Tenses

"Tearing it down" is what Russia and other autocracies active in "Western" Information space is advocating. This would destroy us all and they could feed on the chaos however they would see fit. Unfortunately USA is not alone with this issue, this is general democracies flaw. We either change the democracy itself and the executive law that follows after it or we will join autocracies, possibly the hard way. The "bad guys" knows very good that the system is flawed at the moment and they exactly know how to use it.

In the long run I suspect that drone dominated battlefield will transform both tanks and artillery in a very drastic way. Drones can do job of both of these systems but are not as good as them in any of these. What drones can do: - Deliver precision guided munition of various sizes to the same range as artillery or even greater - Have good time to deliver(if planned upfront - loitering munitions) - Cover the square artillery mission if needed. Can be done both by having preprogrammed drones, but even better, by equipping drones with weapons containing dumb submunitions. This mission will only be viable in situation, when for some reason you can't do precision targeting by drones. The only scenario I can think of is when enemy finds a way to disguise itself from the drones so they will have to shoot blindly. - Drones are not limited in any way in size so the swarm can achieve even bigger barrage weight than artillery battery. We are long way from FPVs with better load than 155, but it is perfectly doable. On the other hand, enlarging artillery shell in any way is a World of Hurt. What drones can't do: - Have better time to deliver(if not planned upfront). When you don't have drones already in the air, artillery will always be faster. In theory one could create a FPV with jet engine enabling it to reach the same or even better time to deliver than tube artillery but this is just not economically/logistically feasible anymore. Such drone would have to go supersonic very fast to reach target before artillery shell so this kind of weapons will be rather restricted to much longer ranges(strategic fires, something like currently developed hypersonic munitions). To be honest there is not much, which drones can't do in comparison to artillery, not to mention the logistics chain and artillery maintenance costs. For me the obious solution is to merge tanks and artillery into one piece of equipment. Tanks will have to move further away from the frontline and start basing on non line of sight fires to complete missions. Direct fire support will become rarity. On the other hand, tube artillery might become more capable for surviving any unexpected engagements, like...direct line of sight one. Cutting logistics to save money is an obvious added benefit and might keep heavy Armored Fire Support Vehicle afloat.

Agreed, counter drone, which is reliable, cheap AND scalable would be a game changer. With that and Russian ISR removed, Ukraine could go back to late spring 2023 and smash Russians into the ground as soon as artillery ammo arrives. But currently I don't see that happening and as @LongLeftFlank mentioned Ukrainians, especially prepared and motivated, is not a resource which is infinite. I feel that something needs to change very fast to prevent further escalation of negative trend in force multiplier to give Ukraine a breath by properly training, equipping and rotating infantry. Massive counter drone is a holy grail, but what can be done in the meantime? Holy grails usually take some time to find, you know...

Taking a few steps back and looking at overall situation, what exactly do you think can really change the tide of this war? Beacuse even with these recent massive mechanized losses the pressure is pretty much the same and we know that when BMPs, BMDs and tanks will not be available, Ruzzians will just go on foot. We currently wait for(and Ukrainians die in the meantime): - ammunition to artillery/more artillery: This will provide support, which is badly needed, especially in defence, might actually stop most of the attacks but not for long due to penetration of Russian ISR up to and beyond artillery positions. - F16s : Just as above and might also have some impact on air defence. I don't see much usage in offence deep behind the frontline, definitly can provide good very close to the frontline air support. If will be properly used, with superior Ukraine ISR, can be hard to deal by Russian anti-air. The minus is that every mistake will be extremely costly and irreplacable(mainly the pilots, planes to the lesser degree). - air defence, anti tank weaponry replacements : this should assure keeping the quality of both of these on current, in my opinion, pretty high level Apart from these, which should come from the "West" exclusively we have the drone war, but is it possible to achieve quality+quantity=pressure of drone swarms to actually push back? I see that as currently the only option to do that but I am not sure, if gaining that high pressure is actually possible. It was analyzed here many times that using classical means for counteroffensive is generally death sentence. And if pushing back is not possible what are we looking at here? Either there is a plan to turn the tide or not, I would not count on Russia running out of something, even if it looks like it. It went for the ammo to North Korea, it went for drones to Iran, it produces a lot by itself, if real necessity arises I don't belive it won't get support from China in a meaningful way. And I think it is clear to everyone that China has no bottom, the current "Games of Hegemony" is exactly because of that. So, do we have a clear target here or just "wait and see"?

Remember that this is Russia. When 1000km range anti air drones will appear, we can be sure to see all russian military aircraft parasiting civilian airlines in no time. The question is actually, if Ukraine should care.

I fear that currently any new artillery capabilities like new howitzers or finally getting enough ammo for them, will not be anywhere close to the impact it made last year. As currently Russia has ISR capabilities allowing it to target the artillery effectively, it won't be able to do counter battery and support missions as good as it could in the past. The biggest indicators for this issue is HIMARS and Patriot being both hit recently. This would not be possible last year. From my perspective the priority has changed and now the wonder weapon is C-UAS capabilities on regional scale. If Ukraine will be able to successfully remove the enemy UAS, it will unlock all the other weapons to be effective enough to provide force multipler on a scale allowing for actual winning the war. All of the stuff, which is below air force is now locked by overwhelming ISR+drone/ballistics/whatever precision weapon you have. As winning by air force superiority is not an option, enemy drones needs to be beaten. Currently we have something like mutual destruction in regard to drone saturation and its effects on anything on the ground. With longer ranges, this drone dead zone extends far behind the frontline. Reliable, cheap, scalable and currently non-existent C-UAS technology needs to be implemented. Spending time and money on anything EW based is also waste of resources until it literally fries the insides of the drone. Looking at current developments, autonomous seems to be casual at the end of current year so lack of manual control due to EW will not be an issue. When drones will be done, artillery and all the other fancy stuff will shine again. Ukraine can't afford to wage war on equal terms in regard of technology so there is no option to just produce more drones than Russia to overwhelm it. It needs to actually fight the enemy drones to achieve its own drone superiority and all the other forces just after that.

My friend had a master thesis on sound indentification of different types of vehicles and it was more than 10 years ago. You don't need AI for that, but it will certainly help, especially to quickly populate database with new types of targets. Generally systems like that is a great example of how much you can achieve with almost no material investment. If algorithms are there, you can cover entire country with such systems and get cheap and precise alternative of radar coverage. Every country should have something like that. In time additional network of thermal imagers and seismic sensors should also accompany the radar, which is not always available and is not easily replaced. For current system I would put as a priority different information transport medium as cell network is not reliable. Optical infrastructure is a life saver in war as it is the fastest and immune to all types of interferences. Next step is to put automatic HMGs on critical locations and you can start to sleep better at least in regard to danger presented by Shahed class drones. For something bigger(and faster - recent "Zircon") you need big stuff but it is even more important to achieve faster response times. I hope that at the end of this war Ukraine will have nearly impenetrable air defenses(for a sane size of attack) thanks to your own developments and innovations.

Don't want to go farther into OT but at least for cargo we should have long ago switched to non-rocket systems. Rockets are good for humans, who are not feeling very well with 100G accelerations on their heads, but for any cargo like satellites, space station components, etc. we should instead fire them into space using electromagnetic catapults. Much cheaper, environmentally friendly and you can do launches all day long. There are some startups for that at the moment but when matured it could instantly replace anything what was lost in space due to warfare or natural reasons.

We need MALE class drones with laser dome zapping 10 small drones at a time at horizontal distance of 20km. THAT firepower, time to deliver and cost effectiveness would put as back at the point, where tanks(unmanned) and other stuff is back as a primary force projection in land warfare. As we are nowhere near this kind of technology we will have to make something up as a stopgap to avoid ugly brawl as we see now.

What I mean by saying that grain exports are not contributing to the war effort is that it provides money. From quick search it seems that agricultural exports peaked in its value in 2021 by adding 27.8 B$ to GDP(so it is not cash, just taxable economic value). Unfortunately money alone is not enough to pop out warplanes, tanks, drones etc. Of course having smaller deficit is nice and will put less strain on western countries, which at the moment effectively keep Ukraine afloat thanks to covering its deficits, but it does not change the situation of war effort by any means. If there would be no grain export, West would have to pay higher bill for keeping Ukraine up, but lets face that, money is of least concern, especially for countries like Germany, which are more comfortable with paying the bills than military support(not saying that they not help, just prefer to base support on money for various reasons). Overall the cost of covering Ukraine deficit is not a big deal for western joint effort. Much bigger problem would be, if entire north Africa started to starve. This was Ruzzians main target to create further disruption in the western countries by destabilizing masses of hungry Africans. They are actively supporting illegal African immigrants long before the war started so it would fit perfectly in this strategy. Any Ukrainian income, which would be hurt during the process was secondary target. In general, keeping the grain exports up is important for various of reasons like mentioned World food security issue, better economy kickstart after the war, etc. but won't help directly in any meaningful way in fighting Ruzzians. When Ukraine kicks out the last Ruzzian out of its borders, we can surely expect very powerful rebuild program, which should put the country back on its tracks despite any previous headwinds.

Exactly. The only issue I have with hating everyone is when I need to decide whom to help first. I won't comment on your insults and I don't really mind them. For me, your recent posts could be safely flagged as russian propaganda. You insist on suggesting that there are any problems with military and humanitarian support going through the border. Just as you suggest that grain export is in any significant way helping Ukraine. These exports are having close to zero importance for the war. All the fuss about it is due to fact that this grain feeds no small part of the World, so everyone are trying to help with that to avoid another humanitarian crisis.

Ok, I really have read enough of this. You are having serious problems with proper assessment of what polish society is and what is not. First of all I don’t like farmers, just as Beleg85 said, they are not likable in overall polish society. I guess that it might be something with millions of donations from EU, retirement system where they effectively have it granted for free and a couple of other things. When farmers across EU started their protests by blocking centers of big cities with farming equipment worth in excess of 1 million euros each, it also was not very understandable by people in traffic jams worrying that they will be late to their, oh so well, paid job. But overall this is actually nothing compared to how „likable” are agro-oligarchs in Ukraine. You are now standing in their defense and I would love to see how much of the money they earn is supporting the war. They basically try to abuse unfair competition on EU markets in order to make money, but looking at the financial statements, I don’t see anything like „war tax” in defense of their country, soil that have given them free money, could you please explain me this? How does that compare to billions in direct financial and material support from western countries? After 2014, when immigration to Poland from Ukraine has increased tenfold, the overall sentiment for Ukrainian people was not perfect in Poland during the start of the war in 2022. Especially among low paid workers, additional competition on job market with low wage expectations were seen as danger. Situation was similar to our US friends, who can elaborate more on overall sentiment toward Mexicans and South American people. Invasion started on 24th of February, my wife spent entire weekend starting 26th on the border, serving hot meals and distributing blankets to the wave of people in need. Week later we went for the local train station, looked around and took home a mother with a child, who have not even spoken a word in Polish/English. She stayed with us for half a year, when she found suitable job and shelter. My then-boss took a family of 8 and even took care of one girl, who was in the middle of chemotherapy, so she could finish it in Poland without problems. This is just a small part of what happened at that time, no one asked questions, no one was whining, because these were people in dire need. Do you think I liked to have a stranger mother with spoiled child in my home? I didn’t, but this is not the point in helping other people to like that. It is to do that effectively and provide whatever is needed despite your feelings or likening. If you will ever work with people like that, you will learn that this is no simple, nor nice task. Now you are telling me that polish people have showed that they don’t give a **** about Ukraine because they don’t want to give billions of Euro to your corrupted oligarchs, who are most likely closely connected with Russia. Not to mention some of their perfidious actions, which are gaining better coverage in Poland, which directly hit polish stock holders(so effectively all polish people due to retirement system). You must understand that Ukraine has a long way to go before it will be normal country and I am not even saying about the war. Believe me, Poland was on the same track 35 years ago, but it serves as an example that even if things are not perfect, it is doable. At the moment Ukraine is corrupted as were all post Soviet countries, but it is not that important as long as the war goes. This WILL be important, when the war finally ends to continue normal cooperation with the western countries and their business. Hopefully Ukraine will join EU, but it has so much work to do. And just as a reminder, borders were open to Ukrainian grain, which is not up to EU standards due to blocked export channel through the Black Sea. Now, thanks to marvelous work of Ukrainian drone fleet, this is not an issue anymore, so what exactly are we talking about? No military/humanitarian or other aid was ever blocked, save for some mistakes, nor will be. This is all about bunch of bastards, who want to profit from the blood of your countryman.

You also need to count in the shells, which are detonated before firing. Ukraine is very helpful with that to their Russian comrades. Saves a lot of effort with bringing shells to the frontline, when you can blow them en masse while stockpiled.

Just to cheer you up, USA are not alone. In Europe every single country has pretty much the same problem on a different scale. Above film about mathematics basics is just a presentation of the tip of the iceberg. This is a big, flashing red alarm to start treating weaponization of information seriously. Really, freedom of speech is NOT freedom of lies and manipulation. Either we act and demand scientific process of proving "facts" or we will drown in b*******.

As all the new toys are described by "Power", so our "P" you don't really have to consider, if they have capacitors( which is rather obvious) or not. High energy devices, which work in bursts always have capacitors(like for example roentgen lamps). With these lasers it is even better as usually when we talk about laser, it is described by effective Power. Unlike the usual way this is already describing how powerful is the laser beam itself, not how much juice is the device taking. So you don't get info on how much HP your new car have as for example 300HP might look a lot but only considering that you don't drive 20t IFV. You already have info on how fast it accelerates, omitting the useless stuff. In general I would not be too focused on how lasers warm the target as you don't know how highly focused they are and this is highly dependent on distance and weather. I would assume that in 300kW range you will get rapid ablation of the surface, whatever it is built from. For comparison you can get the famous 1MW airbone laser, which was supposed to destroy ICBMs in their boost phase from 500km range. From tests it was considered a success but after spending billions on that to the shock and awe of the constructors, they started to wonder how to get a boening in 500km range of launching ICBM. No comment on this part.