04 Mar 2022, 13:12
As you're probably a
eady heard, the Russian invasion has not gone very well so far. They're doing really idiotic things.
Like sending dense columns of mixed armor and thin-skinned vehicles down unsecured Ukrainian roads, without any escorting infantry, air cover, or mobile AA protection. You just do not do things like this, ever. This is Combined Arms 101 (For Dummies). I could spend the next half hour quoting examples going all the way back to 1941, and everybody who graduates from an officer training school ought to know them all by heart.
That's cost them a shit-ton of AFVs. Both to direct UAV attacks, and to things as ludicrous as a bunch of (presumed) civvies in an ordinary car driving past Russian AFVs and tossing molotov cocktails aboard in passing.
And lots of tanks and other AFVs left sitting around, abandoned, in more or less working order.
And some idiot (or succession of idiots) simply left a copy of their overall strategic objectives with a front-line battalion, where it got captured and gleefully publicized by the Ukrainians.
There's lots more like that. And it's all insanely egregiously mind-bogglingly bad.
All of this really culpable stupidity doesn't necessarily mean Putin is going to lose the war. Don't I wish.
October through December of the 1939-1940 Winter War between the USSR and Finland played out like this. Google "Suomussalmi". Or "Raate Road".
Until January, when Stalin took the prosecution of that war out of the hands of the Leningrad Military District and handed it to Semyon Timoshenko. You've probably heard of the guy who served as his chief of staff too: Georgi Zhukov. Then the Russians got serious. They went up the Karelian Isthmus, "straight up the middle", powered their way through the Mannerheim line (at an enormous blood price, but Timoshenko had told Stalin that's what it'd take and Stalin gave him carte blanche), and wrapped the war up by the end of March.
So Putin could still win this one. But it isn't going to come cheap for anybody involved.
eady heard, the Russian invasion has not gone very well so far. They're doing really idiotic things. Like sending dense columns of mixed armor and thin-skinned vehicles down unsecured Ukrainian roads, without any escorting infantry, air cover, or mobile AA protection. You just do not do things like this, ever. This is Combined Arms 101 (For Dummies). I could spend the next half hour quoting examples going all the way back to 1941, and everybody who graduates from an officer training school ought to know them all by heart.
That's cost them a shit-ton of AFVs. Both to direct UAV attacks, and to things as ludicrous as a bunch of (presumed) civvies in an ordinary car driving past Russian AFVs and tossing molotov cocktails aboard in passing.
And lots of tanks and other AFVs left sitting around, abandoned, in more or less working order.
And some idiot (or succession of idiots) simply left a copy of their overall strategic objectives with a front-line battalion, where it got captured and gleefully publicized by the Ukrainians.
There's lots more like that. And it's all insanely egregiously mind-bogglingly bad.
All of this really culpable stupidity doesn't necessarily mean Putin is going to lose the war. Don't I wish.
October through December of the 1939-1940 Winter War between the USSR and Finland played out like this. Google "Suomussalmi". Or "Raate Road".
Until January, when Stalin took the prosecution of that war out of the hands of the Leningrad Military District and handed it to Semyon Timoshenko. You've probably heard of the guy who served as his chief of staff too: Georgi Zhukov. Then the Russians got serious. They went up the Karelian Isthmus, "straight up the middle", powered their way through the Mannerheim line (at an enormous blood price, but Timoshenko had told Stalin that's what it'd take and Stalin gave him carte blanche), and wrapped the war up by the end of March.
So Putin could still win this one. But it isn't going to come cheap for anybody involved.
