If that was true, Russia would have been utterly defeated a long time ago. Ukraine uses about 4000 drones per day, even if a successful hit meant just 1 infantryman killed or incapacitated, Russians will be at the negotiation table, at least, because no way they can sustain 1000 people per day in irrecoverable losses.
They also loose equipment at a staggering rate. From the start of the invasion 2022 until end of July, they have lost more than 570 000 soldiers, 8000 tanks and 16000 artillery systems.
Oh and also 38 war ships and one submarine - against a country that didn't have a navy at the start of the invasion. Drones is ammunition and is used in air, land and sea.
Those are Ukraine numbers, so there is double counting, propaganda, and other such reasons to take some salt with them. Different countries have different estimates but they publish them less often. Those numbers are the best we have, and give a similar magnitude to other estimates but they are also higher than others.
Of course there are also things that nobody can see and there is reason to believe Russia is intentionally not counting some thing.
On the other hand we also have reason to believe Russia is recruiting about 1000 men per day, and the number of troops they have is not increasing. So while the numbers above are suspect they cannot be too far off.
Those are Ukraine numbers, but they are repeatedly confirmed by ISW and others. There are of course errors, uncertainties. But they seem not to be inflated. Often they instead seem to be somewhat conservative compared to other sources.
My point is mainly that "drone only does something of value 1/4 of the time, rest of them are lost uselessly" isn't a bad statistic. Even if it took 10 drones to significantly wound an infantryman, or 100 to blow up a tank, that would be still a very good use of them.
If that was the case the Russian army in Ukraine would be growing quickly. We know that Russia recruits around 1000 people per day and their army stays virtually the same size. That pretty much proves that the casualties are close to 1000 per day.
The models do not account for attack drones which kills most Russian soldiers these days. They also do not account that due to observation drone presence attacking leads to greater losses.
>>The models do not account for attack drones which kills most Russian soldiers these days.
If you have data that reliably attributes Russian casualties to the weapon systems causing them, I'd love to see it. I know that Twitter and Tiktok are chock full of Ukrainian "drone drop" videos but again that is part of the information operations and shouldn't be taken as an accurate reflection of the battlespace writ large. That said....if they were killing >500 Russians daily with drones, which almost all have recordable video footage, we should be seeing maybe 10x as much footage as is getting released.
One work-around would be to find the most appropriate weapon system that IS in the model and see if it could cover FPV drones. I think QJM aggregates weapons systems but goes down to the squad level, so maybe it accounts for specialized infantry tasks like snipers. Insert a weapon into the model that is a "sniper" but with a 10km effective range. Then run the numbers again. That still ignores the effects of Russian EW but hey...this is an iterative process.
There are reports that drone loss for Ukraine is like 3-5 drones per a successful attack. There are also reports that Ukraine carries like 4000 daily drone flights. It is not clear how may of those are for observations and how many are for attacks. If one assumes that there 3000 attack flights and 600 reach the target, it can easily explain 50% of Russian losses.
In addition a sniper is a bad analogy. The drone warhead is at least a hand-grenade useful against hard targets. A better analogy would be a guided light artillery shell if such exists in models.
>The Russians already did the math. They are accepting the butcher's bill because the trendline is obviously heading towards a Russian victory.
If it was so simple no war would ever be fought since the losing side would just decide it's not worth the fight. It was clear Japan and Germany would lose the war the moment the USA entered, yet they fought on for four more years.
Part of the problem is incorrect assessments of the balance of power, combined with stubbornness. Both the Germans and the Japanese assessed that their martial spirit would enable them to overcome their industrially-superior adversaries. Both were wrong. Also militaries the world over have a culture of stoicism under conditions of adversity. At the tactical level it sometimes means you can turn around what appears to be an unwinnable situation. I'd have to dig to see where this has reliably worked at the strategic level. My initial thought is "it doesn't, but military officers who have spent their entire adult lives inculcated to act otherwise will never acknowledge that".
There's been interviews where Ukrainian troops said "we thought the Russians would just run away after the first day of seeing our Leopards".
Both sides in this conflict have underestimated each other in different ways, but industrial attritional warfare is the great equalizer: it doesn't matter what men THINK will lead to victory if enough steel is thrown in the other guy's direction to remove all subjectivity.
None the less, at the heart of the matter it comes down to economics. Russia's GDP vs the colective West's says who's going to win this one - at least, assuming it goes to the long haul and nothing changes (which of course it will, unexpectedly, at some point).
Also the Ukrainians are fighting for survival from the top of the country to the bottom (motivation makes a big difference). For the other side, the view at the top is very different from the view of those going into the fight (often unwillingly) at the bottom.
Not all GDP's are created equal, though. The US/West has the capital to bury Russia....but isn't mobilizing it the same way it did in WW2. Which of course begs the question of "Why not?", the answer to which is: the US doesn't care as much about the fate of Ukraine as Russia cares about the fate of Ukraine. If we're not in it to win it, then why prolong the death and destruction? Unless the death and destruction was the point all along?
>>>Also the Ukrainians are fighting for survival from the top of the country to the bottom (motivation makes a big difference). For the other side, the view at the top is very different from the view of those going into the fight (often unwillingly) at the bottom.
Do you think the Ukrainians aren't suffering from serious motivation problems? Regular reports of men drowning in freezing rivers trying to cross into Romania. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men in hiding from the roving bands of "mobilizers". [1][2][3] The Russians, by contrast, are mostly there because they are from impoverished regions of Siberia and the enlistment bonuses are gigantic.[4] Russia is basically depopulating its ethnic minorities from Siberia to fuel its war machine. For a country that has its very survival on the line, Ukraine has a TON of men who aren't picking up rifles.
Even if Ukraine is doomed to lose, we need to still continue supporting them, simply to win time to rearm, and also to kill enough Russians to make further aggression unlikely.
In WWII, Soviet Union suffered 7.9M combat dead and dead/incapacitated ratio was way softer back then simply because healthcare was on the lower level - it was 80 years ago. Meaning, for each dead there are more incapacitated today simply because severely wounded people (with heavy concussions, explosive amputaions, multiple fractures and shrapnel, infections), mostly died in WWII and now they survive so don't add to the dead statistics - but are useless for warfare later.
Soviet Union had 190M people in 1941 and Russia has 145M, plus in 1940, 6050K kids were born in the USSR and in Russia today, barely 1200K are born each year. So availability of manpower is about 75% of 1941 and rate of replacement is only 1/5 as high.
In 1945, Soviet Union was a country of invalids and widows. It utterly lacked any mobilisation capacity - 1946 conscripts served for 5-7 years in peacetime army because there was no one to replace them (my grandfather was conscripted in 1947 and served till 1953 while there was no war going on).
Easy to see that approximately 3, or max 4 million combat dead (1/2 to 2/3 the share of population) will bring Russia to the same position, considering lower replacement rate of manpower, and lower share of young population.
What is the fraction of those that need to be killed for Putin to see it's going nowhere? My bet is with 1 million. Losing 1 million dead before Ukraine falls means he will not be able to do much else after it does, putting him in a bind. It will be enough for even the most mindless dictator to stop.
They are gaining ground, that’s an indisputable fact.
Current western position is that they don’t want Russia to win, but also don’t want to provide the level of support that would stop Russia - for example take 1,000 Abram’s tanks out of storage and give them to Ukraine. Obviously this is hypocrisy.
We are on the road to failure, and yet here you are, accusing anyone that point out the obvious of working for the enemy. Deaf to feedback and in denial of reality.
That’s how you get giant failures like Afghanistan and Vietnam.
I've been purposely avoiding logging in to be more passive and less invested in the comment wars going on, but I just reversed my policy to congratulate you for a succinct and valuable post.
The political environment is so toxic that anyone who points out any flaw or bad news regarding the NATO strategy is somehow labeled a Putin apologist. It's a horrible state of affairs. You cannot gaslight your own population into a war victory, it's doesn't work like that.
Why should I waste my valuable time to answer anything meaningful to an obvious propaganda comment? Such comments are what are degrading HN discussion.
Isn't the real problem astroturfing, shilling, brigading, being a government agent, and the like?
The person who posted the big wall of text that seems plausible superficially said a bunch of really dumb or dishonest things. At best they're disingenuous, they're doing things like averaging advancements per day, in some places lines literally aren't moving and others people are advancing unopposed, averaging some things is fundamentally dishonest or a fundamental misunderstanding. There are other issues with their comment, but these are all the kinds of mistakes and an informed person participating in honest discourse doesn't make.
People arguing in bad faith need to be called out not tolerated.
Despite saying that I'm arguing in bad faith, you actually have the only substantive response to my post. My interpretation of your comments is that either:
1. I am incorrectly interpreting the models because I am assuming aggregate/averaged rates of advance across a very large (~1000km) frontage. Or:
2. The models are incorrect if they expect rates of advance averaged across such a large front to produce reliably realistic results.
The task, then, is for me to dig back through the specifics of the models (I've got Dupuy's books and a couple of publications and related DoD-internal wargaming rulesets based on Relative Combat Power Analysis) to see if they articulate the scale at which they break down. I do recall reading that QJM was used to estimate the outcome of Desert Storm and produced surprisingly accurate results for that campaign. Given that, I don't think it's unreasonable to apply the model to the current stage of the Ukrainian conflict.
In particular you seem critical of the values I suggested for the "rate of advance" variable. I suspect that even if you dropped that value to 0.1km/day or even 0.....the models would still suggest a highly skewed rate of Ukrainian losses due to the lopsided-balance of fires assets in Russia's favor. The point is to get people to do the math themselves, and to get them thinking about the second and third order effects of a country with 1/3 of its attackers manpower pool losing men at a greater-than-equal rate.
As an aside, it's weird to me that a few paragraphs is derided as a "Wall of Text" but I guess it is to a generation who's baseline of social media engagement is mobile phones and Twitter. I developed my habits of internet discourse on places like bbs.stardestroyer.net in the late 90s: everyone was on a desktop, and everyone was expected to write long-form explanations for their positions, preferably with references.
This is how I write many of my posts on HN, twenty years later.
And yet sometimes that's exactly what's happening -- and it needs to be called out.
Not the "foreign agents" part; that's your insinuation of what the parent commenter said. But there's an unusual degree commonality to the talking points and flat-out factually wrong narratives that people continually post about this conflict -- such that some of them (like "Ukraine wanted to negotiate, but...") we literally hear several times a day.
It doesn't matter what sources they are uncritically adopting these garbage narratives from. It's just propaganda, straight up, and quite obviously so.
The thing is that it's both. It does put in perspective the western narrative that's being pushed because in order to make the necessary support for Ukraine appear as a better deal that it is but also jumps to conclusion when it says Russia will win, this is delusional. The best Russia will achieve is to get Donbass and Luhansk and it's hard to see if that's worth all the lives and money wasted into this stupid war.
Russia gains more population from occupying the remaining parts of Donbas than they lost from the whole war. As for the resources they now confirmed that the world would continue to buy the oil from them for the next 10 years no matter what. That will provide them with enough profit to rebuild.
So until the West starts helping Ukraine for real instead of giving barely enough for Ukraine not ti collapse, I do not see how what Russia is doing is stupid.
Russia's professional army plus reservists was about 2.1M before the war.
Add 2-300K volunteers who signed up since to replace professional soldiers departing, out of patriotism or because pay was increased 3-4x. Even with all that, Russia still won't have drafted anybody in the pool of about 20M ex-conscripts who went through basic military service in their youth.
They can absolutely sustain that and much more from a purely military point of view. Of course, if you involve public opinion in these matters, 1'000 a day is indeed a bit much for what is not a defensive war.
Over the ~10 years of US involvement in Vietnam, the US had 58k dead and 150k hospitalized. In less than two and a half years of SMO, Russia has had probably around 315k casualties? 61k have been confirmed dead for sure.
The other thing to consider is that sure Russia had 2.1M professional soldiers and reservists, but how many knew how to fly a Ka-50? How many were well trained tank gunners? How many were competent, experienced members of the NCO corps, or well trained and equipped paratroopers, or artillery officers? How many are left, and how many have to have their positions go empty or be filled by someone new without adequate experience?
It appeared Russia cannot sustain the losses long term. The sign-up bonus for volunteers during the last year increased by factor of 10 from 2k USD to over 20K. Plus Russia has severe deficit of working force for anything that required non-trivial amount of training. They cannot afford a new mobilization wave for this reason.
"4000 drones per day" : The future is killer robots. Everywhere.
I could see a sci-fi future where we visit some planet somewhere and when we land there are no living beings anywhere.
Just killer robot factories pumping out more killer robots fighting an endless war with each other fully autonomously.
That's another AGI super intelligence end state. You get two AGI super intelligences fighting a war against each other and they fight until the entire planet is turned into killer drones and explosives. A plausible form of paper clip maximizer.
Also... if it is true that drones live for less than 2 sorties on average, that makes their returnable use pointless because launching them one-off doubles the range as they don't need to store charge for return trip, don't you think? Also i assume, primary cells that are not rechargeable, can have higher capacity than rechargeable batteries.
> Also i assume, primary cells that are not rechargeable, can have higher capacity than rechargeable batteries.
Interesting, do you have more information on state of the art non-rechargeable batteries? I would assume they just use normal LiPo cells anyway and just charge them once, ideally at the factory. Cheap, light (compared to the warhead at least), can deliver enough current.
I expect them to have hundreds if not thousands of drones in surveillance/recon roles, in which they'd mostly be reusable. If that "4k used per day" figure actually means the ones expended per day I'd be pretty surprised.
I find that extremely hard to believe, unless you're exclusively talking about sending drones to attack a specific location with a time crunch, I don't see any reason why a drone wouldn't be charged to full. Especially since that figure probably includes unarmed drones used for ISR
The documentaries I have seen on YT suggest Ukraine is building >1M drones annually, which would be enough to cover going through 4K daily, ballpark. Lots of those FPV videos do show various "low charge" warnings, maybe it just doesn't make sense to fully charge something that's basically a guided bullet on a one-way trip?
FPVs fly a few KM before getting to a target, so the battery will be low by the time they get to the part worth recording. There's no need for a return trip since it either finds a target or is intentionally ditched.
Also they use li-ion cells which can be run to a lower voltage than a lipo, which is normally what the flight controllers are configured for out of the box.
