/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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1. The author is apparently making a judgement over a weapon system purely based on his own limited experience - with no references to any other sources, data, or analysis. That is an increasibly small (and rather falwed) sample size for judging a type of weapon systems.
3. Based on the description of authors experience it didnt appear that the unit he served in was particulary capable, skilled, or well-equipped in the use of combat drones.
/long thread/ While I dont think attack helicopters (AHs) are dead, IMO Chieftan is in this video way overestimating their viability on a modern peer and near-peer conventional battlefield
He starts with the "It can do thing that nothing else can" argument, but without acknowledging that the amount of things that attack helicopters can do that other assets or combinations of assets are unable to do has shrunk a lot in recent times.
The Polish order for 96 AH-64s is repeatedly brought up as an argument for AHs being just fine, but that order appears to be an outlier and subject of uncertainties that could see it scaled down or cancelled.
/thread/ There has been a lot of talk recently about vulnerability of European armies regarding functionality of the US made weapons (and US componenets/data used in non-US weapons) with the F-35 being the prime example.
In this thread I want to explain how things are.
1. There are no "kill switches" - people should not be mixing movie/game stories and reality 2. But unless we are able to source everything (parts, software, data) needed for a weapon system to work, we are dependant on the manufacturers support,
including permissions of the government of the country manufacturer is bases in. That level of dependancy can vary based on how much we are not able to obtain or find workarounds for.
@shashj I disagree with how some things are presented/claimed
1. The current NATO requirements, including US forces are for comfortably curb-stomping Russia
@shashj 2. The whining about the number of brigades is extremely stupid because it always only counts our peacetime forces - ignoring our mobilization plans and potential.
@shashj 2. We would currently be able to defend against Russia - it just wouldnt look nice or be an easy, low-casualty war.
/short thread with statistics for 3rd aniversary of the start of the war/
Russian and Ukrainian visually-confirmed equipment losses since the start of the Russian 2022 invasion of Ukraine by category
Since people are asking for Starlink alternatives, here is their current status.
No satellite service comes even close to Starlinks capabilities and capacity and that wont change for years (and one of those that might become competitive, Amazon Kuiper, would also be a US system)
The best alternative is to lay optical fibers and other "normal" connections to Ukrainian positions and ensure that there is a good LTE (it has decent speed and better coverage than 5G) connectivity for mobile users.
Just for pure regundancy reasons, I would expect at least the fixed Ukrainain positions in the rear areas to already have some "normal" alternative. Without Starlink, the worst affected would be mobile users near the frontline.