Comments by "Tim Trewyn" (@timtrewyn453) on "Ukraine's Alternate Win Condition: Inside the Gamble on the War of Attrition" video.

Good point. Success in the counter-battery fight also reduces Ukrainian casualties due to Russian artillery.
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You're right. And Ukraine absolutely has to continue to do this or accept territorial loss.
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@buckshot704 Putin said F16s to Ukraine "simply prolongs the conflict". Given his words are carefully chosen, he nevertheless admits F16s will have an effect, that is, prolonging the conflict. Putin's considered words. As NATO air forces receive F-35s, they can turn over more F16s to Ukraine. That's a multi-year scenario of 500 and 1000lb glide bombs falling on Russian positions. See Sevastopol dry dock. Granted, Ukraine will keep losing apartment buildings, supermarkets, grain silos, and power plants.
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Ukraine needs to target the back shooters in the second line of defense. The Russians in front are often ready to lay down arms.
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Yeah. Just fire smoke shells and see if the Russians waste ammunition on saturating bombardment, which might clear a few mines in the process. A productive use of the fog of war.
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@bwise7739 In addition, the Russian's are seeing that maintaining a fleet at Sevastopol is increasingly difficult. They need to establish a much larger and probably impractical radius of control and defense around that port to operate their fleet out of that facility. Ukraine might be able to make Sevastopol less relevant to the Russian navy.
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Ukraine could probably use ATACMS almost right away, like they pretty much used HIMARS with a short training period. The other systems require setting up a pretty serious support system.
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It is one thing to have a loaded rifle. It is another thing to aim it. Marksmanship conserves ammunition. Saturation bombardment is wasteful and wears out tubes. Perun on YouTube has a recent piece on Russian war production. Russia can sustain a tempo. Russia cannot sustain their recent tempo in Ukraine. This is consistent with their defensive, rather than offensive posture at this time. Russia needs to make a choice about what Ukrainian land it can put out of Ukraine's ability to recover. They cannot keep hanging on to what they currently occupy. Their best prospects are in the Donbas. The geography of Crimea is difficult for Russia. The land bridge and the Kerch bridge are evidence of that difficulty.
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Superb!
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@iMalyshka Blowing up the dam on the Dnipro to the detriment of Crimean agriculture does not seem reserved to me.
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Kim should see an opportunity for his best forces to rotate in and gain combat experience. This could tax Ukraine and tip local battles to the Russians. Kim can lean on his nuclear shield if the US and SK try to poke Kim's paranoia with a military exercise. The NK troop threat should not be minimized, but I doubt Kim will send big numbers. All the more reason to go after the Russian rail system and air mobility assets.
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It is something of an ideal time for other border nations to bargain for benefits from Russia.
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Good point.
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Somebody above commented that Russian artillery is moving closer to the front because many of its artillery tubes have distorted due to over firing. This puts Russian artillery in range of more Ukrainian drones. Cluster munitions follow. Markmanship matters.
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See JSOW munition that F-16 can carry. 100lb 155mm shells are just so-so on trenches. 500lb glide bombs are another matter.
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The problem with the land bridge is that there is only so much depth for stationing air defense. Once Ukraine has a larger air force it can conduct SEAD to open an area of the land bridge to air strikes. Allies used aircraft guns in WWII on locomotives and trucks. The method can still work as long as the SEAD thins out the air defense. It is true that the presence of MANPADs limits aircraft to one fast strafing run on targets.
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That argument would have more weight if the Republicans had taken the US Senate in 2022. They barely took the House. The Republican front runner is no Eisenhower or Reagan either. And those two would probably crank up aid to fight the "evil empire". Today's Republican Party sounds like it has a fringe on the Russian payroll that is also secured with "kompromat." The big win for America First here is that the NATO countries, after being pleaded to by successive American administrations, are finally increasing their defense budgets so they can defend themselves with less reliance on us, some day at least. US oil and gas sales to Europe are also up. If America backs off from Europe, then Germany will soon be buying oil and gas from Russia at market prices again.
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There's a difference between ethnicity and jurisdiction. There are over 190 ethnic groups in Russia. Do they all deserve their own sovereign nation? I am quite confident that Mr. Putin would say that they do not, they are under Russian jurisdiction.
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I think they are trying to show the Russians that Crimea is not the great strategic possession they though it was. Nice beaches though, but Sochi is nice, too.
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Another Bakhmut. Maybe Putin needs a win before the March election.
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I can't think of a worse place for the US and NATO to logistically sustain a military presence than Afghanistan. Maybe Nepal. A slice of aid dollars for Pakistan kept finding its way to the Taliban. Note financial difficulties in Pakistan after US pulled out and the money got shut off.
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@iMalyshka Russian superiority would have won this war by now. The West prudently overestimates Russian capabilities. The result is deterrence of Russian attacks on NATO. Russia is superior when it comes to spying on its enemies, Ukraine perhaps being a recent exception. However, the FSB head was having trouble getting his message out in the big pre-war meeting probably because he did know that Ukraine could put up a fight. Putin would have none of it. He was going in, whatever the FSB said, and he was going to tee up the FSB for blame along with all the others in the room regardless of their situational awareness. The US reaction to Russian opaqueness is the world's largest defense budget.
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If ATACMS are simply ballistic I suspect many will get shot down. They need to have whatever features HIMARS has to evade Russian AD. I wonder if this has been part of the hesitancy to deliver them. If anybody can find a role for ATACMS, it's probably the Ukrainians.
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World's finest riot police. Can't touch that.
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@RandomIdiotGS Even the United States is limited in the number of new recruits it can provide quality training for at a given time. I can't imagine Ukraine doing any better than 10k new troops per month. It probably is not half of that. They have to farm out training to NATO countries, who probably do not have large surpluses of trainers. It's important to the morale of the Ukrainian people that they feel their young people are getting properly trained before being put into battle.
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Trump's prospects have not improved. He lost a slice of anti-vaxxers to COVID, and that is still taking a toll on his voting base. He's lost independents that cannot look the other way from his legal problems. In 2022 the Republicans did not keep the US Senate, and they barely won the House. The American Solidarity Party is pro-life and took 4000 votes from Trump in Wisconsin in 2020. That party is likely to get more pro-life votes in 2024 due to alienation from Trump's conduct. Trump will lose Georgia again. Trump will lose Wisconsin again. The tedious multi-month-long election audit in Arizona found Biden's vote count to be higher than earlier reported. Conventional Republicans cannot figure out a way to put a winner on the ballot. Trump has mesmerized enough of the electorate to get nominated again, but I don't see what he has done to improve his prospects in the States he lost in 2020. But go ahead, make your case. Voter suppression?
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Superb! Truly recruitment has been wildly successful.
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What is the use of the world's largest nuclear arsenal if it does not deter a NATO invasion of Russia? How are nations on the Russian border supposed to feel?
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NATO was in Afghanistan for 20 years. There are comparatively stronger cultural and family ties between NATO countries and Ukraine. I have Ukrainian guests. I haven't had Afghan guests, though I am open to that. I think the West is cautious because it is managing a conflict with a nuclear power. This is more like Cold War persistence against the Soviets. The West came out well in that test of mental strength.
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We are seeing larger warheads and cluster warheads having an impact, e.g. dry dock in Sevastopol. 155mm shells weigh about 100lbs. While certainly not pleasant, personnel in a trench line can survive bombardment by this class of ammunition. The 500lb, 1000lb, and 2000lb munitions that can be delivered by F16s, often in the form of stand-off glide bombs with inertial guidance, are another matter. Russia is issuing warnings about F16s because they see a genuine threat. It makes sense to me that Ukraine is not going to push on infantry assaults now if it is just a few months away from the capability to package SEAD and heavy munition air strikes on Russian defenses. The mud is irrelevant, in fact it suppresses any Russian counterattack. Ukraine can rotate and rest its troops while its larger air force pounds Russian defenses. Will F-16s get shot down? Yes. But F-35s will continue to cycle into NATO and NATO F-16s can then cycle into Ukraine. 155mm should be saved for what it is appropriate for. If the southern Russian defense has 200,000 personnel, and if that army collapses when half of those personnel become casualties that cannot return to the fight, then it still takes 400 days for Ukraine to attrit that 100,000 at an average of 250 casualties per day. And it is somewhat doubtful that Ukraine achieves that average. Russia will probably get better with time at minimizing defensive casualties, even with 1000lb bombs falling on them. If they are not being assaulted by infantry, then they just stay spread out over the defensive lines while their air force and air defense learns how to take out F16s. Taking out Russian rail and road links to its forces in Ukraine is essential. If Russia can maintain its logistics, then it can maintain its bombardment of Ukrainian positions and infrastructure and it will be the UAF that collapses. Ukraine does not have to establish air superiority to drive out Russian forces. It does need the air power to SEAD and open windows of opportunity to strike targets with heavy bombs anywhere in or near Ukraine. Those targets need to include the Russian rail system near as well as within Ukraine, or Russia will probably be able to sustain its occupation.
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The West held out longer than the Soviets. History does not necessarily repeat, but I am not sure that contemporary Russian leadership is much different from the Soviet. What the West has seen is that Russia and China use trade to build up their militaries to take more territory. I think that lesson from history might be fixed in a new way now.
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See recent Perun. Russia can sustain some level of long-term conflict, but probably not as much as it is trying to do now.
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And don't forget the Ukrainian threat to attack Russian electric power facilities if Russia starts that up again this coming winter. Crimea would probably a target in that respect, just when folks up north wanted a vacation down south.
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Russian morale is already at bottom. What Ukraine needs to do is take out the psychopathic (the "strong") back shooters in the second line of defense and drop leaflets or use speaker drones on the neurotypicals (the "weak") in the front lines. The front will surrender once they know the psychos behind them are dead. They'll be some of the best friends Ukraine will have in Russia, if they have to go back there. Do enough of this and that region of the Russian defense has no motive to fight.
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Drones fly right over the mud. Glide bombs do, too.
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