Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-23 and Invasion

[grumbler]

Nato's artillery plan is air supremacy, no?

More like PGMs.  You don't need as many tubes if each round is five times as effective.  Lots of the unknown variables in purely ballistic shooting are known in modern NATO artillery fire.  Lots of the quality control problems associated with Russian shells and powder are not present in NATO rounds.

[Grey Fox]

So would you say it's accurate that we need more launchers anyway?

[celedhring]

I think Russia might be a little more careful with the "we'll murder people in your country, watchugonnadoaboutit huh?" thing right now.

Right now I'd guess that the value of not triggering a "well fuck you, we're giving andother $400 million in aid to Ukraine" response is higher than the intimidation factor in most cases.

But homegrown reactionaries radicalized by "what the West is doing to Russia" is probably fair game.

Or self-styled "anti-imperialist" leftists, radicalised tankies.

Spanish police believes it was a lone wolf (same handwriting in all envelopes, very rudimentary devices). The selection of targets doesn't match well with the usual nemeses of either tankies or far righters. In the sense that a tankie would have probably gone for the US/NATO-related targets, a far righter for the Spanish government targets. The selection of targets seems to come from the worldview of somebody that has got the Ludovico treatment using RT.

[Legbiter]

Nato's artillery plan is air supremacy, no?

Yeah at least a major component of a successful defense. Although an unfortunate side effect of this war for me is that all "what if the Cold War had gone hot" popular media, whether books or games is now ruined for me. We now know what would have happened, the Soviet first echelon would advance from their railheads until they ran out of gas and NATO airpower would have absolutely raped the Soviet second and third echelons. 

[HVC]

It's ok, the nukes wouldn't care how badly the soviet soldiers did

[The Brain]

According to Russian propaganda NATO has launched a ground invasion of the Russian homeland. Yet not even a credible threat to use nukes from Russia.

[Josquius]

Nato's artillery plan is air supremacy, no?

Yeah at least a major component of a successful defense. Although an unfortunate side effect of this war for me is that all "what if the Cold War had gone hot" popular media, whether books or games is now ruined for me. We now know what would have happened, the Soviet first echelon would advance from their railheads until they ran out of gas and NATO airpower would have absolutely raped the Soviet second and third echelons. 

[im[/img]

I guess that's something for future historians to look into.
Is the current state of the Russian army something new or was it there right back to the 60s? - I believe late Soviet corruption was pretty bad but earlier on less so?

[OttoVonBismarck]

In a big land war the supremacy of artillery has been well understood at the very least since WWII, if you are in the position of being asked to advance through territory that is subject to intense enemy artillery fire you are going to lose a tremendous number of soldiers, which is why tactically this is something that generally "is not done."

I've read in the past that over 50% of the casualties the allies inflicted on the Germans on the Western front in WWII was through artillery.

[Barrister]

Nato's artillery plan is air supremacy, no?

Yeah at least a major component of a successful defense. Although an unfortunate side effect of this war for me is that all "what if the Cold War had gone hot" popular media, whether books or games is now ruined for me. We now know what would have happened, the Soviet first echelon would advance from their railheads until they ran out of gas and NATO airpower would have absolutely raped the Soviet second and third echelons. 

While we can certainly learn something from the Ukraine war about what a "cold war gone hot" war would have been like, I think you have to be careful about drawing too many lessons.

NATO tech has advanced quite a bit since the 1980s.  Take items like HIMARS, or the M-777 (not to mention advancements like GPS), whereas the Russians are primarily using soviet-vintage tech.

The USSR was not nearly as thoroughly corrupt as modern Russia.  The USSR also spent a much higher percentage of GDP on the military as compared to modern Russia.

In a Red Storm Rising/Red Dawn mid-80s scenario I would now feel much more comfortable with NATO having the upper hand, compared to how I would have felt in the 80s-90s.  But it would not be a guarantee what the outcome would be - if for no other reason the Warsaw Block would have all it's eastern European allies, instead of Russia fighting by itself.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The popular wisdom in that era of Cold War was always that the sheer manpower advantages in deployed forces would be rough to deal with--there was a broad assumption the Red Army couldn't realistically be stopped from overrunning West Germany in an initial attack, and it would be a slog to push them out of Europe afterward--with general belief we would eventually get the job done due to greater resources etc, assuming nothing went nuclear.

[Threviel]

A non-nuclear peer war is not something Nato is prepared for. In such a war it must be assumed that GPS-like services will go down immediately and backup systems used. The existing stocks of weapons will be exhausted in weeks. But that kind of gigantic conflict would probably go nuclear anyway.

Wouldn't necessarily happen in an invasion of Taiwan, but presumably that war will be a land war on Formosa where the possibility to re-supply will be decisive.

An invasion of a middle/minor power by China/Russia is not something that Nato wants to go nuclear and it would be a good idea to be able to supply any nation fighting against those powers.

Ukraine needs millions of artillery shells, at least a few hundred gun tubes, tens of thousands of tanks and armoured vehicles, hundreds of fighters and all the logistics surrounding that. Given the wealth of western powers we should be able to supply that. To be fair, the US can supply lots of hardware, but they are the only ones. Western Europe ought to be able to supply as much or more than the US and it just isn't so.

[The Brain]

There's smoke coming from the Russian embassy in Stockholm. Reason unknown at the present.

[Eddie Teach]

Burned popcorn?

[OttoVonBismarck]

A non-nuclear peer war is not something Nato is prepared for.

Not just the US, I don't observe that any power is. The USSR geared specifically for fighting a very large conventional war throughout the Cold War, and that meant like a 3 million man standing army with huge reserves of basic infantry / armored / artillery equipment. Russia is probably the one power that still at least seemed to somewhat be trying to prepare for that kind of war and they were shown to be many hundreds of thousands of men short and critically short in many supplies.

My working theory on a true peer war (which based on Ukraine I no longer really think Russia's military is even close enough to be in that discussion), but say with China assuming their modernization is going as well as they say, a lot of the "advanced" equipment and lots of the surface ships will be gone in the first 2 weeks. After that I assume peace will either break out or both sides will have to start rearming because militaries just don't stockpile WWII level supplies.

[HisMajestyBOB]

There's smoke coming from the Russian embassy in Stockholm. Reason unknown at the present.

What color?