acrashb

Or shock. I'd go with shock.

And none of this addresses the major operational and strategic issues that brought them to this point of the war (i.e. losing strategic and operational initiatives and on the defence) - the misalignment between political objectives and military strategy's; a poor collective military learning system unable to adapt at the same or better rate than its opponent; the lack of a modernized operationally competitive C4ISR enterprise which underpins an effective joint targeting system; and the continued erosion without any real mitigation of a logistical system stretching from the forward ammo resupply point back to production and procurement.
The RA can churn out units and people all it wants, however, until it entirely retools itself to fight the war it is in and not the one for 1999, it simply will not matter how many troops it can produce…unless there is a failure in support to Ukraine whose single greatest vulnerability is that is is not strategically self-sufficient in the prosecution of this war.

new post of Mashovets...
 
I now become exclusively a night correspondent ...
 
For more or less long periods of time, electricity is supplied exclusively at night. Therefore, I can collect and process, and even more so write, only at this time. Please understand and forgive...
Moreover, the amount of writing also has to be forcedly reduced due to the desire to be in time for the next power outage. Today also - briefly about the important ... about Russian "leaps" on the territory of Belarus.
The basis of the joint Russian-Belarusian grouping of troops on the territory of Belarus will obviously be the 2nd Motorized Rifle Division (MSD) of the 1st Guards Tank Army of the Western Military District of the Russian Armed Forces (1st Guards TA WMD).
To date, the command of the enemy troops is completing the concentration and deployment of the main forces of this formation in certain areas of Belarus. Its total number deployed there should be about 12,500 military personnel, at the moment 8,950 Russian military personnel from this division have already been deployed in Belarus, in particular:
- 15th MRR, 136th separate reconnaissance battalion, 211th separate engineering and construction battalion, 47th separate communications battalion, 1063rd separate material support battalion, 1117th air defense regiment, (6540 military personnel in the area of the training ground " Obuz - Lesnovsky")
- 1st tank regiment, (1050 servicemen in the area of the Lepelsky training ground)
-1st MRR, (740 troops in the area of the Losvido training ground)
- 147th self-propelled artillery regiment, 1174th separate anti-tank artillery battalion, (620 personnel in the area of the Osipovichsky training ground)
 
It is planned that within the next 2 weeks the command of the enemy troops will also deploy an artillery component of the division on the territory of Belarus.
To date, together with the personnel of the 2nd Motor Rifle Division of the 1st Guards TA on the territory of Belarus is deployed up to:
- 52 tanks
- 28 armored fighting vehicles (mainly of the type of infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers)
– 18 artillery systems
- 11 MLRS
- 8 mobile anti-tank systems (on transport platforms or specialized armored chassis).
However, these are by no means final figures ...
At the moment, the following amount of weapons and military equipment removed from long-term storage bases and reserve points for ensuring mobilization deployment is already “on the way” to the deployment areas of the 2nd Motor Rifle Division:
 
– 86 tanks
- more than 180 AFVs
- up to 150 units of automotive and special equipment.
In addition, it should be borne in mind that today at several points for the collection and repair of weapons and military equipment on the territory of the Belgorod Region, there are still at least 245 units of military equipment and weapons of the 2nd Motor Rifle Division damaged and knocked out in past battles, which are now very active and intense repaired and restored by the enemy. Their appearance on the territory of Belarus is a matter of the near future...
 
 

Is that before or after the Bradley full of 40mm and the bde set of heavy armour. Oh, wait. You said top of the list.
Ok boys, down tools. The priority list has changed. What's that? Oh, yes, I know it changed yesterday. Yes and the day before. Oh, and the day before that too. Yes, I know the priority list now runs to 10 closely typed ... look, just stop what you're doing and start working on [checks notes] ... uh ... a sort of an anti drone thing but not really for drones. Yeah, the specs are a bit vague, but it's really important, ok? Ok. Let's get going.

There was discussion among military commentators that Russians probably could hoard those Lancet videos for several weeks and then release them all at once, to reinforce propaganda effect.

A "fire one missile command" would go a LONG way.

In CM1 this was "follow vehicle"

I try to avoid getting into political discussions relating to U.S. politics. But if Ronald Reagan saw some members of the GOP sympathize with a former KGB officer, who wants to retake lands that he thought were unfairly taken away from Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Reagan would be rolling in his grave.
 

CM needs a shoot-and-scoot command for at least anti-tank squads.  Why would an RPG gunner hang out around the corner of a building after firing a rocket at a tank 200m away?  Because of the up-to-60-second delay on turn based.
Ideally the same thing for armour and, for that matter, regular infantry.  Pop up over a hilltop, a few seconds of automatic fire, and crawl / run away before every asset on the other side of the hill spots, turns and returns fire.
 

The capital core provides two things: Energy storage and strategic direction.  And maybe the drone swarm can collectively manage the strategic direction part, like a flock of waterfowl, but that's probably further off unless we start hybridizing the drones with waterfowl (it all comes back to the birds...)
But really, it's all about precision vs. mass of energy transport (even now).  Low speed energy transport is maneuver: you're moving men and weapons and sensors into position using a lot of energy distributed over all of them and spending it slowly.  When they shoot at something you're moving a bunch of stored energy faster, with the speed variable depending on bullet/artillery shell/rocket and, for anything bigger than a bullet, with a bunch of stored chemical energy inside to be released *very* rapidly with a bang.  So fast energy use is firepower.  Those units also use energy to communicate.  And the problem of all modern civilization is really how do you get enough energy to where you want it to do what you want to do - there are limits to how densely we know how to pack it to make it useable for different applications (food, liquid fuel, battery chemistry, fission, fusion).
We have easily knowable targets on how energy efficient the drones have to be.  I'm totally guessing, but I suppose an active, competent infantryman needs to consume 5000-10000 kCal/day depending on size and activity level, and not including shooting anything or comms beyond shouting.  If you don't put that in regularly he becomes less and less useful until he becomes fertilizer.  But a skinny, lazy one on watch might need only 2000 kCal/day, if you can manage to organize your forces like that.  You can split a squad down to individual elements that use that much, but no further.  
But suppose I make 5 sensor drones that each have average consumption of 400 kCal/day - they maybe use most of it on day one locomoting to their station, then they just sit and observe, compute occasionally, and transmit. Not so different from my battery powered security camera system has fist-sized HD cameras that I only have to charge every 3-4 months if there's a lot of activity.  And they communicate everything they see back to a hub that uses much more energy (writing the data costs a lot more than transmitting it or computing with it).  So I can probably replace an infantryman on watch with a lot more than 5 of those AVs (and I'm using AV for autonomous vehicle to apply to air/ground/subsurface/subspace/teleport/whatever).  The thing they don't do is shoot back, but the "attack" version would probably need to carry chemical propellant and a small number of projectiles.  For a battlefield environment they might use lasers for optical comm - you can transmit data with a *much* lower power laser than to toast something. And if you stop feeding them a while they become as useless as the infantryman who you starved into fertilizer, but unlike him you can revive them by changing or charging the batteries.
[edit: and it takes 18 years and 8 weeks to make a basic infantryman to replace the one you forgot to feed. But you can take a couple hundred of those infantrymen, and really people of any age over about 15, to run a factory that produces thousands of those drones that replace them. You do need a full advanced civilization supply chain to support them, but they all get to live much more comfortably than if you gave them a rifle or a pike and sent them into the field]
And you can continue along that line for the various offensive AVs. We already have a baseline of energy transport and consumption so we need to make them at least that energy efficient.  And that's why I refer to the capital core as the "Drone Carrier" or "AV Carrier" like a modern aircraft carrier - just like today with getting MREs and ammo to the infantry, you have to get batteries and ammo to the AVs.  The things that you get from using AVs instead of people is a) you mind a lot less if a cheap AV is killed, and b) you can distribute that energy consumption into smaller and smaller units.  Artillery shells get smarter and smarter and you use the "bang" of the initial propellant charge to get them close to the target, where they communicate on who gets to blow up who at the other end (this was already in development in the 1990s)
A civilian analogy is deep sea (~10 km depth) science exploration.  I can't really send people that deep to do detailed observations and manipulation of small things. I also can't make a single precision AV (say the size of a housecat) that can go from the surface all the way down to the interesting spot on its own - it costs too much energy and the environment in between is too unpredictable. But I can have a ship on the surface burning bunker fuel (Main Capital Core) that manages a small fleet of large AVs that are each the size of a small car (Secondary Capital Cores A through F), and each of them can carry and supply a dozen smaller AVs the size of housecats or large fish (AVs A(i through xii) through F(i through xii)).  The ship goes out to sea to supply energy regionally, the large AVs go to somewhere near target sites, and the small AVs go back and forth between the precision target sites and the intermediate AVs to recharge and dump data.  Because the fish don't really organize to fight back they don't have to spend a lot of energy on autonomous defense, but if the fish had guns, I'd use some fraction of them to protect the core, some to fight the fish offensively, and a few to get the data.
So the tank isn't "dead" so much as it sits further back and is more of an AV tender, much like an aircraft carrier is mostly an airplane tender/floating airport.  
It's just the UA version of pineapple chicken.
To get a video for TikTok.

CM needs a shoot-and-scoot command for at least anti-tank squads.  Why would an RPG gunner hang out around the corner of a building after firing a rocket at a tank 200m away?  Because of the up-to-60-second delay on turn based.
Ideally the same thing for armour and, for that matter, regular infantry.  Pop up over a hilltop, a few seconds of automatic fire, and crawl / run away before every asset on the other side of the hill spots, turns and returns fire.
 

I've done shoot & scoot w javelin teams, especially in SF2, to great success.  But it depends on how well the team can see the target.  You might think you shoot & scoot just doesn't work, but the team takes time to spot & acquire depending on the visual situation.  My best success was javelin team goes up on roof w perfect visibility and shoots (pause) in 20 seconds, then then come down to safety.  
A better command in CM might be "go here until you shoot, then go here".  The pre-determined pause is the issue.

CM needs a shoot-and-scoot command for at least anti-tank squads.  Why would an RPG gunner hang out around the corner of a building after firing a rocket at a tank 200m away?  Because of the up-to-60-second delay on turn based.
Ideally the same thing for armour and, for that matter, regular infantry.  Pop up over a hilltop, a few seconds of automatic fire, and crawl / run away before every asset on the other side of the hill spots, turns and returns fire.
 

This this this this. 
If the tank AI can scan and target within 15-30s then the infantry AI should be able to fire and move. I've lost many AT squads to the turn delay and it artificially (yes yes I know the whole thing is artificial) corrupts my "tactics".
Well  I call them tactics...not desperate  flailing at all at all... 
 

CM needs a shoot-and-scoot command for at least anti-tank squads.  Why would an RPG gunner hang out around the corner of a building after firing a rocket at a tank 200m away?  Because of the up-to-60-second delay on turn based.
Ideally the same thing for armour and, for that matter, regular infantry.  Pop up over a hilltop, a few seconds of automatic fire, and crawl / run away before every asset on the other side of the hill spots, turns and returns fire.
 

Yeah, no.
But since the ammunition is quite old by now, it could be well past due date. Then we have to scrap it, of course. I guess in that case, Ukraine would win the call for bids.
? wut? No, we don't. Germany may be exemplary for some things, but it is definitely NOT for military spending. That is right in line with airport planning.

Well, yes?
Is there a country that doesn't?
It takes a special kind of bias to find a problem with shooting down unknown warplanes flying over your own country during a war that has consumed all your neighbours (and the bombings were due to some top notch navigation among the air crews, not a matter of policy)

@danfrodo in action!
 

Speaking of drones: 
"
 Canada's Sea-Doo powered the Ukrainian marine drone used against Russian fleet: analyst
The Sea-Doo brand of jet ski may be at the heart of Ukraine’s latest weapon against Russian invaders, a marine drone that could play a growing role in naval warfare 
"
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/canada-sea-doo-ukraine-marine-drone-russia
 

Speaking of drones: 
"
 Canada's Sea-Doo powered the Ukrainian marine drone used against Russian fleet: analyst
The Sea-Doo brand of jet ski may be at the heart of Ukraine’s latest weapon against Russian invaders, a marine drone that could play a growing role in naval warfare 
"
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/canada-sea-doo-ukraine-marine-drone-russia
 

Artillery, due to its range, tends to have operational impact. It's also relatively simple to employ and integrate.
A US Army heavy armed bde is like the whirling chain on a chainsaw. Not the whole saw, just the chain. With out the rest of the saw - the engine, the bar, fuel for the engine  the trigger, the person holding it and knowing what to do with it ... well, you can still do a lot of damage with just the chain but only a fraction of what a saw/can do. The Abrams and Bradleys are just the teeth on that chain. Without the rest of what goes into a bde, and the wider system that supports and enables the bde, well ... look at the Saudis for an extreme example.

AGGGGHHHH!  You didn't warn me! It's a LIBERAL site, man! My eyes! My EEEEYYYESS!!!!! 
 
just teasing

Speaking of drones: 
"
 Canada's Sea-Doo powered the Ukrainian marine drone used against Russian fleet: analyst
The Sea-Doo brand of jet ski may be at the heart of Ukraine’s latest weapon against Russian invaders, a marine drone that could play a growing role in naval warfare 
"
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/canada-sea-doo-ukraine-marine-drone-russia
 

And the grain deal is back! There's  A LOT of things for which Erdogan can be criticized, but his approach to dealing with Putin is perhaps the most effective from all the NATO leaders.
 

Nature solves it by hunkering down in inclement weather. Birds don't fly in storms or even heavy rain.  
I'm not sure we have any truly all-weather aircraft.  Maybe something like this, flying above the weather: