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Armchair Warlord

@ArmchairW

Jun 17, 2023 • 12 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X

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Putin HATES it!

How NATO tried to use ONE WEIRD TRICK to destroy the Russian Army!

Thread 👇

This is very apropos today because Putin revealed details of the April 2022 Russo-Ukrainian peace treaty to the African peace delegation today.

NATO seems to have promised Zelensky not just unlimited support but a war-winning superweapon to get him to denounce the agreement.

This led directly to the provision, starting in late April 2022, of vast quantities of Western precision weapons linked to the full glare of NATO's intelligence and surveillance apparatus.

No other escalation in Western support has remotely approached this one in significance.

This explains why HIMARS - America's most dangerous surface-fired weapon and an enormous leap up the escalation ladder from the previous shoulder-fired missiles - arrived in Ukraine so early and when the AFU still had substantial rocket and missile forces remaining.

This also explains why NATO (read: the US) has been willing to expend so much of its stock of precision-guided MLRS munitions in Ukraine.

This war was to have been the first test of Western next-generation battle doctrine, focused on persistent surveillance and precision strike.

This is a concept that has been mooted for decades now, going back to the original Future Combat Systems concepts of the late 1990s.

The idea is that light Western forces will be able to use "information dominance" and precise long-range fires to win with minimal losses.

Col. Douglas Macgregor (a far higher profile military commentator than myself) has presented precisely such a concept as the "Light Reconnaissance Strike Group," essentially an off-the-shelf FCS Brigade.

You can read the whole presentation at: douglasmacgregor.com/LRSGBriefing.p…

This thinking was also influential in designing the United Kingdom's new Strike Brigade concept, mounted in wheeled APCs but intended to square off with Russian armored formations by using standoff fires and precision missiles.

See: wavellroom.com/2020/01/07/str…

The provision of exactly these capabilities to Ukraine was intended to enable them to target and destroy Russian forces at an absolutely industrial scale, day after day after day, leading to their military collapse and defeat. A "strategy of corrosion" if you will.

The war planners at NATO thought this would work because, as explained above, this was exactly how they themselves intended to fight in the future - stiff-arming heavier enemies with precise fires from standoff distances.

Unfortunately for them, there are no shortcuts in war.

The Russians quickly adapted to the new threat by dispersing, hiding and digging-in their forces, interdicting launchers and missiles, deploying effective GPS jammers, and revealing that their air defenses can do missile defense.

Video: Pantsir shooting down 12 GMLRS missiles.

The end result of this has been much like the end-result of most life hacks - wasted time, effort and money, with the problem remaining very much unsolved.

NATO is running out of precision weapons and the Russian position in Ukraine is probably better now than it has ever been.

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More from @ArmchairW

Armchair Warlord

@ArmchairW

Jun 30

Putin HATES THEM!

Or does he?

Top 10 Failed Wonderweapons of the Ukrainian War⬇️

My criteria are simple - these are weapons (defined loosely) that were heavily hyped by Western pundits that actually failed in service.

So, for example, the Leopard 2 isn't on here because it's actually a perfectly functional tank that has performed in line with other tanks.

10. The Ukrainian Foreign Legion

After the war kicked off, Western outlets began encouraging adventurous foreigners to travel to Ukraine to fight. These new recruits were housed in barracks at the Yavorov Training Ground.

One Russian missile strike largely ended the project.

Read 12 tweets

Armchair Warlord

@ArmchairW

Jun 23

Apparently four missiles were shot down at sea, with one hit far enough into its final dive that falling submunitions still killed several civilians.

As this occurred on a Sunday afternoon and the nearest military target is three miles away, this was likely a terror attack.⬇️

First of all, I'd like to note the speed with which Ukrainian propagandists, while still celebrating the deaths of Russian vacationers, have come around to a remarkably pro-Russian position while commenting on this event: (1) that Russian air defenses shoot down pretty much everything fired at Crimea; (2) that the Russian Ministry of Defense generally puts out accurate information to the public; and (3) that civilian casualties from downed enemy missiles and malfunctioning interceptors are the responsibility of the defender rather than the attacker. I'm sure they won't immediately do another 180-degree turn as soon as they are presented with a less convenient fact pattern.

Secondly, the range at which this attack was delivered (>160km from any point of UKR-held territory) indicates that the Ukrainians have received a number of M39A1 extended-range ATACMS missiles with cluster warheads. There were only a small number of these manufactured around the turn of the century and apparently most were subsequently converted to unitary models, suggesting that the US is already scraping the munitions barrel to keep Ukraine supplied with missiles (and explaining our reluctance to hand any over previously). ATACMS activity has certainly fallen off dramatically in the last two weeks.

Thirdly, as I pointed out upthread, the nearest obvious military target is an airfield located three miles north of this particular beach. There's also an area of farmland about a mile and a half to the east that may serve as a SAM positioning area. Ballistic missiles that get clipped late in their flight don't fall three miles away from their intended targets, and if the Ukrainians had been interested in a military target they would have done what they always do and attacked in the middle of the night. They struck instead on the afternoon of Orthodox Pentecost Sunday, when the streets and beaches would be crowded with civilians. As such - and in light of a pattern of Ukrainian attacks targeting civilians in Russia gathered for holidays - it is likely this attack was intended to terrorize civilian residents and vacationers in a wealthy Sevasopol suburb and the work of Russian air defenses prevented an enormous number of deaths and injuries.

Addendum: Just to provide some visual context on exactly how far this beach is from the airfield in question - it's farther from it than from the harbor!

Addendum 2: It's not clear from the way I wrote it, but there were five missiles in total - four shot down at sea plus one over the beach in question.

I apologize, should have been clearer.

Read 5 tweets

Armchair Warlord

@ArmchairW

May 20

D+10 update for the Russian Spring 2024 offensive. I mentioned last time (D+8) they'd begun to turn the pressure back on in the Donbass after easing off to let the Ukrainians pull troops to Kharkov.

They've marked up gains in 14 locations across the front in the last 48 hours⬇️

1 / Starting from the north, Volchansk, Russian troops have secured the north of town and pushed troops across the Volcha River to begin evicting the AFU from the south side.

2 / No map for Liptsi because the location of the contact line in the area is astonishingly murky for this fishbowl of a war, but the fighting is visible from Kharkov.

Read 17 tweets

Armchair Warlord

@ArmchairW

May 2

By popular demand, I'm writing a listicle - my top ten US military acquisition disasters of the 21st century.

It's a little distressing that I have so much material to work with.⬇️

This list is largely informed by two factors - taxpayer money wasted and capabilities not delivered. So despite my catchy F-32 frontispiece above, the F-35 didn't actually make the list because despite being very expensive the program delivered working hardware.

Number 10: the VH-71 Kestrel

You think it'd be easy to design a VIP version of an AW101, but the DoD managed to make an off the shelf design cost $400M each.

Cancelled in 2009 after sinking $4.4B; sane program management got the replacement VH-92 in at a third of the unit cost.

Read 13 tweets

Armchair Warlord

@ArmchairW

Nov 5, 2023

The Russians have lost around a thousand tanks in Ukraine during the war thus far.

Oh, you want an explanation? Okay. Thread. ⬇️

https://x.com/ArmchairW/status/1510054419299065859?s=20

There has been a problem in estimating Russian vehicle losses since the first hours of the war - Ukrainian propagandists have flooded the internet with dodgy pictures of destroyed Soviet-era vehicles, claimed as Russian. I got started debunking them.

See:

https://x.com/ArmchairW/status/1510054419299065859?s=20

It occurred to me recently, though, that there's a way to "back out" Russian vehicle losses from far better-confirmed data for Russian personnel losses. According to Mediazona's ongoing count there have been 724 Russian tankers killed in the war to date.

Read 9 tweets

Armchair Warlord

@ArmchairW

Oct 9, 2023

D+2 update thread on the 2023 Israeli Crisis.

Palestinian forces - belonging to Hamas and other armed groups in the Gaza enclave - stormed the perimeter defenses yesterday morning local time, catching the IDF entirely off-guard. The front line has yet to stabilize.

Israeli troops have begun to converge on the area and counterattack, so I do not expect the zone of Palestinian control to expand significantly, and absent external intervention they will likely be driven back into Gaza proper soon. However, that isn't the whole story.

The Palestinians took advantage of their initial breakthrough to flush commandos deep into the Israeli interior, where they have been wreaking havoc for the past two days.

Video of a "road of death" in southern Israel, my understanding is the aftermath of a Gazan attack.