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If you have data that reliably attributes Russian casualties to the weapon systems causing them, I'd love to see it. I know that Twitter and Tiktok are chock full of Ukrainian "drone drop" videos but again that is part of the information operations and shouldn't be taken as an accurate reflection of the battlespace writ large. That said....if they were killing >500 Russians daily with drones, which almost all have recordable video footage, we should be seeing maybe 10x as much footage as is getting released.
One work-around would be to find the most appropriate weapon system that IS in the model and see if it could cover FPV drones. I think QJM aggregates weapons systems but goes down to the squad level, so maybe it accounts for specialized infantry tasks like snipers. Insert a weapon into the model that is a "sniper" but with a 10km effective range. Then run the numbers again. That still ignores the effects of Russian EW but hey...this is an iterative process.
In addition a sniper is a bad analogy. The drone warhead is at least a hand-grenade useful against hard targets. A better analogy would be a guided light artillery shell if such exists in models.
If it was so simple no war would ever be fought since the losing side would just decide it's not worth the fight. It was clear Japan and Germany would lose the war the moment the USA entered, yet they fought on for four more years.
Part of the problem is incorrect assessments of the balance of power, combined with stubbornness. Both the Germans and the Japanese assessed that their martial spirit would enable them to overcome their industrially-superior adversaries. Both were wrong. Also militaries the world over have a culture of stoicism under conditions of adversity. At the tactical level it sometimes means you can turn around what appears to be an unwinnable situation. I'd have to dig to see where this has reliably worked at the strategic level. My initial thought is "it doesn't, but military officers who have spent their entire adult lives inculcated to act otherwise will never acknowledge that".
Look at some of the ridiculous propaganda that was written at the start of Ukraine's 2023 summer offensive: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/09/british-made-tan...
There's been interviews where Ukrainian troops said "we thought the Russians would just run away after the first day of seeing our Leopards".
Both sides in this conflict have underestimated each other in different ways, but industrial attritional warfare is the great equalizer: it doesn't matter what men THINK will lead to victory if enough steel is thrown in the other guy's direction to remove all subjectivity.
Also the Ukrainians are fighting for survival from the top of the country to the bottom (motivation makes a big difference). For the other side, the view at the top is very different from the view of those going into the fight (often unwillingly) at the bottom.
>>>Also the Ukrainians are fighting for survival from the top of the country to the bottom (motivation makes a big difference). For the other side, the view at the top is very different from the view of those going into the fight (often unwillingly) at the bottom.
Do you think the Ukrainians aren't suffering from serious motivation problems? Regular reports of men drowning in freezing rivers trying to cross into Romania. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men in hiding from the roving bands of "mobilizers". [1][2][3] The Russians, by contrast, are mostly there because they are from impoverished regions of Siberia and the enlistment bonuses are gigantic.[4] Russia is basically depopulating its ethnic minorities from Siberia to fuel its war machine. For a country that has its very survival on the line, Ukraine has a TON of men who aren't picking up rifles.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-faces-an-acute-manpo...
[2] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/draft-dodgers-are-underm...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-doubles-signing-b...
In WWII, Soviet Union suffered 7.9M combat dead and dead/incapacitated ratio was way softer back then simply because healthcare was on the lower level - it was 80 years ago. Meaning, for each dead there are more incapacitated today simply because severely wounded people (with heavy concussions, explosive amputaions, multiple fractures and shrapnel, infections), mostly died in WWII and now they survive so don't add to the dead statistics - but are useless for warfare later.
Soviet Union had 190M people in 1941 and Russia has 145M, plus in 1940, 6050K kids were born in the USSR and in Russia today, barely 1200K are born each year. So availability of manpower is about 75% of 1941 and rate of replacement is only 1/5 as high.
In 1945, Soviet Union was a country of invalids and widows. It utterly lacked any mobilisation capacity - 1946 conscripts served for 5-7 years in peacetime army because there was no one to replace them (my grandfather was conscripted in 1947 and served till 1953 while there was no war going on).
Easy to see that approximately 3, or max 4 million combat dead (1/2 to 2/3 the share of population) will bring Russia to the same position, considering lower replacement rate of manpower, and lower share of young population.
What is the fraction of those that need to be killed for Putin to see it's going nowhere? My bet is with 1 million. Losing 1 million dead before Ukraine falls means he will not be able to do much else after it does, putting him in a bind. It will be enough for even the most mindless dictator to stop.
Current western position is that they don’t want Russia to win, but also don’t want to provide the level of support that would stop Russia - for example take 1,000 Abram’s tanks out of storage and give them to Ukraine. Obviously this is hypocrisy.
We are on the road to failure, and yet here you are, accusing anyone that point out the obvious of working for the enemy. Deaf to feedback and in denial of reality.
That’s how you get giant failures like Afghanistan and Vietnam.
The political environment is so toxic that anyone who points out any flaw or bad news regarding the NATO strategy is somehow labeled a Putin apologist. It's a horrible state of affairs. You cannot gaslight your own population into a war victory, it's doesn't work like that.
The person who posted the big wall of text that seems plausible superficially said a bunch of really dumb or dishonest things. At best they're disingenuous, they're doing things like averaging advancements per day, in some places lines literally aren't moving and others people are advancing unopposed, averaging some things is fundamentally dishonest or a fundamental misunderstanding. There are other issues with their comment, but these are all the kinds of mistakes and an informed person participating in honest discourse doesn't make.
People arguing in bad faith need to be called out not tolerated.
1. I am incorrectly interpreting the models because I am assuming aggregate/averaged rates of advance across a very large (~1000km) frontage. Or:
2. The models are incorrect if they expect rates of advance averaged across such a large front to produce reliably realistic results.
The task, then, is for me to dig back through the specifics of the models (I've got Dupuy's books and a couple of publications and related DoD-internal wargaming rulesets based on Relative Combat Power Analysis) to see if they articulate the scale at which they break down. I do recall reading that QJM was used to estimate the outcome of Desert Storm and produced surprisingly accurate results for that campaign. Given that, I don't think it's unreasonable to apply the model to the current stage of the Ukrainian conflict.
In particular you seem critical of the values I suggested for the "rate of advance" variable. I suspect that even if you dropped that value to 0.1km/day or even 0.....the models would still suggest a highly skewed rate of Ukrainian losses due to the lopsided-balance of fires assets in Russia's favor. The point is to get people to do the math themselves, and to get them thinking about the second and third order effects of a country with 1/3 of its attackers manpower pool losing men at a greater-than-equal rate.
As an aside, it's weird to me that a few paragraphs is derided as a "Wall of Text" but I guess it is to a generation who's baseline of social media engagement is mobile phones and Twitter. I developed my habits of internet discourse on places like bbs.stardestroyer.net in the late 90s: everyone was on a desktop, and everyone was expected to write long-form explanations for their positions, preferably with references.
This is how I write many of my posts on HN, twenty years later.
Not the "foreign agents" part; that's your insinuation of what the parent commenter said. But there's an unusual degree commonality to the talking points and flat-out factually wrong narratives that people continually post about this conflict -- such that some of them (like "Ukraine wanted to negotiate, but...") we literally hear several times a day.
It doesn't matter what sources they are uncritically adopting these garbage narratives from. It's just propaganda, straight up, and quite obviously so.
edit: though largely it is.
So until the West starts helping Ukraine for real instead of giving barely enough for Ukraine not ti collapse, I do not see how what Russia is doing is stupid.