a little bit of analysis about Kursk

The only thing I'd want to add to Mikael's excellent analysis here is that the Russians are actually fighting a much more conventional area defense than we've seen in the very static fighting in the Donbass. They're not trying to stop Ukrainian drives at the screen line like we saw in the Hundred Days, they're instead diverting them into engagement areas between their front line of screening troops and the main defensive line 5-10km to the rear and destroying them there. Ergo why we've seen Ukrainian units just go on these long runs in the last couple days - way past where the front line should be - and then get wiped out in what look like complex ambushes. That's... actually just how you do a very normal area defense.

Why have the Russians changed tactics? Two reasons. First, in Kursk they - paradoxically - have space to fight. The Donbass is a cramped theater where real estate is at an absolute premium. They're either backing up into the sea, key lines of communication, or critical urban areas there. There's actual operational space in rural Kursk. Second and relatedly, the "forward" defense we're used to seeing in the Donbass will not inflict crippling casualties on an attacker quickly for the simple reason that attacks often fail in the "cone of fire" in no man's land or even behind the attacker's front line, allowing defeated units to easily withdraw. In a conventional defense the attacker is defeated in a kill zone behind the screen line and it is far easier to annihilate an attacking force. Ergo why we're now seeing huge AFU equipment losses, with entire Ukrainian companies burning out behind the ostensible Russian "front."

Having found themselves in battle with the AFU's strategic reserves, the Russians now very much intend to use the Battle of Sudzha-Korenevo to destroy as much of those reserves as possible. Even if that means scaring some war mappers on the internet.

The Bundeswehr is running out of assault rifles (in German, machine-translated quotes below) archived

According to information from WirtschaftsWoche, the force only has 50,000 to 60,000 rifles. “Too few and too broken for almost 200,000 soldiers,” is what military officials say.

The G36 has been in use since 1996. After a dispute over the accuracy of the target in 2014, the federal government at the time stopped the procurement. At the same time, a successor model was a long time coming - partly because of a patent dispute between the applicants for the delivery of a new rifle. Even after the decision for the G95, also from Heckler & Koch, there were delays in the Ministry of Defense until recently, according to industry circles.

One of the problems that caused problems was an additional visor purchased from an external manufacturer whose plastic holder broke off too easily from the G95. In addition, testing is ongoing - even though the French army has been using the weapon for years. Now the government apparently wants to order 119,000 rifles in September and use them for the first time next May.

Turns out, the anti-Soviet propaganda about only every 2nd soldier having a rifle... is now true, but for a NATO country (extra irony from it being Germany specifically). In fact, it's even worse, since 60k rifles to 200k personnel is closer to a 1:3 ratio

Also, the best part is - given how much equipment they inherited from East Germany, they would have probably been just fine if they'd just kept it instead of selling it off and destroying it. Yeah, NATO countries are supposed to use 5.56, but the former Warsaw Pact countries other than Poland either took until the 2010s to start the process of adopting new rifles chambered in it, or haven't even gotten around to it like 20 years after joining (outside of select special forces units).

https://x.com/ArmchairW/status/1805450204541284734

I've pointed out on many occasions that the Russians have the capability to launch a strategic offensive in Ukraine basically any time they want to.

But what I have not addressed is conditions. What would they want it to look like? How would they know when to "roll tanks?"⬇️

Critical to this analysis is just how successful the Russian decision to adopt a "ground and pound" approach to destroying the Armed Forces of Ukraine has been. Despite the full and enthusiastic backing of NATO and a Ukrainian numerical advantage for much of the war, the Russians have maintained a lopsidedly positive loss-exchange ratio against their enemies throughout. Ukraine is going into demographic collapse while Russian society at large has barely noticed the war.

@MNormanDavies pointed out some time ago that the Stavka has placed a heavy emphasis on efficiency in this war. Many Russian decisions at the operational-strategic level can be explained simply by their seeking the most efficient means to inflict mass casualties on the AFU with the lowest risk to themselves. Thus, any decision to transition to high-speed, mobile warfare from low-speed, positional war can be expected to follow that rubric. In other words, the Russians will launch an offensive to rout the AFU after its back is broken in positional war, rather than attack seeking to "change the game" and defeat the Ukrainians in mobile war. The "game" heavily favors the Russians and they're not in a rush to change it!

The difference between these scenarios can be seen quite easily by comparing two very successful offensives: Operation Bagration in 1944 and the 1975 Ho Chi Minh Offensive. Bagration routed the once-mighty Army Group Center - at the cost of 180,000 killed in action, three times the total Russian death toll of this war. I'm sure the Russians would much prefer the 8,000-strong butcher's bill of North Vietnam's war-ending 1975 operation - and they have the strategic insight to see that modern Ukraine, as a corrupt and deeply dysfunctional garrison state propped up by endless foreign aid, is far more akin to South Vietnam than Nazi Germany.

So what does this look like in practice? The Russians are going to keep poking and prodding in their usual methodical way until part of the line collapses "in depth," and then all hell is going to break loose. That could actually be quite soon - for instance, the recent Russian maneuver in Kharkov was likely intended to accelerate this timeline - but regardless, the State Department will be warming up their helicopters shortly afterwards.

As an addendum, it's just occurred to me that the Ukrainian Hundred Days Offensive of summer 2023 could be likened to Lam Son 719 as a poorly conceived and executed offensive maneuver by an army that had no real idea what it was actually getting itself into... perhaps a topic for examination later.

Soaring US munitions demand strains support for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan

(archived)

The U.S. has transferred tens of thousands of its bombs and shells to Israel since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. But it hasn’t given Israel everything it wants. That’s because the U.S. military lacks the capacity to provide some of the weapons Israel requested, according to Gen. CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ... Put simply, the U.S. assesses the health of its own inventories before sending weapons abroad. At times, those stocks don’t have any margin — and in some cases, the U.S. is even dipping below minimum inventory requirements, according to congressional staffers and former Pentagon officials.

an uneasy feeling but nothing specific to complain about

vibes-based performance evaluation

https://twitter.com/ArmchairW/status/1778682534123172215

The MV Dali collided with the Key Bridge in Baltimore three weeks ago and so little has been done for remediation that if this was happening in Russia or China we'd have people writing Ph.D dissertations on this website about poor state capacity and shaken trust in "regimes." ⬇️

Let's look at the current status of things three weeks in:

• M/V Dali remains aground and has not been freed from bridge debris, let alone unloaded, refloated, and evacuated to drydock
• Practically no progress has been made clearing debris, because:
• The handful of small floating cranes on site are obviously not up to the task, because:
• Apparently the Biden Administration decided this would be an ALL AMERICAN salvage effort and refused to bring in foreign crane ships with far greater capacity, thus:
• Workers are being endangered by being ordered to cut the bridge debris into small chunks manageable by the low-capacity cranes on site, complicated by the fact much of this work must be done underwater
• The Port of Baltimore remains closed to all heavy traffic and authorities expect it to remain closed through at least May, which is very optimistic
• Officials expect a replacement bridge might be inaugurated in a decade, which could itself be optimistic

Let's be real - if this had happened in China the port would have been open in days and construction on a replacement span would be underway as we speak. This incident is beginning to illustrate the decline in the real state capacity of the United States of America in the starkest possible terms.

twitter thread

I just got back from Ukraine, where I was visiting some friends. Everything we have heard about what’s happening in Ukraine is a lie. The reality is darker, bleaker, and unequivocally hopeless. There is no such thing as Ukraine "winning" this war.

• By their estimates, they have lost over one million of their sons, fathers and husbands; an entire generation is gone.

Nazis and destroying the demographics of their own people, name a better duo

• Even in the Southwest, where the anti-Russian sentiment is long-standing, citizens are reluctant or straight-up scared to publicly criticize Zelensky; they will go to jail.
• In every village and town, the streets, shops, and restaurants are mostly absent of men.
• The few men who remain are terrified of leaving their homes for fear of being kidnapped into conscription. Some have resorted to begging friends to break their legs to avoid service.
• Army search parties take place early in the morning, when men leave their homes to go to work. They ambush and kidnap them off the streets and within 3-4 hours they get listed in the army and taken away straight to the front lines with minimal or no training at all; it is "a death sentence."
• It's getting worse every day. Where I was staying, a dentist had just been taken by security forces on his way to work, leaving behind two small children. Every day, 3-5 dead bodies keep arriving from the front lines.
• Mothers and wives fight tooth and nail with the armed forces, beg and plead not to have their men taken away. They try bribing, which sometimes works, but most of the time they are met with physical violence and death threats.
• The territory celebrated as having been "won back" from Russia has been reduced to rubble and is uninhabitable. Regardless, there is no one left to live there and displaced families will likely never return.
• They see the way the war has been reported, at home and abroad. It's a "joke" and "propaganda." They say: “Look around: is this winning?”.
• Worse, some have been hoaxed into believing that once Ukrainians forces are exhausted, American soldiers will come in to replace them and “win the war”.

There is no ambiguity in these people. The war was for nothing - a travesty. The outcome always was, and is, clear. The people are hopeless, utterly destroyed, and living in an unending nightmare. They are pleading for an end, any end - most likely the same "peace" that could have been achieved two years ago. In their minds, they have already lost, for their sons, fathers and husbands are gone, and their country has been destroyed. There is no "victory" that can change that.

Except the peace offer then (see under the The Objectives and Strategy of Russia section) was incredibly favorable for Ukraine (and naive on Russia's part), basically just security guarantees and no NATO membership, without any territorial changes. That ain't happening anymore.

Make no mistake, they are angry with Putin. But they are also angry with Zelensky and the West. They have lost everything, worst of all, hope and faith, and cannot comprehend why Zelenky wishes to continue the current trajectory, the one of human devastation. I didn't witness the war; but what I saw was absolutely heart-breaking. Shame on the people, regardless of their intentions, who have supported this war. And shame on the media for continuing to lie about it.

also lmao at the fucking community note

um actually the US says that only a few Ukrainians have died (based on propaganda fed to them by the Ukrainians)

I was reading the latest Simplicius post, and holy shit:

The world can see the US terror regime has no clothes. It looks increasingly weak, particularly given the announcement that Raytheon Lloyd helmed the strikes from—I kid you not—his hospital bed. Yes, he pulled the trigger on a laptop while soiling his bedpan: https://www.businessinsider.com/defense-secretary-lloyd-austin-ordered-strike-on-houthis-from-hospital-2024-1

followed up by this great line:

A decrepit regime led by a senile president and debilitated secretary of state, launching illegal massacres from their nursing homes and hospital beds against the poorest nation on earth—virtually on the same day as their own bloc ally faced genocide and crimes against humanity charges at The Hague.

steel manufacturing machine broke (archived)

> To Build Ships That Break Ice, U.S. Must Relearn to Cut Steel

The science-focused Healy medium icebreaker, which is normally assigned to the Arctic, has to undergo repairs and refitting annually in California or Washington. The other, the heavy icebreaker Polar Star, is nearing the end of its useful service life. By comparison, Russia has three dozen national icebreakers suitable for the Arctic, according to the U.S. Coast Guard, and China has four, including two icebreaking research ships that regularly appear at high latitudes. U.S. officials suspect those have strategic purposes. Beijing says science is driving its Arctic ambitions.

“We need to increase the presence of our Navy and Coast Guard in the Arctic and improve our deterrence in the Pacific,” said Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Without a monumental investment in our shipyards and defense industrial base, we will not be able to secure American dominance in the maritime domain.”

damn, so you need an actual industrial base in order to have stuff ? never knew that before, I thought you just pressed a button and alchemically transformed your GDP into equipment

The machinery and skills to build the hulls of most oceangoing vessels aren’t sufficient for the specialized icebreakers. The hull plates need a bespoke alloy and specialized heat-treatment, with a process to form and weld massive curved plates. ... In addition to the technical challenge, American yards are reckoning with a shortage of shipwrights. Employment in ship and boat building totaled just 154,800 in July after peaking at 1.3 million during World War II, according to data from the Federal Reserve.

turns out, de-industrializing means it will be even more difficult to re-industrialize in the future, since you'll have lost a lot of the workers and institutional knowledge you need for that, because, you know, it's the workers who actually make stuff

The U.S. government identified the need for half a dozen new polar vessels as far back as 2010. Two years later, the Coast Guard launched a program to acquire them. ... Under a joint Coast Guard-Navy program in 2017, Bollinger Shipyards and Halter Marine won contracts for preliminary designs for the new icebreakers. In 2019, Halter Marine won the contract for the polar security cutters, but the pandemic and other delays have slowed design and engineering work and prevented the start of construction. “When Covid hit, all of our suppliers were overseas,” Merchent said. ... In 2022, as Russian President Vladimir Putin launched two giant icebreakers in St. Petersburg, Halter Marine was finally supposed to start construction of the first new icebreaker, to be christened the Polar Sentinel. Instead the company, which was owned by a state-owned Singaporean firm with Chinese clients, was sold to Bollinger. The U.S. icebreakers needed a bigger company with more resources to complete the design work and begin working with the steel, according to people familiar with the program.

Only in August did Bollinger begin testing, cutting and assembling steel prototype modules that could become part of the Polar Sentinel—if the modules meet rigorous tests. Meanwhile, the company will continue recruiting and training more shipyard workers. Full construction could begin next year. “We’re relearning how to build this type of ship,” said the polar security cutter program manager, Coast Guard Capt. Eric Drey.

love taking 13 years to even start working on a thing I supposedly really need. Who knows when they'll even deliver a finished ship, 2050?

twitter thread (nitter alt) about the deteriorating US situation in the Middle East

They all think it's still 2003, with no notion of constraints, nor any respect for or even knowledge of the US' enemies. ... The Iraqis are at the heart of this crisis, and nobody in the official US sphere is talking about it openly. Every "retaliation" for Iraqi attacks on US bases is taking place in... Syria. Now why is that? Is it because the US doesn't care about Iraq and just wants an excuse to go after Assad again? No. Blinken flew under the cover of night into Baghdad, wearing a fucking flak vest, specifically to try to convince the Iraqi government to do something to stop all these attacks!

The reason the US is attacking "Iranian" warehouses in Syria to deter attacks by Iraqis - without EVER mentioning them by name - is because the US deep state is scared shitless of an Iraqi quagmire. The Iraqis go out and officially declare war on US. The US response? Silence. There's constantly escalating attacks inside Iraq. Rockets, drones, now IEDs against US convoys. The Iraqis are totally open about this, they're saying in public "we're at war with the US! We're gonna kick them out!" and Lloyd Austin goes up and pretends these Iraqis don't exist!

... a core feature of the US army today is that it is basically close to unusable, de facto. The US Army has a couple of massive problems right now: first, it's got a HUGE manpower deficit, especially in combat arms. Second, it can't really move very easily! Moving an army corps is a lot of work: it requires a lot of airlift, or - more preferrable - sealift. But US sealift capacity has atrophied immensely since the 90s. Getting an US armor division to Iraq today is a lot more difficult than it once was, due to lowered capacity.

I don't want to dive too deeply into army-specific problems in this thread, so I'll just get to the upshot: the US doesn't have enough men to really put "boots on the ground" in a serious conflict, nor the transport capacity to do so. It's not just a lack of political will. ... the US is basically down to a small garrison presence. You can back that up with air power, but on the ground, the US posture is a few islands of hundreds or thousands of Americans... in a sea of hostile arabs. These arabs have modern small arms. Some of them have night-vision equipment. But most of all, they have heavy stand-off weaponry: Burkan ("Volcano") rockets, used to great effect in Syria, Iranian suicide drones, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and iranian SAMs.

To further complicate the fairly terrible ground situation, American airpower in the region is very vulnerable. Most Americans still think they have this factory-fresh, high tech air force, but that's not been the case for decades. The workhorses - F16, F15, F-18 - are ancient ... the same kinds of planes used by Saudi Arabia against Yemen. And the Houthis have shot down a lot of Saudi jets. So even the Yemenis - the second most poor country in the region - can now realistically challenge US airpower, using iranian-made SAMs. Today, America has neither the fiscal space or the productive capacity to really deal with airframe attrition ... US bases in the region can now be attacked by stand-off weaponry, and it's long been a known problem that the USAF has never seriously adapted to the idea that airfields can simply be contested by enemy stand-off weaponry from afar. F-35 stealth doesn't work on the ground. ... the entire dynamic of the US actually using airpower in the region has now potentially changed, and changed in a very ominous, depressing way. Carriers can now be hit by anti-ship cruise missiles and drones, which are becoming widely available in the region. Are they guaranteed to work? No. But they're not guaranteed to fail either. Airbases can be hit with cruise missiles and drones; just ask the Americans at Al-Harir!

All of this means that Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon and Tony Blinken at State are in a very, very shitty position right now, to say the least. The openly declared war against the US in Iraq is basically being shoved under the rug, because the US can't afford to admit it exists! To uninformed Americans, the US is still a completely dominant, invincible force. America only loses because it gives up; its planes are invincible, its technology supreme, its forces, untouchable. But this fantasy is a product of the US military's isolation from civilian life. For people inside the military, the view is very different ... Thus, if Lloyd Austin goes up there and says "okay, the Iraqis are attacking us now", he is going to be inundated with calls from moronic GOP politicians and uninformed US civilians to "unleash the American magic!!!" or "teach the arabs why we don't have healthcare lol!!!".

But in reality, that moment in time has passed, and it's not coming back. If Austin goes up there and admits that, admits that the US is now severely limited in what it can do and how much it can fight, he'll lose his job. What's worse, the US will lose imperial prestige! That prestige is fantastically important, for many reasons. Partly, it serves as deterrence against people picking further fights with the US. Partly, it makes the current - completely unsustainable - budget deficits somewhat manageable in the short term. I could go on, but I hope I've made my point by now. The Iraqis are, as the American saying goes, pissing all over the American pant-leg right now. The Iraqis themselves are saying "we're pissing on you, America!", but America is forced to say "No no no, it's just raining!"

It's perhaps somewhat exaggerating how bad things really are, but there's still a lot of interesting points, especially the stuff about air power. Back in the olden days, you did need to actually fly your own planes over the enemy airbases to disable them, but this is no longer the case thanks to advances in missile technology, and the proliferation of cheap missiles among even militia groups means that forces which normally couldn't maintain their own airforce can now still manage to strike at far-away targets, and do so with munitions significantly cheaper than what they'll be destroying. And of course, there's the important logistical reality that Western commentators systematically ignore - how capable is the US, really, at deploying a large ground force, and doing so quickly? Not supplying another military, not flying around and bombing the occasional target, not sending in some special forces team to do a raid, but a proper army corps, of several divisions, the way they were once able to do in Iraq? Even back then, there was still a lot of preparation involved, the invading force didn't just materialize in Kuwait one day, so how capable of repeating that would they be now?

interesting article I came across in view of some recent discussions about carriers and their continued relevancy (archived)

Now, the take here is maybe a bit too hard against carriers, but there's still some interesting points

But, in my judgment, these battles also illustrated the fact that the aircraft carrier, for all its advantages, was acutely vulnerable to airstrikes. Subsequent US success in the War in the Pacific was largely due to its extraordinary capability to produce carriers (and all other types of ships) in historically unprecedented numbers, and to keep them manned with well-trained air crews. After the Battle of Midway, the Japanese were never able to match the Americans in either respect.

That said, the vulnerability of the aircraft carrier to airstrikes never diminished, and even as the Japanese navy shriveled away to a faint shadow of its former self in late 1944, the susceptibility of all surface ships to attacks from the air became more and more apparent.

The most interesting part was the idea that we've actually already seen how a fleet can be damaged by precision-guided missiles - all the way back in WW2, it's just that the "missiles" in this case were actual planes flown by human pilots in kamikaze attacks.

The so-called kamikaze attacks reached their zenith in the spring 1945 Battle of Okinawa, where ~1500 pilots and aircraft were expended, and inflicted substantial damage on large numbers of US warships. According to a 1999 US Air Force analysis, by the end of the war ~3000 kamikaze sorties resulted in the sinking of 34 US warships and damaged 368 others, with a “hit” ratio of almost 20%. In my estimation, this is a rather extraordinary success rate when one considers the pronounced disadvantages they faced:

• Kamikaze planes were flown by woefully undertrained Japanese pilots (a great many of them only teenagers) flying what were, by then, even more woefully obsolete aircraft.
• The aircraft typically carried less than about 500 lbs. of munitions, often in the form of two 200 kg bombs which lacked the explosive punch necessary to do serious damage to a large warship – therefore multiple strikes on the same ship were required.
• The US Navy moved heaven and earth in a substantially inefficacious attempt to prevent the strikes, including massive numbers of aircraft flying combat air patrol out to maximum distances, and many scores of smaller warships deployed in vast arrays of screening ships.

The simple fact was that, despite the highly focused effort to interdict them, US defenses were frequently overwhelmed by large and determined “salvos” of this first generation of precision-guided anti-ship missiles. ... Nevertheless, the kamikaze demonstrated incontrovertibly that warships in general, and aircraft carriers in particular, were – and would continue to be – extremely vulnerable to large salvos of precision-guided munitions. That vulnerability not only persists to the present day, but is unquestionably more acute than ever before due to the fact that anti-ship missile technologies have advanced much further in the post-World War II era than has the capability of the targeted ships to defeat them.

Altogether, the fleet arrayed off the shores of Okinawa consisted of over 600 ships! Nothing even remotely approximating this huge fleet had ever been seen, and quite likely never will be again. The configuration of current US carrier strike groups consists of a single carrier, 1 guided-missile cruiser, and 3 – 4 destroyers and/or frigates. So, in a potential battle today between a US carrier strike group and a peer or near-peer adversary, a mere half-dozen ships with an extremely limited number of defenses will face massed salvos of hundreds of cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, supersonic and hypersonic anti-ship missiles, and dozens of submarines with many hundreds of torpedoes – all of which deploy large modern warheads capable of inflicting a mortal blow against any of the ships in the group.

US naval power apologists may argue that the array of defenses on these ships is much more capable than in World War II. But it simply does not matter. It won’t be enough. Regardless of how one attempts to crunch the numbers, a putative engagement between a carrier strike group and the PLA Navy in the South China Sea would entail simultaneous massed attacks of precision-guided anti-ship missiles zooming in from all points of the compass.

"I like settlers who didn't get captured"