Russia is losing 2/3 of a battalion combat group of equipment a day and we are into day 79.
That's over 52.6 full battalion equipment sets out of the 120 initially sent into Ukraine & ~180 over all in the Russian Ground Forces
1/
IOW, 43% of the total committed Russian mechanized combat vehicle fleet and likely the best 29% of the total Russian combat vehicle fleet have been destroyed or captured.
Percentage casualty rate wise, this is the institutional equivalent of the III Armored Corps in Ft Hood 2/
... Texas catching a high yield tac-nuke for the US Army.
Per the Oryx visual compilations, Ukraine is losing one vehicle destroyed or captured for every 3.5 Russian vehicles.
If the current Ukrainian casualty rates match the 2014-2015 fighting.
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Ukraine is taking about one casualty for between 5 & 7 Russian casualties right now.
The Ukrainian diaspora email list I participated in carefully collated Ukraine versus Russian casualties in the 2014-2015 period of Donbas fighting.
4/
The aggregate Ukraine vs Russia losses in 2014-2015 were:
...that the single largest cause of AFU non-combat losses was lethal medical conditions, resulting from inadequate medical screening of personnel who were being called up during the conscription campaign, that covered men of up to 45 years of age.
9/
As the list-admin observed at the time:
"1. Russians are accustomed to taking heavy combat losses and the political blowback is much smaller than would be seen in any Western nation;
2.The high combat loss rates deplete the aggregated experience pool in the Russian military
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... dumbing it down, and making it more likely to take foolish risks, and offer bad assessments to the nation's political leaders;
The realities of (1) & (2) have been observed repeatedly in the Ukrainian war, and given the losses sustained in middle ranking and junior
11/
...officers in the campaign, the propensity to blind optimism and the tendency to starting fights that sane people would not start will obviously continue for decades.
The punchline is that the culture of yes men surrounding the leader, the general insensitivity to combat...
12/
...losses, and the depletion of talent and expertise will make the Russians prone to starting fights they cannot win for the foreseeable future.
Put differently, the Ukrainian war has made the Russians much more dangerous than they were before this war."
13/
The previous passage was why I was stating Twitter in January & early February 2022 that the Russians really were going to go for a full regime change invasion.
The reason I didn't surface any of this then was Russian disinformation had so overrun Western government policy
14/
...makers, the ranks of senior intelligence officials, and corporate media that anyone mentioning it without months of videos showing incompetent Russian military performance versus superb Ukrainian combat tactics would be labeled a flipped out kook.
15/
The applicable proverbs which applied while I waited to surface this:
"There are none so blind as those who do not wish to see."
"There none so deaf as those who do not wish to hear."
16/
Simply _No One_ wanted to see or hear that the Russian Military is really a uniformed version of the movie "Idiocracy."
25,000 dead Russian soldiers still isn't enough for many of them right now.
"Directed Cognition" does that.
17/
For the rest of you, we have this BBC screaming headline:
Ukraine is going for a one million citizen military mobilization.
The six years of Dombas fighting conscript classes plus prewar Ukrainian military is ~650,000 right there.
Add in the mobilizing territorials, & yeah, one million Ukrainians under arms are here by 30 June.
19/
These Ukrainian reinforcements include the six conscript classes who fought in Donbas in 2016-2021.
That is, the Ukrainians are calling combat veterans back to the colors fighting in the same areas that they served six to nine months of combat in, working with NCO's
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...who are already fighting there.
Russian conscripts present in Ukraine & being called up are barely trained greenhorns with no NCO's to speak of.
Effectively, 100 Ukrainians are generating the same combat power as 300 Russian troops.
21/
And this combat effectiveness value ratio is increasingly in Ukraine's favor over time.
As the Russians lose more and more of their best soldiers & vehicles.
Their greenhorn replacements die faster & kill fewer Ukrainians.
22/
The Russian offensives at Izyum and Severodonietsk failing beyond recovery is confirmation that my prediction of the Russian tactical truck fleet collapsing right now is close to the mark.
Russia has lost the ability to do more than a single push out of the Donbas, and then
23/
... only with civilian trucks.
We are in the beginnings of a Russian Lanchester square law curve collapse. 24/
The first was the UK's Operation Outward. It was noticed after a windstorm during 1940's Battle of Britain that barrage balloons dragging severed cables under them caused shorts on power lines, damaging the power grid in occupied Europe.
This would be the 2nd reported downing of a Tu-22M by an S-200. The earlier Tu-22M being in December 2023.
It looks like these Tu-22M are still using Soviet era EW suites which were not geared against the S-200 C-Band, 100 KW, 5N62 Square Pair FMCW tracker/illuminator. 2/
Between ~1996 and 2005, most FMTV trucks accepted by DCMA for the US Army had my signature on the truck property forms along with my DSN phone number.
I got three or four calls in Sealy Texas from NCO's in Iraq trying to score ballistic composite glass armor because they stopped these EFP attacks⬇️
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DCMA Sealy was getting photos from contractor relatives of bombed FMTV's with sheet metal armor and receiving IED damaged trucks to get rebuilt.
You could tell the blast damage from how the windows were missing and the roofs were bowed at the top.
2/
When you pulled out the stowage boxes in the cabs there were usually spent 5.56mm or 7.62mm brass casings...
Or SAM hunters can use a weather balloons with a set of commercial off the shelf ELINT and thermal imaging sensors - connected via a smartphone - hanging underneath to listen for radars and look for SAM missile launches 24/7.
The world has changed.
(I wonder if the Houthi are doing this balloon surveillance trick to the Western merchantmen?🤔)