Why is Putin firing missiles at Western Ukraine?
- He is so confident in victory he can afford to use up his (diminishing) stocks of super expensive, hard to replace long-range missiles on splashy, high profile, but militarily ineffective pinprick attacks.
- He is trying to divert attention/headlines away from the fact his ground forces haven’t done squat for 3-4 days now.
The ground stall probably won’t last. You’d guess Putin is building up supplies for a “big push;” Hoping to get a lucky breakthrough somewhere somehow.
If he does get lucky, he buys time and gets some momentum back. If he fails, he just burns down his troops stamina, morale, and supplies further.
He probably would need a longer a 5-6 day “pause” stall to rebuild the supplies. Surrender/desertion rates of irreplaceable soldiers will start to climb as they sit.
He can only replace stamina and morale with fresh troops. Which he doesn’t have. Yes Russia nominally has 900,000 active duty soldiers. But I saw a good line on Twitter –
The Russian Army is huge and modern, but the huge part isn’t modern and the modern part isn’t huge.
Besides, Putin can’t supply the 190,000 troops he has. How can he supply moving in more or even the temporary supply surge needed to swap them out with fresh tanks and men?
To that end, the links below are a fascinating look at the boring supply stuff of which non-armchair wars are made (said the man sitting in his armchair – grin). At least I’m relying on armchair logistics experts who hopefully live a little closer to reality. Note the first piece was written in November 2021 BEFORE the war started.
Feeding the Bear: A Closer Look at Russian Army Logistics and the Fait Accompli
Logistics Rule–look at the map. You might be wondering why the Russian invasion of Ukraine looks like a group of almost equidistant road-linked thrusts stretching from Russian and Belarus into Ukraine. (thanks to @Nrg8000 for this) pic.twitter.com/VTLc0orqUb
— Phillips P. OBrien (@PhillipsPOBrien) March 12, 2022
Had excellent question from cc @LG_Chelle what percent of ammunition is used by Russian army (in North) now with their resupply convoy stuck on that 40 mile long traffic logjam.
A Russian armored vehicle carries ammo for one day of heavy fighting. So a tank has about 40 rounds
— Tomi T Ahonen Moved to Post, Spoutible & Mastodon (@tomiahonen) March 13, 2022
This is a thread that will explain the implied poor Russian Army truck maintenance practices based on this photo of a Pantsir-S1 wheeled gun-missile system's right rear pair of tires below & the operational implications during the Ukrainian mud season.🧵
— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) March 2, 2022
