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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   28029 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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People don't want to talk about the war because

  1. by and large, the west is losing it because of bad procurement, industrial output and planning

  2. despite their skepticism about particulars -wokism, governance, I'm betting most people here are in favor of US hegemony and see the countries involved as somehow 'theirs' - something like the nationalist delusion. No, they aren't. The countries belong to people who have power and influence in them - and that ain't you unless you're a billionaire with an entire department of lobbyists and a prominent position in CFR etc.

  3. it's a rather gnarly affair, entirely possible there's been up to half a milion dead by now, 3/4 of that Ukrainian. I'm basing that claim on the estimates of amputees being 25-50k according to press quoting charities, and the amputee/KIA ratio being certainly somewhere between 6 (GWOT) to cca 30 (WW1).

So, it's perfectly clear why we aren't talking about it.

That’s not it at all!

The only one of those which even suggests why we’d avoid the subject is 1. I guess some people probably don’t want to talk about a losing team? But I can’t say I ever expected Ukraine to come out on top.

But I can’t say I ever expected Ukraine to come out on top.

Given the pushback I've been getting here over the last years, there's a good few people who expected it. One would think so, except it's apparent the entire military procurement sector in the West is vastly more corrupt than in Russia.

There are lots of reasons to oppose Russia/push back on (perceived) Russia partisans even if one thinks Ukraine is doomed. But you may be right if I’m typical-minding.

Interesting that you blame corruption. My intuition at the start was Russia rolling in and destroying major C&C. Maybe not on Desert Storm level, but something relatively fast. In that case, the industry of either side wouldn’t matter too much. Frankly, I assume that’s what Russia expected, too. If they’d known how much money and experience they’d lose to get this far, I would like to think it wouldn’t have happened.

But given that Ukraine didn’t shatter, and instead got this awful slog—now the production is key. And they sure can’t do it on their own dime. As critics have observed, we dumped most of our old and cheap munitions, and are struggling to spin up new production. So is this failure because of corrupt or incompetent procurement? Or were we just not expecting it to come to this?

I realize this sounds like I’m saying “nah, we’d totally win if we weren’t holding back.” Hubristic, right? But there really is a lack of political will. Our politicians even fought over sending the old stuff to this small, faraway, non-NATO country. If that level of intervention was unpopular, is it so surprising that we haven’t kept up in shell production?

Russians believed defenses were going to crumble because enough people are bribed. They targetted anti-air installations etc but iirc weren't even hitting command posts and definitely not blowing up soldiers in barracks. It was no 'Shock & Awe'.

That changed after it became clear it'll go on. They blew up almost the entire 'International Legion' base, with the exception of one building where both missiles were intercepted and/or failed. It wasn't executed perfectly, the missiles didn't arrive within a brief window so most people got out..

I would like to think it wouldn’t have happened.

Nah. It'd have happened, the difference is they'd not have underestimated it. Russia is a state born in warfare. They're not blessed by protective seas like Americans or Britain. And after WW2, you can hardly blame them wanting to keep neutral states on their border.

Sure, these days you can always just nuke the invaders after they cross the border, and it's not even a big deal contamination wise. But the idea is not instinctively attractive to most people.

So is this failure because of corrupt or incompetent procurement? Or were we just not expecting it to come to this?

Recent funny factoid I learned. The weapon Lancet was inspired with, Israeli Hero-120 was sold to Hungary for $350k per suicide drone. Russian Lancets were on export for $35k. Actual price to build them is almost certainly <$10k even in low series production.

Switchblade 600, an equivalent weapon, costs $120k. These are all electric drones without thermal sights with comparable ranges.

Is this efficiency? Consider anti-missiles and anti-air. US warships defend themselves with some fancy IR seeker missile costing $900k . Russian equivalent has very similar flight characteristics, no seeker, probably cost $10k a pop. It's just a two stage missile with a proximity fuze and command guidance / detonation. Especially at sea, autonomous missile makes little sense. Target can't dip behind terrain.

Russian lancets paired with Orlan-10s are insane cost-effective weapons that are the biggest organic capability that Russians have used to truly wreck Ukrainians, and the Russians deserve every bit of credit for developing an insanely capable platform themselves.

Without getting into too much details, small form factor UAVs are where the west is absolutely fucking smoked. Russia can spit out Orlans at 1/10 the price of a worthless Switchblade, not a single fucker uses the meme level Black Hornet or any other US platform, and thats not even getting into what China is doing. A boeing insitu is like a cool buck and a half, but Chinese WZ are literally 20% of the price and even that is considered way too expensive for the Chinese. Commercial off the shelf parts bought off Taobao are allowing Ukraine to offset Russias immense artillery advantage, and trust me that the Chinese are way fucking ahead of the USA on that. I talked in other threads about air supremacy and I stand by that, but even a hundred F35s can't take out a thousand AV500, let alone 10k jury rigged Mavic 2 EAs.

The gutting of European manufacturing in favor of precision strike capabilities made sense in 2000 to mid 2010s, but the game has changed with small form factor drones. Every unit knows it, but fucking Rheinmetall is still dicking around with maaaybe one composite cabled tether UAV for their new panther while China is integrating drones at 2:1 ratio per combatant. I used to think the only thing that will stop China is their retarded focus on grenade launchers at the squad level, but the fucking drone swarms spat out of flatbed trucks is a goddamn nightmare worse than skynet.

Orlan-10 is more of a long-range long endurance spotter, it has an ICE engine. Lancets are getting targeting data from small electric recon drones with 2-3 hour endurance. We know Orlans can be acquired by stingers- there's even footage of it getting shot down from drone's POV. Electric drones are probably way less conspicuous in IR.

, but the fucking drone swarms spat out of flatbed trucks is a goddamn nightmare worse than skynet.

If you spot the flatbed trucks before they release the drones, you can hit them with PGMs or cluster MLRS strikes. Electric drone range is quite limited..

At this point, anyone who isn't developing autonomous defense drone swarms isn't gonna make it. With AI and terrain following, getting rid of lots of drones is going to be very hard next to impossible. Filling the air with flak fragments gets you only so far. It's strictly line of sight.

Guess what's line of sight: 2 mach ATGMs like the Russians have. So anything exposed is toast. There's also the obvious counterplays, such as drones marking the spot the flak is firing from, sending info back to MLRS and then you have 500 cluster bomblets on that location within a 30 seconds, ideally. Or, you know, a tank firing a HE round from 10 km away.

focus on grenade launchers at the squad level,

I mean, grenade launchers integrated with drone spotting are stuff of nightmares. Unless you're running like a lunatic or under hard cover, you're gonna get blown up. What's wrong there?

Modern warfare makes me wish for a nuclear winter. People getting blown up from 50 km away because a drone spots them, or getting hunted down by FPVs.. bad. It's bleak and only ever going to get more bleak.

I talked in other threads about air supremacy and I stand by that, but even a hundred F35s can't take out a thousand AV500, let alone 10k jury rigged Mavic 2 EAs.

I dunno, but doesn't F-35 have radar guided missiles that can take out the AV500 from outside its range. I presume it can carry some short range IR missiles, right? Are these helis designed to be really cheap ? Can you truly build a cheap helicotper ?

Orlans are the 2-3 hour recon drone you are talking about. Small quads have only a 20 to 30 minute lifespan, meaning they have a range of about 10km (and realistically we are looking at 4-5km) at best, compared with the 40km+ with Orlan and Lancet. The orlan is low observation, deep recon capable, with laser guidance. IR is really shit, the 640x480 sensors don't have digital zoom and drones don't show up on 2015 era IR optics till about 2km away at best, because they are a flat profile from front. Nafo gloats about how its all COTS shit but orlan is damn good and cheap for what it does. Deep recon LO with lasing means the lancets dont need their own onboard guidance, only initial telemetry. The last meter probability kill with Orlan 30 is way above artillery spam and way cheaper than slinging kinzhals or the retarded pitchup rocket spam.

GBAD is basically toast once it lights up against a drone swarm becsuse of dynamic targeting, you dont even need mounted ATGM when the drone is itself the munition. Chinese drone swarms are fire-and-forget with ranges of 30km as they are tube launched winged UAVs, not quadcopters, so the outer radius for them to.be spotted is really large. Trucks are also hard to spot far behind the frontline, as we see the brits use blowpipes off trucks and the HIMARs trucks took like 2 years before they got hit, so killing launchers before they shoot off the payload is really tough.

I dunno, but doesn't F-35 have radar guided missiles that can take out the AV500 from outside its range

Of course, but the AV500 is dirt fucking cheap. Around 40-120k per unit, including munitions, and thats with CAIC markup. China can churn these out by the hundreds per week, and there is no way for NATO air superiority conops to just put enough metal in the air to counter that. Until Skynex, Iron Beam or Loyal Wingman come up at scale, an AV500 or loitering munition swarm of 40 munitions per salvo can get through even a russian Pantsir+Shilka screen. Iron Beam is the best option to kill swarms though, and Rafael says they are a year from deploying it at scale, but you still need to spam Iron Beam units. About 4 seconds on target to kill, and pretty short range.

Orlan has a flight endurance of 9-10 hours.

Chinese drone swarms are fire-and-forget with ranges of 30km as they are tube launched winged UAV

is there any videos or drawings of these?

Around 40-120k per unit, including munitions

Are they really making helicopters + some anti-air missiles <120k ? What's the specs on the missile ?

About 4 seconds on target to kill, and pretty short range.

I wanna see that chew up MLRS spam aimed at its location.

Especially once you start using more durable rockets. Chewing up through few cm of steel on a rotating rocket seems pretty tough! And there's a dozen coming in, and you've got what, 15 seconds to do it ?

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FWIW, this isn't why I don't talk about Ukraine. I don't talk about it because it seems like a morass of propaganda to the point where I haven't been willing to try to do the work to understand what's closer to the truth. Maybe I'm wrong and it's actually quite legible if I were to dig in, but right now, it doesn't seem like a good tradeoff for me.

Yes, it's a morass of propaganda. Some things, such as social media casualty counts done by the other side using an open methodology allow us to glimpses of how things are. E.g.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/07/10/bring-out-your-dead

Other things - like pre-war information etc also.

And then you've got the amputee numbers:

https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-war-amputees-wounded-soldiers-e2c5c47ea4b8326d980e630d3df87b77

upwards of 20k. There's another article saying 'around 50k' by some amputee charity person.

That's 200k dead if we assume Ukraine is slightly worse at casualty care than US in GWOT. (~6 KIA per amputee).

Posts about the war in Ukraine consistently get some of the most engagement out of all top level posts. We've had at least two posts in the past month about Ukraine that generated lots of discussion.

There doesn't necessarily need to be a new post about Ukraine every week because most weeks, nothing newsworthy happens.

I, for one, would love to hear from Atlanticists and Putinists as well what they think the endgame is here. No, really. Like, what?

Endgame ?

This or next year, Ukraine folds and accepts territorial loss and permanent neutrality (Finlandisation- no NATO, no EU membership). NATO is ran by idiots simply wasn't able to provide the armaments necessary for victory. Might be some fun (meaning FPVs into NATO political leaders) out of this when Ukrainians with their half million dead are going to be given no rebuilding assistance [1].

EU (specifically the centrist fraction of EU parties) is mulling a union-wide draft law, supposedly voluntary at the start, so recruiting at most 10% of age groups. So there might be remilitarization. It's required in the mid run anyway because America is likely going to go down.

Russia reforms their military procurement in preparation for WW3 (new defense minister looks up to the task) and will probably take over the Baltics out of pure vengeance when US hegemony collapses following the China war. It's nice real estate, but I guess most the young people there will flee and Russian hydrocarbon funds will go to pay for those pensions too.

[1]

"On the question of NATO's role in the reconstruction of Ukraine after the war. The first thing I will say is that first of all, you need to ensure that Ukraine prevails. Because unless Ukraine prevails, there's nothing to reconstruct in a free and independent Ukraine.

We must be able to help Ukraine prevail because it's important for Ukrainians. But also because every day this war drags on, of course, the more destruction and the more expensive, the more resource demanding it will be to do reconstruction afterwards."

I'm not an Atlanticist or a Putinist BUT I have played Paradox games, which gives me an intimate understanding of Putin's motivations and goals.

The endgame is to peel off those sections of Ukraine that Russia thinks are valuable/pro-Russian, and to neutralize what's left of Ukraine, rendering them a permanent non-threat and pliable diplomatically and economically. Russia appears to be (currently) attempting to reach this goal by conducting a war of annihilation, attriting Ukraine's combat personnel and equipment until it either accepts Russia's terms or is unable to resist Russia's de facto imposition of them.

Russia's war against Finland is a good historical example to look towards.

Attempting to reach this goal by conducting a war of annihilation

I'm going to get accused of being a "Putinist" surely, but Russia is not waging a war of annihilation. They are conspicuously avoiding civilian casualties.

As usual, the worst victims of war are the men actually doing the fighting, whose lives are treated as worthless by basically everyone.

I'm going to get accused of being a "Putinist" surely, but Russia is not waging a war of annihilation.

Well, except that they're both losing much of their youth to combat and emigration.

By "war of annihilation" I (perhaps unclearly) meant "destroying all their hardware and killing all their personnel to reduce their ability to fight" not "killing all their civilians."

I think the word you were looking for was "attrition".

Yes, I used that word in explaining what I meant. :)

That makes sense. It's definitely a war of attrition.

A guy in Kiev blews himself and the recruiter guy wrestling with him up with a grenade. It was a homemade one, looks like both survived.

At this point, I don't understand why Ukrainians simply refuse to move when 'recruited'. Unless they start killing them, getting a beating is preferable to getting blown up, and they can't maim recruits because that'd defeat the entire point.

Off the top of my head, I suspect that Ukraine will break eventually, Putin will take over some or all of the country but be unable to enforce particularly high levels of order or get his industrial base high enough for further invasions. Ukraine will be remembered as a pointless tragedy / failure of western will / pyrrhic victory depending on factional allegiance.

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