Agreed. 50 is “paltry” - it’s just symbolic.  I had even guessed earlier that would be the number.  A few hundred would be meaningful, helping to create enough maneuver battalions to really apply pressure.

One of the replies  

I just want artillery with enough range to destroy the Russian logistics train. Let the Russians fight with no ammo and no food.

lol

You know you did something bad when your actions cause Germany to supply your enemy with heavy armour.

Oryx  (@oryxspioenkop) January 5, 2023

Germany offered to send a Patriot battery to Poland and Poland said you should send it to Ukraine. And then the Germans balked at that. Then fast forward a mouth or so and the US send a battery to Ukraine and now for whatever reason Germany is on board now. Must be overcome with the Christmas spirit.

The answer is "NO."

Bradleys will not be a game changer. There is no infantry fighting vehicle that would be a game changer.  The TOW cannot be fired on the move, the 25mm has some capability, armor is not sufficient against any tank.  If UA tanks beat RU counterparts, Brads are superfluous value added. If RU defending tanks or ATGMs defeat UA tanks, the advance will stop.  There isn't a scenario where the Bradley will be the difference between success and failure.

The technical requirements for maintenance and repair will be a bear.  If we are going to put the Ukrainians through that chaos, then give them what matters:  A game changer would be M1 tanks.  We have over 2000 in long term storage. A better infantry fighting vehicle with the same tank force isn't much of a difference.

IFVs do not, and never have, functioned as a maneuver force independent of armor.  This has been explained before.

This whole thing is stupid. A battalion of state of the art IFVs will be gobbled up. I cant understand why we would send 50 armored vehicles for ground combat to the Ukrainians and send M2s and not M1s.

So Ukraine is getting two Patriot batteries now? Fuck yeah!

And we know those 50 Bradley IFVs are just the tip of the iceberg. First we'll equip a battalion. Then another. Then another. Eventually somewhere down the road they'll end up with enough to equip an entire armored corps. And that is fine by me.

Now they just need some F-16s or F-18s and they'll really be able to get the party started.

They are still using Scooby Doo vans at the front and can’t assault in many areas for lack of armor. Brad would save a lot of lives just from artillery fire let alone direct fire. Ukraine has over a thousand MBTs but precisely 0 modern IFVs to support them. VAB, BTR-4 and armored F550s aren’t the same.

And don’t tell me that shitty IFVs don’t exist without tanks, I know what Stryker Dragoon thinks it’ll be when it grows up! Ha.

Would Strykers be useful to Ukraine?

Further down the tweet it is confirmed that the pic is the French deploying to Romania.

Given the resourcefulness they've shown in this war, hard to think of any surplus equipment they couldn't find a way to use.

Not blaming you Prime, but that particular picture caption is total misinformation; that dude is alive and well, and the setup for the picture was just a style that was popularized a few years ago (fire truck and full crew laid out, aicraft and full equipment, all done in the same fashion).

It was very popular on miltwitter a couple years back. It was just a fun way to show the people and equipment laid out like GI Joes or whatever, with different countries/militaries competing to have bigger and better ones. You can find examples of this being done by a lot of Euro/NATO mil accounts (official ones even).

Everybody's house in Ukraine is going to look like an ARCOMer's basement when this is all over. People will have milsurp blankets in every car trunk, and every dude cutting wood or mowing the lawn will have his "yard work" pairs of faded camo trousers and cutoff shorts.

In Every Modern War, Ukraine Has Been the Big Prize
The Eurasian heartland is the axis of what the great geographer Halford Mackinder called the “World-Island.”

https://archive.fo/nTlwS

With only modest exaggeration, we could call the past 100 years or so the Ukrainian Century, for that country has figured centrally in every great global clash of the modern era.

Ukraine is a strategic prize due to resources and geography. Occupying some of the richest agricultural land anywhere, it produces large shares of the world’s wheat, corn and barley; it accounts for 6% of all calories traded on international food markets. Ukraine is Europe’s second-largest country by geographical size, and overlooks the Black Sea, which links European Russia to the world.

Most important, Ukraine is the hinge connecting what the great geopolitical thinker Halford Mackinder termed the Eurasian Heartland, with its enormous lands, agricultural riches and energy resources, to the economically advanced countries of Europe.

...

“As much as anything, World War I turned on the fate of Ukraine,” the scholar Dominic Lieven wrote. Conquering the area, then part of the Russian empire, was central to Germany’s plans to create a resource-rich Mitteleuropa from the North Sea to the Caucasus. When German armies wrested Ukraine away from a post-revolutionary Russia in 1918, Berlin briefly achieved its Eurasian vision — which crumbled when Germany lost the war on the Western front, thereby undoing its Eastern conquests and allowing Lenin’s Soviet Union to create its own Eurasian empire under Communist rule.

Ukraine again loomed large in Adolf Hitler’s dreams of hegemony. It possessed the “living space” and the foodstuffs that could render Germany impregnable against the continent-sized enemies — the British Empire and America — that Hitler ultimately planned to fight for global primacy.

The Allied victory ensured merely that Ukraine remained subordinated to a totalitarian Soviet empire.

“Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire,” former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski observed in 1994, “but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”

That’s a good guide to understanding why Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his project to restore Moscow’s mastery, beginning with Russia’s meddling in Ukrainian elections in 2004 and culminating in the full-on invasion in February.

Putin targeted Ukraine in hopes of subduing one crucial piece of the post-Soviet landscape, and thereby bringing others, from Belarus to Kazakhstan, into line. A quick Russian victory would have been a testament to the strength and strategic cunning of the world’s autocracies. It would have fundamentally changed the strategic situation in Europe by casting pervasive insecurity from the Black Sea to the Baltic, and left a freshly invigorated Chinese-Russian partnership clearly dominant within Eurasia.

Not much has gone according to plan, and a Ukrainian victory would bring very different consequences. It would make one the world’s leading tyrants look pathetic rather than preeminent. It could create tension in Russia’s partnership with China by forcing an enfeebled Putin to beg for assistance that Beijing would be reluctant to give. It would produce a revitalized Western community with a commanding position against a dangerous but degraded Russia. Once again, a war involving Ukraine will shape the contours of world order.

The war is also a reminder about how core features of geopolitics remain the same, even as so much in the world changes. Geography still matters. Land-hungry tyrants still seek to dominate their surroundings through conquest and murder.

In every generation, optimists hope that the world has left these ugly truths behind. As Ukraine’s experience teaches us, we forget them at our peril.

Anything would be useful, but are they appropriate for this sort of war? No, they aren’t, at least not in a use like the US envisions using them.

BTRs seem to be getting the job done. I don't see why the Stryker wouldn't work with it.

Attached File

Ukrainian music time!

OT - but for those of you like me who rarely venture into GD anymore, I just saw it by chance and wanted to give you a heads up that long time member IHJ passed away.

https://www.ar15.com/forums/General/IronhandJohn-Deceased-/5-2613174/

One of those it’s not ideal but better than nothing deals. Strykers deployed how the US does, with towed artillery and no tanks, would be a far cry from ideal. How we spend $5m a piece on something that’s too heavy to deploy and too light to fight is beyond me.

Russian social media



https://vk.com/wall-36289614_11508





https://vk.com/wall-27532693_3735208

Yeah, that's all I was trying to say. I think it is GREAT that 50 Bradleys will be sent initially, but it's not the operation of a couple battalions worth of vehicles that concerns me, the logistics and training does.

But, I am sure the Ukrainian staff dudes have gotten a good feel for how to integrate new foreign equipment and train their troops, and just how much they can ask of their units before that balance turns unfavorable (dangerous). They proved that during their earlier offensives; even if those objectives were pared-back under NATO influence, they still did a hell of a lot.

But russians don't target civilians, looks just like whaAleppo.. Russia did in aleppo Syria.

Just a few months ago Ukraine was making attacks with Humvees. Being able to back those up with more troops and bigger guns will be great.

They're supposed to have like 3 prototypes.   Sounds like good news, if true, another desperation move.

Greetings Charlie!  

I respectfully disagree.

You are clearly a historian of past tank battles; AWC grad maybe?  Historically, you could be right.  But:

- Ukraine is not fighting the Russian army of 1940.

Ukraine is not even fighting the Russian army.  They are fighting Putin’s army in 2022-2023.

Putin is pure FSB.  Putin replaced the top Russian military planers with FSB goons (just as Putin replaced the corrupt Russian oligarchs with even more corrupt FSB oligarchs).  

The FSB is primarily running this sh*t show, and it shows.  

As for the current “military,” look who Putin favors? :  

- Chechens and Wagner PMC.  Do you think either group are adept tank tacticians?  

The remaining Russian army sees all this, and their heart is not in this fight (with or without tanks).  As a result, look how they deploy their tanks:

- tanks lobbing rounds as indirect fire (with little effect, no surprise)
- hull down in defensive static positions
- tanks sent out without officers, because the officers fled to the safety of the rear areas (and if your CO flees, how dedicated would you be to an advance?).
- Mobiks who had a 1/2 day of training on a T-72 ten years ago are suddenly behind the gun and controls of the T-72s
- Mobiks who have been literally welded inside their tanks to stop them from fleeing
- Mobiks who are increasingly caught playing “radio games” where they drive their tank out of sight, yell into the radio for 15 minutes pretending they are attacking the Ukrainians while just sitting there, and then returning safely to base



The Russians misuse their assets and lose them easily as a result


Not to mention:

- the T-72 has proven to be no match against:

- Javalin
- N-LAW
- Stugna P

And several others.  The T-72 always loses.  And ,

The TOW has a proven record destroying T-72s in Iraq.

Unmotivated Mobiks are no match against people fighting to save their own wives, daughters and homes from the invaders.  Plus,

Western trainers and tacticians are training the Ukrainians.  Notice how reserved the UA has been with their tank assets?  They came out to assault and retake Kherson.  Then they went back into hiding, so as not to fall prey to Russian air power.  They use their armor carefully and correctly.  The Russians: not so much.


Given these new variables, the Bradleys will prevail over the T-72s (and T-62s) Russia is carelessly throwing into this fight.

There will be weeks and months of training, so videos and pics were always likely to come out anyway, and it doesn't make a fundamental (tactical or operational) difference. Especially since a lot of the training is likely going to take place in Germany, where media secrecy like that is frowned upon.

The only small hope that making the announcement had, is that with each succeeding one, Putin realizes he is only getting more fucked with every passing day, and it would be simpler for him to withdraw (but then Putin never cared anyway, and he wouldn't hold anything over which to negotiate).

So we're doing the "rational" international political thing, which is fine, but since we know Putin is insane, the best we can hope for is that other people in his orbit pick up what we are putting down, and do the needful.

Save us all a lot of effort.

ATTMs are more effective in defense than offense. At this point it’s clear that barring a loss of supplies Ukraine can hold the line, the question is more about attacking.

NEW: US is sending Sea Sparrow anti-air missiles to Ukraine, which Ukraine will launch from its existing Soviet-era BUK launchers. It's part of a new $3.8 billion package for Ukraine and Eastern Europe w/@laraseligman  
https://t.co/UHetBlZUn4

Paul McLeary  (@paulmcleary) January 6, 2023

I agree. Bradley's will be a huge upgrade to Ukraines combined arms assaults, paired with ukraines tanks and trained properly they will use them with outstanding results. Tank assaults backed by infantry in Bradley's are going to be a huge welcome in the upcoming spring offensives