in a similar vain, russians - in the ww2 also had waves of conscripts attacking without weapons … you pick the weapon of the guy who just got shot in front of you …if you get shot first, then you don’t need a weapon in the first place
Are you looking at the air filter on the right front fender?
And that’s probably another of Putin’s Problems: he thought the modern day Russian conscripts would be willing to do that same here.
But there’s a slight difference between an untrained, poorly equipped largely infantry force defending their homeland against an invader that constitutes an existential danger to the country, so they had no other option but to resist, and expecting the same as the invading force.
And it’s also interesting to note, “an untrained, poorly equipped largely infantry force defending their homeland against an invader that constitutes an existential danger to the country, so they had no other option but to resist” is a pretty good description of the Ukrainians in this mess.
Also, it should be noted that any Soviet soldier in WWII who said screw this and ran was summarily shot on the spot. Running away was certain death. Fighting the Germans there was some chance they’d survive.
no, (i can tell the sucking end from the blowing end of an engine 
)
…I’m talking about the exhaust system under the front fender (centered, under the radiator)
which makes it easy to ID even if tarped-up (and the reason is evidently that you do not want to run a potentially superheated set of pipes under 20.000 liter of inflamables that could start to leak by being shot at )
Ah. Got it. Never seen that before. Gonna be quite loud if you run into a rock.
Also helped, of course, that when Russia started disguising them, pictures of the disguised trucks were all over social media within minutes. I’m getting the impression that the Ukrainians knew where the Russians were better than the Russians themselves did.
Can’t remember if I posted this article already, which follows up on your point, @Chronos . The Ukrainians seem much more social-media-savvy than the Russians, and are using it in much more innovative ways.
I think that - to a certain extent - answers the question on “how European are the Ukrainian people”
the whole “they look rich/tall/blond for beiing refugees” kind of logic you see in that other thread
The Russian public will never be told. There will be a lot of “training accidents”, but the real story will never be told to the public.
I presume the Russians will also have removed the TDG placards indicating what the vehicle is hauling (I can tell by the 1203 number that truck is transporting gasoline). But then again, if their top brass just sent 160,000 troops driving on cheap Chinese tires out on “training maneuvers” and kept the real mission secret, it wouldn’t surprise me for them not to have thought those little details through.
I’m reminded of the Mongolian invasions of Japan in the 1200’s, when the Mongols vastly outnumbered the Japanese but screwed up by rushing the invasion and grabbing every kind of boat they could get their hands on to send their troops out across the sea. Then they got hit by typhoons, and all those cheaply made ships and re-purposed river boats and anything not equipped for rough seas sank and killed most of the invaders for the Japanese.
The short answer is no-ish. I am a retired tanker though so I may be using “guns” in a broader sense than you are.
The maximum javelin range started at 2km. Upgrades moved it up to 2.5km. I would guess we are looking at all the longer ranges now. By the time we were giving Ukraine their first javelins a couple years ago I suspect all the older missiles were out of war stocks. There is a variant that I am excluding that was recently in testing with an extended range of 4.5km. Even if we are transferring the first run US war stocks are unlikely to even have them in significant quantity yet. Javelin’s guidance is effective out to maximum range.
2 - 2.5km is longer than the effective range (against tank sized point targets) for the T72 and T80 before the last decade. Both have been through recent upgrades that included new fire control so they may be pushing up close to comparable. That is comparing maximum range with effective range where the gun drops below a 50% chance of hit. Firing multiple rounds increases the odds that one of them hits. Russia also fields an HE round for their 125mm tank gun. Even if they cannot effectively hit a tank sized target at a given range close can still count when you are flinging HE at dismounted troops. (A quick search did not yield an effective range against area targets. More later) Russia also have been including the ability to fire the AT-11 (NATO designation) anti-tank guided missile through the 125mm tank gun in all their upgrades. It’s range is 5km.
Then there is the BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles. It’s 100mm main gun has an effective range with HE-Frag against troop/area targets of 4km. (Providing us a good estimate of the tank main guns.) It also has a through the gun tube ATGM with a max range of 5.5km. The 30mm autocannon has a bit shorter of an effective range than the max for the javelin but high rate of fire and HE still gives it a chance of being effective enough in dire circumstances.
The there is their tube artillery. Indirect fires are getting into an order of magnitude greater range. Russian, and Soviet doctrine before, pushes some of their copious artillery force down to low levels where they are expected to operate in direct fire mode. Effectively they are WWII assault guns in that role. They easily out range the Javelin with shells containing more explosive than either of the guns above.
If you manage to infiltrate behind lines and are facing a convoy of trucks without any escort, you can outrange pintle mounted machineguns. That is assuming the terrain allows you to see from that far away. Some of the truck mounted guns can cover quite a bit of the range envelope for the Javelin.
Javelin are not used for indirect fire. They are fire and forget. The operator looks at the target to “show” it to the missile. After firing the operator can duck or run. The missile will continue to track and guide itself towards the selected target. That beats less advanced systems that require tracking the target all the way until missile impact. It does still mean exposing yourself before firing.
Javelins are nice ATGMs. They are really nice. They still take sleepy eyed Ukranian killers willing to put themselves in harms way to be effective.
That was in response to the statement “even truck drivers have guns”. I was assuming that that meant personal weapons like (at most) an AK, and 2 km is indeed well beyond the range of such a weapon. Heavier weapons such as those on a tank or even APC would have longer ranges.
And even if you can’t use a javelin for indirect fire, you still have to expose yourself for only a very short time to fire one. The convoy doesn’t have enough eyes to watch and fire on every head poking out of cover in a 2-km radius.
I went to post this and Discourse notified me it already had been linked in this page. So I’ll add that I was glad to see the railroad element. And there was some video footage!
The best I can figure is that this notion that the Soviet Union sent soldiers into battle without weapons is Hollywood getting their wars mixed up. In WW1 Imperial Russia was an agricultural society that was incapable of producing enough weapons for its soldiers and did send ‘riflemen’ into battle without enough rifles to go around. The Soviet Union didn’t have this problem in WW2, Stalin had industrialized the country at a horrific cost in human lives prior to WW2. During the war the USSR outproduced every other country on the planet in every category of ground warfare equipment, from tanks to artillery to mortars to small arms.
Enemy at the Gates is a Hollywood movie, not a documentary. Vasily Zaitsev never had a sniper duel with the head of the Berlin Sniper School as depicted in the movie, and contrary to how he was depicted in the movie, he was an ardent communist. See his autobiography.
My point was, would the average truck driver or passenger be able to hit someone a thousand or more feet away who had just shot at them and was a moving target running away? Whereas the ambushing group would have a chance to draw a bead, aim for fuel tank or riders.
My thought exactly - the old USSR was run by a politburo, the committee. This is osme person who thinks he’s a political and military genius and doesn’t want to hear “we can’t”. Sometimes it’s important to listen when the guys who know things say “we can’t”.
Perhaps an important aspect to this is that the population has not limits on their online activities and no fear of being arrested for what they do or say online. This makes for a more proactive, more aware, and more tech-savvy population.
That and the misconception that the Soviets sent conscripts in waves and waves against machine guns.
Except that apparently, there is a bit of truth in that in the desperate early days of Barbarossa, this did happen at times. Quoting Antony Beevor in The Second World War, concerning a do-or-die defense of Leningrad,
Also, because of the chaos of the Red Army soldiers getting taken prisoner, then escaping and rejoining combat units, there were battles where not all of the soldiers had enough rifles, but that was due to the chaotic state and the speed of the German attacks in the summer of 1941.
Likewise, there were times where soldiers had rifles but not sufficient ammo or no ammo in the very early days in particular battles as the Soviets struggled to attempt to stop the onslaught as their were doing logistics on the fly. America, Britain and the Dutch didn’t really do any better in the early days against Japan, either, of course.
Adding to what our resident expert on WWII writes, the Soviets were wisely selective concerning what they asked for on Lend-Lease. Lend-Lease supplied the USSR only 1.9% of all their artillery and 7% of their tanks but 409,500 motor vehicles, where Soviet production amounted to 265,000, so Lend-Lease exceeded USSR production by 1.5 times.
As I was looking at the numbers, I wonder if the reliance on US trucks contributed to the mindset which logistics is second fiddle.
While that may very well just be a crazy thought, militaries have cultures which last decades or centuries. The US experience in WWI, of trying to supply troops so far away, directly lead to it being studied between the wars and then US logistics were unmatched in WWII. That culture is still with the US forces.
This. There is an article in the Times about how Ukranians are phoning their Russian relatives who totally deny there has been an invasion or war and insist that this just an action to clean out the Nazi government led by the drug-addled Nazi Zelensky. When they protest they are under attack, the relatives insist they are being attacked by the Ukrainian army.
Tldr version - if there is a cultural issue, it’s probably that the Russian Army never really got over the rot that happened with the collapse of the Soviet Union. None of its performance since then has been particularly impressive, its performance in the Chechen Wars was fairly abysmal and the current situation in Ukraine speaks for itself. Soviet and Russian doctrines regarding logistics have substantial differences from Western Allied and NATO doctrines, but logistics have never been second fiddle, at least back in Soviet days.
Long version - having fully motorized logistics was a novelty only enjoyed by the US and the Commonwealth during WW2. Germany for example used more horses to move supplies and to tow their artillery in WW2 than they did in WW1. Germany was never able to have more than 15-20% of their formations mobile units (panzer, panzer grenadier and motorized infantry) using trucks for their logistics; the remaining 80-85% marched on foot and had guns towed and supplies moved by horses.
The USSR developed Deep Battle Theory back in the 1920s and 30s which envisioned making breaks in the front lines and exploiting with deep strategic movements into the enemies rear areas, which would require substantial logistics to sustain and prevent running out of supply and becoming isolated themselves. During the Second World War they planned and executed deep operations aimed at encircling and destroying German forces much more often than the Western Allies did. For example, the successful destruction of 6th Army at Stalingrad, Operation Uranus only set the stage for a far more ambitious plan, Operation Saturn which aimed to cut off all of German Army Group A in the Caucasus and very nearly succeeded. Operation Bagration drove the Germans clear across Belorussia, effectively destroyed Army Group center and isolated Army Group North in Courland in the Baltic states in the space of two months, and you know how swiftly they were able to completely smash the Japanese and move through Manchuria in August 1945. They did this even is smaller operations, such as the Cherkassy-Korsun Pocket, a deep battle where Soviet forces were able to isolate five German divisions which were only able to escape at the cost of having to abandon all of their heavy equipment, topically in Ukraine. Granted, of course, that this was done with the aid of lend-lease trucks, but they certainly appreciated how to make use of them.
Just for comparison, the aforementioned Battle of the Bulge drove a salient into Allied lines before stalling and failing. The seemingly logical thing for the Allies to do after this German failure would have been to attack the salient from the flanks, encircling the German forces located therein and annihilating them. Instead the Allies simply pushed the salient back rather than trapping them in the bulge they made.
After WW2 when they were no longer relying on US made lend-lease trucks, but rather their own home-built ones, they didn’t have logistical problems putting down the revolts in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and during the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 the 40th Army was in Kabul within 5 days of crossing the border, no small logistical feat with the circuitous route and rough terrain they had to cover as seen on this map.
Regarding doctrinal differences in logistics, the Soviets preferred a more control from the top method than NATO did and does. For example, there were very few trucks in a Soviet tank battalion, or a modern Russian one, compared to their counterparts in NATO nations. Supply was/is viewed mostly as the responsibility of the larger parent formation. In this style of doctrine, the flow of supplies can in theory be more effectively sent to the places and units that higher command wants them sent. This reflects the communist desire and preference for top-down control in pretty much all things, which can be seen as a weakness, but it served them well in WW2 and they did plan to reach the Rhine in a week had the Cold War even gone hot.
Along your lines I guess this chart says a lot …
… assuming that a big percentage of the military spending is just “fixed cost” (paying wages, doing mantainance, upkeep of buildings) … so that leaves you with (relatively) little money for discretional spending (e.g. buying/dev. new weapon systems, etc…)
little money means very limited possibility to embrace new technologies (not just belic, but also stuff like comunications and logistics)
… and today it shows that what we still have in our “collective minds” is the soviet army … which no longer exists and we are seeing for the first time the russian army … that is just not the same …
on a strategic, long term level, i think that was Putin’s cardinal mistake
Reminds you of that Hollywood trope of “piss-poor noblely” that does everything to keep up their appearance with potemky’s villages but the house is empty, the piping not working and the roof has been blown off
→ a few showroom models of new weaponry that they cant afford to lose and hence not use in a war.