Kiev Is Burning

[ink]

6 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Im so glad we didnt have twitter or facebook in 1940, or we would still be waiting for the Americans to make up their minds.

Surely if the Cambridge Analytica story taught us anything, it's that people are even easier to manipulate now.

[Murph]

8 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Im so glad we didnt have twitter or facebook in 1940, or we would still be waiting for the Americans to make up their minds.

But Stuart, I have been opposed to any intervention in the Biden Bank country.  Plus if the US HAD sat out WWII and let the Euros have one of their constant squabbles, would it have been any different than the last 1000 years?

[crazyinsane105]

16 minutes ago, Murph said:

But Stuart, I have been opposed to any intervention in the Biden Bank country.  Plus if the US HAD sat out WWII and let the Euros have one of their constant squabbles, would it have been any different than the last 1000 years?

It would have ended up with the Soviets taking over much of Western Europe, minus the UK. Unsure if that would be a desired outcome

Not to mention that once Pearl Harbor took place, it was unlikely the US was going to sit on the sidelines. And then Hitler declared war on the US…which made it impossible to be neutral 

 

 

[Markus Becker]

23 hours ago, Murph said:

 

More like a killer investment. Some ammo that's going to expire, some deep reserve AFV and so on and US taxpayer money that's spend to buy stuff from the US industry. 

And that little cripples the Russian military. 

[mkenny]

1 hour ago, Markus Becker said:

 

More like a killer investment. Some ammo that's going to expire, some deep reserve AFV and so on and US taxpayer money that's spend to buy stuff from the US industry. 

And that little cripples the Russian military. 

From where I stand it is the western economy that is being crippled. Shorn of its  cheap energy and now completely dependent   of the USA and its much higher prices and  even combined  unable to manufacture enought war materiel to  match the Russians. 

Remember the boasts?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2022/12/05/russias-economic-prospects-have-gone-from-bad-to-terrible/

 

Dec 5, 2022

 

The biggest economic problem that Russia and Russians face today is, of course, the war. Instead of an expected growth of around 4% for 2022-2023, Russia's economy is expected to decline by 8% over those two years. Sanctions have hit production in key sectors very hard, and the effects will continue to mount. The government is shifting to a wartime economy, which means even more state control and military spending and less investment in human capital such as education and health care.  

Hundreds of thousands of educated, young workers have left the country, and several hundred thousand more Russian citizens have been mobilized for war rather than productive pursuits—not to mention the roughly 100,000 casualties so far. Living standards will continue to fall, and an increase in wage arrears and unemployment seems inevitable as well. Longer term, the Western shift away from Russian oil and gas brought on by the war will undermine Russia’s most important economic sector.

The Russian economy has been underperforming for 15 years due to poor institutions—weak rule of law, poor protection of property rights, corruption—and consequentially relatively low domestic and foreign investment. Now due to the war, Russian economic prospects have gone from lackluster to dreadful.

 

[Yama]

27 minutes ago, mkenny said:

From where I stand it is the western economy that is being crippled. Shorn of its  cheap energy and now completely dependent   of the USA and its much higher prices and  even combined  unable to manufacture enought war materiel to  match the Russians. 

Remember the boasts?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2022/12/05/russias-economic-prospects-have-gone-from-bad-to-terrible/

I think most people remember, they don't need to be posted every five minutes. It is obvious Russian economy has survived somewhat better than what many people thought - but that tends to be a thing with economies. They are quite resilient by default, and seldom things go as bad as doomsayers say - or as great as cheerleaders proclaim. Grim things were predicted for EU economies as well over the war - shortage of energy, 3 euro gasoline and so forth. Few of those things materialized.

[mkenny]

14 minutes ago, Yama said:

I think most people remember, they don't need to be posted every five minutes.

 I understand why many would prefer to forget what the  western plan was and how badly they miscalculted. 

The Forbes article reflected the western belief they had the  ability to bankrupt  any nation at will.  We need to be constantly reminded that the days of  'Rules Based Order' (AKA The west make the rules and everyone else has to follow them) are well and truly over.

Edited December 10, 2023 by mkenny

[Stuart Galbraith]

3 hours ago, Murph said:

But Stuart, I have been opposed to any intervention in the Biden Bank country.  Plus if the US HAD sat out WWII and let the Euros have one of their constant squabbles, would it have been any different than the last 1000 years?

Yes, because we would have had a coin toss between Communism or a Thousand year reich. And personally, I rather like Jews being in the world.

I wouldn't be here either. My grandfather was liberated by US servicemen in Austria. So please pardon me murph, I'm not as sanguine as you are about such matters.

[RETAC21]

3 hours ago, Markus Becker said:

 

More like a killer investment. Some ammo that's going to expire, some deep reserve AFV and so on and US taxpayer money that's spend to buy stuff from the US industry. 

And that little cripples the Russian military. 

90% of US aid is spent on the US

[Roman Alymov]

2 minutes ago, RETAC21 said:

90% of US aid is spent on the US

According to Alexey Arestovich, one high-ranked US decisionmaker have told him that total ampunt of US aid to Ukraine is more than cost of all bridges of USA. If it is true, this 90% if really spent in US would have had significant physical impact on US industry and infrastructure. Is it really seen, or it was "spent" the same way as in A-stan and Iraq (stolen by corrupt US officials/business)?

    Here in Russia, much smaller investments are providing results that are visible form satelites....

 

Another interesting figure in this video is pro-Ukr estimation of current number of UkrArmy as 800k (vs. 410k of RusArmy).

[RETAC21]

6 minutes ago, Roman Alymov said:

According to Alexey Arestovich, one high-ranked US decisionmaker have told him that total ampunt of US aid to Ukraine is more than cost of all bridges of USA. If it is true, this 90% if really spent in US would have had significant physical impact on US industry and infrastructure. Is it really seen, or it was "spent" the same way as in A-stan and Iraq (stolen by corrupt US officials/business)?

    Here in Russia, much smaller investments are providing results that are visible form satelites....

 

Another interesting figure in this video is pro-Ukr estimation of current number of UkrArmy as 800k (vs. 410k of RusArmy).

This has been addressed before, the "money" was actually spent decades ago in terms of buying the hardware, the actual spend is refurbishing and transporting it to Ukraine, done with US contractors, so the "billions" of aid actually amount to a very little amount of actual money, and that's why the Ukrainians are complaining, they don't get a lot of hardware and ammunition at the end of the day because, once the warehouses are empty, no one is producing more expensive military hardware, because that costs "real" money. At least, until now.

https://x.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1732384994968936645?s=20

https://x.com/rshereme/status/1732652425276727758?s=20

[Yama]

12 minutes ago, RETAC21 said:

This has been addressed before, the "money" was actually spent decades ago in terms of buying the hardware, the actual spend is refurbishing and transporting it to Ukraine, done with US contractors, so the "billions" of aid actually amount to a very little amount of actual money, and that's why the Ukrainians are complaining, they don't get a lot of hardware and ammunition at the end of the day because, once the warehouses are empty, no one is producing more expensive military hardware, because that costs "real" money. At least, until now.

Funnily enough, lot of the stuff delivered to Ukraine was already depreciated to zero (or near zero) accounting value in the books. That is not, of course, how it is reported in public. "Yeah we sent them 30 old BMP-1's, which takes value of our total donations to...zero euros".

[Roman Alymov]

6 hours ago, Yama said:

Funnily enough, lot of the stuff delivered to Ukraine was already depreciated to zero (or near zero) accounting value in the books. That is not, of course, how it is reported in public. "Yeah we sent them 30 old BMP-1's, which takes value of our total donations to...zero euros".

Well, there is obviously a lot of space for creative accounting here. 

[crazyinsane105]

8 hours ago, RETAC21 said:

This has been addressed before, the "money" was actually spent decades ago in terms of buying the hardware, the actual spend is refurbishing and transporting it to Ukraine, done with US contractors, so the "billions" of aid actually amount to a very little amount of actual money, and that's why the Ukrainians are complaining, they don't get a lot of hardware and ammunition at the end of the day because, once the warehouses are empty, no one is producing more expensive military hardware, because that costs "real" money. At least, until now.

https://x.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1732384994968936645?s=20

https://x.com/rshereme/status/1732652425276727758?s=20

Was simply cheaper to send over a bunch of stuff to Ukraine than even decommission it ourselves. Storing it in bases was also taking up precious resources 

[seahawk]

But now it is eating up a large part of the budgets, for no results. The West can not afford to continue the support without wrecking the economy and their own military. The West has lost, Russian resilence has won.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Yes, we are all being bankrupted by sending over life expired equipment we bought in the 1990's. Funny how nobody thinks Russia is being bankrupted by using up all the equipment it bought in the 1980's.

 

[RETAC21]

31 minutes ago, seahawk said:

But now it is eating up a large part of the budgets, for no results. The West can not afford to continue the support without wrecking the economy and their own military. The West has lost, Russian resilence has won.

That's what Russia hopes, but actually it's worse, there are no contracts for new hardware that could be sent to Ukraine, so the West is counting on cheap items like FPV drones and artillery to kill enough Russian hardware to keep Ukraine going.

[Ssnake]

Well, do you want the Food Machinery Corporation to resume M113 production?

(Yes, FMC and Harsco merged into United Defense, then sold that to the Carlyle Group, then to BAE Systems)

The point is, this production line simply no longer exists, nor does to one for the Marder IFV, or the Warrior. The workers have retired, or found new jobs. If you want to produce new stockpiles of Bradleys, you need to replace them with a new IFV, and as far as I know the US Army hasn't decided on a new IFV yet.

New CV90s could be produced, but Hägglunds doesn't have the capacity to produce as many as are being lost in Ukraine as they have been in survival mode since the last major order, the Dutch CV90/35 (and now everybody (well, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland) wants to upgrade their CV90s, so predictably they are soon going to work at capacity limit).

Pizarro IFVs would be another option, but I suspect that SBS doesn't have a spectacular capacity either since the Ajax hulls are supposed to be made in the UK.

 

Now, we can and maybe we should criticize that there simply are no major prouction lines open for IFVs and very few for MBTs. But you would need continuous demand, and for a major production line you'd need something like a common IFV for most of Europe. Up to this point everybody has been very careful to pick their own national model with minimal fleet sizes, guaranteeing maximal inefficiency. Europe is outspending Russia 7:1 in defense and has next to nothing to show for it. It's all true. It's been true since the 1990s. It's been true since Putin's 2007 speech at the Munic Security Conference, and Russia's invasion of Georgia a year later.

When was the first time that you criticized this Europe-wide dysfunctional policy?

Lamenting the situation now does fuck all to help anyone but Russia. Turning the ship around will require an effort to overcome bureaucratic inertia that, maybe, only the military can if political leaderhip cares enough. Is defense on the Spanish voters' minds? Or the French voters'? The Italians? Greek? British? Dutch? Belgian? Austrian? Maybe it is in Germany, Denmark, Sweden. It certainly is in Poland, the Baltic republics, Finland.

At the end of the day, we'll need new production lines. The only customer who would order a large number of whatever is market available right now is Ukraine, assuming that they will continue to receive billions of Euros of financial support that for the first time will actually cost the taxpayer some, and which might not flow back immediately to the countries donating the money because Rheinmetall's new factory will be located in western Ukraine, not Germany or Poland, and it'll take years before meaningful production will start, assuming that Rheinmetalls's own weapons are sufficient to prodect their own factory from Russian tactical missiles.

[Stuart Galbraith]

At this point, im idly wondering if something like the Nazi late war 'E' series might be an idea. Something terribly cheap, not with a particularly long life, but adequate to mount a smoothbore 120mm gun with thermal sights. Maybe not even fit the damn thin with a stab. Rather than designing a tank to last 30 years and with a huge power to weight ration, maybe something to last 15, with modest armour, modest anything. Maybe not even a turret. Give the damn thing a fixed superstruture, and resign yourself to the less capablity its going to have.

After all, till we start designing systems to kill drones in huge multitudes, which I dont think is as hard as we think, there doesn seem to be a lot of point sending more and more western tanks to be turnd into pillboxes, either via drones or via minefields. Particularly as we have but trace amounts of the damn things to begin with.

An APC really should be fairly easy. Several nations making Boxer right now. Is it really that hard between us to pony up and try to expand the production to start equipping Ukraine?

 

[Rick]

2 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

At this point, im idly wondering if something like the Nazi late war 'E' series might be an idea. Something terribly cheap, not with a particularly long life, but adequate to mount a smoothbore 120mm gun with thermal sights. Maybe not even fit the damn thin with a stab. Rather than designing a tank to last 30 years and with a huge power to weight ration, maybe something to last 15, with modest armour, modest anything. Maybe not even a turret. Give the damn thing a fixed superstruture, and resign yourself to the less capablity its going to have.

After all, till we start designing systems to kill drones in huge multitudes, which I dont think is as hard as we think, there doesn seem to be a lot of point sending more and more western tanks to be turnd into pillboxes, either via drones or via minefields. Particularly as we have but trace amounts of the damn things to begin with.

An APC really should be fairly easy. Several nations making Boxer right now. Is it really that hard between us to pony up and try to expand the production to start equipping Ukraine?

 

Monkey models 

[Stuart Galbraith]

I was thinking more Ersatz than deliberately dumbed down ala monkey model, because you dont want your allies having better weapons than you. The whole Abrams process to Ukraine was slowed down by the demand to fit less advanced armour, which was ridiculous. It may even have cost Ukraine its offensive this year.

Look at the Entwicklung series AFV tanks in WW2. If you think for a moment, of the subcomponents of say, a Leopard 2 or an Abrams.  Mass produce those. Fit them in a hull that will probably suffer stress cracks in 15 years, if it survives that long. Cheaply made, even cheap steel, assembled in a hurry. Then plug in just enough fire suppression systemst to make it viable if its penetrated. Give it steel armour, just enough to allow fitting of Knife reative armour. Plug in cheap weapons sights. I doubt you would get the cost down much, but if you concentrate on easily available subcomponents, you might just get something that could be mass produced, even if you have to split the components over several nations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entwicklung_series

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entwicklung_series#/media/File:Entwicklung_panzer.png

 

Think of a 21st Century Vickers Mk3. Cheap, cheerful, and more than good enough to fill up the battlefield.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_MBT_Mark_3

All this is viable, if someone had the imagination, and the willingness to invest, to make it happen. I seem to recall the E25 wasnt even going to have a recoil in it. Yes, it would probably wreck the vehicle if it was in combat at length, but ultimately so what? Its meant to be thrown away.

 

If we concentrate less on making money, than just filling up the front line with viable equipment, the Ukrainians might get somewhere. Instead we keep getting into arguments about the French wanting to build ammunition factories in their country, or the Germans want to build a tank plant in Ukraine. We all want a good boot up the ass and start thinking along the lines of what Ukraine needs, whcih is equipment, and lots of it.

[mkenny]

3 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

 Funny how nobody thinks Russia is being bankrupted by using up all the equipment it bought in the 1980's.

 

It depends on what you gain with  your losses.  Clearly the western failure to bankrupt Russia was a huge loss and fatal to their campaign to impose ' (Western) Rules Based Order' on the rest of the world.  I would suggest this massive overeach served only to alert the rest of the world to the fate that awaits all who dare to disobey the western masters and motivated them to set up a viable and competing  financial system.

[Stuart Galbraith]

You say that its inevitably failed. From what I read the Russian economy is in the doldrums, and shows no sign of improving. In the most stark example, Russian airliners regularly have engine failures or suffer availablity problems because they are having to use black market parts. Several have crashed.

No, its not been the immediate success we had hoped. But its clearly impacting them, and if it didnt achieve strategic effects overnight, neither did the blockade of the Germans in both world wars. In the long run, however, they proved decisive, and so might the damage to the Russian economy. The only quesiton is how long its going to take.

Its really very simple. Either people want to trade with the west, or they dont. Dont want the trouble, be more like India. They seem to manage just fine dont they? It was Russia that was stupid enough to believe they could shit where they ate, and I guess they learned different.

[seahawk]

A first step would to really use all the stuff that is still in depots - be it private or military. OIP in Belgium alone still has about 300 armoured vehicles. Kürassier tanks, M113, etc.

The US depots could probably provided M113 for years and also M1.

One important thing for Europe would decide on having a depot for used and retired vehicles as a war reserve. Ideally somewhere in Spain.

[futon]

19 hours ago, crazyinsane105 said:

It would have ended up with the Soviets taking over much of Western Europe, minus the UK. Unsure if that would be a desired outcome

Not to mention that once Pearl Harbor took place, it was unlikely the US was going to sit on the sidelines. And then Hitler declared war on the US…which made it impossible to be neutral 

 

 

Sitting out could imply sitting out of CKS's Nationalists Chinese fate. Even if the US didn't want to sell oil to Japan because of disgust with the war, if it was not supporting the Nationalists Chinese via things like lines of credit, the Burma Road supply with GB along with activities like relocating the Pacific fleet from the West Coast to Hawaii, or forming the AVG "Flying Tigers", hinting at Japan with "aggressor country" disarment in the Atlantic Charter, I do not think the attack on Pearl Harbor would have happened, and likely have not moved close with Germany. Afterall, the Nationalists Chinese were in partnership with Germany beforehand. So then with that sitting out thought exercise, it would be the Wong Regime surpassing CKS's as the Nationalists Chinese.