Posting here so I don't get laughed at in the main forum.  We've seen the photos and videos of lines of Russian burnt out tanks and APC's lining roads in built up areas.  I'm not a combat veteran.  But I've played numerous hours of Close Combat, Company of Hero's and what not.  Typically the worst result is to run your armor down main street.  You got to dismount and advance through the buildings with armor behind.  The secret of street fighting is to stay out of the street.  If you got to go fast, you got to go around.  This seems so basic, I just amazed the Russians are learning the hard way.

It would take hours to clear each mid-high rise building in these industrialized cities and would likely just result in killing a bunch of civilians.

There is no right way to do it; fighting in cities sucks. Only way to win imo is level it...

Which funnily enough is Russian doctrine. I don't know why they're not doing it - you could see this approach in Syria. If a street contains enemy units, artillery until there is no street, then send in folks to mop up. It's costly and bloody.

Combat Mission Black Sea is the game you seek.

Yeah. Ideally you bypass built up areas and attack the support units in the rear (as armor). The Russians are going into Ukraine with the mindset we had in 2010 Iraq instead of 2004 Iraq.

They, believe it or not, seem to care about international optics and it is costing their military terribly.

Ukraine seems like what an invasion of Iran would look like. Very few set-piece battles, and a shit ton of state sponsored COIN rolled into one.

For wargaming? I don't think it really changes what we already knew, but if I had to guess the Russians are even more resistant to changing tactics than we are, and that's why they're getting clapped so bad.

One issue seems to be their supply system.  From what I've seen from various analysts, articles, etc., Russia lacks the ability to supply its forces more than about 100 miles (or perhaps 100 kilometers - damned Europeans and their fancy measuring sticks) from their supply depots and/or railheads.  Given the videos showing the state of repair on their supply vehicles and the state of the roads, I presume they simply can't bring enough ammunition forward to provide that level of sustained firepower.  Of note, they seem to be doing a fairly credible job of leveling the city of Mariupol, which is relatively close to the Russian-controlled Crimea and the separatist regions, so they would presumably have closer lines of supply there.

Of course, they may have a future issue in getting supplies through the Crimea, as it would be supplied by sea and they got one of their shiny amphibious assault ships a bit dinged up there recently.

Mike

One of the things that the USA has done very well is supplement training for our pilots with professional flight simulators on the ground (full mock up of the cockpit, thing moves, whole nine yards).  I read a great article about it and basically it said that you can train people in the simulator to do things that initially would be too dangerous for them to try out for the first time in an expensive plane.  It also allows the U.S. pilots to more cheaply train so they do get at least more experience than they otherwise would.  

I know that when the US Army was trying to do its future combat soldiers modular ground vehicles they wanted to incorporate into the onboard computers essentially simulators so that soldiers could sit in their actual MGVs and train out in advance entire missions even while deployed.  I thought at the time that was a great idea.

As VR and other tech gets better and better I think there is a lot of value that we here in the West can get in terms of computer simulated training and I do NOT see our near peer adversaries taking advantage of that themselves so it's something we should exploit.

From what I've been told, the newest Abrams can do this already. I remember the old turret simulators in the late 89s and how much of an advantage those gave us....