85yo King Harald goes to NATO’s northern border, walks through a snow shower to have lunch with the troops in their canteen, King Crab on the menu.
He notices a few changes since he was last at the border in 1969. ( He was also at the inauguration of FDR, for his fourth term as President, when he and his mother and sisters were in exile after escaping the Nazis on a US warship)
Meanwhile , the Norwegian Defence Minister inspects the border on a snowmobile)
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I hope someone came to help that guy get out of what is left of that tank.
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Best not to get your hopes up sadly
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For some reason this guys tweets won’t embed. Link below.
https://twitter.com/raging545/status/1635969234898505731
BTR-4E Bucephalus 8x8 wheeled IFV
Latest War on the Rocks podcast highlights.
Ukraine is in the middle of a mobilisation conscription wave. They are building very large motorised forces. These units have single types of equipment. One will have Bradleys. One CB90s. One Marders.
The west will dig deep into ammunition reserves to give Ukraine the best chance at an offensive. Many countries left their ammunition investments too late, so US will need to push deep into their reserves.
Offensive will be more like Kherson, nibbling away at the front, rather than the Kharkiv lightning push.
Kharkiv ran out of steam because of a lack of bridging equipment. Only one mobile bridge supplied the forces, which had been captured from Russia. Kherson allowed the Russians to leave intact because of a lack of mine clearing gear. Ukraine couldn’t push forward quickly as the minefields kept slowing them down.
Drone recon started the war at the unit level. As the bulk of NATO trained mission command style front line officers have been killed or promoted, retired or reserve officers have replaced them. These tend to use Soviet style micromanagement command. Much of the unit drone recon is pulled up to battalion level.
Ukraine is losing quality in Bakhmut. They have plenty of manpower. The challenge is to build a quality force, to have enough time to train skills in order to succeed in attack. NATO should have scaled up training earlier.
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Very interesting summary.
Sounds plausible that despite insufficient modern tanks but with lots of assault boats and infantry fighting vehicles, large “motorized” forces with sufficient ammunition and auxiliary equipment could mount offensives that “nibble” the front quite effectively.
I would see a similar role for drone operators moving with such forces as for those moving with heavier tank forces. Still need dense drone coverage for screening to move faster than dismounted screening infantry and to extend range further by laser guidance. Big limitation would be not having enough of extended range tank capability to fire at extended range while actually moving.
So I am particularly interested in this paragraph:
I believe dense drone coverage would need to be pulled up to battalion level or higher and at the same time directly linked to individual vehicle/squad/fire team level. Something like that looks to me like it was happening with dense coverage at Bakhmut and would I think be necessary for motorized/mechanized infantry brigades both land and amphibious.
So I would be very interested in any details of the “micromanagement” issues that arose from pulling drones up to battalion level - both links elsewhere and timestamps to start at in link to podcast.
L8R gone
On that happy note I will relax about getting lots of sleep before considering whether it is necessary to respond to other comments 
gone
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Around 21:00 onwards hits the drones and the types of leadership. There’s no set way that Ukraine uses drones, it all depends on the personality and training doctrine of the leader of a specific unit. That fits with what I’ve seen, where Ukraine has organically grown these capabilities in multiple ways by different units in parallel across the line of conflict. A different interview with a drone operator said they don’t get opportunities to share techniques with other units as they are so focused on their specific battlefield work.
Whole interview is 30min, recommend the lot.
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That absolutely fits with the narrative of “make Russia/USSR great again” disguised with “unifying the slavic ppl” or the more disingenuous one of “getting rid of NAZIs”
But when you talk about preconceptions or assumptions, you have to take into account the poor understanding of the situation and factors at play that gave the different intelligence and security services, and Putin the idea that this operation was going to be a walk in the park - call it ignorance or delusion, which they still have not given up on, that keeps them in the current course; now more and more backed into a corner with their only chance for survival is some sort of event where they can claim some accomplishment; thus, continuing on this course of self destruction in the hopes that they can survive longer than the West’s resolve IOT find that exit point.
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probably as add on interface. Such modifications were done to carry and launch the HARM missiles already.
Not only that but able to sustain the advance.
in other news
or the heated border dispute between Canada and Denmark on Hans Island where the shots fired meant leaving a bottle of whiskey or schnapps and replacing each others flags.
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Why are Canadians always so bloody nice?
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This is a pretty funny summary
https://twitter.com/saintjavelin/status/1636075550904131586/mediaviewer
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Mud
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