What I wonder about is what sort of manufacturing defect produces an e.g. simple artillery shell that detonates just sitting there or that detonates upon firing in the gun.
Badly made or badly stored explosives that are inherently (or become over time) shock or heat sensitive are one candidate. OTOH, shelf-stable “safe” explosives have been a solved problem since about 1940. Better-solved today, but WWII artillery shells didn’t have this problem (when fresh). Otherwise I’m in a quandry as to what could cause a basic unfuzed shell to explode.
I don’t know anything about the details of Russian artillery shell fuzing, but at least for US mechanical fuzes, it takes some pretty amazing manufacturing failures to produce one that’s live from the git-go which will probably trigger upon the acceleration down the gun barrel.
Electronic fuzes, which are pretty common now obviously have all the wonderful failure modes electronics are prone to. More of which tend to dud than to trigger early.
At least in US practice, fuzes aren’t mated to shells until pretty close to firing time. So fuzes cooking off on their own should (that word again) not be, in most cases, causing full bore magazine explosions.
'Tis a mystery.
I did think of another potential cause: Ukrainian disinformation and hacking. Feed enough fake reports of ammo explosions into the Russian C2 system, add in some staged vids on social media, and let the rumors go viral. Shades of the Sepoy Rebellion and the pig-tallow lubed cartridges.
Having fired off a bunch of explosives myself back in the day, I have to say that it would not take too many explosions upon firing to persuade most of us to be pretty much afraid of pushing the button. Which tends to limit the effectiveness of your armed forces when they won’t actually use their, you know, … arms.
How much more does it cost to produce explosive material that’s shelf-stable and/or shock-insensitive? If they can’t get the ingredients they need because of funds or export sanctions, or don’t have time to follow through on a careful production process (e.g. thorough mixing, good quality control), I wouldn’t be surprised if the result is an explosive compound that is prone to really unpleasant behavior.
AIUI, those fuzes typically look for a number of things before they’ll even consider detonating: the G-load indicating it’s been fired and/or the G-load from spin due to barrel rifling are a couple of signals that come to mind that would be hard to accidentally reproduce during the course of handling by operators. No doubt they are designed to dud (fail-safe) rather than trigger unexpectedly. Unless critical components are replaced by a 1-ruble coin hand-soldered into place to save time and money.
I’m not ruling out sabotage at all - but if I had to place a bet on the source of the problem, I would bet on degraded quality control at the munitions plant.
Although an easy way (the easiest way?) to cheat with explosives production is to substitute inert easy to source ingredients for the more expensive harder to get explody stuff. But in general, HE chemistry is hard and adulterants could have unexpected effects.
Please - did anyone seriously think there wouldn’t be losses?
If they’re going to use the hardware some of it will be damaged and/or destroyed because that happens in war.
Is that a significant loss when attempting to breach defensive lines? I don’t know, not a military expert, but compared to what the Russians have been losing over the past year this doesn’t strike me as outrageous. Unfortunate, perhaps, but not outrageous.
I believe it’s when firing, not just sitting around. Typical premature detonation on firing:
Cracks or voids in the explosive fill. Western ammo is x-rayed 100% for this. The compression/spin forces from firing collapse the voids with enough force to detonate the explosive fill.
Steel fractures not discovered after forging/machining/or heat treatment. X-ray not done/done poorly. Shell fractures when exposed to launce forces, explosive fill detonates. Western requirements are 100% X-ray.
Bad/incomplete welds. Projectiles are forged/shaped tubes. A base plate is welded in place, then the explosive is melt poured into the round. Western practice is again, 100% X-ray. If bad, hot propellant gases will enter thru weld porosity and detonate the round.
The explosive. Western use of Comp B (composition B) has been stopped due to an increase in premature explosions. We went back to good old TNT and later insensitive HE. Not sure of Russian explosive fill but incomplete mix or ingredient composition errors will drastically increase the sensitivity. Detonation on firing is a result.
The rush to fill orders. Short cuts, substitute materials, untrained workers all contribute.
As we have seen in western efforts; supply chain disruptions, peacetime levels of manufacturing capability, limited skillsets all contribute to long lead times. You can’t just turn the dial up to eleven. I was in ammo quality/logistics for 37 years. All the manufacturing specifications, quality steps and safety requirements were written in blood.
Yeah, it’s one thing to know how to make shelf-stable explosives, but one of the things you have to know to do is to be really meticulous about all of the steps. You can use all the right ingredients, and put them through an approximation of the right process, but if you’re a little sloppy about that process, the results might not be so stable.
Air support is vital if the enemy is using airstrikes against you. There is nothing in that article that I noticed to suggest the Bradleys were destroyed by Russian air power.
To be sure, a war with jets on your side will go better for you than a war without jets on your side. That does not mean, as you post appears to imply, that fighting a war against a mostly non-aerial enemy (i.e. Russia) is doomed to expensive failure absent air power.
Then war is unaffordable and unsustainable (would that it were so in general). Losses are inevitable. Given the conditions it may well be that heavy losses are inevitable, they certainly have been so far. Such is war.
My point is that the losses to Ukraine are unaffordable and unsustainable.
They lost 15% of their best new armored vehicle in a week. They can sustain that for maybe 6 weeks, till it’s all gone.
But for Russia, losses of men and equipment are irrelevant. They have massive reserve supplies of both, and they can continue fighting for years.
The reservoir skulls have made it into at least one news article:
Could be from the World War II Battle of the Dnieper in the same area, in which 350,000 Soviet soldiers and 100,000 German soldiers were killed:
It doesn’t seem implausible to me. A few months ago there was a video about some soldiers in Ukraine digging a trench and finding the remains of a fallen WWII soldier.
Russian Telegram channels reportedly announce the death of another Russian Major general, killed by a Ukrainian missile attack in the Zaporizhzhia region:
He is on wikipedia’s list of Russian generals killed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, marked as ‘Claimed’:
Russia’s central bank sounded alarms on inflation amid the falling ruble and a record labor shortage.
Russia’s central bank sounded alarms on the economy Friday as the falling ruble and a record labor shortage add inflationary pressures.
Policymakers kept the benchmark interest rate steady at 7.5%, where it has been since September, but signaled an increase may be coming soon.
“The option of hiking the rate was considered, but by consensus we decided to hold the rate, but tighten the signal,” Governor Elvira Nabiullina said at a news conference, according to Reuters, adding that “the likelihood of a rate hike has increased.”
It appears Putin has to replace soldiers during a labor shortage and pay them with a devalued ruble.
