20701

Trying to figure out exactly what the Russians have and in what condition is an old sport, one played by pros and amateurs alike going back decades! During the Cold War, if you recall those Reagan-era “Soviet Military Power” booklets that came out every year for a while, we trotted out often debatable assessments off Soviet TO&E, which sparked a lot of debate. Since then things may well have gotten even less certain, with Russia continuing some aspects of the Soviet era force structure, developing a large post-communist export sector, and modernizing in an often haphazard way much of its own military.

One thing that hasn’t changed though is that you can’t just chuck stuff in a warehouse or park it in a lot and call it good. Everything needs to be maintained, cleaned, inspected, sometimes even cycled or run for a while, if not thoroughly mothballed for protection. If the latter, getting it back into fighting trim takes time and has to be done correctly. Certain things decay, like rubber parts, lubrication, fuel. Certain things like batteries discharge or have to be re-installed, etc. Vehicles–especially multi-ton armored vehicles–cannot sit there on their tires without a rotation schedule to prevent flat spots. That, or they have to be up on blocks effectively. And all of this, ideally, should be in structures protected from the weather.

The long and the short of it is it takes money, skill, and intention to stockpile war stuff and have it actually be useful over time. It is at the very least an open question as to whether the Russians have those three things in sufficient quantity.

20702

About that. I’m not going to post the video since it was taken by an armed drone and it doesn’t take much imagination to know what happens next, but how are they going to survive the winter?

image

Honest question for anyone who might know, what does adequate winter gear look like (@BloodyBattleBrain? Anyone else?)? What they have their looks like they’re going to freeze to death and the drone might as well have saved its munitions.

20703

Sure… and many U.S. Soldiers look down on U.S Airmen because they are better trained, housed better, have more amenities, so they must be softer and not as hardcore.

20704

It’s a bit more complicated than that. Say rather that it is a combinationow precipitation (starting last year), poor infrastructure planning (stretching back decades), exacerbated by the world situation.

I don’t know about other countries, but anyone paying $1000/month in Norway at the moment either has a huge building complex to warm up (in which case they’re hardly representative of the average Norwegian), are on insanely stupid power plan, or both of the above. There are some very stupid power plans - the “fixed” price one where the power company “pre-buys” power at supposedly preferential rates was a disaster last month; companies expected prices to rise to $0.8 - 0.9/kWh in October, but instead we got a very warm and windy october, which meant we could import 1000s of MWs of “cheap” wind power - and prices ended up being averaging around $0.2/kWh instead. Which mean that while I paid around $250 for October to warm my pretty average Norwegian home, there were people with apartments/smaller homes paying $7-800 because they are/were on “fixed” price plans.

Prices for this month are on track to be about the same, btw, so again - anyone paying $1000/month at the moment has screwed up. And I have to stress that point - it’s that person’s screwup. Anyone with expertise about power in Norway has been saying for the past year now that people need to quit gambling on power prices and switch to spot price contracts (where you pay market rates + 0.1 cents). There is really no excuse for not having done so, other than that person not paying attention for the past year (which - to be fair - we all live busy lives so things may slip, but if paying your power bills a huge problem, it might be worth paying attention to them).

Apologies for the lecture, but I get annoyed when I see claims that $1000 monthly bills are common in Europe, because that is BS, pure and simple. I know, because this is quite literally the stuff I work with every day.

20705

Yeah, but that’s true!

20706

People are mocking Russian outfitting, but I’ve unfortunately been seeing a lot more videos of Russians with full kit, decent battle armor, thick winter clothing. I think we’re back to more wishful thinking, but I guess we’ll see. What the government doesn’t supply, the people have been.

20707

I found the discussion then to be largely banter and posturing.

My regiment says very much the same thing about other regiments, with especial disregard for the Guards regiments as they are the reddest of red coats!

As a serious point of analysis it is largely stupid.

I know immediately after the Iraq war the brotish armed forces were a bit of an embarassment equipment wise, looking “like a defeated army” according to one american general apparently.

I was 17, 18 then, and vividly remembwr the equipment.

It was shit.

Now we have some decent stuff.

Which brings me onto the question of winter gear.

When I go out for a winter operation I don’t take that much.

That’s because I have to carry it all, and we dont tend to stay still for any length of time.

And moving constantly keeps you warm ish.

I’ll take my winter sleeping bag, a few layers (bear in mind our body armour and uniform form some quite effective layers) and, me personally because I hate the cold, extra socks so I can change them often, and several gloves, some thin and some thick.

Thin so I can wear them during the day and still use radios, weapons etc.

I’ll always have a scarf or similar.

Also, I know that we rarely go out for extended periods of time in cold weather and expect to stay in the woods.

Talking 3 to 4 day operations in the forests, and then usually a forward operating base of some sort.

Ideally we would avoid the situation entirely!

20708

They aren’t able to do any of this stuff, man. I’m not quoting some Twitter guy… Inn simply using my eyes and observing what a complete failure the entire Russian military is.

They are, quite simply, not an effective fighting force.

Seriously man, in the first WEEK of their conflict, they were incapable of effectively supplying their own forces. Since then, their national economy has suffered immensely, they have suffered massive losses of materiel, and their logistics chain seems even more fucked than it was when they started.

Russia cannot mobilize anything. Ignoring the simple truth that they literally do not have suitable manpower for such a task, their military logistics system cannot support a sustained war effort.

Russia failed miserably in the initial weeks of the war, and their capacity to fight has only declined since then.

20709

I don’t know about these days but 30 years ago U.S winter gear was layers upon layers of thick wool with big rubberized boots we dubbed Mickey Mouse boots. The coldest I was ever personally on a FTX was for a REFORGER in Wildflecken and it was at least negative 30/40 due to the kerosene heater freezing over. Changing clothes sucked, having any part of the body exposed sucked, but once fully kitted out you could “function” and shamble around. We could operate artillery after a fashion but I don’t think there would be any infantry charges. Maybe 10th Mountain or 2nd IB could do it better than we could in the cold as they were the supposed specialists.

20710

A billboard in Poland

“High energy prices is one of his weapons too”

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20711

Mark Hertling’s assessment of how the war has gone and where we’re at (former Commanding General US Army Europe).

First part is analysis of what’s happened so far:

Assessment of where we are now starts here:

20712
20713

Yeah, he still hasn’t presented any supporting facts for his position or refuted anyone else’s argument. MOTS.

20714

We have watched Russia catastrophically fail for the better part of a year now. Anyone who thinks they are going to suddenly turn things around simply isn’t paying attention.

20715

I mean it could be that Janster is just fundamentally a pessimist and is therefore always expecting the worst possible outcomes

20716

The last couple years certainly haven’t made me more of an optimist.

20717

Perun has two of his videos cover graft and just the incredible corruption that is ongoing in Russia, and what serious impact that has on military forces, who will seem fine until they are used.
I think it was Perun, but I don’t remember who said just before the war Russian soldiers in Belarus was selling fuel on the black marked big time.

I don’t think it was purely logistics that broke down, it was soldiers on the lower who had just sold every bit of fuel they had and probably a lot more, causing the entire operation to break down, I suspect this isn’t happening now, but ofcourse, I cannot be sure.

Logistically, remember they are fighting a big war on their doorstep, powerprojection wise, this is way easier than for the Usa fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan by a -lot-
They will be able to supply their troops over winter, I don’t think thats a problem, however for the west we have to face it, either we supply Ukranie PROPERLY now, or they might loose, we can’t be too skittish about it, but I worry many countries will over winter…we’ll see.

As for frozen conflict, give Ukranie another 20 Himars and enough missiles…and they will fucking unfreeze them, supply them with all the winter gear they can need, and send people to help them repair their infrastructure over winter…maybe even connect them to european powergrid…

There are options, but this WILL escalate stuff…its not fucking fun.

Also, I’m not going to post my powerbill, but for august - october it LITERALLY was 900-1000 dollars a month, I have a big villa, but djiz man…I’m not lying…also spot price, I had fixed rates last winter and profited big on that, I won’t again, the power companies here won’t let me.

Its very cold here, we use a -lot- of power for heating, I can use wood, which I do have a ton of, but I pollute the neighborhood a lot with this…

20719

This is my question. If Putin/Russia can so easily raise 1 million troops then it forces us to ask, why haven’t they done it already? What is Putin waiting for? Why didn’t they raise 1 million troops and win the war back in the summer before they would have to supply winter gear as well? Maybe Janster can answer that.

20720

To lull them into a false sense of security.

20721

Oh, it’s orders of magnitude easier.

That’s why the fact that they lost so badly in the initial weeks such a huge indicator.

That’s pretty much the easiest fight they could have fought, and they got destroyed.