did i mention this the last fake time ?

https://reuters.com/world/europe/...

errm

russia has an airforce ?
pretty big one i thought.
why do they need a train station ? that's just a convenience.

he or the time before that ?
unsound military reasoning.

damn i drank too much coffee thus far this last place brews it strong lol

What many people don't understand regarding the war: the size of ukraines territory.

It's the second largest european country.

To quote the top 6 from google:

Russia - 17,098,246 km² (6,601,670 mi²)
Ukraine - 603,500 km² (233,000 mi²)
France - 543,940 km² (210,020 mi²)
Spain - 505,992 km² (195,365 mi²)
Sweden - 450,295 km² (173,860 mi²)
Germany - 357,114 km² (137,882 mi²)
Finland - 338,425 km² (130,667 mi²)

The USA has 9,833,520 km2 ( 3,796,742 mi²).

Plus that a lot of ukraine territory is rural.

Just remember this when looking at maps / troop movements / ... . They're not talking about a field trip travelling few interstates, they're talking about moving fuckton of weight through kilometres of wood / plains / etc. while being monitored 24/7 via satellites - and still pulling off surprise attacks.

@IntrusionCM so noted.

my point was however that a compliment of air to ground on escort could accompany air drops if needs be. russia i imagine is also still fuel rich given it has enough to escort.

a train is convenient but i can't imagine they would lose much ground over its loss.

one would think they'd already be trying to begin building beachheads in the form of reinforced military installations with air fields unless ukraine has a decent air force as well which could muck construction up.

do they ?

I haven't really been following that close, but that headline caught my attention.

@IntrusionCM point is over extension seems like it would be harder these days.

if they dropped alot of armor in the region and a lot of ground troops they could work hard to neutralize anti aircraft installations and units and keep their lines in the form of air drops well back and truck things the rest of the way overland.

ukraine looks very flat.

@AvatarOfKaine

That's the reason I mentioned the size of the ukraine...

We're talking about hundreds of kilometres here. You cannot just take a small walk over 100s of kilometres. Nor can you bomb them.

Which is good and bad. Bad because it's one of the reasons this war will - at least I hope so - become a reminder of how primitive and vicious we humans are.

The number of known war crimes committed is just a sinister foreplay I guess into what gruesome stuff will unfold the next months and when the war is over.

Again. We're talking about 100s of kilometres... Either through rural area, which might be impassable (tanks and muddy forests don't mix well, Russia lost quite a lot of equipment just cause of bad weather) - or by train / existing infrastructure. Take that infrastructure away ... And it hurts.

Reason why Russia mined a lot of bridges / interstates etc.

@IntrusionCM certainly but i wasn't so much describing bombing as airlifting munitions and supplies.

also in checking the su-57 (supposedly russians newest jet) has a fuel range of 1500 km

so it could in essence fly probably on a trip to the target of say about at least 500 km if you allow extra fuel range for maneuvering and multiple passes before a clean return.

so launching in waves they could empty their payloads and return i imagine and neutralize strategic targets fairly well, so long as you have an airfield within that distance.

@IntrusionCM this is rough guessing of course.

@IntrusionCM that and if ukraine were a square that would only be 736 km per dimension.

@AvatarOfKaine theoretically, yes.

practically... would you fly 1500 kilometres when you don't know what's sitting on the ground?

I guess that's the trouble - not that I'm an expert on war strategies, though I love the "what if" games.

An large transport air plane is a big target.

You don't need much to hit such a large target...

Transport is the hardest thing. Doesn't matter if it's on land or air.

@IntrusionCM well there is always an element of risk in literally all military operations.

the idea would be to recon and take a front, move your land troops forward and do your best to sweep the area to a point where you could control things well enough to HOPEFULLY clear the area of people with anything that could take down a supply plane or a fast moving helicopter.

truthfully, a jet moving at mach 4 is kind of a hard target to hit as well, and a whole squadron of them a bit harder to remove, all they need to do is launch a few missiles and boom, lots of dead folk.

truth is, if you were ok razing a whole town, the firepower modern warfare commands would put an end to resistance quickly. but the world would frown on that.

so the element of politics prevents this.

again 100s of kilometers, you can't dot the map with resistance, you have to choose carefully where you mount your resistance or those jets make you go boom.

@IntrusionCM which is the other thing.

people don't march in big clustered groups, and often troops are transported these days by apcs or dropped in from hehe big targets with wings :P

so.

moving people in and getting a supply chain going is not gonna be quite so hard as one would think unless the enemy has pretty sufficient air power.

back in the afghan war, for a little while we used what were i think termed 'big ass gunships' by some, they circled a battlefield and fired very large ordinance at troops. the enemy changed tactics to guerilla warfare almost instantly but they had mountains and forests and caves to hide in.

basically, a railroad again is useful, but it supplies only a set of linked points, and would not be the only option by far.

there are supply convoys using armored vehicles, and air drops

if there is a sea or a river there are options there as well.

@IntrusionCM but yeah without more detailed information you can't really tell what the hiccups are. i know the history of napoleans defeat invading russia for example.

but ukraine while large has a very large shared border with russia and is not russia.

i would, if i were the russians start trying to extend my own infrastructure into ukraine and keep it supplied, with the winter coming and halt my advance unless i could capture several towns along said border after crossing whatever may pass as a frontier.

and then said in more excursions, get my supply chain problem fixed, and send in intel planes, get some human resources mixed in with the population to get information that could be of use, etc. that and they do have satellites which can get telemetry down to 1m i believe as well. perhaps better, so long as something isn't occluding them.

for me it would be about a slow push.

with air based offensives to try to starve the Ukrainians out.

@IntrusionCM but the point is, in the long run, that rail car supplied one point on the map, if it was a crucial point it would matter but the border is big there is a river on the border, and it mostly looks like fields.

all terrain military vehicles could get supplies over it across 100s of miles assuming air support was effective. which is the big thing now.

i build a base, a plane flies by and launches a missle at it wile i'm constructing it i'm toast.

so it would seem trying to keep civilians in their homes might be a good strategy and to build structures in towns to house more troops. then ukraine would blow up its own people using air.

@IntrusionCM looking closer that river is only 100 ft across that borders the two countries and there appears to be a frontier on the russian side which is mostly wooded.

they could probably demo tracks to create roads to reach the emankment at many points or just air lift vehicles and bridge kits to the bank and drop engineers and workers there to put them up.

if ukraines intelligence gathering capacity is limited they'd be fucked.

if they're being tied up all over which it seems they are, they;d be fucked.

@IntrusionCM but i guess to make the final point lol without all the jolly analysis, if the russian commanders were relying on just one method of moving supplies and troops into ukraine they'd be idiots.

all the ukrainians would have to do to prevent slow invasion would be sabotage a whole bunch of the railway at different points and that would halt them.

likely they took out a strategic point of entry supplying one region of said big ass country.

which will slow the encroachment further inland at and around that point.

pretty much a win by point strategy is all you have until the civilians cry uncle.

@IntrusionCM outside intervention will likely be necessary to prevent russia from achieving its goal, unless there militaries are evenly matched or ukraine can muster a sizable war machine in the winter months, which may not even be a cause for cessation as the usa for example trains winter commandos. we just never get to use them.