Ukraine Invasion - Please do not post videos showing attacks/similar

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peterwalkley said:
There's some very simple maths here. Building a replacement soldier takes ~18 years, building a tank ... a lot less.
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In some ways at least as importantly, if not more so in the immediate future, the "replacement" won't have the same level of experience so you might need to go through several others until you hit on one who survives long enough to gain that experience.

There is something to be said from your troops surviving the loss of their equipment due to enemy action in a state where they can if not learn from it, at least carry on with their existing experience in another vehicle even if it might be several months later, because even if you've got loads of "replacements" they don't have the experiences.

The attitude that the Russians seem to have of "zerging" with green troops is extremely wasteful of both manpower and equipment as you're not really giving your troops a chance to learn from what they're doing, let alone pass those lessons on.
But again that's part of the Russian doctrine, the US etc tend to recognise even in peace time the importance of experienced personnel, and try to increase the skill set of even basic troops over their time in the forces, whilst the Russians tend to rely on a much smaller number of "skilled" personnel, of which they've burned through a lot in Ukraine (IIRC they've reportedly even sent a lot of their training staff to the front, and in the west that would be a last ditch emergency thing, because you need them to train the new recruits in the basic skills needed to give them a chance of survival).
 
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stannous said:
If we're serious now rather than virtue signalling, why aren't we training crews on and supplying our remaining MBTs, we've no reasonable use for them (force projection by threat?).Buggered if I know.
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National pride.

The fact that Britain, who once produced and globally exported some of the best tanks going no longer has the ability to build tanks is something our government believe to be of high embarrassment for the nation, or would be if the public knew. The government are currently telling people that we have a new tank called Challenger 3 coming when in reality what we have coming is a German upgrade package for our existing Challenger 2 tanks, they've gone so far as to create a British/German shell company to give the contracts to in order to try and hide the fact that they're just getting the guys who build Leopards to upgrade our existing tanks to be more Leopard like.

If we gave away all our tanks and had no tanks the country would look both silly and weak, both of which would would make the government look bad, and you can see in the above paragraph the lengths they're currently going to to avoid looking bad (and to avoid actually investing in British industry but hey ho).


I_M_Weasel said:
They left Afghanistan and had suffered far fewer casualties and much less economic damage.
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It wasn't the casualties that caused the problem for them in Afghanistan, it was the time, nine years of achieving nothing but dead Soviets.


peterwalkley said:
There's some very simple maths here. Building a replacement soldier takes ~18 years, building a tank ... a lot less.
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To add to this, a lot of people try to think of the Russian army and instead imagine the Soviet army, but the two aren't really comparable, the Soviet army was better trained, equipped, commanded and also importantly when charging into bullets: more numerous.

People tend to mis-use the USSR and Russia as interchangeable terms but it's often forgotten that while Russia is the accepted successor state they only mad up half of it's population.

For every three Russians in the USSR there was one Ukrainian. Russia cannot maintain their current infantry loss rates, they may be able to absorb/replenish their equipment losses for years but at this rate they will run out of fighting age men before Ukraine does (theoretically of course, no country would actually keep fighting to that point, even Russia).
 
ubersonic said:
stannous said:
If we're serious now rather than virtue signalling, why aren't we training crews on and supplying our remaining MBTs, we've no reasonable use for them (force projection by threat?).Buggered if I know.
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National pride.

The fact that Britain, who once produced and globally exported some of the best tanks going no longer has the ability to build tanks is something our government believe to be of high embarrassment for the nation, or would be if the public knew. The government are currently telling people that we have a new tank called Challenger 3 coming when in reality what we have coming is a German upgrade package for our existing Challenger 2 tanks, they've gone so far as to create a British/German shell company to give the contracts to in order to try and hide the fact that they're just getting the guys who build Leopards to upgrade our existing tanks to be more Leopard like.

If we gave away all our tanks and had no tanks the country would look both silly and weak, both of which would would make the government look bad, and you can see in the above paragraph the lengths they're currently going to to avoid looking bad (and to avoid actually investing in British industry but hey ho).
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I once suggested on this thread doing a deal with the Americans to give the Ukrainians all of our Challenger 2s and immediately replace them with Abrams M1A2s manufactured in the USA, but was jumped on for it by our resident military experts. Clearly, the MAGA Republican Congressmen/Senator nutters will not allow 157 Abrams M1A2s to be given directly to the Ukrainians by the USA anytime soon (even though they currently have 2,000 of them sitting in a desert in long-term storage), but they could give them to us and in return we could give our 157 working Challenger 2s to the Ukrainians.

(It's obvious that it is better for us for our MBTs to be used by the experienced Ukrainians to further degrade the strength of the Russian Army now, than for us to have to use them ourselves against a more powerful and emboldened Russia in the future when they attack a NATO member state after defeating Ukraine.) The Germans would feel obliged to match our MBT contribution to Ukraine (just like they did before), so the Ukrainians would get 314 Challenger 2s and Leopard 2s out of it, which would give them an edge on the attack going forward.

Amusingly, many of the aforesaid patriotic contributors to this thread clearly voted for Boris Johnson's Conservative government in 2019 and yet he wanted to scrap all our Challenger 2 tanks and replace them with nothing (because he thought that they are not needed by the British Army nowadays).
 
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Russia was already suffering from a low birthrate and negative population growth before the war started so I cannot imagine how the amount of losses they have suffered in Ukraine is going to help
 
Maple Leaf said:
(It's obvious that it is better for us for our MBTs to be used by the experienced Ukrainians to further degrade the strength of the Russian Army now, than for us to have to use them ourselves against a more powerful and emboldened Russia in the future when they attack a NATO member state after defeating Ukraine.)
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If it comes to that is nuclear anyway so wont make any difference. If they attack a nato state can't see it being anything less than ww3
 
Maple Leaf said:
Amusingly, many of the aforesaid patriotic contributors to this thread clearly voted for Boris Johnson's Conservative government in 2019 and yet he wanted to scrap all our Challenger 2 tanks and replace them with nothing (because he thought that they are not needed by the British Army nowadays).
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The source to this is questionable ("military source") and the story was denied; but the British Army hasn't needed the Challenger 2 so he wasn't wrong. It's useful in Ukraine because they don't have the air power the UK and NATO have. If we were to fight Russia we'd likely have air superiority and would simply destroy a T-72 with a Hellfire missile fired from an Apache 5 miles away. Britain's money is better invested in our Navy and Airforce. Poland and Germany should be the backbone of a European land based Army, but realistically America is always going to do the heavy lifting anyway. Those "MAGA nutters" quite like the UK, I don't think they'd sit back and watch Europe get conquered either.
 
ubersonic said:
For every three Russians in the USSR there was one Ukrainian. Russia cannot maintain their current infantry loss rates, they may be able to absorb/replenish their equipment losses for years but at this rate they will run out of fighting age men before Ukraine does (theoretically of course, no country would actually keep fighting to that point, even Russia).
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It isn't really that simple, in a race to the bottom Ukraine can't stay combat effective vs the situation long before Russia runs out of meat for the grinder even though they are no USSR.

Ukraine needs to be enabled/continued to be enabled to fight Russia vs sophistication to avoid losing man power to the point of breaking.
 
Andromeda1983 said:
Russia was already suffering from a low birthrate and negative population growth before the war started so I cannot imagine how the amount of losses they have suffered in Ukraine is going to help
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It really is going to have a very long term impact on both countries. I think Peter Zeihan did a video about that subject for Russia.
 
While it's not helping Putin's falling population problem, the war gave Putin an excuse to conscript poor Muslims and other minorities to get rid of them. Prior to war, forecasts were that Russia would become half Muslim in the future due to the massive differences in birth rate between White Russians and the ethnic minorities in the south and east, but with hundreds of thousands of them now dead, Putin may have bought himself some extra time before orthodox is no longer the most popular religion in Russia.

Kadyrov is playing the long game, he will never be Russian president but if he keeps his family in power then maybe his great grandchildren can be
 
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Генеральний штаб ЗСУ / General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

Загальні бойові втрати противника з 24.02.22 по 02.11.23 орієнтовно склали / The total combat losses of the enemy from 24.02.22 to 02.11.23 were approximately: особового складу / personnel ‒...
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Russia losses double the manpower in just one day then the total combat loses of the UK in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's just I different mind set when your a dictator I guess.
 
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This comment from the Economist link about sums up Russia's position and view on losses:

The course of the counter-offensive has undermined Western hopes that Ukraine could use it to demonstrate that the war is unwinnable, forcing Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, to negotiate. It has also undercut General Zaluzhny’s assumption that he could stop Russia by bleeding its troops. “That was my mistake. Russia has lost at least 150,000 dead. In any other country such casualties would have stopped the war.” But not in Russia, where life is cheap and where Mr Putin’s reference points are the first and second world wars, in which Russia lost tens of millions.
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Cleaver man I have a lot of respect for him. It shows strength to admit when things haven't gone to plan and there are no easy answers to the problems facing him and the Ukrainian army.
 
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Rroff said:
What is your point?
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Did you not read it or you just ignore it?

The commander in chief clearly states the situation is not good without something to differentiate:
General Zaluzhny is desperately trying to prevent the war from settling into the trenches. “The biggest risk of an attritional trench war is that it can drag on for years and wear down the Ukrainian state,” he says. In the first world war, politics interfered before technology could make a difference. Four empires collapsed and a revolution broke out in Russia.

Mr Putin is counting on a collapse in Ukrainian morale and Western support. There is no question in General Zaluzhny’s mind that a long war favours Russia, which has a population three times and an economy ten times the size of Ukraine. “Let’s be honest, it’s a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life. And for us…the most expensive thing we have is our people,” he says. For now he has enough soldiers. But the longer the war goes on, the harder it will be to sustain. “We need to look for this solution, we need to find this gunpowder, quickly master it and use it for a speedy victory. Because sooner or later we are going to find that we simply don’t have enough people to fight.”
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If there is no specific breakthrough and he cites F16's as being less useful now, then it's going to devolve into just a war of attrition. In a country (I don't care about Russia as they are the aggressors) which as forced conscription of men of a large range of ages, if the top leadership reckons that without a breakthrough (not saying its not possible) that they will lose simply by numbers...........then it's frankly unethical to not sue for peace. It's even more unethical if people knew this from the start and sent 100,000+ brave Ukrainian men to their deaths needlessly.



edit: Also it was a genuinely quite an interesting insight into the person, character but also the military doctrine of usage of equipment. Sorry if there were too many long words in it and not enough flight radar images for you that you couldn't see the point......
 
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Orangeade said:
Did you not read it or you just ignore it?

The commander in chief clearly states the situation is not good without something to differentiate:


If there is no specific breakthrough and he cites F16's as being less useful now, then it's going to devolve into just a war of attrition. In a country (I don't care about Russia as they are the aggressors) which as forced conscription of men of a large range of ages, if the top leadership reckons that without a breakthrough (not saying its not possible) that they will lose simply by numbers...........then it's frankly unethical to not sue for peace. It's even more unethical if people knew this from the start and sent 100,000+ brave Ukrainian men to their deaths needlessly.



edit: Also it was a genuinely quite an interesting insight into the person, character but also the military doctrine of usage of equipment. Sorry if there were too many long words in it and not enough flight radar images for you that you couldn't see the point......
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It was a long article which covered a lot of points - you just threw it in without elaboration on what your point was...

...and then straight to being a **** towards me with infantile belittlement - despite most of what is covered in that article is what I've been saying all along.

Albeit I my conclusion to those points is different to your own - thinking anything can be gained through suing for peace at this point is lunacy after everything we've seen, Putin/Russia will not respect it.

What the US/the West needs to wake up to is what it actually requires for Ukraine to put Russia on the back foot and make actual progress, it isn't so hopeless though many windows for achieving it have been lost, even without grinding down Russia's man power it is possible to make the situation tactically untenable for them so that no Russian soldier or commander will even want to be in Ukraine, more so than many of the mobilised probably don't want to be there now.

EDIT: I don't know how it can be shown any clearer really - Putin has shown he is quite happy to sustain WW2 level losses to get what he wants - he isn't going to settle now for simply carving off a bit of Ukraine, maybe use any kind of settlement to rebuild his forces, he'll happily send many 100s of thousands more to their deaths to get back the whole of Ukraine - even if it wasn't his original intentions, and the opening strategy tends to suggest it was, his mentality won't let him stop there - same as I don't think he set out with a larger conquest of Europe in (serious) mind, but if he'd rolled over Ukraine in a few days while the West sat back weak and ineffectual he just wouldn't be able to stop there it just isn't in his nature.

EDIT2: Those 70+K Ukrainian deaths are not in vain as tragic as it is, I don't think people broadly have any notion the consequences of Russia sweeping through Ukraine and the security nightmare that would have brought to Europe's doorstep, while many think NATO/nukes would be a deterrent, and in many ways they are, it would not be sufficient for the situation which would increasingly unfold.
 
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