Armata soon to be in service.

[Erwin]

"Put simply, someone has to break track on that crew-less vehicle, and it ain't gonna be no robot."

You are forgetting about the anti-gravity hyperdrive coming online for AFV's soon.  (Or was that "Hammers Slammers"?)

Seriously, once you remove life-support systems, protection and survivability of the machine can be greatly enhanced (or miniaturized and made cheaper re economies of scale).  Disposable weapons systems?   Or focus on nanotech that (say) eats/destroys POL etc.

[LukeFF]

2 hours ago, Erwin said:

Seriously, once you remove life-support systems, protection and survivability of the machine can be greatly enhanced (or miniaturized and made cheaper re economies of scale).  Disposable weapons systems?   Or focus on nanotech that (say) eats/destroys POL etc.

No offense, but that's spoken like someone who's never been in the military. 

[Erwin]

No offense taken.  But, there is a real danger that we here are discussing ways to refight the last war, or some modern Cold War fantasy.  I brought it up as the above reflects (at least used to) DARPA's thinking.   Back in the last century we had an effort towards finding new ways to fight wars using non-kinetic means that would make all the toys we discuss and play with here obsolete.  But, am way out of date now, and am sure there are truly amazing things in the works. 

Edited November 29, 2016 by Erwin

[Michael Emrys]

6 hours ago, Erwin said:

Disposable weapons systems?

The Russians have had those forever. Sometimes they are called 'Men'.

Michael

[Erwin]

With the new tech making physical fitness less of a necessity, the new expendables would be the elderly - we have way too many and they are crippling society.  Looking at you, Michael... 

(I am only 15 - honest...)

[Michael Emrys]

14 hours ago, Erwin said:

(I am only 15 - honest...)

Since your 60eth birthday?

Michael

[Baneman]

On ‎30‎/‎11‎/‎2016 at 3:38 PM, Erwin said:

With the new tech making physical fitness less of a necessity, the new expendables would be the elderly - we have way too many and they are crippling society. 

The fully-tracked mobility scooter brigade.

Genius !

[Erwin]

Am seeing a movie with our aging action stars like Stallone, Van Damm, Schwarzenegger, and those blokes from StarWars etc.  The goofy "kid" and comedic relief character would be played by Dwayne Johnson.

Edited December 1, 2016 by Erwin

[Michael Emrys]

3 hours ago, Baneman said:

The fully-tracked mobility scooter brigade.

I saw a video several years back of something exactly like that. A guy's wife had for some reason lost the mobility of her legs, so he designed and built a tracked powered wheelchair for her. The video showed her briskly driving down forest trails and even climbing curbs. Made me lustily envious.

Michael

[Erwin]

Hmm... Imagining Michael lusting after women who have lost mobility... 

[Michael Emrys]

30 minutes ago, Erwin said:

Hmm... Imagining Michael lusting after women who have lost mobility... 

I considered giving her a light tap on the head—nothing permanent mind you—and stealing her wheelchair. But since that would involve traveling all the way to Arizona and back, I gave up the project.

Michael

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

Having seen the state of the art in military automation and modern equipment, I feel pretty comfortable that most of the fighting will still be done by humans of a certain age and type.  

[Erwin]

Hey wot you got against AZ, Michael?  Am in AZ right now and it's great!  Can't beat the sunshine. 

Anyone having lived thru the weather in the UK for decades, knows why I have a Lawrence of Arabia desert, heat & blue-skies weather addiction.

[Douglas Ruddd]

3 hours ago, Michael Emrys said:

I saw a video several years back of something exactly like that. A guy's wife had for some reason lost the mobility of her legs, so he designed and built a tracked powered wheelchair for her. The video showed her briskly driving down forest trails and even climbing curbs. Made me lustily envious.

Michael

There are many out there....

http://www.tracfab.com/

[Michael Emrys]

3 hours ago, Erwin said:

Am in AZ right now...

Oh? One more item to add to the list of reasons not to go there...

Michael

[Erwin]

Absolutely.  Love the peace and quiet here, heh.

[Peter Cairns]

We already have some robo versions of Quadbikes, years back I saw a video of a university in Wales that was developing one as a robo sheep dog. We also now have robotic tractors in the works.

 

it won't be long till we start to see driverless or optionally driven logistics vehicles doing resupply especially for things like artillery.

i think a quad bike with a central mount that can be quickly changed for recon, support or antitank would be a useful and viable drone in the near term. Great for recon as small cheap and expendable. 

Maybe a future US squad will be a Bradley replacement with a four man team in the back each controlling one of the four armed quads that follow behind as it's swarm!

Peter.

[Michael Emrys]

1 hour ago, Peter Cairns said:

Maybe a future US squad will be a Bradley replacement with a four man team in the back each controlling one of the four armed quads that follow behind as it's swarm!

Or better yet, precede it.

Michael

[c3k]

UAVs and other "robot" battle-mechs have one flaw: their comm link. Or, better yet, the chip which controls that comm link. If it's made in China, it'd be hard not to envision a backdoor built into it: a commie-link?

Any aperture (talking comms here), can be exploited. It can be jammed, misdirected, delayed, intercepted, targeted, etc. That's just looking at getting into the control system or the UAV. (It's a two way opening: there's got to be a transmitter and a receiver. Sometimes both on each unit. Either way, it can be hacked.)  Also, think about the tremendous EW footprint of a four-ship mother-tank. Bolt an off-the-shelf radar detector to the nose of a GBU82, and no need to worry about GPS signals. (Okay, that's a simplification, but you get my drift.)

Or, you could say that you'd render the link as a "nice to have" feature and that the device could go fully autonomous. Yeah. If you think the game AI is bad, wait till you see flying/crawling/driving robots with guns, bombs, or missiles. "Sorry, men. Our programmers had a divide by zero error in there. You must be the new replacements?"

As stated, maintenance needs are not simplified by autonomous devices. In fact, they are exacerbated.

These are cool ideas, but they do not take into account a vicious, manipulative, opportunistic, skilled foe. Or Murphy.

 

[Michael Emrys]

^^^

Words of wisdom there.

Michael

[Battlefront.com]

On 12/3/2016 at 10:35 AM, c3k said:

UAVs and other "robot" battle-mechs have one flaw: their comm link. Or, better yet, the chip which controls that comm link. If it's made in China, it'd be hard not to envision a backdoor built into it: a commie-link?

Any aperture (talking comms here), can be exploited. It can be jammed, misdirected, delayed, intercepted, targeted, etc. That's just looking at getting into the control system or the UAV. (It's a two way opening: there's got to be a transmitter and a receiver. Sometimes both on each unit. Either way, it can be hacked.)  Also, think about the tremendous EW footprint of a four-ship mother-tank. Bolt an off-the-shelf radar detector to the nose of a GBU82, and no need to worry about GPS signals. (Okay, that's a simplification, but you get my drift.)

Or, you could say that you'd render the link as a "nice to have" feature and that the device could go fully autonomous. Yeah. If you think the game AI is bad, wait till you see flying/crawling/driving robots with guns, bombs, or missiles. "Sorry, men. Our programmers had a divide by zero error in there. You must be the new replacements?"

As stated, maintenance needs are not simplified by autonomous devices. In fact, they are exacerbated.

These are cool ideas, but they do not take into account a vicious, manipulative, opportunistic, skilled foe. Or Murphy.

 

I remember way back in the tail end of the Cold War there was a lot of discussion about NATO vs. Soviet aviation.  The general consensus was that NATO planes could outfight Soviet planes pretty much across the board.  The various highend avionics of the NATO planes was cited as the primary reason.  But some pointed out that the more primitive systems in the Soviet aircraft had a major advantage under some circumstances... resiliency.  A trait of Soviet weaponry going back to WW2, I might add. 

This meant that in various damage scenarios a NATO plane would fall out of the sky while the Soviet plane could theoretically make it back.  Which got some people thinking "low tech is better".  No.  The point is that the high tech advantage of the NATO planes meant that under normal circumstances they suffered no damage and the Soviet ones would suffer more damage than redundant systems and simplified engineering could withstand.  Therefore, the standards used for comparison should always focus on "average use" under "average conditions" rather than the extremes.

For things like drones, remote sensors, automatically triggered weapons, etc. the important thing is to evaluate practical weaknesses, not theoretical ones.  In Ukraine we're seeing that play out in several areas, one of which being drones.  The Russians military in Ukraine (sorry, coal miners) are using the top end Rusian jamming equipment to screw up drones.  However, they don't have much of this equipment and therefore Ukraine is successfully flying drones in many areas without interference even though theoretically Russia could shut down all drones if it had enough equipment.

Another point to consider is the concept of combined arms is still valid even if the traditional arms have been increased from Rock/Paper/Scissors to Rock/Paper/Scissors/Lizard/Spock   The Russian jamming equipment is pretty much immune to Ukrainian counter measures only because of Minsk II's restrictions.  If Minsk II went away they would target those energy emitting suckers big time.  Ukrainians can build UAVs far faster and in larger quantities than Russia can build jammers!

Steve

[John Kettler]

c3k,

Commie-link? Brilliant! And that direct Chinese ownership is why, under no circumstances, should the government or anyone doing sensitive stuff of interest to the Chinese ever buy a Lenovo PC. The product line used to be IBM's.

Steve,

Even with identical platforms, there is no doubt in my mind that, pilot for pilot, NATO would beat Russian opposite numbers. The reasons lie in better training, way more training time (believe the delta was a factor of 10 vs US), quite a few combat experienced leaders and far better tactics. To give you some idea in that regard, during the mid 1980s, the Russian Air Force journals were talking about the radical notion of very limited off leash (not under the usual rigorous GCI procedures) ops for fighters. And the creation of a mini-SUAWACS capability via use of the SUAWACS to control several of the lookdown/shootdown  radar equipped MiG-31 FOXHOUND, as the long range eyes for a small clutch of less capable fighters, was deemed revolutionary by us. That was where Russian fighter ops stood then.

Where the Russians really shone was in the MiG-25 FOXBAT. There the "backwards" Russian radar with its "crude" vacuum tube technology radar was discovered to be 1) so powerful it could burn through US jamming, 2) had WRFs (War Reserve Frequencies) wholly unknown to western ELINT and therefore not in the threat emitter catalogs of our aircraft jamming systems, and 3) EMP proof! As if all that wasn't hard enough to stomach, it was found, too, the MiG-25 had a wholly unknown to us separate J-band radar (primary was X-band) under the hood.

With the above in mind, factor in things like engine life. Ours were of the order of 3 x as long to overhaul and could be rebuilt many times, whereas a MiG-21's engine didn't last long, could be overhauled once, then had to be replaced outright. Just as our pilots had an enormous edge in soft factors, so, too, did our ground crews. They were enormously better educated, better trained and far more experienced. Generally speaking, the Russians had to use officers to perform most technically demanding tasks, for skilled technical people were rare then in the Russian military and very much still are. This comes because our society is so much more technologically sophisticated and accustomed to technology than theirs. They were copying IBM mainframes. We weren't copying theirs. They stole the radar designs for the F-18, not us the ones for the MiG-29 and Su-27. Their planes had poor visibility, lower performance sensors, worse cockpit ergonomics by far, and some of those issues remain true to this day. 

Did the US suffer from some of its whiz bang tech when it came to reliability? It did, at least for a time.  Circa 1978, the average operational availability of the F-14 Tomcat was a horrible 60%. This meant carrier groups had to consist of two carriers in order to be able to conduct continuous ops. One did nothing but fly strikes, while the other handled air defense. I was directly involved in analyzing this as part of a CAP remanning study at Hughes, which built both the then peerless Phoenix missile and the also peerless track 24/engage 6 simultaneously AWG-9 FCS. I haven't checked the numbers lately, but I feel reasonably safe in asserting F/A-18E/F availability is north of 85%.CodeNameDuchess, feel free to jump in.

Circa mid-1980s, Steve, the US expected to be able to generate, and had done this many times in exercises, about twice the RUAF SGR (Sortie Generation rate), more than that in certain categories. Believe the A-10, thanks in part to being based close to the action, was going to fly a dazzling 7 sorties/day, and the F-15s/F-16s ~ five. Working from distant memory here, so YMMV, but regardless of the exact numbers, the difference was enormous. What worried us greatly then was that the Russians and allies had quite an edge on numbers, and as we all know, numbers tell in war. This was especially true when factoring in woefully inadequate NATO ammo stocks.

Hope those who read this now have a better. In fairness to the Russians, but doubtless using picked aircraft, air crews (saw a bunch of aircraft markings indicating primo crews on video released) and ground crews, in Syria the initial Russian air effort was quite impressive, with SGRs closing in on the theoretical maximum. But that is a surged RUAF effort. What's the situation in very short order? A third of the force is grounded because of various breakdowns! The article's badly written in important places, but a 33% virtual attrition rate, let alone the other kind (in flight aborts, crashes on takeoff/landing)--on top of the attrition which would occur in a defended NATO area, paint a picture of Russian air power with, to use a boxing analogy, an impressive flurry of heavy punches early in the fight but no real staying power over time. RUAF wasn't suited for a a longer haul, still less around the clock operations. This is the direct result of the entire Russian military philosophy during the Cold War. And after the Berlin Wall came down, we learned exactly how serious the Russians were about fighting a short war. Armed Forces Journal reported a TOP SECRET Russian war plan had been found in which they expected to reach the Channel in two weeks, a feat to be made possible by no fewer than 200 tac nukes!

The Russians expected to fight a short intense war, and their weapons fully reflected this reality. People can go off about Suvorov/Rezun all they like, but having commanded both a BTR-60PB MRC and a T-55 equipped TK CO, we ignore him at our peril when it comes to service life and maintenance for Russian military equipment. But we don't have to take his words, since there is plenty of evidence supporting his case. For example, a TK CO would generally have at most a platoon of tanks for training, and these would be used for a time, then sent in for repairs, with their place taken by others. The idea was to husband limited service life to the greatest extent possible. This is why Suvorov/Rezun  sounds off the way he does about Exercise Dneiper in 1967, the "peep show" which terrified western defense people. We saw our worst nightmares incarnate in the seemingly endless tanks and other weaponry being used, but he knew full well that the peep show caused enormous damage to the Red Army because the entire force assemblage burned through much or even all of the primary service life of the equipment. This was a huge hit on combat readiness and apparently forced massive outlays for equipment replacement. Based on talking to the flyboys, he found the same thing was true for their planes, and they were most unhappy as a result. This was officer to officer candid chats, too. Thus, this terrifying to the uninformed display of presumed military prowess (with officers used throughout) was immensely destructive to the Red Army's combat readiness post exercise, but to those of units covering the border during it, for they were stripped of officers in order to make the biggest splash before the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4zMxktcniE

Regards,

John Kettler

 

[John Kettler]

2 hours ago, John Kettler said:

Hope those who read this now have a better.

...sense of the realities of the Cold War aerial warfare equation. It further occurs to me that I should mention the Russians had some stupendously powerful SOJs (Stand Off Jammers) in the form of the Tu-16P/BADGER J medium bomber variant. One of these flew too low near one of our ships, hooked a wingtip housing one of those jammers into a wave, then cartwheeled spectacularly as it destroyed itself. The US was mighty interested in that pod and found a way to retrieve lt.  My understanding is that this technical exploitation led to the US doing something similar for SAC, but I don't know the details. This is from conversations with that guy I worked with who had a sponsor in the Agency's Office of Scientific and Weapon Research. I've seen Cold War studies looking at Russian SOJs vs AWACs. It could SLC (Side Lobe Cancel) a certain number of emitters  (electronically ignoring them), but once that threshold was reached, the scope would strobe on every axis with a jammer on it, blanking large parts of the radar display outright.

Regards,

John Kettler

[John Kettler]

There's been some major news about matters Armata on another thread which I wanted to make sure wound up over here. Cross post of a great find antaress73 made.

T-90M to sport T-14's 2A82-1 cannon, Malakhit ERA, Afghanit APS and other T-14 Armata items and fire potent new KE and tandem charge TLGMs. Announcement made on January 21st. Also, am curiious regarding listing of Vacuum and Vacuum-1 KE (which I've never heard of), as opposed to Griffel, which we have discussed.

https://sputniknews.com/military/201701211049856690-t-90m-armata-cannon-russia/

Article has this new video with the T-14 in it, too. One filthy tank. Armor modelers take note! Could even the mighty TMS-65 get it clean?
 

An earlier article had a juicy morsel. Seems the T-15 Heavy IFV will have its own drone. The same article has another video it shows Russia's one-of-a-kind Uran-9 robotic tank(ette).

https://sputniknews.com/military/201605221040052588-armata-firing-tests-video/
 

John Kettler

Edited January 28, 2017 by John Kettler

[John Kettler]

Judging by what's in the video, rather than the article, there are at least three in firing tests. Three as we all know, is not the same as one of a kind. Regardless, this is, as the British say, a nasty bit of kit. Tons of firepower in a small platform: the type of thing JasonC would probably categorize, as he did of WW II German Marders, as eggshells with hammers. In this case, though, instead of a powerful cannon, the real punch lies in the ATGMs, which, if I understood correctly were not Kornet but the considerably less penetrating and radically different guidance method, but still pit viper deadly, 9M120 Ataka.

Regards,

John Kettler