Two striking figures from that for me. Firstly, 4,200 weapons have been provided. Secondly, some sources are reporting a hit rate of 90%.
The first figure will likely be accurate, the second must surely be more suspect but even if it were anywhere in that ball-park that is notable.
You can do the maths and perhaps begin to understand why Russia is reluctant to commit tanks and convoys to the front line and instead relies on artillery.
seems in line with reports of Javelins 93% (or so) of effectiveness. One fighting unit reported 100 vehicle kills out of 112 Javelins fired …
Those high numbers are probably partially owed to russian’s inability to integrate weapon-systems in coordinated actions. It seems that the tanks do the tank thing, the artillery does the art. thing, infantry doing theirs … … but no coordination in between.
Lot’s of people speaking of tanks (partially) taking the course of battleships in declining importance
I saw another article that said the railway workers in Belarus had done their part to sabotage the war effort by slowing down shipments to the front. When repressing workers in an industrialized society comes home to roost…
(Recall stories about how slave labour in Nazi munitions factories did what they could to sabotage munitions production, for example replacing the small bits of explosive triggers in artillery shells with chewed bread.)
The other thing is - when the USA was churning out liberty ships, and a bomber every minute - their factories were converted to a war effort from the beginning and still took a few months to get up to speed. The normal pace of things was better illustrated by the Iraq War when they expended a few years’ production of high tech hardware in a matter of days.
I have trouble imagining Russia has been producing tanks, or trucks, or munitions (or MRE’s) in the volumes they are being consumed, and probably have not for decades. Are the assembly lines even there to produce T72’s again? How big an auto industry does Russia itself have, let alone a heavy truck industry? What would happen to their economy (or the former economy) if they start to commandeer civilian trucks to serve as supplies transports? I’m imagining the Russian soldiers’ rations arriving in McDonalds tractor trailers, since those trucks presumably are currently idle. (And they probably don’t have a big supply of camouflage paint right now…)
Yeah, this isn’t the Red Army with millions of active-duty personnel and millions more in organized reserves with tens of thousands of tanks in active and mobilization units and tens of thousands more obsolete models in deep reserve. The Russian Ground Forces are shockingly small if these are the kinds of numbers and size one is expecting to find. The International Institute of Strategic Studies The Military Balance 2021 lists their personnel at ε280,000 (incl conscripts) and a frontline tank strength of only 2,840: 650 T-72B/BA; 850 T-72B3; 530 T-72B3M; 310 T-80BV/U; 140 T-80BVM; 350 T-90/T-90A; 10 T-90M, with 10,200 in store: 7,000 T-72/T-72A/B; 3,000 T-80B/BV/U; 200 T-90. Those in store are in deep storage left over from the Cold War. I imagine they’re going to have to start de-mothballing them if tank losses continue at the rate they have been. Ukrainian claims for tanks destroyed have reached into the 400s, and if that number is cut in half for a more realistic figure, that’s still reaching 10% of Russia’s active tank force gone in less than a month.
The US has been estimating Russian losses at something around half of Ukraine’s claims and the mid-point of that and admitted Russian losses and estimated that 6,000 Russians had been killed up to around last week. That is a lot of Russian combat power gone, particularly when considering that’s not including either wounded or POWs, and that historically the large majority of casualties fall on the direct combat branches of infantry, armor, and such which constitute a rather small percentage of the total personnel of an army. Using even very old historical killed to wounded ratios from WW2 of 3 wounded to 1 dead at a time when wounded were much more likely to die before reaching treatment, that would place total casualties in the 24,000 range - which is again approaching 10% losses of their total active strength in under a month.
They’re more into the T-14 these days and the pace of production is slow. I think T-72s models are still technically being produced for export, so no doubt that can be diverted. But again in limited numbers. The mechanically problematic T-80 (arguably technically inferior to modernized T-72 models) was discontinued in favor of the T-90 which have been discontinued in favor of the T-14. The T-72/80/90 family are all fairly similar.
However they apparently have literally well over 10,000 T-72/T-80/T-90’s in storage. What kind of shape they’re in and how long they’d take to rehabilitate and in some cases modernize is anybody’s guess. But some at least will have been recently retired and should be in decent enough shape.
Prettybig actually. At ~50-70,000 heavy trucks a year they have quite a bit of capacity. But this is assuming embargoes don’t slow that. Still despite its economic decline relative to the Soviet era, Russia is still pretty well industrialized and has an extensive native natural resource base. It is still a really, really big country.
I don’t think this has been posted, a handy guide to all the different AT missiles Ukraine has received (or will receive):
One thing that jumped at me about the french PILAS:
“the French military has categorized it as a “traumatic weapon” and prohibited personnel from firing more than two or three of them in peacetime across their entire service careers.”
Is that unusual, or are the french just more honest? I saw a clip of a team firing a Javelin, and nobody bothered with ear-protection, or reacted distressed.
Actually, it took a couple of years to get up to peak speed. Things were finally in full force in 1944.
Not that many factories were converted at the beginning of the war and the stories of how they were built are fascinating.
The Soviets did a fantastic job as well, including moving their factories east to the Urals. They outproduced Germany in such critical areas as tanks and machine guns.
CNN just broke a story where a russian magazine posted 10.000 dead Russian soldiers and 16.000 wounded … the article (in the .ru mag) disappeared within minutes.
If true, I find it interesting that the numbers are not that far off from what the Ukr. report (assuming the articles numbers are 1-2 days old, hence lower)
add on Q: what % of an army are normall “fighting troops”? … 20%? 30? 40%? …
Interesting, but I find the ratio of killed to wounded pretty suspect; 1:1.6 is an extremely high fatality rate. A common rule of thumb from the World Wars is that killed to wounded is normally around 1:3, and from wars such as Vietnam and Iraq, at least on the US side, where the US had a high degree of overall control of the battlefields and the ability to relatively safely rapidly medivac casualties the killed to wounded ratio was more like 1:6 or 1:7.
Regarding the percentage of “fighting troops”, it depends on both the nation and the definition of combat arms being used, but using a typical definition that counts infantry, armor, cavalry/reconnaissance, artillery, air defense, combat aviation, and combat engineers, its typically only 10-20% of an army. They are more or less guaranteed to suffer a lot more than 10-20% of the casualties, but with the situation in the Ukraine being what it is, I wouldn’t envy being a Russian supply truck driver right about now.
There was a story linked in one of these threads suggesting (insofar as anything can be understood through the fog) that Russian logistics impairs not just bringing supplies forward but also taking wounded back, and that many more soldiers are dying as a result than is typical.
As I’ve mentioned the Russian demographic is interesting. The birth rate dropped significantly since 1990 - men 20-30 are about 5% of the population, so about 8M to 9M. If they’ve committed almost 200,000 troops, presumably mainly men of that age range, to already fighting in Ukraine - plus all the support troops manning all the other bases, running the mundane administrivia etc. - plus all the men who have civilian jobs and don’t want to go fight and can’t be spared from their jobs… It seems to me there’s not a lot of fallback for more troops; suggesting 26,000 out of the 200,000 troops in Ukraine are out of action has got to be kind of frightening for the Russian people.
Plus if your vehicle is hit by a Javelin or your aircraft is shot down, odds are you are not just wounded. We don’t hear much about shooting battles, as in exchanges of rifle fire.
It’s possible, also, that the Russians just really don’t particularly care about their wounded.
If someone gets his leg blown off, and is bleeding heavily, the Russian army might just shrug and say “Ah, our logistics chain is strained enough as is, let him bleed out, not worth it to haul him all the way back.”
another thought … we see daily pics of ambushed tanks, personnel transporters, etc…
It’s probably safe to say for every of those you can count 5 dead russian troops (that are not shown in the vid’s)…
I assume if the russian tanks get hit so hard that the turrett gets torn off and flies through the air (fairly frequent event, it seems …), everything inside the tank is pretty much “gone”, right? (gone as “not easy to ID anymore”)
Pretty much. The amount of force it takes to send a turret (weighing who knows how many hundreds of pounds) flying high in the sky is going to pulverize everyone within the tank, especially given the confined nature of the crew compartment (pre-turret-adios) and how pressure was/is drastically increased within the compartment.
Another possibility that occurred to me is that if the article is correct, the definition of wounded being used might only be counting the severely wounded - those requiring extensive hospitalization or maimed to the point that they won’t be capable of further military service for a long time, if ever. If so, there could be another 14,000 or more lightly wounded not counted in those numbers. Perhaps a translation issue?
Russian tanks have a crew of three. They are tiny compared to other tanks. One of the things that keeps them small is leaving out a loader for an autoloader. Where the ammo is stored in the turret leads to cook offs and popped turrets.
I recently watched a video about the T-72 and other older tanks still in Russian service. It was made before the current conflict. The biggest criticism of the tank was that even though there have been significant upgrades to the systems there were few upgrades to the survivability and armor. Survivability was supposed to be a big upgrade in the new T-14 tanks. They have a revolutionary design which puts the crew in the hull with an unmanned turret. In theory anyway.
