Vanir Ausf B

Mick Ryan's take on the war after returning from Ukraine. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/ukraine-war-how-check-russia-s-momentum Russia is now a more dangerous adversary than it was two years ago. This calls for change in how the war is fought. There is a compelling and urgent need for NATO to change from a “defend Ukraine” policy to one of “defeat Russia in Ukraine”. At the same time, Ukraine needs to develop and share with its supporters its theory of victory. One official in Kyiv told me there is no clear vision of how Ukraine will win. A new Ukrainian theory of victory must be a foundational element of any revised Western strategy.

I don't know if anyone has posted this yet, but RUSI just published a paper on the present and near future state of drone warfare. Mass Precision Strike: Designing UAV Complexes for Land Forces by Justin Bronk and Jack Watling Excerpt: Swarming capabilities are commonly touted as the most significant area of capability development in the small UAV defence sector. However, the requirement to swarm introduces significant hardware and software complexity, which in turn drives cost growth and reduces the number of individual assets that can be fielded for any given budget. Massed UAV groupings, as seen regularly in light shows at civilian displays, rely on a ground control station tracking the position of all UAVs in a formation at all times and a central mission computer sending commands to each one to coordinate their movements. This allows large numbers of very simple small UAVs to fly in a coordinated fashion, but it is not a practical approach for military UAVs and weapons in a contested battlespace, due to terrain masking, EW, signal range and emissions control challenges – the ground control station would be struck, decapitating the whole swarm. Instead, for a mass precision strike complex to be capable of swarming tactics, the individual assets involved must have onboard sensors and low-latency datalinks that are resistant to hostile EW disruption. In addition, each asset must carry a mission computer powerful enough, and software complex enough, to fuse the information about terrain, threats and targets received from its own sensors and those of other UAVs in the formation through datalinks, and to react to that information dynamically in real time. These capabilities are not inherently new, nor are they reliant on advances in AI or complex machine learning models. However, what the requirements for sensors, datalinks and advanced software do is raise component costs, even if used with an inherently cheap airframe/engine combination. Furthermore, if a mass precision strike system is premised on swarming tactics for its effectiveness against its core target sets, then the number of assets required to use it in a sustained fashion will be increased, due to the need to consistently project sufficient assets into the target area to swarm. In conjunction with the increased hardware and software complexity required, this requirement to sustainably field swarming UAVs in large quantities over time means that fielding this sort of system as more than a ‘Night One’ theatre entry tool is likely to be uneconomical. In terms of where swarming capabilities are likely to add value commensurate with the additional cost implied by their inclusion as part of a precision strike complex, the primary application will be to improve the capability to overwhelm air defence systems... Other advantages of swarming capabilities are that they can help reduce wasted warheads by deconflicting target selection so that multiple assets do not hit the same target. However, doing so in a way that can differentiate between a target having been hit and successfully disabled versus a target having been hit ineffectively and thus requiring a repeat strike with another asset requires significantly more advanced sensor and processing capabilities than simple deconfliction. Ultimately, for target deconfliction and strike optimisation, the value added question will come down to whether the additional efficiency against defended and undefended target sets gained from functional swarming capabilities outweighs the strike weight foregone by the increase in individual asset cost and the resultant reduction in quantity.

I'm not sure this is the way for China to take back Siberia. https://www.ft.com/content/ba524406-ee6c-4c39-9ac2-110a2549569a

He references Cannae and Marathon, but the front was IIRC something like 2700 km long. Pocketing some fraction of the Russian army (he never explains exactly how or where) while allowing them to advance in other areas doesn't sound like a war-winning strategy to me given the Russian ability to reconstitute formations.

On-map self propelled guns and howitzers are not allowed indirect fire in CM. IIRC the rationale is that ranges for on-map fire would typically be too short for their trajectory to hit.

Except for the attacker in attack/defend-type battles. Some people also allow it in meeting engagements but I prefer not to. As always, prior communication is the key.

More RUSI analysis from Justin Bronk. Getting Serious About SEAD

There is an EFP version of the Lancet.

I think that is correct for the commander's sight. The gunner's daylight sight on the T-64B is the 1g42. It's magnification and field of view are variable from 3.9x/20° to 9x/8.5°. By comparison the TZF 9 gunner's sight on the Tiger is 2.5x/25° and 5x/14°, so the T-64 has stronger magnification at the cost of a narrower field of view. Which of these would be better at spotting a machine gun team 450 meters away is anyone's guess. If we were talking about nighttime spotting or first shot accuracy the T-64 should be much better but I don't know that there would be a dramatic difference in daytime spotting. I agree with other posters that the OPs test is worthless for demonstrating anything at all.

It's the EU elections in June. Macron isn't a candidate but his party has candidates and they are trailing in the polls.

Pretty sure it's for realz. https://www.asterslaw.com/press_center/legal_alerts/draft_law_on_mobilization_and_military_record/

Apropos the above, the new US weapons package will include ATACMs The White House is expected to announce as soon as Tuesday that it will send a new package of weapons worth $300 million to Ukraine, and it will include a number of Army Tactical Missile Systems, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the discussions. The package will include a number of the Anti-Personnel/Anti-Materiel, or APAM, an older version of the long-range ATACMS, which travels 100 miles and carries warheads containing hundreds of cluster bomblets, according to one of the officials. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/12/white-house-aid-package-ukraine-00146487

That's what I interpreted him as saying. Asking when Russia will run out is like asking when the world will run out of oil. The answer is never, it just becomes more scarce. In fact the IISS estimate I posted above does not actually predict a run dry date, but rather how long Russia will be "able to sustain its assault on Ukraine at current attrition rates".

IISS says 2-3 years.

Russians are reading the forum.

LOL, true.

Lancet range is about 40 km so Ukraine could be holding them just out of range. This HIMARS was 50 km behind the front line so that tracks.

If reporting is accurate this was not a ballistic missile, but rather the Russian analog to GMLRS. The Russians claim a three minute "launch-ready" time for the system, but who knows.

Last month it was a NASAMS. If Russia starts using Tornado-S in larger numbers it could become a serious problem.

A (probably paywalled) WaPo article about Ukrainian recruitment efforts. It largely echoes @Haiduk's comments from yesterday. _____ Syrsky has been tasked with auditing the existing armed forces to find more combat-eligible troops, after Zelensky’s office recently announced that of the 1 million people who have been mobilized, only about 300,000 have fought at the front lines. But nearly a month after his promotion, no one in the military leadership or the presidential administration has explained where those 700,000 are — or what they have been doing. More than 4,000 amendments have been made to the mobilization bill, and some lawmakers see the measure as an attempt by Zelensky to pass off responsibility to parliament for inevitably unpopular decisions. “It’s time to start an adult conversation with society and not to be afraid of it, ” Bobrovska said. “It’s not 2022, when emotions took over.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/04/ukraine-mobilization-zelensky-russia/

Has Finland provided weaponry that realistically could be used to strike inside Russia? I tried to look it up but it seems Finland is coy about what they send, exactly.

Even if they wanted to it's unlikely Ukraine has the forces to spare.

I have no doubt it is to create space for the F-16s. The Russian A-50s are data linked to S-400s that launch 40N6 missiles with a 400 km range, meaning they could hit aircraft flying west of the Dnieper all the way from Russia.

It is and always has been. There are things you can do to stack the odds in your favor, and it sounds like you did that to a degree. But in Combat Mission, and I would argue in real life, doing everything the right way doesn't guarantee success. Of course, the corollary to that is sometimes you can screw up and still win.