Ukrainian Defensive War against the Russian Invasion - Mark IV: The Partitioning of Discussion

You talking madshit for someone in Battle Cannon range...
I could still draw a bead to those gloriously flat surfaces...
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Didn't you say earlier, that you know what it would do for Challenger 2, but wasn't certain about German kitty?
Only speculation, but my thought was that ERA would actively impede the function of the challenger's armour. The leo only has passive armour (iirc) so it might actually benefit.
 
Found in a Bakhmut trench, Russian propaganda for their average level of literacy:
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:story:

And on a more sober note:
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Bless his simple beekeeping heart. This is the kind of shit that makes me want to go help with mine disposal; at least when the shit stops, since I promised my family I wouldn't go while rounds are still flying.
Given that Russia fields retards from prisons with fetal alcohol syndrome, picture books are only way to communicate.
 
Leopard 2 with ERA bricks:
There's a video too.


In Zaporizhzhya sector, a wounded wild boar came to the positions of the Ukrainian military where it was fed [edit: watered]
source
 
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Lucky boar, just about any other war it would be dinner

Assuming that it wasn't dinner after the soldiers put their phones away
Unless Ukrainian rations are fucking awful, I doubt it. You gotta have a taste for boar, its way more gamey and wild tasting than regular pork. Not to mention it'll make you rapturously sick if you don't cook it well enough/you butcher it improperly. Really good if you've got the taste for it though. Cute little fella too.
 
You gotta have a taste for boar, its way more gamey and wild tasting than regular pork. Not to mention it'll make you rapturously sick if you don't cook it well enough/you butcher it improperly. Really good if you've got the taste for it though. Cute little fella too.
I found it depends on how long they've been feral; escaped pigs only a generation or two off the farm aren't so bad, but the ones running wild since the War of Northern Aggression taste pretty stout.

A year ago Steve did a review of Ukrainian field rations, and they look excellent. I'm definitely down for some of those when they show up on the market.
 
The Naval-attack mode was using the ships's surface RADAR instead of the anti-air. But having never manned an S-300 so having to trust the internet, supposedly the ground attack magic is being about launch at targets RADAR can't see and the ability to input coordinates and having the computer program the missile with the flight trajectory for you.
Well, you can point a missile towards the intended target and trust its internal inertial systems to keep it flying relatively straight, and as for the terminal guidance if you're using SARH you're fucked, but an ARH system would be able to find something to lock on to, although with varying degrees of success and for a very broad definition of success as we've seen here. Ground clutter is the single biggest impediment on using radar-guided anything to attack land targets.
It wouldn't hinder anything although Kontakt -1 is 1983 level stuff. Good for an old RPG-7 warhead and maybe something a bit bigger but that's about it.

Anything with a tandem charge will go through it no problem.
If you've got the bricks, why not? I doubt its heavy enough to slow a modern tank down and well... what are the chances some of these poor mobiks don't have anything newer than the RPG-7?
 
Well, you can point a missile towards the intended target and trust its internal inertial systems to keep it flying relatively straight, and as for the terminal guidance if you're using SARH you're fucked, but an ARH system would be able to find something to lock on to, although with varying degrees of success and for a very broad definition of success as we've seen here. Ground clutter is the single biggest impediment on using radar-guided anything to attack land targets.

If you've got the bricks, why not? I doubt its heavy enough to slow a modern tank down and well... what are the chances some of these poor mobiks don't have anything newer than the RPG-7?
As much as everyone likes the meme about the mentally retarded Russian military and their rusting equipment, it's not really true anymore.

The mobiks in Ukraine at the moment have been trained and preparing for the counteroffensive for 6+ months. The surprising effectiveness of Russian attack helicopters was also a shock for many observers.

As for their gear, the RPG-7 warhead has been continually upgraded and has tandem charge warheads now, plus the singe shot RPGs are better and quite common, as is the big RPG-29.

Kontakt -1 will also help a lot against most Lancet derivates and other smaller kamikaze dones along with cluster bomb warheads.
 
Scuttlebutt on the tweeters is that the russians are reinforcing melitopol. Ukraine may have bombed an air base there.

Well, you can point a missile towards the intended target and trust its internal inertial systems to keep it flying relatively straight
Fortunately, the missile always knows where it is at all times.
 
The mobiks in Ukraine at the moment have been trained and preparing for the counteroffensive for 6+ months.
Just being in occupied territory doesn't constitute training and it's not like the average Ukrainian soldier has seen a lot of that either. Their draft has been utter chaos from day one of the war and has hardly improved because the constant pressure doesn't lend itself to mass data collection and filtering and general reform.
From what I heard from Ukrainians, drafting and training is very hit and miss. Some people get drafted and even though they have useful skills they get assigned to some random post that doesn't make use of their skills at all, and the amount and quality of training they receive is often completely random as well, from "three months drilling by veterans" over "do it yourself training at a training facility (or do nothing if you don't want to)" to "sitting in a trench two weeks after showing up to the draft office", and a good proportion of officers and troops are incompetent retards. Based on videos and testimony, troops on both sides seem to spend their time out of combat mostly getting drunk and fooling around, not practicing skills.
I have no statistical data to conclude how common all that is, but pretty much everyone you talk to privately says the same, so I think it's "widespread".

So while the problems on the Ukrainian side are nowhere near as bad as the as on the Russian side, it's not a case of well trained vs cannon fodder. The reality is more complicated than that. The Russians still have some quality troops, alongside their supply of clueless village idiots who'd rather be anywhere else.
The Russian army still have a superior quantity of machines (artillery, APC, tanks, cruise missiles, air anything), while Ukrainians have advantages in morale, intelligence and manpower. The Russians seem to be able to drag a lot of increasingly decrepit stuff out of storage, but can't replace manpower to the same degree.
Ultranationalists scream for a second wave of mobilisations, but the Russian army can't even equip the troops they have on the front lines right now with clothes and food, so how useful that would be is questionable. The recent find of Russians using Chinese shells made in 1983 and packaged with Iranian shipments doesn't inspire confidence in the status of their ammunition stocks either. Ukrainian artillery men already complain about current Pakistani 155mm shells fouling up barrels and having poor accuracy compared to the EU/US made ones they are used to, meanwhile Russians have been complaining about ancient shells and WW II artillery pieces since last year.

It's important to keep in mind that the main reason people meme on Russia so hard is that they planned and prepared their war at their leisure and still eat rocks against what should be a vastly inferior opponent which got surprised by the attack. Ukraine is still a very poor country with massive corruption issues (that were in the process of being addressed and had already decreased over the course of the last decade, because unlike Russians, Ukrainians hate that state of affairs), and the Ukrainian army is not a NATO force.

Related:
Ziggers semi regular post testimonies by supposed western trainers who say Ukrainians are lazy and refuse to learn and damage equipment to be sent home, but so far that's all made up. Everyone who verifiably worked with Ukrainians says they are information sponges and work hard to learn everything they can. Since ziggers for the most part lack the cognitive abilities to make up lies, I think there's a decent chance that's a statement about about the training and morale of Russian recruits. We've seen it countless times: Ziggers baselessly claim something applies to Ukraine when there's overwhelming evidence it does in fact apply to Russia, so I think it might be worthwhile to consider whether something there is no hard data on like this follows the same pattern.
 
Well, you can point a missile towards the intended target and trust its internal inertial systems to keep it flying relatively straight, and as for the terminal guidance if you're using SARH you're fucked, but an ARH system would be able to find something to lock on to, although with varying degrees of success and for a very broad definition of success as we've seen here. Ground clutter is the single biggest impediment on using radar-guided anything to attack land targets.

tl;dr: Doing some refreshing, the 5V55* family of missiles since the 5V55R (which is their most common I believe) use ARH for lock and inital tracking, and SARH for terminal guidance.
The process that was described was plugging in coordinates manually instead of using a RADAR lock, which is why even with upgraded launchers the system is still limited; the ground attack mode uses the command module for bearings until it goes ballistic, so sounds like ground attack might be disabling the SARH and having it go purely off intertial guidance + ballistic trajectory which would explain the inaccuracy. OR they might be leaving it on, i imagine soviet block housing has a RADAR signature.

Ziggers semi regular post testimonies by supposed western trainers who say Ukrainians are lazy and refuse to learn and damage equipment to be sent home, but so far that's all made up. Everyone who verifiably worked with Ukrainians says they are information sponges and work hard to learn everything they can. Since ziggers for the most part lack the cognitive abilities to make up lies, I think there's a decent chance that's a statement about about the training and morale of Russian recruits. We've seen it countless times: Ziggers baselessly claim something applies to Ukraine when there's overwhelming evidence it does in fact apply to Russia, so I think it might be worthwhile to consider whether something there is no hard data on like this follows the same pattern.

I talked with a guy who did US army training for the Iraqi Army in the early parts of OIF, and did that few times, and he was asked (in essence) "Are arabs as lazy and shit at soldiering as the memes say?". And he gave a very controlled answer.

- The Iraqi recruits usually were from the country and had more heart than brains (They'd have made excellent marines)
- They needed a little more motivating and watching to ensure they were on-task than the average US training class, but not that much more.
- Most of the soldiering issues stemmed from Iraqi recruitment requirements being nearly non-existent & the total lack of education. A good amount of the guys in the training platoons were functionally illiterate. This caused unexpected complications in teaching - if you can't read or write, you can't take notes to review later. And he specified lack of education not necessarily intelligence - they all wanted to learn, and some guys were able to read/right basic level stuff by the time initial training was done.
- It also caused unexpected breakdowns in discipline - if a guy can't write, its hard to validate he's been attentive on guard duty.
- the number of complete and utter shitbags vs competent soldiers was about the same as in the US.

Anyway, tl;dr his opinion of Iraqi enlisted was fairly high. They did extended training with some of the platoons including going out on combat patrols and by the time they got to that stage he was confident in the men and going out with them, as much as he'd feel going out with any regular army unit. He felt if Iraq as a whole could fix their education system, they'd be able to turn out good soldiers.

But he had zero respect for Iraqi Army officers. They were lazy, shiftless, entitled ... one of the platoons they trained for over 6 months, from raw recruits to a unit he felt confident going outside the wire with. Then they turned them over to the new Iraqi army. He went to visit them before shipping back home, and their camp was ate the fuck up. No discipline, no one on guard duty. And it was all due to their shit commanders.

I would expect is roughly the same for Ukraine. There's a lot of shiftless goldbrickers in any army.
 
I would expect is roughly the same for Ukraine. There's a lot of shiftless goldbrickers in any army.
Eh, Ukrainians have first world tier education and a very different culture. I think the issue in Ukraine is mostly chaos in the administration and many of the officers being old reservists with a similarly retarded mentality many Russians share (except with far less corruption and systematic lying), both inherited from the Soviet Union. I suspect one of those sovoks was behind the famous Leopard and Bradley tour parallel to Russian trenches through a minefield.
I'd attribute the issues to scrambling to create an army during a surprise massive foreign invasion, rather than inherent problems with Ukrainian culture or human capital.

In other news, the IAEA visited ZNPP again. The report is quite long, but the most pertinent part is this I believe:
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts have so far found no visible indications of mines or other explosives currently planted at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), but they still need additional access to carry out further such checks at the site, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said today.
It remains a mystery to me why the Russians refuse to hand over the plant operation to a neutral party, unless they do plan to do something nefarious, or at least keep the option on the table. It's a liability from a political and economic perspective. When the reactors were still running they used the place to store military hardware, does anyone know whether they still do that?
 
Ziggers semi regular post testimonies by supposed western trainers who say Ukrainians are lazy and refuse to learn and damage equipment to be sent home, but so far that's all made up. Everyone who verifiably worked with Ukrainians says they are information sponges and work hard to learn everything they can
IIRC, there was one guy who complained the Ukranians he oversaw didn't want to push trenches. The russians would attack their trenches and then retreat the second there was resistance and call in artillery. I guess that aspect would be frustrating but I don't remember if he specified it was a training/confidence issue over a laziness issue.
 
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