Armchair Warlord
@ArmchairW • 157,021 subscribers
Weaboo, author and battle theorist. Interactions are not endorsements.
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Today was probably the worst day for the Armed Forces of Ukraine since February 2022. Let's walk through it. The Russians started the day off by destroying two HIMARS launchers at their hide site in Sumy. This has likely ended GMLRS support for the Kursk operation temporarily.
Armchair Warlord3,552,940 views • 1 year ago
General Gerasimov recently announced the village of Borovaya had been taken by the Russian Army. This set off a storm of accusations that he was lying, because no mapper had Russian troops anywhere near the town in force. Today the MoD posted proof they seized it weeks ago.⬇️ You can watch the video for yourself, it's attached. Notice that the leaves are off the trees, indicating that the assault went in and the Russians cleared the town during the March-April timeframe. Thus as far as the Russian Army was concerned, their holding Borovaya was old news and they were presumably quite surprised to see frenzied Telegram blowback on the announcement. No "serious" mapper as of yesterday had Russian troops anywhere near the town - most had their front line approximately five kilometers to the north. And as I pointed out earlier, this seizure was actually old news to the point the Russians felt comfortable announcing it officially. By now the true Russian front line is likely some ways south of the town and the area is secure. There's an old saying in America, "The people who know aren't talking, and the people who talk don't know." The Russians have always had good operational security in general, and earlier this year one of the only side-channels that voenkor commentators used to communicate with their few actual front-line sources - pirated Starlink terminals - were bricked.* Cut off from the front line, Russian civilian commentators fell back on analyzing Ukrainian propaganda (something they've always heavily relied upon) at the exact moment the Ukrainians also seem to have tightened their own OPSEC and become institutionally aware of the role their own propaganda was playing in mapping Russian advances for the public and refuting their narrative of constant success. * This is why broenkors have been screaming and rending their garments about Starlink access. It's their leak vector. The Russian Army never officially used pirated terminals to any significant extent and may have in fact intentionally triggered the crackdown to choke off an OPSEC risk by putting a couple pirated terminals on cruise drones. I specifically believe that the Ukrainians have imposed media and even propaganda blackouts in two sectors - Kupyansk and Zaporozhie - in which they attempted to launch counteroffensives in the last six months. Both of those attacks failed, but the blackouts seemingly remain to avoid embarrassment - and given the Russians only post front updates sporadically and in accordance with their own OPSEC requirements, this means that the front lines in both sectors probably bear little resemblance to the war mappers' current traces. Given that all of this also happened in the February-April timeframe this further suggests that the Russian "pause" in March of this year was simply a reporting artifact and that they're sitting on significant unrecognized gains. Which the Russian MoD has in fact reported on two occasions now during high-level updates, but the mappers refused to believe them!
Armchair Warlord37,312 views • 17 days ago
A dark theory for the evening. Let's talk about Russian strategy in Ukraine.⬇️ Looking at developments lately, specifically: (1) the Ukrainian casualty leak showing an astronomical 1.7M KIA/MIA; and (2) the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk - I thought should revisit a dark thought I had a while ago, namely that, "maybe the killing itself is the point of all of this." I've said before that the Russians have fought an extraordinarily clean war in Ukraine, but it should be understood that there is a very legalistic shade on that assessment. They've killed very few civilians, and Ukrainian propagandists are perpetually beclowning themselves trying to pretend that the usual single-digit handful of injured civilians that accompany the latest attack using hundreds of standoff weapons fired into city centers (producing secondary explosions visible from outer space as military targets hidden among civilian infrastructure are destroyed with surgical precision) somehow constitute gEnOCiDe rather than some of the most well-controlled warfighting in the history of the business. There is another and far darker side to Russia's "clean" war, however. Let us consider the fate of the Armed Forces of Ukraine - legal combatants all, whom the Russians can and do target and kill without limit. I mentioned the casualty leak earlier, but I feel this needs to have a line drawn under it - one point seven million personnel killed or missing in action in the AFU, over the course of the war. 1.7 MILLION. Seven or eight percent of Ukraine's prewar population, probably something like a quarter of the entire national cohort of military-aged males, dead or missing. Casualties on the scale of a genocide, sufficient to permanently cripple any postwar Ukrainian nation. Casualties multiple times that which I assessed two years ago as sufficient to shatter the AFU based on the experience of Nazi Germany. This brings me to the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk two weeks ago, in which a run-of-the-mill Russian attack walked through twenty kilometers of Ukrainian defensive belts and into open country. The Ukrainian propagandists coped by whining about how the single most important front sector for the AFU had somehow "run out of infantry." But did the Russians throw in a mobile reserve to collapse the front and chase the AFU back to the Dniper, despite doubtless knowing full well what was going on? No, they did not - they consolidated in the breach and awaited the inevitable, panicked Ukrainian counterattack, in which they would have the opportunity to destroy Ukraine's remaining elite troops. Which brings me to my conclusion. The Russians have had countless opportunities to make large advances in this war, especially recently - the Ukrainian front line is an absolute shambles and their "drone wall" tactic will falter against any serious attack. So ineffectual is the AFU that very few Russian moves at the front even face serious opposition these days, with most geolocations of Russian advances showing them already established in place and dealing with harassment by kill drones after having seized positions bloodlessly. The Russians have in fact consistently foregone breaking the front and taking swathes of ground in favor of killing the largest possible number of Ukrainian soldiers on the existing front line under the existing attritional combat dynamic. This "tactical directive" held true even during the Battle of Sudzha-Korenevo, fought in prewar Russia. Rather than counterattacking aggressively to evict the AFU, the Russians saw the opportunity to kill gigantic numbers of Ukrainians in a trap the enemy wouldn't be able to extract themselves from for ideological reasons, and they took it. That battle ended up being nine months of hideously lopsided butchery that broke the back of the AFU. All of this makes observing the war more than a little maddening, but it's a consistent pattern of behavior that begs for explanation. So here's my theory. The Russian government has consistently sought to end the war via peace treaty with the existing Ukrainian government, not via regime change, outright conquest, or even killing enough of that government to find a more flexible interlocutor among the Maidanites. Putin apparently wants a treaty with Zelensky. The Russians have also consistently made demands of the Ukrainian government - and its NATO sponsors - that are absolute political nonstarters for the Maidan-era regime and which that regime, by its very nature, simply cannot accept. Russian language rights, Orthodox religious rights, demilitarization, large territorial concessions which would see the AFU surrender vast urban areas without a shot fired. And yet the Russians insist, and they're going to continue killing Ukrainian soldiers at ever-more lopsided ratios until they get their way. Which leads me to the brutal conclusion: Putin doesn't want to see Ukraine conquered. He's never publicly expressed any desire for that. The consistent Russian policy is instead to see Ukraine - a "free" and "independent" Ukraine, having come to this impasse of its own sovereign will - utterly humiliated. Putin wants to make Zelensky put on a suit, come groveling to the Kremlin, and sign a treaty that will see the Maidanite government surrender its arms, disgorge huge amounts of territory, and reverse every single anti-Russian policy position it ever had. Ukrainian nationalism will be discredited overnight by the hands of those very nationalists, and the economically irrelevant, demographically shattered rump state will be sucked back into Russia's political orbit in a matter of days. So of course the Russians are only advancing in the most leisurely way possible. Their goal is to place the Ukrainian government into a militarily untenable situation so as to force a flamboyantly humiliating peace treaty upon them that includes large territorial concessions beyond the line of control - the ultimate Ukrainian taboo - so as to discredit Ukrainian nationalism by the hands of the very ultranationalists who took their nation to war in the first place.
Armchair Warlord514,704 views • 9 months ago
We've been watching the Russians fly their Su-25s until their wings fall off in Ukraine for the last three years, just hammering away at the front line in the nastiest air defense environment yet seen in war, and the Air Force still wants the A-10 to go away. Make it make sense.
Armchair Warlord607,315 views • 1 year ago
Still boggles my mind that the Ukrainians made an actual movie trailer for their 2023 counteroffensive. The arrogance was unbelievable. These people thought they could not lose, and their main concern was selling tickets to what was to be the geopolitical event of the year.
Armchair Warlord215,970 views • 1 year ago
Nothing to see here, just the Ukrainians rocketing a random intersection in Belgorod to kill and terrorize civilians. If the Russians did this we'd have a week of international condemnation, sob-story news articles and deranged posts on this website. Ukraine? Yawn.
Armchair Warlord315,068 views • 1 year ago
The Iranian strike on Nevatim and Tel Nof Airfields (and other targets) in Israel on Tuesday completely validated my analysis from April. In April the Iranians demonstrated they could defeat Israel's BMD system at will and strike precision targets - this time they did damage.⬇️ Video of the engagement suggests that the vast majority of the Iranian salvo - probably more than 80% - penetrated and struck targets in Israel. There was once again no indication of any significant midcourse defensive effort, and terminal-phase defensive fire was sporadic and ineffective. Israeli defensive fire in fact appears to have been significantly lighter than in April, which I suspect can be chalked up to two things. First, the Iranians attacked with little to no warning and Israeli heavy SAM batteries (contra their Iron Dome systems) were likely at reduced readiness. Second, the Israelis may have fired off the majority of their available ammunition defending against the attack in April, and given diversions of missiles to Ukraine and the generally glacial pace of new ammunition coming out of Raytheon's factories, it may not have been entirely or even partially replaced as of October 1st. The Iranian attack put several warheads into hangars and flight lines at Nevatim that we know about, with imagery of Tel Nof still under embargo and presumably being sanitized ahead of release - a damning state of affairs. The Iranians can be expected to have damaged aircraft, infrastructure, SAM systems, and AD radars at both airfields, as well as hitting several other targets elsewhere in the country less intensively. The effectiveness of the strike can be seen by simply observing the Israeli reaction - rather than an immediate counterattack they have withdrawn for deliberations, with some talk of a deescalatory downward-step retaliation against the Houthis or Hezbollah. The reason for this is simple - the Iranians have now demonstrated the ability to overwhelm the Israeli AD system at will and precisely strike targets, and with their missile shield ineffective the Israeli leadership is coming to terms with the fact they run a small and isolated country with a limited amount of critical infrastructure. At this point the Ayatollah can push a button and turn the lights out in Israel, and no amount of American money can prevent that. As an aside, the Wasp ARG in the Mediterranean may have fired off all or nearly all of its stock of SM-3 missiles defending against the attack. US officials claimed 12 rounds were fired, with no assessment of successful interceptions. Clearly the task force was, at a minimum, simply overwhelmed by the sheer number of incoming vampires, to say nothing of the large amount of debris, booster fragments, and possibly decoys the missiles scattered in their wake. Not only do USN missile destroyers only carry a small number of these rounds in their silos (generally eight or less) but their production rate is glacial - apparently Raytheon only made 12 of them in 2023. The cost of that engagement to the US taxpayer, by the way, could have been as much as $340 million dollars if those were Block IIA interceptors.
Armchair Warlord298,185 views • 1 year ago
ATACMS is such a fearsome weapon system that the Ukrainians have to (checks notes) fire so many of them at single targets that they literally overwhelm the simultaneous engagement capability of Russian air defense systems. Hair-raising but not remotely sustainable.
Armchair Warlord299,870 views • 2 years ago
Cool argument bro. I raise you five exploding Patriot batteries on video.
Armchair Warlord154,287 views • 1 year ago
Sometimes when the Ukrainians get really energetic about retaking some particularly blasted piece of real estate the Russians will pull out of it, moonscape it with bombs, and walk back in shortly afterwards. The astonishing thing is that the AFU keeps falling for this.
Armchair Warlord125,444 views • 10 months ago
8. There are no Nazis in Ukraine! Oh come on. Ukraine's "founding fathers," Bandera, the OUN/UPA, the Galician SS? Nazis and Nazi collaborators, many implicated in the worst crimes of the Holocaust. Ukraine's most prestigious military units? Packed to the rafters with Nazis.
Armchair Warlord215,412 views • 1 year ago
I've seen some people express incredulity over claims I've made recently that Ukrainian forces are suffering casualties an order of magnitude or more higher than the Russians in Ukraine. This is what inevitably happens when an artillery army faces a human wave army.⬇️ Contrary to the endless, unsupported claims of Ukrainian propagandists - a big lie repeated endlessly - the Russians are not constantly making mass attacks across the front and being repelled by "heroic Ukrainian defenders." The usual tactical cycle in Ukraine looks something along the lines of: 1. The Russians constantly shell, bomb, and drone all identified Ukrainian positions and forces, down to individual soldiers moving in the open, causing mass casualties. The Ukrainians have no substantial surface or aerial fires left and respond only with sporadic drone attacks, causing minor casualties. 2. The AFU continually throws press-ganged conscripts into the line to prevent outright collapse. Due to Russian fire superiority, these conscripts have to move up to front line positions on foot, over considerable distances, while under surveillance and constant attack by fire as they move from rear positions to intermediate positions to front line strongpoints. This process takes time and many don't make it. Russian forces making similar journeys to their own front line generally do so in safety. 3. Eventually some Ukrainian front line position becomes isolated in this hurricane of fire, and surveillance indicates that there are only a handful of effective combatants left in it - slated reinforcements were killed or haven't made it that far forward. 4. Russian command sends an assault platoon or even a squad forward to seize the weakened position. Generally these assaults are successful with few Russian casualties, and we only learn that the Russians have advanced because the Ukrainians publish video of drone harassment raids on the seized position. 5. Russian forces dig in on the captured position and continue bombarding the Ukrainians while monitoring for weak nodes in the front line. Damaged or disabled vehicles (if any) from the latest assault are recovered, repaired, and returned to service in days to weeks. Generally within a day or two another strongpoint or fortified zone fades and can be seized. You can immediately see how this tactical model produces casualties an order of magnitude or higher for the Ukrainian side than the Russian, and it is borne out by careful and skeptical observation of the character of fighting in Ukraine. The Russians advance a step at a time with utmost deliberation while the Ukrainians and their NATO advisors drive themselves insane trying and failing to stop them with decisive maneuver tactics in a war that the Russians have coldly shaped into a struggle of merciless, positional, lopsided attrition. The Russians have implemented and continually refined this tactical model since April 2022, seeking to maximize enemy casualties while minimizing their own. This really represents the pinnacle of data-driven Soviet fire doctrine - the application of "x" rounds into "y" specified enemy positions for "z" time can be resulted to expect in an advance of "K" kilometers and "D" enemy casualties. They've probably refined the old Soviet fire models (largely based off WWII data) to an absolutely Ptolemaic degree in this war. Eventually the Russians may change tack and resume a war of high-speed maneuver - presumably when they can do so in a relatively secure manner with minimal losses to their own forces. What is certain, however, is that they will only take this action at a time and place of their own choosing.
Armchair Warlord65,688 views • 8 months ago
So you all remember how the Ukrainians have been screaming about "kidnapped Ukrainian children" for three and a half years now? How this was THE basis for ICC charges against Russia? The Ukrainians could only produce 339 names, of which many are adults or not actually in Russia.
Armchair Warlord76,794 views • 10 months ago
The Ukrainians launched a major attack on Crimea last night, probably trying to disrupt the "vibe" for Victory Day next week. It was a fiasco. 170 attack drones shot down, a dozen heavy missiles, 16+ sea drones. No noteworthy damage - the Russians maybe lost one fighter jet.⬇️ This was their first attempt to break out of where they've been bottled up in the northwest Black Sea in several months - judging by the annihilation of the attack force I expect we won't be seeing much of them for a while. They've clearly managed to regenerate some sea drone capability since the death of much of the Black Sea Attack Network's personnel early last year, but as you can see in the attached video the Russians have also been working on their game and had little trouble destroying these craft with AT drones among other weapons. I say "maybe" on the fighter jet because although the loss of an Su-30SM to a drone-launched antiaircraft missile was widely reported, the video provided by the Ukrainians shows nothing definitive and does not match the broenkor narrative that the crew ejected and was subsequently rescued. As such the footage is possibly old - there was an aircraft of the same type shot down by MANPAD while attacking Ukrainian commando boats last year, with the crew lost. The broenkors may be "rushing to be wrong" yet again.
Armchair Warlord85,759 views • 1 year ago
Given the self-evident panic in the Ukrainian command over the Russians now punching holes into their Donbass front line at will, I think it's likely that whatever raiding force they had stacked up for a cross-border attack just got redirected south to die on the primary front.
Armchair Warlord59,595 views • 9 months ago
What Patriot doing? Seriously, the last report of Patriot launches in Ukraine that I could find on Telegram is from October 22nd. There have been numerous large-scale missile and drone raids in the interim. Suggests they're out of either missiles or functional launch systems.
Armchair Warlord34,284 views • 4 months ago
