Ukraine Always Get What You Want

Wow, can’t believe I’m rooting for the Luftwaffe.

 

We did the sort right there in Red Square.

 

Buy the Russian dips!

 

“The Washington Generals of The History Channel,” — Homer Simpson.

 

Far right Russian puppets, you say?

 

Of all these videos I keep seeing, the thing that is blowing my mind is the number of random cars driving down the street and, in the night videos, the lights still being on in the cities.
Who the hell is out there driving in the middle of a war?
And shouldn't the Russians have either knocked out power to most cities by now as a strategic measure, or the Ukrainians ordered blackout conditions for security?

 

Same kind of person who leaves a World Series game early ...

 

"A small, evil, feral-eyed man." -- Mitt, channeling McCain, on Putin

 

Copped from writer S.M. Sterling's Facebook feed.


"Casualty figures are always hard to pin down in the heat of action, but as a rough cut, the Russians seem to be losing about 1,000 men a day dead in the Ukraine, which means about 5,000 more seriously wounded per day. Say 6,000 a day out of service -- maybe cut it to 5,000, or 4,000. That's 20-25,000 so far from a force of about 200,000.

The -combat- element of a 200,000 man force would be well under half the total; say 80,000, and that includes artillerymen and other crews for indirect-fire weapons. Infantry are usually over 80% of the casualties in sustained combat, and AFV crews a fair share of the remainder in a mechanized army. Keep this up for a week or ten days, and the combat element of the original invasion force will be effectively gone.

Mind you, Russia has reinforcements, but not infinite numbers of them. They don't have a mass-mobilization scale reserve setup any more.

Incidentally, this illustrates why most great-power armies in the 20th century were so frickken' -big-. If you're going to fight a peer competitor head on, you have massive casualties and you have to be able to replace them fast.

The British had a small professional army in 1914, but they hadn't contemplated participation in a European war seriously -- it was a colonial gendarmerie. Since the end of the Cold War, the advanced world has cut their armies back to a colonial-gendarmerie level.

What we're seeing now is how expensive in lives it is when first-world armies clash."

 

That estimate is probably so high as to be ridiculous.