Ukraine’s Top Military Leadership: We Are Starting to Win, Russia Is Starting to Lose
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30mm is probably unsuited, you don't need that calibre vs a drone, you need agility, and higher RoF.
The detection abilities all look undercooked for me too, some sort of mesh radar, infrared, and visible spectrum cameras combined with high speed classification network with targeting abilities, and realtime information about current friendly movements is still necessary to identify and confidently neutralise enemy drones. To counter jamming some sort of fibreoptic umbilical system and/or lifi would be necessary too.
And I know its being worked on, but people are being pretty hush hush about that. The challenge then being productionising these systems, it's all very well on a test bed, but the front line has some rather extreme conditions for hardware, and software, and the manufacturing of these integrated systems is challenging too. You'll need loads of them to really be effective. Mobile big dog type platforms would also be fabulous to run alongside a tank brigade
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The power requirements for lasers that can damage drones is pretty extreme. Ye cannae change the laws of physics captain! And so, deployments to mobile platforms likely to be probably more suited to a dedicated support type role IMO. Mounted to AFVs perhaps. LFVs anyone?
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Honest question, what makes Ukraine troops that much better trained?
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It's not that they will run out of people. They have people, but to keep recruitment levels so high and equipment manufacturing so high they are overcharging their economy. Right now in Russia there are three types of jobs if you want to make money afaik, work in the military complex (arms manufacturing), in the gas extraction industry or directly in the military.
It's Dutch disease x100, if the state at some point stops being able to fund the war machine, their economy collapses.
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My guess: it was doubling down on his bet made in 2014, which in turn was triggerd by chance (protests over an EU accession treaty triggering a revolution in Ukraine) and opportunism.
Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and his popularity ratings soared. He allowed the conflict to be frozen and undertook a campaign of military reforms, but Ukraine also undertook their own.
He subsequently isolated himself to such degree that he was surrounded by yes-men, and they told him Ukraine could be conquered with 200 000 men (and was about to collapse anyway, etc). He thought it would be over in days and told them to get it done.
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they will run out of capable troops
I think you've got the wrong tense there, comrade.
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I just occurred to me that Europe has probably been kinda soft and deferring to the USA to take the lead on this.
But if the USA drops their support it might actually be for the best. It will allow NATO and the EU to finally stand on their own and become a superpower in their own right - which can help stabilise the region and also ultimately the world as the USA implodes.
It might not go this way but it's a new world order I would prefer than the current state of affairs or dictatorships taking the international lead
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Russia ran out of weapons and is now sharing a single Mosin Nagant between 100 men.
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Because Ukranian troops have 2 things Russian troops will never have.
- Commanders that don't use idiotic human wave attacks.
- Shoes.
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Well the Ukrainians are at least trying to train their troops while Russia has been caught shoving raw recruits into the front line after literally no training. Those reports are obviously magnified by each side's information ops but we do know the Russians have a survivability problem. The two biggest things you learn in basic are what to do when someone starts shooting, and how to hit things with your rifle. Everything else is extra that's meant to make you able to use specialized equipment. The real learning environment has always been combat itself. And in this arena the Ukrainians are absolutely dominant.
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"Capable" in this context doesn't just refer to training alone.
As laid out in the video, Russian recruits are getting older and older (as in: have sometimes even fought in Soviet era conflicts) and recruitment standards are dropped more and more (apparently having Schizophrenia is OK for a Russian soldier) to keep a steady influx of warm bodies. Next, Russian recruits appear to be broadly separated into two groups: The meat shields who are rushed to the front with minimal training to plug the biggest holes in the units (stark examples include only multiple days between reported recruitment and death). The second group is going through a more traditional training regiment but also shortened. This shortening also applies to officer candidates.
In short: Recruits are getting less physically capable due to the average age increasing drastically over time, and militarily less capable due to shortened or basically nonexistent training.
As for the Ukrainians: I expect the video with analysis on their casualties and recruitment to drop this week.
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To add to this, Putin can recruit from the poorest regions for a while, but at some point he needs to get men from the larger cities. The last thing he wants is protests from Moskou etc. The average person from Moskou hadn't had that much negative effects from the war yet. But if you, your son or father is forced to the battlefield it's a different story.
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But... war never changes!
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Very credible
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I just tag them. For example the guy a few threads above arguing that the conflict is too far from the USA and they shouldn't involve themselves is tagged "stalin apologist".
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This is true to an extent. But in 1862 the US didn't have to worry about an invasion from Canada. If the Russians remove too much from the Far East though, China is going to rename Vladivostok to Haishenwai. Also ISIS is going to start infiltrating from Central Asia, again. Russia has real security concerns on it's borders that require a real military presence. They could not easily strip their border guard (a national paramilitary police that's commonly included in their military headcount) or border military units. They also cannot strip the major metro areas of their paramilitary units, such as the elite units guarding Moscow. Otherwise the next Prigozhin could succeed.
He already stripped what he could from the Far East at the start of the war so now he's largely left with units on NATO borders that haven't been called in yet. As much as it sucks, we all know NATO isn't going to attack Russia. And in fact this is where most of the reinforcing units are coming from for things like the Kursk Salient.
The next issue is battlefield saturation. In the American Civil War how many troops you could field was largely limited by control of water ways and rail lines. With modern vehicles and supply chains the limit is reached differently these days. Basically there's a point at which if you add another division to a line it starts to be detrimental instead of helpful. They will actually get into each other's way. This has remained largely unchanged since World War 2. And in fact the number of troops Russia has in Ukraine is reminiscent of World War 2, In June they reported they have 700,000 troops in Ukraine. This is likely the maximum amount of pressure they can put in the area.
So as long as Ukraine can deal with that number of troops efficiently, they could theoretically fight forever.
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I'm sorry but it's far more important to make sure the Russians don't get that ammo resupply. Combat sucks.
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As much as that made me laugh it's not true. I wish it was though.
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I hope you're right. Because in general the reaction of the Russian population to the war has been so meek, I'm starting to doubt it would be any different once recruitment starts hitting the biggest cities.
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If the Russians remove too much from the Far East though, China is going to rename Vladivostok to Haishenwai.
Are there any real pretensions on the territory on China's part? It sounds like it would just cause more problems than it's worth (though it's not like that fact prevented Putin from attacking Ukraine), and possibly kill off BRICS.
