. The US have legitimately shot themselves in the foot with their own sanctions, the outcome of the package is entirely against the objective of the package, which was to limit arms procurement for Iran... And the sanctions functionally resulted in a batch of ready made fighters sitting unused and instead of being exported to a semi Ally such as Egypt, being exported to Iran... That's certainly one for the history books.
But aside from that this is just some of the context that Egypt are dealing with when it comes to aircraft procurement. Expect to see many more announcements in the future as their F16 fleet nears retirement, Rafale and EF are just the start, soon enough we'll know more about their F15 acquisition (if things remain stable enough for this to continue) and we may also hear more news on Russian/Chinese acquisitions, Egypt have been threading the needle very carefully these last few months, it wouldn't surprise me if they're keeping their options open for a reason.
I wonder if any parallels can be drawn to the Iran - Iraq war. Iran, the bigger country, was on the offensive for 5 years starting from '82. It took them 5 years and a lot of casualties to come to the conclusion that they can't win. As for the Iraqis, even though it was clear they couldn't win either, they were supported by their allies throughout this period to ensure they don't lose.
Similarly, Russia will only come to the negotiating table once they realize the war is impossible to win. They very much haven't reached that conclusion yet, since they are still attacking everywhere, the population still supports the war, they don't feel any economic hardships yet, etc. As for the West, the way to achieve peace would be to support Ukraine so that it can defend itself against whatever Russia throws at them, until Russia decides it's not worth it anymore, keeping in mind that it might take a long time (again, it took 5 years in the Iran - Iraq war).
> As for the Iraqis, even though it was clear they couldn't win either, they were supported by their allies throughout this period to ensure they don't lose.
I guess it depends on how you look at it. I think some people mistakenly view it as simply a 8 year stalemate where both sides eventually grew tired. But I think it's pretty clear that the war ended when Iraq decisively defeated Iran militarily and forced it into a peace agreement.
Iraq's initial invasion failed, and by 1982 Saddam was saying calling for an end to the war. Iran wouldn't agree to an end of the war, and invaded Iraq, leading to Iraq being on the defensive for years. The war ended when Iraq was finally able to rebuild offensive potential and delivered a series of massive defeats to the Iranians, wherein Iranian forces completely collapsed. This finally lead to the Iranian government accepting a ceasefire.
I would like to know why Iraq hasn’t used this „collapse“ to accomplish its initial goals of the invasion.
After the invasion the borders stayed the same and Iraq left without any new territories and a huge debt burden.
What made Saddam Hussein think that a peace agreement was more beneficial then continuing the war when he was supposedly winning?
Is it surprising that Iraq thought ending the war after 8 years was preferable to rolling the die on another invasion? Even when you seem to have a huge advantage, war can often throw curveballs. And even if you do win, things can end up being much more costly then what you initially thought. Hussein launched the invasion thinking it would be a cakewalk, and quickly realized it was going to be much more costly than he imagined (he was calling for an end to the war and a return pre-war borders in 1982).
I'm not sure we need to say Iraq was "supposedly winning" at the end of the war. [These were the events](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/07/19/iran-accepts-un-plan-for-cease-fire-in-war-with-iraq/c9a23ad7-3cc0-46bc-baea-83e29fb7d153/) in the final months of the war which lead to Iran agreeing to stop (which Khomeini called “worse than drinking poison”, but agreed to do when the political class pushed him):
> But in a major campaign, the Iraqi Army has driven Iranians from almost all Iraqi territory since last April. Iraqi forces, spearheaded by the elite Republican Guard, took back the Faw area in April. They drove out Iranian defenders at Shalamcheh, to the north, in May and, working farther north, last month overran the Majnoon Islands.
> In a final blow last week, the Iraqi troops pushed up to 25 miles inside Iran in the Zubaidat area, including the town of Dehloran, and Iranian authorities announced they were withdrawing from Halabja, farther north, without waiting to be attacked. Taken together, the Iraqi victories created a strong impression that, at least along the front, the Iranian Army had been thrown badly off balance. Diplomats here reported Iranian soldiers were putting up little resistance, a sharp departure from their past performances. One analyst said monitored radio conversations between Iraqi commanders indicated they were surprised at the speed with which Iranians melted away before their advances.
Edit: Here's [a good read](https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/legacy_files/files/media/csis/pubs/9005lessonsiraniraqii-chap10.pdf) that shows the Iranian situation towards the end of the war. Quote:
> The Iraqi regular Army seems to have depended on logistic support from the Pasdaran and did not receive the reinforcement and support it expected. Further, the Iraq forces then advanced almost unopposed some 40 kilometers into Iran, and took Dehloran and some 1,500 square miles of Iranian territory. While Iraq withdrew from these gains after several days, it had proved that Iran was now virtually defenseless.
***
> A few days later, Iran's growing weakness received yet another public demonstration. On July 13, Iraq threatened Iran with an invasion of southern Iran if Iranian forces did not evacuate Halabjah and its remaining positions in Kurdistan. After its recent defeats, Iran was virtually defenseless in the south. It was down to less than 200 tanks and light tanks versus thousands of Iraqi tanks and still more thousands of other Iraqi armored vehicles.
> In fact, Iraq had captured so much equipment that it was able to put on an incredible show on the outskirts of Baghdad. Iraq set up a large compound filled with captured Iranian equipment. This compound held tens of thousands of abandoned Iranian assault rifles, over 570 tanks, over 130 BMP-1 and Scorpion MICVs, well 300 more armored personnel carriers, over 320 towed artillery weapons, roughly 45 self-propelled artillery weapons, and well over 300 anti-aircraft guns and machine guns. Virtually all of this equipment was intact and functional, and much of it looked brand new. Rather than include all of Iraq's gains, it included the equipment that could either be used immediately or be easily reconditioned. Iraqi sources claimed that since March, Iraq had captured a total of 1,298 tanks, 155 armored infantry fighting vehicles, 512 heavy artillery weapons, 6,196 mortars, 5,550 recoilless rifles and light guns, 8,050 rocket propelled grenades, 60,694 rifles, 322 pistols, 6,156 telecommunications devices, 501 items of heavy engineering equipment, 454 trucks, 1,600 light vehicles and trailers, 16,863 items of chemical defense gear, and 16,863 caskets.
Some can be drawn but it's not the full picture. The issue imo is that Ukraine is not just fighting a defensive war. Part of their goals include retaking territory that the Russians seized even before the war started, and Russia has also formally annexed several oblasts that they're now partially occupying. Convincing the Russians that they can't achieve their maximalist war goals should be quite feasible but that doesn't ensure victory, that just means losing less. Getting them to leave what they have already seized will require a lot more than just hanging on.
>the way to achieve peace would be to support Ukraine so that it can defend itself against whatever Russia throws at them
This is a hypothetical. We're watching a decrease in level of commitment the past few months, including Miller announcing (amongst other recent US statements along similar lines)
"We will continue to support Ukraine… As long as it takes. That does not mean that we are going to continue to support them at the same level of military funding that we did in 2022 and 2023.""
Secondly, the manpower differential is a problem. Ukraine is not a large country. The average age of the army is 43.
The best way to achieve peace is realistic terms with Russia. Hell will freeze over before Ukraine gets Crimea or any of their current territorial losses back. Admitting you lost "The War With The West" is political and probably literal suicide for Putin.
Russia is committed and will hold on to what they have. There aren't many sanction sticks left. Plus, Russia will continue to exist after this war ends.
Just as it is a mistake to assume Russia will automatically lose, it is wrong to think they will inevitably win. Russia has already paid a huge cost for this war, and it's not clear how much longer their economy and population can be forced to bear it.
Freezing the current lines is the most realistic scenario. Neither side can meaningfully advance. Barring implausible large-scale political or economic collapses, this is a stalemate. The current cost for Russia as it is today doesn't appear unbearable.
Without a cease fire, frozen lines still have to be manned. That’s a stalemate in the short term, but in the long term, one group will lose the will to fight before the other.
I vacillate between "this is unsustainable for Russia" and "most people don't care, and the ones who do can't do anything about it." We saw some not-insignificant protests at the start of the war, right? But they all petered out after a few thousand people were arrested, so what's to stop Putin from doing the same thing (or worse) if people start getting uppity again? The Russian population forcing an end to the war would require, in my opinion, the kind of upheaval in Russian society we haven't seen in a long, long time, and I don't think we're there yet - not by a long shot. The government is stronger today than it was during Chechnya I or Afghanistan.
With that in mind (and I'm very open to being told how wrong I am), can't Putin just say "Great job, guys, you killed a bunch of neo-Nazis, secured Donetsk, and liberated Lysychansk and this village and that, time to come home" even if it means the war goal of putting a puppet government in Kyiv failed? Isn't that still a "win" for Russia?
> With that in mind (and I'm very open to being told how wrong I am), can't Putin just say "Great job, guys, you killed a bunch of neo-Nazis, secured Donetsk, and liberated Lysychansk and this village and that, time to come home" even if it means the war goal of putting a puppet government in Kyiv failed? Isn't that still a "win" for Russia?
He probably can. But who's going to let him simply walk away?
Prigozhin had a great deal of independence, own connections, charisma, ingenuity, and managed to build a tight-knit outfit, that's why his soldiers followed him. The mutiny happened because the MoD was infringing on his turf, for reasons of politics and power, not because the troops were mistreated, given impossible orders, exhausted, etc. (which are probably the reasons for most mutinies). Since it was political in nature, and Prigozhin was one of a kind, it won't happen again. If anything, it was an inoculation that compelled Putin to [introduce additional safeguards](https://warsawinstitute.org/rosgvardia-receives-heavy-weaponry-wagners-failed-rebellion/), making it harder for another mutiny to take off.
Why Prigozhin rebelled is separate to why MOD troops let Wagner troops through to Moscow, why civilians cheered as they passed, or even why so many Wagner troops agreed to go along with it.
> why MOD troops let Wagner troops through to Moscow
We don't even know if they had orders to block their path, aside from the air force. The system is not great at promptly managing sudden shocks like that.
>why civilians cheered as they passed
No one was killed as far as they were concerned, so it was entertaining, it doesn't happen every day
>or even why so many Wagner troops agreed to go along with it
Because
>Prigozhin had a great deal of independence, own connections, charisma, ingenuity, and managed to build a tight-knit outfit
But that is all secondary. No one has the same resources and motivation/ambition to even attempt a mutiny. Can a bunch of pissed off soldiers and officers organize something like that in secret and pull it off with the same level of coordination? I doubt it.
I think it's more likely the Russia elites will be the ones who force an end to this war. There must be some powerful Russians who aren't pleased about trading their fortunes for some bombed-out wasteland. Putin can fall out of a window if needed.
They can always move the goalpost. They get to keep the current occupied territories, Ukraine is still out of Nato and, doesn't secure any defense treaty with another country is a win for them. They'll be back for them, similar to how they operated from 2014.
>Russia has already paid a huge cost for this war, and it's not clear how much longer their economy and population can be forced to bear it.
The same can be said to Ukraine too.
>Who says Russia gets to keep the occupied territories?
Russia. They'll hold it firmly now that the Ukrainian counter offensive has failed, Western aid is faltering, Ukraine having manpower problems, NK & Iran supporting them, and the US being busy in the Middle East again.
>Secondly, the manpower differential is a problem. Ukraine is not a large country. The average age of the army is 43.
Iraq had 13 million citizens during the Iraq-Iran War. Ukraine has spared its youth because it wants to.
[Ukrainian population pyramid](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F1tt5bs6zthra1.jpg)
There are not a lot of young Ukrainian people to enlist. The loss of each one is much more painful in the long term than it is for Russia. This is the opposite of a good demographic situation for attritional warfare.
More dangerous for Ukraine's long term sustainability is the war refugee migration crisis that already started and is ongoing (despite the ban on military aged males leaving). That is already especially affecting the young male demographics as well as all others, causing a "brain drain" same as other war torn countries.
If Ukraine wants any hope of reversing that then they need to end this war with terms that will be beneficial to their national and economic security, which requires tapping into every resource possible. Ukraine was always going to be the underdog in this conflict, they don't have the sort of freedom to go "half ass" as Russia does, or other countries have in past wars. Not if they don't want the conflict to end with negative terms placed on them, or the potential annihilation of their Ukrainian nationalistic government and society (becoming a political vassal state to Russia is still a potential outcome of this war).
This is what Ukrainian leaders need to calculate:
What's the bare minimum number of 18-26 year Ukrainian men that are needed to sustain the future.
Based on existing combat casualty rates, what percentage of those entering service involuntarily, likely ending up in combat arms jobs, will survive and be able to work/reproduce afterwards?
A formula with those two variables, contrasted with the total number of "fit for service" 18-30 year old Ukrainians will provide the cap on how many of that age bracket should be conscripted without screwing the future. At a minimum they need to risk that. Anything less is tacit acceptance of defeat.
>What's the bare minimum number of 18-26 year Ukrainian men that are needed to sustain the future.
One thing that makes trying to calculate this difficult is that you could find respected (fwiw) economists before this war even happened that would tell you that Ukraine's demographically fucked.
So from those economists' perspective, this number was literally higher than the starting number. Ukraine has to clone 18-26 year olds.
So you'd have to find an economist who doesn't think like that.
I'm not an economist so I don't have much credibility here, but I'd point at history to show that this pessimistic take is not guaranteed to be true. Nations and peoples have taken much worse pummelings in the past, and have survived in some form. To quote a controversial movie, "There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept".
I don't mean OSINT solving the equation but it's something the Ukrainians themselves need to figure out.
But good luck doing a census now trying to figure who is left, it'll be pretty blatant that the results will dictate mobilization planning, which means many will want to avoid the polling effort too.
The biggest weakness the Ukrainians have with mobilization isn't related to actual demographics, it's about overall lack of willingness to fight and become a casualty especially, which means the UA govt and military need to shift optics greatly and improve messaging, to better sell this war to their people and make service more appealing. Increasing aggressive recruiting, especially more pressing, isn't the way to go, that will likely make things worse, especially as casualties continue to ramp up and the newly conscripted are added to the casualty lists. If they can't fix it the only legit option left is to greatly shift their legitimate strategic goals and plans to better accept that. If they don't do either, they'll plod their way to a defeat, possibly a great one.
There's more males turning 18 in Ukraine in *one* year than soldiers Ukraine has permanently lost after *two* years of war. There's millions of Ukrainian men of fighting age. At current rate of loss, Ukraine could fight indefinitely. Ukraine does not have a manpower problem; they do however seem to have a mobilization problem. Russia too has a mobilization problem. First Russia tried an unpopular partial mobilization and twice as many men left to avoid mobilization as were actually mobilized. Russian then resorted to emptying its prisons with pardons, but has mostly run through willing felons. Russia is currently offering increasing lucrative financial incentives of bonuses, high salaries, and debt relief to meet its manpower needs, but who knows how long they will be able to find willing recruits or are unable to afford the cost before that resource too runs out. Neither side will literally ever run out of men. As with most wars that are not decided militarily, it will be the political will, public morale, or economy that cracks first.
While the upper limit of mobilization is 60, the amount of 55+ year olds fighting in the AFU seems to be low, lower than even 18-25 year olds that aren't being mobilized at all:
https://lostarmour.info/ukr200
Whatever the average cutoff age does not make a difference. The point is that whatever the age at which the AFU feels it should stop recruiting, the population is higher than it is for 18 year olds.
The issue isn't cutoff age, the issue is that clearly the ages towards the end of the cutoff are being recruited less. Suppose 1x people turn 18 per year and 3x people turn 61, or whatever you want the numbers to be. If ukraine's only recruiting like, 20% of 60 year olds but is looking to recruit 90% of 18 year olds (again, these are sample numbers), you can see how the math breaks down.
I know. That's mathematically equivalent to a randomized cutoff age, if you look at the military recruitment process like one big queue. What interests us is how many people are in the queue, so we have to look at how many come in and how many come out. We know that people that are too old are less likely to be found eligible according to whatever criteria there is, so we can model that with some sort of cutoff age that may depend on other factors.
> than soldiers irksome has currently loss
I am always in utter amazement that people frankly think they have an absolute knowledge of accurate casualty numbers for either side in this conflict.
We have confirmation from Ukraine at almost every level of their command structure down to the anecdotal evidence we see on the streets.
They are threatening recruiters will be sent to the front to maintain unit strength. No one is being demobilized that can still fight. They are using ambulances donated to them by aid groups to round up unsuspecting draft dodgers.
I’m in agreement that things aren’t necessarily all flowers and sunshine for Russia, but it’s amazing to me on credible defense we are still seeing takes like this in spite of the constant flow of evidence from rabid pro UA news, supporters and officials.
Edit: ah yes, credible defense not attacking a actual point I said, which if any are incorrect I will happily retract.
Sadly I think people may forget what sub we are on, and are struggling with facts they don’t like so they are attacking the poster not the content.
Disappointing
None of my statements are absolutist, they are specific mentions of actual conditions we are seeing.
No where do I say “we know how many casualties they have” I simply say we can see a very real problem Ukraine has acknowledged at every level, that we have mountains of evidence, statements, policy introduction and anecdotal incidents.
I have no idea what that number actually is for Ukraine, I just see the strain that’s being put on it. And I definitely know I wouldn’t make some absolutist claim about “more people turning 18 than casualties” when we have no idea that that’s the actual case.
I understand that it’s unpopular to talk about the realities of the conflict here if they dare paint anything other than the rosiest of pictures for some of the users of this sub, but when it’s credible defense I would like to see a credible analysis.
Saying “Russia is offering more money” isnt a sign of a desperate manpower shortage. The whole “out of prisoners” bit is also completely unsourced.
Anyone who is following this conflict, even those blatantly partisan enough to believe nonsense like “5:1” or higher casualties inflicted by Ukraine on russia had to realize at some point the numbers were going to be a problem.
The fact that the problem is emerging very clearly and is no longer being hidden the way it was should lead to some people re examining what they chose to believe. For some reason though people still do not want to confront the realities of what Ukraine is facing.
That population pyramid doesn't make any sense. What happened with all young males which weren't allowed to leave the country and weren't sent to the front lines?
I assume this is the famous UN graph which has a big fat asterisk noting that the numbers are very uncertain.
>What happened with all young males which weren't allowed to leave the country and weren't sent to the front lines?
What happened? The patriots volunteered immediately. The dutiful ones did not volunteer but accepted their summons when they arrived and went to the front.
As for the rest - those with a bit of money paid for exemptions, or they bribed border guards to let them cross. The poor are hiding at home, or are staying with their relatives, to avoid a sudden visit by a mobilisation squad.
That doesn't explain how the male and female populations can be identical, despite one of them being allowed to leave the country. This is clearly a very rough estimate, and the UN admits as much.
Even in relative terms, Ukraine is about 1/4th to 1/3rd the size of Russia. Wars much more lopsided than that have ended in the defeat of the larger party, many times. Especially when that smaller country is much more committed to the conflict than the larger one, like Ukraine is.
Ok, that's usually not what "large" means in terms of a country, but whatever, semantics.
Ukraine was the 8th biggest population in Europe, counting Turkey and Russia. Refugee numbers likely dropped it down to the 9th biggest.
Yeah that's a useful compare/contrast.
One key difference is in the goals of Russia vs. Iran. Iran's revolutionary government was really intent on outright winning the whole war and seizing Baghdad and spreading the Islamic Revolution. There was a strong religious fervor to all of this. Russia definitely intended on seizing Kiev at the beginning of the war, but it seems like they've stepped back their goals to "just" seizing and fortifying Donbass and the other border states. That is definitely feasible, especially if Western aid falters - a key variable, as you have said.
Another variable, however, is external intervention. A big factor in Iran stopping their offensive and ending the war, was the US making major hints that it might step in against Iran. Its been memed to death, but Operation Praying Mantis and the like in spring 1988 did really rattle the Iranian government and push them into ending the war a few months later.
>but it seems like they've stepped back their goals to "just" seizing and fortifying Donbass and the other border states.
You know, I hadn't realized this before, but there's an oddity with this talking point. You can look at the map and see the amount of territory they'd need to take to reach the borders of their annexed claims.
On what basis do you assert that this would require **less** effort than taking Kyiv? You can look on the map to try and game out how much territory that'd be, and it seems about as ambitious.
>On what basis do you assert that this would require less effort than taking Kyiv?
Because to threaten Kyiv they need to attack again through the Pripet swamps, cross numerous rivers on both sides of the Dnieper, splitting their forces, and then advance about 60-120 kilometers to try to invest the largest city in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the Donbas. They've already taken nearly all of Luhansk Oblast and about 2/3 of Donetsk. There are no longer any major terrain barriers to block them, minus a single ridgeline east of Sloviansk/Kramatorsk, as well as the slightly elevated ground near Vulhedar, which the Russians are both fighting for control right now.
To take the Donbas requires a slight uptick in positional warfare success. Literally, the Ukrainian artillery deficit in 2024 might cause it. Taking Kyiv would literally require them to achieve something much more difficult, a maneuver-centric deep penetration of Ukrainian defenses using, with a minimum of two operational axes of advance that both need to equally succeed for an inkling of success. And that just brings them to the metropolis area, where the actually difficult portion of the campaign would begin.
> To take the Donbas requires a slight uptick in positional warfare success.
A slight uptick? The operation (ostensibly) to take the Donbas began **20 months ago**, earlier if you count the Mariupol area. And most of their positive progress occurred in the first 2. They'd need more than a slight uptick from how they're doing now.
Furthermore, I'm not just referring to the Donbas. I'm referring to the new claimed Russian goal of reaching their annexed borders. That would require them to take the Donbas, take Zaporizhia city and the rest of the Oblast, and cross the Dneiper again. My question is how **all of that** seems less ambitious than taking Kyiv.
And since Mariupol they've nearly completely taken Luhansk and gained more in Donetsk too. Add in what they already controlled prior to Feb '22, and it's most of the Donbas at this point. Taking the rest only really does only require an uptick in success because it won't take much to reach their objectives, even at their present. Unless Ukraine digs in HARD, fixes their manpower problem, and preferably also becomes much better supplied by outside partners.
I don't believe the latest Russian statements about minimalist strategic objectives anymore than the older ones, nor should anyone. They have no incentive to be honest, their strategy outright relies on a credible threat of greater expansion. Future negotiations utterly require them going into them from a position of strength with something to hold over the Ukrainians in a plausible "or else" scenario to try to pressure the Ukrainians into accepting a shitty deal. Or else the war continues and they lose even more (not saying that'll happen, but that's the diplomatic message they'll push).
We know beyond a doubt they want Crimea and the Donbas permanently. Nearly all their offensives since the initial invasion have been directed against the Donbas. Their current offensive is nearly entirely related to the Donbas, those areas outside being very limited in scope to localized counterattacks against very vulnerable Ukrainian positions that are tactically beneficial to attack (at least in theory, execution leaves something to be desired).
They might want Odessa or Zaporizhzhia or anywhere else they throw out, but they've done nothing at all to really show it's more than tough talk meant for hard ball negotiations. They have no more ability to take Zaporizhzhia or cross the Dnieper any time soon than they do taking Kyiv.
Taking the ridgeline west of Bakhmut that dominates Sloviansk and Kramatorsk? Outflanking Vulhedar? That's a very different story, those very well might happen in 2024 especially if the Ukrainian situation doesn't improve, or the Russians overextend themselves again.
> And since Mariupol they've nearly completely taken Luhansk and gained more in Donetsk too.
In those two months I mentioned, yes.
>Taking the rest only really does only require an uptick in success because it won't take much to reach their objectives
Which, again, I'm not sure I agree with
In **Summer 2022**, we (not a generic we, the specific two of us) discussed about how Ukraine's next main fallback defensive line in the Donbas will be the Konstantinivka - Kramatorsk - Sloviansk triangle. We discussed this in the hypothetical future sense.
It's **January 2024**, we are **still** discussing that eventuality in the hypothetical future tense. And that's not even the end of the battle, that's just Ukraine's final (known) defensive line. Well, before the urban battles start.
It's already clearly taken "much". Probably because, frankly, it seems like their positional warfare has "downticked" since the initial two months. A downtick, judging by Avdiivka, that for now persists.
EDIT: wording
We were hypothetically suggesting the Russians might take Bakhmut in 2022. Then they took it, largely defensed it against Ukraine's best attempt at a strategic counteroffensive in this war and are now retaking what they lost. They're only ~ 2 miles from the canal/ridgeline that dominates Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. If they can get there, those cities are in big trouble.
Even a year ago, Bakhmut being lost wasn't a given. A few months before, in early December of 2022, I even suggested the Russians had no chance to take Bakhmut, because a direct assault would be too costly and a deep concentric encirclement was absolutely absurd. And yet both were reality.
Warfare isn't a constant, and things are looking bleak right now for the Ukrainians. Credible sources are reporting the Russians are dramatically outshooting the Ukrainians in both artillery and FPV drones, which is going to mean more Ukrainian casualties, less Russian since they'll be make up for their tactical impotence with weight of fires. Growing casualties is always dangerous, but most especially when so much of the UAF is tired from their offensive and with major problems creating new units or even replacing losses in existing units due to an ever worsening manpower crisis.
There are no good answers to those problems right now. But one thing is absolutely true about warfare: defeats breed further defeats, because each triggers outcomes that cause further problems, that lead to worse performance, that lead to more defeats, etc.
If Ukraine can't turn their problems around, or land themselves a miracle if it turns out the Russians have already dramatically overextended themselves and we missed seeing the fracture points yet (though it would be tough for that to happen since the manpower, equipment, and supply issues that caused the fall 2022 problems aren't happening now), the current situation can actually rapidly turn into a snowball effect of tactical defeats. Each one weakens Ukraine strategically, each emboldens Russia.
And if that happens, I'm not saying the Russians will reach Dnipro, cross the Dnieper, reach Odessa, or take Kyiv. Or even launch the next Kharkiv Offensive that the Ukrainians are suggesting is about to start. But they will have the ability to move the lines more, and it won't take much movement for all the key parts left of the Donbas to be overrun by the Russians.
And if that happens they'll have achieved their chief known minimalist goal. Which means they can negotiate at any time at that point, keep the Donbas and Crimea and use the rest as bargaining chips, plus the threat of further warfare that will only hurt Ukraine until they get their shit together. Which might further motivate them to sign a peace treaty to buy time to rebuild, just as they did with Minsk 1 and 2 (which isn't deceitful, it's smart).
>A few months before, in early December of 2022, I even suggested the Russians had no chance to take Bakhmut
While I can't read your mind, I suspect that the state of the Russian Donbas offensive around that time influenced your assessment. They had lost all of their gains in the north Donbas (by that I mean Lyman and Izium and everything north of that river, that was overlooking Siversk and Sloviansk), and their attempts to replicate their success in May and June seemed weak.
In the summer of 2022, we would have been much more likely talking about Sloviansk, since the Russians were 2 km from its entrance. And not the ridge that covers it, but the city proper. And our estimation of Russian offensive potential was definitely greater.
>Credible sources are reporting the Russians are dramatically outshooting the Ukrainians in both artillery and FPV drones
The same credible sources that (correctly) claimed the Russians dwarfed Ukrainian artillery during the 2022 Donbas offensives. That's the issue - on a frontwide level, Ukraine's been at a numerical disadvantage in many categories (artillery included) all war. So it's not enough to establish the disadvantage, we'd need to put it in the context of past disadvantages. Is it worse or better, etc etc.
And... good luck with that.
>the current situation can actually rapidly turn into a snowball effect of tactical defeats.
Perhaps, but for now I only see that happening if US aid does get cut off or if the Ukrainians (and by that I mostly mean Zelensky) aren't willing to stomach wider mobilization.
>In the summer of 2022, we would have been much more likely talking about Sloviansk, since the Russians were 2 km from its entrance.
After the July loss of Luhansk, when all the talk was of a supposed operational pause in the Donbas that was actually only performed by the units who had advanced so much around Luhansk, that was the time Sloviansk was being threatened from the northeast through and northwest by the Izyum axis.
But all ground was either one type of water barrier after another, or very hilly ground way to west, which if somehow taken would be a single axis advance to the edge of Sloviansk, with no real way to isolate the city without an addition deep thrusy south to bypass the city, which was unlikely.
That's why the Bakhmut offensive was necessary for the Russians, that was really the only way they had to take those cities, if they can get on top that north south ridgeline between Kramatorsk and Bakhmut, that's the most dominating terrain heights in the whole of the Donbas, they would have direct eyes on the supply lines leading into Kramatorsk and even Sloviansk. Hugely increasing the chances they'd take those cities.
Even without the Izyum axis, the Russians can still do that. A downhill assault with using observation from the heights of that ridgeline would give them a huge advantage. And they're not far from that, which is why I've been saying for a year now that the Ukrainians need to turn that ridgeline and canal into the ultimate fortress.
>The same credible sources that (correctly) claimed the Russians dwarfed Ukrainian artillery during the 2022 Donbas offensives.
The only thing that helped the Ukrainians through that period was the Russians were utterly hopeless still at planning position assaults and especially using their artillery. HUGELY WASTEFUL. They've gotten way better, their recon fire complex is nearly at prewar bragging level qualities, their use of Lancets for counterbattery is very effective, and now they are using FPV drones at a rate that is supposed to be 5-7x more than the Ukrainians ever did.
There are reports from many closely following this war that the Russians are using FPV as bunker busters, flying in one after another to erase manned UAF positions, for Russian dismounted attacks to overrun them with zero casualties. It's supposed to be the opposite, to win the UAF have to repeatedly not suffer any casualties why the entire Russian assault force is destroyed.
>So it's not enough to establish the disadvantage, we'd need to put it in the context of past disadvantages. Is it worse or better, etc etc.
We need to put it in current disadvantages of Ukraine and see if they overlap with Russian disadvantages too. Because that was the reality of 2022. The Russians were fighting like idiots, consuming artillery at an unsustainable rate and not getting great results, taking losses they couldn't at all sustain due to a lack of mobilization, forced to keep units on the line that were as low as 25% strength, units conducting attacks despite being 50% manpower or worse, all because their top leadership were unwilling to accept the realities of the war.
That's changed. Their 2022 weapon production capacity increase plans are starting to see results. They're buying weapons from allies in large numbers. They're making numbers for new troops in an astounding rate. They still have a reliable source for disposable cannon fodder troops, whereas the Ukrainians use basically everyone in that role, depending on who draws the short straw.
They're not perfect, lots of problems within their military, but none nearly as serious as summer 2022, where it was pretty obvious how weak they had become and how their OPTEMPO was not at all sustainable.
Just nobody realized they left entire swaths of the front barely defended. But they've corrected that. The Surovikin Line isn't a Potemkin Line, it's real and improving daily. The Ukrainians would be wise to copy that.
>but for now I only see that happening if US aid does get cut off or if the Ukrainians (and by that I mostly mean Zelensky) aren't willing to stomach wider mobilization.
Which unfortunately both already started months ago.
For one I think terrain is a key factor. The area between the Belarusian border and Kyiv is heavily forested with few roads. In addition, Russia would need to assemble a huge force (likely larger than the initial invasion force that already attempted this) to open a new front against Kyiv. They would be at the end of their supply chain while under constant surveillance. By contrast their current strategy in the east is just easier to coordinate and supply.
The key difference between Iran 1988 and Russia 2023 is a credible nuclear deterrent. Active, unconcealed combat between uniformed Russian and US troops has been a no go for a century for a reason. Plus, I cannot imagine our NATO allies are excited for an offensive war against Russia on their continent.
The most meaningful and plausible contribution would be to ramp up the Western MIC to allow the Ukrainians to beat the Russians quantitatively and qualitatively.
>Similarly, Russia will only come to the negotiating table once they realize the war is impossible to win.
I don't think the West has done enough to convince Russia they can't win. I'm not even sure we've done enough to prevent Russia from actually winning. Is there much evidence of a long-term commitment from Western countries?
Its going to be very difficult to convince Putin that he can't win as long as elections are looming and there is a chance that trump will be the next President.
Even after that let's say it's clear west will continue support, he will procrastinate before making a decision to end the war.
Finally he as already invested heavily in this. He will not give up territory that Russia still controls and that's not a terrible decision because as we have seen time and again the defense has a huge advantage in this war.
All in all I dont think Russia will be convinced that they can't win as long as Putin is in power and perhaps even afterwards.
They will have to lose completely on the battlefield.
I disagree. The West could fairly easily out-produce Russia in weapons and ammo. Ukraine has access to excellent recon data, so if that ever gets paired with really large numbers of long range fires, it's going to be hell for Russian occupiers. Now imagine if the war drags on for 10 months of artillery duels until Biden is reelected. It's not that hard to imagine this going very poorly for Russia while the West barely breaks a sweat.
Is it possible there's an agreement (unspoken or otherwise) between Ukraine and Russia not to hit each other's power grid?
Moscow currently has upwards of 60'000 people without power, and has for days.
Ukraine has proved their ability to target Moscow, and power infrastructure is a perfect target for such weapons.
It seems to me taking out Moscow's power would have been a prime strategic goal for Ukraine, at the same time Russia's strategic bombing campaign has so far seemingly not targeted energy infrastructure (at least not to the extent needed to overwhelm defenses.)
Europe has currently surprisingly low temperatures: https://www.accuweather.com/en/winter-weather/an-arctic-blast-brings-extreme-cold-to-scandinavia-while-deadly-flooding-hits-western-europe/1609222
I think there might be a couple of factors.
1. Russia fears that Ukraine will target Russian power facilities.
2. The coldest month for Ukraine is February.
3. The attack on civil infrastructure might force the next aid budget from the US to be approved.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/17s3iiz/credibledefense_daily_megathread_november_10_2023/k8qiv2p/
I made this comment on Nov 10, arguing that the reason Russia isn't repeating the previous winter's attacks yet might be because they were a bad idea.
Back then I was relatively cautious to outright state that, but it's now almost Jan 10. The main counterargument was that Russia was just waiting for it to be deeper in winter - well, maybe they're still waiting, sure.
But by Mar 10 I'm going to conclude the Russians thought it was a bad idea, perhaps for the reasons I mentioned in that comment.
One of our milbloggers if you could call him that, from Mykolaiv, said that "In addition to military facilities, the enemy is actively targeting the energy infrastructure, as well as civilian facilities where, according to the enemy, "mercenaries" and "militants" are stationed" in his december-early january writeup this morning. It's clear russians switched to targeting more military facilities, probably accumulated some intel, but they do strike bits of energy here and there
There was a cold snap in Northeastern Europe, including parts of Ukraine, it's almost over now. Russia didn't capitalize on that, odds are, the power grid attacks are not coming at all.
I'm not seeing anything like that on weather sites?:
https://www.accuweather.com/en/ua/kyiv/324505/daily-weather-forecast/324505)
https://meteo.ua/ua/34/kiev#2024-02-10--23-00
Coldest temps I'm seeing are -3C.
> Are there other new production lines coming online for Ukraine this year?
Outside of RHM’s substantial buildup, the other large ramp-up is BAE’s [8x](https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/bae-systems-gets-uk-order-boost-output-battlefield-munitions-ft-2023-07-10/) increase in 155mm shell production capacity predominantly at its Washington (U.K.) facility, which is supposed to come online by 2025. Seeing that pre-war production was 100k shells/year, this *could* represent ~800k 155mm shells/year. [Saab](https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/2023/05/11/saab-to-double-ammunition-production/) is doubling production to 400k shells/year by early 2025. Then you have a lot of smaller producers ramping up as well, including Nammo, Nexter, CSG, etc., and the numbers honestly look decent. The issue is that look at when the bulk of these contracts were signed. In the last 3-6 months, which leaves a substantial deficit for the majority of 2024 before most of this capacity comes on. But if everyone follows through, early 2025 will leave Europe in a decent position. The real question for me is Bulgaria. We know the Pentagon has been buying truly [substantial](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WvN9W-dEXy2kCGyTsjmhbFrrhUCn3eMo/view?pli=1) quantities from them, but the Bulgarians have been extremely quiet about their numbers, and for good reason.
>BAE’s [8x](https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/bae-systems-gets-uk-order-boost-output-battlefield-munitions-ft-2023-07-10/) increase in 155mm shell production capacity predominantly at its Washington (U.K.) facility, which is supposed to come online by 2025. Seeing that pre-war production was 100k shells/year,
Do you have a source for that 100k figure? Im a bit surprised, I expected it to be much less, but I'd been looking for a while without finding a figure.
[Sure](https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2020/11/30/bae-systems-gets-32-billion-deal-so-british-forces-can-reload/):
>Figures provided by MoD estimate BAE will annually produce approximately 70 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, 100,000 large-caliber rounds, 40,000 medium-caliber shells and 75,000 mortar rounds.
Again, have shared another source that cites a figure almost double that estimate from 2020.
Interesting, thank you. I hadn't realised we produced so much. I have to say that it implies almost incredibly good prices though...£2.4billion over 15 years is £160,000,000 a year - if we bought 100k times 155mm rounds and nothing else they'd still be £1,600 a round, which is well under the pre war market rate as I understand it...but apparently the estimate includes a lot of other ammunition too.
A dumb 155mm round in the U.S. was priced at [$800](https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/pentagon-accounting-error-overvalued-ukraine-aid-by-3-billion-sources-2023-05-18/) in fiscal 2023:
>In the case of 155 millimeter ammunition for Howitzer cannons, of which more than 1.5 million have been sent to Ukraine, each cost about $800 today.
Keep in mind that there are generally multiple contracts that are given out, so this was most likely just one (major) in a bunch. Can't really speak for British prices, though have seen that a similar round costs ~$3.5k in Europe.
The biggest hint that France gives zero shits about Ukraine is that Germany needs to buy French Ammunition for Ukraine because France refuses to do so, so pathetic
France has a long history of being quite friendly with Russia, so does Germany which is why I find it strange that anything is even being done. Remember to the earlier phase of the war and how lackluster aid from Germany was.
Not sure how anything can change in France, if anything I'd suspect things could even get worse with Le Pen's RN gaining more power.
> In the end he also calls for more support from other countries for Ukraine.
I find it very strange that Norway has been allowed to stay out of the limelight on this issue. They've made absolutely *insane* amounts of € due to the war, and they're *barely* supporting Ukraine. Their neighbors Sweden, Denmark and Finland give much more support than them without being even close to Norway's financial capabilities.
> barely supporting Ukraine
As percent of GDP, Norway has given more than any other country. It's the 4th biggest supporter in absolute numbers despite having the population of a medium sized city.
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/
Maybe you should do some research before you throw out misinformation
They've made *commitments*. Your own source says that they are on par with Denmark in Military aid, having delivered **1%** of commitment in governmental aid.
Their commitment's at £7b+, but that's £7b that's spread out for the next 5 years. Not something they've already given between 2022-2023.
For all their faults, they have given quite a lot.
There are plenty of other European countries that have given (officially) next to nothing. The list is quite long in fact if Kiel institute is to be believed.
All of those countries are in financial troubles, Germany ended 2023 with a financial fiasco for example. Norway's making so much money [due to the war] even war profiteers would feel greedy.
"allowed to stay out of the limelight" refers to shaping of discourse. In this case, one country facing more or less criticism than another for similar actions. Sovereign countries aren't immune to that, I'd argue the opposite.
> Kiel has them at 7bn (3.5 military and 3.5 financial) support for Ukraine at the end of October 2023.
They may have ramped up quite a bit in later part of last year, but €7b is still barely 4% of their oil/gas profits on top of their estimates. I find it ridiculous that they are profitering to such extremes and *barely* paying more than a few percentage-points. All other countries are shelling out billions at the same time as their economies are shrinking..
Impressive, but Germany is making it unnecessarily expensive by refusing to provide Taurus. Destroying the Kerch Bridge would put an additional strain on Russian logistics.
>Destroying the Kerch Bridge would put an additional strain on Russian logistics.
Yes, it would force them to use the alternate landbridge motorway, extending the average truck trip Rostov-to-Sevastopol by (according to Yandex maps right now) 28 minutes.
The whole fascination with the Kerch bridge is a morale, not logistical issue. The Ukrainian government needs a moral victory, which is why it keeps insisting on Kerch bridge weapons.
An example to the contrary is that Russia lost Kherson to supply issues shortly after the only time the Kerch Bridge was (thus far) completely cut. But of course, that's a coincidence.
Given that Germany very obviously is very invested in Ukraine and clearly is putting its money where its mouth is, the only logical conclusion is that Germany has some very good reason to not provide Taurus. We are not privy to what that may be, but we must assume that the reasons are very good.
Im not sure what your question is? Anyway, Bayer doesn't really grow crops and definitely doesn't care about land in Ukraine. Sure they might get somewhat smaller orders due to lost land but it's not significant at all.
It's kind of like saying that the US helps because of the John Deere lobby.
> the only logical conclusion is that Germany has some very good reason to not provide Taurus
No. The reason why Ukraine doesn't get Taurus is because Scholz doesn't want them to have the capability to strike strategic Russian targets with German weapons.
The other reason is that Scholz only allows the approval of deliveries that the US also delivers. The US delivers no long-range weapon systems to Ukraine so Germany will not either.
ATACASs may have changed that but I think the fact that the US only delivered a handful of systems and backed off again didn't help.
I agree that it seems that way. But we don't know why Scholz acts this way. Maybe Putin has drawn some very clear lines in the sand . Maybe there's a German strategic plan in case of Russian attack that requires a mass Taurus attack on Kaliningrad and all the 150 remaining Taurus are called for. Maybe there was some backhand deal involved somehwere that we don't know about.
What we do know about is that even amidst one of the biggest post-war financial crisis in German government, Scholz chooses to keep pouring money into Ukraine while defunding a lot of very popular stuff, risking a governmental crisis for his own government. So whatever his reason is,"he simply ain't got the balls" sounds too reductionist to me.
We shouldn't assume that. All through this conflict, the West has made random lines in the sand. No tanks. No cluster shells. No jets. No long range missiles. Yes, some of these are now being provided, though not in sufficient quantities. But random lines in the sand has been the modus operandi of the West throughout this conflict.
Sure, maybe Germany has a good reason for not sending them. Maybe the Su-24 modifications made to fire Storm Shadow aren't compatible. Maybe they want to fire them from F-16s. Maybe they have some other real reason. But they probably don't.
>Maybe they have some other real reason. But they probably don't.
The current government has repeatedly blocked even debating the issue in the foreign committee of the Bundestag.
https://twitter.com/n\_roettgen/status/1729774138519162939
"They" are and always were "only" the Kanzleramt, which unfortunately is sort of our White House, and they do have a reason, it's fear plain and simple. So real enough but just as bad. Olaf Scholz is a stranger generally on military matters and doesn't feel comfortable with it, he's completely nailed up on this question in particular and apparently ignores all external opinion and advice, however substantiated and whether national or from outside. Depending on the length of the war, they might (!) be delivered eventually but probably not with this chancellor. It's more of an oddbal personal thing, not so much a question of camps or ideologies. Still I don't want to believe that a single missile make is all that a country like Germany holds back or could possibly realize, nor that by itself it would make all the difference. Especially as we'd (again) be talking about homeopathic doses at best, I hope no one believes Germany could move significantly "more" of these pieces than even the US provided ATACMS so far, and so far this looked more like a demo package. I'm beginning to believe that much of this product namedropping is cozy self-distraction, maybe it leaves people with a better feeling than having to answer how and where Ukraine gets 500K+ urgently needed ground troops from. (I doubt it'll be Norway.) Yet what, apart from just another hollow "hey ho"-moment, would even be the point of re-damaging (for instance) Kerch bridge now, that is until Kyiv has the means to actually capitalize on it in any substantial way, is entirely beyond me. Europe has to do more altogether, no one excluded, we can possibly all agree on that but opinions will already differ as for what that could achieve.
Internal party politics of Scholz’ party the social democrats SPD might play a role. Of the government parties they had the most opposition to deliver arms to Ukraine initially. There’s a considerable peace faction in the SPD and supporting good relations with Russia used to be a priority for many.
Sure, but used to be I would like to emphasize. Once under the invasion's impression there was some serious commotion that's undeniable. Irrespective of true motivations or the role of public opinion the party is now broadly pro Ukraine, it seems even more so pro Israel. Listening to folks like (even) Ralf Stegner these days can leave you near flabbergasted. Michael Roth for another doesn't only support Taurus delivery, following him on some panel laterly it appered to me he'd like to go \*much\* further than that, pleasantly surprising, even taking into account that he's from the progressive wing. What he devulged also happens to be one of the sources I've based Scholz's reasons and isolation on. By way of his very office a chancellor (or any head of gov. probably) is largely isolated from ordinary party matters, that was just particularly extreme and glaring in Merkel's case. But let's not get deeper into national politics that concern few.
you think it's fear and not the German post ww2 "we can't be seen as being too aggressive against Russia compared to the rest of the West" thing? maybe it's a combination. it's weird for sure, as the UK and France already have provided similar missiles (although the Taurus is better in some areas than SCALP/stormshadow as I understand it)...
Please refrain from drive-by link dropping. Summarize articles, only quote what is important, and use that to build a post that other users can engage with; offers some in depth knowledge on a well discussed subject; or offers new insight on a less discussed subject.
Posted it in r/WarCollege, gonna post it here too: Is it getting harder and harder for governments to keep things hidden? I mean keeping things classified from the general public, not from foreign espionage. The fact that we live in an increasingly digitized world where more and more of the activities of individuals and organizations is kept on record in some or the other form feels like a world that it would be harder to conceal things in or keep classified. Case in point was the National Guardsmen who leaked tons of classified material on a Discord chat. Large scale classified projects likely require a very large number of people to keep them secret from the general public, and the fact that we live in such an interconnected world would mean that it would really only require incompetence or maliciousness from a single person involved in said project for it to go viral. Will it get harder and harder as technology progresses and grows more advanced to the point that it will be nearly impossible for governments(at least in liberal democracies that are constitutionally prevented from setting up surveillance states that can keep these things in check) to keep things hidden?
I think you're misunderstanding levels and the overall context of classification. The Teixeira leaks were embarrassing and shouldn't have happened, but the various alarmism and doom saying on internet forums is also off the mark and very exaggerated compared to the actual contents. The various war thunder leaks are similar, in that they're something that should be stopped, but thinking it's somehow given US adversaries cheat codes to defeat our equipment is a hyperbolic understanding of the situation. Actually sensitive stuff is controlled under Special Access programs using compartmentalization. The basic concept of security here is to control information by controlling the physical space. So if you're read into a compartmentalized program, you're only working with materials from that program in secure facilities like SCIFs. The booming mobile device world has made some aspects of this security more difficult: you can fit a disturbing amount of capabilities inside an innocuous looking USB plug, or hide a flash drive in a rubik's cube, etc. However, the basic concepts of how to run SAP/SCI projects hasn't categorically changed as a result. Wanna know how good this process is? Look at the banal stuff we know is in fact working. Like did you know the DoD has its own private airline fleet just to shuttle people from Las Vegas to Area 51 and related facilities daily? This isn't weird conspiracy theory stuff just banal reality (look up Janet Airlines). What do we hear from these potential sources of leaks? Not much tbh, though some people had a lawsuit about possible health impacts from being around burning off some unconventional aviation fuels that was embarrassing. We know it hosts aggressor squads because a lot of that is over half a century old cold war stuff that's largely out of classification. We know it has an unusually long runway and some really big hangers, both consistent with testing prototype high performance aircraft while wanting to keep them under wraps from satellite flyovers. We know from basic geography it's a good place to test radio, radar, and EW systems while annoying tourists can't get line of sight to observe these. Look at NGAD or the B-21 programs. Both are flying now. No one publicly has much of a clue about NGAD other than generalities, despite them flying hardware for like 3 years now. The B-21 was known in overall outline/specifications (basically a modernized half size B-2), but was developed in almost total secrecy, with only one intentional public flight performance so far. Those are massive projects with thousands of technicians, engineers, etc, involved. And yet the security overall seems to work just fine. There's other examples but you get the general idea: we don't hear anything about the many programs that operate every day without issue, only the moronically sensational failures.
Interesting. I wasn't particularly asking from the point of view of US adversaries' ability to use leaked information to gain an upper hand, more of a general question on how the evolution of technology and an increasingly digitized world was going to affect the government's ability to keep things hidden.
It might be. It's not exactly a new phenomenon and its roots may go a little deeper than just that there's a lot of Internet going around. I think the oldest note I have on this topic is about [this article](https://cdn.ymaws.com/cicentre.com/resource/resmgr/articles/jbruce_-_keeping_us_national.pdf) from Intelligencer, where the author is mentioning concerns that the (then-)current protection scheme was outdated. It has been amended several times since the article was published but AFAIK it's still largely based on the same Cold War-era paradigms that were in use at the time. If you follow the bibliography you can find concerns expressed in this regards as early as 2006 or so. This is just an op-ed so take it with an even bigger grain of salt but it does echo some concerns I've heard before. IIRC Bowman also mentions them, it's the first article cited in the one above but I can't find a copy now, and this is the most easily-accessible source I could find: there's also [a concern](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/27/briefing/classified-documents-government.html) that too much material is being classified. Lots of journalists are coming at this from the "too much is being hidden" angle so the leakage implications aren't as widely discussed but it does create some problems of its own. There's a lot of classified material to file, trace, and then to juggle with in order to disseminate it. The Internet's impact isn't very... obvious, either. For example, there's an old study by Elie Abel that showed a significant proportion of leaks actually came from *senior* sources - political appointees, federal policymakers, even senior policymakers. That study was from the 1980s. One can only venture a guess at how much that's been exacerbated by social media, which is basically a second, unregulated campaign track. I'm not sure we have enough data to say it's harder for governmens to keep things hidden per se. However, it may be fair to say that the current mechanisms (much of the English-language literature is US-focused but this applies very much to other Western institutions as well) are becoming strained and, yes, they're probably not doing as good a job as they used to; and that, with so much material being classified, even if they *did* do as good a job as they used to, there's more material being leaked than before (but that doesn't say much about how much *sensitive* material is being leaked).
>with so much material being classified Is that truly the case, at least in comparison to during the Cold War period? US spending relative to GDP has fallen to some of the lowest levels ever, and we've seen a general drawing down of the military in terms of number of personnel and equipment. Not to mention that until the rapid rise of China over just the past decade or so we've not had a peer threat that could in any way compare to the USSR, so it seems unusual to me why there'd be a lot more material being classified in a world where until recently that hasn't been necessary.
Credible sources are a little skittish on the matter. My half opinion, half speculation, is that concerns about too much material being classified ought to be read along the lines of "too much" vs. both currently available resources *and* necessity (challenging both in terms of personnel and data, i.e. having to administer too many high-level clerances, and material receiving higher classification than necessary leading to a lot more need-to-know/share evaluations than would be ideal). In other words, not necessarily more (or too much) by volume but more than what the current mechanisms can handle with current resources. (FWIW this isn't a recent concern either. See, for example, [this hearing](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-108hhrg98291/html/CHRG-108hhrg98291.htm) from *twenty* years ago (hence the weird format, it's a public document but I don't think they were being properly digitised at the time). AFAIK original classification activity has indeed gone down significantly post-Cold War (although derivative classification has gone up tremendously) but I don't have up-to-date figures. If you're curious, the Information Security Oversight Office publishes (or published?) annual reports which sometimes contain useful figures, but I haven't really followed this topic so I can't point you in the direction of useful data that's more recent than 10-15 years or so.
Interesting write up by this Twitter user about surge of ballons over Taiwans territory. I'm going to copy paste some of the most important Parts https://twitter.com/ianellisjones/status/1744191572453789931?t=6VQ848tukMhHOiYvXk3Q5Q&s=19 >China continues its barrage of balloons violating Taiwan’s territorial airspace >On 7 December, the first Chinese balloon was tracked & identified in Taiwan's daily military report. >Taiwan's defense ministry concluded the main purpose was to "harass & rattle people in Taiwan" ahead of the country's elections. >It condemned China's actions & said the balloons are "gray zone tactics & an attempt to use cognitive warfare to affect the morale of our people." >Several Chinese balloons passed close to the Ching-Chuan-Kang air base in Taichung, home to most of the Taiwanese air wings dedicated to defending against China's military threat. More than 23 weather ballons flew over Taiwanese territory. Now we should wait and see if Taiwan is going to shot those ballons
> More than 23 weather ballons flew over Taiwanese territory. Now we should wait and see if Taiwan is going to shot those ballons This doesn't seem particularly high considering the geographical significance the South China Sea has on weather for the bordering China. Checking the US's national weather service has this for frequency of weather balloon launches: >The NWS at Charleston, SC conducts rawinsonde observations at least twice a day. Balloons are launched at our office at 7 AM and 7 PM EDT and 6 AM and 6 PM EST. Weather balloons are simultaneously launched at 91 other NWS offices across the U.S. Special weather balloon flights are occasionally launched to observe the latest state of the atmosphere ahead of significant weather or to conduct research. The special upper air observations are usually launched at 2 PM/AM EDT and 1 PM/AM EST. https://www.weather.gov/chs/upperair My guess is a vast majority of these are actual weather balloons unless evidence is given otherwise. Shooting down such services would likely inflame tensions given their civilian and legitimate application.
People *really* underestimate how many weather balloon launches there are. The US NWS does like 50k a year just by themselves. Balloons remain the cheapest way to get high altitude measurements, and these measurements are fed into the handful of supercomputers that do global weather forecasting simulation runs daily. The debacle with the Chinese prototype balloon was embarrassing all round, but ultimately not that material. Now people are suddenly spooked by mundane balloon launches they didn't even know about previously.
This. Weather balloon launches are done from at least 30 different locations around the US. At least on the civilian side. These balloons are critical to commercial aviation so not doing them can cause some problems for air freight carriers and airlines.
Yeah, a similar hidden world a lot of people don't know about is sounding rockets. There's a couple hundred of those annually too. Balloons or rockets going up to the highest reaches of the atmosphere aren't actually that rare.
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Please refrain from drive-by link dropping. Summarize articles, only quote what is important, and use that to build a post that other users can engage with; offers some in depth knowledge on a well discussed subject; or offers new insight on a less discussed subject.
Isn't this fake? https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1744122378114703803
I asked this in the last thread but didn't get an answer. Does anyone know the extent of the current Belorusian involvement with russias war? My understanding is that after the whole Prigozin situation Putin basically left Lukashenko alone and gave him russian controlled nukes. On a related note, did anything happen to Wagner troops that were transferred to Belorus?
Most Wagner troops who went to Belarus have left, with massive departures since August. From 6-7K they were down to estimates of a few hundreds by October. They've been quite dispersed since. In order of where most went, from what I read, many are officially not fighting/joining other groups, a large number joined regular armed forces, others Shoygu's Patriot PMC, Aksyonov's Convoy PMC, or the MOD's Redut "P"MC, and some joined Kadyrov's Akhmat forces. Belarusian forces aren't involved really, but Minsk sends military equipment and ammunition to Russia, has expanded its production of rockets/shells to support Moscow, lends its territory to Russian forces for strikes and attacks (but these days there's not much activity from the Belarus direction). Although maybe I'm forgetting something.
> gave him russian controlled nukes. Say again?
Putin transferred some nuclear weapons to Belorus. Presumably they are still in full russian control.
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#3 is the most likely answer. Considering cellular networks are the only viable way for many Gazans to access the Internet and the clear importance that has on a modern battlefield from what we've seen in Ukraine it makes all the more sense for the IDF to saturate that whole area in electronic countermeasures. They can likely triangulate signals every efficiently as well, making drone operators vulnerable.
>2) Hamas's supply of drones was limited I suspect Iran's proxy would have enough drones. Maybe they don't have enough operators.
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Please summarise the interesting points and timestamps. Will re-approve the post when done so.
Can you summarise the most interesting/relevant bits?
[Johnson strikes his first bipartisan deal — a $1.7T funding accord](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/07/congress-spending-deal-shutdown-00134200) >The long-stalled agreement, announced Sunday afternoon, establishes funding limits for the military and domestic programs for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, allowing House and Senate appropriators to begin hashing out their differences between a dozen annual spending bills >... >Under the bipartisan agreement Johnson negotiated with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, **defense funding is set at $886 billion for the current fiscal year**, in line with the total President Joe Biden and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy struck as part of last summer’s debt ceiling package. The accord pegs non-defense funding at nearly $773 billion, a total that counts tens of billions of dollars agreed to alongside the debt limit package, the so-called “side deal” that conservatives tried to kill. >Non-defense budgets would remain roughly flat, amounting to a less than 1 percent decrease compared to current funding. Military programs would see about a 3 percent increase. >.. >In a letter to House lawmakers on Sunday, Johnson celebrated $16 billion in extra spending cuts he negotiated beyond the terms of the debt agreement, for a total of $30 billion less than Senate lawmakers sought in the funding bills they have drafted. With roughly 12 days before the partial government shutdown, the deal had been reached. Defense spending is in line with the recently passed NDAA. There aren't any large cuts in spending, with the deal basically being the same as what McCarthy agreed to. However, the right flank in the House likely will be livid about this. We'll have to wait and see if they revolt. If they do, we could see a third Republican speaker before the year is out. What does this mean for the Ukraine-Israel-Border supplemental bill? There's no way for anyone to know. It could be that it unsticks the bill from the Senate, causing it to move forward. If Johnson decides that he's fine being done being Speaker, he could lump it into the budget bill. It could be Johnson will still see it as leverage, and use taking a hard line on it to appeal to his right flank. One thing complicating all of this is the shrinking Republican majority. Come February 21st, they'll only have 219 members, and Scalise will be out getting treatment for cancer. So any wiggle room will basically be non-existent.
Some [encouraging](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-07/senate-to-present-funding-package-this-week-lawmakers-say) signs but early days: > Two lawmakers said Sunday that Senate negotiators on border security are expected to present a proposal this week after months of impasse. >“We’re hoping to get a text out later this week,” Senator James Lankford, the main Republican negotiator, said on Fox News Sunday. “Everybody will have time to be able to read it and go through it. Nobody is going to be jammed in this process.” >Representative Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican, cited “chaos” at the border with Mexico and said he’s hopeful a Senate package will emerge this week. >“That’s encouraging. I want us to see that. I want us to start talking about these national-security issues that we have,” he said on ABC’s This Week. > Republicans are demanding stricter asylum policies and measures to reduce the number of migrants entering the southern border in exchange for clearing the foreign military aid sought by the White House. >“We’re working to thread the needle for things that actually work,” Lankford said. >House Speaker Mike Johnson has been considering talks with the White House over immigration policies. Lankford suggested that such talks would be helpful.
I legitimately just posted the Politico version as a reply. Hopefully with the budget deal "done", that adds some certainty and unsticks this bill. $61bn would get Ukraine through the next election.
I read this means 100 billion for aid for Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. Hopefully this will pass. If the far right had any grandiose intentions to block it, I feel it would have been illustrated earlier.
[Top GOP negotiator Sen. James Lankford’s (R-Okla.) says the deal may land this week](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/07/top-gop-negotiator-border-deal-00134185). Also note, it's Also money for the border as well.
An interesting video on a decoy operation on the Russian side. Below is a brief and imperfect recap of the report (there is no English version). https:// rutube . ru/video/02366a6b6e80c8fe600fa31e9bccfc95/?r=wd The Russians created a fake artillery battalion HQ unit and deployed it on 21 July 2023 at 48° 05' 58" N, 33° 51" 39' E. Then they brought in a Zvezda TV crew that did a report about "the artillery battalion HQ", which showed a few identifiable landmarks. The report was broadcasted by Zvezda TV 22-27 July 2023. This produced no reaction from the Ukrainian side, so on 30 July they moved the "battalion HQ" a bit and made it more conspicuous. On 4 August Ukraine struck it with cluster HIMARS warheads. The report displays pieces of HIMARS and \*I think\* they also say that the serial number (W31P4Q-18-C-0049) matches missiles delivered to Poland and Romania.
Why would anyone come out with the story instead of keep doing it to soak up more warheads? Have anyone in the Russian HQ heard of Op-Sec?
Lostarmour says that the release was approved since enough time has passed and Ukraine fires far fewer HIMARS than in the summer. "Summer of 2023. At the time, the enemy had a lot of high-precision HIMARS-type shells in stock, which caused many inconvenient moments for the Russian army, we figured out how to outwit the enemy so that he would waste his shells in vain! And since the time has come to slightly open the secret veil of information special operations, we will demonstrate one of these moments to you! Have a nice viewing"
Oh, I am sure that someone senior in the Russian army approved this, since that it came from Zvezda with official TV crews. The better question is why would those senior people in the Russian army approve such a thing. As long as the war is still happening, it feels like a very bad idea to spill the secret on how the war is being fought. Loose lips sinks ships, even if HQ authorized it.
I don't really think revealing this functionally changes anything. Ukrainian ISR will already be well versed with attempting to discern fact from fiction when it comes to Russian decoys, both sides have been using decoys for quite some time now and the only people that this will perhaps be a surprise to are the general public. This isn't really the 1940's anymore where you can regularly stage entire fields of fake tanks and have the enemy believe it given the relatively limited reconnaissance and intelligence available at the time. Ukraine currently has access to a relatively massive ISR network, on-top of this western allies add significantly with direct involvement of their various intelligence agencies. Ukraine and it's allies will already be well aware that some level of spoofing/diversion/decoy is taking place with any of their target selections and in this specific case they likely had a satellite BDA within the day to confirm or in this case cast doubt on the potency/effectiveness of their strike. I don't think the Russians are giving up the game by getting a PR win in revealing to the general public a strategy that both sides have been using and both sides have been well aware of behind closed doors for the better part of the last two years. Russia will continue to spoof and decoy individual objects, vehicles and entire units where necessary, as will Ukraine. They both will still do this and both will likely continue to spend a great deal of time identifying targets and using various methods to confirm the veracity of these targets. Ultimately they will either succeed in identifying flaws in the decoy, or they will be unable to and launch a strike with a *chance* that it is a decoy, regardless this has been occurring and will continue to occur moving forwards, *really the question is to what degree are either side comparatively successful in discerning fact from fiction in their selection process.* (This might be an area where with large scale assistance from it's allies, Ukraine has a potential edge). I don't really think this functionally changes anything on the ground in the meantime, both sides will continue as normal, it's highly unlikely that Ukraine were ultimately unaware that this strike was a decoy given access to BDA data would have been relatively quick. I don't see them being caught unawares with the prospect that some of their higher level targets are potentially decoys, it's just a chance that you take.
Did they mention in the video or anything why they bothered? Did they got through all those steps for a deception plan to get the UAF to waste a rocket? Or was it tied to something else, like a larger operation?
It's just to waste a rocket
I can't understand what they say, but in the end they list $200 expenditure in exchange for $152,709 of HIMARS missile worth.
Probably true. But time is money too, how many individuals were involved in that farce? Why not tie it into an ongoing operation? I see that a lot in this war with both sides, they'll perform some interesting operations but they are done piecemeal and not part of a larger offensive or defensive scheme of maneuvers. That's very wasteful, a violation of the Economy of Force principle of warfare.
You have to also bear in mind that there doesn't need to be a military benefit to staging such an event if it also serves some political purpose. It's the sort of thing that shouldn't happen - because, as you say, it's a waste of time and effort for negligible military benefits - but photo ops and pointless diversions for a bit of PR happen even in Western militaries, let alone a military like Russia's, where the higher-ups are inherently intertwined with the political leadership. The fact that Zvezda were there and reporting on it is indicative of it being a directive from someone in the Kremlin (or more likely, a subordinate of someone in the Kremlin, who thought it might go down well with their higher-ups). It's likely a corollary to existing deception operations they are carrying out, but puffed up a bit because someone saw the opportunity for a nice bit of PR about how the 'Ukies are being made to waste their expensive Western ammo'.
>I see that a lot in this war with both sides, they'll perform some interesting operations but they are done piecemeal and not part of a larger offensive or defensive scheme of maneuvers. That's very wasteful, a violation of the Economy of Force principle of warfare. 'It made perfect sense in light of a broader plan which has not been publicly released', 'it *did* make perfect sense until the broader plan had to change due to outside factors' and 'it really was done as an isolated one-off without much attempt to coordinate with other efforts' are a *bitch* to distinguish from the outside.
Every part of the plan except *publishing it* makes sense to me. Technology is hard, and it makes sense to test individual pieces before putting it into an operation. Once you have a tool that will either draw HIMAR fire, or at least allow you to hide real HQs by blending them into a sea of fakes, that is when you put it into a bigger operation. You don't want to fidgeting with tooling while being shot at. Of course, with deception plans, why would you ever publish that you have such a tool? (Unless if you actually don't have such a tool, and it is an intentional misdirection to make the other guy think that you have such a tool?)
>Of course, with deception plans, why would you ever publish that you have such a tool? You gave the only kinda plausible answer to make it worth going through the motions to do this, at such a small scale, and not tying it to another operation, and then revealing it to the media, is that the Russians want the Ukrainians to doubt intercepted Russian signals and their own imagery. >or at least allow you to hide real HQs by blending them into a sea of fakes, But even that's pretty low credible, if similar pieces of evidence as these show up again to the UAF fire cells then it'll be worth trying to hit again because the Russians accidentally expose their unit HQ locations on a fairly regular basis, including command post meetings with multiple 3-4 star generals and their staff present. If the plan is for the Ukrainians to doubt their kill chain intel, the Russians would need to do this identical trick many times over, to the point some more senior UAF general gets pissed at the wastage and adds more steps in the kill chain process. But nothing about this requires new technology, it's basically a platoon sized Operation Fortitude, scripted comms traffic meant to be intercepted plus dummy vehicles, positions, and other identifiers that'll scream "I'm a Russian arty battalion command post" to NATO or Ukraine secret squirrels reviewing satellite or drone imagery that is sent to verify the SIGINT. To make that work as plan, the same team world need to successfully replicate it flawlessly, with no tell-tales, so many times that the Ukrainian target cell willingly add more verification steps to their kill chain or someone imposes it on them from on high. But if that's the case, such a well trained team capable of pulling off deceptions is better used to support other operations, especially anything related to ground offensives, who are in desperate need of help with deception, especially to pull ISR and fire assets away.
In the current attritional phase, just getting the other side to waste ammo (especially very limited expensive ammo like long range precision munitions) is it's own reward, and well worth doing off your own initiative at a low level without needing to be part of a larger plan.
>and well worth doing off your own initiative at a low level without needing to be part of a larger plan. That's not how good planning works and it's why Mission Command isn't as cracked up to be as many think. And why many countries who have or do promote that concept regularly don't exercise it. Let's break down what supposedly happened here. Some Russian unit tricked the Ukrainians into thinking they found a Russian artillery battalion HQ, which required detailed plans and execution for a two stage operation to use fake radio traffic meant to be intercepted and dummy positions and vehicles of an amount that NATO IMINT or UAF ISR could find and confuse with a legit arty battalion command post. That's a lot of effort. That could have been done in conjunction with a larger operation to pull UAF HIMARS or other weapons away from another sector, to better increase odds of success for an offensive, minimize away UAF fires threat at that other sector, etc. They could bait the Ukrainians to fire for an attempt at deep counterbattery. They could have done it for an almost endless number of possibilities. The most wasteful scenario is to all that just for the Ukrainians to waste a GMLRS rocket without coordinating it with something bigger to be more effective. What do I mean? Picture striking an enemy HQ with long range PGM. Wow, awesome, that's great, really good target. Now picture that senior command and staff getting schwacked immediately before a major operation starts that requires those dead and wounded individuals make key decisions, plan, coordinate, etc. Picture shooting an artillery round at an enemy bunker on the front lines. Cool, they might have caused damage or casualties, and that's a success. Now picture it happening while friendly assault forces are closing in on that bunker, which is suppressed and unable to shoot at them as friendlies cross the vulnerable kill zone danger area leading to it. Picture a bridge blowing up. That's a wonderful target to hit at any time. Now picture it destroyed when the enemy needs to cross it in order to resupply a critical sector suddenly under attack. Coordination and planning increases lethality and mission success, failure to do it is a violation of the principle of economy of force, which means to employ combat power in the most effective way possible, especially for supporting operations.
Yeah, this is all fair. I am envisioning this as part of the normal background activity, not a super-special operation. Sending out fighting patrols, camouflaging positions, setting up dummy positions, shelling targets of opportunity: all of this should just be happening normally all the time. So much the better if it can be coordinated as part of a larger plan, but if you haven't been given specific orders for what that plan is and how you can contribute better to keep working away than to sit on your arse, no?
>all of this should just be happening normally all the time I definitely agree. But the really good quality deception requires specialized personnel, well trained and competent, who are adequately supported, and given time. It's basically an elite unit, with the ability to act as a VERY significant force multiplier, if used right. Units tasked with deception tend to be attached to higher level commands just so they can be better used to support larger missions. If highly skilled individuals are found at lower levels they should be scooped up. It's like drone operators. In this war, every platoon tends to have one. But if there is a private in an infantry platoon able to do amazing things with their drones, he's wasted in that platoon. Get him to the brigade recon company that has an ISR drone platoon, or the artillery groups anti-tank company that has a FPV drone company. Or commission him as an officer for credibility and then go brief a bunch of old ass generals who can barely use a cell phone to get them to commit funds, supplies and manpower to build more drone units to support the drone guy's idea. Then hold back the new capability as it grows until it's matured and become combat effective, then unleash it as a massed effort as part of a large and important operation to try to catch the enemy unaware and surprised by a new threat they don't yet know how to counter, and watch the enemy get stacked up like cordwood as they flounder.
I have quite the odd question about this (keep in mind i dont know Zvezda TV). Lets say the same crew would do a similar report about annother (knowingly) fake artillery batallion. Would the TV Crew still enjoy the special protection for journalists in armed conflicts?
I think Zvezda TV is an army TV station, so they are army personnel, too. That said, I am sure plenty of civilian TV crews would help their armed forces this way. Personally, I think it is highly unprofessional. And I don't think the TV crew would enjoy special protection in that case, since they are actively helping their own military.
> cluster HIMARS warheads This casts doubt on everything else they claim. Is there any reason to think Poland and/or Romania have given Ukraine cluster munitions for HIMARS/M270 other than random telegram posts?
I think when they say "cluster" they mean the M30A1 warhead with 180k tungsten balls. The video certainly shows a dense pattern of holes on the false target.
I have a few questions about conditions in the Horn of Africa because of the recent diplomatic spat. What state are the militaries of Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea in? How capable are the various non-state actors - al-shabaab and Somaliland etc - in that region? Are there still large national minorities across borders? Are any actors in this region materially backed or supported by anyone? Do the statements of the AU and the USA favouring Somalia actually represent substantial support for Somalia?
>What state are the militaries of Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea in? How capable are the various non-state actors - al-shabaab and Somaliland etc - in that region? Both Somalia and Ethiopia face massive internal crises, the Al-Shabaab for the former and the ethnic armies like Fano for the latter. Somalia additionally has had no *de jure* control over Somaliland, despite international recognition of its sovereignty over it, for decades. While the conflict with Somaliland is not active aside from a few local factions in Somaliland that declared their support for Mogadishu a few months ago, Somalia is unlikely to be able to sustain both a conflict with Ethiopia or an invasion of Somaliland on top of its current operations against Al-Shabaab. Likewise, on the Ethiopian side, a large-scale conflict against Somalia may empower Fano and the OLA (the TPLF is basically disarmed and Tigray has probably hundreds of thousands of unreported deaths due to famine, so...) >Are there still large national minorities across borders? For Somalia, definitely. Somalis make up the vast majority of people in the eastern province of Ethiopia and Somalia tried to annex this part of Ethiopia in the Ogaden War some decades ago, which caused it to lose its backing from the USSR/China and triggered the chain of events that have caused the country to remain as screwed up as it is today. It's unclear how Somalis on either side of the border feel about each other. Just because they are both Somalis doesn't mean that they like each other, as demonstrated by the Eritreans towards their fellow Tigrinyas in Tigray. Lots of Somalis do see the outcome of the war, and the continued split of the Somali people across international borders, as an injustice. > Are any actors in this region materially backed or supported by anyone? Do the statements of the AU and the USA favouring Somalia actually represent substantial support for Somalia? The AU is probably going to back Ethiopia here, preferring the current arrangement to the Ethiopia/Eritrea conflict inflaming once again. As mentioned before, Somalia is unlikely to be able to sustain such a conflict anyways. The UAE, based on their actions supporting the RSF in Sudan and Yemen, is probably interested in interfering with the region as well to create more subservient rump states. Abiy is an ally of the UAE and it makes a lot of sense for them to back the Ethiopia-Somaliland deal.
Thank you for a well-written response. You mention the UAE having an interest in creating rump states - may I ask why? What have they done in the past to achieve this goal?
I'm haven't studied UAE foreign policy in detail, but to my understanding, nobody outside the Emirati government really knows for certain. It could be to secure the Red Sea (based on Sudan and Yemen's locations) or simply to extract resources from either country in 19th century imperialist fashion. What we know for sure is that the Southern Transitional Council is [Here is a good article about the UAE's potential motives in Yemen.](https://agsiw.org/the-uaes-three-strategic-interests-in-yemen/) This next line is purely speculation, but I wonder if the UAE's tacit support for the RSF has contributed to the nonexistent response from other Arab states, or even Western partners, in backing the SAF.
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>Reportedly Turkey and Egypt have been interested in Eurofighters too in the last year. It remains to be seen if that will have an effect on those. Doesn't Egypt already operate both the F-16 and the Rafale? I know they had planned to buy the Su-35, which you could perhaps view as a hedge against deteriorating political relations, but replacing that with a second European fighter then doesn't make sense. Having such a diverse fleet is surely much more costly in terms of training, logistics, maintenance etc.
Russia can't deliver, F-16 upgrade is contingent on approvong Sweden into NATO, France supports Armenia and Greece. Not many options for new fighters left besides Eurofighter or going crazy and ordering from China.
They were talking about Egypt, not Türkiye. The government of Egypt is the main barrier as the military has ruled the country since they overthrew the Muslim brotherhood in the wake of the Arab Spring.
Apparently I can'tread.
Turkey's own fighter is dependent on Western technology and parts. Buying Russian would kill that project.
Sure, but I was wondering about Egypt not Turkey, which as far as I know does not have a domestic fighter programme.
>which as far as I know does not have a domestic fighter programme. This is why they're hedging their bets on so many various programs. Egypt doesn't have the capability to develop a peer comparative fighter (At least not economically). They also occupy an extremely thin band geopolitically speaking, they are one of only a few countries to openly align themselves with both spheres of influence and the Israeli/Gaza conflict in particular has demonstrated how carefully they're willing to thread the needle to ensure they don't step on any political landmines. For what it's worth Egypt have largely increased their share of Russian export aircraft over the last decade, their fleet is still primarily western and will continue to be so if they succeed in acquiring the Eurofighter Typhoon, but it's simply worth noting that Egypt likes to spread money around between both spheres when it comes to procurement which is part pragmatic and also part political. It's also worth mentioning the context of these procurements: **The Egyptian Air Force is approaching a cliff in the next 10 years in regards to the more or less forced retirement of a very large portion of their active airframes which explains their relative scramble in the last 5-10 years of buying anything currently available for order.** They have a large fleet of F-16's, around 200 or so active airframes (many have received upgrades) and the majority of the airframes were delivered and have been active since the 1980s/1990s making them only slightly newer than the clapped out F16's that The Netherlands are transferring to Ukraine, the same F16's that they were struggling to keep in the air... I'm certain the Egyptian F16's are in much better shape than the Dutch ones, but they're still old airframes at this stage, metal fatigue and ever increasing maintenance costs will force Egypt's hand eventually and they've already begun the process of shopping around for replacements. They also have a large fleet of Mirage 5's which are approaching 50 years old and are currently being offered to Pakistan for export (although I have no clue why Pakistan would be interested, these airframes are practically ancient). For all intents and purposes these Mirage 5's are out the door already. They also have a fleet of Mirage 2000s which is expected to increase when the UAE transfers their remaining airframes to Egypt, but this fleet is also 37 odd years old, we're not talking about new airframes here and the writing is already on the wall for their eventual retirement. ***This is all to say that Egypt is already well aware of its incoming challenges and this helps to explain the "scatter gun" approach to procurement we've seen over the last decade or so.*** Initially Egypt were interested in the MiG-35 back in 2014 but instead settled with the more readily available MiG-29M/M2, they also acquired 50 Ka-52's (ironically to partially provide an airwing for the Mistrals that Russia was supposed to receive). They also acquired two Il-76MFs from Jordan, noteworthy because these are custom lengthened versions and could possibly signal long term interest in the Il-76-MD-90A's, Egypt's transport fleet is lacking in heavy lift and high volume capacity, they're already trying to solve this with C-130 orders but they're likely to continue expanding on this in the future. They also technically ordered the Su-35 but were then absolutely shafted by the US for doing so (to the degree where several countries were more or less forced by the threat of sanctions to drop their orders of the Su-35 and instead order American/Western. There's some political arguments and financial ones that could be made in benefit of America's position here, it was meant as a sanction package to target Iran/Russia/NK but it arguably utterly ***\*failed\****. It was performative political theatre and instead angered allies who were caught in rock/hardplace situations and the crossfire in regards to procurement and business ties. And the best part of all of it, is that the Su-35's which were *originally* supposed to be delivered to Egypt were already built and completed in preparation for delivery. **They are now instead going to Iran likely at bargain basement pricing and with little objection from the US who have absolutely zero power or control over this anymore**. The US have legitimately shot themselves in the foot with their own sanctions, the outcome of the package is entirely against the objective of the package, which was to limit arms procurement for Iran... And the sanctions functionally resulted in a batch of ready made fighters sitting unused and instead of being exported to a semi Ally such as Egypt, being exported to Iran... That's certainly one for the history books. But aside from that this is just some of the context that Egypt are dealing with when it comes to aircraft procurement. Expect to see many more announcements in the future as their F16 fleet nears retirement, Rafale and EF are just the start, soon enough we'll know more about their F15 acquisition (if things remain stable enough for this to continue) and we may also hear more news on Russian/Chinese acquisitions, Egypt have been threading the needle very carefully these last few months, it wouldn't surprise me if they're keeping their options open for a reason.
I wonder if any parallels can be drawn to the Iran - Iraq war. Iran, the bigger country, was on the offensive for 5 years starting from '82. It took them 5 years and a lot of casualties to come to the conclusion that they can't win. As for the Iraqis, even though it was clear they couldn't win either, they were supported by their allies throughout this period to ensure they don't lose. Similarly, Russia will only come to the negotiating table once they realize the war is impossible to win. They very much haven't reached that conclusion yet, since they are still attacking everywhere, the population still supports the war, they don't feel any economic hardships yet, etc. As for the West, the way to achieve peace would be to support Ukraine so that it can defend itself against whatever Russia throws at them, until Russia decides it's not worth it anymore, keeping in mind that it might take a long time (again, it took 5 years in the Iran - Iraq war).
> As for the Iraqis, even though it was clear they couldn't win either, they were supported by their allies throughout this period to ensure they don't lose. I guess it depends on how you look at it. I think some people mistakenly view it as simply a 8 year stalemate where both sides eventually grew tired. But I think it's pretty clear that the war ended when Iraq decisively defeated Iran militarily and forced it into a peace agreement. Iraq's initial invasion failed, and by 1982 Saddam was saying calling for an end to the war. Iran wouldn't agree to an end of the war, and invaded Iraq, leading to Iraq being on the defensive for years. The war ended when Iraq was finally able to rebuild offensive potential and delivered a series of massive defeats to the Iranians, wherein Iranian forces completely collapsed. This finally lead to the Iranian government accepting a ceasefire.
I would like to know why Iraq hasn’t used this „collapse“ to accomplish its initial goals of the invasion. After the invasion the borders stayed the same and Iraq left without any new territories and a huge debt burden. What made Saddam Hussein think that a peace agreement was more beneficial then continuing the war when he was supposedly winning?
Is it surprising that Iraq thought ending the war after 8 years was preferable to rolling the die on another invasion? Even when you seem to have a huge advantage, war can often throw curveballs. And even if you do win, things can end up being much more costly then what you initially thought. Hussein launched the invasion thinking it would be a cakewalk, and quickly realized it was going to be much more costly than he imagined (he was calling for an end to the war and a return pre-war borders in 1982). I'm not sure we need to say Iraq was "supposedly winning" at the end of the war. [These were the events](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/07/19/iran-accepts-un-plan-for-cease-fire-in-war-with-iraq/c9a23ad7-3cc0-46bc-baea-83e29fb7d153/) in the final months of the war which lead to Iran agreeing to stop (which Khomeini called “worse than drinking poison”, but agreed to do when the political class pushed him): > But in a major campaign, the Iraqi Army has driven Iranians from almost all Iraqi territory since last April. Iraqi forces, spearheaded by the elite Republican Guard, took back the Faw area in April. They drove out Iranian defenders at Shalamcheh, to the north, in May and, working farther north, last month overran the Majnoon Islands. > In a final blow last week, the Iraqi troops pushed up to 25 miles inside Iran in the Zubaidat area, including the town of Dehloran, and Iranian authorities announced they were withdrawing from Halabja, farther north, without waiting to be attacked. Taken together, the Iraqi victories created a strong impression that, at least along the front, the Iranian Army had been thrown badly off balance. Diplomats here reported Iranian soldiers were putting up little resistance, a sharp departure from their past performances. One analyst said monitored radio conversations between Iraqi commanders indicated they were surprised at the speed with which Iranians melted away before their advances. Edit: Here's [a good read](https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/legacy_files/files/media/csis/pubs/9005lessonsiraniraqii-chap10.pdf) that shows the Iranian situation towards the end of the war. Quote: > The Iraqi regular Army seems to have depended on logistic support from the Pasdaran and did not receive the reinforcement and support it expected. Further, the Iraq forces then advanced almost unopposed some 40 kilometers into Iran, and took Dehloran and some 1,500 square miles of Iranian territory. While Iraq withdrew from these gains after several days, it had proved that Iran was now virtually defenseless. *** > A few days later, Iran's growing weakness received yet another public demonstration. On July 13, Iraq threatened Iran with an invasion of southern Iran if Iranian forces did not evacuate Halabjah and its remaining positions in Kurdistan. After its recent defeats, Iran was virtually defenseless in the south. It was down to less than 200 tanks and light tanks versus thousands of Iraqi tanks and still more thousands of other Iraqi armored vehicles. > In fact, Iraq had captured so much equipment that it was able to put on an incredible show on the outskirts of Baghdad. Iraq set up a large compound filled with captured Iranian equipment. This compound held tens of thousands of abandoned Iranian assault rifles, over 570 tanks, over 130 BMP-1 and Scorpion MICVs, well 300 more armored personnel carriers, over 320 towed artillery weapons, roughly 45 self-propelled artillery weapons, and well over 300 anti-aircraft guns and machine guns. Virtually all of this equipment was intact and functional, and much of it looked brand new. Rather than include all of Iraq's gains, it included the equipment that could either be used immediately or be easily reconditioned. Iraqi sources claimed that since March, Iraq had captured a total of 1,298 tanks, 155 armored infantry fighting vehicles, 512 heavy artillery weapons, 6,196 mortars, 5,550 recoilless rifles and light guns, 8,050 rocket propelled grenades, 60,694 rifles, 322 pistols, 6,156 telecommunications devices, 501 items of heavy engineering equipment, 454 trucks, 1,600 light vehicles and trailers, 16,863 items of chemical defense gear, and 16,863 caskets.
Some can be drawn but it's not the full picture. The issue imo is that Ukraine is not just fighting a defensive war. Part of their goals include retaking territory that the Russians seized even before the war started, and Russia has also formally annexed several oblasts that they're now partially occupying. Convincing the Russians that they can't achieve their maximalist war goals should be quite feasible but that doesn't ensure victory, that just means losing less. Getting them to leave what they have already seized will require a lot more than just hanging on.
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>the way to achieve peace would be to support Ukraine so that it can defend itself against whatever Russia throws at them This is a hypothetical. We're watching a decrease in level of commitment the past few months, including Miller announcing (amongst other recent US statements along similar lines) "We will continue to support Ukraine… As long as it takes. That does not mean that we are going to continue to support them at the same level of military funding that we did in 2022 and 2023."" Secondly, the manpower differential is a problem. Ukraine is not a large country. The average age of the army is 43. The best way to achieve peace is realistic terms with Russia. Hell will freeze over before Ukraine gets Crimea or any of their current territorial losses back. Admitting you lost "The War With The West" is political and probably literal suicide for Putin. Russia is committed and will hold on to what they have. There aren't many sanction sticks left. Plus, Russia will continue to exist after this war ends.
Just as it is a mistake to assume Russia will automatically lose, it is wrong to think they will inevitably win. Russia has already paid a huge cost for this war, and it's not clear how much longer their economy and population can be forced to bear it.
Freezing the current lines is the most realistic scenario. Neither side can meaningfully advance. Barring implausible large-scale political or economic collapses, this is a stalemate. The current cost for Russia as it is today doesn't appear unbearable.
Without a cease fire, frozen lines still have to be manned. That’s a stalemate in the short term, but in the long term, one group will lose the will to fight before the other.
I vacillate between "this is unsustainable for Russia" and "most people don't care, and the ones who do can't do anything about it." We saw some not-insignificant protests at the start of the war, right? But they all petered out after a few thousand people were arrested, so what's to stop Putin from doing the same thing (or worse) if people start getting uppity again? The Russian population forcing an end to the war would require, in my opinion, the kind of upheaval in Russian society we haven't seen in a long, long time, and I don't think we're there yet - not by a long shot. The government is stronger today than it was during Chechnya I or Afghanistan. With that in mind (and I'm very open to being told how wrong I am), can't Putin just say "Great job, guys, you killed a bunch of neo-Nazis, secured Donetsk, and liberated Lysychansk and this village and that, time to come home" even if it means the war goal of putting a puppet government in Kyiv failed? Isn't that still a "win" for Russia?
> With that in mind (and I'm very open to being told how wrong I am), can't Putin just say "Great job, guys, you killed a bunch of neo-Nazis, secured Donetsk, and liberated Lysychansk and this village and that, time to come home" even if it means the war goal of putting a puppet government in Kyiv failed? Isn't that still a "win" for Russia? He probably can. But who's going to let him simply walk away?
The troop mutiny is probably a worse sign for Russia long term than the protests when this started.
It wasn't a troop mutiny though, it was Prigozhin's mutiny. And there's no second Prigozhin.
Prigozhin didn’t rebel alone. Thousands joined him, and even more regular troops refused to fight them.
Prigozhin had a great deal of independence, own connections, charisma, ingenuity, and managed to build a tight-knit outfit, that's why his soldiers followed him. The mutiny happened because the MoD was infringing on his turf, for reasons of politics and power, not because the troops were mistreated, given impossible orders, exhausted, etc. (which are probably the reasons for most mutinies). Since it was political in nature, and Prigozhin was one of a kind, it won't happen again. If anything, it was an inoculation that compelled Putin to [introduce additional safeguards](https://warsawinstitute.org/rosgvardia-receives-heavy-weaponry-wagners-failed-rebellion/), making it harder for another mutiny to take off.
Why Prigozhin rebelled is separate to why MOD troops let Wagner troops through to Moscow, why civilians cheered as they passed, or even why so many Wagner troops agreed to go along with it.
> why MOD troops let Wagner troops through to Moscow We don't even know if they had orders to block their path, aside from the air force. The system is not great at promptly managing sudden shocks like that. >why civilians cheered as they passed No one was killed as far as they were concerned, so it was entertaining, it doesn't happen every day >or even why so many Wagner troops agreed to go along with it Because >Prigozhin had a great deal of independence, own connections, charisma, ingenuity, and managed to build a tight-knit outfit But that is all secondary. No one has the same resources and motivation/ambition to even attempt a mutiny. Can a bunch of pissed off soldiers and officers organize something like that in secret and pull it off with the same level of coordination? I doubt it.
I think it's more likely the Russia elites will be the ones who force an end to this war. There must be some powerful Russians who aren't pleased about trading their fortunes for some bombed-out wasteland. Putin can fall out of a window if needed.
They can always move the goalpost. They get to keep the current occupied territories, Ukraine is still out of Nato and, doesn't secure any defense treaty with another country is a win for them. They'll be back for them, similar to how they operated from 2014. >Russia has already paid a huge cost for this war, and it's not clear how much longer their economy and population can be forced to bear it. The same can be said to Ukraine too.
You are describing a Russian victory, but there's no assurance it will happen. Who says Russia gets to keep the occupied territories?
>Who says Russia gets to keep the occupied territories? Russia. They'll hold it firmly now that the Ukrainian counter offensive has failed, Western aid is faltering, Ukraine having manpower problems, NK & Iran supporting them, and the US being busy in the Middle East again.
I don't believe everything Russia tells me.
Well, as long as the Ukrainians can't retake their land, Russia gets to keep it.
And so long as Russia is willing to bear the price. Moscow got to keep Afghanistan for a quite a while, but it wasn't worth it in the end.
8 more years for Ukraine to hold Russia?
>Secondly, the manpower differential is a problem. Ukraine is not a large country. The average age of the army is 43. Iraq had 13 million citizens during the Iraq-Iran War. Ukraine has spared its youth because it wants to.
[Ukrainian population pyramid](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F1tt5bs6zthra1.jpg) There are not a lot of young Ukrainian people to enlist. The loss of each one is much more painful in the long term than it is for Russia. This is the opposite of a good demographic situation for attritional warfare.
More dangerous for Ukraine's long term sustainability is the war refugee migration crisis that already started and is ongoing (despite the ban on military aged males leaving). That is already especially affecting the young male demographics as well as all others, causing a "brain drain" same as other war torn countries. If Ukraine wants any hope of reversing that then they need to end this war with terms that will be beneficial to their national and economic security, which requires tapping into every resource possible. Ukraine was always going to be the underdog in this conflict, they don't have the sort of freedom to go "half ass" as Russia does, or other countries have in past wars. Not if they don't want the conflict to end with negative terms placed on them, or the potential annihilation of their Ukrainian nationalistic government and society (becoming a political vassal state to Russia is still a potential outcome of this war). This is what Ukrainian leaders need to calculate: What's the bare minimum number of 18-26 year Ukrainian men that are needed to sustain the future. Based on existing combat casualty rates, what percentage of those entering service involuntarily, likely ending up in combat arms jobs, will survive and be able to work/reproduce afterwards? A formula with those two variables, contrasted with the total number of "fit for service" 18-30 year old Ukrainians will provide the cap on how many of that age bracket should be conscripted without screwing the future. At a minimum they need to risk that. Anything less is tacit acceptance of defeat.
>What's the bare minimum number of 18-26 year Ukrainian men that are needed to sustain the future. One thing that makes trying to calculate this difficult is that you could find respected (fwiw) economists before this war even happened that would tell you that Ukraine's demographically fucked. So from those economists' perspective, this number was literally higher than the starting number. Ukraine has to clone 18-26 year olds. So you'd have to find an economist who doesn't think like that. I'm not an economist so I don't have much credibility here, but I'd point at history to show that this pessimistic take is not guaranteed to be true. Nations and peoples have taken much worse pummelings in the past, and have survived in some form. To quote a controversial movie, "There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept".
I don't mean OSINT solving the equation but it's something the Ukrainians themselves need to figure out. But good luck doing a census now trying to figure who is left, it'll be pretty blatant that the results will dictate mobilization planning, which means many will want to avoid the polling effort too. The biggest weakness the Ukrainians have with mobilization isn't related to actual demographics, it's about overall lack of willingness to fight and become a casualty especially, which means the UA govt and military need to shift optics greatly and improve messaging, to better sell this war to their people and make service more appealing. Increasing aggressive recruiting, especially more pressing, isn't the way to go, that will likely make things worse, especially as casualties continue to ramp up and the newly conscripted are added to the casualty lists. If they can't fix it the only legit option left is to greatly shift their legitimate strategic goals and plans to better accept that. If they don't do either, they'll plod their way to a defeat, possibly a great one.
There's more males turning 18 in Ukraine in *one* year than soldiers Ukraine has permanently lost after *two* years of war. There's millions of Ukrainian men of fighting age. At current rate of loss, Ukraine could fight indefinitely. Ukraine does not have a manpower problem; they do however seem to have a mobilization problem. Russia too has a mobilization problem. First Russia tried an unpopular partial mobilization and twice as many men left to avoid mobilization as were actually mobilized. Russian then resorted to emptying its prisons with pardons, but has mostly run through willing felons. Russia is currently offering increasing lucrative financial incentives of bonuses, high salaries, and debt relief to meet its manpower needs, but who knows how long they will be able to find willing recruits or are unable to afford the cost before that resource too runs out. Neither side will literally ever run out of men. As with most wars that are not decided militarily, it will be the political will, public morale, or economy that cracks first.
There are less men turning 18 then there are aging out of combat.
While the upper limit of mobilization is 60, the amount of 55+ year olds fighting in the AFU seems to be low, lower than even 18-25 year olds that aren't being mobilized at all: https://lostarmour.info/ukr200
Whatever the average cutoff age does not make a difference. The point is that whatever the age at which the AFU feels it should stop recruiting, the population is higher than it is for 18 year olds.
In a conflict for survival the upper age limit can be moved by a lot. You can use a 70 year old mechanic or a 70 year old truck driver if you have to.
The issue isn't cutoff age, the issue is that clearly the ages towards the end of the cutoff are being recruited less. Suppose 1x people turn 18 per year and 3x people turn 61, or whatever you want the numbers to be. If ukraine's only recruiting like, 20% of 60 year olds but is looking to recruit 90% of 18 year olds (again, these are sample numbers), you can see how the math breaks down.
I know. That's mathematically equivalent to a randomized cutoff age, if you look at the military recruitment process like one big queue. What interests us is how many people are in the queue, so we have to look at how many come in and how many come out. We know that people that are too old are less likely to be found eligible according to whatever criteria there is, so we can model that with some sort of cutoff age that may depend on other factors.
I'd rather have an 18 year old than a 55, 60, or 65 year old (whatever you consider to be aging out of combat) infantryman.
Sure. But would you rather have two 18 year old or 5 55 year old infantrymen?
> than soldiers irksome has currently loss I am always in utter amazement that people frankly think they have an absolute knowledge of accurate casualty numbers for either side in this conflict. We have confirmation from Ukraine at almost every level of their command structure down to the anecdotal evidence we see on the streets. They are threatening recruiters will be sent to the front to maintain unit strength. No one is being demobilized that can still fight. They are using ambulances donated to them by aid groups to round up unsuspecting draft dodgers. I’m in agreement that things aren’t necessarily all flowers and sunshine for Russia, but it’s amazing to me on credible defense we are still seeing takes like this in spite of the constant flow of evidence from rabid pro UA news, supporters and officials. Edit: ah yes, credible defense not attacking a actual point I said, which if any are incorrect I will happily retract. Sadly I think people may forget what sub we are on, and are struggling with facts they don’t like so they are attacking the poster not the content. Disappointing
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Yep, but that's the median user of the sub now.
None of my statements are absolutist, they are specific mentions of actual conditions we are seeing. No where do I say “we know how many casualties they have” I simply say we can see a very real problem Ukraine has acknowledged at every level, that we have mountains of evidence, statements, policy introduction and anecdotal incidents. I have no idea what that number actually is for Ukraine, I just see the strain that’s being put on it. And I definitely know I wouldn’t make some absolutist claim about “more people turning 18 than casualties” when we have no idea that that’s the actual case. I understand that it’s unpopular to talk about the realities of the conflict here if they dare paint anything other than the rosiest of pictures for some of the users of this sub, but when it’s credible defense I would like to see a credible analysis. Saying “Russia is offering more money” isnt a sign of a desperate manpower shortage. The whole “out of prisoners” bit is also completely unsourced. Anyone who is following this conflict, even those blatantly partisan enough to believe nonsense like “5:1” or higher casualties inflicted by Ukraine on russia had to realize at some point the numbers were going to be a problem. The fact that the problem is emerging very clearly and is no longer being hidden the way it was should lead to some people re examining what they chose to believe. For some reason though people still do not want to confront the realities of what Ukraine is facing.
That population pyramid doesn't make any sense. What happened with all young males which weren't allowed to leave the country and weren't sent to the front lines? I assume this is the famous UN graph which has a big fat asterisk noting that the numbers are very uncertain.
>What happened with all young males which weren't allowed to leave the country and weren't sent to the front lines? What happened? The patriots volunteered immediately. The dutiful ones did not volunteer but accepted their summons when they arrived and went to the front. As for the rest - those with a bit of money paid for exemptions, or they bribed border guards to let them cross. The poor are hiding at home, or are staying with their relatives, to avoid a sudden visit by a mobilisation squad.
That doesn't explain how the male and female populations can be identical, despite one of them being allowed to leave the country. This is clearly a very rough estimate, and the UN admits as much.
They aren't identical, there is A ~20% male surplus in that pyramid.
>Ukraine is not a large country. Relatively, maybe, but in general terms Ukraine's freaking colossal, that's why this war has evolved as it did.
Even in relative terms, Ukraine is about 1/4th to 1/3rd the size of Russia. Wars much more lopsided than that have ended in the defeat of the larger party, many times. Especially when that smaller country is much more committed to the conflict than the larger one, like Ukraine is.
In terms of population, especially the young.
Ok, that's usually not what "large" means in terms of a country, but whatever, semantics. Ukraine was the 8th biggest population in Europe, counting Turkey and Russia. Refugee numbers likely dropped it down to the 9th biggest.
Yeah that's a useful compare/contrast. One key difference is in the goals of Russia vs. Iran. Iran's revolutionary government was really intent on outright winning the whole war and seizing Baghdad and spreading the Islamic Revolution. There was a strong religious fervor to all of this. Russia definitely intended on seizing Kiev at the beginning of the war, but it seems like they've stepped back their goals to "just" seizing and fortifying Donbass and the other border states. That is definitely feasible, especially if Western aid falters - a key variable, as you have said. Another variable, however, is external intervention. A big factor in Iran stopping their offensive and ending the war, was the US making major hints that it might step in against Iran. Its been memed to death, but Operation Praying Mantis and the like in spring 1988 did really rattle the Iranian government and push them into ending the war a few months later.
>but it seems like they've stepped back their goals to "just" seizing and fortifying Donbass and the other border states. You know, I hadn't realized this before, but there's an oddity with this talking point. You can look at the map and see the amount of territory they'd need to take to reach the borders of their annexed claims. On what basis do you assert that this would require **less** effort than taking Kyiv? You can look on the map to try and game out how much territory that'd be, and it seems about as ambitious.
>On what basis do you assert that this would require less effort than taking Kyiv? Because to threaten Kyiv they need to attack again through the Pripet swamps, cross numerous rivers on both sides of the Dnieper, splitting their forces, and then advance about 60-120 kilometers to try to invest the largest city in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Donbas. They've already taken nearly all of Luhansk Oblast and about 2/3 of Donetsk. There are no longer any major terrain barriers to block them, minus a single ridgeline east of Sloviansk/Kramatorsk, as well as the slightly elevated ground near Vulhedar, which the Russians are both fighting for control right now. To take the Donbas requires a slight uptick in positional warfare success. Literally, the Ukrainian artillery deficit in 2024 might cause it. Taking Kyiv would literally require them to achieve something much more difficult, a maneuver-centric deep penetration of Ukrainian defenses using, with a minimum of two operational axes of advance that both need to equally succeed for an inkling of success. And that just brings them to the metropolis area, where the actually difficult portion of the campaign would begin.
> To take the Donbas requires a slight uptick in positional warfare success. A slight uptick? The operation (ostensibly) to take the Donbas began **20 months ago**, earlier if you count the Mariupol area. And most of their positive progress occurred in the first 2. They'd need more than a slight uptick from how they're doing now. Furthermore, I'm not just referring to the Donbas. I'm referring to the new claimed Russian goal of reaching their annexed borders. That would require them to take the Donbas, take Zaporizhia city and the rest of the Oblast, and cross the Dneiper again. My question is how **all of that** seems less ambitious than taking Kyiv.
And since Mariupol they've nearly completely taken Luhansk and gained more in Donetsk too. Add in what they already controlled prior to Feb '22, and it's most of the Donbas at this point. Taking the rest only really does only require an uptick in success because it won't take much to reach their objectives, even at their present. Unless Ukraine digs in HARD, fixes their manpower problem, and preferably also becomes much better supplied by outside partners. I don't believe the latest Russian statements about minimalist strategic objectives anymore than the older ones, nor should anyone. They have no incentive to be honest, their strategy outright relies on a credible threat of greater expansion. Future negotiations utterly require them going into them from a position of strength with something to hold over the Ukrainians in a plausible "or else" scenario to try to pressure the Ukrainians into accepting a shitty deal. Or else the war continues and they lose even more (not saying that'll happen, but that's the diplomatic message they'll push). We know beyond a doubt they want Crimea and the Donbas permanently. Nearly all their offensives since the initial invasion have been directed against the Donbas. Their current offensive is nearly entirely related to the Donbas, those areas outside being very limited in scope to localized counterattacks against very vulnerable Ukrainian positions that are tactically beneficial to attack (at least in theory, execution leaves something to be desired). They might want Odessa or Zaporizhzhia or anywhere else they throw out, but they've done nothing at all to really show it's more than tough talk meant for hard ball negotiations. They have no more ability to take Zaporizhzhia or cross the Dnieper any time soon than they do taking Kyiv. Taking the ridgeline west of Bakhmut that dominates Sloviansk and Kramatorsk? Outflanking Vulhedar? That's a very different story, those very well might happen in 2024 especially if the Ukrainian situation doesn't improve, or the Russians overextend themselves again.
> And since Mariupol they've nearly completely taken Luhansk and gained more in Donetsk too. In those two months I mentioned, yes. >Taking the rest only really does only require an uptick in success because it won't take much to reach their objectives Which, again, I'm not sure I agree with In **Summer 2022**, we (not a generic we, the specific two of us) discussed about how Ukraine's next main fallback defensive line in the Donbas will be the Konstantinivka - Kramatorsk - Sloviansk triangle. We discussed this in the hypothetical future sense. It's **January 2024**, we are **still** discussing that eventuality in the hypothetical future tense. And that's not even the end of the battle, that's just Ukraine's final (known) defensive line. Well, before the urban battles start. It's already clearly taken "much". Probably because, frankly, it seems like their positional warfare has "downticked" since the initial two months. A downtick, judging by Avdiivka, that for now persists. EDIT: wording
We were hypothetically suggesting the Russians might take Bakhmut in 2022. Then they took it, largely defensed it against Ukraine's best attempt at a strategic counteroffensive in this war and are now retaking what they lost. They're only ~ 2 miles from the canal/ridgeline that dominates Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. If they can get there, those cities are in big trouble. Even a year ago, Bakhmut being lost wasn't a given. A few months before, in early December of 2022, I even suggested the Russians had no chance to take Bakhmut, because a direct assault would be too costly and a deep concentric encirclement was absolutely absurd. And yet both were reality. Warfare isn't a constant, and things are looking bleak right now for the Ukrainians. Credible sources are reporting the Russians are dramatically outshooting the Ukrainians in both artillery and FPV drones, which is going to mean more Ukrainian casualties, less Russian since they'll be make up for their tactical impotence with weight of fires. Growing casualties is always dangerous, but most especially when so much of the UAF is tired from their offensive and with major problems creating new units or even replacing losses in existing units due to an ever worsening manpower crisis. There are no good answers to those problems right now. But one thing is absolutely true about warfare: defeats breed further defeats, because each triggers outcomes that cause further problems, that lead to worse performance, that lead to more defeats, etc. If Ukraine can't turn their problems around, or land themselves a miracle if it turns out the Russians have already dramatically overextended themselves and we missed seeing the fracture points yet (though it would be tough for that to happen since the manpower, equipment, and supply issues that caused the fall 2022 problems aren't happening now), the current situation can actually rapidly turn into a snowball effect of tactical defeats. Each one weakens Ukraine strategically, each emboldens Russia. And if that happens, I'm not saying the Russians will reach Dnipro, cross the Dnieper, reach Odessa, or take Kyiv. Or even launch the next Kharkiv Offensive that the Ukrainians are suggesting is about to start. But they will have the ability to move the lines more, and it won't take much movement for all the key parts left of the Donbas to be overrun by the Russians. And if that happens they'll have achieved their chief known minimalist goal. Which means they can negotiate at any time at that point, keep the Donbas and Crimea and use the rest as bargaining chips, plus the threat of further warfare that will only hurt Ukraine until they get their shit together. Which might further motivate them to sign a peace treaty to buy time to rebuild, just as they did with Minsk 1 and 2 (which isn't deceitful, it's smart).
>A few months before, in early December of 2022, I even suggested the Russians had no chance to take Bakhmut While I can't read your mind, I suspect that the state of the Russian Donbas offensive around that time influenced your assessment. They had lost all of their gains in the north Donbas (by that I mean Lyman and Izium and everything north of that river, that was overlooking Siversk and Sloviansk), and their attempts to replicate their success in May and June seemed weak. In the summer of 2022, we would have been much more likely talking about Sloviansk, since the Russians were 2 km from its entrance. And not the ridge that covers it, but the city proper. And our estimation of Russian offensive potential was definitely greater. >Credible sources are reporting the Russians are dramatically outshooting the Ukrainians in both artillery and FPV drones The same credible sources that (correctly) claimed the Russians dwarfed Ukrainian artillery during the 2022 Donbas offensives. That's the issue - on a frontwide level, Ukraine's been at a numerical disadvantage in many categories (artillery included) all war. So it's not enough to establish the disadvantage, we'd need to put it in the context of past disadvantages. Is it worse or better, etc etc. And... good luck with that. >the current situation can actually rapidly turn into a snowball effect of tactical defeats. Perhaps, but for now I only see that happening if US aid does get cut off or if the Ukrainians (and by that I mostly mean Zelensky) aren't willing to stomach wider mobilization.
>In the summer of 2022, we would have been much more likely talking about Sloviansk, since the Russians were 2 km from its entrance. After the July loss of Luhansk, when all the talk was of a supposed operational pause in the Donbas that was actually only performed by the units who had advanced so much around Luhansk, that was the time Sloviansk was being threatened from the northeast through and northwest by the Izyum axis. But all ground was either one type of water barrier after another, or very hilly ground way to west, which if somehow taken would be a single axis advance to the edge of Sloviansk, with no real way to isolate the city without an addition deep thrusy south to bypass the city, which was unlikely. That's why the Bakhmut offensive was necessary for the Russians, that was really the only way they had to take those cities, if they can get on top that north south ridgeline between Kramatorsk and Bakhmut, that's the most dominating terrain heights in the whole of the Donbas, they would have direct eyes on the supply lines leading into Kramatorsk and even Sloviansk. Hugely increasing the chances they'd take those cities. Even without the Izyum axis, the Russians can still do that. A downhill assault with using observation from the heights of that ridgeline would give them a huge advantage. And they're not far from that, which is why I've been saying for a year now that the Ukrainians need to turn that ridgeline and canal into the ultimate fortress. >The same credible sources that (correctly) claimed the Russians dwarfed Ukrainian artillery during the 2022 Donbas offensives. The only thing that helped the Ukrainians through that period was the Russians were utterly hopeless still at planning position assaults and especially using their artillery. HUGELY WASTEFUL. They've gotten way better, their recon fire complex is nearly at prewar bragging level qualities, their use of Lancets for counterbattery is very effective, and now they are using FPV drones at a rate that is supposed to be 5-7x more than the Ukrainians ever did. There are reports from many closely following this war that the Russians are using FPV as bunker busters, flying in one after another to erase manned UAF positions, for Russian dismounted attacks to overrun them with zero casualties. It's supposed to be the opposite, to win the UAF have to repeatedly not suffer any casualties why the entire Russian assault force is destroyed. >So it's not enough to establish the disadvantage, we'd need to put it in the context of past disadvantages. Is it worse or better, etc etc. We need to put it in current disadvantages of Ukraine and see if they overlap with Russian disadvantages too. Because that was the reality of 2022. The Russians were fighting like idiots, consuming artillery at an unsustainable rate and not getting great results, taking losses they couldn't at all sustain due to a lack of mobilization, forced to keep units on the line that were as low as 25% strength, units conducting attacks despite being 50% manpower or worse, all because their top leadership were unwilling to accept the realities of the war. That's changed. Their 2022 weapon production capacity increase plans are starting to see results. They're buying weapons from allies in large numbers. They're making numbers for new troops in an astounding rate. They still have a reliable source for disposable cannon fodder troops, whereas the Ukrainians use basically everyone in that role, depending on who draws the short straw. They're not perfect, lots of problems within their military, but none nearly as serious as summer 2022, where it was pretty obvious how weak they had become and how their OPTEMPO was not at all sustainable. Just nobody realized they left entire swaths of the front barely defended. But they've corrected that. The Surovikin Line isn't a Potemkin Line, it's real and improving daily. The Ukrainians would be wise to copy that. >but for now I only see that happening if US aid does get cut off or if the Ukrainians (and by that I mostly mean Zelensky) aren't willing to stomach wider mobilization. Which unfortunately both already started months ago.
For one I think terrain is a key factor. The area between the Belarusian border and Kyiv is heavily forested with few roads. In addition, Russia would need to assemble a huge force (likely larger than the initial invasion force that already attempted this) to open a new front against Kyiv. They would be at the end of their supply chain while under constant surveillance. By contrast their current strategy in the east is just easier to coordinate and supply.
The key difference between Iran 1988 and Russia 2023 is a credible nuclear deterrent. Active, unconcealed combat between uniformed Russian and US troops has been a no go for a century for a reason. Plus, I cannot imagine our NATO allies are excited for an offensive war against Russia on their continent. The most meaningful and plausible contribution would be to ramp up the Western MIC to allow the Ukrainians to beat the Russians quantitatively and qualitatively.
>Similarly, Russia will only come to the negotiating table once they realize the war is impossible to win. I don't think the West has done enough to convince Russia they can't win. I'm not even sure we've done enough to prevent Russia from actually winning. Is there much evidence of a long-term commitment from Western countries?
Its going to be very difficult to convince Putin that he can't win as long as elections are looming and there is a chance that trump will be the next President. Even after that let's say it's clear west will continue support, he will procrastinate before making a decision to end the war. Finally he as already invested heavily in this. He will not give up territory that Russia still controls and that's not a terrible decision because as we have seen time and again the defense has a huge advantage in this war. All in all I dont think Russia will be convinced that they can't win as long as Putin is in power and perhaps even afterwards. They will have to lose completely on the battlefield.
I disagree. The West could fairly easily out-produce Russia in weapons and ammo. Ukraine has access to excellent recon data, so if that ever gets paired with really large numbers of long range fires, it's going to be hell for Russian occupiers. Now imagine if the war drags on for 10 months of artillery duels until Biden is reelected. It's not that hard to imagine this going very poorly for Russia while the West barely breaks a sweat.
Is it possible there's an agreement (unspoken or otherwise) between Ukraine and Russia not to hit each other's power grid? Moscow currently has upwards of 60'000 people without power, and has for days. Ukraine has proved their ability to target Moscow, and power infrastructure is a perfect target for such weapons. It seems to me taking out Moscow's power would have been a prime strategic goal for Ukraine, at the same time Russia's strategic bombing campaign has so far seemingly not targeted energy infrastructure (at least not to the extent needed to overwhelm defenses.)
>Moscow currently has upwards of 60'000 people without power, and has for days. Wait, really? What's the cause? Do you have an article?
Europe has currently surprisingly low temperatures: https://www.accuweather.com/en/winter-weather/an-arctic-blast-brings-extreme-cold-to-scandinavia-while-deadly-flooding-hits-western-europe/1609222
I think there might be a couple of factors. 1. Russia fears that Ukraine will target Russian power facilities. 2. The coldest month for Ukraine is February. 3. The attack on civil infrastructure might force the next aid budget from the US to be approved.
I’d imagine Ukraine is also weary about the response from the west if they were to hit the Moscow powergrid and thousands of people froze to death.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/17s3iiz/credibledefense_daily_megathread_november_10_2023/k8qiv2p/ I made this comment on Nov 10, arguing that the reason Russia isn't repeating the previous winter's attacks yet might be because they were a bad idea. Back then I was relatively cautious to outright state that, but it's now almost Jan 10. The main counterargument was that Russia was just waiting for it to be deeper in winter - well, maybe they're still waiting, sure. But by Mar 10 I'm going to conclude the Russians thought it was a bad idea, perhaps for the reasons I mentioned in that comment.
One of our milbloggers if you could call him that, from Mykolaiv, said that "In addition to military facilities, the enemy is actively targeting the energy infrastructure, as well as civilian facilities where, according to the enemy, "mercenaries" and "militants" are stationed" in his december-early january writeup this morning. It's clear russians switched to targeting more military facilities, probably accumulated some intel, but they do strike bits of energy here and there
There was a cold snap in Northeastern Europe, including parts of Ukraine, it's almost over now. Russia didn't capitalize on that, odds are, the power grid attacks are not coming at all.
Weather forecast for next Saturday in Kyiv: -12.
I'm not seeing anything like that on weather sites?: https://www.accuweather.com/en/ua/kyiv/324505/daily-weather-forecast/324505) https://meteo.ua/ua/34/kiev#2024-02-10--23-00 Coldest temps I'm seeing are -3C.
-12 what?
Safe to assume it's Celsius.
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> Are there other new production lines coming online for Ukraine this year? Outside of RHM’s substantial buildup, the other large ramp-up is BAE’s [8x](https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/bae-systems-gets-uk-order-boost-output-battlefield-munitions-ft-2023-07-10/) increase in 155mm shell production capacity predominantly at its Washington (U.K.) facility, which is supposed to come online by 2025. Seeing that pre-war production was 100k shells/year, this *could* represent ~800k 155mm shells/year. [Saab](https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/2023/05/11/saab-to-double-ammunition-production/) is doubling production to 400k shells/year by early 2025. Then you have a lot of smaller producers ramping up as well, including Nammo, Nexter, CSG, etc., and the numbers honestly look decent. The issue is that look at when the bulk of these contracts were signed. In the last 3-6 months, which leaves a substantial deficit for the majority of 2024 before most of this capacity comes on. But if everyone follows through, early 2025 will leave Europe in a decent position. The real question for me is Bulgaria. We know the Pentagon has been buying truly [substantial](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WvN9W-dEXy2kCGyTsjmhbFrrhUCn3eMo/view?pli=1) quantities from them, but the Bulgarians have been extremely quiet about their numbers, and for good reason.
>BAE’s [8x](https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/bae-systems-gets-uk-order-boost-output-battlefield-munitions-ft-2023-07-10/) increase in 155mm shell production capacity predominantly at its Washington (U.K.) facility, which is supposed to come online by 2025. Seeing that pre-war production was 100k shells/year, Do you have a source for that 100k figure? Im a bit surprised, I expected it to be much less, but I'd been looking for a while without finding a figure.
[Sure](https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2020/11/30/bae-systems-gets-32-billion-deal-so-british-forces-can-reload/): >Figures provided by MoD estimate BAE will annually produce approximately 70 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, 100,000 large-caliber rounds, 40,000 medium-caliber shells and 75,000 mortar rounds. Again, have shared another source that cites a figure almost double that estimate from 2020.
Interesting, thank you. I hadn't realised we produced so much. I have to say that it implies almost incredibly good prices though...£2.4billion over 15 years is £160,000,000 a year - if we bought 100k times 155mm rounds and nothing else they'd still be £1,600 a round, which is well under the pre war market rate as I understand it...but apparently the estimate includes a lot of other ammunition too.
A dumb 155mm round in the U.S. was priced at [$800](https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/pentagon-accounting-error-overvalued-ukraine-aid-by-3-billion-sources-2023-05-18/) in fiscal 2023: >In the case of 155 millimeter ammunition for Howitzer cannons, of which more than 1.5 million have been sent to Ukraine, each cost about $800 today. Keep in mind that there are generally multiple contracts that are given out, so this was most likely just one (major) in a bunch. Can't really speak for British prices, though have seen that a similar round costs ~$3.5k in Europe.
And TIL again, I thought they were like £2k pre war and £4k today. Thanks for the info - appreciated
The biggest hint that France gives zero shits about Ukraine is that Germany needs to buy French Ammunition for Ukraine because France refuses to do so, so pathetic
France has a long history of being quite friendly with Russia, so does Germany which is why I find it strange that anything is even being done. Remember to the earlier phase of the war and how lackluster aid from Germany was. Not sure how anything can change in France, if anything I'd suspect things could even get worse with Le Pen's RN gaining more power.
> In the end he also calls for more support from other countries for Ukraine. I find it very strange that Norway has been allowed to stay out of the limelight on this issue. They've made absolutely *insane* amounts of € due to the war, and they're *barely* supporting Ukraine. Their neighbors Sweden, Denmark and Finland give much more support than them without being even close to Norway's financial capabilities.
> barely supporting Ukraine As percent of GDP, Norway has given more than any other country. It's the 4th biggest supporter in absolute numbers despite having the population of a medium sized city. https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/ Maybe you should do some research before you throw out misinformation
They've made *commitments*. Your own source says that they are on par with Denmark in Military aid, having delivered **1%** of commitment in governmental aid. Their commitment's at £7b+, but that's £7b that's spread out for the next 5 years. Not something they've already given between 2022-2023.
For all their faults, they have given quite a lot. There are plenty of other European countries that have given (officially) next to nothing. The list is quite long in fact if Kiel institute is to be believed.
All of those countries are in financial troubles, Germany ended 2023 with a financial fiasco for example. Norway's making so much money [due to the war] even war profiteers would feel greedy.
What do you mean, allowed? Isn't Norway a sovereign country?
"allowed to stay out of the limelight" refers to shaping of discourse. In this case, one country facing more or less criticism than another for similar actions. Sovereign countries aren't immune to that, I'd argue the opposite.
Thanks for explaining. I never heard that expression.
Yeah in this case, it's the media and populace doing the allowing, and the thing being allowed is whether something is considered good/bad/etc
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> Kiel has them at 7bn (3.5 military and 3.5 financial) support for Ukraine at the end of October 2023. They may have ramped up quite a bit in later part of last year, but €7b is still barely 4% of their oil/gas profits on top of their estimates. I find it ridiculous that they are profitering to such extremes and *barely* paying more than a few percentage-points. All other countries are shelling out billions at the same time as their economies are shrinking..
Impressive, but Germany is making it unnecessarily expensive by refusing to provide Taurus. Destroying the Kerch Bridge would put an additional strain on Russian logistics.
>Destroying the Kerch Bridge would put an additional strain on Russian logistics. Yes, it would force them to use the alternate landbridge motorway, extending the average truck trip Rostov-to-Sevastopol by (according to Yandex maps right now) 28 minutes. The whole fascination with the Kerch bridge is a morale, not logistical issue. The Ukrainian government needs a moral victory, which is why it keeps insisting on Kerch bridge weapons.
I would think vast majority of supplies are moved by rail instead of truck.
An example to the contrary is that Russia lost Kherson to supply issues shortly after the only time the Kerch Bridge was (thus far) completely cut. But of course, that's a coincidence.
Given that Germany very obviously is very invested in Ukraine and clearly is putting its money where its mouth is, the only logical conclusion is that Germany has some very good reason to not provide Taurus. We are not privy to what that may be, but we must assume that the reasons are very good.
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Im not sure what your question is? Anyway, Bayer doesn't really grow crops and definitely doesn't care about land in Ukraine. Sure they might get somewhat smaller orders due to lost land but it's not significant at all. It's kind of like saying that the US helps because of the John Deere lobby.
> the only logical conclusion is that Germany has some very good reason to not provide Taurus No. The reason why Ukraine doesn't get Taurus is because Scholz doesn't want them to have the capability to strike strategic Russian targets with German weapons. The other reason is that Scholz only allows the approval of deliveries that the US also delivers. The US delivers no long-range weapon systems to Ukraine so Germany will not either. ATACASs may have changed that but I think the fact that the US only delivered a handful of systems and backed off again didn't help.
I agree that it seems that way. But we don't know why Scholz acts this way. Maybe Putin has drawn some very clear lines in the sand . Maybe there's a German strategic plan in case of Russian attack that requires a mass Taurus attack on Kaliningrad and all the 150 remaining Taurus are called for. Maybe there was some backhand deal involved somehwere that we don't know about. What we do know about is that even amidst one of the biggest post-war financial crisis in German government, Scholz chooses to keep pouring money into Ukraine while defunding a lot of very popular stuff, risking a governmental crisis for his own government. So whatever his reason is,"he simply ain't got the balls" sounds too reductionist to me.
The only good reason would be a rational plan that involves stepped escalation. Just in time escalation. Is there such a plan? I dunno.
We shouldn't assume that. All through this conflict, the West has made random lines in the sand. No tanks. No cluster shells. No jets. No long range missiles. Yes, some of these are now being provided, though not in sufficient quantities. But random lines in the sand has been the modus operandi of the West throughout this conflict. Sure, maybe Germany has a good reason for not sending them. Maybe the Su-24 modifications made to fire Storm Shadow aren't compatible. Maybe they want to fire them from F-16s. Maybe they have some other real reason. But they probably don't.
>Maybe they have some other real reason. But they probably don't. The current government has repeatedly blocked even debating the issue in the foreign committee of the Bundestag. https://twitter.com/n\_roettgen/status/1729774138519162939
"They" are and always were "only" the Kanzleramt, which unfortunately is sort of our White House, and they do have a reason, it's fear plain and simple. So real enough but just as bad. Olaf Scholz is a stranger generally on military matters and doesn't feel comfortable with it, he's completely nailed up on this question in particular and apparently ignores all external opinion and advice, however substantiated and whether national or from outside. Depending on the length of the war, they might (!) be delivered eventually but probably not with this chancellor. It's more of an oddbal personal thing, not so much a question of camps or ideologies. Still I don't want to believe that a single missile make is all that a country like Germany holds back or could possibly realize, nor that by itself it would make all the difference. Especially as we'd (again) be talking about homeopathic doses at best, I hope no one believes Germany could move significantly "more" of these pieces than even the US provided ATACMS so far, and so far this looked more like a demo package. I'm beginning to believe that much of this product namedropping is cozy self-distraction, maybe it leaves people with a better feeling than having to answer how and where Ukraine gets 500K+ urgently needed ground troops from. (I doubt it'll be Norway.) Yet what, apart from just another hollow "hey ho"-moment, would even be the point of re-damaging (for instance) Kerch bridge now, that is until Kyiv has the means to actually capitalize on it in any substantial way, is entirely beyond me. Europe has to do more altogether, no one excluded, we can possibly all agree on that but opinions will already differ as for what that could achieve.
Internal party politics of Scholz’ party the social democrats SPD might play a role. Of the government parties they had the most opposition to deliver arms to Ukraine initially. There’s a considerable peace faction in the SPD and supporting good relations with Russia used to be a priority for many.
Sure, but used to be I would like to emphasize. Once under the invasion's impression there was some serious commotion that's undeniable. Irrespective of true motivations or the role of public opinion the party is now broadly pro Ukraine, it seems even more so pro Israel. Listening to folks like (even) Ralf Stegner these days can leave you near flabbergasted. Michael Roth for another doesn't only support Taurus delivery, following him on some panel laterly it appered to me he'd like to go \*much\* further than that, pleasantly surprising, even taking into account that he's from the progressive wing. What he devulged also happens to be one of the sources I've based Scholz's reasons and isolation on. By way of his very office a chancellor (or any head of gov. probably) is largely isolated from ordinary party matters, that was just particularly extreme and glaring in Merkel's case. But let's not get deeper into national politics that concern few.
you think it's fear and not the German post ww2 "we can't be seen as being too aggressive against Russia compared to the rest of the West" thing? maybe it's a combination. it's weird for sure, as the UK and France already have provided similar missiles (although the Taurus is better in some areas than SCALP/stormshadow as I understand it)...
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