NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
Not to mention that: 1)Since then warfare itself changed a lot: better antitank weapons, much better optics and firecontrol, introduction of drones, much better guided muntion, thermovision etc. 2)Russia is useing outdated tanks costing 8-20 times less than Abramses. 3)It's a war in which both sides can't reach their oponents supply centers: Ukraine because it doesnt have the range and Russia because weapons are comming from west and large part of logistics is happening in Poland and Slovakia. 4)Neither side has air-dominance, while during GulfWar allies had air superiority during entire conflict and insertion of land forces was preceded by long bombing campaign
I think a fundamental flaw that also makes most of these loss stats completely meaningless is, that they do not really look at ukrainian losses in detail. Of course I understand why analysts shy away from trying to give good estimation for ukraines losses, but without them, russian losses mean nothing. If they degrade ukraine faster than western aid/russian involuntary donations can pour in, then it would still be good for them. They can even afford to lose stuff at a higher rate since they have more of it, as long as the curves of russian stocks depleting and ukrainian stocks don't meet before russia has won.
I am not claiming that russia is winning the war of attrition atm, just ranting about something that has bothered me since the beginning and made me lose respect for a lot of supposed experts. Its usually done for flashy news headlines and the analysis can be boiled down to 'things are still blowing up'. I hope this war ends soon and when it does, it will be very interesting to have military historians and analysts do deep dives on it a decade later, so we can get a mostly propaganda free assessment of how things actually played out. I am very curious about ukrainian operations in detail, they already had some great exploits during the donbass war, even after you wiped away all the propaganda.
On October 05 2022 16:53 Artesimo wrote: I think a fundamental flaw that also makes most of these loss stats completely meaningless is, that they do not really look at ukrainian losses in detail. Of course I understand why analysts shy away from trying to give good estimation for ukraines losses, but without them, russian losses mean nothing. If they degrade ukraine faster than western aid/russian involuntary donations can pour in, then it would still be good for them. They can even afford to lose stuff at a higher rate since they have more of it, as long as the curves of russian stocks depleting and ukrainian stocks don't meet before russia has won.
I am not claiming that russia is winning the war of attrition atm, just ranting about something that has bothered me since the beginning and made me lose respect for a lot of supposed experts. Its usually done for flashy news headlines and the analysis can be boiled down to 'things are still blowing up'. I hope this war ends soon and when it does, it will be very interesting to have military historians and analysts do deep dives on it a decade later, so we can get a mostly propaganda free assessment of how things actually played out. I am very curious about ukrainian operations in detail, they already had some great exploits during the donbass war, even after you wiped away all the propaganda.
You don't really need super detailed stats for that. It all boiled down to Russia being unprepared for a protracted war. At the beginning of this conflict UA had 150-200k soldiers. Russia attacked them with 180k troops. The fact of the matter is that if you're on the offensive your forces should outnumber the defenders about 4 to 1 in order to have a successful invasion of foreign territory. This means that Russia should start with 600-800k troops to be able to secure its victory in case their week long blitz didn't achieve its objectives. Home turf advantage is really big in war, not just in terms of morale and supplies but even stuff like ease of retreating when necessary. Russians are suffering terrible losses and their killed/wounded ratio is beyond insane. Their medics are poorly equipped and as they retreat they leave their wounded behind to die a slow death.
Just check out Russian medic's kit:
The most they can save their troops from is if they hurt their finger while opening a can of food...
On October 05 2022 16:53 Artesimo wrote: I think a fundamental flaw that also makes most of these loss stats completely meaningless is, that they do not really look at ukrainian losses in detail. Of course I understand why analysts shy away from trying to give good estimation for ukraines losses, but without them, russian losses mean nothing. If they degrade ukraine faster than western aid/russian involuntary donations can pour in, then it would still be good for them. They can even afford to lose stuff at a higher rate since they have more of it, as long as the curves of russian stocks depleting and ukrainian stocks don't meet before russia has won.
I am not claiming that russia is winning the war of attrition atm, just ranting about something that has bothered me since the beginning and made me lose respect for a lot of supposed experts. Its usually done for flashy news headlines and the analysis can be boiled down to 'things are still blowing up'. I hope this war ends soon and when it does, it will be very interesting to have military historians and analysts do deep dives on it a decade later, so we can get a mostly propaganda free assessment of how things actually played out. I am very curious about ukrainian operations in detail, they already had some great exploits during the donbass war, even after you wiped away all the propaganda.
You don't really need super detailed stats for that. It all boiled down to Russia being unprepared for a protracted war. At the beginning of this conflict UA had 150-200k soldiers. Russia attacked them with 180k troops. The fact of the matter is that if you're on the offensive your forces should outnumber the defenders about 4 to 1 in order to have a successful invasion of foreign territory. This means that Russia should start with 600-800k troops to be able to secure its victory in case their week long blitz didn't achieve its objectives. Home turf advantage is really big in war, not just in terms of morale and supplies but even stuff like ease of retreating when necessary. Russians are suffering terrible losses and their killed/wounded ratio is beyond insane. Their medics are poorly equipped and as they retreat they leave their wounded behind to die a slow death.
Just check out Russian medic's kit:
The most they can save their troops from is if they hurt their finger while opening a can of food...
Looks a fair amount like my first aid kit. But I'm sure a random picture from discord is a fair and credible source of what Russian paramedics use. Are you sure this isn't just the (rather grimy) first aid kit issues to a random soldier... or hiker in the woods?
On October 05 2022 16:53 Artesimo wrote: I think a fundamental flaw that also makes most of these loss stats completely meaningless is, that they do not really look at ukrainian losses in detail. Of course I understand why analysts shy away from trying to give good estimation for ukraines losses, but without them, russian losses mean nothing. If they degrade ukraine faster than western aid/russian involuntary donations can pour in, then it would still be good for them. They can even afford to lose stuff at a higher rate since they have more of it, as long as the curves of russian stocks depleting and ukrainian stocks don't meet before russia has won.
I am not claiming that russia is winning the war of attrition atm, just ranting about something that has bothered me since the beginning and made me lose respect for a lot of supposed experts. Its usually done for flashy news headlines and the analysis can be boiled down to 'things are still blowing up'. I hope this war ends soon and when it does, it will be very interesting to have military historians and analysts do deep dives on it a decade later, so we can get a mostly propaganda free assessment of how things actually played out. I am very curious about ukrainian operations in detail, they already had some great exploits during the donbass war, even after you wiped away all the propaganda.
You don't really need super detailed stats for that. It all boiled down to Russia being unprepared for a protracted war. At the beginning of this conflict UA had 150-200k soldiers. Russia attacked them with 180k troops. The fact of the matter is that if you're on the offensive your forces should outnumber the defenders about 4 to 1 in order to have a successful invasion of foreign territory. This means that Russia should start with 600-800k troops to be able to secure its victory in case their week long blitz didn't achieve its objectives. Home turf advantage is really big in war, not just in terms of morale and supplies but even stuff like ease of retreating when necessary. Russians are suffering terrible losses and their killed/wounded ratio is beyond insane. Their medics are poorly equipped and as they retreat they leave their wounded behind to die a slow death.
Just check out Russian medic's kit:
The most they can save their troops from is if they hurt their finger while opening a can of food...
You are missing my point. Loss numbers for only one side tell you very little of how significant or meaningful they are, they mostly just tell you about the scale of human tragedy. I specifically lamented only this and said that I am not making any statement on the feasibility of the russian army. My point still stands, russia losing 44 tanks in 1 day means very little if they killed 55 ukrainian tanks in exchange for example. So if someone tells me only their losses for one day its just telling me that shit got blown up. It tells me nothing about how significant those losses are in the context of the war, for that you have to factor in other information - like you are currently doing by trying to make sense of their general equipment.
Not really a main point, but I see this X:1 advantage stuff being thrown around a lot, usually its misunderstood though / is a very simplified explanation for people who don't have anything to do with the military/war. You don't need a 4 to 1 (or whatever ther number. Usually I hear 3:1) advantage on the whole front, its just a statistical rule for specific operations when assuming comparable equipment and quality of troops (and abused some terrain features / intelligence etc ofc, I am trying to simplify it a bit though). In practice, this number can be much higher/much lower due to position, equipment, quality of troops etc. I don't think ukraine has a 3:1 advantage atm for example, but in their kharkiv offensive, they concentrated troops to achieve a local superiority in manpower and/or equipment/capability and used it to break through. They do not have to outnumber russia 4:1 on the whole front, and yet they successfully conduct offensive operations against russian troops in defensive positions - not doing so is something russia got criticised a lot for in the initial stages of this war. If they had done so, we might be looking at a completely different situation right now. Sources who now proclaim that russia was never able to win just because of the number of troops can be safely disregarded. Russia did a lot more to screw up, and ukraine did a lot more to fight them off than simply deploying more than a fourth of russias troops.
On October 05 2022 22:03 {CC}StealthBlue wrote: It also appears that Russia appears to be getting ready to annex Belarus with leadership of Belarus helping.
I was writing about that in spring. Though I doubt that Lukashenko is that eager to help. The whole "Allied state of Russia and Belarus" back in the 90's was in a lot of ways his affair, so he could become a leader of Soviet Union 2.0. Due to our government in the 90's being retards who led country to a default, and our president being a drunk joke, Lukashenko and his ideas (increased nationalisation of the economy with only small and medium-sized business being in private hands, increased social spending, state-funded work projects) were very popular in Russia where basically all large-scale business was privatized by oligarchs, who used it for their personal gains, while a lot of common people were literally surviving on potatoes, since they "didn't manage to enter the market economy". So if he would be eligible to run elections in Russia, say, in the 1999, the had great odds in his favour.
But then Putin came, and took the mantle of savior of Russia from the chaos of the 90's, and the integration between countries didn't come to pass (though a lot of provisions remained working, like cheaper gas for Belarus, economic cooperation, easier border crossing etc), and Lukashenko generally tried to push further from Russia, until 2020, when he survived on our support, and I guess owed us one for that.
On October 05 2022 16:53 Artesimo wrote: I think a fundamental flaw that also makes most of these loss stats completely meaningless is, that they do not really look at ukrainian losses in detail. Of course I understand why analysts shy away from trying to give good estimation for ukraines losses, but without them, russian losses mean nothing. If they degrade ukraine faster than western aid/russian involuntary donations can pour in, then it would still be good for them. They can even afford to lose stuff at a higher rate since they have more of it, as long as the curves of russian stocks depleting and ukrainian stocks don't meet before russia has won.
I am not claiming that russia is winning the war of attrition atm, just ranting about something that has bothered me since the beginning and made me lose respect for a lot of supposed experts. Its usually done for flashy news headlines and the analysis can be boiled down to 'things are still blowing up'. I hope this war ends soon and when it does, it will be very interesting to have military historians and analysts do deep dives on it a decade later, so we can get a mostly propaganda free assessment of how things actually played out. I am very curious about ukrainian operations in detail, they already had some great exploits during the donbass war, even after you wiped away all the propaganda.
You don't really need super detailed stats for that. It all boiled down to Russia being unprepared for a protracted war. At the beginning of this conflict UA had 150-200k soldiers. Russia attacked them with 180k troops. The fact of the matter is that if you're on the offensive your forces should outnumber the defenders about 4 to 1 in order to have a successful invasion of foreign territory. This means that Russia should start with 600-800k troops to be able to secure its victory in case their week long blitz didn't achieve its objectives. Home turf advantage is really big in war, not just in terms of morale and supplies but even stuff like ease of retreating when necessary. Russians are suffering terrible losses and their killed/wounded ratio is beyond insane. Their medics are poorly equipped and as they retreat they leave their wounded behind to die a slow death.
Just check out Russian medic's kit:
The most they can save their troops from is if they hurt their finger while opening a can of food...
Looks a fair amount like my first aid kit. But I'm sure a random picture from discord is a fair and credible source of what Russian paramedics use. Are you sure this isn't just the (rather grimy) first aid kit issues to a random soldier... or hiker in the woods?
I can confirm that our regular medkits for corpsmen are certainly not up to the NATO standards, though even things presented allow for more than a finger bleeding, you don't generally use tourniquets for those. From the stories of one medic serving on the front (though he was a surgeon, not regular corpsman), field hospitals were equipped adequatly, at least where he worked in Kherson area.
On October 05 2022 16:53 Artesimo wrote: I think a fundamental flaw that also makes most of these loss stats completely meaningless is, that they do not really look at ukrainian losses in detail. Of course I understand why analysts shy away from trying to give good estimation for ukraines losses, but without them, russian losses mean nothing. If they degrade ukraine faster than western aid/russian involuntary donations can pour in, then it would still be good for them. They can even afford to lose stuff at a higher rate since they have more of it, as long as the curves of russian stocks depleting and ukrainian stocks don't meet before russia has won.
I am not claiming that russia is winning the war of attrition atm, just ranting about something that has bothered me since the beginning and made me lose respect for a lot of supposed experts. Its usually done for flashy news headlines and the analysis can be boiled down to 'things are still blowing up'. I hope this war ends soon and when it does, it will be very interesting to have military historians and analysts do deep dives on it a decade later, so we can get a mostly propaganda free assessment of how things actually played out. I am very curious about ukrainian operations in detail, they already had some great exploits during the donbass war, even after you wiped away all the propaganda.
You don't really need super detailed stats for that. It all boiled down to Russia being unprepared for a protracted war. At the beginning of this conflict UA had 150-200k soldiers. Russia attacked them with 180k troops. The fact of the matter is that if you're on the offensive your forces should outnumber the defenders about 4 to 1 in order to have a successful invasion of foreign territory. This means that Russia should start with 600-800k troops to be able to secure its victory in case their week long blitz didn't achieve its objectives. Home turf advantage is really big in war, not just in terms of morale and supplies but even stuff like ease of retreating when necessary. Russians are suffering terrible losses and their killed/wounded ratio is beyond insane. Their medics are poorly equipped and as they retreat they leave their wounded behind to die a slow death.
Just check out Russian medic's kit:
The most they can save their troops from is if they hurt their finger while opening a can of food...
You are missing my point. Loss numbers for only one side tell you very little of how significant or meaningful they are, they mostly just tell you about the scale of human tragedy. I specifically lamented only this and said that I am not making any statement on the feasibility of the russian army. My point still stands, russia losing 44 tanks in 1 day means very little if they killed 55 ukrainian tanks in exchange for example. So if someone tells me only their losses for one day its just telling me that shit got blown up. It tells me nothing about how significant those losses are in the context of the war, for that you have to factor in other information - like you are currently doing by trying to make sense of their general equipment.
Not really a main point, but I see this X:1 advantage stuff being thrown around a lot, usually its misunderstood though / is a very simplified explanation for people who don't have anything to do with the military/war. You don't need a 4 to 1 (or whatever ther number. Usually I hear 3:1) advantage on the whole front, its just a statistical rule for specific operations when assuming comparable equipment and quality of troops (and abused some terrain features / intelligence etc ofc, I am trying to simplify it a bit though). In practice, this number can be much higher/much lower due to position, equipment, quality of troops etc. I don't think ukraine has a 3:1 advantage atm for example, but in their kharkiv offensive, they concentrated troops to achieve a local superiority in manpower and equipment/capability and used it to break through. They do not have to outnumber russia 4:1 on the whole front, and yet they successfully conduct offensive operations against russian troops in defensive positions - not doing so is something russia got criticised a lot for in the initial stages of this war. If they had done so, we might be looking at a completely different situation right now. Sources who now proclaim that russia was never able to win just because of the number of troops can be safely disregarded. Russia did a lot more to screw up, and ukraine did a lot more to fight them off than simply deploying more than a fourth of russias troops.
3-to-1 advantage comes back even to Sun Tzu's "Art of War" I believe, but this ratio works only for the equal force (though it sorta applies for this war). Iraqi Freedom, Six Day War, German offensive on France (Case Yellow) were conducted quickly and with decisive results by the numerically (at least in ground assets, though it may just show the importance of air superiority) inferior force. You are also right about the focused point of attack getting all the support from available assets which allows to create a much greater local superiority (not necessary in numbers, but in firepower) to allow for breakthrough and exploitation that would force other defence line to collapse due to the threat to the communication lines and being surrounded.
I wouldn't agree on "Ukraine hasn't 3:1 advanage atm". They certainly do, in manpower at least, maybe even more than that. They were conducting wave after wave of mobilization for at least half a year, and their own officials claimed that the UA army size is from 700k in May https://www.euronews.com/2022/05/21/live-sievierodonetsk-shelling-brutal-and-pointless-zelenskyy-says-as-russia-continues-offe to 1 million in July https://www.axios.com/2022/06/15/ukraine-1000-casualties-day-donbas-arakhamia While no estimate have given Russia a number of more than 200 000 soldiers at the front at any given time. Hence the mobilization in Russia, since it is not able to hold on just amount of firepower, since enough troops were trained in the UA Reserve Corps and equipped with NATO equipment, while large mass of poorly equipped TDF and battered regular brigades were holding out during spring and summer. A lot of similarities to Barbarossa campaign actually - deep first initial strikes, rapid and large scale mobilization of the defender, firepower against manpower at the start of the war and Germany also didn't switch to a total war economy up until early 1942 I believe, when it suffered a significant defeat (though army of course was quite mobilized, but it was more normal back then). Though the difference is that current Russian command is way less proficient than German one was.
For any ratios to be meaningful, you would need to consider force multipliers. Three guys with a tank can do a lot more than 3 guys with a knife. But that is excessively hard to do well, and usually those force multipliers are very situational. If they are fighting in a tight cave, the three guys with a knife might be doing even better than the 3 guys with the tanks which cannot move or fire.
Regarding the start of this discussion, for numbers to be useful, comparing them with other numbers can be very helpful, and depending on what you want to look at, different numbers may be a smart idea to compare.
If you want to see who is doing better, comparing russian and ukrainian losses would be sensible. If you want to see how long this can be kept up, comparing losses to production and stores is sensible.
It is true that "40 tanks" on its own is not really informative, though.
Ukraine mobilized from day one and has been putting constant time and effort into training more and more of their troops. Most of the Territorial defence force units should probably be renamed at this point. tends of thousands of troops have received training in NATO countries during the war. Russia is just now activating their mobilization efforts. Mobilizing and training troops is an extremely painful and complex activity to do during a war. A lot of the vets that went to Ukraine at the start complained that they didn't get to fight and were forced to train fresh Ukrainian conscripts. Russia now has to reactivate its mobilization infrastructure and they're finding that a lot of the things they counted on from the soviet days are either wholly missing (like the uniforms) or were not maintained well at all (the lack of beds or obstacle courses even for camps).
The troops mobilized will not be good for doing anything but holding a trench line for months. Months that they now will spend in winter. Ukrainian TDF's were able to spend this time learning how to survive and fight in warm summer months.
Also I must emphasize one of the great tragedies. we don't have numbers from any side on how many men were conscripted to fight in the occupied areas for russia. these troops have been given the least amount of equipment and support and have been forced to fight at the front. We may only find out after the war the numbers that have been forced to fight and how many have died. The biggest loser in this war will be the people of Luhasnk and Donnesk.
BBC Russia is reporting that in the fighting for Lyman over half of the 3rd Guards Spetnaz unit has been lost. Also reports that the Russian army is starting the evacuation of wounded, and equipment across the Dnipro river.
More great progress! Liberated areas were confirmed, plus some previously unconfirmed. Also, Kharkiv has apparently been liberated as the Russian forces have reportedly withdrawn to the Luhansk border? Is this confirmed?
On October 06 2022 04:37 Magic Powers wrote: More great progress! Liberated areas were confirmed, plus some previously unconfirmed. Also, Kharkiv has apparently been liberated as the Russian forces have reportedly withdrawn to the Luhansk border? Is this confirmed?
There seem to be kind of grey area in the remains of Kharkov region, where both sides conduct recon missions, without having firm control on the area. Main Russian forces seem to pull back from the area.
I also would agree a lot with Sermokala's previous post (though UA mobilization had a ton of issues of its own).
On October 06 2022 01:46 Sermokala wrote: Ukraine mobilized from day one and has been putting constant time and effort into training more and more of their troops. Most of the Territorial defence force units should probably be renamed at this point. tends of thousands of troops have received training in NATO countries during the war. Russia is just now activating their mobilization efforts. Mobilizing and training troops is an extremely painful and complex activity to do during a war. A lot of the vets that went to Ukraine at the start complained that they didn't get to fight and were forced to train fresh Ukrainian conscripts. Russia now has to reactivate its mobilization infrastructure and they're finding that a lot of the things they counted on from the soviet days are either wholly missing (like the uniforms) or were not maintained well at all (the lack of beds or obstacle courses even for camps).
The troops mobilized will not be good for doing anything but holding a trench line for months. Months that they now will spend in winter. Ukrainian TDF's were able to spend this time learning how to survive and fight in warm summer months.
Also I must emphasize one of the great tragedies. we don't have numbers from any side on how many men were conscripted to fight in the occupied areas for russia. these troops have been given the least amount of equipment and support and have been forced to fight at the front. We may only find out after the war the numbers that have been forced to fight and how many have died. The biggest loser in this war will be the people of Luhasnk and Donnesk.
Putin's regime would have you believe they're protecting these people but it's been pretty clear that their goal is the opposite. The whole point is to have them killed, and if they happen to take some "nationalists" with them, that's just a bonus. Sickening, like everything else about this invasion.
If you want a bit of a break from the battlefield analysis and nuke talk, here's a Soviet-born political philosopher sharing his thoughts on what the hell is happening in Russia. For instance, he's talking about Putin's propaganda generally being very effective at what it's designed to do which is to confuse, pacify and depoliticize people - except in the case of mobilization where it's having the opposite effect (besides confusion I suppose).
Well worth a listen, both of these guys make great content.
It appears that Ukraine is no longer short of artillery shells due to the fact that Russia has left such huge stockpiles behind.
Ammunition left behind by fleeing Russian troops is filling Ukraine's depleted reserves and powering its counter-offensive, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Russia's hurried retreat from Kharkiv in early September saw soldiers abandoning a mass of hardware, including tanks, other armored vehicles and howitzers.
They also left behind huge quantities of Soviet-caliber artillery shells, the paper reported.
"The Russians no longer have a firepower advantage," one unnamed artillery officer told the paper.
"We smashed up all their artillery units before launching the offensive, and then we started to move ahead so fast that they didn't even have time to fuel up and load their tanks. They just fled and left everything behind."
That equipment is being turned on Russian forces as Ukraine advances beyond the recently recaptured city of Lyman in the Donbas region, the WSJ reported.
The recapture of Lyman provides strategic advantages as city served as a supply and logistics hub for Russia's operation in the region.
Also this threads favorite topic: Tanks. The EU Parliament voted in favor, 500 to 26, for member states to send Battle Tanks to Ukraine. Not binding apparently, only a recommendation.
EPT![[image loading]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/947249440094322739/1024725720871743558/unknown.jpeg)
![[image loading]](https://i.gyazo.com/035cd8ed4aec8b4ef5b37952ba20fa04.jpg)
