So the purpose here is just to light the battlefield up for some reason?
Grifman
21268
From what I have read and seen before, this looks like a thermobaric attack.
jpinard
21269
Then we need to give Ukraine the weapons needed to crush Russia now. Not trickle them in over the course of the next year. Because western nations will not feel the same about this war in 12 months as we did the last 12. Dragging this out only benefits Putin and he knows it.
meeper
21270
Definitely not.
Aerosol weapons are very distinctive during their expansion stage and pretty boring overall afterward. For this to be an aerosol weapon, the weapon would’ve had to be enormous, be very poorly mixed, and be a very altitude high blast.
This is definitely a long duration burn weapon (phosphorus or magnesium). I can’t speak with certainty what it is, but I’m confident that this isn’t a thermobaric weapon. (source: me. I spent almost a decade evaluating various energetic weapons and designing countermeasures against them).
You wouldn’t be able to see this level of detail during the day - clouds of combustion products would block the view. During the night though, the crazy brightness of the burning pellets shines through those clouds pretty effectively.
vyshka
21271
I think there was a drop into Germany that wasn’t a complete cluster, but other than that it did not go well.
ddtibbs
21272
The idea behind modern Airborne operations isn’t drop a bunch of dudes and hope for the best, but rapid airfield seizure to allow follow on troops to be lifted in and expand the airhead. I believe that was the intention behind Russia’s failed air assault on the Kyiv airport.
In the first days there was a Russian plan to drop VDV elites in an airfield miar Kiev and make them capture government buildings causing collapse of Ukrainian state. But bloodthirsty Ukrainians didn’t embrace this quick and deathless resolution to the conflict.
What @ddtibbs said.
The problem with the idea (as Russia failed attempt showed) is that you have to take the airfield AND the surrounding area in a 3-4 kms radius, if you don’t want to get shot down constantly by manpads. And that’s supposing you destroyed any important mechanized AA and SAMs in a much larger areas.
Actually, that’s a great point, because that’s what historically has happened to both airborne and amphibious specialty forces. They get used as higher-quality infantry and ground up. The 101st at Bastogne, the Marines in 'Nam (and both types many times in post-war actions).
Of course, if these expensive specialty forces are not that good in the first place, you end up with the worst of both worlds. You spend enormous amounts of resources creating units that you then use as cannon fodder.
Russians also did a lot of mistakes. Even Wikipedia describes them with sources.
I understand they didn’t prepare for landing before sending helicopters with troops and so they had enough people to capture the airport but not enough to hold it. I understand the initial plan was that this attack will start and end the war so… I don’t know. I made worse mistakes in strategy games, I guess.
Here’s an opinion of Russian economist (who is actually of Ukrainian/Jewish heritage and lived in Israel and later London for many years) I like.
Here’s a translation of the most interesting point:
[To win the war the world has to] take away two things from Russia: assets to buy stuff and people who design and make all these weapons.
With “assets to buy” the West is waging a holy war. They have frozen half the reserves (correctly). Introduced a ceiling on the price of oil sold (but only on oil sold by sea) at a rate slightly higher than the real price - leaving Russia $80 billion a year in revenue, as if that alone is not enough for two wars at once. They stopped buying gas (or rather Russia stopped selling it - because it made the price go up so much that the income from Asian supplies alone was higher than it used to be from everything). They gave up a bunch of small exports, all in all “killing” something like 15 billion dollars a year of Russian foreign currency earnings. All in all, after all the efforts, which resulted in a couple hundred billion dollars in subsidies for more expensive fuel, Russia may be short 50 billion a year - and that’s the upper estimate.
Fifty billion a year was the average capital outflow from Russia in previous years. Yes, another $40 billion a year was left behind by Russian tourists outside Russia waving Visa and Mastercard cards from Russian banks. Except that 2022 is not an average year. Not every year 2 million people leave the country. If everything was as before - there would be capital outflow of 150 billion at least, and emigrants would take not 40 but all 80 billion. It would have been, but it wasn’t - the singers of collective responsibility came along and decided to save the Kremlin money for the war by banning cards, limiting accounts to Russians, forcing almost the entire world to stop opening accounts for them altogether, freezing the assets of the oligarchs (and thus saying goodbye to the idea that they would transfer the rest of their money out of Russia). As a result, the Kremlin first got scared and tried to limit the withdrawal of capital, but then they saw that the whole world was on their side, and gave it up: there is nowhere to put the dollars.
Here’s another problem: the Kremlin decides whether to sell oil and gas or not. If you lower the ceiling - they won’t sell, the prices will go up, and Russia will be a winner again, and the world has lost. That is why it is possible to cheat off just a little bit, (if anything), even if it requires paying hundreds of thousands of travel allowances to European deputies and ministers discussing the height of the ceiling. And it is the Russians, who are collectively to blame for the withdrawal of those dollars from Russia, who are not stopped by the Kremlin or Armageddon - they can be forced into war, but nothing can force them to comply with Russian laws: the export of capital was banned in the 90s, but every last crumb was taken out of the country. The only obstacle to the depletion of Russia’s foreign currency reserves now is the West’s sanctions. The only obstacle to the depletion of human potential is the emigration bureaucracy and the absence of a “green corridor” for Russians with defense and high-tech professions who want to leave their homeland. I would not be afraid to conduct an experiment: announce that Russians have 6 months for visa-free entry into the EU and the USA and the right to stay, provided that at least one family member meets the basic requirements of qualifications, initial capital (small) and signs a declaration of disagreement with the Kremlin policy. My guess is that in six months Russia would have no one to make rockets and nothing to make them from.
Viktor Bout is the arms dealer that Lord of War was based on. Paul Whelan not part of the trade.
Russia should’ve at least tried to get a conditional first rounder in that deal as well. I don’t think Bout can play the low post anymore.
KevinC
21280
He might not have a post game but he has a lot of other weapons on offense.
I’m not going to lie, if I’m the opponent I’m a lot more worried about him shooting from downtown than Griner.
Yes, sheer over-confidence, poor intelligence work, and generally sloppy planning. If there’s anything history teaches us about ops like these, it’s that as risky as they are even with the best planning and attention to detail, they are guaranteed to be fiascoes when you try to execute them haphazardly.
Best I can tell from this he’s arguing that in practical terms the best strategy is to facilitate the movement of people and capital out of Russia. Which I am sure is accurate. Politically it’s not so simple of course.
Before I break one of my central tenets And respond to a P&R thread somewhere, What is the central thread and context of the question being asked here? I’ve looked up and down in this sprawling unspecific thread for about 10 minutes and all I see is questions/references about World War II movies and what not.
Oh, someone was asking about the viability and value of air mobile ops in Vietnam, in the context of a discussion of Russia’s use of its airborne forces (not very effective use that is). I figured you would know the most about the history of chopper-borne troops in Southeast Asia for sure.
They stopped being viable in Lam Son 719 in 1971. Large scale airborne or air assault operations are suicide and have been for 50 years. The operations the Russians were running at the beginning of the war were minuscule in scale compared to those operations people are talking about historically. Even these minuscule operations are suicide unless you have complete air dominance, to include completely squashing the enemies air defense system. Much tougher in an age of handheld MANPADS. Especially given the fact that for the last 15 years, the systems can be fed by information dominance and many other technological factors. The Russians failed in the early days of this war because they completely underestimated what the US/West could provide Ukrainians in terms of absolute information dominance in real time.
Yeah. One of the effective things would be giving free reign to Russian oligarchs who’d find a way to move a lot of good stuff out of Russia. But they kinda bear responsibility for Putin’s reign so while pragmatic it’s questionable. Other things are less questionable but understandable emotionally, like how it’s much harder for common people to get to EU or Russia now, or how sanctions stop Russians from spending their oil dollars on fancy EU bags, stripping the country of cash.
