Who needs a guy?
A drone that small can also easily fly inside a building, which might be useful for examining structures for boody-traps at minimal risks to humans. Among other things.
Five weeks after Putin announces a ‘partial mobilization’, we begin to get a clearer picture of results on the ground.
Russian Losses Fueled by New Units Untrained in ‘Basic’ Weaponry: Ukraine (msn.com)
An online search shows lots of anecdotal evidence that training of newly mobilized Rus. troops to date has been disastrous. I’m wondering if the world is missing out on substantial amounts of proper or appropriate training that’s going on? Those stories wouldn’t make for interesting news, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Are the plentiful tales of all the unsuitable inductees and horrible training conditions news because they focus on exceptional newsworthy disasters, or taken in the aggregate does it paint a picture of what’s generally going on in Russia?
Perhaps Putin ascribes to spray and pray automatic weapon fire methodology?
Except Russian forces are poorly supplied.
The Russian NCO’s must be furious at the daily screw ups by under trained troops and unmotivated soldiers. Tanks running over equipment or wandering into mine fields. Supply Trucks dying on the road because someone drained the oil.
It’s has to be a shit show that mobilization made worse.
I have to wonder how many of these there are by now.
Contract troops, who were the majority of the skilled NCO corps, were the first into the meat grinder. It’s possible that conscript privates are being led by untrained conscript corporals and by green lieutenants.
Have y’all seen this article? Reuters got access to an abandoned Russian base and the thousands of documents left behind, and here’s their special report on what they learned. I’m just getting into it now, but it makes for fascinating and horrifying reading.
It’s pretty clear that any lessons being learned aren’t being passed on by those who learn them.
There’s a thriving business in videos of Ukrainian drones dropping bombs into the foxholes of various Russians. This has been going on for months now, at least. And yet, we still see lots of Russians sleeping in open foxholes with little or no effort made to install any kind of top cover or concealment to prevent or reduce the impact of such attacks. These bombs aren’t armor piercing or anything, so even a light cover that bounces the bomb a bit off to the side would probably have a huge impact on the numbers of casualties from such attacks, but the Russians don’t seem to be making these kinds of adjustments.
Compare that to the US in Iraq, when it became clear that Humvees were insufficiently armored. Every guy out there started experimenting with “Hillbilly armor”, to see what worked to keep people alive. Such efforts finally evolved into actual upgrades to the vehicles.
Learning shit like that, and making sure it gets passed on to the new guys, is a big part of the NCOs’ job, but the Russians appear to be completely dropping the ball on this.
I was corrected in an earlier thread (and rightly so) when I suggested that. Apparently the US doesn’t make or deploy those cluster warheads anymore, and hasn’t for quite a while. There was an unacceptably high dud rate combined with questionable effectiveness.
They got replaced with the M30A1 warhead, which is basically somewhere between the WWI-style Shrapnel shells and a modern HE/fragmentation warhead, in that it has something like 180,000 tiny tungsten balls surrounded by 200 lbs of HE and goes off what looks like 5-10 feet above the ground.
Beyond that, I’m sure there are casing fragments that get blown outward, and those could account for the puffs of dust that are further out. But it could be a regular old HE/frag warhead too… it does look a lot like it hit the ground when it detonated.
Worth mentioning that Russian warrant officers are very different from western NCO’s. For the most part they’re basically specialized arms guys and have little command responsibilities. The Russian army is a very top-down organization which is almost certainly why there has been such a seemingly high Russian general casualty rate by western standards. Russian generals tend to lead from the front more than western commanders do. Warrant officers meanwhile are not highly regarded or leaned on by their superiors because the best conscripts are recruited into officer schools.
So losing experienced contract NCOs IS a real problem for Russia. The contract troops kinda know what they are doing, unlike most of the under-trained conscripts. But much less so from an organizational, leadership and command & control sense, because Russian doctrine doesn’t lean on them much for that.
In other words, upscaled omnidirectional Claymore.
It seems Russia has some serious troop level problems near Kherson. Companies, normally around 100 troops, have just 6 or 8 troops instead.
“Ivan Ivanov.”
“Present.”
“Nikolai Petrov.”
“Yo.”
“5th Guards Regiment, all present and accounted for, sir!”
It’s the Daily Beast, supposedly drawing from Ukranian Intelligence, so who knows if accurate. They are asserting that Russia has secondary lines of troops whose job is to simply shoot those trying to escape the front lines.
The story is built from a purported intercepted phone call between a Russian soldier and his wife. In the call he describes being dropped off behind the frontlines while fromer inmates are taking towards the frontline. His job is to shoot any trying to run away. Supposedly, there is a third line behind him to catch those who run from the second line.
The concept is an old one:
It’s lines of barrier troops all the way down, with Putin at the bottom.
$275 Million in Additional Presidential Drawdown Security Assistance for Ukraine
Oct. 28, 2022 |
Today, the Department of Defense (DoD) announces the authorization of a Presidential Drawdown of security assistance valued at up to $275 million to meet Ukraine’s critical security and defense needs. This authorization is the Biden Administration’s twenty-fourth drawdown of equipment from DoD inventories for Ukraine since August 2021.
Capabilities in this package include:
Additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS); billions of ball bearings or unitary warhead not specified.
500 precision-guided 155mm artillery rounds; most certainly Excalibur.
2,000 155mm rounds of Remote Anti-Armor Mine (RAAM) Systems;
More than 1,300 anti-armor systems; AT4 or possibly some Javelin.
125 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWVs);
Small arms and more than 2,750,000 rounds of small arms ammunition;
Note that US DoD is looking to buy Soviet/Russian pattern AK-74 rifles, these are chambered for 5.45x39mm rounds unlike US 5.56x45mm or older AK-47 in 7.62x39mm.
and
Four satellite communications antennas.
I still do not trust Russia to actually be defeated.
Anyone know more about the report from AJ etc that the Russian navy ‘repelled’ a drone attack on Sevastopol?
I’ve seen reports that the Admiral Makarov was damaged and another that says a minesweeper was damaged. No confirmation from reliable sources as of yet.
Are you referring to this report?
It looks like the Russians might try to use it an excuse to suspend the UN agreement to allow safe-transit for grain and fertilzer through the Black Sea.
https://news.yahoo.com/russia-suspends-participation-ukraine-grain-124850270.html