supersquirrel @ supersquirrel @sopuli.xyz

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2 yr. ago

Why do reporters keep writing that the Russia is advancing when it factually doesn't?

You are correct to point this out, it has to be purposeful spin. Russia is condemning a terrible number of soldiers to death for little to nothing, the ground lost by Ukraine is irrelevant at this rate.

Even worse for Russia, there is no armored blitz they can make to suddenly make rapid progress, since they don't even have enough unarmored vehicles let alone armored personnel carriers.

One major hurdle that needs to be overcome is a way to defend such armour against drones. I'm guessing that some kind of light and cheap AA is already pretty far along in development.

Artillery is like golf, you don't just need the biggest driver to do the biggest impact all of the time, golf would just be sledgehammering sideways if that was all it was. Combined arms warfare doesn't just mean infantry, artillery, armor, CAS.. all working together, it MUST also mean a variety of artillery sizes on call working together.

I am NOT trying to understate the risk of drones especially to small specific weakpoints in armor and defensive doctrine, but the answer to antitank drone swarms is obvious. You have smaller artillery (say a m113 mortar vehicle) nearby along with decisive 155mm artillery and you hammer the area around your heavy armor with the smaller mortar weapon so that everything but the friendly armor dies.

I don't care whether we are talking fpv drones, unmanned ground vehicles that are lightly armored, infantry, drone operators, the trucks they used to get into the area, the trenches they are operating from.... Hammer it with artillery. Do that with 155mm artillery and you seriously risk destroying your own tanks especially if your shells are hitting close enough to your friendly armor to matter. Also 155mm artillery is so apocalyptic you don't want to use it in some cases because it creates too much cover for your enemy with the craters it leaves behind...so you poke the enemy with mortars while you dance your tanks around their quickly isolated entrenched infantry positions.

Of course there is a counter to this but it is like discussing the hypothetical ways you could defeat a grizzly bear while forgetting that a grizzly bear can go everywhere you can, and at 45mph. Your transportation, IF you have it offers no protection. Try to keep up, it will be the end of you.

War is a matter of how much artillery you apply and how long your enemy pretends they can keep fighting you as they get blown to bits by it, tanks are the thing you hold up to tempt the enemy into charging your artillery in a desperate attempt to deny that harsh reality. To put it another way, you create hell with artillery and then you roll your tanks right behind that hell because they are the only things that can survive on the brink of utter, apocalyptic artillery fire.

That is when the enemy finds out that while you needed the artillery to field the tanks, that doesn't mean the artillery is the thing they should be afraid of now... no somehow after that apocalyptic artillery barrage things are about to get worse for them when they hear the sound of heavy armor advancing behind the rolling artillery barrage.

That is how true armored combined arms warfare works and was understood even before the tank was invented to be the spearpoint to the shaft of artillery, and it is not something the west has cared about facilitating Ukraine's possibility to do seriously up until now. Whatever the shitty reason, what is undeniable now is that Russia will pay dearly for thinking that armored combined arms warfare is a thing of the past compared to raw numerical advantage, unarmed motor bikes and cool fiddly new drone technologies.

Edit just an aside, the reason Russia isn't fielding effective main battle tanks is because a) they are all gone along with their crews except for a slowly rebuilding t90m stock (shitty tanks) and b) they cannot even protect their logistics lines entering into the region they are preparing to launch an armored assault from reliably, which means Russia has much bigger problems than needing more tanks. Tanks are no help to Russia right now, they have let their operational capacity degrade far too much for that to matter, just look at the headlines about all the kinds of logistical targets Ukraine has hit over the last two weeks alone. Russia can't use tanks in an effective way if that is happening to them... categorically and they likely know that.

The leopard or abrams family of tanks are, if you have a railway or shipping industrial capacity you can defend with artillery, and when deployed with overwhelming artillery support, still the most decisive land warfare weapon systems on earth. One only need look at what the m109 family of self propelled artillery or the bradley IFV fighting vehicles can do and wonder what kind of weapon systems someone might turn to when they need a bit more high volume armored firepower applied directly to the face of the enemy.

It seems very wrong to me that main battle tanks were given to Ukraine without artillery, I can't see it as anything other than being set up to fail or just utter incompetence at the highest administrative level (the lower down staff thinking it was stupid).

Western journalists will try to compare and suss out from a logistics standpoint how many russian tanks an abrams or leopard tank can destroy and do a cost benefit analysis according to Russia's economic might and how long they can sustain that kind of catastrophic tactical inefficiency... and none of it matters when you are on the other end of an abrams barrel being commanded by a well trained crew operating in an effective combined arms combat. The answer is you lose, end of story.

The idea for an armored probe into Baghdad originated from a desire to assess enemy strength, test their reactions, and demonstrate U.S. capability and resolve. Colonel Perkins, commanding the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, advocated for this aggressive reconnaissance. The mission, assigned to Task Force 1-64 Armor, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Eric Wesley, part of Perkins' brigade, was to conduct a high-speed raid from the airport, through major southern city arteries (Highway 8), into central Baghdad, before returning to the airport.

Early on the morning of April 5th, a column of approximately 29 M1 Abrams main battle tanks, 14 M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and support vehicles (such as M113s and M88 recovery vehicles) rolled out from the airport perimeter. Their movement was swift, utilizing the speed and shock effect of the heavy armor. The column encountered significant resistance almost immediately after entering the urbanized areas. Iraqi forces, primarily Fedayeen fighters and some Republican Guard remnants, engaged the American armor with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), small arms fire, and mortars. These attacks often came from rooftops, alleyways, and prepared defensive positions.

The U.S. tankers and Bradley crews responded with overwhelming firepower, utilizing machine guns, 25mm cannons, and the Abrams’ 120mm main guns. Close air support from A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft and attack helicopters also played a crucial role in suppressing enemy positions identified by the ground column. Despite the heavy resistance, the task force successfully navigated approximately 12 miles of urban terrain, reaching key intersections and government districts in southern and central Baghdad.

The raid was not without cost. Several vehicles sustained damage, primarily from RPGs, though the heavy armor of the M1 Abrams tanks proved highly resilient. One M1 Abrams was disabled by an RPG or possible anti-tank mine, requiring recovery efforts under fire. The crew, however, was unharmed. U.S. casualties for this first run were relatively light given the intensity of the fighting, with reports of a few wounded. Iraqi casualties were estimated to be significantly higher. After several hours of intense fighting and having gathered valuable intelligence on defensive setups and the nature of the opposition, TF 1-64 Armor executed a fighting withdrawal, returning to the relative safety of the airport by midday.

https://www.americangrit.com/post/the-gamble-for-baghdad---an-account-of-the-2003-thunder-runs

Tanks are certainly more vulnerable than they used to be, and they will be used differently because of that.. you are absolutely right though it is propaganda that heavy semi-modernized tanks with night fighting capability like abrams or leopard tanks wouldn't annihilate Russian ground forces in Ukraine if properly supplied by artillery support and air cover.

Russia is basically entirely demechanized as a fighting force at this point (at a strategic level, they still have armored vehicles and field them but existentially NOT enough for the amount of mobilized troops), experiencing a shortage of even civilian vehicles necessary for logistics. An abrams rolling through that is a fucking nightmare for Russians, I literally can't imagine anything more scary in that kind of situation aside from the artillery that as I have emphasized repeatedly, is necessary for supporting heavy tanks for multiple complex reasons.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l9DiYSCTDfk

The above footage is from during the day.. these are meant to be used at night... can you imagine trying to fight one of these on a moonless night when not all of your soldiers even HAVE nightvision equipment in the first place?

You can hearrrrr the 120mm armored cannon, but where EXACTLY is it and is it pointing at you right now?????

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8byK_V0ec2M

^ Yeah these are really old leopards, with a less powerful 105mm cannon and crucially much thinner armor. It is important not to get confused here though, we are talking heavy armor so there are layers. This era and type of leopard tanks are more rightfully described as "tank destroyers", they are meant to make contact with enemy mechanized breakthroughs quickly, safely and efficiently, forcing an enemy incursion to slow down and engage long enough for the bulk of friendly forces to catch up and overwhelm the limited enemy breakthrough. The fire stabilization, control, and nightfighting capabilities of the leopards in Ukraine might be very good I don't know, but even with the reactive uparmor additions they have been given these particular leopards weren't designed like the abrams you think of when you think abrams or leopard tank. Those are true heavy armor, even before you put reactive armor on them, and they have a much scarier 120mm cannon. Still as you can see, they are very effective and you can imagine what the beefier cousin of these tanks is like to fight when fielded in a similarly effective fashion, you need serious anti-tank equipment to stop their momentum and when you do you better have a plan.

These leopards are designed with an extremely effective mindset of high intensity night fighting ambush tactics, but a semi-modern abrams or leopard can do that and ALSO turn the lights on and fuck you up head on in broad daylight no matter how many times you punch them back in the face. That is the difference between a tank destroyer and a heavy main battle tank.

This is the end of the road for microsoft.

yes

AI Talent Shortage meaning shortage in talented AI.

It will be used to justify murder when during a heatwave, power is preferentially shunted to it instead of poor people dying as the powergrid breaks down under stress.

Working precisely as intended.

boss > yeah I know we got bombed monday and wednesday but you are still scheduled thursday friday

worker > is there a factory floor me to work on

boss > don't worry about the details

worker > wait can't they just bomb the same factory the same way again?

boss > what did I just tell you

the Russian War Machine right now

mines detected

Wow protestors these days will stoop to the level of wisely putting pressure on major companies supporting genocide?!?

First property damage and now this??

clutches plastic pearls

Let me re-emphasize here to clarify some other comments I have made, with what main battle tanks and armored fighting vehicles will Putin do so with?

While Russia is beginning to produce T90 tanks at a decent rate producing tanks is inherently a slow business to be in and Russia needs to restock its basic supply of tanks before it even thinks about an actual, honest real armored offensive again. Russia also seems to producing its current armored vehicles at a rate that somewhat replaces them one for one with vehicles lost on the battlefield (which is only maintaining an already critical lack of armored vehicles for them) but Ukranians should rejoice if they keep doing that because their armored fighting vehicle armor fucking sucks especially against skilled FPV pilots like Ukraine has and artillery like Ukraine has. Even when Russia fields main battle tanks with heavy armor they rarely at a basic level extend that grace of protection to the infantry carrying armored vehicles.

The Bradley IFV demolishes their armored fighting vehicles, it makes Russian tankers think twice, Europe has other counterparts that are similarly effective and..... Russia for the most part doesn't and if Russia does with some of their BMPs there is a very small chance that the armor crews and associated nearby infantry, artillery and air support are trained at all about how to support them in a way they can be used decisively. Most of those Russian armor veterans with that experience are probably long long long long dead because the armor on the vehicles they were ordered to use again sucks. When your armored fighting vehicle crews don't survive engagements and they have to keep fighting against armored fighting vehicle crews that do (even if their vehicles don't), it is a losing proposition on every level.

You can argue in a defensive war that Ukraine doesn't have an advantage here because armor is for assaulting not defending, but that is misunderstanding the basic role of armor especially "tank killers" as they were referred to in WW2. When an enemy inveitably makes a decisive breakthrough in your front lines through application of overwhelming force (artillery) and number, the speed with which your forces can move to contain the breakthrough determines whether the situation becomes a strategic defeat. Armor allows friendly Ukranian forces to decisively smash Russian breakthroughs in the Ukranian frontline from the sides while minimizing the hazards that would come from being forced to truck a similar amount of infantry unprotected in normal military trucks blindly at the Russian assault force and hoping that your scouts see them before they see you... or just hoping the Russians can't exploit the opening the inherent slowness of friendly infantry moving over hostile terrain creates.

Russia’s poor performance has likely been caused by several factors: the Russian military’s reliance on dismounted infantry and mechanized forces to take Ukrainian territory, Russia’s failure to use operational fires in a coordinated way that enables maneuver, and Ukraine’s effective utilization of defense in depth.

...

Changes in the Russian-to-Ukrainian fighting vehicles loss ratio underscore the growing inefficiency of Moscow’s invasion. In early 2024, Russia experienced loss ratios higher than those it suffered during its initial 2022 invasion in exchange for only a fraction of the territorial gains. Russia’s offensives since January 2024 have yielded only marginal territorial gains but consistently suffered unfavorable loss ratios. The disparity points to the challenge of attempting repeated frontal assaults into well-prepared defenses and Russia’s reliance on mass rather than maneuver. Russia has attempted to offset these losses by greatly increasing its domestic defense production and supplementing with foreign supplies, including from China, Iran, and North Korea

Although the Kremlin appears willing to absorb high attrition in a bid to outlast Kyiv, the sustained disproportionate equipment loss rate erodes its capacity to generate fresh, high‑quality formations for the decisive breakthroughs it still seeks. Since January 2024, Russia has traded vast quantities of equipment for mere meters of ground—a strategy that decisively falls short of Moscow’s objective to greatly expand its control of Ukrainian territory.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-battlefield-woes-ukraine

Civilian vehicles now account for 90 percent of the hundreds of vehicles the Russians lose in action every month. There are a lot of wrecked compact cars along the front line—enough for the Russians to begin cannibalizing the wreckage in order to build new compact cars.

https://daxe.substack.com/p/the-russians-have-lost-so-many-compact

I think probably because people are exhausted and scared and I guess when I stop and think about it I can understand that even as I am frustrated that I am being misunderstood.

People did not choose to be too exhausted and scared to genuinely listen to me, that was something done unto them by their environment and that is the thing that is the root driver of this, not people misunderstanding me in the moment. Every Russian bot troll spouting stupid hate reduces people's capacity to engage with someone like me who at first might trigger a kneejerk categorization as one of those things. The conversation has been degraded on purpose.

...and so I will be patient and explain myself

Russia doesn't have any significant reserves of armored vehicles with which to continue creating offensives, that is the hard truth for Russia. It does not mean Ukraine is not under serious threat, it means Russia cannot continue to push large offensives without utterly crashing out their economy and fighting force.

All of this hype about drones and motorbikes making tanks and armored vehicles obsolete is part of the lie trying to be sold to cover for the fact that Russia is trying to fight offensives without armored vehicles and they just can't. It never works, it isn't working and it won't work drones don't change that especially when the other side is better at drone tactics AND has armored fighting vehicles. Russia is condemning countless Russians and North Koreans to pointless brutal deaths at the hands of superior Ukranian tactics, and the PR coming out of it looks horrible for Russia most especially from an arms sales standpoint, which is a major driver of Russia's political power along with their oil obviously.

Russia can't keep slamming the few remaining armored vehicles they have into overwhelming defensive Ukranian positions and expect to continue to function as a country, it just won't happen. They will have to find ways to terrorize Ukraine that involve acts of terrorism rather than outright mechanized manuever warfare, and they are and it must be very scary for Ukraine.

That doesn't change the fact though that Russia is not in the strong position that the western media seems to think it is, independent of how Ukraine is doing.

I did not mean to portray this as an easy time for Ukraine, or that Russia doesn't still pose a serious existential threat longer term to Ukraine.. my point is that the western media is bought by rich people and Putin has those rich people for the most part on his side including my orange shit stain of a president, or at least putin has bought them off from directly attacking him too harshly.... which has resulted in a picture being sold to people everyday in my country that Ukraine is about to collapse when Russia just blew through the vast majority of their armor reserves and are now trying to launch an offensive with no significant mechanized troops/armor to support it.

Russia also has lost a huge amount of artillery systems and Ukraine now has a domestic steady production of them.

Russia is far weaker than it looks here, which isn't to say this isn't a desperate junction for the lives of people living in Ukraine, this is a war, I understand that. Wars don't pause for nice days and happy news...

Yes, this is what I was intending, the only part you missed was my general reluctance to engage in the worship of warfighting as I saw what it did to my country.

Look at my post and comment history, everything I have said is consistent with it, I am welcome to someone debating on the merits of my arguments (which in no way are pro russian or pro russian imperialism) but I bristle at being called a Russian plant because it reveals an intellectual laziness that is uninterested in my points that are decidedly, unambigously pro-Ukraine.

I don't know what people's primary languages are here, maybe my words are being lost in translation?

You misunderstand me, I support Ukraine, I just grew up in Iraq War era US and I know what happens to a culture when it sees the future mostly in terms of weapon systems and their capacity. It means I support Ukraine but I also understand how this system tends to evolve and that changes how I relate to it.

edit my point is that this is a quiet indicator that Ukraine is in a stronger position than the media usually portrays it in the western world, at least in my bubble. I believe Russia is foolish to continue the war because while Ukraine is suffering immensely it is also evolving while Russia is not and that will cost Russia dearly. Good.

Is this what it looks like when a country is losing a war? The moment before utter collapse looks like the nation's defense industry maturing international partnerships and production lines in conjunction with other powerful countries on a mutually beneficial basis while being the focus of an arms development expo?

Damn, Ukraine I would surrender now if I were you.

/s

Also while I think Ukraine deserves to become a much larger focus for global military industrial arms development, also.... this shit is a bad drug. It will kill you even as it makes you more powerful... but at this point I see this as a bigger threat to Ukraine than Russia decisively winning. This is just getting absurd how hard US mainstream media is trying to sell the idea that Ukraine is losing. I am not saying the outlook or current situation are great in the near term for Ukraine, but again I don't think Ukraine would be developing mature arms production relationships specifically to share their expertise learned on the battlefield if Ukraine was losing the way the news always is trying to convince me it is....

They simply wouldn't have the time, because war famously isn't great about giving you spare time to pursue opportunities elsewhere in the world. If Russia was winning the way it needs to all aid flowing into Ukraine would just basically be flowing inwards, a one way street of more powerful, rested, experts providing materials and knowledge to an exhausted fighting force that doesn't have the time to pursue new developments rather than keep hammering on the ones that are working at the frontline.... this isn't that relationship though, this is clearly a two way conversation which demonstrates a different power balance, one where Ukraine is much more powerful than the media keeps trying to portray it as. I am not saying Ukranians aren't exhausted, I am saying they are exhausted AND.

If you don't understand why I am proposing this other hypothetical possibility for Ukraine, understand I elucidate it because I believe it is the position that the US military industrial complex wanted Ukraine to be in, but Ukraine fought so hard despite being supported by shitty allies that weren't actually real allies that it didn't happen. The U.S. military industrial complex doesn't want domestic arms productions in other countries with homegrown experts there who understand war without needing consultation and direct arms sales from US companies that have a monopoly in material and knowledge about how to produce the means for countries to effectively defend themselves.

Basic summary of the novel on the back cover, Jordan PeePee had to write a self help novel because he was too cowardly to become the romance novel writer he always wanted to be, so I will write the description for this novel as it actually is not how it manifests in this fractured reality.

"A meeting between two unlikely lovebirds, one hopeful young woman just out of college and full of liberal arts ideas but needing a guiding light, and the other a jaded and forlorn, wise salt & pepper man who the wallflower, daughter of a fancy radical leftist wallstreet banker close to George Soros, sees brooding on the shoreline one day and feels the strange desire to approach him, ask him about his shitty political ideas and listen for hours and hours..... Time flies when love sings, a love story like no other, a fantasy impossible in it's perfection? 10/10 Loved the novel"

Look I just want to say things and then have people clap and all of a sudden people are getting angry at me for doing that as an intellectual and these crazy postmodern neomarxists claim I need to think about the things before I say them and I honestly I think I am very upset about this. Please buy my book.

something a neo-marxist-anarchist would say! - said in the voice of a tiny tiny tiny man (with such a sexy voice omg horsedaddy yes)