can't find a more reputable source at the moment
The War in the Ukraine
- Thread starter SampanViking
- Start date
It is true then it’s probably (most likely) a diversionary offensive. The reports of a huge buildup in the south and de-mining by Ukraine points toward Mariupol.
Attacking multiple spots to pin down resources. I do believe someone posted reports that Ukrainian armor was building up again on the Kherson side.
At this point, full mobilization isn't really going to change the war in the short term, Russia will need some time to reconstitute all it's BTGs to full strength and make sure they work together properly. After all conscrips and professional soldiers are different in readiness.
I'm not even sure if Putin wants to drag the war on much more, if even his steadfast ally Kadyrov is publicly stating displeasure, imagine what's not being said behind the scenes, full mobilization might be politically unfeasible due to the narrative used to start the war not being particularly convincing to Russian citizens to justify actual war rather than limited policing action. (Why spend blood and money killing Nazis in another country)
At the same time, Ukraine does not look like it will accept anything but the full expulsion of Russian forces from its territories, so the war goes on.
The Ukrainians are really throwing everything they've got this time, regardless of casualties. However they'll find Kherson, Zaporizhzhia Station and Mariupol to be far harder to take than expected based on geography and force composition. Unlike Kharkiv, Russian forces hold a substantial buffer and as Ukrainians advance they're lengthening the front while shortening it for Russians, as Russians already got all the low hanging fruit.
The problem is how Russian forces are organized. A Russian BTG can't sustain basically any loses without being rendered effectively destroyed.
source:
The lack of manpower is the reason why Russia is deploying proxy troops in masses which comes with another bunch of problems like low morale, lack of proper communication and general combat power.
Ukraine sabotaged the power infrastructure in Russian Belgorod oblast causing power outages in half of the region so the Russians paid them back and knocked out like a fifth of their available electric generation capacity.
That "superior Russian military" was Rosvgardia and LNR units. Of course they retreated. And I wouldn't call it a retreat in panic since it seems to be pretty obvious they retreated orderly enough. Of course they left inoperable vehicles behind.
Russia said it before the conflict started that this is happening because of NATO expansion. And so it is. Ukraine was a de facto member of NATO as can be seen.
Russia would use a different tactic against NATO. It would quite quickly escalate into using tactical nuclear weapons.
You're comparing a 700 men structure against a 4000 men structure. If I split the ABCT into six smaller groups, those smaller groups would also be "effectively destroyed" under such losses.
To take it to an extreme; if I merge the entire army into a single structure and compare it against an ABCT, the ABCT would also need to destroy XYZ times more targets. This is completely meaningless.
Can we please just get past these hyperboles? Does anyone on this forum pretend that Russians have as much fire power as the US military or even PLA? They are not fighting against them.
The Russians have been fighting for months and taking a lot of damages. If Russian forces can be destroyed so easily, then how come they are still fighting? There is no evidence that when Russians have enough combat strength in the theater, that they will be unable to fight. Kherson is a great example of that. You can say their fleeing from Kharkiv is cowardly or you can say they were practical. But what evidence is there that they cannot fight when they have enough troop strength?
How do you expect me to take you seriously if you mirror twitter hyperventilation and repeat nonsense like the Russians cannot keep fighting?
Intelligence is intelligence but ground reality trumps all. Of course armchair generals (you, me, the whole forum members, Twitter, reddit etc) can mock them for their intelligence failures but get at their shoes and think that you a real general (sic).
You get reports, Ukraine is amassing troops and equipment at this place and at that place. How do you counter this, when you don't have manpower?
As you said, you can only draw manpower from other places and thus weaken the defensive lines there. So yeah, it might have been an Intel failure or maybe they knew it but assesed that the diversion was the real attack or maybe they didn't know it but because they didn't have enough manpower at that front they were doomed either way
We can never know what has happened, what we know though is that the principle cause of this isn't intelligence but manpower actually. How many wars have been fought without intelligence and with fog of war, and still managed to be won by various forces. Even if your intelligence is lacking, if you have manpower available you can plug a lot of holes, have reserves, secondary-third back up defensive lines, sizeable rapid reaction forces, continuously executing diversion attacks, rotating, attacking, executing elastic defence, encircle etc.
So yeah, intelligence is of course important, but manpower is number 1 and will always be on ground wars (unless you are vastly inferior technologically). You can play all the tricks you want but in front of pure strength all you have is nothing
That's exactly the point. The Armored Brigade Combat Team is the smallest independent operating basic deployable unit of maneuver in the US Army. Meanwhile the BTG is the Russian counterpart as smallest independent operating maneuver unit. The paper properly explains the fundamental flaws of the BTG concept in a conventional war. Having artillery batteries on that level gives a BTG a remarkable firepower on paper but like stated the fact that they can't sustain any loses is the crucial factor here.