Russo-Ukrainian War Thread - Page 520

On August 06 2023 09:16 Kerotan wrote:


I'm breaking a 3 year old not posting streak to respond to this trash.

This is a joke.

Macgregor makes some really interesting and valid points about ISTAR (Intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance) and then waffles for quite some time.

I urge you to engage critically with this material, you are not contributing to this discussion in a meaningful way. In fairness to you, plenty of other posters are just posting links with very limited commentary, but they aren't all parroting opinions.

Lets break down this video and do some "midnight, I need to go to bed" critical analysis.

Discussion of the offensive, and how it seems to be going no where - this is very fair and testable statement, if offensives are judged in ground gained, then the current offensive is lacklustre.

Tally of bodies comment - This is presumed and its likely that killed and injured will be high, especially as the attacker usually suffers heavier casualties. However, I've not seen reliable material on how many people have died on either side.

"I just received some overhead surveillance material from Ukraine" - where is this material coming from? He is currently a retired colonel, so we can presuppose this material is open sourced. This is not to say the material is of poor quality. Others have demonstrated the use of OS satellite imagery and come to interesting conclusions. Its entirely possible that this material shows 123,000 freshly dug graves, but without verification we should be wary of this leaned on heavily in his argument.

"and the estimate on the bottom of the picture is that 400k Ukrainian soldiers have been killed so far" - from whom? and what does the relevance of a picture of 123k graves have to do with that figure?

To be charitable, perhaps he has buddies in the US intelligence community who leaked this material whom presumably have no motivation to soft peddle the stats in classified material. To be uncharitable, perhaps he got this image off 4chan.

The comments on re-fighting WW2 - this is the generally interesting comment that I mentioned up top. I would argue contrawise to his position: that Russia is doing ISTAR better than Ukraine, but this is an area that warrants close inspection and data that is simply not available to me or other civilians.

I heartily agree with his sentiment that nothing happens in eastern Ukraine without the Russians knowing about it. We can quibble how much: but the proliferation of drones and the reams of footage coming out of this war attests to this being a reasonable idea.

The downlink stuff: I have no idea if the Russian C3 stuff is better, might be: a big unknown for folks outside the Russian military or foreign intelligence communities.

Again, a really interesting point about air defences! Even as a casual observer this passes the smell test, the amount of GBAD that Russia and Ukraine have has relegated the use of conventional air power to the side lines. Helicopters are making pitch up attacks and jets have had to stay out of reach of s300 and launch standoff munitions.Let it not be said that I'm being partisan!

Focus on territory, rather than destruction - This is a really curious point, Douglas earlier remarks that the offensive is going nowhere- did he mean its not making any ground or is not destroying the required materiel? This is really hard to test - if the Ukrainians are destroying large amount of materiel, they ain't saying nor are the Russians and both have very good reasons not to say. I would conclude that they aren't, and we are witnessing a force making slow headway into a prepared position.

-Edit OSINT could be used to test this point, however there are biases as to what will be represented - Ships sunk and damaged will be reliable data points, they are big, few and hard to conceal their loss. A Tank knocked out by a man portable AT weapon, somewhat reliable. A piece of material behind the lines disabled by a missile or artillery, somewhat under represented.

The non-sequitur about how "the west" has seemingly corrupted the Ukrainians with shit military tactics is odd, and very much the trope of "we used to know how to fight wars" "back when America was strong"

Broken armies versus defeated armies. A lot of what he says in conjecture, but if the army is indeed melting away - then you would be think large Russian territorial gains would follow. These may not serve a tactical purpose, but it would strengthen Russia's hand at the peace table, and the enforcement of their "war goals".

We could ended this war in march - neutrality. I don't know how to respond to this because a lot of what is refers is utter bollocks. Leaving aside the claim that Ukrainian negotiation team said we could live with neutrality (when, where), the idea that Russia didn't want a Foward operating base from NATO which could be used to attack them on their border is nonsense.

First, before the conflict, there were 5 NATO countries on their border, there are now 6. Second, Why does a defensive alliance want to go war with Russia, a nuclear armed power, who has been not been shy of nuclear brinksmanship? What sound reason is there? what credible threat? Is NATO going to war with Russia because we hate how much they love the "family" in Russia.

Trying my best here: Nato wants all the energy resources in an increasingly energy starved world, so we fight a huge war with both sides having Nukes, in a war were hundreds of thousands of people will die (judging by the casualty theory on display here), so we can melt the planet faster. It doesn't pass any sense at all, and while irrational behaviour is possible, irrationality on this scale is incomprehensible.

"they don't want to march on Poland etc, if they did they would be marching on kiev right now" - They tried marching on the capital and it went really badly for them. To head any rebuttals off at the pass: You do not usually conduct an air assault on a city airport without the intent to take the city, because without reinforcement those airborne troops will die.

"The oppressed Russians in Ukraine" - A huge can of worms. For brevity I'm not going to go there, but will mention that when Doug says "this is what the war has always been about", the Russian message on the war has never consistent, and readily bumps into reality onto a ready basis.

"Ukrainians are bad" - Ukrainians have capacity the be bad. The evidence needs to be weighed before any conclusions could be drawn.

"Host just states money is being stolen by Ukrainian oligarchies" - Entirely plausible again, but like this is something you actively believe in if you are already in the echo chamber.

A lot of discussion about Trump which really doesn't say anything I can critique.

A good point about the construction of militaries, which then devolves into "we've contracted this war out" and then into rambling conspiratorial thinking, which editorialising here is"we are using actual warfare to fight the culture war".

To hear him tell it, the economy of Europe is in shambles and I was stabbed to death 17 times yesterday on the streets of Londonstan all because I wouldn't say mahshallah.
This is a waste of time to rebut: however, Russian is the one hold out of anti-globalist sentiment? So China, Korea and Japan are all multicultural paradises where everyone has six genders and changes their race after lunch? This is nonsense.

I'm fully expecting you to not engage with any of the critique - please surprise me as I watched and listened to this journalistic abortion three times, in attempt to broaden my outlook and actually engage with content outside my wheelhouse.

Even if you don't engage, you can do better than just posting a video. As you are still posting on a forum in 2023, you clearly care about something.

TL:DR
You got a source for that statistic?
MY SOURCE IS THAT I MADE IT THE FUCK UP