Update from Ukraine | Can Ukraine start a Big counterattack in Bakhmut?

VIDEOS

1. Russian Soldiers Blew Themselves Up: Putin’s Ammunition Depot Is Burning Like Hell!
ANKA Daily News
316K subscribers
Feb 22, 2023 7:30 p.m. EST
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zZ36PP3rTk

The greatest strength of an army is its reputation. The biggest reason for defense spending all over the world is “deterrence.” All states that want to be protected from the attacks of other countries increase their military power. As a result of the increase in military power, the reputation of the army rises more. This discourages other countries from attacking.

2. RUSSIANS ARE SCHOCKED AFTER UKRANIAN ATTACKS ON MARIUPOL || 2023
Warthog Defense
471K subscribers
Feb 22, 2023 5:30 p.m. EST
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql9yeZO1kpk

3. Ukrainian servicemen hold against the Russian offense in the Bakhmut area – report from the trenches
UATV English
380K subscribers
Feb 22, 2023 5:45 p.m. EST
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoMCerXkKJk

Toretsk – is a small town near Bakhmut in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. Here, on the Bakhmut direction, the Russian occupation army has been conducting attempts of offensive operations for months. First with waves of prisoner-mercenaries from the Wagner PMC, now – regular Russian army tries to do the same. Watch the report directly from the trenches – in our video.

VIDEOS

1. Inside the Ukrainian tank brigades holding back a larger, more modern Russian force
PBS NewsHour
3.55M subscribers
Feb 22, 2023 7:45 p.m. EST
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI2WJuFWNVE

Ukraine and the U.S. say Russian forces have launched offensives in three areas in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. With support from the Pulitzer Center, Nick Schifrin and videographer Eric O’Connor visited all parts of the frontline. They give us this inside look at the Ukrainian tank brigades tasked with holding back a larger, more modern Russian force.

2. Belarusian volunteer battalion destroy Russian observation point with ATGM
The Sun
3.71M subscribers
Feb 22, 2023 12:15p.m. EST
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WDLrRQSD90
Footage released by the Belarusian volunteer ‘Volat’ battalion of the Kastus Kalinouski Regiment shows pro-Ukrainain forces using a ATGM to destroy a Russian observation point in the distance.

The ATGM is fired from a secluded building at the observation point that is destroyed. Once the Russian observation point is destroyed the troops flee the abandoned building after giving away their position.

3. Ukraine War: What’s the Bucharest Nine?
Sky News
6.18M subscribers
Feb 22, 2023 12:00 p.m. EST
Sky’s Defence and Security Analyst Professor Michael Clarke explains the significance of the ‘Bucharest Nine’ and how it was formed.

Ukraine ping

ftrpilot: [Unreal. ]

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the Russian military attempted to fit $100b worth of military in a $50b budget - as Kamil Galeev put it, Putin tried for a a powerful army and a powerful navy.* As might be expected, they failed miserably. For much of the last 2 decades, Indian military spending exceeded Russia’s. Does anyone think India’s military is better-equipped? It’s still flying MiG-21’s, introduced in 1959.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/military-spending-defense-budget
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/RUS/russia/military-spending-defense-budget

Much of the caterwauling about Russian corruption is just journalists peddling a fairy tale. Is there corruption? Sure. Worse than Ukraine’s? I wouldn’t bet on it being much worse. Fact is - Russia has a ton of legacy systems from the Soviet era. Unless guarded, it gets stolen by local gangs, who pay the officials in charge for info about the inventory. That’s not corruption - it’s lack of cash to properly guard very costly inventory. We get theft here, too**. The difference is we spend copious sums of cash of securing it. And the people who guard it are paid a living wage. Not so in Russia.

Misha Firer at Quora has pictures of himself walking through a Russian base.*** Everything is stripped because no one is guarding it. Stateside, we get copper thieves walking off with copper wire taken off live power lines, at considerable personal risk evident in the mishaps occasionally reported on the back pages. Imagine unguarded weapons there for the taking at Russian military bases. If our weapons depots were like Russia’s, we’d get a shrinkage problem, too. That’s not corruption - it’s lack of resources.

Much of the time, insufficient cash is allocated, the officials responsible throw up their hands in disgust and just say all their objectives are met every time some periodic assessment comes up. This, pretty much, is how so many government and private sector organizations, civilian and military alike, have proved to have capabilities they claimed, only on paper. You might not get what you pay for, but you *never* get what you don’t pay for.

* https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1497993363076915204.html
** https://www.timesofisrael.com/6-arrested-for-swiping-dozens-of-rifles-from-army-base/
*** https://www.quora.com/How-strong-is-the-Russian-military%E2%80%99s-might/answer/Misha-Firer

Ukraine ping

Widget Jr:[Somewhere in Iraq, there has to be veterans from the wrong end of the US military thinking to themselves “and everyone though we were overrated?!”]

You’re not alone in thinking this. A former naval aviator’s view re the Desert Storm era Iraqi military:

[Iraq in 91 fielded more than twice the number of MBTs as Russsia has currently in their entire army. Mostly T-72s with some T-59s. In terms of functional relative combat power, the Lions of Babylon were a qualitative peer to most of the current, 2022 Russian armor in the SMO, which is also mostly T-72s with a small minority upgraded with Gen 1 night vision and slightly upgraded ERA, which appears to be ineffective against Javelin and NLAW. Keep in mind also that at the time we weren’t using the god-mode Abrams Sep4/TUSK but a mix of 105mm gunned M1s and a large number of M60s still.

The Iraqi Air Force had 700+ combat aircraft and unlike Russia, with no combat experience outside of barrel bombing Syrians, most of the professional Cadre were veterans of the Iran Iraq war, where they were fighting against top-of-the-line western systems like the F-14 Tomcat and AIM-54. Both their ground forces and air forces had substantially more combat experience (including several aces, for the Air Force) than the coalition, or the Russians in the SMO. The Iran Iraq war was total war, although we overlook it today. Chemical weapons, mass armor clashes, huge special forces activities and massive casualties. These were hardened, bloodied troops.

Baghdad was the most robustly defended target in terms of Air Defense in the entire world. Look up the YouTube clip of the Air Guard viper pilot who had to notch seven (7!) SA-2s and SA-6s in a single sortie to make it back to base. His wingman wasn’t so lucky. Both AH-64s and A-10s were fully withdrawn from operating beyond the LOD due to losses from SAMs and AAA. Baghdad was impregnable to anything other than cruise missiles or stealth aircraft strikes.

Saddam had hundreds of TBMs and used them to good effect, tying up basically all of SOCOM and a good chunk of ACC trying to hunt them down. The Iraqi forces were well equipped, experienced, and well positioned by any unbiased measure. Claims they were not generally fall into either obfuscations to deny the huge force multiplying effect of certain western technologies, or feeble defenses that subhuman Arabs could not possibly master exquisite Russian technology and so were steamrolled. Aside from being a grotesque view on first principles, it’s also flatly wrong.]

The points to be made here? Uncle Sam made it look easy. It wasn’t. The Russians ain’t Uncle Sam.

An explanation of how US airframes would be a game changer, because of their EW and comms capabilities and PGMs:

[Air power excels at destroying artillery outright, and suppressing its use just by being airborne in the general vicinity. You can’t fire and displace fast enough to get away from an F-16 coming to ruin your whole afternoon with cluster bombs. And it can engage your battery well outside of the range of your Manpads if it chooses to and E/A-18s turned the protecting SAMs into scrap metal days ago. Artillery is a primo target for airpower– largely static relative to the aircraft, mostly unarmored or lightly armored, and a high concentration of personnel in a small footprint.

Russia can’t leverage their airpower to shut down enemy artillery because they didn’t invest in a lot of seemingly boring network centric warfare technologies that the US/NATO did. Link-16/22 etc let’s any platform push through targeting data to any other, so the recon PLC on the ground can instantly relay the coordinates of an enemy battery to the stack of 30-50 fast movers orbiting overhead.

That call for fire gets vetted through airborne C4ISR which has access to every aircrafts fuel state and load out and position and vectors whichever is most appropriate into position. Meanwhile the whole circus is protected by ES/EA that will *immediately* detect any red force attempt to radiate well before the emitter can build a tactical picture, and vector fighters or electronic attack assets toward it as appropriate.

Russians don’t have secure directional data links, so just talking gives their fix away. They operate almost exclusively through GCI which is provincial, with one hand not knowing what the other is doing. They lack the PGMs and targeting pods to accurately engage outside the AAA and Manpad threat window so have to yeet unguided rockets ballistically off their frogfoots toward the general direction (coordinates written in grease pencil on the canopy based on open air radio calls, based on videos leaked online) of the enemy. Meanwhile their Flanker Fulcrum availability is very low for maintenance reasons and even lower since they are tasked with the PGM deepstrikes and can’t be spared to escort CAS or even overwatch them generally.

Airpower is one of those things you can’t half-ass. Since the 70s the Russians knew they were going to get bled if they went against NATO aur forces so never developed the SEAD/DEAD, tankers, AWACS, and LINK/TADIL infrastructure required for offensive air interdiction in Indian Country. It’s not like the USA is a prodigy or something, thousands of aviators were killed or captured in Vietnam where we started to learn these lessons. They never had that experience, and didn’t learn from ours apparently. ]

If its OK to answer, who is the former naval aviator?

In the Gulf Wars the US and allies had a long list of advantages. They all proved overwhelming, we still have them, and they have all gotten better. Problematic systems like the Patriot evolved into the PAC-2. The Iraqis, for their part, were actually trying to fight like a army. They at least made a effort to use secure C3I/C4I and keep their troops properly supplied, unlike the Russian invasion. They were overwhelmed by forces at least two generations ahead of them. After they were reconstituted by the allies and the British withdrew from Basra, it was the Iraqi army which retook the city on their own from Muqtada al-Sadr's rebels (why is he still breathing?!).

Another point to make, and not one to lead to over confidence, is that a lot of what is believed about the Russian military is based on the legacy of World War II and Cold War. Retired General Mark Hertling has gone over many of the weakness the Russian military has in its personnel (link). Their personnel quality has declined. We can see this in how the Russian MOD, army units, and Wagner publicly feud with each other. That is unheard of in US and NATO modeled militaries.

I say this with caution, the more we see of what the Russian military has, the more overrated their equipment is shown to be. Much of their equipment quality is stuck where it was before the USSR collapsed and upgraded to varying degrees. After watching the US go through Iraq twice, watching the supposedly superior Russian army take such losses to a supposedly inferior country like Ukraine is a real shock to honest observers. What is shows is how badly overrated the sum of the Russian military and arms really are.

A example of this is the T-90. After the Gulf War, excuses were made for Russian military hardware that the US was not fighting Russians, export models, or Arab military problems. The T-90 was originally the T-72BU, then the Gulf war happened. The T-72BU quickly renamed the T-90, Russia put export models on the market, and avoided putting their own ~~T-72BUs~~ T-90s in conflicts where they might have losses, like the First Battle of Grozny. That was until Syria, when TOW-2s first field in 1987 were destroying T-90s first accepted in 1992, and were supposed to survive earlier generation anti-tank weapoins.

Of course, it doesn't help Russia that Ukraine is a former Warsaw Pact country that used, designed, and built a lot of Russian weapons. Such as the Moskva, which was so poorly maintained she was barely seaworthy when sunk.

Don't get me started on all the shills and sell outs like Macgregor.

You two have provided excellent information (and analysis) in the last couple of posts. Well done.

I only have a couple of comments to add.

Problematic systems like the Patriot evolved into the PAC-2.

While this statement is true, I would not call the 1991 Patriot system problematic.

In 1991, the high end desktop computer was a 386 with 8 megs of ram. Your cell phone today probably has more ram than a 1991 Patriot.

In Desert Storm, Iraq was launching SCUD (ballistic) missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Ballistic missiles are difficult to shoot down, even today.

IMHO, the U.S. military had done an excellent job of keeping up with computer technology, certainly much better than Russia.

As computers technology advances, so does U.S. military equipment.

Our equipment is designed to be upgradable.

Of course, it doesn't help Russia that Ukraine is a former Warsaw Pact country that used, designed, and built a lot of Russian weapons.

I believe that is why Ukraine shot down a lot of Russian aircraft in the opening days of the war.

Ukraine knew the capabilities and limitations of the EW systems on Russia's aircraft. Any Russian aircraft that flew in range of Ukraine S-300 was shot down.

Please know that I read all of your posts. Feel free to ping me on any discussion.

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