Hey look, a giant sign telling you to unionize

FTFY

What can Ukraine do to exploit a gap in air defenses?

…Have you not been paying attention to the Ukraine’s campaign of long range strikes utilizing missiles and drones?

In terms of shell ratios, I am less interested in trying to find precise numbers on that since it is an incredibly difficult process to accurately do for one army much less two, but also I am not sure it is necessarily relevant in any absolute sense since Ukraine and Russia utilize their artillery so differently.

In terms of hard facts that have changed well here you go:

https://defence-blog.com/ukraine-uk-agree-on-joint-artillery-production/

https://defence-blog.com/ukraine-ramps-up-bohdana-howitzer-production-to-40-systems-per-month/

These two changes alone significantly change the strategic power balance between Ukraine’s military and Russia’s military as the L119 is unquestionably the best mass production battle tested towed light infantry support howitzer ever made and the bohdana in towed and self propelled forms is a world class 155mm howitzer that is easily compatible with a global constellation of militaries who may increase military aid at any point.

You can go look up the movement of the front over the course of the war. To even out the numbers, we’d have to roughly triple the number of shells we send to the front (ignoring troops for now). That would likely bring the war to a stand still. To start reversing the movement at the same rate we’d likely have to triple it again. So cocktail napkin math says that if we actually want to revert back to pre-invasion borders, we’d have to increase expenditures by around 10x and sustain that for the next 3 years.

I disagree here with this for two reasons.

First Ukraine’s artillery shell production and transition into nato calibers of 105mm and 155mm is increasing, and the strategic relation of power balance between Russian and Ukrainian artillery is actively changing. This isn’t static, Ukraine is quickly developing an advantage here especially when you consider efficiency of resources applied to the front.

Second, Russian air defenses are collapsing, Ukraine is hammering them day in day out and there is no way Russia can replace these air defense radars and missile launchers along with sufficiently trained crew at a high enough rate to sustain this current situation. Russia is HUGE there is an incredible amount of territory that must be covered with air defense. I would not call the current situation a simple battle of attrition right now, Russia is facing an existential collapse of their war machine if their air defenses decisively collapse in too many areas. I am not suggesting the likelihood is high at the moment but the probability of it happening is meaningfully increasing every day.

I am not trying to reject all of your points, but I think the aspects I have brought up have to be taken into consideration. Ukraine will have the capacity to domestically produce and maintain L119 105mm howitzers, 155mm bohdana production has finally begun to hit stride as well, these are strategic leaps forward in terms of practical infantry fighting power and I find conversations tend to ignore these non-flashy but quite meaningful transformations that have happened over the past year or two for the Ukrainian military. They make this moment of Russia’s faltering general offensive a far more fragile position than people generally recognize. This isn’t to say Ukraine isn’t in a fragile position itself of course. What I am saying is I wouldn’t expect the status quo to necessarily continue indefinitely here, it will for some time and then all of a sudden it abruptly won’t.

Fuck ICE

Your upper body twists 180 degrees in a flash, you are horrified but somehow the magic power of the cool S has kept you alive even after your torso has been twisted to the extreme. You look down at your butt in front of you and it dawns on you that must live the rest of your life assbackwards as a human S.

Yeah the experience on older military equipment is just as important too though! Just for kicks and giggles let me pose the question, how many Ukrainians do you think Russia has trained to be extremely good at shooting a Browning M2 .50 cal heavy machine gun accurately by flooding Ukraine’s skies with Shaheds?

Certainly a whole lot of Ukrainians are involved in air defense that aren’t necessarily front line soldiers and you have to stop and think about whether it is really “winning” to start training your enemies general populace on how to shoot heavy machine guns extremely well.

Do you know what weapon will be in every single war until humans go extinct? …and maybe after that too who knows? The Browning M2 .50 cal machine gun.

Russia is training tons of Ukrainians to get obnoxiously good at doing things with a M2 that you probably shouldn’t be able to do with an M2 like shooting down cruise missiles and such, and let me stress that at the end of the day after artillery and drones it is crew served weapons such as the M2 that decide combat at the the infantry level whether they be mounted on ground robots, tripods or vehicles. So TL;DR Russia is training Ukrainians to be extremely good at one of the most decisive infantry combat weapon ever made by refusing to stop flooding Ukraine’s skies with flying bombs… to me that is NOT a winning strategy.

I use the M2 just for example here but the principle applies generally.

See Ukraine getting the M119 105mm howitzer as another specific example of Russia defeating itself by forcing Ukraine to procure and become efficient at weapons far superior to Russia’s own.

but this involves the Russian drones getting much more sophisticated (read: expensive) which is also a win.

It really frustrates me that this isn’t acknowledged by media coverage at all when this is a very basic strategic shift in power to understand. When Ukraine successfully evolves their flying bomb defenses and Russia is forced to make costlier flying bombs that fly faster and higher and utilize more sophisticated equipment to avoid defenses the media reports on this as if it is a sign of Russia’s superior inevitable strength because the Russian weapons are becoming more advanced. There is usually zero acknowledgement at all why Russia didn’t make those flying bombs more advanced in the past… i.e. they weren’t FORCED to devote more resources to each flying bomb to penetrate Ukraine’s defenses until Ukraine tipped the scales more in Ukraine’s favor.

There is a natural paradox here that as shahed type drones become more and more sophisticated they in a sense become less and less scary as costs rise faster and faster, the shahed strategy fundamentally relies upon extreme cost efficiency especially because they are basically weaponized target drones that train the opposing military to be extremely good at complex aerial interdiction which isn’t necessarily what you want to do when you are short on trained pilots/air defenses yourself. In a sense Russia is incurring a training deficit in favor of Ukraine every time they attack with shaheds instead of focusing on training and equipping their own pilots and air defense crews that they then have to spend MORE money making up for later (those could have been training target drones for Russia’s pilots and air defenses instead of Ukraine’s)… I understand that does nothing to comfort people afraid of being hit by these scarier more sophisticated flying bombs as we speak but the strategic dynamic I am pointing out here is nonetheless very real.

If there is one lesson in military power to take from the example of US military it is that an airpower advantage expressed in terms of functioning combined arms coordination has a non-linear impact upon the battlefield, drones are an echo of this expressed at the tactical level rather than the more operational level that fighter-bombers usually operate at, but the lesson is similar and when taking it into consideration the usual narrative around flying bombs is flipped on its head. Just because the consequences of Ukrainian forces not shooting down a flying bomb before it reaches its target are tragic doesn’t mean the experience gained by Ukrainian forces utilizing a diverse range of assets to combat mass aerial attacks isn’t the kind of experience that would take an unfathomable amount of military resources to replicate in peacetime live training exercises. I don’t stress this point to diminish the human cost here but rather to point out Russia faces an existential military risk in that they might accidentally train the nation they are trying to defeat to be far super in aerial operations to their own forces in a decisive way. I would argue that is already happening though Ukraine is of course “training” Russian aerial defenses as well, Russia just doesn’t have the material capacity to properly equip and fund aerial defense forces to the point that they would be taking full advantage of the experience gained from shooting down Ukrainian drones and monetizing that as a form of military experience that could be exported as part of arms sales to allies.

By comparison Ukraine is positioning itself to be an international expert on aerial defense against mass flying bomb attacks in technological terms but even more importantly in doctrine and tactical experience.

Suddenly you find you are extremely good at keeping a coin spinning on a cafeteria table by periodically flicking it with your finger.

When life gives you lemons immediately take note as you may be stuck in a computer simulation, lemons are not naturally occuring and thus life has no lemons to give you, do not be fooled by the illusion your captors erected to keep you stuck in a computer simulation and harvest your brain waves for mining cryptocurrency.

Cool S Blessing is Super Effective! Your friends and family suddenly out of the blue think “you know, I bet jballs was very cool in middle school!”.

I think some kind of “pod” system would be nice where similar posts/crossposts could be visually grouped together like a “pod” of dolphins all surfacing on your feed together in a natural flowing way (randomly assigned color coding maybe?). Seeing one dolphin surface after another should feel like cohesive movement of a pod and any one post should link towards other dolphins in the pod not currently visible too.

You could then as a user “pod” a post by linking it with another post and the resulting feed of newly “podded” posts could itself be a browsable “pod feed”.

Obviously a different word than pod may be better, but I like the whale pod metaphor.

heretic!

IMO, the system works best when there’s no one owner and most people running and moderating things are volunteers.

I agree with most of what you are saying but I don’t think everyone has to be volunteers on the fediverse. Moderating and IT work are forms of labor, there is no reason people can’t be materially supported for doing that labor, the problem comes in when the structures and systems become profit driven for social media/BBS systems. One is not the other, we can and absolutely should prioritize materially supporting the people who make the fediverse run and we need to consciously divorce that concept from monetizing fediverse social networks themselves or else we will keep burning out and taking advantage of volunteer devs, admins and moderators.

Watch the Star Trek ENT theme song and at the moment you find yourself bleating it out back to your tv like an injured drunk sheep that can’t hold a note in tune THAT is the moment you have become a Real Man.

~I’ve got faith, faith of the heart~

press s to receive a blessing from The Cool S.

Where is your proof then?

We cannot ignore the fact that once the capacity for choice is introduced something essential is changed. I don’t think there is an easy place to draw the line, I expect it is only degrees of gray past a certain point with preventing poor quality of life/debilitating disabilities but on the other hand it is very clear to me that there are very very very BAD places to draw the line and I absolutely do not trust the structures of society nor the choices of individuals not to violate basic human decency here. I am not an extremist on this, what I am is very worried about how I see a desire in people to choose their children in a way that would never be healthy even if they could.

The absolute most efficient method for increasing the likelihood of american and european military powers giving larger amounts of military aid to Ukraine.

I think that what is lost about reddit from reddit specifically being such a shitty company that has so desperately enshittified itself to the point of comic absurdity in what feels like a blink of an eye is that… reddit is the start of a great concept. Of course any system can be gamed, we all could just be dogs on the internet pretending to be humans, but most of the time the upvoting and downvoting along with the multilayered threaded conversations allows for conversation, links and facts to surface that I find harder to find in other places and in general surprisingly sophisticated compared to other places on the internet, so yes!

Of course there is only so much here, which is where you come in!