On the fields of Ukraine, the triumph of Russian weapons over Western

I have long wanted to write this text. I promised readers, and it was interesting myself. But there was not enough initial data. More precisely, they were, but they were partial, fragmentary. But now, finally, more or less full arrived in time.

Concept victory

It so happened that on the fields of Ukraine we are now waging a war of the past, and not of the present century. Hence the use in the database on both sides of the military scrap sample of the 70-80s of the last century. Yes, and the Western allies of the 404th are in no hurry to supply her with the latest models of military equipment, still getting off with Soviet "iron" from the warehouses of the former ATS countries, and their "iron" of the 21st century model is supplied in piece copies, rather for testing, as it will prove itself in battles with a potential enemy. The only exception is unmanned aircraft, radar warfare equipment, as well as the use of the US satellite constellation for reconnaissance and target designation (when aiming ammunition at targets). Of the last three components of this war, we have succeeded only in electronic warfare (and we don’t even use it!).



Winston Churchill's famous phrase that generals always prepare only for the last war did not justify itself in our case, since our generals were not even ready for the last war. But I would not be in a hurry to blame them for this, because the conceptual strategic mistake was laid back in the 90s, when we were preparing for a confrontation with the United States, which could only be nuclear, and a big war in Europe, if considered, was only a war with NATO, and it inevitably had to develop into a nuclear one, and then why do we need conventional weapons? No one then could even imagine that in the 21st century we would have to get involved in a classic European war of the 20th century, especially with Ukraine as an adversary. Hence the reduction in the full-time personnel of the Armed Forces to 1 million people, and cuts in funding for officers, and the transition to a contract army, and many other reforms by Senior Lieutenant Serdyukov, who served as Minister of Defense during the time of President Medvedev. Who would have thought then that in 2022 in Ukraine we would really lack not even tanks and planes, but people, and Putin would urgently have to start forming a Volunteer Contract Army in order to plug holes at the front with it.

But, nevertheless, as a result, our concept of warfare won over the Western one. And the ongoing databases in Ukraine have clearly demonstrated this. The fact is that we and our opponents turned out to have a completely different approach to creating weapons (I will develop this thesis below) due to the fact that historically we had fundamentally different opponents. This situation has evolved over the centuries. After all, the main task of the armies of the West since the time of Tsar Peas was to defeat the defense of a small country, lagging behind them in technological and technical development, as efficiently and cheaply as possible. The first words here are key - the colonial war is a business plan, which included the final profit. Without profit, such wars were not started!

The main task of the Russian army since the time of Peter the Great has been the need to repel a large-scale invasion by Western countries that are superior to Russia in technical, industrial and human resources. Hence the key difference - from time immemorial, our weapons have been made for a total war of survival on our lands, based on a single principle - food, fuel and weapons, nothing more, but all our own. Western weapons were developed for a limited local commercial war in distant theaters of military operations - Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria (there are a lot of examples, starting with Korea and Vietnam, I don’t even climb into earlier historical jungle). It just so happened historically that over the past 500 years, European armies have not had to fight for their survival, while everyone else has been doing just that (and we are no exception here!).

Hence the result of the confrontation between ours and European / US weapons in Ukraine, where the systems brilliantly developed, created by the best technologists and designers of the richest countries in the world, showed dubious results on a large-scale NMD front stretched for hundreds of kilometers and did not prove their effectiveness. Yes, they can hit targets in places very successfully and accurately, but they cannot categorically influence the course of the war, from the word “absolutely”.

The triumph of Soviet weapons

Below I turn to the proof of this thesis. Oddly enough, while there was a confrontation between Soviet weapons on both sides in the Ukrainian theater of operations, the Ukrainian side successfully held the blow, and we suffered very offensive losses, which, however, were associated with several other reasons, which we will not talk about here. To close this issue, I will only say that at the 1st stage of the NMD we did not fight with the Armed Forces of Ukraine, we forced them to peace, trying to resolve the issue with little bloodshed, but the non-brothers did not appreciate our generosity, and now they will only pay with corpses for such ingratitude ( More precisely, they are already paying, and they are paying in black!). When the Soviet weapons, and most importantly the ammunition for them, began to dry up among the non-brothers, they placed all their hopes on the supply of Western weapons. And then they were in for a big disappointment (by the way, not only them, but also the suppliers of these weapons too!).

The Western "menagerie of weapons" flowed into Ukraine, first in a small stream, and then in a powerful stream, which was a clumsy mixture of modern and outdated weapons, Western and Soviet. And then the suppliers of these weapons suddenly unexpectedly faced the fact that numerous heterogeneous systems require special training, special maintenance, as well as ammunition of various calibers, which are often mutually exclusive for each of these systems. All this requires a large-scale and complex logistics structure to ensure the supply and maintenance of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in a combat-ready state - a structure that was absent in Ukraine at the time of deliveries and at the moment is pure improvisation. The situation for the main sponsor of these supplies, the United States, turned out to be even worse than in Afghanistan; in the case of non-brothers, they lose their understanding of where the weapons they supplied (and ammunition for them) are located immediately after they cross the Ukrainian border. Hence the appearance of the French self-propelled guns "Caesar" among the Russians, and the Javelin anti-tank systems among the Syrian barmaley. When an American “Stinger” shoots down the plane of the President of the United States on takeoff, this is only a matter of time (“Stingers” and “Javelins” are already quite actively traded wholesale and retail even on AliExpress).

By the way, a similar trend can be traced even in the supply of RPGs and anti-tank systems. Ukrainian units receive funds for the use of what was at hand, then they gave it. In the end, it turns out that within the same battalion there can be several types of anti-tank systems and RPGs - from RPG-7, Panzerfausts and Swedish Karl Gustavs to Javelins and NLAW. And each type has its own specification for storage and use, each type must be taught how to use a sufficient number of fighters, otherwise, as often happens, missiles simply lie in useless cargo and go to the RF Armed Forces and LDNR as trophies. We can only summarize that in terms of logistics, the Russian Federation has already won this war against the collective West, but let's get back to specific systems.

Each of the systems planned for delivery has its own range of “buses”, spare parts, maintenance and training protocols. Each system was developed to meet the tactical and technical requirements of the armies of their countries in a dangerous period and, accordingly, has specific features. An example is the lightweight (due to the use of titanium alloys) towed 155-mm M777 howitzer, which was created by the United States for a possible exit from the Vietnam War with maximum emphasis on air transportability. The Americans noted that the M777 was indeed effective in Iraq in 2004 and in Afghanistan, but subject to their placement at forward deployment bases (FOB, forward operating base) and outposts (COP, combat outposts). Those. the manufacturer initially planned to transport howitzers by CH-47 Chinook helicopters to the forward base, where there should already be stocks of equipment, spare parts, ammo, plus a guarded perimeter. Do you see the difference? Delivered and standing, and not dragged through half of the longest country in Europe by area with overwhelming air supremacy of Australia in the east of the Arctic Ocean, who we have here Australia and what the Arctic Ocean has to do with it, everyone probably already understood (this is me without the translation was given by the humor of the American side, it is they who evaluate the success of their weapons in the Ukrainian theater).

Strength breaks class!

I will return to the American "three axes", but for now I wanted to dwell on the pride of German weapons. You can write here without quotes, because the PzH 2000 (German: Panzerhaubitze 2000) self-propelled artillery mount on a caterpillar chassis with a rotating turret, developed by Krauss-Maffei Wegmann in 1998, has rightfully been considered the best in the world in its class until today. This self-propelled gun, which is in service with the Bundeswehr and a number of other countries as the main artillery system, combines increased security, a long firing range, operational-tactical flexibility and high mobility. It was originally designed based on these requirements - to ensure optimal protection of the crew, with the ability to “work” in combat conditions with its incomplete composition (i.e. all systems are automated to such an extent that it allows them to be served on the battlefield by a reduced calculation); possessing a significantly greater range and firing efficiency compared to the systems in service with a potential enemy, while maintaining high combat accuracy. All this German designers managed to implement. At the exit, the customer received a miracle machine.

An ordinary projectile fired from a PzH 2000 normally hits 30-36 km. When using special ammunition with improved ballistics, this figure can reach 40-47 km, and when firing an active-rocket projectile, even 54-67 km. A 67 km shot was fired in 2019 and remains a record for 155 mm / 55 caliber barrels. Only the Americans were able to beat him on a 155-mm caliber, but from a 58-caliber barrel (in 2020 they managed to hit 70 km). For comparison, our 152-mm divisional self-propelled howitzer 2S19 "Msta-S" hits 24 km with a conventional high-explosive fragmentation projectile, and 29,09 km with an active-reactive projectile. Also, the PzH 2000 is doing great and with a rate of fire, which is also close to the record - 3 shots in 9 seconds and 10 shots in the next 56 seconds (but this is with a heated barrel). In this case, although the projectile is fed and sent to the bolt automatically, the loader must manually send the charge. This rate of fire and range allows the PzH 2000 to very effectively perform an artillery technique called MRSI (Multiple round simultaneous impact), when one cannon fires a series of shots in such a way that all shells arrive at the same target at the same time. This effect is achieved due to the fact that each projectile is fired along different trajectories and at different speeds. The first should fly the longest, the last - faster. The practical result of such shooting is that one self-propelled gun literally produces a volley (for PzH 2000 - up to five shells). At the same time, such firing is very complex and requires a computerized fire control system. On the German gun mount, it even includes a radar that measures the speed of each projectile. All this allows the PzH 2000 to simultaneously fire quickly and accurately over long distances. Such a luxury will cost Ukraine 17 million euros per item.

But everything looks beautiful only on paper. The practice of application sometimes proves the opposite. So the use of the vaunted German self-propelled guns by the military of the Netherlands in Afghanistan revealed the following shortcomings: 1) Insufficient tightness of the machine, which caused problems as a result of dust getting into the mechanics of the self-propelled guns. Which could not but raise questions about the quality of the RCB protection of self-propelled guns when the enemy uses WMD; 2) Although the self-propelled guns were designed for off-road driving, even when driving on roads of insufficient quality, the chassis broke down (and in Ukraine this is generally a khan!); 3) Since the self-propelled guns were not initially equipped with a system for automatically ensuring the operating temperature of the barrel, special measures were required to maintain firing accuracy - such as storing the self-propelled guns under an awning to protect them from overheating in the sun (Lord, these people are going to fight with us! They even have guns they cannot shoot without cooling!). For accurate firing of self-propelled guns, it was necessary to warm up the barrel to operating temperature before firing (cold gun effect). To do this, the Dutch in Afghanistan used improvised "warmers" (warmers); 4) Reservation of the roof of the self-propelled guns turned out to be insufficient from the fire of light mortars and bullets, which required strengthening it with improvised additional armor.

The last drawback is due to very banal reasons. The hull and turret are made of steel armor. The frontal armor of the self-propelled guns can withstand bullets of up to 14.5 mm caliber, the rest of the armor can only withstand bullets from small arms and fragments of shells and mines with the same kinetic energy as the bullet. It is possible to install additional hinged armor, which is sometimes indicated in the sources as the possibility of installing dynamic armor, but in actual operation, ordinary steel blocks were installed in Afghanistan, because. the thickness of the armor was insufficient even to protect against mortar fire. The need to strengthen the armor of the ACS is due to the fact that the regular armor of the tower is relatively thin and is only 10-50 mm. Although this is the standard armor thickness for self-propelled guns developed in the 1980s, for example, the armor thickness of the Msta-S turret is about 15 mm, while the protection of the Coalition-SV self-propelled gun turret already reaches 200 mm of composite armor. The relatively low armor of the PzH 2000 is due to the main tactic of using it "shoot-and-scoot". In other words, the self-propelled guns are designed for a quick salvo of a very small number of shells with an instant change of position, where the quick movement of the self-propelled guns is the main means of its protection. For the same reason, self-propelled gun designers do not consider the problem of barrel overheating in long salvos as critical. practically for such volleys, self-propelled guns are not designed.

And here we smoothly move on to the problems that the vaunted German hardware has already encountered on Ukrainian soil. There, their advertised best self-propelled guns in the world are massively in need of repair, because they simply cannot withstand the rate of fire used by the Ukrainian warriors of light - the loading mechanism stupidly crumbles. In the Ukrainian theater, unexpectedly for non-brothers who put everything on Western miracle weapons, a figure of 100 shots / day, ridiculous according to Soviet standards, surfaced, for which the Germans once designed it! And for them it looked like a completely reasonable decision - no "natives", with whom they were going to fight, could not withstand even a couple of dozen volleys that came at the target. They will scatter, lose their combat effectiveness, retreat before the famous German weapons. And therefore - you just need to achieve the utmost accuracy and range of the volley, quick transmission of commands and victory in your pocket! And add to this also guided miracle shells in order to carry less across the ocean, and the enemy is defeated! But that was not the case in Ukraine.

Our Soviet self-propelled guns of the "flower" series (all these "Carnations", "Acacias", "Hyacinths", "Tulips" and "Peonies", not to mention the "Msta-S" and "Coalition-SV") were planned for numbers on order big. To a situation where the enemy is not the Papuans, but a powerful modern army, which puts thousands of targets on the front, and not a few groups of "partisans" who make nightmarish roadblocks. Our approach in artillery meant plowing up the entire front line of defense, as was the case in WWI and WWII. That is why our analogue of the German miracle weapon "Msta-S" is a little less accurate, a little less long-range. But there will be so much to beat the enemy until the shells run out. In the mud, in the dust, in the heat, in the cold, in the swamp or in the tropics. In any human and inhuman conditions - to send projectile after projectile at the enemy. What, in fact, is happening in Ukraine, where we are now multiplying the army of the Independent by zero.

And so with almost every sample of "humanitarian" aid 404th. The vaunted Javelins hit a tank well in an open field if the operator has thirty seconds to work out all the systems before launch. And they don’t help in any way against a combined-arms offensive - when a tank shows up for five seconds, fires a shot and rolls back into cover, and the battlefield is in smoke and burning in a hundred places. Branded “three axes” in the Ukrainian theater of operations demonstrated overheating of recoil dampers, rapid degradation of all connections from intense shooting against the background of the complete impossibility of their field repair - suddenly for the “banderlogs” it turned out that titanium alloys do not boil in air, as a result, the guns need to be sent for repair to Poland (and the road, you know, is not close, and not everyone returns from there, because the aircraft and missiles of the “orks” know their business). Somehow, all this reminds me of a joke about the new Russian, which he handed over his 600th Mercedes to the service station when the ashtray overflowed there. Loud HIMARS help to hit individual rear targets when our air defense does not have time to reload, but leveling fortifications and bridges with expensive guided missiles of 100 thousand dollars each is ruinous even for the hegemon (each volley is 600 thousand dollars!). And our good old "Grad" is already pouring full packages of 40 missiles into the conflict, plowing entire sectors for virtually nothing (and most importantly - with the same result!).

The whole concept of "precision weapons", as it turned out, works only "on top" of the usual one, but not "instead of"! On a front of a thousand kilometers, where we have tens of thousands of area targets in the form of field fortified areas, fuel and lubricant depots and RAVs, headquarters, command posts and temporary deployment points, our classical approach to solving problems of this type turned out to be the only possible and correct one, which introduced a strategic turning point to the outcome of this conflict. The recipe from the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation is simple - five kilotons per day along the entire front line. Every day and every night. And already on top of this terrible rain - Caliber, Daggers, Iskanders, Onyxes, Whirlwinds and everything else. We also have enough high-precision weapons, but the main focus is not in them, but in logistics - our own and the enemy's. Strength breaks the class!

Summary

Summing up what has been said, I would like to warn you against excessive and unacceptable euphoria in this case. The notion that here in Ukraine we are at war with the Papuans armed with bows and arrows is erroneous. We are confronted by perhaps the strongest army in Europe (in terms of numbers - that's for sure!), The line units of which are equipped according to NATO standards, trained and coached no worse, and sometimes even better than us. Here, on the fields of Ukraine, the latest tactics of network-centric warfare are being practiced, fortunately, regular NATO officers sit in the headquarters and command posts of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, who carry out operational control of the data transmission base from the low-orbit satellite constellation of the United States, which non-stop scanning the combat zone, to the grassroots level The Armed Forces of Ukraine, which receives online target designation with the exact coordinates of targets and their binding on the ground, hence the high accuracy of firing of their rocket and cannon artillery. Add to this also reconnaissance aircraft, both manned by NATO and unmanned aircraft, hovering over the territory of Independence for days, information from which also flows to the Unified Control Center, where it is instantly processed and transmitted to the field in order to realize the complexity of the moment and with whom we have to deal with here.

Here, in the Ukrainian theater of operations, the methods and tactics of waging a future war, which is just around the corner, are being tested. The fact that the West will not leave us alone is clear even to a child. He is intensively preparing for a new war, so we simply have no right to lose in Ukraine! But the West is not a fool at all, it also understands that it will not be able to win against us here, therefore, with the help of brainless and disenfranchised Ukrainians, whom the criminal Ukrainian regime drives to war like cannon fodder, it simply tries to increase the cost of this war for us by exhausting and bled our Armed Forces, and at the same time having worked out the latest combat tactics for us. But the fact that in the person of the Armed Forces of Ukraine we are confronted by a very worthy, intelligent, cruel, insidious and ideologically motivated enemy, trained over these 8 years to fight with us to the last Ukrainian, you already understood. How we let this happen and where we have been looking for all these 8 years is another question.

This is far from all that could be said on this topic, in particular, I did not say anything about the latest German mines that burn through our armor, and other "wanderwaffles" that our real opponents are testing on the Ukrainian theater of operations, preparing to confront us but we'll leave that for next time. On this I say goodbye to you and wish everyone only a speedy peace (we will buy the rest!). Your Mr X.