/Thread/Rant/
About expanding the Ukrainian mobilization and gross incompetence in the management of some parts of the military:
1. Delaying expanding mobilization because it will be unpopular is beyond idiotic - you will still need to do it later anyway and by delaying the decision you will meanwhile take more casualties and lose more territory than you otherwise would
because understrength units will take more casualties.
In fact, severely understrength units are at risk of collapsing - just like Russian units did in Kharkiv in September 2022.
Everyone delaying expanding the mobilization is at best a short-sighted idiot.
2. MoD should have started ages ago making firm mobilization plans in coordination with other relevant ministries (finance, industry, etc.) to ensure that the expanded mobilization is effective and orderly
3. UA MoD needs to take a very hard look at all those hundreds of thousands who are reported to be in service outside of combat areas - I have heard too many stories from Ukrainians about how especially the National Guard service
and all its many BS positions (useless checkpoints, military doing things that civilian institutions can handle, and acting like facility security at locations that don't need any or only a tiny security force) are being used to avoid being deployed into combat.
4. Fixing that can actually reduce how many people you actually need to mobilize - and many of those in safe areas have training that would allow for them to be deployed either immediately or at least without multi-month training.
5. Ukraine would also benefit from a better organized mobilization process. Instead of randomly sanding over papers, send letters/SMS/emails to those you want to mobilize, and those who don't turn up within the specified period should be immediately arrested
(not just asked to show up later) if encountered by law enforcement/military.
6. Ukraine should also demand deportations of those who left the country with documents exempting them from military service they weren't eligible to get - so either fakes or obtained via corruption.
7. The Army needs to (and should have done so months ago) establish and properly equip specialized engineering units for building proper fortifications - not just have deployed units do it with whatever people they can spare - often without proper resources and planning.
/end/
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As usual, there are a bunch of problems with this CNN report: 1. The Russian figure is supposed to be all-calibers while the Western figure is 155mm only - The Russian equivalent (152mm) is around half of those 3M.
2. Western artillery supplied to Ukraine is more accurate - so you need fewer rounds to achieve the same effect
3. NATO artillery ammo production will narrow that gap by late 2024 and if the US Congress approves the military aid package for Ukraine, which contains money for further ammo production expansion, NATO production is likely to match the Russian production around late 2025
This is the important point - given the prevalence of GPS jamming and SpaceX only knowing the approximate location of terminals, SpaceX can either provide service coverage over the frontline which means also Russians who are close to UA positions, or not provide service to anyone in the area.
And figuring out which terminals are operated by Russians and which by Ukrainians is non-trivial. If you want to avoid accidentally cutting off UA units from service, you can't afford to make mistakes.
This is the approximate size of a Starlink coverage cell if you center it in the center of Avdiivka - so if you want Ukrainians there to have coverage, Russians within ~12km will also be able to use Starlink terminals they have there.
to rebuild its forces enough to even begin to contemplate ideas about even a limited clash with NATO, but the theory it presents is pretty much just a wish for the (much more powerful) opponent to just give up
and some of those theoretical arguments have already turned out to have failed in Ukraine, so depending on them would be beyond idiotic.
1. Since most of the US ground forces would have a minimal role to play against China and the USAF asset reallocation would be limited by what airbases in the region would be made available
by the US allies plus the availability of tanker aircraft, I consider that scenario to not give a good opportunity to Russia in Europe - the more scary and plausible scenario would be a POTUS who is hostile to enforcing NATO A5.
Your regular reminder that Starlink is a usually (unless obtained as ITAR-restricted version) a civilian service with terms of service that ban integrating terminals into weapons. Musk is often behaving like a fool but 99.9% of Starlink terminals were unaffected by restrictions.
IMO, this article based on the @kielinstitute data that also cites our (@oryxspioenkop ) data is the work of people who are bad at math and missed multiple factors that invalidate their work.
1. It doesnt account for equipment Russia pulled out of storage
2. It ignored that only some of the captured vehicles (IMO around 1/3) became operational with the side that captured them - the rest serving as sources of spare parts.
3. Our visually-confirmed losses are likely an underestimate - but likely to a higher degree for damaged and destroyed vehicles than for captured ones. So Ukraine likely lost a lot more tanks that lack visual evidence than it captured without visual evidence.