Big serge substack

It is probably safe to say that the current week Juneis shaping up to be one of the most significant of the entire Russo-Ukrainian War. On Monday, big serge substack, all eyes were on the Ukrainian Armed Forces and their much anticipated summer counteroffensive, which began with a series of battallion level attacks across the breadth of the theater.

In the last 72 hours or so, the pro-Russian side of the internet has been sent into an tailspin of panic over a new Ukrainian counteroffensive which is currently being launched in the Kharkov region, with the intention of compromising the Russian army grouping at Izyum. The panic was triggered by claims that Ukraine was advancing unopposed, encircling - or perhaps even capturing - the city of Balakliya - and on the verge of cutting off supply lines to Izyum. A modest city with a prewar population of perhaps 50, people, Izyum was always slated to be a focal point in this war, due to its location at a critical intersection. The topography of northeastern Ukraine is dominated by a few critically important features which determine patterns of movement. The region is furthermore shaped by the Severodonetsk River - alternatively called simply the Donets from which the Donbas, or Donets Basin, draws its name - which snakes lazily around the plain. Izyum is a strategically crucial city because it is where the highway crosses the river; as an added cherry on top, the Oskil River - a major tributary of the Donets - confluences with the Donets less than five miles to the east of Izyum, meaning the city essentially sits directly on the intersection of all the most important geographic features of the region. A highly simplified map of the area looks like this:.

Big serge substack

As the calendar barrels into another year and we tick away the days of February, notable anniversaries are marked off in sequence. The nature of the war changed dramatically after a kinetic and mobile opening phase. With the collapse of the negotiation process whether thanks to Boris Johnson or not , it became clear that the only way out of the conflict would be through the strategic defeat of one party by the other. Thanks to a pipeline of western support in the form of material, financial aid, and ISR and targeting assistance which allowed Ukraine to transcend its rapidly evaporating indigenous war economy, it became clear that this would be a war of industrial attrition, rather than rapid maneuver and annihilation. Russia began to mobilize resources for this sort of attritional war in the Autumn of , and since then the war has attained its present quality - that of a firepower intensive but relatively static positional struggle. The nature of this attritional-positional war lends itself to analytic ambiguity, because it denies the most attractive and obvious signs of victory and defeat in large territorial changes. Instead, a whole host of anecdotal, small scale positional analysis, and foggy data has to suffice, and this can be easily misconstrued or misunderstood. This suggests that Russia is winning meaningless, pyrrhic victories which will lead to its exhaustion, so long as Ukraine receives everything it asks for from the west. At the same time, the Z-sphere points to these same battles as evidence that Ukraine can no longer hold even its most heavily defended fortress cities. This is the way of such an attritional conflict, which burdens armies with cumulative and constant stressors in a test of their recuperative powers. Wear and tear and the raging of the waters will erode and burden the dike until it bursts. And then the deluge comes. The signature operational development of is at this point clearly the complete Russian capture of Avdiivka.

A recent study from two German analysts at the European Council on Foreign Relations estimated that, in the optimist scenario, the USA and Europe can supply Ukraine with approximately 1.

Check this out me korosho drugies: bigserge. This guy is fucking hilarious. Kyive was a trap. Kharkiv was a trap. Lyman was a trap. Kherson is a trap. He never gives up!

The Phalanx CIWS SEE-wiz is an automated gun-based close-in weapon system to defend military watercraft automatically against incoming threats such as aircraft, missiles, and small boats. This is essentially the ships last layer of defense against any incoming attacks. A smart commenter asks the right question, which leads to this exchange:. What I don't get is why aren't the Houthis shooting salvos? Single missiles have very little chances of success. Just a matter of time before we lose a ship. This is more like pot shots. A Houthi missile recently put a US destroyer's close-in weapons system to the test, a report said.

Big serge substack

Military history writer Big Serge has published an excellent essay that explains much of what has puzzled observers of the conflict in Ukraine—why does Russia appear to be hanging back, what happened to that much touted offensive, and some other matters as well. First, however, here are some basic points that will serve as guide posts. Big Serge is an amazing commentator. For anyone else interested in the dynamics of force generation in modern armies, I'd like to suggest writings from the 's, such as John Dickinson's "The Making of an Army," for American parallels. Essentially, the US Army had the same problem as the Russians in , when the law and Constitutional interpretation decreed that the National Guard could not be sent out of United States Territory, which created a dilemma for planners on how to use it as an effective reserve or nucleus for a large volunteer army. Putin apparently either does not want to do something similar or lacks the legislative support to pass a law permitting the outright drafting of its mobilized reservists into its regular army formations. It's a fascinating inversion of the Russo-Soviet mobilization system that existed in the last century, which finds the Russian military in similar straights to the dilemma's US law placed on US Army planners in the lead up to WWI.

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Russia conducts regular troop rotations , while Ukrainian forces remain on the line due to the lack of replacements. If a given BTG is composed of both contract soldiers and conscripts at any given time, deployment outside the Russian Federation for the unit as a whole will be problematic. Copy link. Downstream effects are those of the enormous flooding which is currently taking place. Through May of this year, there were fewer than 9, recorded civilian deaths in Ukraine including both Ukrainian and Russian controlled territories. In fact, Avdiivka is clearly a locale with great operational significance. Meanwhile, continued Russian pressure on the northern front via a slow squeeze on the city of Kupyansk, at the top of the Oskil line as well as operations towards Lyman on the Zherebets axis provide a base of progress towards the other operational perquisite for Kramatorsk, which is the Russian recapture of the north bank of the Donets River, up to the confluence of the Oskil at Izyum. This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. What matters for our purposes, however, is the military implications. The operation at Avdiivka was a high intensity, four month battle. More generally, however, BTGs are fragile units, by which we mean relatively low losses in infantry or tanks make them unsuitable for further combat tasks.

With the Russo-Ukrainian War now rolling on into its seventh month, I thought this might be as good a time as any to put together a more extensive analysis than the twitter format allows. What follows will be my assessment of what exactly the Russian Armed Forces have achieved, why they made specific operational choices, and the general shape of the battlefield today.

Its capture creates space for Russia to begin a multi-pronged advance on next-phase Ukrainian strongholds like Konstantinivka and Pokrovsk more on that later and pushes Ukrainian artillery away from Donetsk. But it's to be feared that his patience has limits, and will eventually reach them. Having admitted that it could only have been the Ukraine that had blown up the dam even if it may have been done with the help of some twisted Western service - British, of course , I had come to the same conclusion as you: the Ukrainians and their allies are completely losing it, especially as they've also just blown up an ammonia pipeline. Thats my trolling alter ego, cruelly suppressed by dk flag policy. However, this plan is foundering on three separate rocks: 1 industry has been much slower to ramp up than expected; 2 even the expanded production targets are too low to win the war for Ukraine ; and 3 even if adequate ammunition could be procured, Ukraine would quickly run into problems with barrel availability. All this is to say, the claim that Russia yet again suffered catastrophic losses in Avdiivka is simply not supported. Furthermore, Ukrainian sources on the ground emphasized that the Russian assault in Avdiivka was quite certainly not a mere function of mass, and noted effective Russian small unit tactics with a powerful fire support. This is the way of such an attritional conflict, which burdens armies with cumulative and constant stressors in a test of their recuperative powers. It is probably safe to say that the current week June , is shaping up to be one of the most significant of the entire Russo-Ukrainian War. Please Remain Calm.