Back in July I wrote a thread analyzing Ukrainian personnel losses in the context of German casualties in WWII, in which I determined that due to extreme casualties they could not sustain the war effort much past Spring 2024.
Today their new mobilization law came out and it's insane. Here's some highlights. People are now fully eligible for service in the Armed Forces of Ukraine are in "Disability Group III," comprising people who:
1. Are missing or blind in one eye 2. Are partially deaf 3. Have a tracheotomy 4. Have jaw defects that prevent normal chewing 5. Suffer from dwarfism (<130cm for men) 6. Have a missing or nonfunctional arm 7. Have an amputated leg up to the thigh 8. Are missing fingers 9. Are missing both feet 10. Have a pacemaker implanted 11. Have only one working kidney 12. Have only one working lung 13. Have suffered from "traumatic castration" 14. Have a brain abscess (!) 15. Have a substantial skull defect 16. Have Parkinson's (!) 17. Have extreme scoliosis 18. Have severe chest deformities 19. Have "severe adrenal insufficiency" (it's a war eh?) 20. Have no bladder.
It also apparently drops the official conscription age from 27 to 25, but I doubt that's been taken adhered to at any point in the war and particularly not in the last year.
These are not the measures of a healthy society fighting a low-casualty war. This is Armageddon.
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.
The Russians have lost around a thousand tanks in Ukraine during the war thus far.
Oh, you want an explanation? Okay. Thread. ⬇️
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.
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.
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.
"Dozens" of Ukrainian soldiers surrendering north of Klescheevka, apparently around 48.552153, 37.960711. Probably the remnants of a whole company.
Very much calls into question their recent claims of success in the area and the motivation of their troops.
Location on the map. This is quite close to the location of an earlier, unsuccessful Russian attack so it seems the Russians regrouped and gave it another shot.
If Mediazona's count of Russian casualties in Ukraine is accurate - and it probably is - Russian losses tapered off over the month of August to the point they're now hardly worse than American ones at the height of the Iraq War.
This suggests the AFU is beginning to collapse. ⬇️
First of all the bottom line - Mediazona has confirmed a mere 133 Russian military deaths in the first three weeks of August (their data only goes to August 23rd right now). This is on top of a long-term downward trend in Russian casualties since the winter.
Mediazona's total count is slightly over 30,000 for the entire war right now.
How do I know it's accurate? Russian admissions. Recently Gen. Teplinsky, head of the VDV, stated that 8500 Russian paratroopers had been wounded and returned to duty over the course of the war.
Update and a little analysis on the attack on Pskov Airfield. ⬇️
First of all this was not a gimmicky operation with cheap drones. Loitering munitions of some kind were used - I personally suspect Switchblade 600s - fired in a large swarm with sophisticated EW support.
Switchblade 600 has a number of features that make it a good choice for this kind of operation - easy and fast setup, adequate range and speed, relatively small size with limited RCS, thermal, optical and audio signatures, and onboard optics allowing precision targeting and BDA.
Launched from Estonia, they would arrive on target at Pskov in less than 20 minutes. Given reports of 20 or more attacking drones, enough were launched to destroy every aircraft on the ramp at Pskov and inflict a devastating blow on the Russian Air Force.