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Ukraine – Those Guns Unknown To Me
Over the last months I read each Daily Report on the war in Ukraine by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
The reports list the losses of the Ukrainian side on each of the major fronts. I was especially interested in the dedicated counter-artillery campaign the Russian's have been waging during the last two months.
They numbers in the Russian reports may be wrong or exaggerated but they are in a range that is plausible for such a high intensity operation.
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The average daily Ukrainian losses are 12 major artillery pieces, one artillery radar and 3 to 4 artillery ammunition points or depots. The Ukrainian losses of men are listed at around 400+ per day. (The reports exclude the Wagner operations in Bakhmut/Artyomovsk.)
For the one month I recorded 214 destroyed truck pulled howitzers, 92 destroyed self-propelled howitzers and 56 destroyed Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS). About 12,000 Ukrainian troops were also reported to have been killed.
For comparison the artillery 'fist' of a NATO tank or motorized infantry division is its artillery brigade. It consists of 3 fire battalions each of which has 3 fire companies each of which has 6 guns or MLRS. That is a total of 52 major artillery pieces.
Losing a total of 362 major artillery pieces as Ukraine has done in a month is a lot, much more than the 'west' is able to replace. The current lack of ammunition that Ukraine claims to have will soon change into an oversupply simply because Ukraine will lack the guns and MLRS to fire it.
But that isn't the focus of this piece.
I have wondered about some howitzer/gun types the reports mentioned as destroyed. I had never heard of those and had to look them up.
What is for example the M101 truck pulled howitzer?
After World War I, the U.S. Army Ordnance Department studied various captured German 105 mm-caliber howitzers and developed the 105 mm Howitzer M1920 on Carriage M1920.
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A modified version of the M1 was trialed in 1932 which used semi-fixed ammunition instead of separate-loading ammunition.
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The original M1 carriage had been designed for towing using horses rather than trucks, and a new carriage, the T5 (M2), was developed in 1939 and standardized in February 1940.
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The U.S. military artillery designation system was changed in 1962, redesignating the M2A1 howitzer the M101A1.
So the M101, pictured below, is a U.S. copy of a German army howitzer design from World War I. Some 10,000 have been build mostly during World War II.
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The ones Ukraine has, and the two Russia claimed to have destroyed, were gifts from the Lithuanian army reserve.
The D-44 anti-tank gun was also unknown to me:
The 85-mm divisional gun D-44 (Russian: 85-мм дивизионная пушка Д-44) was a Soviet divisional 85-mm calibre field artillery gun used in the last action of World War II.
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The barrel was developed from that of the T-34-85 tank and was capable of firing 20–25 high-explosive (HE), armor-piercing, and high-explosive antitank (HEAT) projectiles per minute.
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A nice little museum piece.
There is also the Rapira anti tank gun which turns out to be a bit more modern:
2A19 or T-12 is a Soviet-designed 100-mm anti-tank gun. It was the first anti-tank gun to adopt a smoothbore barrel, and to introduce modern armor piercing shot, like the APFSDS. It uses long projectiles that are more powerful than its caliber suggests.
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In 1971 a new variant was introduced, T-12A or MT-12 "Rapira" (2A29). This has the same barrel, but has a redesigned carriage and gun shield.
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By the mid-1990s modern western tanks' frontal armor protection could no longer be penetrated by a 100 mm gun. The 100 mm caliber ammunition had reached the limits of what could be achieved with it.
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It is sad to see that the Ukrainian army has to use such museum pieces. Yes, they still may be useful in special cases. Also having such guns is probably better than having no gun at all.
But they have no chance to survive or even win on a more recent battle field.
Ekaterina Blinova has written another excellent report, “Sy Hersh on US Proxy War on Russia, Snowden’s Expose & Nord Stream Sabotage”, that keeps us updated on the Nordstream Terrorist Attacks by the Outlaw US Empire. Excerpt:
Commenting on his recent piece on Substack titled “From the Gulf of Tonkin to the Baltic Sea,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist pointed out that US President Lyndon Johnson lied to the American people and made US spies change the intelligence on the Gulf of Tonkin incident to get congressional permission to expand the Vietnam War, which ultimately claimed the lives of 58,000 Americans and between one and three million Vietnamese.
Now the Americans have a president who does not tell the truth about what he authorized and what happened, Hersh continued, referring to the Nord Stream sabotage plot.
However, when Joe Biden talked publicly about halting Nord Stream on February 7, 2022 and told the press that the US “will be able to do it” within three weeks of the intelligence briefing, “guys in the group were upset because that was supposed to be a covert operation,” the journalist noted.
Moreover, after the group did its job and planted the bombs in June 2022, they realized that Biden had done it for political purposes and that it wouldn’t help the war against Russia, according to Hersh. In fact, the US president sought to prevent Germany and Western Europe from opening up the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was not subjected to sanctions, the journalist believes.
“That’s the rationale for the mission: to make sure that Western Europe keeps on supporting NATO and keeps on funneling arms into what is clearly a proxy war against Russia that’s being fought right now,” Hersh underscored.
This presidency has been caught out, in a way, due to what they did to the pipelines, the journalist noted, presuming that the Biden administration would never recognize the wrongdoing.
The comparison with the Gulf of Tonkin lie is curious because it remained a lie for quite awhile and LBJ never suffered any adverse repercussions. It’s also curious that Western media seems to believe that if they don’t publish anything related to it, they can continue to control the narrative over the act of war–except that they can’t as its developments are being broadcast/published globally. Other nations add together the 2014 coup, the massive illegal sanctions and theft of Russian property that’s been ongoing since Obama/Biden, and the NS bombings along with the daily litany of lies coming from Biden’s government, and they can easily conclude the Outlaw US Empire is just that–an Outlaw, a Criminal/Terroristic government that isn’t to be trusted at all. And over the past week we’ve seen China come out with some very accusatory statements of fact that merges with the actual narrative of the bombings and two different proposals for peace and security to which the Empire said Absolutely NO.
With all these facts presented, what is a nation to do? First a look at what other nations are doing is made, and it’s seen that 80+ favor China’s GSI, while many others are dumping the dollar and making other arrangements–many are submitting requests to become part of BRICS or SCO. IMO, there’s no way to not see what’s occurring internationally if you’re a nation trying to advance its own interests–the way to advance them is to join with other likeminded nations into a bloc for protection against the Outlaw US Empire while also advancing your and other nations’s interests by acting together in all areas: trade, finance, diplomacy, etc.
The Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Indians, and others have announced the end of the Unipolar World and emergence of its replacement, the Multipolar World with genuine Multilateralism and respect for the equality of all nations and thus their peoples. But to make the emergence the new paradigm, a struggle must be entered into as the old order isn’t just going to lay its arms down and surrender–it will need to be forced to do so, and that reality cannot be obfuscated.
Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 25 2023 21:53 utc | 143
@Neven Acropolis | Feb 25 2023 13:52 utc | 24
The Russians are being so extraordinarily careful not to overstate Ukrainian deaths that they are severely understating the situation. Particularly on casualties. Like the claims about equipment destroyed, these seem to be based on literal body counts (drones taking pictures of the dead). What are not being counted are the Ukrainian wounded, who have an unusual distribution in comparison with other modern wars. This war has very limited small arms and fragmentation wound rate, most of which are survivable with extended modern medical extraction and treatment. Instead, we see very high rates of bariatric injuries, which kills far more people near the detonation, and wounds people away from it, but the wounds tend to kill the victims in 3 to 5 days unless they can be treated with
advanced surgery in modern facilities which Ukraine no longer possesses. This is simply not possible in the Ukraine where the medical infrastructure has long collapsed under the floods of injured, meaning that after triage all but the most trivial injuries are stacked on stretchers to die in the corridors, providing morphine only to the noisiest to preserve supplies.
So instead of the 1:10-17 ratio of killed in action to wounded, where 90% of the injured will survive, typical of modern warfare (e.g. Iraq) resulting in a distribution of deaths as 33% direct combat, 22% non-hostile, 45% indirect combat (died while undergoing transport or treatment), we are seeing WW I like rates of 1:10, less than 20% of the injured will survive in the Ukraine (because of higher ratios of bariatric to other injuries and inadequate medical evacuation and treatment). Assuming the same 22 per 100 killed in accidents (might be higher, Ukrainians tend to be less disciplined, not as well trained, and generally reckless, especially when alcohol or drugs are involved), we are probably seeing a distribution of deaths around 35% direct combat, 25% non-hostile, 45% indirect combat. This is why the Russian claims about Ukrainian casualties should be multiplied by 5 times to calculate the effective Ukrainian death rate rate. In other words, when Russia reports on Ukrainian KIA, of 100, the actual mortality rate is probably 400 to 600.
Similar field rates are happening with Russians, resulting in a ratio very similar to the US in Iraq (but at lower injury rates due to fewer IEDs and more deaths due to higher levels of artillery, mortar and rocket attacks). It should be noted that the US killed 40 Iraqi to every US loss. Extrapolating that statistic off my estimate for Russian dead of 22,000 to date, means that Ukraine would have lost some 880,000 men. When we base it off Russian claims of about 150,000 Ukrainian deaths, that extrapolates to 400,000 to 600,000 deaths. To me, allowing for Ukrainians being far better armed than the Iraqi and the Russians being much less recklessly destructive than the Americans, suggests that the actual Ukrainian death toll is currently between 500,000 and 600,000.
Posted by: Hermit | Feb 25 2023 22:34 utc | 156
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