So when I play Wargame or Company Of Heroes, I usually just artillery/airstrike the shit out of an enemy position before I send me troops in, and when I do there's almost nothing left in the area. For a real life example, didn't the U.S army basically just demolish Aachen building by building to dislodge the Germans with excellent results?
Why doesn't this work for the Russians in real life? Vuhledar is basically a bunch of tenements in the middle of a field, why didn't the Russians just flatten the entire thing and fire thermobaric rounds to suck the oxygen out of all the Ukrainian tunnels?
How the fuck can the Russians bomb bakhmut for 5 months and there still be anything standing?
Recently talked to my brother about how in the original Blitzkrieg I just used to set it to max speed and order an artillery strike on the objective for 5 minutes. And he laughingly pointed out how that's exactly the Russian strategy right now
Literally the only way to play that game
This is literally what Russia is doing to all urban and semiurban areas.
They shell every building with tanks or artillery, then shell everything around it with artillery, and then move in with infantry till they encounter resistance and then shell the resistance. Repeat.
>nothing left in the area
That's pretty much what I do too.
There is nothing standing in the areas that have seen prolonged fighting. Just rubble and maze-like trenches all over the place.
>There is nothing standing in the areas that have seen prolonged fighting
This always makes me chuckle, when people say that Russia is totally fine, since the areas they conquer are economically strong and they can make back the money they lost because of the war in no time
When people say that they are usually referring to the resources under the ground
Ah that would make more sense.
Then again it's not like you can just conjure up the infrastructure to exploit those resources out of thin air and I think Russia still has plenty of untapped natural resources in their own territory.
Even worse : adding up all the mineral wealth of Ukraine would not even get close to what Russia already invested in this war.
Russia is pretty good at building shit and a lot of places in deeper Lugansk/Donetsk are pretty unharmed
I have no doubt the Russians could get a lot of coal and natural resources out of Donetsk and Lugansk in the upcoming years
As for wheat, Ukraine is so mined to shit that it's not as practical anymore
In any case, Russia rebuilt Chechnya nicely without getting anything in return economically, at least the Donbass and Southern Ukraine has coal, iron, sea access, etc
Huh, why does it say the heart of Russia and not the heart of the Union?
Because The Union was an Empire serving Russia
The poster is from 1921, the Soviet Union was still a baby concept and the memory of the Russian Empire was fresh in literally everyone's minds
Except this has been disproven time and time again and Russia itself was basically just a peasant farm for the Soviet Union compared to more metropolitan and higher prioritized places like Georgia and Ukraine
Yeah, Moscovites and people from SPG had it nice, but that's literally it
Same thing
Yeah, and that's implying Russia is a competent country with an industry led by competent, honest tax-payers. Look at what happened to the industries of the Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics. Fun fact, the leader of the DPR, Denis Pushilin, runs a ponzi scheme company.
In reality a half destroyed house or pile of rubble is often easier to defend than an intact one.
If you have to move towards a house, you just have to watch the door and windows. If the enemy is hiding in a pile of rubble he can use any tiny crack as a loophole
>How the fuck can the Russians bomb bakhmut for 5 months and there still be anything standing?
They cannot shell with the same intensity they used to, they would deplete their stocks. And for that matter most of bakhmut is completely uninhabitable, but big concrete commie blocks can withstand a lot of even direct hits from artillery, and this is where the ukrainian personnel are probably hiding. Some of them would be underground too.
>fire thermobaric rounds to suck the oxygen out of all the Ukrainian tunnels?
They have very few of these and the vehicles that fire them are super retarded and vulnerable. I also have major doubts that they work as well as the russians like to adverties.
Bombing literally everything before you advance takes time, gives your enemy time to know what you are doing and where, and even though the ukrainians have way fewer guns, they have longer ranged ones and can counterbattery you.
I read somewhere that Russia was firing nearly as many shells per day as they were during the height of WW2
>just liek in muh gaymez
In traditional (conventional pre-smart-bomb) war artillery is usually fired to suppress and stun right before troops assault because the opposite extreme (firing to wipe out all life) consumes too much ammunition to be practical.
A lot of people, even military officers, don't fully understand this and think they can fire a medium level of artillery between the two extremes and still get good results when they actually can't. Dug in infantry is very hard to kill with dumb arty bombardments.
Can you give some examples or reading material?
Uh, no actually. It's one of the historical truths of basic combined arms so it's like asking for a math proof of 1+1=2. You'll have to look around.
I suggest starting with the US army artillery and mortar manuals' tables definitions of neutralize, suppress, and destroy.
Destroy means only 30% casualties.
Neutralize means temporarily stop what they're doing and possibly inflict 10% casualties if you're lucky.
Suppress means distract (no casualties involved at all).
If you can get the Russian Cold War nomograms which measure how long it takes to statistically get a dumb shell to land on a given spot against a target, they evaluate several thousand rounds to get 50% casualties against a company of stationary APCs (who sit there for the whole duration of a multi-battalion bombardment exhausting more ammo than its supplied with).
You'd need enough fire power on hand to systematically destroy structure after structure without time or ability for the enemy to reposition or rebuild. You'd also need this to be coordinated closely with your own troops to take care of any remainders and prevent enemy movement. Russians are capable of neither of these things in the current year, so it simply isn't a viable strategy.
can someone explain how if their strat is to shell the FUCK out of everything that moves then send infantry in how is there a war? how tf are they not winning, I dont get it
That strategy needs a metric shitload of ammunition - you're talking several thousand shells (at least) for every 100m box on the map. Even that doesn't guarantee that you'll clear the area, that's the theory that was tried and failed on the Western Front of WWI, and again at Stalingrad in WWII. More often than not, especially if the enemy has had time to dig in, all it does is suppress them for however long you're shelling them for.
Russia has tried to do that in Ukraine, but it doesn't have the artillery shell stockpile or production capacity to manage it across two entire fronts. They don't have the money to try to buy either of those from someone else either.