We Told You So Dept.:
(MOSCOW) Russian President Vladimir Putin has [inadvertently] admitted to the significant losses Russia has suffered in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, which has been raging since February 2022.
“Putin literally admitted irretrievable losses in the amount of 363 thousand people,” said a military analyst. The purported losses would be orders of magnitude beyond those previously claimed by Russia, with the Kremlin having only officially admitted to around 6,000 troop deaths.
Despite the losses, Putin has maintained that peace with Ukraine will only be achieved “when we achieve our objectives”. This was stated during his first marathon news conference since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
The invasion was met with fierce resistance from the Ukrainian forces, backed by the international community. The severity of the Kremlin’s recent military reversals in Ukraine has been acknowledged by Putin. Mr. Putin insisted that Russia could “move forward” despite Western economic sanctions and political isolation stemming from its Ukraine invasion.
“Practically along the entire line of contact our armed forces are improving their situation, to put it modestly,” he said at his marathon news conference. There has been very little movement on the front line in recent months, but Russia is targeting two eastern towns in the Donetsk region, Mariinka and Avdiivka.
Russia has claimed that Ukraine is suffering a high number of troop deaths during the war, with Putin stating in October that Kyiv had lost 90,000 troops since starting its latest counteroffensive in June. Putin also mentioned that the Ukrainian death toll was “simply huge” and at “approximately one to eight as a ratio” to Russian deaths.
Ukraine’s military success in a “small area” is described by President Putin as a last-ditch attempt to break through to Crimea. He explained that Russian forces decided to withdraw several meters into wooded areas “to save our lads” and suggested that Kyiv’s main motive is to show the West that it needs more military funding.
If you're keeping score at home, this latest series of admissions (overt and accidental)
1) Confirms that last week's declassified U.S. military estimate of Russian losses in this debacle was spot on, to three decimal places. Oops.
2) Undoes all the fanboys claiming "Russia has already won", and shoots that stupid lie right in the ass, as Putin admits they still haven't achieved any of their objectives.
3) Points out that Putin's only plan is more of what has failed for the last 22 months, just with 90% less ground military to do it.
Suck it, simps. Belly up to your party-sized sub sandwich of crow. With extra crow. Your beloved KGB-thug hero just admitted this is a generational-level fuck-up of biblical proportions for a hopelessly incompetent and ineffective Russian military. Russia has killed more of its own troops in two years in Ukraine, a country 1/4th its size and 1/10th its military strength, than the U.S. has lost in all its wars and conflicts worldwide combined from 1946-now.
And he further admitted they've been stalemated for nearly two years, despite simultaneously floating the bullshit that they've killed Ukrainian troops at an 8:1 ratio.
This is like the NY Yankees admitting they tied a Little League team 0-0, even though 7 of the other team's grade school-aged players had to go home for curfew before the game was called after maxxing out on innings.
You can keep rootin' for Putin all you want. But you'll need an entirely new line of horseshit to peddle to keep fooling yourselves. But go ahead and keep digging into it; there's got to be a Christmas pony for you under it somewhere.
Pisser for those still carrying a torch for that codswallop.
Ukraine doesn't want to return to Moscow's tender loving embrace, and never will. Like we told you nearly two years ago. And Moscow has gutted its own minimal military power in pursuit of an epic level of failure. While the entire world sees them for the Potemkin nation, in every respect, that they've always been.
As Patton noted, "All glory is fleeting." But this level of national faceplant will last for ages.
Related: New Russian Airborne Division suffers "exceptionally heavy losses"
UPDATE: Video link corrected.
As to "no one else is reporting this recently":
Vladimir Putin says no peace in Ukraine until Russia achieves its goals | ABC News - YouTube
President Putin says Russia's goals in Ukraine have not changed - YouTube
Putin Says No Peace in Ukraine Until Russia Achieves Goals - YouTube
No peace in Ukraine until Russia's goals achieved, says Putin - YouTube
Russia’s goals in war with Ukraine remain unchanged, Putin says - YouTube
Putin: No peace in Ukraine until Russia achieves its goals - YouTube
45 comments:
This... does not seem like a reliable source. "TrustyDigest" on msn.com seems to allow just about anybody to post anything and have it show up under an 'msn.com' domain. The linked video about "Putin admits losses" is from ABC, and from February of this year. I wasn't able to find any other news org reporting on this, which I would expect if it was true.
Video link corrected to the correct speech.
I also posted links to half a dozen other major news organizations reporting on the same speech, so you evidently didn't look too hard for confirmation. It's literally everywhere.
363,000 divided by 15,000...
that's 24 times the casualties they took in afghanistan. and afghanistan took them 5 times longer to do it. (664 days vs 9.5 years)
also, this dispels the rumor that putin has been lied to by his generals. the theory was that he had no idea what the actual casualty rates were and that was why he kept going.
turns out he knew exactly how many casualties there were.
"One death is a tragedy. 363,000 deaths is a statistic." - Vladimir Putin
So if the Mass Media tells you it's TRUE!
That or British Gossip Rags?
"Video link corrected to the correct speech.
I also posted links to half a dozen other major news organizations reporting on the same speech, so you evidently didn't look too hard for confirmation. It's literally everywhere."
So was the Ghost of Kiev.
Time will tell Aesop.
Nowhere in the press conference (transcript below) does Putin admit to irretrievable losses of 363,000.
That unnamed "military analyst" quoted at the top of the post is spouting bullshit.
the transcript:
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/by-date/14.12.2023
Here's a causualty report from anti-Putin Mediazona saying there have been 39,424 Russian casualties "corroborated by publicly available data as of 15 December"
https://en.zona.media/article/2022/05/11/casualties_eng
Would love to see your expert analysis of this little tidbit of information.
BTW also well know across several media outlets, maybe you have some MSN support there?
https://sonar21.com/the-u-s-navy-is-unprepared-for-a-prolonged-war-with-yemen/
America is looking like a paper tiger. Prove me wrong, my table is over here.
Michael,
Jesus, Mary, & Joseph, man it's Putin's Russian media at his own scripted press conference in every one of those videos.
FFS, how many times does the frozen mackerel have to smack you across the face before you feel it?
America isn't a paper tiger (of the ten largest air forces in the world, we have four of them, for one example, and we have nearly as many aircraft carriers as the rest of the fleets in the entire world, combined), but that we've been under-supplied with munitions for any sort of prolonged conflict longer than 15 minutes was an open secret way back to the 1970s.
There's only been about a hundred published reports on this in the last 60 years, on everything from iron bombs to artillery shells to torpedoes to air-to-air missiles to AT weapons to damned near anything else you could imagine larger than small arms rounds. (And even for that, brighter readers might recall how scarce ammo got for five years when we were involved in Iraq and Afghanistan simultaneously, and every single civilian ammo production line was doing nothing but government military contract work.)
Shooting off $500,000 missiles at $4000 drones just underlines how asinine the generals and admirals running the shitshow at the five-sided idiot palace are.
I've got left-wing Brookings Institution white papers on my shelves detailing the extent of the U.S. military budgets under-acquiring wartime stores dated from while we were still fighting in Vietnam, and that problem has never been adequately addressed by the Congress or by any administration going back to Kennedy.
Our war stocks peaked in 1945, and they've never recovered.
Worse, our active duty strength and fleet size are the lowest they've been since the 1930s, which was a proximate cause of WWII, yet we have one commissioned admiral per active ship in the US Navy fleet, and more commissioned general officers than we did when the Army was over ten times larger than it is now, at over 8M men, a fact I've decried on this blog times beyond counting.
Welcome to the party, pal.
Look harder, Henry:
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-admits-russia-suffered-huge-losses-ukraine-1852660#:~:text=Russian%20President%20Vladimir%20Putin%20may,conference%20in%20Moscow%20on%20Friday.
"Russia lost 360,000 people in the war, according to Putin," Matveev wrote. "244 thousand mobilized. 486 thousand volunteers. And there are only 617 thousand at the front. Entertaining military mathematics from Putin.
The losses were 113 thousand people," he continued. "But there was also the invasion group and those who were recruited before mobilization. And this is around 250 thousand. That is, Putin literally admitted irretrievable losses in the amount of 363 thousand people."
First off I am stealing the butthurt meme. Its glorious.
As several have noted previously this is not a game to win, but a game to lose. Such that war can be considered a game. If the loss rates are 8 or 10 to 1 in UA favor the confluence of forces (as the commies like to say) sway in UA favor provided they keep getting kit.
But something else is becoming abundantly clear -- air forces are irrelevant. The RU-UA engagement may not be the best test case as RU has acted stupidly in this regard but I believe it to be true. If a defensive force can achieve what I call 'total area denial' by near automated means (drones, rockets, mines) the cost ratio become insurmountable. You can see some of this as RU is reluctant to commit their latest bombers in anything other than a stand off mission within their own borders throwing guided missiles at UA targets.
Most of the tools for TAD are already here. A impregnable CIC to run it all is what is missing.
Russia (pure propaganda) only admits to 6000 lost. But also claims Ukrainian casualties in the recent offensive were 8:1, and were tallied by Russia at 90,000, which inadvertently admits that Russia lost another 11,000+ men in that same recent period, not reported nor admitted overtly in the official Russian casualty figures.
Oops.
OTOH:
Ukrainian (pure propaganda) claims 342,800 Russian casualties.
The UK military estimate is 302,000 Russian casualties.
The U.S. military estimate is 315,000 Russian casualties.
Clever readers will note a trend there.
Bit of self contradiction going on here...
Quoting Tucanae
"But something else is becoming abundantly clear -- air forces are irrelevant. The RU-UA engagement may not be the best test case as RU has acted stupidly in this regard but I believe it to be true. If a defensive force can achieve what I call 'total area denial' by near automated means (drones, rockets, mines) the cost ratio become insurmountable. You can see some of this as RU is reluctant to commit their latest bombers in anything other than a stand off mission within their own borders throwing guided missiles at UA targets.
Most of the tools for TAD are already here. A impregnable CIC to run it all is what is missing."
When drones kill APCs with impro munitions- that is NOT irrelevant. and Drones are part of the air force (NOT capitalized Air Force).
WW I trench warfare is not gonna end well for the Russians Or Ukes.
Aussies are selling cardboard drones to the UKES
"Ukrainian forces reportedly used the PDDS cardboard drones in an attack on an airfield in Kursk Oblast in western Russia on August 27. The attack damaged a Mig-29 and four Su-30 fighter jets, two Pantsir anti-aircraft missile launchers, gun systems, and an S-300 air surface-to-air missile defence system."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-03/ukraine-war-australian-made-cardboard-drones-russia-warfare/102804120
Spot a small cardboard drone on radar, I dare ya.
No winners in this conflict except the Bidens and Zelensky
Putin didn't say what Matveev said he did. Matveev is citing his own numbers not Putin's.
Speaking of looking harder, go read the press conference transcript instead of relying on reports in MSN and Newsweek.
I read the transcript. Matveev tabulated Putin's numbers accurately.
Putin assuredly didn't mean to say what he revealed, but he did say what he said, and Matveev's numbers tally. Putin's missing 113,000, plus the 250,000 he didn't mention, add up to 363,000.
Which accords with multiple outside estimates.
Just not the ones released by Moscow.
Norway's military estimated Russian losses at 200,000 a year ago, so another 100,000 in the second year isn't much of a stretch.
When all the dots on the graph keep coming up in the same zone, we have a winner.
Aesop,
Again, I suggest we believe nothing we see, hear, or read on the Internets.
Russia winning? Ok.
Russia losing? Hmmm. OK
Russia has viable air breathing hyper-vel missiles, doomsday weapons, Tsunami torpedoes, etc? MmmKay....
(The) Ukraine fighting for Democracy and freedom? Sure.
Ignorance CAN be blissful.
Two things:
1) There were 250,000 in the invasion group, but that doesn't mean all 250,000 were casualties.
That's the number that was added to the 113,000 number to get to 363,000.
But even the 113,000 presumed casualties is questionable. It was derived from subtracting 617,000 "on the front" from the sum of 244,000 mobilized plus 486,000 volunteers, but not all military personnel are stationed on the front.
I don't believe ANYTHING that ANYONE says about what has and is happening in this war. Nobody will tell the truth because the truth is the last thing any of them wants out. We will likely never know how many casualties either side incurs nor the true extent of material loss. And the Fed Gov along with their media whores are just as guilty of massive disinformation about this and pretty much every other subject that affects us all.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/war-ukraine-tab-quietly-removed-washington-posts-homepage
Or as the Zero Hedge title says, "And it's gone".
I guess the penis piano player should have asked about Saddam, Noriega, Kaddafi and the others the USA declared solid allies before him.
I wonder what the Las Vegas odds of him disappearing before spring are.
BTW couldn't resist: Your comment:
"OTOH:
Ukrainian (pure propaganda) claims 342,800 Russian casualties.
The UK military estimate is 302,000 Russian casualties.
The U.S. military estimate is 315,000 Russian casualties.
Clever readers will note a trend there."
They all share the same information source?
When has the UK military ever deviated from the Pentagon's opinions and numbers?
If Russia is saying that Ukraine is suffering 8 times as many casualties, and they admit to 363,000 on their side, then that means they are suggesting Ukraine has lost 2,904,000 men. Color me skeptical.
Aesop, your comment about using $500,000 missiles to shoot down $4000 drones being "asinine" is akin to saying the military is "stoopid" for spending hundreds of dollars on body armor to protect against 30-cent bullets. It's only stupid if it doesn't keep our assets alive and intact.
@elysianfield and Dan,
Agnosticism is not an option.
There are, self-evidently, casualties on both sides. What level would they necessarily be to explain a 2 year debacle and stalemate from 10-foot tall RUSSIAN DOMINANT SOLDIERS...?
Is it closer, in your opinion, to a casualty tally of 6000, or closer to 300,000?
I'm not looking for dead-on-balls accuracy, but Russia has had to do three mobilization recruitment drives in less than 22 months, after committing the initial 250k+ or so troops, when in a normal year they would only do one annual recruitment to replace annual peacetime turnover.
Then factor in that they haven't moved forward in 16 months, anywhere, after moving backwards for 100 miles, in some areas being pushed completely back into Mother Russia.
This on top of losing the equivalent of an entire fleet, an entire air wing's worth of aircraft, and 2/3rds of their entire existing stock of frontline armor and AFVs, by multiple independent analyses. Which we've only seen from Russian armor...gee, every time it's been used in actual combat, going back to the 1970s. Their vehicles and tactics are shit, and been since 1946, and they don't have anything close to the imaginary quantity that everyone was worried about 40 years ago in the Fulda Gap.
So much for lightning armored thrusts across "ideal tank country".
This suggests beyond rational argument that their casualties have been massive, not negligible, and nothing like 8:1 compared to Ukraine's.
I've already spoken to "winning" and "losing" (which are ludicrous terms for the country where the war is being fought). Both sides can lose. Russia cannot win.
Ukraine either survives, or ceases to exist. That's all that's on the table, and all that ever has been.
The cement-headed intransigence of the Putin fanboys in adhering to their unsupportable delusions makes the moonbats on Democommunist websites look calm and rational by comparison. Putin's tongue-bathers think it's still February of 2022. That ship sailed a few hundred thousand casualties ago. Any Day Now™ is a fart dream in a hurricane.
Michael,
you go ahead on and read tea leaves from WaPo.
As for casualty estimates, trying to conflate Ukraine, the UK, the Pentagon, (and Norway, whom you skipped) into a monolith of agreement isn't even half-bright, and doesn't withstand any scrutiny whatsoever. Naked gainsaying, 20 yard penalty and loss of down.
Spin harder, but it still won't make the reality go away.
Notably, as usual, you never engage on the point under discussion, but try to flywheel things to some illusory non-sequitur. It's your defining characteristic.
So since you want to wander all over, how are your investments in Russian rubles paying off these days?
@Henry,
1) You are correct. I'm sure they all went home to Moscow safe and sound after serving their enlistments, without a scratch on them. That's why Vlad needed three more mobilizations to replace them, and three times the initial troop commitment just to keep from being thrown back all the way to actual Russia.
2) Tell the class why Vlad needs 780,000 troops to replace the 250,000 unscathed happy go lucky lads who all returned to their homes last year, the ones who weren't brewed up in 8000 flaming wrecks of tanks and AFVs, or shelled into chum all over Ukraine.
Their initial ground forces on February 20, 2022 didn't number even 800K, yet now they've committed 617,000 to their "special military operation".
We didn't even hollow out our army that hard at the height of Vietnam.
The story isn't hard to suss out:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/02/15/russ-doubled-its-army-in-2022-but-its-casualties-doubled-too/?sh=703959747428
Gamblers call this "throwing good money after bad".
Putin's willing to kill as many Russian soldiers as it takes to spin out some half-assed semblance of victory, rather than getting the Makarov Retirement Party awaiting him for admitting openly how bad it really is. He may even have convinced his lackeys that if he goes, they go too. The ones who demure keep falling out of 10th floor windows, or shooting themselves in the back of the head three times and falling into a river. How unfortunate.
That's all that's ever been the deciding variable in the equation.
If Putin quit fighting tomorrow, the war would cease to exist. Followed, in short order, by Putin.
If Ukraine quit fighting tomorrow, Ukraine would cease to exist.
Both sides know this, and so the war goes on, until Putin taps out, or Ukraine does.
Which explains the great enthusiasm on the Ukrainian side, and the great reluctance on the Russian side.
"The moral is to the physical as three to one." - Napoleon
A casualty level of 300,000+ Russian soldiers is merely the cost of Putin doing business.
His only concern is his own ass, damn the casualties, and everyone can see it who has eyes to see.
@Michael Gladius,
Your analogy fails, unless the vests cease to exist or have to be discarded after every incoming round, and you're charging a machinegun.
So under those conditions, how many vests a minute can you afford to buy?
A vest stops multiple bullets, and rarely ever gets used even once.
We have destroyers who have launched 25-33% of their basic load of missiles, and when it hits zero, they have to come all the way back to the US to reload. (The stock of available reloads is severely limited as well).
If they're attacked by anything else in the meantime, or in transit to reload, they're about as well-protected as a Princess cruise liner.
Care to revise and amend your remarks after considering the actual truth on the scene?
Nice try Aesop.
To get to the 363,000 figure each and every man of the 250,000-strong initial invasion group would have to have been killed or wounded. Not bloody likely.
Also, you never specifically addressed my bringing up the iffiness of the 113,000 figure that was added to 250,000 to make up the 363,000 dead and wounded figure.
617,000 "on the front" subtracted from 244,000 mobilized plus 486,000 volunteers does indeed equal 113,000, but those frontline troops are sure to have a bunch of back-up supply and service teams, not to mention replacements troops stationed back from the front. That would partially account for the 113,000 figure.
You keep trying to square that circle. Be the first on your block.
Putin left them out, and unaccounted for.
Including the entire 250,000 invasion force.
I don't think every one of them got killed or wounded. Combat footage over the first year suggests is was probably not more than 60% of them. Which was transparently why they needed a massive draft and metric shittons of volunteers, very quickly.
And then, as the Forbes piece pointed out, as they sent double the amount of troops in mid-year in Year One, this time with second-rate leadership, third-rate equipment, and fourth-rate training, they managed to double their casualty rates.
Leaving 617,000 "on the front" out of a sum total of 980,000 bodies.
So I repeat, tell the class what else would reasonably account for a two-year stalemate, and Putin going from sending 25% of his entire ground army, to suddenly drafting far more than that a few months into this (which effort fell over 50,000 troops short of the goal, while over a million healthy military-aged males fled Russia by train, plane, boat, goat, and track shoes to Anywhere But Russia), plus twice that number of volunteers, and needing to triple his ground commitment for a war with only 6000 casualties?
Every government in the world outside of Russia (including Belarus and China) knows the real answer to that question, and it's not because Russia is killing 8x as many enemy troops as they're losing themselves in combat.
Say it with me, Henry: "well over 300,000 Russian casualties, so far."
It won't hurt a bit, I promise.
Logical deductions are like that.
That people still persist in thinking Russia, alone, of all the nations on the planet, is incapable of massive self-serving lies - like nothing from 1918-1991 there ever happened, and as if Putin himself isn't a former KGB senior thug - should be a PhD-level psychological research project.
If Putin gave a speech telling people his army was flying winged unicorns into battle, in two hours I'd have twenty people in Comments explaining Russian advances in cross-breeding horses and eagles to me to justify it.
https://i.imgur.com/3V0K0oM.png
When this kicked off, I thought that the Russians would fuck up Bigly when faced with a stout Uke defence, and it would fairly soon turn into a long drawn out version of the Hurtgen Forest fight.
Given where things are now, I don't think that was far off.
The current fight therefore seems to be positional, attritional and dominated by artillery. And the big problem for the Ukranians as far as I can tell is that the Russians have more tubes, more shells and more people than the Ukranians.
If that is correct then the Ukes may well have God on Their Side, but they're still fucked. All I can see coming up is more slaughter around largely unchanged lines until the Ukes, NATO and The West in general give up and some sort of shitty truce goes into effect.
That probably sounds pretty bleak and pessimistic, but I don't realistically see any it going any other way, bar a Black Swan like Vlad being deposed/assasinated..
If anybody can see a viable alternative outcome to what I've proposed I'd really like to hear it.
Most of the points you raise--such as the two-year stalement, military-age men fleeing Russia, that Russia engages in lies, that Putin is a former KGB thug, the second-rate leadership, etc.--those are all thrown out just to confuse the issue considering I was only dealing with what was touted at the total casualty number.
To repeat, the front doesn't define the whole area of military operation. So 617,000 men at the front and how many men operating to the rear of the front line. It has to be substantial. So merely subtracting 617,000 from 980,000 is nonsense.
And, dear Aesop, the casualty number was the nut of your post. The rest was just you pontificating.
@Aesop
The ceramic body armor pieces need to be replaced more frequently than the metal ones (which were discontinued because nobody likes being a steel target for bullet splatter, despite the plates working), so they do need to be discarded after a certain number of hits. Not one-to-one, sure, but the point of using missiles is 1) the ship doesn't have to be hit at all, and 2) the missile usually scores a hit the first time. You get what you pay for when it comes to first-shot accuracy. Compared to the costs of extra armor, more maintenance, need for repairs, and extra fuel cost and lower strategic mobility on a ship without the missiles, suddenly those missiles become the cheaper option.
Talking about body armor not being used is as irrelevant as mentioning the ships not currently being shot at.
Yes, missile resupply was gutted after the Cold War ended. No, if the destroyers use up their missiles then they're not defenseless while returning to rearm. They just have to rely on CWIS firing $100,000+ in depleted Uranium rounds, most of which will miss the target and therefore be wasted.
Henry,
You appear to be not tall enough for this ride.
The points I raised all require explanation, and the number of casualties either supports those things, or it doesn't, and vice versa.
Russia having to hold three call ups supports the contention that Russia has suffered massive casualties, somewhere north of 300,000 men.
So does a two-year stalemate.
So does having to triple their troop commitment since the outset merely to avoid being pushed all the way back to actual Russia along a 2000km front.
So does second-rate leadership, third-rate equipment, and fourth-rate training.
If we're to believe Russian casualties are but 1/8th that of Ukraine, none of these things would have been necessary nor likely, and Putin's 3-day "special military operation" to conquer Ukraine wouldn't be in Month 22, and on the cusp of entering Year Three.
And yet, that's exactly where it is.
You keep running into that problem headfirst, at speed, as if it wasn't there.
So when Putin's math demonstrates an obvious shortfall of 113,000 men, and he completely neglects to mention the other 250,000 he started this out with, one is not free to assume that they're all happily released from duty and back home with mommy, or in the rear areas with the clerks and jerks, as if there had only been 6000 Russian casualties. (That assumes we're dealing with the world in reality, not as some people wish it existed. I'm not responsible to service other people's delusions.)
Putin let the cat out of the bag, doubtless inadvertently, but it's plainly there nonetheless.
Multiple military estimates all land within spitting distance of that same number, one which no Russian official dare openly utter, on pain of regime change or personal defenestration.
Putin furthermore explicitly noted that they haven't met their objectives in Ukraine, despite nearly two full years, sending an additional 600K troops to the fray, the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of Russian lives, and thousands of ground combat vehicles, as noted by every legitimate source on the planet.
When you can't note multiple indicators in support of the obvious as anything other than "pontificating", you obviously can't grasp the difference between what you imagine, and facts visible to Stevie Wonder, from orbit. All you've done since the get-go is dig in your heels and gainsay, based on wishcasting and handwaving.
So if the best you've got in response to all available evidence for nearly two years is to burp out "No it isn't!" to try and gaslight the obvious, you'll have to pony up another £7 for the full hour's argument.
Better luck next time with Any Day Now™.
Michael Gladius,
You're still comparing apples to oranges.
An SM-2 missile costs between $1.2M and $2.5M@.
They're being used to shoot down garage-tech Houthi drones.
That's financially stupid on the face of it, and then there's the problem that the missiles expended are functionally irreplaceable.
We didn't gut missile replenishment after the Cold War, that only made it worse.
The bigger issue, for 60 years, is that we've never spent enough on any of our toys to have adequate war stocks of anything.
Not mortar rounds, not tank rounds, not AT missiles, not smart bombs, dumb bombs, torpedoes, land mines, sea mines, nor any other thing you could imagine.
And we haven't had the capacity to increase production of any of those things since the 1950s.
Under those conditions, for 70 years now, wasting any of them on Houthi toys for anything other than self-defense is simply asinine, and ultimately unsustainable.
If Houthis are the problem, you don't swat the bees, you destroy the hive.
Somebody wants to deploy a B-2 alpha strike, once, from Diego Garcia, and carpet-bomb the living shit out of them? Go ahead on.
I suspect we won't see any further problem with launches.
If we do, and it requires going back in with forward-deployed A-10s, or carrier-launched Apaches until the message is received, well and good.
But pissing away an already-scarce resource from our dwindling fleet is about the most jackassical way to go about this, and makes no justifiable sense whatsoever, on any level.
BTW, CIWS is a last-ditch last-minute self-defense, and there are only 2 mounts, yet again with a limited ammo supply in the magazine.
The whole point of the AN-SPY is multiple target track-and-launch.
When your missiles are expended, and you have to wait, and can only shoot at two targets for the last split-second of their inbound attack, you've pissed away that whole advantage, you're going to want to be up to speed on your damage control and lifeboat drills.
Ask the Brits how well that worked out for them off the Falklands for a preview.
The only things missing are an analysis from CNN and a Ukrainian flag.
And any IQ points from you, Cat Toy.
"When drones kill APCs with impro munitions- that is NOT irrelevant. and Drones are part of the air force (NOT capitalized Air Force)." -- Aesop
A matter of definition and use. My definition of an air force asset is that it is maintained by such a force and used on an airframe that is manned, eg air launched munitions. In the RU-UA context most of the drones are being utilized by the RU-UA ground divisions not the air force of the combatants. That actually became a bone of contention in the US force structure. Both the army and the air force were buying/using drones of the same type. But USAF insisted on a officer whereas the Army were using Tech Sergeants for the same functions.
Guess we can agree to disagree.
"To repeat, the front doesn't define the whole area of military operation. So 617,000 men at the front and how many men operating to the rear of the front line. It has to be substantial. So merely subtracting 617,000 from 980,000 is nonsense." -- Henry Cybulski
Battle can be as much a matter of position than just number of bodies and loss ratios. UA has been trying to degrade Crimea to eliminate RU effectiveness on the southern front. Having a large force at front that cannot be resupplied is a detriment, not a positive.
Tucanae,
Where (and more precisely, when) are you pulling my supposed quote from...?
Just asking for context.
BTW, drone operations have returned CAS to the hands of the soldiers on the front lines, taking a separate Air Farce completely out of the equation, for both tactical anti-personnel and anti-armor and strategic anti-artillery and anti-Air Farce operations.
As the Russian military is learning daily.
And a kill is a kill.
A tech sergeant in a bunker who's blown up five MiGs and Sukhois on the ground has contributed more to the war effort than a guy in an F-16 who's only killed a couple of helos, and frontline grunts don't care if the other side's artillery batteries were blown up by A-10s, Frogfoots, or drones, as long as they were blown up.
This development twists our own Air Farce's panties all in a wad, and really chaps their hides.
Dogs in space can hear their shrieks of agony.
Now imagine if, instead of shooting down garage-tech Houthi drones with million-dollar missiles, the Navy had the wit to be watching the launch sites with Predators or the equivalent, and sent a Hellfire up the asses of the launch crews, removing all of them from the battlefield permanently like the finger of God.
Or simply equipping a drone with jamming pods to screw up their uplink guidance, sending their drones back to earth like swatting a swarm of flies at one stroke, and costing us nothing but electrons and avgas.
That's how a competent military would be doing things, but ours is far from that.
It's gonna leave a huge demographic hole, in both countries.
Anonymous John Wilder said...
It's gonna leave a huge demographic hole, in both countries.
Good time to buy stocks in the Mail Order Bride business. :P
-Grey Fox
Meanwhile, several weeks ago Ukraine accidentally admitted to having lost over 1,126,000 men and women. Yes, they're sending women to the front now. That's how you can tell they're "winning".
And how many of those are combat losses, vs. civilians being shelled and rocketed in their apartments since 2022?
Nobody's ever questioned Russia's ability to commit atrocities and kill millions.
They're pretty much the silver medal winners in that sport, going back more than a century.
Seems Simplus has posted Estonian MoD and American think tank reports on Ukraine.
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/breaking-down-thinktank-lands-latest
Sounds like the defeated, depleted and crippled Russians are pretty healthy threat (Ahem)
ASSUMING the Russians really want to eat up NATO.
Amazing what the SPAWN of the Kagans will post in a think tank.
Snip:
As many know, ISW (Institute for the Study of War) is a DC-based neocon cutout run by Kimberly Kagan, sister-in-law to PNAC neocon Robert Kagan, husband to Victoria Nuland. In fact you can see the report itself is undersigned by Robert’s brother, Frederick W. Kagan as well.
And Aesop, speaking plainly what military hasn't done atrocities? Let's ponder Gaza, Hiroshima and such.
It's only an atrocity if you lose, eh?
Explain how Hiroshima was an atrocity.
Those arguments have been beaten to death before you were born, and they still hold no water.
And Russia hasn't outright lost anything since 1905 (unless we want to count their unfortunate adventurism into Afghanistan, soon to be surpassed in Ukraine), yet they're still the silver medal holder of all time for number of population killed.
Mostly their own, and with a healthy slug of Ukrainians from before the 1940s thrown in.
Hence the notable lack of enthusiasm there for a return to Russia's tender embrace.
Based on their performance in Ukraine in the last 22 months, Russia's armed farces would have a serious problem just taking on Poland, let alone all of NATO.
Putin's megalomania has set their defense rebuilding back 25 years in less months than that, and they go backwards approximately another year for every month Russia's idiocy continues.
It's not 1980 there anymore, nor even 1990.
They were at a blazing 10% of their Cold War peak strength, until 2022.
Now they'd be overmatched by the Texas National Guard.
Which is why, once panic sets in, things in such a contest would go all canned sunshine rather rapidly, and also why the odds of anyone on either side volunteering to play stands at about 0%.
Russia happily dumped metric shit-tons of materiel into both North Korea and North Vietnam when it was rather harshly inconvenient to us.
Now the shoe's on the other foot, and it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of pariahs.
Why not just go enjoy Christmas, and leave things alone for awhile, instead of stirring a pot that's already gone cold for the Russiaphiles?
here (and more precisely, when) are you pulling my supposed quote from...?
Just asking for context.
I owe you an apology. Wrong commenter, not you.
As to the Houthi, indicatications are Iran is providing the necessary intel and has a ship stationed appropriately. Sink by any covert means of choice and it would degrade the Houthi operations greatly. A repeat of the USS Cole incident comes to mind, just a different target.
Hope one and all have a great Christmas.
@Aesop
How is pointing out that stopping an attack usually costs more than the attack itself "apples to oranges"? The only difference of note is that armor requires one to take a hit while intercepting missiles means one doesn't.
Yes, the price differences are mathematically dramatic. Doesn't make it stupid unless a cheaper alternative exists. If you were talking about cheaper alternatives, then you'd have a stronger argument. But given the choice between letting the other team blow up or damage our (very limited) supply of stuff versus not, it's not so stupid anymore. You can spend $500.000+ on a heavier, slower, less fuel-efficient ship that has to take every attack on the nose (mandating expensive repairs), or you can spend $500,000 on a missile that allows you to keep your (very limited) supplies intact.
You think a $4,000 drone/missile is "garage tech"??? How many people do you know who can build anti-ship missiles in their garage? Might as well try to build fighter jets in rural Afghanistan. The garage tech spam is $100 apiece, not $4,000. And $100 rockets don't threaten our ships; hell, the Palestinians can barely hit static land targets in Israel.
No argument on the stockpiles bit. Honestly, the only way to fix that is to set up permanent funds like Alaska has, and use passive income to cover the hundreds of billions (possibly trillions) of dollars storage on that scale would cost.
There are 2 good reasons to use the missiles now. 1) They have an expiration date. Missiles have issues with degrading, and it's less hassle to use them up and buy new ones than to try and repair/retrofit existing designs. 2) Live-fire practice. Anyone with half a brain is studying offensive drone/rocket attacks and their countermeasures. The field is not static; it is constantly changing. For the cost of near-expiration missiles (and freeing up storage space) we get to keep abreast of developments instead of falling behind.
The Navy has been studying the Falklands War since 1983. Everything they're doing in the Red Sea is based on that, and testing newer methods to make sure they don't suffer the same fate in the future. Like CIWS: the point of it being on the ship in the first place is to rapidly engage such targets. Computer-controlled autocannons can aim faster than a guy aiming with his fingers, and the only way to beat it is for the opponent to time their strikes with equal computer precision (something garage tech Houthis cannot reliably do). A difference of one or 2 seconds is plenty of time for a targeting system that acquires targets at the speed of light.
Jane, you ignorant slut.
Evidently you haven't figured out yet that the missiles being intercepted overwhelmingly aren't and haven't been aimed at US warships, nor even US-flagged vessels.
If US warships or civilian vessels being attacked were the case, that would be open-and-shut casus belli, and the solution there would be a couple of B-2s or B-52s with a shit-ton of iron bombs apiece, rendering the entire Houthi-occupied areas into pre-Cambrian rubble, followed by as many carrier-launched alpha strikes as it took to return their lands to territory inhabitable only by goats and scorpions.
It would take about 20 minutes, one time, and never need repeating.
So instead, we're busily expending critically scarce multi-million$$ missile inventory in an act of extravagantly stupid do-gooderism that's both economically idiotic, and militarily retarded.
Which is clearly news where you sit. How sad for you.
Bone up: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2023/11/10/what-are-the-missiles-the-houthis-have-fired-at-israel/?sh=7a703be33c07
When you catch far enough up to current events to actually have some idea WTF you're talking about, to the point you can even tell what's actually occurring, you go right ahead and jump in with your opinion. Try to make it a better-informed one.
In the ridiculously few times any action is taken against anyone's warship, self-defense is always appropriate. Even in that case, you still don't expend multi-million dollar missiles to defend against garage-tech. It's like launching nuclear-armed ICBMs to shoot down a spy balloon. Even if it works, you'd still be an idiot for doing it.
Burning up scarce fleet defenses to white knight in conflicts we're too squeamish and skittish to intervene in properly is simply the same jackassical military thinking that left our entire military leaving Afghanistan overnight, in their underpants, and getting our own people killed in the process.
The solution to the Houthi problem isn't expending the magazines of destroyers, it's blowing them off the map, followed by letting Iran know they're about to enter a new phase of pariah status if one more non-state actor under their sponsorship isn't wrangled under control in about 0.2 seconds.
If they can't figure out what the diplomatic phrase "grave response" means, the mushroom clouds from JDAMs dropping on all your government buildings at 3AM is usually quite the eye-opener. They've been aching for this since 1979, and the bill ought to come due in a most profound way.
The total number of tears shed by other governments in the region if we Saddamed their entire misbegotten regime could be counted on your fingers, and they'd spend the next 40 years fighting to get back to where they were five minutes before it began, and losing, to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, the Kurds, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, all happy to take a piece of Iran as a souvenir.
Perhaps that exact lesson would be instructive for other countries as well.
I know that this post is aging, but I just saw this over at The Drive, and thought it might be of interest for those of us who aren't totally drunk on Putin's cheap a$$ vodka:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/massive-fireball-rises-over-crimean-port
This war isn't over yet, as much as the low info types may think it is...
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