JonS

I think it was a zombie-operation.  There was a plan and the big red button was hit.  Those executing the plan were not told to stop, even if everything else did, and went ahead with "the plan", likely not even knowing the situation until they got to the site and then went "well crap...orders are orders are orders".
You get something like this in motion, it can be really hard to stop.

Since Ukraine doesn't exist in a bubble and neither do we, we are involved whether we like it or not. That means we need to put our political power and money where it counts to produce a resolution that works to maintain a global order that's quite significantly canted in our favor. Ukraine did work mightily to prepare for this scenario but they were limited by innate capability, the then state of interstate politics in the EU, the ability/willingness of American administrations to help. For our part, the strategic goal should be to a; recognize that Russian aggression on this scale is highly destabilizing to the international order, b; pursue what means are feasible to put a stop to that aggression now and c; ensure that such aggression in the foreseeable future is not going to reoccur.
We created the global order and benefit enormously in a myriad of ways large and small. $40 billion is a small price to pay to maintain it.

Conceptually, is it plausible to layer a whole bunch of slow actions to create a quick overall operation through simultaneity?

Sanctions can work surprisingly quickly
https://i.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/300587871/russia-is-fixing-weapons-with-fridge-and-dishwasher-parts

Sanctions can work surprisingly quickly
https://i.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/300587871/russia-is-fixing-weapons-with-fridge-and-dishwasher-parts

so stealing washing machines is actually a plan to get around sanctions... devious.

Gavins! Russia is doomed:
(Dutch YPR-765s)

Wouldn't the current do that once the site is abandoned the the sections become untethered?

Exactly - the point I wanted to highlight, given my particular trade, is the use of IPB.  It is an effective tool, particularly when you can draw on the expertise of SMEs - in this case a combat engineer who knows the detail on the river and bank conditions.  From there, as an analyst, once you narrow down the likely crossing sites you can start refining your NAIs and TAIs.  He also discusses the likely enemy assets needed to cross that gap and that allows you to work out the echelon you're facing and where that equipment might come from and how it will get to where it needs to be.  This allows you to add more NAIs to locate them and TAIs to strike them.  By knowing the equipment that is likely to be used you can then give clearer direction to your ISR assets - in this instance look for boats.  If deemed a High Payoff Target (HPT) then you are looking to strike that/those asset(s).  There was also some good detail about timings as well as time estimates.
A lot of people outside the intelligence trade seem to think that good tactical intelligence is enabled by super secret technical whizzbangery.  In fact it isn't - it is essentially a speed-time-distance problem that you are solving based on a knowledge of the enemy's orbat/likely orbat and the area of operations.  This is almost a classic case study of how to do this and how, if done competently (as in this case), tactical intelligence provides the decision support to get inside the enemy's OODA loop and to defeat him.

Nice to see John Salt getting a solid shout out.

I dunno, trees at riverside are not reliable. Their roots are weaker and the trunk itself is just not as strong. The ground under the bank is waterlogged and unless youre crossing in say a gorge or other hewn Rock type channel then theres not much to anchor to. If one tree goes they can easily take more with them. The only really secure way would be using several T72s further up the bank., as the drag from that current would be massive.
Then when the bridge is hit you could easily rip the tracks off your bolstering tanks when the structure hits into the water and is shoved downstream.   (EDIT rip the tanks off the tracks and watch them toboggan downslope).
Ive shot on a platform out in the middle of a medium river. Holding the platform (a barge, essentially), loaded with cast, lights, crew etc steady in the middle of the current was brutal. Heavy Stanchions on the banks plus a river boat up stream. We also tied off to our telehandlers that were positioning lights. This was all extremely dependent on weather and River conditions, not just at our location but 50 kms upstream. A heavy shower up north cut out night short. We were all glad. 
We were a Tier 1 film making crew, highly professional with tons of money and prep days. Used local river men with deep knowledge of the river. Not a lot of meetings but very detailed, lengthy and technical tech scouts, walking the river, sitting out in the river boat in the current, examining the banks, etc. We had an engineer, cranes, divers, ambulance, and coast guard.
People laugh about shooting with kids and animals, but water is easily the hardest, most awkward, slowest process and greatest potential for injury and death than anything else.
You dont **** with water, water ****s you.
Or Ukrainian 152s. Either/or >:D

Well, one less BTG to track

No from the entry and exit tracks they laid it diagonal, which means they likely did not have a fast boat to push into place to anchor it.  That means that the either did not know what they were doing or their boats got dead, or stuck in traffic.  
You can get away with this in a pinch but it is sloppy.  Exit bank will get some really weird ruts over time, so when it rain you have problems.  And you risk warping the connectors on the sections, which means the pontoons are locked and you cannot pick that back up...which apparently was not a problem because the UA blew it up anyway - Bright Side!

Wouldn't the current do that once the site is abandoned the the sections become untethered?

This isn't a new problem though - it's basically encapsulating the problem the allies had in Normandy (replace atgm with atg, mortar and mg).
The answer then was slow grinding attrition chewing forward. The same approach would work now, with a high level of isr asymmetry allowing the attrition to be highly one-sided (ie, /their/ side gets attrited, but not ours ). It'd still be really slow though.

Is fast and quick really that important? You know what they say about the triple constraint of projects ...

Pick any two you want, and watch the third suffer.
(except in combat case the corners would be something like time, casualties, and resources)
 
Anyhoo, what I had in my mind is basically a smaller scale implementation of your proposal for the UA offensive against the hypothetical RA defence of the Donbas. Ie, the one where UA isolates and reduces each company position before moving on. Except in the case of NATO vs UA it'd be finding, isolating, and reducing each platoon or section position, before moving on. It's not going to win many Rommel-esque style points, but it'd get the job done at tolerable cost in casualties, I think. In other words, I'm choosing to sacrifice Time in the above triangle in favour of Casualties and Resources.
And, of course, logistically in the hypothetical NATO vs UKR war it'd be UKR in the strat log position that RUS is currently in (no friends, no suppliers), rather than being the beneficiary of an endless magical conveyer belt of free splodey goodness.

Is fast and quick really that important? You know what they say about the triple constraint of projects ...

Pick any two you want, and watch the third suffer.
(except in combat case the corners would be something like time, casualties, and resources)
 
Anyhoo, what I had in my mind is basically a smaller scale implementation of your proposal for the UA offensive against the hypothetical RA defence of the Donbas. Ie, the one where UA isolates and reduces each company position before moving on. Except in the case of NATO vs UA it'd be finding, isolating, and reducing each platoon or section position, before moving on. It's not going to win many Rommel-esque style points, but it'd get the job done at tolerable cost in casualties, I think. In other words, I'm choosing to sacrifice Time in the above triangle in favour of Casualties and Resources.
And, of course, logistically in the hypothetical NATO vs UKR war it'd be UKR in the strat log position that RUS is currently in (no friends, no suppliers), rather than being the beneficiary of an endless magical conveyer belt of free splodey goodness.

I think most of the questions you had for me have already been broadly covered, and I don't have too much to add. JonS answered the quadcopters question with exactly what I had in mind - currently, they don't have the technical capabilities to produce effective and targetable data. Now granted, I have some bias myself, as I have spent the last two years observing training in a desert, and it's much harder to terrain associate you quadcopter footage with Google Maps in a barren wasteland, as opposed to Ukraine with it's clearly defined fields and villages. But adjustments become a problem as you don't have a firm grip on your observer direction, and then there is the vulnerability to small arms as you have to get much closer to produce more accurate data. You could certainly kit up a quadcopter to achieve those effects, but then you run into weight issues, and power issues, and size issues; is your quadcopter now something that you can hand off to an infantryman and have him stuff in a truck? I think it will be a useful tool for observation and mortar fire on enemy battle positions, but not something you can routinely use to target maneuvering formations.
I wouldn't describe a lot of opinions on drones as "pushback", but more along the lines of hesitancy. Militaries are quick to tout the capabilities of their new systems, but when the soldiers get a hold of them, reality rears its ugly head and the ground truth of their real capabilities becomes apparent. The US Army is full of such examples, some that you probably wouldn't even realize. Yes, at some point in the future we may be able to solve some or even most of these problems, but you also can't write doctrine based on a future capability that isn't even fully realized. Look at something like Nett Warrior, which has gone through many iterations and different equipment sets but has yet to be realized in the extent originally envisioned. The Army could probably dump a lot of time and effort on developing doctrine for an infantry platoon that has the capability to seamlessly network with every rifleman, but why would we, when we don't even have a system of record that can achieve that. You don't want to fight the previous war but you also can't pretend the next war is going to be fought with systems that haven't even been proven yet. Not saying the UAV isn't proven - clearly they are effective systems in the current operational environments - but more along the lines of things like micro UAVs or UGVs.
I'm not foolish enough to believe that war never changes and things will always be the same, but I'm also not going to buy off on having to completely change up our doctrine to counter threats that haven't even been fully realized. Drones  are dangerous and units will have to adapt their procedures to survive, but at the end of the day countering UAVs is about reducing the enemy's ability to observe you, and HEY, maybe you should figure out how to make the thing flying around and looking at you go away first, before completely changing up how we do things. Right now there is certainly an equipment gap when it comes to dealing with UAVs that is making things difficult, but a slow, poorly armored aircraft, with limited sensors and payloads, and a critical requirement to maintain comms to do its mission, and that has no effective means of cover or concealment and relies solely on a small signature and distance for survivability, certainly strikes me as system with vulnerabilities. Drones may be cheaper then manned aircraft but there is a limit on how many can be shot down before UAV operators have to start changing their tactics.
But I'm a pessimist I guess, and have burned by plenty of equipment that didn't hold up to what was promised. If you're gonna tout the next new thing that's going to change war, you need to prove to me that it's actually achievable first. I guess I won't be applying to Army Futures Command any time soon. 😁
In regards to a question I can't find anymore, about what I think potential solutions to the UAV problem may be:
I think there are a couple options out there. We can already target mid-size drones (think TB-2 or RQ-7 equivalents) fairly easily with current equipment, the main issue is probably range. So maybe we need a UAV specific missile that sacrifices speed and payload for range, as they aren't chasing down high performance jets at altitude anymore.
Where are the anti-UAV drones? We need a new Fokker Scourge, with drones swooping out of the sun to shoot buckshot at loitering quadcopters. I mean it sounds cool, right??
If we can track a small mortar round traveling hundreds of feet per second through the air with counterfire radars, how come we can't utilize similar technology to locate small UAVs? I am not a radar expert by any means, but it sounds feasible? Tie in a decentralized UAV finding radar with Avenger style systems operating down to the company level, and anytime a UAV comes within your bubble, rollout of cover and shoot it down with missiles or - even cheaper - proximity fuzed 20mm cannon rounds. Provide some sort of optical assistance and you can maybe even forgo the radar except for early warning.
Maybe some sort of weapon system that takes advantage of the noise a drone creates? Quadcopters have quite the unique sound profile, maybe there is some sort of way we can take advantage of that. I don't know, I'm just a dumb artilleryman.
Thank you for these insights! Good to see the mortar still has their traditional place on the battlefield. I imagine the infantry fight is much harder to turn into sexy Twitter videos and we won't see a lot of this on OSINT channels.
So honestly some of the hits do look like ATGM hits. The "B Roll" footage interspersed shows a much closer view of the convoy that seems to be well within ATGM range, you can clearly see the lead vehicles engaging something with their main gun, and (gonna channel my inner Trent here) some of the hits on the vehicles have a very distinctive "plume" of rising smoke I see with a lot of ATGM hits. And near the end, one of them definitely hits a mine. I think what we may be seeing is a perfect doctrinal example of an Engagement Area - artillery and mortars to disrupt movement and keep infantry in cover or in their vehicles; dismounted ATGM teams engaging lead vehicles of the convoy to stop forward movement; all in concert with an obstacle plan.
This is an excellent observation, and one I hadn't really internalized! I agree that this is probably due to survivability requirements. 
Digital Fire Control Systems are not so much about precision but rather speed. Digital systems greatly speed up the ability to lay and shoot howitzers. The howitzer is firing the same data that it would be if it were using optical systems, the difference is that the crew can just lay the howitzer faster and easier. If anything, I would argue that the digital FCS's greatest advantage is in fact the ability to mass even more. A wide range of howitzers unit could mass quickly on a single mission, displace and have the ability to conduct a quick "hip shoot" at any point during their survivability move - theoretically at least. Reality is, as always, more complicated.  But still, digital fire control systems have probably been the largest gain in capability for executing indirect fires in the last 100 years, I think even more so then the introduction of computing software to calculate firing data.
I'm sorry, but I don't buy the logistical issues. Army's have been firing unfathomably large amounts of howitzer rounds since World War I, with much worse logistical transportation equipment. I'm sure the invention of the machine gun and automatic rifle greatly increased small arms expenditures beyond what militaries were used to but I don't think the answer was reduce our ability to output small arms fire. You couldn't have replaced German machineguns at the Somme with snipers and achieved the same effects. Large volumes of artillery fires brings a certain suppressive effect that can't be matched with other systems. And mass isn't about blasting every treeline - it's about bringing all your available assets to bear at the same time to achieve a desired effect- sometimes that's a rear area command post, sometimes that's a platoon in a trench in a treeline. And a lot of times it's not even about killing the platoon in the trench - it's about keeping their heads down until my infantry can maneuver in and shoot them in the face.
In regards to GOs and obsession with precision, in 2014 the Field Artillery Commandant laid out a standard that 80% of targets acquired should have a Target Location Error within 10m to 5m

8 years later we didn't even come close to achieving this as an Army and the goal is long forgotten. Why? Because the ability to achieve that Category 1 and 2 TLE required cumbersome additional steps that are completely unfeasible for forward observers to accomplish in LSCO environment. You'd be hard pressed to make these requirements go away as well due to the physical and geographical nature of the target mensuration steps required to achieve CAT 1. Is it worth generating that CAT 1 grid for a command post? Absolutely, you wanna make that round count. But the infantry commander on the ground? He doesn't have time to wait on his FSO to mess around with his target mensuration software, squinting at a blurry satellite image and making sure that he is picking the right tree in the forest that's hiding the machine gun position. He needs suppressive fires now, and needs it for the next 30 minutes so he can organize his troops and maneuver on the enemy. Precision munitions are not as simple as point laser, shoot PGM - when you're dodging incoming small arms fire, you don't have time to make sure you have the right grid for the machine gun position, instead of the bush that's 50 meters in front of it that your laser clipped. For a precision round, that's enough distance to greatly limit your effectiveness, no matter how cheap they are.
 

My sensor sees two dudes in a tree line. Cool! I can hit those two with a single PGM. Done, dusted. Let's move on.
*boom*
Oh, damn. There were actually another 15 dudes in that tree line, but my sensor didn't pick them up and my one PGM missed them precisely. Q, send me another BMP full of crunchies, willya? And Guns, hit that /whole/ tree line for me this time please?

That deaf, dumb, blind army can’t play invasion pinball for crap.

Land based?  Yemen?  I think you might need to look at a map again...maybe a map of the belt and road initiative.   Think about the volume you are talking and then tell me again how land transport is going to make any sense.  If there were a RR line maybe.  But there isn't and there isn't a pipeline, so you are talking trucks... or maybe camels.     The land route runs from Gwadar Pakistan to Urumqi China.  Trucking any volume over that route would be insane.  Maybe the basis of a new reality TV show.
The New Silk Road - China's Belt and Road Initiative (chinahighlights.com)

I'm going to take a minute before work to address this Twitter thread by Trent. I only caught the first part of his thread in my responses yesterday, and I think the rest of what he posted is a perfect example of him taking isolated situations and extrapolating them to create sexy scenarios for public consumption with little additional evidence. In this thread he takes examples of shell burst patterns to build this idea of Ukraine using a vast network of distributed, digital howitzers to shoot and scoot across the battlefield. The tactic is certainly feasible on paper - it's been around in doctrine since WW1, the US Army calls it a "roving gun" - but hardly unique to Ukraine. The AFATDS system and digital howitzers that we use are literally designed to facilitate this function. And while Ukraine may be using a digital system to route and process fire missions, but from what I've seen the vast majority of their howitzers (and definitely not the 122mm D-30s he references) lack the digital systems to make it truly effective to the extent he describes. Trent uses a lot of questionable assumption to build this idea of Ukrainian artillery supremacy that is honestly not backed by the data I'm seeing. If he has more sources to back his claims I would love to see them, because none of his thread passes the sniff test for this artillery officer.
Please don't take this as a slight on you Grey Fox or anyone who found Trent's thread interesting, this is just professionally frustrating to see someone the public "trusts" peddling such poorly sourced information in such a confident manner. Now I get to see his thread linked in every Reddit and Twitter thread featuring artillery, talking about something that is almost certainly not happening, at least not to the extent that Trent describes.

Trent Telenko's posts on Twitter really bother me because he seems to take singular events and extrapolate them into generalities that sound good on paper and which people lap up. It started with his tires post, and if he saw the quality of some of the equipment I had as a battery commander (yes, including their tires) he'd probably have an aneurysm. I've also seen my own share of 40 mile convoys of stopped American logistical vehicles, the difference being that US soldiers got to go home after their training with some lessons learned, and the Russians didn't. And as an artillery officer I don't even want to talk about his observations about VT fuzes.

I'm not entirely sure where he is going with this thread, but having actually worked in a Division level strike cell in Iraq, processing missions from SOF, ground space owners, and targets developed within our own cell, the so called "JAG officer poisoned chain of command" is a gross over simplification at best. Yes, times to strike were lengthy, but it was designed that way and NOT due to JAG considerations, and we were certainly capable of being faster, and routinely did so when the situation required. Trying to compare a COIN oriented environment to the modern LSCO fight is ignorant, and as a OC/T who see units training Brigade level fire support in large scale combat operations on a monthly basis, we are certainly faster then the "hour" he claims we are at. From what he describes, the GIS ARTA app is very similar to the US Army's AFATDS system - designed to process a large range of target requests and associate them with a shooter. It's good to see Ukraine adopting this style of software, but it's hardly unique, and the realities of maintaining the digital communication linkages required for full functionality of the system can be hard in a contested environment. The US military has a difficult enough time doing that in the field, and we have much better comms equipment then Starlink and a lot less incoming rounds.
Sure makes for a good sounding Twitter thread though.

You have heard of urban planning for traffic, of course?  Yes, you can use math to describe human behaviour, or grocery stores would have too much or too little produce, buses would have no idea what routes to run and how often and the multi-trillion dollar industry if marketing would be in serious trouble.
"Oh but these aren't war", I hear those of you who are climbing on Clausewitz's grave to die upon.
You have heard of military logistics?  They do all sorts of math based on "human behaviour" in warfare, lots of margins and "spoilage".  If humanity was an impossible puzzle that only artistic genius could figure out, we could never keep them gassed up, fed and bombed up.  Hell we have developed some pretty simple methods to transform those mysterious humans into whatever we want...we call it Basic Training.  And this is without even looking at the hard physics frames around humanity, like we all need sleep, O2, food and water, a hug now and again, and we can't breath underwater for very long and cannot fly unassisted. 
So what?  Oh we are a complex, bordering on chaotic system at times but most people are NPC in this game of life, going around their individual loops day in and day out.  What about "crisis", they can plot fire escape planning based on how fast we will cram an exit, so there is that.
So what to war?  Not sure to be honest.  I don't know how far more complex modeling of human system in warfare will take us.  We applied some pretty simple ones here and were proven more right than wrong and we even used "simple math" like how many tanks Russian's had abandoned.  We basically had a data stream showing all this and the calculus that the Russians were screwed was not that hard to come up with.  
I think it is important to understand that math will likely remain indicative and not definitive, like weather forecasting.  We can say with high accuracy what a series of observed phenomenon are telling us, and shockingly we will us math. However, the context and human-meaning of those phenomenon likely will need human interpretation for some time.  I do not believe we will have models that say definitively "and by Tues you will have won the war", this is like saying "on Tues, at 10:03 am, the wind on your deck will be 12 kph, from this exact direction". 
What I do want to some math behind those indicators.  So you know that when the Afghans all start doing something, not normal, we can pick it up and have a good idea why.  Quantitative assessment that links back to qualitative.
It is the 21st century, I do not buy this "war is all art...let me listen for god's voice and we will know what to do".  Humans are very predictable in many ways and their behaviour follows patterns.  We would do better understanding them and using that to inform us in warfare, as opposed to this weird "finger painting towards victory".  The use of modeling has been part of war since the beginning, the question is how much we trust machines to do and how much we leave to the human minds, the answer is likely somewhere in the middle, at least for now. 
So as to math, one can oversimplify, and one can under-value, which we have seen both on this thread alone.

Leaving statues and monuments is a daily act of violence against the affected communities. Just like the statue of Saddam in Bahgdad and the various statues of Stalin and Lenin in the former Soviet bloc, the statues of Colston and all the traitorous US generals can FRO. 
Edit: if you are relying on statues and memorials to provide an education in history, well... /rolleyes