[saturn_656]

andyt andyt:

I couldn't understand why for instance Ukrainian soldiers would give up their amored vehicles to the insurgents. Turns out they were surrounded by citizens who made them do it. Those citizens don't feel abused by Russia, nor do many others in the east. What the EU offering goodies did was expose the fault lines in Ukraine. Ones that Putin then exploited - Putin saw this coming, while the EU did not. While Ukraine was more cohesive than Yugoslavia, it is cracking into the same ethnic sorts of divisions. This isn't all Russias doing, but the people of east Ukraine themselves as well. Partition might be the best solution here, so that not too much more blood is spilled. NATO countries can't now preach about the inviolability if borders when they acted in the exact opposite way in Yugoslavia.

God himself couldn't have kept Yugoslavia together. Multiple ethnic factions were engaged in outright war. NATO stepped in to bring order. NATO did not initiate the war.

Yugoslavia died when Tito did, they just didn't realize it right away.

[Winnipegger]

Not a good idea to shoot citizens. Especially if they disagree with you. If you shoot your opponents, are you any better than Russian troops? More importantly, if Ukrainians start shooting Ukrainians, that gives Russia their excuse to send in their forces.

I watched the streaming video of Odessa, the links you provided. Scary. One thing I noticed is someone dropped firecrackers. That sounds like gunfire. That was an obvious attempt to get police to shoot unarmed protestors.

[PostFactum]

andyt andyt:

And the rest of the 125,000 all support the west, do they?

It was the bullshit that the insurgents were all just Russian agents, as PF would have it that made me say Ukraine needs to stand up - what you call advocating violence (Why are you not chastising htos govt troops for practicing violence?)

There is a lot of popular support for Russia in east Ukraine.

And we can put all this grannies in one train and send to Russia.

andyt andyt:

The supporters have been much more engaged than those that support the west. This has to be recognized and taken into account. Ukraine isn't going back to what it once was.

Not agree.

andyt andyt:

@PF - I guess you did. But in that case, don't the people of the east have the same right of rebellion as those in Kiev?

No, in Kyiv we wanted better life, not destroy the country. We didn't have military weapons and foreign soldiers. We really wanted this, we didn't have ak-47 with foreign soldier behind us.

[PostFactum]

Winnipegger Winnipegger:

Not a good idea to shoot citizens. Especially if they disagree with you. If you shoot your opponents, are you any better than Russian troops? More importantly, if Ukrainians start shooting Ukrainians, that gives Russia their excuse to send in their forces.

I'm not going to do this, it's just idea, because I can't imagine other way to go out of situation.

[stratos]

Jabberwalker Jabberwalker:

I have and they are poorly trained. Their NCO's are barely the equivalent of our privates.
quote]

This old Canadian military philosophy whereby Privates are trained-up to take over from Corporals, Corporals trained to take over from Sargents, Sargents from officers goes straight back to Sir Arthur Currie, himslf. It was a peculaiarly Canadian innovation (the British DID NOT like to have their class barriers crossed like that) and it has been a guiding philosohy ever since. I suspect that's how we get so much from our usually little forces .. this kind of cross-trained flexibility.

We do the same in the US (not sure where it comes from)though as a private we learned up to what a SGT. did. The Russians we encouraged not to think just follow the orders of the officers. Few enlisted/conscripted were to lead they were/are trained to fight with their equipment to a high degree but in regards to battle field situational thinking and or leadership they depend on their officers not NCO's.[/quote][/i]


This was developed 1915-1916 when the U.S. was neutral. The weight of American numbers helped to turn the tide in WWI but they were still using 1914 "human wave" tactics right up to the armistace (in spite of the fact that the allies had abandoned this approach after Verdun and the Somme). Whatever innovations the U.S. Army brought to the field, they were later on in their history.[/quote]

I know a lot of our tactics we used in WWII against Germany we got from the Germans. We copied their lightning war and put our own spin on it. For the war against Japan we pretty much learned as we fought. Finally finding various ways to overcome their tactics.

[bootlegga]

Winnipegger Winnipegger:

Well, I can only speculate about ground combat. I may be a computer software developer, but wanted to be an aerospace engineer since I was a pre-schooler. I read a lot about Russian space operations after the Soviet Union fell. Damn! They were farther ahead than anyone thought. Soviet ICBMs were thought to have primitive targeting, hardly able to hit anything. Then the west got details: they were almost as good as American missiles. Definitely good enough for the warheads they carried.

Then there's space stuff, my specialty. I never even heard about the Energia rocket until after the Soviet Union fell. It's first launch lifted a Soviet battle station: 88 metric tonnes, radar absorptive coating, painted black, didn't even use radio for communication, it used laser communication for complete stealth. Held 100 nuclear mines, a laser to defend against any anti-satellite weapon such as Brilliant Pebbles, and a cartridge of test targets for the laser. It even had a canister of special gas that would envelope the satellite, blocking any ground laser. But Mikhail Gorbachev was arguing with Regan to not launch orbital battle stations, he didn't want it. He attended the first launch of Energia, discovered what they were launching. The launch vehicle worked perfectly, but when the satellite battle station was supposed to use on-board thrusters to settle into orbit, it fired in the "wrong direction" causing it to de-orbit and safely crash in the ocean. And if you believe that was an accident, I have a bridge to sell in Brooklyn. It's not a good idea to disobey the Premier of the Soviet Union.

I talked to the lead engineer who developed the ion engine for NASA's Deep Space One. He told me NASA management had hired Russian engineers to teach them everything they knew about electric propulsion. He was glad I was interested in his work. NASA developed an ion engine with 3,000 second specific impulse. That's a rocket guy's way of saying fuel efficiency. Since rockets are limited by fuel, that's extremely important. Instead of an ion engine, another principle was Hall Effect. NASA thought the best you could achieve with that was 1,700 seconds, so they didn't waste their time. Turns out the Russians got that to work as well as NASA's best ion engine. And the Russians did it in the 1960s! Every Russian military satellite used Thruster Anode Layer Hall Thrusters for station keeping. And they developed a laboratory model of a big one, required a lot of electric power but specific impulse better than NASA's best.

Their rocket technology may not be as good with solid or cryogenic fuel, but they developed rocket engines that use storable propellants much farther than Americans. "Storable" means liquid at room temperature. There's a reason the Atlas V rocket uses a Russian engine, and the first stage of the Antares rocket was built in Ukraine. That launched the Cygnus cargo ship to the International Space Station.

Most of which is useless in the conventional conflict we've been discussing so far.

Winnipegger Winnipegger:

You can pound your chest and say "we're great!". And I don't know about ground troops. But their aerospace is second to none. They did fall behind in electronics and radar during the cold war. Since the Soviet Union fell, they caught up.

Caught up to the West? Doubtful. They may be second, but the US is still well ahead of them and it's likely Europe is too.

Winnipegger Winnipegger:

Ps. bootlegga said the Mi-24 is great against infantry/insurgents. That's the point. That's who they face.

I didn't realize you put anti-tank missiles on gunships to kill insurgents...oh wait, you don't. The Mi-24 was desiogned as a jack-of-all-trades (anti-infantry, anti-tak, even anti-air)and it's pretty good as long as you have air superiority, however as I've noted, the USSR/Warsaw Pact likely would NOT have had air superiority. As such their vaunted capability is far less impressive than might be the case against some insurgents hinding a cave somewhere. Like any helo gunship, their survivability on a modern battlefield without air superiority is measured in minutes.

[Winnipegger]

The current situation appears to be about trickery and manipulation. I'm reminded of a couple ancient books.

The Art of War
Written more than 2,000 years ago by a Chinese general named Sun Tzu.

The Lost Art of War
Written by another Chinese general, a descendant of Sun Tzu named Sun Bin. This book was lost for centuries, until a copy was found in an ancient Chinese tomb. A few words here and there are missing because the bamboo strips the original was written on had rotted.

Both are English translations.

[stratos]

$1:

Like any helo gunship, their survivability on a modern battlefield without air superiority is measured in minutes.

Not even then. In the USSR's war in Afghanistan they had air superiority the whole time. The stinger missiles once deployed enabled the rebels to shoot the hinds down. Keep in mind the rebels did not have air craft.

[peck420]

Winnipegger Winnipegger:

Get it? Only 800 in a city of 125,000. That's less than 1% of the population; in one of the strongest "rebel" cities of east Ukraine. The people do not want this, but insurgents have heavy weapons.

There was an estimated 45,000 Taliban, in Afghanistan, in 2001.

That was 0.17% of the population, at the time.

The number of combatants rarely relates to the level of support.

[Goober911]

andyt andyt:

He sure did, over and over.

It's good to see that Ukraine has soldiers willing to step up instead of moaning about the enemy having intelligence. I sure hope you're not representative of Canadian soldiers if we're ever in the same situation, or we'd be fucked. "We can't act, the enemy has intelligence" HOly shit.

AndyT
My apologies for being so rude and ignorant.

[bootlegga]

stratos stratos:

$1:

Like any helo gunship, their survivability on a modern battlefield without air superiority is measured in minutes.

Not even then. In the USSR's war in Afghanistan they had air superiority the whole time. The stinger missiles once deployed enabled the rebels to shoot the hinds down. Keep in mind the rebels did not have air craft.

Way back in the day, I remember reading about how decisive the Stingers were. Prior to their use, SAMs (Redeye and/or Soviet models) employed by the muhajadeen typically had to be fired from behind or even above to geta solid lock on Mi-24s. The Stinger changed that by allowing targeting from the front.

If Wikipedia is accurate, the Stinger was not nearly as deadly as press reports made it sound, but they were effective in demoralizing Soviet pilots because of their better effectiveness compared to older handheld SAMs.

$1:

The rebels also used Soviet made shoulder-launched, heat-seeking SAMs and American Redeye, which had either been captured from the Soviets or their Afghan allies or were supplied from Western sources. Many of them came from stocks the Israelis had captured during their wars with Soviet backed states in the Middle East. Owing to a combination of the limited capabilities of these early types of missiles, poor training and poor material condition of the missiles, they were not particularly effective. The RPG-7, originally developed as an antitank weapon, was the first effective countermeasure to the Hind. However, the RPG-7, not being designed for air defense, had several shortcomings owing to its design. Oftentimes attempting to use one to shoot down a helicopter was fatal to the user.

From 1986[19] the CIA then began supplying the Afghan rebels with newer Stinger shoulder-launched, heat-seeking SAMs.[20] These were a marked improvement over earlier weapons, and while their actual military impact was not irrelevant, their real value was their demoralization and deterrent value against air power, and their propaganda worth to anti-Soviet groups. The Stinger missile locked on to infra-red emissions from the aircraft, particularly engine exhaust, and was resistant to interference from decoy flares. Countermeasure flares and missile warning systems were later installed in all Soviet Mi-2, Mi-8, and Mi-24 helicopters, giving pilots a chance to evade the missile. Heat dissipaters were also fitted to exhausts to decrease the Mi-24's heat signature. Tactical and doctrinal changes were introduced to make it harder for the enemy to deploy these weapons effectively. These reduced the Stinger threat but did not eliminate it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-24

[stratos]

Nice find there boots

[Goober911]

andyt andyt:

And the rest of the 125,000 all support the west, do they?

It was the bullshit that the insurgents were all just Russian agents, as PF would have it that made me say Ukraine needs to stand up - what you call advocating violence (Why are you not chastising htos govt troops for practicing violence?)

There is a lot of popular support for Russia in east Ukraine. The supporters have been much more engaged than those that support the west. This has to be recognized and taken into account. Ukraine isn't going back to what it once was.

@PF - I guess you did. But in that case, don't the people of the east have the same right of rebellion as those in Kiev?

No one has stated that all insurgents were from Russia. There is support in Eastern Ukraine for Russia, and I would gather more ethinc Russians for staying in Ukraine.

[jj2424]

andyt andyt:

And the rest of the 125,000 all support the west, do they?

It was the bullshit that the insurgents were all just Russian agents, as PF would have it that made me say Ukraine needs to stand up - what you call advocating violence (Why are you not chastising htos govt troops for practicing violence?)

There is a lot of popular support for Russia in east Ukraine. The supporters have been much more engaged than those that support the west. This has to be recognized and taken into account. Ukraine isn't going back to what it once was.

@PF - I guess you did. But in that case, don't the people of the east have the same right of rebellion as those in Kiev?

Last post of the morning and you'll be back in 20 minutes, when your 6 hour shift at the gas bar is over. No wi-fi at that place?

[Goober911]

andyt andyt:

I couldn't understand why for instance Ukrainian soldiers would give up their amored vehicles to the insurgents. Turns out they were surrounded by citizens who made them do it. Those citizens don't feel abused by Russia, nor do many others in the east. What the EU offering goodies did was expose the fault lines in Ukraine. Ones that Putin then exploited - Putin saw this coming, while the EU did not. While Ukraine was more cohesive than Yugoslavia, it is cracking into the same ethnic sorts of divisions. This isn't all Russias doing, but the people of east Ukraine themselves as well. Partition might be the best solution here, so that not too much more blood is spilled. NATO countries can't now preach about the inviolability if borders when they acted in the exact opposite way in Yugoslavia.

Putin refined the tactics used to create the Georgia war- He also upped the training for his Military, they are still crap except for the elite units.

Ukraine is correct in not using major force. That gives Putin his reason to invade, popular support from the East which he does not have yet.
Otherwise it is an occupation, thousands of troops and the costs would be significant.
Russia has small units operating in Ukraine, elite, well trained, armed and supported by Russia.
They are the lead in this so called rebellion. Then you have all the others jockeying for power.