Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
The oldest sure fact in any war, is you can replace equipment, you can't replace men at the rate that you use them.
IIRC the estimate is that the Ukrainian military is losing 200 or more people a day, so roughly 6000 a month, 72000 a year. in 2021 they had roughly 200,000 men and woman in their full time military and 900,000 in their reserves.
Right now between bringing in foreign fighters or reservists to fight, they're bringing in and probably rushing soldiers to the front. Those types die quicker.
But they are being gutted.
I mean Russian casualties are huge, we know that, but the Russians have gone away from their original tactics, and they're sitting back and pounding everything into dust and then sending their troops in. Russia seems to have the ammunition stock piles to do that. But also the Russian Military is large enough to sustain those losses longer.
The only way to really counter that is to force the Russian's to fight on multiple fronts or to be forced to stage to fight on multiple fronts which would slow down their ability to re-enforce what's in the Ukraine. But that's not likely to happen.
I think at some point as this war gets longer and longer that Ukraine is going to have to give up the idea of an actual military confrontation and go to a more asymmetrical war.
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On the first bolded part, that's not accurate, and only really applies to professional armies, not the kind of armies that are going at it in Ukraine right now.
Russia has been losing a ton of modern equipment it can't really replace, it's one reason why they've changed tactics, the situation was unsustainable. They have huge stockpiles of soviet era equipment, but not modern, and with the sanctions their ability to build new modern weapons is unknown and likely greatly hampered.
Same really goes for Ukraine, they're a lot shorter on heavy equipment than in men. It's one reason why UA is losing so many men, they have to be more careful with their heavy equipment because they don't have enough and they don't know when and where they'll get more.
On the second bolded part, it's still very unclear to what extent Russia can actually replace men long term. Their army is larger on paper, but many of those troops are very low quality or the wrong type to send to Ukraine. Huge amounts of Russian forces are also internal security forces or tied to other borders. We've already seen a wave of burnings in Russian recruitment offices, and technically speaking Russia's leadersship is not legally allowed to send soldiers in mandatory service into Ukraine, an issue which might come to a head at some point.
Based on the best predictions I've seen, this time in the war is when Russia was kind of supposed to have the biggest advantage (after the initial surprise which they wasted). The quality of equipment on the Ukrainian side is to some extent going up as they're getting supplied from the west, while it's going down on the Russian side as they're more and more reliant on their Soviet stockpile. (The actual size of which is unknown to outsiders, but could be only a few percentage points of what they are on paper.) The advantage in trained personnel is shrinking if not vanishing over time, as Ukrainian troops are constantly gaining combat experience.
Russia's logistical issues are also at their lowest during the summer.
As far as we know, it's quite possible this period is the high point for Russia, before things start turning for the worse again.
On the third point, the one prediction that's been most consistently wrong in this war are predictions of the superiority of the Russian army in comparison to the Ukrainian army. We really don't know if that's at all true or not.
Another issue of course is that Putin seems to have all but disappeared from the public (Pointman could perhaps elaborate on this?). It's also obvious that the longer the war goes on, the harder it is to keep the Russian public in the dark over what's going on.