Oh, I know, I’m just too much of a perfectionist sometimes.

An explosive concussion is a blast wave, but also concussion is a type of head injury, so then my brain needs to explain…

I can speak with some authority here when I say trenches have relatively little effect when it comes to substantial overpressure such as that caused by FABs. A not insignificant number of sheep were sacrificed to quantify ways to defend forces against them.

The unsurprising outcome: other than distance, there’s relatively little you can do for defense. That said, it turns out you need a lot of these weapons to do more than localized damage. Substantial overpressure is a bugger and even things like hiding behind corners do essentially nothing. Line of sight is not a pre-requisite for effectiveness.

If anything, I just assumed that trenches would magnify the effect.

I’ve been reading a bit since I last posted, so it seems that the pressure is the killer, not the heat or the oxygen content. I was surprised as I read that MLRS could also be FABs, that would seem to indicate that the same targeting accuracy would work for the FABs to take out chunks of trenches regardless of cover. So trenches are probably even less useful even in a standoff war. I had it in my head the old Vietnam tests of the MOABs where it was a massive payload that had to be dropped by a big bomber. As with everything, we’ve figured out how to make it even more deadly.

Russian army training was crap before the war in Ukraine:

Even if mobiks were trained according to Russian “standards” they would struggle, but now? Just meat for the grinder.

But now we know it. Thanks Putin!

MythBusters Episode 191: Trench Torpedo.

Security apparatus are people. They probably get used to no holidays in Paris, some lost Italian villas. Now unless Moscow is bombed I don’t see how the situation is going to get significantly worse for them. Russia will not turn into North Korea, at least not quickly, they will never have not luxurious lives with power over their surroundings. It will probably cost more for them to buy iPhones and fancy cars but you understand that no sanctions will flat-out deny them access to fancy stuff.

Perhaps they still think that this situation is temporary and they’ll send their kids to Oxford next year and there will be a boiling point somewhere in there. But other than that unless Putin starts laughing mad and orders public trials of his closest allies I don’t see them doing anything. Well, maybe if the CIA is as cool as they say they are.

Have any of the window victims to date been close allies?

There was a report on Danish television where the reporter went to Moscow to see how ordinary Russians were dealing with the war, and they actually found that iPhones cost the same in a Moscow shopping center that they did in Copenhagen, and that they were importing them from vendors in the Middle East.

I don’t know how viable it is in the long term, but it certainly made it look like the Russians had options.

Global economy is global economy I guess. And smuggling (which, in a sense, is what we are talking about) goes back a lot farther in history than government sanctions…

True, and supplying one city is very different from supplying an entire country, so it’s impossible to say much of anything from a single snapshot.

Seems like Ukraine has counterattacked and may have pushed the Russians out from the Bahkmut outskirts yet again. Per ISW, it is Russian sources claiming that Ukraine has pushed them out.

While it has to be hell on earth down on the ground, from a strategic perspective I have to imagine Ukraine is happy to tie down Russian forces here for going on six months now?

If they have a favorable casualty ratio compared to the Russians, absolutely. Even without the meat grinder aspect there has to be some value to Ukraine to continue to deny Russia the one objective they’ve been trying really really hard to achieve.

Well you know I didn’t mean iPhones specifically but general ability of elites to support their lifestyle. Even if something is not available to general public they will have it. It’s not a continental blockade of England turning bad for Pavel, at least not yet.

Indeed. The days of true blockades are long gone unless you are a very small, very isolated country with no money. And even in the most rigorous blockades of the past, stuff got through one way or another.

The President lets his inner comedian out for a pretty good one:

A Russian drone operator who said he witnessed the episode told the paper that a Russian tank commander drove his T-90 tank toward a group of Russian national guard troops, fired at their checkpoint and blew it up.

The national guard, or Rosgvardia, is not part of the Russian armed forces, and reports to Putin directly.

That rift was one of several at play in the Russian war effort. Other power centers include the mercenary Wagner group, led by Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, and the forces led by Ramzan Kadyrov, the warlord who leads Russia’s semi-autonomous region of Chechnya.

The Russian military appears to have limited coordination with any of them, officials said, according to the paper.

“There was no unified command, there was no single headquarters, there was no single concept and there was no unified planning of actions and command,” retired Russian General Leonid Ivashov told the paper. “It was destined to be a defeat.”

Testimony from a very embittered volunteer apparently still serving on the front for Russia, published by Girkin. Also, a genuinely entertaining read; even through the filter of translation, it’s clear the man has a way with words.

Sorry, there will be a lot of swearing. It was actually supposed to be a large and rather strict text, but firstly, I doubt that in this format it will even reach anyone, usually when you yell obscenely at someone, it reaches them faster, and secondly, I simply don’t have time for a big, strict, practically academic analysis of all the garbage. So sorry, it will be short and with swearing. [it is not short]

Those who read my TG channel could already notice that a terrible thing happened to me recently – I watched Russian TV…

In other sectors of the front, the Russian command does not need such a goading, as it voluntarily drives to slaughter the last remnants of the infantry, no longer very combat-ready due to previous losses. The Russian military has an incredible talent for turning any village with a couple of landings and a pig farm into Verdun, on which their own, not enemy, units are ground. Why?

In the text about radio communications, I described the main problem of command and control in the Russian army, due to which the army cannot really advance, cannot maneuver, and cannot even fully repel enemy attacks. Nothing larger than the “remnants of a motorized rifle battalion” in the RF Armed Forces can be controlled as a single organism. And, of course, in this situation, the battalion commanders and company commanders of these “remnants” become well-deserved heroes, who, if possible, drag all the shit on their own backs. Although more often, alas, they don’t. And they are buried with their subordinates when, after half a dozen assaults, each organized worse than the previous one, we still capture another piece of land and collect their rotten remains.

From the fact that the Russian army can do nothing except for, bleeding, capture another village while surrendering a district center or an entire region on the other flank, the Russian army made an amazing conclusion – let’s take more villages! And arranged the maximum possible Verduns along the entire front line, including the very infamous Pavlovka in the DPR. And, of course, Bakhmut. How could it be without it? Why not kill the last remnants of combat-ready infantry at it? It’s not possible at all. These fucking bastards need to get positive motives for the news somewhere! Here, we freed another 100 meters of such and such village. And whoever is the first to report on the complete liberation of the village gets an order.

I think that the Ukrainian command later, already in captivity, will give these people the appropriate awards. Because on the eve of the winter offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, it is almost impossible to provide the Armed Forces of Ukraine with some more significant service than killing the remnants of our infantry and the remnants of our tanks. Although no, I’m sorry. We can! It was provided to the hohols by the organizers of mobilization in the Russian Federation, who drove the lion’s share of those mobilized into “rifle regiments” without heavy weapons and artillery, the same state as the regiments of the Donbass “mobiks”. These absolutely uncontrollable due to the lack of proper command personnel and, of course, the lack of communications, units are simply created in order to devour the human resource and do not represent any combat value. They are simply created for the Armed Forces of Ukraine to locate them by the clusters of constantly turned-on cell phones, listen to their analog “Baofengs” radios and strike precisely at them, inflicting strikes in the flanks and rears of their neighbors – the battered during 10 months of the war formations of the regular troops of the Russian Federation and the Republics.

Wow, I could feel the heat from those flames. Read through it all and it’s just full of shitshow after shitshow.