I was going to reply to the thread but my answers were substantially the same as @Gorsnak’s # 3 - it’s common sense to use the best condition, best quality materials first if there is a priority to getting units in the field. It’s only going to get worse as time goes along, and there may well come the sudden halt when they’re down to one’s that will fundamentally require a complete rebuild.
And as stated before, at some part it isn’t a cannibalization issue either, because if every tank likely has ‘soft tissue’ damage (belts, hoses, seals, etc) the refurbishment will stop until sufficient supplies of those products can be found (in good working order) or produced, no matter how physically sound the rest of the materials are or how many replacement parts can be found.
I strongly suspect that we’ll see more improvised support in the not to distant future, civilian vehicles with squad mounted weapons and improvised armor attached. Not so good on offense, probably adequate for punitive attacks on partisans or ‘rebels’.
would not surprise me to learn later on that the russians picked all their best tank mechanics and send them to ukr to storm a fortified chicken-shack armed with nothing but a pocket knife - or similarily stupid things (like throwing their soldier-trainer staff under the bus early in the war)
Most western nations agree with you, and the Canadian (Armed) Forces certainly does. Whenever the subject comes up of mandatory service, or the idea of “everyone youngster should serve somewhere” the Canadian Forces brass silently reminds the Department of National Defense that they don’t want anyone there that doesn’t want to be there. They hinder more than help. They are a huge drain on morale. And this is in peace time. In a total war scenario, things change but short of that conscripted soldiers are generally more hassle than their worth.
But the caveat here is again we have to consider doctrine. Western military doctrine is highly focused on quality over quantity. A particularly good example is how the western military will create a mission specific force to accomplish an objective through careful planning and analysis. But as has been quipped “quantity has a quality all its own.” You can overwhelm a superior force with superior numbers especially if the numbers are used wisely. I don’t think the Russian leadership (the ones not captured or killed) is skilled enough to do so. I think they will take a very blunt assault perspective, and that will just create body bags for the Russians.
what I don’t understand … why are they staying there and not just walking off - it does not seem to be organized at all, so I have a hard time visualizing that they are watched very close
“Keep you head down” is an age old way to survive. “There’s safety in numbers” is an Goldie Oldie as well. I fully expect walkers would get shot, zombie or not.
unless you are of course on the way to the slaughterhouse …
I’d be the one trying to sneak out from the truck/train (insert extremely sad analogy of jews being rounded up and put on trains to Auschwitz … your best chance to avoid a gas chamber was early in the process, before getting on the train)
… but that is the reason I am wondering … security does not seem to be that thight and some people standing around there for already a week going into the woods to collect fire-wood …
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mass media with 12 - 36 hrs delay, citing the same twitter sources …
point is: there are probably 100 journalists in eastern Ukr… and 10s of 1000s of people around the places where fighting is happening … its a simple “numbers” game
The thing is, anyone who’s played Starcraft (the game referenced in the term “zerg rush”) knows that there’s a level of defense past which no number of zerglings will be able to get through. Pump them into an enemy base as quickly as is allowed by their movement speed and the space they take up, and keep that rate up indefinitely, and they’ll still all get destroyed before they get a single scratch in on the enemy bunkers or tanks.
In the real world defenses are never that permanently impervious. Defenders eventually run out of prosaic ammo, advanced weapons, gun barrels overheat, men get exhausted after 24 hours on the parapets continuously mowing down zerglings, etc.
A well-equipped well-emplaced defense can slaughter a LOT of enemy who’re just using “vast charging herd” tactics. But it’s not like a coastal bluff versus the sea; the defenders will run out of defensive capacity in a timespan of hours or days, not years.
In a sense we’re seeing that issue writ large in the recent warnings that the collective West is becoming seriously depleted on expendables as they push back against the much larger herd of much less capable Russians over a span of so far only 8 months. In a war that may well rage another 2-3 years.
From what I understand, they had some sort of political rivalry, and ended up producing two different tanks at two different facilities- one in Kharkiv and one in Nizhny Tagil. Which is why the Ukrainians have a preponderance of T-64/T-80 models in fact.
In practice I believe they equipped the first-quality units in Germany and the western USSR with T-64s and the units in other parts of the USSR with T-72s- basically a policy of putting the best tanks where they’re most likely to see action.
But yeah, it would make a lot more sense to be reviving T-72s out of storage, if only so they’d have to supply one type of ammunition, one type of spare parts, and so on. It doesn’t make sense to start getting T-64s out or T-62s out if you have older versions of the currently serving tanks in storage, at least from a logistical perspective.
The logic underpinning debating the efficacy of zerg rushing is fundamentally flawed. Russia is on the defensive, not the offensive. Partial mobilization was only declared after the Ukrainian counteroffensive cracked open a large section of the front and sent the Russians packing from the area of Kharkov. The only part of the frontline that has seen any appreciable offensive action at all from the Russians over the past couple of months has been near Bakhmut, and that is allegedly being conducted largely by the Wagner group.
The Russian army was never meant to operate without the mobilization of its conscripts, and Putin’s decision not to order any level of mobilization until the end of September has given Ukraine a six-month lead on mobilization and the generation of new forces. What Russia is now trying to do is shore up its defenses to hold onto what it has already taken in the face of the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive, not zerg itself in the direction of Kiev. A major consequence of the sham annexation referendum that Russia held that has largely gone unnoted in the press is that by Russian law, conscripts can’t be forced to serve outside of Russian territory except during wartime. By claiming the four oblasts where the ‘not-war’ is being fought are now legally a part of Russia under Russian law, Putin gets to send conscripts into the fighting while maintaining the fiction that what is going on isn’t a war, it’s just a ‘special military operation.’
I think the parties above are talking about two different things (and neither are wrong). If I understand correctly, @FlikTheBlue is referring to the rumblings that indicate a new offensive could be routed through Belarus. And @Dissonance is speaking of holding the faux-territories Russia has annexed.
If the rumors are true, then @Dissonance’s quite correct observations aren’t needed, and if the rumors the main thread are talking about turn out to be correct, well, it does have a lot in common with a zerg rush.
Hopefully I’m understanding both posters correctly, and wanted to explain what I saw as the talking past each other.
Okay, un-redacted. I do think all of that tank smoothbore 125 mm ammo is interchangeable. So T-64 or T-72 it should make no difference.
ETA: As noted below the T-62 IS a different beast, but no doubt they have warehouses full of nearly useless moldy rounds that at least exist on paper .
Not for the T-62. Those used a 115mm gun. And Russia (or their separatist lackeys) have been using them in Ukraine recently.
Hadn’t really considered that, but it makes sense. I’m still skeptical of how much utility hastily trained conscripts will have in this war, unless their plan is to just run the Ukrainians out of ammunition a-la Zapp Brannigan and the Killbots.
D-Day in 1944, 21 yr old soldier Severloh (being at the wrong place at the wrong time) shooting out of a foxhole …
Severloh says he manned a MG 42 and fired on approaching American troops with the machine gun and two Karabiner 98k rifles; while a sergeant whom he did not know, kept him supplied with ammunition from a nearby ammo bunker until 15:30. He claimed to have fired over 13,500 rounds with the machine gun and 400 with the rifles.
*Interviewed in 2004, he said: “It was definitely at least 1,000 men, most likely more than 2,000. But I do not know how many men I shot. It was awful. Thinking about it makes me want to throw up.”
I’ve got a few Nigerian princes who need your help transferring large sums of money out of their country that would like to contact you via email for your banking information for anyone buying Heinrich Severloh’s fairytale. Total American casualties at Omaha beach on D-Day were 2,400 along a 5-mile front. Quoting the introductory paragraph from wiki rather than the part where he describes his fairytale:
Heinrich “Hein” Severloh (23 June 1923 – 14 January 2006) was a soldier in the German 352nd Infantry Division stationed in Normandy in 1944. He became famous for a memoir WN 62 – Erinnerungen an Omaha Beach Normandie, 6. Juni 1944 , published in 2000. In the book, the authors claim that as a machine gunner, Severloh inflicted over 1,000 and possibly over 2,000 casualties to the American soldiers landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day.[1][2] However, Severloh’s claim is not viewed as credible by either US or German historians. Total US casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) from all sources along the five-mile length of Omaha Beach on D-Day are estimated at 2,400.[3]
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