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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   29572 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Tens of thousands of Ukrainians fought in Bakhmut, a town of 100k people along a thousand km long line. They lost.

France, Britain and Germany would truly struggle to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers in a high intensity conflict in Ukraine. They would struggle to defend a single city. There is no European army that could hold a sizeable portion of the front except for Ukraine/Russia. The scale of the Ukraine war is vastly beyond what any European leaders have imagined for decades.

Sweden and Finland can call on ~14 battlefield-capable brigades between them. Poland has a few combat-ready divisions. Germany could probably scrape together a single active division, France the same.

Really only the former three would actually be able to put troops in the line next week. They are the ones who, bordering Russia, have been feeling the heat the longest and have actually done the work of preparing.

And how many have seen ground combat at this kind of scale? I don’t think most European soldiers have seen full on combat in a generation or more. And I think this is an under appreciated problem both at the front and at home. Battlefield capable is not the same as being strong enough to keep fighting after half of your unit gets blown up. And at home, how willing is the general public to send thousands of men to die in Ukraine? How many deaths will send public support for the war into the toilet?

Sweden has 3 brigades to defend 1500 km. Sweden's military is remarkably under dimensioned. Finland has a more sizeable military but needs the force at home. Moving the military to the other side of Europe leaves the home front vulnerable while providing Russia with a reason for war.

Sweden and Finland implicitly (often stated explicitly, even) work together as a team. Finland provides the land force, Sweden provides the navy and the air force.

They could siege Leningrad again, that worked out pretty well for them last time, right?

If this was a Finnish forum you could probably start a flamewar lasting hundreds of posts on the topic of "the degree of Finnish participation in the siege of Leningrad".

I mean they ended up better than pretty much all of the Axis powers except maybe Italy

Yeah, I wasn't being sarcastic, they came out of it amazingly well all considered.

For various (very good reasons) no nation will ever fully deploy their entire military to a foreign country. A good rule of thumb is that you can halve all publically available numbers for effective combat readiness: this allows for effective cycling of units and reinforcements on the front line.

Ukraine lacks reserves and so units committed to the front remain until the point of annihilation: but if they maintained proper ratios, they'd not have enough to cover their front. At best you could expect a single expeditionary force cobbled together from all of Europe.

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