I love checking for dead Russians , it’s a daily highlight
With the ratio of the bad guys killed to the vehicles destroyed, I can confidently say that the bad guys are being forced to walk to the frontline….
IIRC it was between Christmas and New Years 2022 where we broke 100k russian casualties.
Ballpark ~10k casualties per month in 2022. For 10 continuous months.
In *any* NATO-aligned military post Gulf War that would have been considered a disaster outside of a peer conflict (even if we scaled the casualty numbers in proportion to the size of that military). There would be inquiries, trials, and ruined careers. There would probably be a doctrinal change whether or not that’s actually warranted. Even before the Gulf War – their casualty predictions for that were 10k in the first week and another 20k by the end of the month, and then a significant drop off as large-scale combat ends and it’s mop-up duty. And *that* casualty projection made a lot of people very hesitant to execute that war.
But NATO-aligned countries actually learned from the combat experience they’ve had since 1917. The Gulf War was the first major air-land-sea war that wasn’t a slugfest with massive casualties on *both* sides – because of things like GPS, precision strike, integrated command and control, situational awareness, stealth, shock-and-awe deep strikes, and decades of development aimed at improving the survivability and effectiveness of each individual soldier – and then actually getting a lot of that hardware distributed to *a significant portion* of those actual soldiers if not *all of them*. And we train on scenarios that are more complex than “we attacked bravely and the capitalist dogs were completely defeated.” When we have a mission or operation, we generally analyze it after even if it went well because we want to know if we could have done something better, if there’s anything we could learn to make it more efficient and/or less risky next time or if there’s a way to avoid the whole thing in the future. ~600 coalition casualties vs. ~50,000+ Iraqi military dead.
We learned to do war better, and built better stuff to do it with. That was just the first time we’d seen how much better we had gotten.
**But Russia’s government and military don’t actually do any of that at the structural level, and haven’t in a hundred years**
The Soviet Union flew the Mig-25 in 1964 and put it into service in 1970. Our military-industrial complex panicked and by 1972 we had the F-15’s first flight; by 1974 we had the first flight of the F-16 because the F-15 was going to be too expensive and complicated to buy *multiple* thousands of instead of just *a thousand* of; and by 1978 we had the F/A-18’s first flight and *that* was only *that late* because the Navy looked at both of those programs first and then decided they wanted both of those to have a menage-a-trois with an A-6 Intruder so they got started a little later.
Three excellent, high performance multirole fighter jets the slowest of which can hit Mach-1.8, the least maneuverable of which can pull 7.5g flight after flight, can carry a variety of precision-guided munitions, shoot medium-range air-to-air missiles, perform reconnaissance functions, and are rated for 8,000-15,000 flight hours depending on which one it is (though the original design briefs only wanted as little as 4,000 flight hours). And they all had a combat radius of over 500km.
And then in 1976 we got our hands on a Mig-25 and found out the Soviet military-industrial complex had actually said “we will make faster jet plane than the capitalist dogs”. Sure it can hit mach-3 in a straight line briefly before you have to throttle down or run out of fuel. Annnnnd that’s about it. 4.5g. It can shoot air-to-air missile. Rated for 2,500 flight hours – extended to 3,500 by decree (not because of performance data) in 2022. And it had a combat radius of 299km.
Russia hasn’t produced a clean-sheet designed tank since 1964 – but the tank they use *most* has direct lineage back to the early 1950s. Because that 1964 clean-sheet was designed and built in Ukraine.
The M1 was truly a quantum leap in tank technology from the M60. It was designed because our military-industrial complex recognized that the M60 was simply outclassed by the T-72. By the time it first saw combat the vast majority of American tanks that went into combat were the M1A1 variant – state of the art at the time and despite being heavier than the M1, it dealt a heavier punch and was otherwise generally *better* in most ways than the M1 which was better in *every* way than the M60. M1A2 Sep3 makes *those* tanks look like antiques even though many of them *are the same hulls*.
The T-90M is a heavily upgraded T-72; the T-72 is basically what happens when a T-62 and a T-64 have a baby; the T-62 is a chonky T-55.
The M1A2Sep3 *is* constrained by parts of the original M1 design; but the T-90M has some design constraints that carry over from the *T-55* which work started on in the late 1940s.
Like the M1, the T-90M also stores ammunition in an armoured box on the back of the turret with blowout panels to protect the crew from a hit that ignites ammunition, and as a bonus it can carry 42 125mm rounds to the 39 of earlier T-90s and T-72s. Even more importantly, this 42 round combat load matches the M1A2’s.
But the T-90M still has a derivative of the same ring-around-the-turret autoloader the original T-64 had; to make it less vulnerable to incinerating the crew they dropped the autoloader’s capacity from 39 to 22 – so now the 3-person crew that used to be able to pop off 39 rounds in 390 seconds can pop off 22 rounds in 220 seconds after which they have to feed rounds by hand into the auto loader one by one like a M1 crew has to all the time, but without the extra person *whose job that is* or a crew that trains in reloading the autoloader outside of combat.
They used the saved space and weight to add some armour to the autoloader – but since the mechanism had to fit in the same *footprint* and all the saved space was *vertical* pretty much none of that armour went *around* the autoloader where it’s most vulnerable.
And because the gunner and commander are in the turret *above* the autoloader and need to be able to access it in combat once the magazine runs out to load rounds into it from the box on the back of the turret with the blowout panels, they basically just replaced the *bottom* 45% of their ammunition carrousel with a metal plate.
It’s *really* rare for a kinetic penetrator or explosively-formed penetrator to come from *under* the tank. Anti-tank mines are usually just a big kaboom.
And in that 220 seconds that is the *best* a T-90M can do for 22 rounds, an *acceptable* M1 crew will have fired 36 rounds and a highly skilled crew could have already fired its entire combat load 52 seconds ago.
I should probably add a detail about that armoured ammunition box with blowout panels. There’s no access to it from inside the turret like there is with literally every NATO tank with that feature.
After the T-90M fires 22 rounds in combat – if it ever lives that long – they have to open the tank, get out of the turret, open the armoured box on the back of the turret, pull a tank round out of the box, close the box, hand the tank round down into the other crew member in the turret, get back into the turret, open the autoloader, put the round in the autoloader, close the autoloader, advance the autoloader until that round is in position to be loaded into the gun, shoot, and then do all of that again.
Which is something they usually only do out of combat at a base or supply depot.
This also means its not really a “blowout panel” it’s more of a “lid.”
So the *modern Russian Military* tried to address the turret-toss issue of the T-90/T-72/T-64 tanks in the T-90M so fewer crews get vapourized by a hit that *might* disable a Western tank but in a way that could eventually be repaired and most of the crew likely survived the original hit.
They identified “too much kaboom” under the turret.
So they put less kaboom under the turret, put more armour where the rest of the kaboom had been, welded a kaboom box to the back of the turret, made the kaboom box big enough that their tank now carries as much kaboom as the capitalist pig tank M1A2, and called it a day.
Up-armoured carrousel? Check. Less kaboom under turret? Check. Ammunition box with blowout panels on back of turret? Check. Yay our tank survivable like disgusting capitalist Abrams tank.
But the useful combat load dropped from 39 to 22 and the only reason the T-90M is less prone to a turret toss is that there’s less physical space under the turret which is filled with things that explode, and if it does still explode there’s less total explode so the turret doesn’t go as far. But the crew still get incinerated, just a *little* less. And if you’re in combat long enough to go through 22 rounds, that’s probably a pretty heated, sustained engagement. A major battle not a skirmish.
The average M1A1 in Dessert Storm used 30% of its combat load – about 12 or 13 rounds. So imagine being in combat continuously long enough to go through 22 tank rounds, and then you have to go outside each time you want to shoot again. But because your “ammunition capacity” is 42 rounds the missions are planned as though you have 42 rounds available. And a T-72 would have 39 rounds.
It’s not even like having a spare magazine for an EDC and a box of 9mm in the glove compartment. It’s like your spare magazine being a 9mm pez dispenser sewn into the bottom of your backpack.
And they put that into service in 2019.
And they struggle to keep more than a few dozen in the field at any given time (though they are getting more common).
**Anyways, if the Russians hit 350k casualties they will average ~20.8k casualties per month in 2023 which is more than double the rate they saw in 2022 which they kicked off by attacking with what they felt was their ~200,000-300,000 most effective and best equipped troops for this kind of warfare.**
**And this is happening with goals which have become progressively less ambitious.**
Despite the bombastic rhetoric coming from ruzzia, who is on a full throttled propaganda campaign working to leverage the pro ruzzian actions of the Repugnians in US Congress, the Conservatives in Canada and the right wing parties in some Euro countries, there is increasing indications that the burn rate for ruzzian soldiers is now mirroring their negative burn rate for armor, missiles and other equipment. Despite convicts, mercenaries and enslaving the poor from the outer republics more ruzzian military are dead or permanently incapacitated per month then the offset of new recruits.
And what Ruzzia does bring into the fold is now rushed to the front poorly trained and equipped, and more and more of them possessing the knowledge they really are fodder destined for meat waves.
Ruzzia has a full court press ongoing in all forms of media hoping to convince the meek, the weak willed and the ambivalent that they are on top and the defenders of democracy do not have the stomach for the long haul.
8 comments
I love checking for dead Russians , it’s a daily highlight
With the ratio of the bad guys killed to the vehicles destroyed, I can confidently say that the bad guys are being forced to walk to the frontline….
IIRC it was between Christmas and New Years 2022 where we broke 100k russian casualties.
Ballpark ~10k casualties per month in 2022. For 10 continuous months.
In *any* NATO-aligned military post Gulf War that would have been considered a disaster outside of a peer conflict (even if we scaled the casualty numbers in proportion to the size of that military). There would be inquiries, trials, and ruined careers. There would probably be a doctrinal change whether or not that’s actually warranted. Even before the Gulf War – their casualty predictions for that were 10k in the first week and another 20k by the end of the month, and then a significant drop off as large-scale combat ends and it’s mop-up duty. And *that* casualty projection made a lot of people very hesitant to execute that war.
But NATO-aligned countries actually learned from the combat experience they’ve had since 1917. The Gulf War was the first major air-land-sea war that wasn’t a slugfest with massive casualties on *both* sides – because of things like GPS, precision strike, integrated command and control, situational awareness, stealth, shock-and-awe deep strikes, and decades of development aimed at improving the survivability and effectiveness of each individual soldier – and then actually getting a lot of that hardware distributed to *a significant portion* of those actual soldiers if not *all of them*. And we train on scenarios that are more complex than “we attacked bravely and the capitalist dogs were completely defeated.” When we have a mission or operation, we generally analyze it after even if it went well because we want to know if we could have done something better, if there’s anything we could learn to make it more efficient and/or less risky next time or if there’s a way to avoid the whole thing in the future. ~600 coalition casualties vs. ~50,000+ Iraqi military dead.
We learned to do war better, and built better stuff to do it with. That was just the first time we’d seen how much better we had gotten.
**But Russia’s government and military don’t actually do any of that at the structural level, and haven’t in a hundred years**
The Soviet Union flew the Mig-25 in 1964 and put it into service in 1970. Our military-industrial complex panicked and by 1972 we had the F-15’s first flight; by 1974 we had the first flight of the F-16 because the F-15 was going to be too expensive and complicated to buy *multiple* thousands of instead of just *a thousand* of; and by 1978 we had the F/A-18’s first flight and *that* was only *that late* because the Navy looked at both of those programs first and then decided they wanted both of those to have a menage-a-trois with an A-6 Intruder so they got started a little later.
Three excellent, high performance multirole fighter jets the slowest of which can hit Mach-1.8, the least maneuverable of which can pull 7.5g flight after flight, can carry a variety of precision-guided munitions, shoot medium-range air-to-air missiles, perform reconnaissance functions, and are rated for 8,000-15,000 flight hours depending on which one it is (though the original design briefs only wanted as little as 4,000 flight hours). And they all had a combat radius of over 500km.
And then in 1976 we got our hands on a Mig-25 and found out the Soviet military-industrial complex had actually said “we will make faster jet plane than the capitalist dogs”. Sure it can hit mach-3 in a straight line briefly before you have to throttle down or run out of fuel. Annnnnd that’s about it. 4.5g. It can shoot air-to-air missile. Rated for 2,500 flight hours – extended to 3,500 by decree (not because of performance data) in 2022. And it had a combat radius of 299km.
Russia hasn’t produced a clean-sheet designed tank since 1964 – but the tank they use *most* has direct lineage back to the early 1950s. Because that 1964 clean-sheet was designed and built in Ukraine.
The M1 was truly a quantum leap in tank technology from the M60. It was designed because our military-industrial complex recognized that the M60 was simply outclassed by the T-72. By the time it first saw combat the vast majority of American tanks that went into combat were the M1A1 variant – state of the art at the time and despite being heavier than the M1, it dealt a heavier punch and was otherwise generally *better* in most ways than the M1 which was better in *every* way than the M60. M1A2 Sep3 makes *those* tanks look like antiques even though many of them *are the same hulls*.
The T-90M is a heavily upgraded T-72; the T-72 is basically what happens when a T-62 and a T-64 have a baby; the T-62 is a chonky T-55.
The M1A2Sep3 *is* constrained by parts of the original M1 design; but the T-90M has some design constraints that carry over from the *T-55* which work started on in the late 1940s.
Like the M1, the T-90M also stores ammunition in an armoured box on the back of the turret with blowout panels to protect the crew from a hit that ignites ammunition, and as a bonus it can carry 42 125mm rounds to the 39 of earlier T-90s and T-72s. Even more importantly, this 42 round combat load matches the M1A2’s.
But the T-90M still has a derivative of the same ring-around-the-turret autoloader the original T-64 had; to make it less vulnerable to incinerating the crew they dropped the autoloader’s capacity from 39 to 22 – so now the 3-person crew that used to be able to pop off 39 rounds in 390 seconds can pop off 22 rounds in 220 seconds after which they have to feed rounds by hand into the auto loader one by one like a M1 crew has to all the time, but without the extra person *whose job that is* or a crew that trains in reloading the autoloader outside of combat.
They used the saved space and weight to add some armour to the autoloader – but since the mechanism had to fit in the same *footprint* and all the saved space was *vertical* pretty much none of that armour went *around* the autoloader where it’s most vulnerable.
And because the gunner and commander are in the turret *above* the autoloader and need to be able to access it in combat once the magazine runs out to load rounds into it from the box on the back of the turret with the blowout panels, they basically just replaced the *bottom* 45% of their ammunition carrousel with a metal plate.
It’s *really* rare for a kinetic penetrator or explosively-formed penetrator to come from *under* the tank. Anti-tank mines are usually just a big kaboom.
And in that 220 seconds that is the *best* a T-90M can do for 22 rounds, an *acceptable* M1 crew will have fired 36 rounds and a highly skilled crew could have already fired its entire combat load 52 seconds ago.
I should probably add a detail about that armoured ammunition box with blowout panels. There’s no access to it from inside the turret like there is with literally every NATO tank with that feature.
After the T-90M fires 22 rounds in combat – if it ever lives that long – they have to open the tank, get out of the turret, open the armoured box on the back of the turret, pull a tank round out of the box, close the box, hand the tank round down into the other crew member in the turret, get back into the turret, open the autoloader, put the round in the autoloader, close the autoloader, advance the autoloader until that round is in position to be loaded into the gun, shoot, and then do all of that again.
Which is something they usually only do out of combat at a base or supply depot.
This also means its not really a “blowout panel” it’s more of a “lid.”
So the *modern Russian Military* tried to address the turret-toss issue of the T-90/T-72/T-64 tanks in the T-90M so fewer crews get vapourized by a hit that *might* disable a Western tank but in a way that could eventually be repaired and most of the crew likely survived the original hit.
They identified “too much kaboom” under the turret.
So they put less kaboom under the turret, put more armour where the rest of the kaboom had been, welded a kaboom box to the back of the turret, made the kaboom box big enough that their tank now carries as much kaboom as the capitalist pig tank M1A2, and called it a day.
Up-armoured carrousel? Check. Less kaboom under turret? Check. Ammunition box with blowout panels on back of turret? Check. Yay our tank survivable like disgusting capitalist Abrams tank.
But the useful combat load dropped from 39 to 22 and the only reason the T-90M is less prone to a turret toss is that there’s less physical space under the turret which is filled with things that explode, and if it does still explode there’s less total explode so the turret doesn’t go as far. But the crew still get incinerated, just a *little* less. And if you’re in combat long enough to go through 22 rounds, that’s probably a pretty heated, sustained engagement. A major battle not a skirmish.
The average M1A1 in Dessert Storm used 30% of its combat load – about 12 or 13 rounds. So imagine being in combat continuously long enough to go through 22 tank rounds, and then you have to go outside each time you want to shoot again. But because your “ammunition capacity” is 42 rounds the missions are planned as though you have 42 rounds available. And a T-72 would have 39 rounds.
It’s not even like having a spare magazine for an EDC and a box of 9mm in the glove compartment. It’s like your spare magazine being a 9mm pez dispenser sewn into the bottom of your backpack.
And they put that into service in 2019.
And they struggle to keep more than a few dozen in the field at any given time (though they are getting more common).
**Anyways, if the Russians hit 350k casualties they will average ~20.8k casualties per month in 2023 which is more than double the rate they saw in 2022 which they kicked off by attacking with what they felt was their ~200,000-300,000 most effective and best equipped troops for this kind of warfare.**
**And this is happening with goals which have become progressively less ambitious.**
[Today’s statistics](https://www.reddit.com/r/RussianLosses/comments/18exj8a/estimated_russian_losses_from_24022022_to/)
Despite the bombastic rhetoric coming from ruzzia, who is on a full throttled propaganda campaign working to leverage the pro ruzzian actions of the Repugnians in US Congress, the Conservatives in Canada and the right wing parties in some Euro countries, there is increasing indications that the burn rate for ruzzian soldiers is now mirroring their negative burn rate for armor, missiles and other equipment. Despite convicts, mercenaries and enslaving the poor from the outer republics more ruzzian military are dead or permanently incapacitated per month then the offset of new recruits.
And what Ruzzia does bring into the fold is now rushed to the front poorly trained and equipped, and more and more of them possessing the knowledge they really are fodder destined for meat waves.
Ruzzia has a full court press ongoing in all forms of media hoping to convince the meek, the weak willed and the ambivalent that they are on top and the defenders of democracy do not have the stomach for the long haul.
They are wrong.
Decent numbers for a weekend…..
Are russians running out of stuff? Or is it just winter