Armchair Warlord Profile picture
Weaboo, author and battle theorist. Interactions are not endorsements.
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Nov 5, 2023 9 tweets 4 min read
The Russians have lost around a thousand tanks in Ukraine during the war thus far.

Oh, you want an explanation? Okay. Thread. ⬇️ Image 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:
Oct 9, 2023 13 tweets 6 min read
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. Image 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.
Sep 4, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
"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. Image
Sep 2, 2023 15 tweets 6 min read
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. ⬇️ Image 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. Image
Sep 1, 2023 10 tweets 5 min read
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.
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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.
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Aug 27, 2023 15 tweets 6 min read
For the last several months, commentators have endlessly talked about these tactically significant "heights" being fought over in Ukraine. Ukraine's pretty flat, so what are these exactly?

Let's talk about intervisibility lines, with a practical discussion about Rabotino. ⬇️ Image Militarily significant terrain features can be so subtle that you don't even notice them in daily life.

An intervisibility line is the line where you can see over the terrain feature you're standing on and into low ground beyond - essentially the top of any rise in the ground. Image
Aug 25, 2023 13 tweets 6 min read
Rumor is that with the Ukrainian Army increasingly degraded in the wake of their disastrous Spring-Summer 2023 offensive, and no Western intervention forthcoming, Zelensky is going to order total mobilization. He's said as much.

This will not save Ukraine. ⬇️ Image Ukraine has relied on mass conscription since Day 1 of this war, and in fact did a large-scale reserve callup beforehand, in an attempt to offset Russian firepower with sheer numbers.

This has led to astronomical casualties, with reasonable estimates over 300,000 KIA by now. Image
Aug 5, 2023 7 tweets 4 min read
Given the recent breakdown of the Grain Deal(tm) and Ukrainian attacks on commercial shipping in the Black Sea, the Russians might want to reinforce the Black Sea Fleet.

But AW - they can't do they! The Bosporus is the only way in and out!

It actually isn't. ⬇️ Image Russia has a back door into the Black Sea via their internal network of rivers and canals, which they not only use routinely to move cargo around the country but also have done some planning to use to shift warships around between the Black, Baltic, Caspian and Northern Fleets. Image
Aug 3, 2023 7 tweets 4 min read
Interesting video that came out on July 31st showing the Russians pushing back a Ukrainian mechanized platoon trying to counterattack, as far as I can tell, south of Novojehorovka.

If my geo is correct this debunks Ukrainian counterattack claims.

Source: https://t.co/NQWyDJcBMQt.me/veles_v_okope/…
There's only one scrubby forest with an angled treeline like that in front of it near Karmazanovka. The low altitue and extreme zoom of the drone make the perspective pretty wild.

Green is the approximate route of the Ukrainian vehicles as they retreat.
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Jul 27, 2023 11 tweets 5 min read
Somebody at the State Department probably thought they'd come up with a banger when they put out this talking point: "If Russia stops fighting and withdraws, the war ends. If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends."

Too bad it's nonsense. ⬇️

(comments by Jens Stoltenberg of NATO) Image Ukraine could end the war tomorrow ("stop fighting") by agreeing to Russia's four demands, which have been constant since the start of the "Special Military Operation." They are:
1. Demilitarization
2. Denazification
3. Neutralization
4. Recognition of Russian annexations Image
Jul 26, 2023 14 tweets 6 min read
The Russian Army just blasted open a 12-kilometer hole in the Ukrainian front line and captured more terrain in a week than Ukraine has in the last two months of their counteroffensive.

Let's talk about it. ⬇️ Image This is part of a general Russian push in Lugansk north of the Seversky Donets river that has been going on for about the last two weeks. Smaller gains have been reported in the far north near Kupyansk as well as in the Serebryanski Forest along the river to the south. Image
Jul 25, 2023 21 tweets 9 min read
Military ethics, for when soldiers are asked to do something legal under the Law of Armed Conflict but morally disastrous.

They don't really exist - they're certainly not codified and enforced properly in any force I know of - but they should.

Thread ⬇️ Image But Major Warlord, you say - the US military has ethical requirements!

Yes, it does. They're the same government-employee ethics any civilian bureaucrat has to adhere to. Don't accept lavish gifts, don't make your subordinates run errands, don't commute in government vehicles.
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Jul 21, 2023 13 tweets 6 min read
The Ukrainian War isn't going to be "the" war of the 21st century. It's probably going to be remembered as the minor war before WWIII that everyone observed very closely and then proceeded to draw wildly incorrect conclusions from.

Much like the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. ⬇️ Image The Russo-Japanese War showed exactly how combat was in the early 20th century and presaged the character of the First World War - both the Western Front's static fighting around Port Arthur and the Eastern Front's blood-soaked mobile warfare in Manchuria. Image
Jul 20, 2023 11 tweets 5 min read
The Black Sea Grain Deal is dead. The astonishing thing is that it lasted as long as it did... which was in no small part due to Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, playing games with the Russians.

Put another log on the bonfire of the institutions. ⬇️ Image The Black Sea Initiative was negotiated in June 2022 ostensibly to ensure that vulnerable populations in Africa didn't starve for lack of Ukrainian food exports with the war on and the Ukrainian Black Sea ports (through which most of those exports passed) shut down. Image
Jul 16, 2023 10 tweets 4 min read
Info came out recently about US training courses for Ukrainian soldiers in Germany, which revealed the US Army has done little to internalize the lessons of the war.

Part of this was discounting drone recon in favor of old-fashioned patrolling.

But is this really a bad idea? ⬇️ Image To preface this discussion, it's clear that the US military is very far behind the times in integrating UAVs at the small unit level. These things are transforming the battlefield.
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Jul 13, 2023 13 tweets 5 min read
Every since D-Day on February 24th, 2022, Ukraine has been fighting a total war against Russia.

One of the most ghoulish talking points I see out of Ukrainian shills and Russian doomers is that Ukraine can and will simply take millions of casualties to win.

Can they really?⬇️ History shows that things are far more complicated, and societies fighting existential total wars will run out of acceptable manpower and collapse militarily long before they physically run out of people to conscript into the ranks.

Let's examine such a society: Nazi Germany.
Jun 29, 2023 9 tweets 4 min read
The war in Ukraine has been in many ways a bonfire of the institutions. Governments across the West have systematically ignored their own domestic and international laws in the service of the Ukrainian cause.

Let's talk about efforts to conscript Ukrainian refugees in Europe.⬇️ Non-refoulment of refugees is a core principle of international law, arguably a ius cogens norm on par with things like the prohibitions on torture and slavery.

The principle is that you cannot place refugees back into danger of further persecution.

See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-refou…
Jun 25, 2023 10 tweets 3 min read
Given what we know now about Prigozhin's rebellion - particularly that some 3/4 of Wagner refused to participate - it's likely Putin knew about the plot well in advance and, ever the judoka, allowed it to go forward for reasons of his own.

What reasons? Short thread: ⬇️ 1. Consolidation of power. Most of the Russian political class vocally lined up in support of Putin during the incident. Those who did not have doubtless been noted and can expect unusual but plausibly-deniable deaths in the near to medium term.
Jun 20, 2023 6 tweets 3 min read
Good hit, target burning.

I've always said, only half joking, that Oryx is everything Ukrainian that can be passed off as Russian and everything Russian photographed five times.

Now that so much of the AFU is Western-equipped, I suspect their sources are drying up. Image I've been a critic of Oryx for a long time. In fact, what put me on the map as a commentator was an audit of their work that I put together in March 2022. Even as bare-bones as it was it still seems to be the standard debunk, which is amazing to me.

Jun 17, 2023 12 tweets 5 min read
Putin HATES it!

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

Thread 👇 Image 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. ImageImage
Jun 16, 2023 9 tweets 4 min read
This article needs a debunk.

First of all, Politico misunderstands why a lot of foreign students attend US military courses. Many are not there to actually learn anything but rather to make connections with the US military.

politico.com/news/2023/06/1… It's completely routine for foreign students to arrive at an American military school having already done whatever it is that school prepares you for.

In my Career Course class we had a foreign officer who (as a 1LT!) had already seen combat as a cannon battery commander. Image