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KV7

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Everything posted by KV7

  1. Perhaps the solution is to put local attack helicopters etc. into the standard artillery fires and FVP drone protocol. I cannot see why a platoon commander etc. cannot just ask for a support mission against e.g some armour in a vicinity and let some dedicated command unit work out the best form of attacking it and make the required requests. The additional difficulty for attack helicopters is their longer range, so you need a higher level unit to allocate the resources.
  2. I agree. I suspect one reason they have for using large bombs is that you get more effect per glide-guidance kit, and so if the kits are the bottleneck, and carriers are not, you can get somewhat better effects at the cost of doing more sorties.
  3. It seems to be almost impossible short of a near total collapse. If it were to be done, I think you would need to establish some bridgehead in some unexpected location, possibly using airmobile infantry, and then rely on boats for resupply, and then be able to expand this enough to take some actual crossing with a bridge, or to just create a buffer that will make the use of barges or pontoon bridges good enough. If Ukraine was so stretched that this were feasible, Russia also could more easily cut Ukraine in two with a thrust north along the eastern bank of the Dnipr and either ending the war that way, or could push on having the advantage of potentially crossing at many more points.
  4. No it seems to not be $ppp. But the China figure is above the official values due to some crude adjustment for hidden expenditures etc. Calculation of $PPP for the military sector is very difficult, as we no not have many standard commodities to use to make a price index. It's also not so advisable to use the GDP price index, as military capacity is so uneven. Consequently, $PPP estimates for military output are very varied. This is a reasonable estimate. Note that for China and Russia, the technological sophistication of their defense sectors and their orientation towards providing affordable outputs for the local military means that the adjustment using the defense price index leads to a larger increase in estimated defense sector output than when whole of GDP prices indexes are used.
  5. Could it be a guided 300mm rocket, i.e. 9М542 with 150 kg unitary warhead ? In this case however it seems the incoming object looks too short, the explosion looks too small, and the accuracy looks too good.
  6. Discussion of some leaked French documents assessing the Ukrainian situation.
  7. I think you have misunderstood what I am saying. Note the "also has a life of it's own" which covers some of what you have said. The main issue relevant to your arguments here is whether the non-economic component is sufficient to sustain an insurgency or some civil disobedience that makes occupation untenable. It's to some extent an open issue we could in theory discuss fruitfully, as I in no way have all of the required information to make an assessment of it. In any case for now I will defend at least the weak proposition that much of eastern and some of the central regions are unlikely to have a sustained anti-Russian insurgency if the basic economic/infrastructural etc, issues are resolved by Russia in some prospective occupation. As for the western regions, a peace settlement could be a big problem for some parts of the political class, as then they would have a reduced ability to explain difficulties as a result of special circumstances or Russian or pro-Russian influence. Actually this is one reason why I have always been in favour of Ukraine letting the east go - as it would enable a proper test of this or that developmental strategy and then perhaps something like the "on the box" instantiation of democracy as a semi-scientific test of competing ideas without the difficulties imposed by real or imagined or invented Russian influence.
  8. As with many things, the ideology lives on an economic substrate, though also has a real life of it's own. Ukrainian identity of the particular sort that is relevant to conflict with Russia is tied to a dissatisfaction with the economic situation, but also to the "status" of the country. The "We are Ukrainians, we reject the Soviet past, and want to be western" is to a large extent a striving for both material and social improvements and also a desire to not be looked down on by westerners, which for much of their lives, were and maybe still to some lesser extent, "masters of the universe". To some substantial extent, if there is partition of Ukrainian territory, some substantial fraction in many regions will, especially after some grueling war, be approximately satisfied with being either regime so long as the economic and social situation is acceptable. And the ones that are not will largely move to their preferred location.
  9. For Russia, how much is ammunition the bottleneck on frequency of fire missions, vs lack of targets and fear of exposing positions and getting them hit by drones etc. ? I think it is plausible that they have enough shells such that the fires they could do but do not are mostly cases where the marginal exchange of causalities is not necessarily favourable. E.g just hitting some area where enemy troops could be, but where there is no identified concentration, might in expectation cause ~0.66 of a casualty for Ukraine from the shelling and ~0.66 of a casualty for Russia from possible retaliatory UAV strikes, so it is not a good idea if the objective is attrition. It might however make sense when the one Ukrainian casualty is some defender of some key position that otherwise might require deploying ten Russian troops and incurring 2 casualties to displace in some assault. But here the bottleneck would seem to relate to weight of fires and then number of pieces deployed, as this sort of attack will still not ideally be some "shell this village non stop for a week" type affair - even if something like this is occurring any single battery will not just be firing hundreds of shells a day or something like that. If however Ukrainian capacity is depleted to the point where Russian artillery can just entrench and fire away with impunity, then availability of shells suddenly matters a lot.
  10. Actually I am kind of surprised no one ever thought to make something like this, with some larger gun for destroying structures and defensive works. It would have especially made sense when there was no 120mm HE available.
  11. It seems that Ukrainians look to also have something like my suggested attack above in mind, as they are quickly constructing defensive lines to the east of Zaporizhia and even as far north as Dnipropetrovs'k (Dnipro). I still don't think the balance is far enough in Russia's favour to make it imminently possible though.
  12. Some of this, if it exist, may be due to additional risk of making attacks that are not on a salient. Ukraine obviosly could not bring long range systems near the Avdiivka front, as this would put these systems even within range of 122mm artillery, and into heavily surveilled territory.
  13. To me the only incoming munition we can see at 0:23 minutes looks like something largish (full bore 125mm or larger) and coming in at a rather steep angle. 125mm HE or HEAT fired from long rang could fit or it could just be a UAV. It does not really fit any Russian ATGM.
  14. Very good video of the naval drone attack here:
  15. You could perhaps tether two together with a cable and have them detonate via a hit on the connecting cable, where the tension in the connecting cable initiates the charge. Or have the mine itself be some sort of cable shaped thing like a very small mine-clearing charge.
  16. Another option is to deploy something like a torpedo net as a passive defense, though in the case of these drone attacks, it need not even penetrate into the water much, as the target is not subsurface, and so the drag will be much lower. Such a system also would at least complicate an undetected attack.
  17. I wonder if some sort of projector of very small mines (with a time delay failsafe to make them not persist) could work to lay a defensive screen. Even a very small mine on the order of 2-5kg or so should suffice to stop these targets. You could perhaps use an existing weapon like a depth charge projector, but using some mine dispersing cluster munition to disperse hundreds of mines in a defensive screen around a ship. It's likely inferior to using drone based CAP but it could be a cheap and effective addition to the defense.
  18. There is a short report outlining the argument here, i.e. that you get more comprehensive clearing when women are (also) involved. https://reliefweb.int/report/world/womens-participation-improves-mine-action
  19. This sounds very silly but it is perhaps more a sort of unthinking extrapolation from a sensible case. Apparently, there is a problem in poor countries with some de-mining efforts, where activities women and children do are made excessively dangerous because those undertaking the de-mining do not think to e.g. clear paths required to fetch water or get to school etc. as the men who are deciding which areas to clear first are not doing these activities and then do not understand exactly which areas are commonly traversed. I suspect these sorts of issues are however of much lesser intensity in Ukraine due to a higher level of development, urbanisation, and lesser gender division of labour etc.
  20. It appears to able to be be reloaded by swapping in a new preloaded rack (2 per launcher) using a small crane or similar.
  21. This is to me very strange. Even if they made a successful landing, what could be achieved by it ? Likely they would be detected and captured, even if they made a successful landing. AFAICT there are no Russian assets that can be raided either.
  22. I don't see how else they can better make a move like this. If they do it further to the east they can avoid that string of settlements along the H-08 highway but there are towns also in the way there, e.g Omylnyk. But in general avoiding roads and towns is not necessarily a good thing. Towns and roads are very useful for logistics, and for providing cover against UAV. A push like this would require at least 20,000 troops so they cannot really be stationed in hastily build foxholes etc. But the main issue is that they lose the advantage of having the Dnipro protecting one edge of the salient and which also presents a risk to Ukrainain troops that try to defend along it as they could be trapped. And blocking the roads out of Zhaporizia would require a much wider front if the initial push was further west. A direct frontal assault through Kamainske/Piatykhatky/Stepove also would be quite hard I think but these positions would be abandoned in the scenario above as they would be at risk of being pocketed.
  23. Roughly yes, but there is some wide array of combinations of shell shortages and general collapse where it may be possible, i.e. less shell shortages and more morale/capability/stretched forces related collapse would do it too.
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