Well, the front hasn’t moved much since Ukraine fended off the thrust toward Kyiv. Maneuvers for an attack on enemy positions just a mile or two away doesn’t require nearly as much fuel as a drive on a target 100 miles away. And the supply lines behind the fronts, though not invulnerable, are well established, in generally friendly territory, and protected by semi-permanent air defenses.
There was nothing in the article about what its delivery capacity is. I was thinking about the problem with horse cavalry. Operate too far from the base and the mules and horses bringing the feed are consuming all they carry leaving nothing for the troopers’ horses.
In principle, with tankers of any given capacity, you can reach any arbitrary distance from your fueling base… but it quickly grows to an absurdly large ratio of tankers to actual payload vehicles. England had some planes fighting in the Falkland War flying all the way from Great Britain, and needed something like seven tanker planes for every one warplane, with a complicated pattern of tankers refuelling other tankers so the other tankers could make it far enough to refuel the warplanes.
IiRC a US Army rule thumb in Afghanistan is they spent 100 gallons of diesel & jet fuel to deliver one gallon to the front line units.
All in all, not an efficient use of effort.
Sure but at some point it is not about efficiency, it’s about having that gallon of fuel so you can use the tank or what ever. Not using the tank is way worse than not spending 100 gals.
Not to say things could not have been way more efficient but there is a lot of value in having freedom of operation regardless of efficiency over having your freedom of movements dictated by uncertainty of supply for the sake of efficiency. If your enemy knows you will make operational calls based on fuel expenditure, that gives them an operational envelope to exploit. So long as you have the money and resources to do it spending the fuel over efficiency makes sense.
That has more meaning if you’re fighting a tank war. If you’re fighting a drone war it’s a considerable cost savings in both hard assets and support for those assets. Instead of sending 100 gallons just send 1 gallon via drone. No need to worry about freezing weather or muddy fields.
Granted completely. My point was simply that commercially insane levels of economic inefficiency can make complete sense in a military setting.
The folks whinging about the poor efficiency of Russia’s developmental armored fuel tanker miss the point.
Is anyone tracking Ukrainian losses in the way Russia’s seem to be checked daily?
The UK MInistry of Defense is tracking Russian losses. It’s an estimate.
Guardian feed
Unlike the Ukrainian military, the Russian Ministry of Defence does not release daily counts of claimed personnel/equipment losses inflicted, and they haven’t released much information at all about casualty counts. Independent open-source intelligence sources count both Ukrainian and Russian equipment losses. Here are the relevant pages from Oryx: Ukrainian equipment losses; Russian equipment losses.
It’s quite a toll on machinery alone.
When do we know that such losses are too much for one side or the other?
Armored tankers make sense, if they can get fuel to the front lines where unarmored tankers can’t. Inefficient delivery is a lot better than no delivery at all, and petroleum products are one of the few things Russia has plenty of.
On the other hand, if these armored tankers still get killed by Javelins and the like, then the choice becomes “spend a little money and not get fuel to the front, or spend a lot of money and still not get fuel to the front”.
Ahh cool , I misunderstood you, apologies.
What is “permanently wounded”? Something like a leg blown off - not fatal but disabling?
Yes, some form of injury that makes them unfit for further military service. (It doesn’t take a lost limb to make it impractical for someone to perform combat duties.)
Captured or defected would presumably also count as permanent casualties. There have been a good number of both of those.
Good news: "Turkey’s Erdogan gives green light to Sweden NATO bill
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has submitted a bill to parliament to approve Sweden’s application to join NATO.
The move brings a long-running diplomatic saga one step closer to a resolution.
Sweden had applied together with Finland for NATO membership in May 2022 in the aftermath of Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine.
However, Turkey blocked Sweden’s accession to NATO for months but ended its opposition at a NATO summit in Vilnius in July."
Ukraine: Kyiv said it stopped Russian drone strike on Odesa – DW – 10/23/2023 Third headline down.
Russian Air Force losing the duel with their own air defense.
One of many tidbits. "The two incidents represent a serial failure of either the Su-35’s sistema svoi-chuzhoi (IFF) that is produced by the Russian Central Scientific Research Institute of Economics, Informatics and Control Systems (TsNII EISU), or the inability by Russia’s VKS and its air defense units to effectively process the signals emitted by the unit.
Attempts by Breaking Defense to contact the institute revealed that the institute’s website has been shuttered and that its facilities have been closed down as part of bankruptcy proceedings."
Kind of critical for an aircraft to be able to identify itself to the air defense people.
They probably went bankrupt just making the signs for the building.
In the spirit of nitpicking, the Vulcans refueled on Ascension Island on the way. But yes, 11 tanker planes were required for the trip.
Nitpick to my own link: this is no longer the longest bombing run in history, the US beat them during Desert Storm flying out of Diego Garcia.