09:44
With these new allocations of +50,000 men, the total for the army’s maneuver brigades goes up to around 400,000 men.
On top of that, we have the forest of battalions, but the maneuver brigades are part of the command chain and operate in combined combat while the battalions are probably unleashed within an area or defend a community.
15:07
Today’s 🤣🤣 will be Putin’s subtle goal shift.
https://twitter.com/KateGoesTech/status/1621201464742891522?s=20&t=YkI9vnmilhH-3WJNLWEh-Q
15:11
The Baltic Sea fleet would not get very far against Sweden.
To have any chance of success, they would need to do the same as during the attack on Ukraine, convince the world that the huge naval exercise was just an exercise and then head straight for Gotland (the mainland?) from where they are about half an hour out.
Now all our coastal missile batteries, submarines, and fighters will go on full alert as soon as they change docks in Kaliningrad.
Impossible, therefore.
15:16
I want to point out that during spring, summer, and autumn I was crying out for CV90s and came up with all sorts of epithets for Germany and France – I see myself as a constructive optimist.
I’ve also seen the two pessimist types but have decided that the constructive pessimist infects the destructive pessimist into full-blown screaming. Whether it’s good or bad that they run around in circles I probably have no opinion on other than that it clashes a bit with my positive view of the situation.
15:31
Antje – I have long thought about this before and it is completely wrong to single out a group, in this case religious and/or Muslims (since those were the two groups Rosenberg was thinking of) and restrict freedom of speech against them.
In my world, there are enormously many vulnerable groups that no one mentions in any debate – severely overweight people, those who see themselves as ugly, the perpetual single at 40, disabled people, socially hard-to-navigate, social phobia… the list can be made very long of those who have anxiety every day.
This is because the religious group can argue very strongly for their cause but the disabled person with social phobia cannot.
In a country, you must have the same for everyone but then it is very good if there is good behavior in how we treat our fellow human beings and that is where all of us come in.
Freedom of speech goes both ways so if the guy who yells at the Jew or Muslim gets a whole subway car yelling back at him, the citizens have solved what we think we need laws for.
Civil courage requires no laws.
09:38
In the US’s enormous weapons package yesterday, there were two long-range weapons, and one was to be delivered within 9 months, but the other was in SAAB/BOEING stock if I have understood this correctly.
By comparison, the Russians’ artillery support around Bakhmut disappeared because Ukraine managed to knock out two larger ammunition depots in the rear.
As soon as the glide bombs with a 150 km range arrive, they will reach all the ammunition depots that the Russians have sweat over for months, preparing for this and the spring offensives.
This wonderful ammunition is just a transport flight and a road transport away.
The depots take months to move; the only thing the Russians can do is try to get as much as possible close to the front.
My gut says that videos of front-line destroyed ammunition depots and trucks will surface, and then at some point within 1-2 weeks, the main depots will start exploding in the darkest Donbass, leaving moon craters behind.
The last time this happened, the entire Russian supply chain was in ruins after 3 weeks with HIMARS, so this is a bit of a race against time.
What’s the kicker?
Well, the Russians have discovered that they are having some success with the Tannenberg technique and also their attacks according to doctrine where they have armor, so they have started with artillery again, we read from some Russian Twitter bloggers the other day.
Enough time has passed, and an ammunition depot has vehicles coming and going all the time, so it’s quite easy to find – Ukraine probably has a long list of coordinates for all ammunition depots in the captured territory, a reasonable guess.
Ukraine may need about 100 long-range munitions to stop artillery support for the Russians’ “offensive with 500,000 men”.
One Globemaster round trip and a short convoy of trucks away.
Yesterday Erik14 posted something exciting as usual, the National Guard has probably been eyeing the army’s two newly established divisions and feeling overtaken, so they will set up two of their own divisions just because they can.
8 Assault brigades, and those applying must have “like to attack” on their CV.
They are pulling personnel from border guards, national police, and some others. If I may guess, it’s a forest of small battalion groups or smaller – there are more than we can count.
Apparently, they got more applications than they could handle and are probably fully staffed immediately. Then they are manned with combat-experienced soldiers with the right mindset who already function in groups and platoons, and the command chains are well established already.
There were rumors about this last fall, but now we know that the army set up two divisions with 3+3 brigades and that the NG didn’t want to be outdone and is setting up two more, 4+4 brigades (or 3?)
Territorial forces are probably not far behind or are included here, but they already have 9 brigades of qualified infantry with some armor as infantry support.
So we have a newly formed offensive capacity here with 4 divisions of +50,000 men depending on composition.
Many were terrified of Wagner’s 50,000 men in Bakhmut and Soledar; does this mean we are now equally confident that Ukraine will win with this reinforcement, or is it different, are prison inmates with tuberculosis better soldiers?
Does anyone know how the Russians’ 20 divisions they were supposed to set up are doing, have they fully staffed them yet (I chuckle at this rhetorical question since the 3rd Army Corps became 15,000 pensioners instead of an elite of 50,000 men).
Then it seems there will be 140 Leo2s in the first batch and 14 Challengers. That probably gives 11 tank companies that can be distributed among 3 or 4 tank battalions.
The earlier 300 Polish tanks went to armored brigades; I have thought that mechanized brigades would be better since P and I lack certain competencies in sufficient numbers, but one thought I had is that the crews in the P brigades might be the best?
UA also has wizard-level in combined battle groups from different units, and in plain Swedish, that’s damn hard, every officer who has sweated through a final exercise knows that.
For the sake of the exercise, I go with mechanized brigades, and then we have 3-4 mechanized brigades, or airmobile, each with a tank battalion and the remaining battalions with better Western fragmentation protection topped with better Eastern tanks, like BMP3.
These are resourced within a month.
The second batch of Leos seems like it could be quite large, and there will surely be more, Leo1 and Leo2 mixed.
Don’t forget the Poles’ P91, Cyprus’s T80, and all the T72s from South America – could be 300-400 more just in Eastern armor?
And then workshops are running at full throttle throughout the former Eastern states to send serviced armor back.
I have seen a shift among the Russians where there are now significantly fewer tanks but many T80s and T90s. They followed doctrine and wasted the poorer equipment first but made a lovely mistake because the capable crews died first.
Now they are operated by inexperienced crews and thus mostly become big targets.
The current offensive, which has cost the Russians maybe 30% of their remaining capable units so far, will continue, probably escalate, during February.
IF there is an offensive capacity according to Russian doctrine in the cards – that is, overwhelming armored attacks, then they will have to move from their safe bases and forward to UFA within range of the long-range weapons Ukraine has today. Then distance-set mines and suicide drones and finally air and army aviation.
Before they crash into dynamic defense with mines, NLAW, and Leo2.
Ukraine will do everything they can to knock out as much as possible before it reaches the front, and as soon as they are within range and stationary, 777 will open up with their guided shells.
We know that Ukraine could hit staff meetings that lasted a few hours where the staff location moved daily and they knocked them out when all the senior officers gathered – they presumably have control over everything that happens?
Long columns of armor are really easy by comparison.
This obviously applies to infantry concentrations, the more soldiers arriving and being quartered in larger barracks.
One might guess why Ukraine has been sparing artillery for a while now?
By the way, the 40th marine infantry is finished now (according to Erik14), there were probably 3 more so 40% consumed of the marine infantry (or was it 4?).
Losses are high, but there seems to be rotation on the southern front, and there hasn’t been the kind of offensive at Kreminna and the NS defensive line through Svatove that those who wrote about it suggested; some Twitter users were shouting all-out war here, but it might definitely be a bit early.
It seems a wedge has reached the Zerebets river if you go by where UA has pushed back attacks?
And there are still fights in the forests around Kreminna and Bilohorivka.
In the forests around Kreminna, it’s probably free hunting on Russians as soon as it gets dark and an enormously difficult terrain to fight in for the Russians.
Previously, the Russians absolutely hated fighting in forests, and at Izyum it became one big graveyard of the whole thing. For the sake of the VDV, one can hope they have enough batteries for the image intensifiers, it’s cold now so they run out quickly…
Those forests have every opportunity to swallow the VDV, a thousand men run in, the trees sway for a while, and no one comes out 😀
That Ukraine would suffer an acute shortage of everything is contradicted by the fact that they are currently setting up four divisions, but it hurts immensely that the war has continued to this point mainly because Germany opposed arms deliveries in spring, summer, and autumn. The only consolation is perhaps that this is what they will be remembered for after this war and that France and Germany will see themselves overtaken by both JEF and also in EU matters.
Hard to believe that we will see our own hero Ulf on TV at prime time forbidding Norway, Denmark, and Belgium from sending CV90s because “the USA must send (*any silly German excuse*) first.”
VDV also has the opportunity to become the branch of the armed forces that makes a collective decision not to fight first, a couple of notches up on my list with operation getaway – but it will be more that they go to a geographic area and go on the defense against the blocking battalions.