"All of Vlad's forces and all of Vlad's men, are out to put Humpty together again." (16 Viewers)

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Dimlee said:
The new software has yet to be used on the battlefield, but Auterion is shipping 33,000 of its artificial intelligence drone "strike kits" to Ukraine by the end of this year as part of a contract with the Pentagon.
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Never been used and they want to just put it on the battlefield. Hope it doesn't go crazy and kill everybody.
 
Glider said:
I believe these to be some wise words from the outgoing head of MI6, who we can safely assume knows more about the situation, than any of us.

Personally the part that I found interesting is the comment that Russian losses are over one million. It gives some credence to Ukraine's claims regarding Russian losses.

The outgoing head of MI6 has issued a damning indictment of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, saying that Vladimir Putin has "bitten off more than he can chew".
Richard Moore, known within MI6 as C, used his farewell speech in Istanbul to say that while Russia was unlikely to win on the battlefield, his agency was seeking to recruit spies inside Russia and worldwide in order to fight back.

"Putin has sought to convince the world that Russian victory is inevitable, but he lies. He lies to the world. He lies to his people. Perhaps he even lies to himself," said Moore. "But we should not believe him. Or credit him with strength he does not have."
Any Russian victories on the battlefield remained incremental, said Moore, and incurred massive costs as the president's army fell far short of its original aims to swiftly capture all of Ukraine.
The rising costs now included more than a million casualties – a quarter of them "poorly trained troops from Russia's poorest regions" that were "fed into the meat grinder", he said.

Iran, China and North Korea had all aided Putin's war in Ukraine, Moore said, allowing Putin to avoid possible internal collapse or an inevitable ceasefire deal.
"In the end, if we hold our nerve, Putin will need to come to terms with the fact that he has a choice to risk an economic and political crisis that threatens his own rule, or make a sensible deal," he said. "This is a choice he would have had to confront earlier, if not for the outside help he had been receiving."
Full link
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And equally, as far as I am concerned, the lack of equivalent help that Ukraine is getting. Those NorK and other troops have made a significant contribution to Russias ability to survive the Ukrainian defence plus China and the other equipment suppliers are giving their latest and best equipment while the US and some others are only giving stuff that is close to end of life.

How much shorter would this war have been if the west had thrown in F-35's and our other best and latest after the first few weeks when it became obvious that Ukraine had beaten Russia almost to a standstill. And how much benefit would the west have gained from the testing of our latest and best. As it is what has been shown is that our ten year old stuff is equal or better than what Russia has now and that the idea of high cost manned "wonder weapons" being the answer in any conflict is flawed at best and dangerously out of date.

The vast majority of Ukraines "victories" have been won by low cost drones and even their latest weapons like the Flamingo are, relative to anything the west produces, low cost and low tech (excluding the AI which is home grown and almost certainly way ahead of other western countries).
 
MiTasol said:
How much shorter would this war have been if the west had thrown in F-35's and our other best and latest after the first few weeks when it became obvious that Ukraine had beaten Russia almost to a standstill. And how much benefit would the west have gained from the testing of our latest and best. As it is what has been shown is that our ten year old stuff is equal or better than what Russia has now and that the idea of high cost manned "wonder weapons" being the answer in any conflict is flawed at best and dangerously out of date.
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How would have the F-35 worked in the first few weeks, without any formal training as well the battlefield component support the F-35 relies on?

You can't just yank a Fulcrum driver out of the seat and drop him into a F-16, Mirage or Viggen and say "good luck!", it takes training and familiarization, which equates to time spent.

The Western contributions to Ukraine have been great, but a total logistics nightmare. They have received Challengers, Abrams and Leopards, for example and each MBT has it's own learning curve as well as logistics trail.

Fighters can be infinately more complex in this regard.
 
GrauGeist said:
How would have the F-35 worked in the first few weeks, without any formal training as well the battlefield component support the F-35 relies on?

You can't just yank a Fulcrum driver out of the seat and drop him into a F-16, Mirage or Viggen and say "good luck!", it takes training and familiarization, which equates to time spent.

The Western contributions to Ukraine have been great, but a total logistics nightmare. They have received Challengers, Abrams and Leopards, for example and each MBT has it's own learning curve as well as logistics trail.

Fighters can be infinately more complex in this regard.
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If the allies had wanted to the F-35 COULD have worked the same way as a lot of the NorK equipment did originally - by being operated by experienced NorK operators.

I think however that it would have been far better for one or more NATO countries to say to Ukraine send us X airframe drivers and ground staff and we will train them on the F-35. When they meet our standards of competency we will return them WITH an F-35 for each pilot. That would have given the Russians a massive headache in a very short time because we know how motivated the Ukrainians who leave Ukraine to train are.

Instead we fiddle farted around for two years and eventually trained them on an airframe that has been in service for 47 years. Even the upgraded versions are not modern aircraft and the ones they were given were, as far as I know, all aircraft that had been, or were being, retired from service -- and none were not upgraded to the latest specs.

And yes I do know that training an F-35 pilot is not a two minute job and takes a lot more than training a 747 or A380 pilot but this war is now almost 4 years old. Given the Ukrainians motivation there would be no shortage of fully trained F-35 drivers in action by now if this had happened even six months after Putin invaded.
 
MiTasol said:
If the allies had wanted to the F-35 COULD have worked the same way as a lot of the NorK equipment did originally - by being operated by experienced NorK operators.

I think however that it would have been far better for one or more NATO countries to say to Ukraine send us X airframe drivers and ground staff and we will train them on the F-35. When they meet our standards of competency we will return them WITH an F-35 for each pilot. That would have given the Russians a massive headache in a very short time because we know how motivated the Ukrainians who leave Ukraine to train are.

Instead we fiddle farted around for two years and eventually trained them on an airframe that has been in service for 47 years. Even the upgraded versions are not modern aircraft and the ones they were given were, as far as I know, all aircraft that had been, or were being, retired from service -- and none were not upgraded to the latest specs.

And yes I do know that training an F-35 pilot is not a two minute job and takes a lot more than training a 747 or A380 pilot but this war is now almost 4 years old. Given the Ukrainians motivation there would be no shortage of fully trained F-35 drivers in action by now if this had happened even six months after Putin invaded.
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Years later, there will be studies and books about the military assistance in this war. They will not provide a nice picture.
Before the invasion of February 2022, there was a de facto embargo on lethal weapons sales to Ukraine, despite the Russian aggression since 2014.
In the first weeks after the invasion, Ukraine could buy artillery shells only from the "global South" countries, either directly (as from Sudan) or through intermediaries (Bulgaria, Czech - thank you!). Germany offered helmets. Non-lethal equipment had to be smuggled through the Polish border to avoid lengthy procedures. The promise of Polish MiG-27s in March 2022 was withdrawn after the Poles realised that they could not get modern replacements from the Allies.
Then 155mm shells and missiles began to arrive, thanks to God and the taxpayers of NATO countries. Politicians became involved in the intensive discussions about armour and aircraft and Patriot batteries. But in the meantime, troops at Bakhmut needed not Western tanks and jets but infantry tools: machine guns, grenade launchers, light mortars and tons and tons of ammunition.
Many lessons to learn...
 
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