Ukraine Invasion: Part 49

[MagicFox]

Welcome to our 49th thread with the usual thanks to all regular contributors and lurkers 🇺🇦

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The point was that there's no point bothering with conscripts if you can't even process willing volunteers.

Well, yes,indeed. And there's no point pretending they would make the least difference to anything, either. Which is why I find Sunak particularly dispiriting: who is he hoping to impress with this nonsense anyway? He must think there are an awful lot of idiots among the electorate. Idiots with no relations.

There are plenty of volunteers to join us (and decent pay and career options plus teaching a trade would entice more). The issue is in processing them- but this seems to be a common trait with this government.

They couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery. Thank goodness we have a chance to change our government for one promising to do better.

He must think there are an awful lot of idiots among the electorate.

Is he wrong?

I do hope he's overestimated the number.

I think the cost is much lower for American made shells, but it's hard to isolate a unit cost because we're currently spending $1.5B to expand production capacity and the budget doesn't break out unit costs vs capital investments. The US DoD owns the plants and pays Raytheon to operate them, so that muddies the waters too.

The last figure I recall reading for unit cost here for a bog standard 155mm round was about $1k.

And speaking of artillery shells, here's an epic rant from a Russian soldier about the poor quality of the North Korean shells they have been supplied with. If the Russians are making so many of their own shells, why are they killing their gun crews with unsafe ammunition?

https://x.com/PStyle0ne1/status/1794778251660808410

I mean, this isn't relegated to old shells. Cutting edge tech can fail miserably too.

https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1bm128o/ukrainian_m777_howitzer_fails/

Consider that the M777 requires liquid N2 to function, a consumable not exactly all that common on the battlefield.

Both sides have been going through tube artillery like nothing before as well. There are many pictures online of AFU and Russian arty pieces withe the characteristic blown barrel from a critcial stress fracture ripping open. War is not ideal.

Guns fail like that when they aren’t maintained or the barrels aren’t replaced as required.

liquid nitrogen is generated in the field, usually at the depot level and supplied to gun crews in bottles.

https://www.southteksystems.com/high-pressure-nitrogen-generators-military/

But as we've heard, logistics and maintenance for a lot of the donated equipment is not being provided for. There's a reason Ukraine told BAE Systems to take a hike when it came to the mounting numbers of defunct M777s coming off the field. The one plant in the US needs to have them sent back to them, which adds a huge amount of time.

So what did they do? They fixed them themselves. There are other issues that are less readily solvable (some of the Leopards and Abrams had problems), but they've been very enterprising and resourceful in fixing these failings of the Western benefactors. I'd be a little pissed too if after the wait, I got a partially functional tank I was then expected to fix up.

EDIT: While we're on the M777, actually, just another few observations. Aside from the recuperator being LN2 filled, like most modern lightweight guns now which adds logistical challenges, there's also the battery operated hydraulic elevation system it uses. If you're out of LN2 and the battery goes down, you can't do anything with that gun. Like, you literally cannot tow it away if it's in the ready to fire configuration should that happen. The manual way of solving this is not something you want to do given how good Russia has gotten at counter-battery fire, accounting for the loss of many of the M777s in the field.

These scrapped M777s still have their electronic systems on the frame, for some reason. Either they forgot to remove them(!) or those units are fried.

More M109s and Caesars, please.

Either that, or he doesn't want to win the election so he's throwing out controversial ideas to make even Tory diehards less likely to vote for the Tories.

I wouldn’t underestimate how well policies like this generally land in middle-class Tory heartlands and with (granted not all but a good proportion of) older voters. It plays on the fear that they have of the unemployed, unfocused and delinquent youth.

Next they’ll be expecting asylum seekers to do national service!

A certain group of voters would definitely vote Tory if they said asylum seekers were to do national service!

Don't give them ideas, Natsku!

Hey it was Igotjelly who came up with that!

It’s a pretty common tactic for the Tories to try and win back the grey vote by appealing to nostalgia. Remember how they used blitz spirit to win Brexit? Most of the people who are so obsessed with that mentality were not even born during WWII. My grandparents who lived through it very much didn’t go on and on about blitz spirit (which is also different to how many believe it came about. It was Labour and the Liberals and others forcing things like opening of the underground to be a mass bomb shelter for the city populace against gov’t wishes), yet my Tory voting dad won’t shut up about it. Like he was there personally storming Normandy.

Too bad the Tories are going to get eviscerated at the polls anyway between Labour and Reform.

More M109s and Caesars, please.

The M109 weighs 27.5 tons, the M777 about 4.3 tons. The M777 can be easily airlifted from the US, but not the M109. The point of sending the lighter guns was that they could be supplied quickly and in large numbers, and required less of a logistical tail. The Caesar is also a big, heavy self-propelled gun, so it has similar advantages and disadvantages.

The US also started supplying M109s in early 2023.

At this point, a lot of the supposed advantages of the airlifted towed units is lost so you may as well go with better protection for the crew via SPGs instead.

TIA is not fun, though again, proper soldiering with entrenching can deal with most of those impacts.

Kinda like how we could throw loads of MANPADS like Stingers and Iglas at the front to hold off gunships and CAS planes, and now we can get proper IAD systems over to give better cover.

This is getting much too technical to read to the point of derailing the thread imo

Apologies. I thought covering the finer points of what is being used and why and how best such equipment can be applied was under the remit. Should I take it to another thread? I do follow a lot of the more technical sources on military strategy and equipment because they miss out so much on just regular news stories or gloss over a thing that might be pretty important e.g. the rise of drone warfare and EW counters, or artillery production and counter battery radar usage.

It’s tricky but it’s a case of being aware of the audience..it’s sometimes hard to get the balance right.

Certainly if you’ve served in one of the more technical role in the forces, maybe been around weapons systems and the conversation drifts into your specialist subject there’s a danger of getting overly technical.

Less technical stuff - perhaps putting the more detailed stuff on another thread - and a positive attitude would be welcomed, yes.

Noted. Will reduce input where it gets too in the weeds.

Our new comrade is certainly appearing knowledgeable about a variety of subjects, especially how well Russia is doing compared to the Wests failures.

They've shoe horned a lot in in the last 10 days that they've been posting.