acrashb

The problem of assuming a trade for durable peace is believing Russia wants peace.  What Russia wants is nobody on their border that represents a better alternative to autocratic rule.  No concession from Ukraine is going to fix that.  Also Russia should not be rewarded for this forcible seizure of Ukrainian territory.  Ukraine joining NATO is a Ukrainian decision regardless of any relationship with Russia.
I expect this will all be a moot issue.  Between sanctions, EU weaning itself off Russian energy and the global financial community looking at investment in Russia to be off the table for at least a decade, Russia might make a deal to retreat from Crimea to try and beg the west to take them off the pariah state list.  

Jomini would be proud, this is very much in his "let's take geometry to war" type of thinking.  It is also one of the reasons Clausewtiz did his thing as a counter-reaction.
So frontage is a pretty complex beast.  It is, in land warfare, what you can physically control and influence at the front edge of ones land (and air) power.  Note I say "physically" because once you introduce multi-domain concepts we get into cognitive and conative frameworks which transcend inches and feet. 
So how that land power is packaged is incredibly important when discussing frontage.  For example, the RA is using what I have called "dim mass", this means they are relying on masses of people and equipment to try and generate and project that land power (and air, but that is different).  They do this to "hold ground", which is, as you point out, really a 3 dimensional construct on the battlefield.  This will drive them to have to have a force-to-space metric of effective density in order to defend, and another to attack.  This is again really complicated as we get into C2 and logistics architecture, as well as Ukraine's road infrastructure but the terrain basically soaks up so many troops based on how those troops are trained, equipped, commanded and supplied/supported. 
For Russia that metric of troops-to-space is going to be higher, likely much higher than the UA.  They have not demonstrated wide spread effective integrated ISR, their logistics are a mess and air power is really disjointed.  They do have a lot of artillery though [aside: this is where the term "force multiplier" comes from] but can they integrate it?  So what? The UA has: a lot of ISR advantage due to their overall approach and western feeds, a much more distributed logistics infra, intimated knowledge of the terrain, much better equipment and training and far better force integration.
So, so what?  Well the RA is in a asymmetric frontage control situation, they need more troops to try and influence a chunk of physical space than the UA.  So the last thing the RA should be doing is attempting massively long frontages, it is a bad "combat power" economy.  They will need to pour more and more troops in just to try and make that line controllable, while Ukrainian defence becomes offense and can attack all the holes in the Russian line to isolate and chew up the defence piecemeal.  What is clearly missing in Russian planning is that their metrics are broken and have been since day 1.  They thought that X-thousands of troops/equipment could do A, when it turns out it could only do Z.
As to my "work", oddly, land warfare is more of a side gig and vestige of a misspent youth.  I work in "other spaces" now but this war has forced me to dust off the old land war shelves and work some dormant muscles. 

Au contraire - I just felt that with everyone going on about the war winning capabilities of half-decent NCOs, it was worth demonstrating what we bring to the party.  Anyway - I've got some more map colouring in to do ... 😉

I think that some of this is just human nature, we had the same when Germany occupied the Channel Islands, France had same in vichy areas. 
Folk need money to live and just accept the new situation. 
P.S. as ever thanks for your information it's always appreciated. 

So we are going to get a 'follow me' command to facilitate convoy movement?

I've been thinking about these two things and their interaction.

The first issue, which has happened often in this thread and which I’ve seen in other commentary, is comparing frontage from WW I / WW II with the frontage in this war.  The fundamental problem, which requires a paradigm shift, is that 'frontage' is a linear (one-dimensional) term.  This works when air dominance is not terribly important and ISR and related effective force projection is limited to the LOS of binoculars.  So already it works relatively less well with WW II, as air dominance was reasonably important in that conflict.

If two armies are thought of as two sheets of thin cardboard on a flat surface that interact mostly where their edges touch, then the linear metric and comparison of frontage from WW I to now works fine.

But it has never, at least since the invention of ranged weapons like throwing a rock, worked exactly that way, and while the approximation may have been fine in WW I it isn’t fine now.  

Instead of linear, one-dimensional frontage, we have three-dimensional frontage extending back as far as artillery can throw under observation. Let’s say 5km in WW I – binoculars with ideal viewing – and 20km today (unlimited spotting with drones / LEO satellites, discounting cruise and ballistic missiles since they are not really tactical weapons, and using the range of the 2S19 Msta) with a 5km set-back from the front for some reasonable safety of the artillery. If our observation platforms are also lethal and exist in quantity, then the depth gets greatly extended.

Let’s says the height in WWI would be about half a kilometer for relatively effective machine gun / small arms AA, today 4km for MANPADs (roughly double this if we include vehicle-mounted systems like the 2K22 Tunguska).
So a 10km ‘front’ in WWI has a volume of 25km^3, and today has a volume of 800km^3.  This means that for a given WWI frontage, comparisons should multiply by a factor of 32 to scale to modern, as seen in Ukraine, warfare.  
This factor is imperfect.  The volume isn’t a rectangular sweep, as the height declines with depth; the depth is variable depending on the type of artillery used, spotting conditions, and so on; modern firepower is significantly higher per soldier; and my numbers are estimates subject to disputation (especially the height of WW I).  But the overall thesis, that frontage should mean volume, and the volume of the battlespace is greatly larger than in previous wars, holds.

So the ‘frontage’ that a modern army can hold and maneuver in is much shorter for a given manpower number.
This interacts with pincers / encirclement.  If we have a straight-ish front, we have a certain volume to defend; pincers significantly increase this volume and each arm has to be wide enough to allow for logistics in the middle, like the heartwood of a tree.  Based on my numbers above, that’s 40km wide with a logistics corridor, let’s say 45km minimum on each side.  Which starts to look less like a pincer and more like moving the front forward on a 90km front.
 
Which goes back to, I think you said elsewhere, much flatter fronts advanced more slowly / simultaneously.  So blitzkrieg is dead.

I’m interested in your comments especially in two areas: a) have I just re-invented the wheel in terms of thinking more about volume and less about frontage (I hope so; I'm not ground-breakingly brilliant and surely this is an ordinary concept in military circles )?;  b) overall how does this interact with the theoretical frameworks that you use at work?

Yes the timing is not particularly good. Although Turkey is gaining many points in all fronts, at least this is the picture now. The last time we followed allies against the russians, it backfired with the minor Asia disaster in 1922, where they helped Ataturk and an ancient thriving communty since 2000 bc was lost in flames...(our foolish leaders helped too of course). 
But since Steve, you haven't relaased any CM game in the aegean (although it would be interesting with terrain and mixing russian/NATO equipment ) i it is a good first sign this ain't gonna happen 😁

You're killing me.  So now I need to retool my career and join an armed forces and/or three-letter agency just to get a follow me!  

Well, if that's the worst news I get today it isn't a bad day.
 

Its my growing impression that Putin's 'grand strategy' is to run Ukraine out of bullets, artillery shells and AT missiles by providing a unending stream of cannon fodder troops for them to shoot. After the Ukrainians' ammo is depleted the remaining Russians, in theory, win by default. That, at least appeared to be their way of fighting in Mariupol, and may be the reason behind their fruitless mini-assaults along the front. Russian soldier morale is beside the point if your objective is to get the enemy to use up all of his ammo killing them.

Sending the people who make your missiles to the front is a whole new level of eating your seed corn. Not only is that factory shut, they don't ever expect to reopen.

So ATGM, Drone and "EW AAA Light UGV Tank" are all the same species...unmanned systems.  My guess is that we are finally at the emergence of the unmanned RMA.  It is a misconception that RMAs happen suddenly, we get surprised by them because they evolve to a tipping point and then break.  Every RMA in history has taken decades and in some cases centuries to build up.  The reason for this is that they often rely on a combination of technologies and the doctrine of employment of those technologies to coalesce into the phenomenon.
So "unmanned" is pretty old as a concept.  Wiki says 1849 at Venice with "incendiary balloons" but Genghis used "flaming swallows", the Romans had flaming pigs and the Egyptians had freakin "war lions".  Then there are legions of "human unmanned systems" which span the gambit from "local partners" to "colonials" to "Indigenes".  This is not a new idea is my point.
So ATGMs are really just an evolution of "unmanned" which has evolved to "unmanned that carry and fire other unmanned" in the form of UAVs and UGVs.  So what?
Well unmanned, up until now, has never been able to combine autonomy with range, lethality and ISR that we are seeing in this war. These systems are going to get better in all these factors but the most important is "autonomy".  Fully autonomous systems do not need a continuous communications link back to a human to do their job.  One cannot cut that link because it is not required except to send ISR data back, which has work arounds. So the first thing we will likely see is a race to the bottom on autonomy because "more, better autonomy" will win.  Here AI/ML and CPU technology will be critical in creating unmanned advantage, all based on the ability to miniaturize processing power and create the software.
Range and lethality depend on energy.  How much can a system carry, how far and for how long. Energy production and storage technology also continue to accelerate, as does explosives technology. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-29880-7_3)  So what?  Well it means that lethality will weight less and the energy systems that power carrying it are getting more efficient, so more lethal, longer and further.
Roll into this materials technology in both strength, weight and manufacturing costs and you now have a system one can mass produce easier and cheaper than a human based one.  
"No, Capt...so freakin what?!"
Well that one is hard.  The actual impact on the battlefield is really hard to guess because a lot of really smart people have not fully played all this out.  My guess (and it is a guess) is that warfare is in for a major shift at a texture level because you are basically changing a building block component; this is right there next to the impact of the changing "bullet".  Accept this time it is not the kinetic penetrator, it is information processing.
What might that look like?  Well I think it will look more like a knife fight in Frank Herbert's Dune but at really long ranges.  Each side will know where their opponent is; however, what is competitive is the resolution of that knowledge, higher is better as it allows for better precise targeting.  One will need precise targeting in order to know what and where to have the first stage of this kind of fight, "unmanned battle".  This will be highly attritional as it is hard to manoeuvre against unmanned systems in the classical sense because they cannot be shocked or scared.  So we will likely see and exchange of long range unmanned systems, all with high precision capability being counter with other unmanned defensive and offensive systems.  This may very well occur over the horizon before "people" even see each other.  
So back to the Dune knife fight, land formations will still have to manoeuvre quickly but it will be to positions of advantage for the slower body shield penetration battle (unmanned attrition).  Once one side buckles then we may see second stage forces, likely a combination of manned and unmanned close in quickly for the positional kills we are used to seeing in manoeuvre warfare, so fast finishing thrust once inside the body shield.  And for anyone taking notes, there is a spectrum between these two conditions so it won't be simple or predictable...this will be why we still need a human brain on the field, and that brain will need to be "forward enough". 
The "follow-ons" to all this are significant.  Mass and speed still matter but now mass has to be "dynamic mass" in ways we have not seen.  Systems have to be able to de-aggregate and aggregate much faster than the human based land warfare systems we know and love.  Slow mass is dead on the future battlefield, and I do not mean linear forward movement, I mean how fast it can change its nature.  So we will still need hammers, but before they become hammers they will have been wire-feelers, pliers, spears, arrows and hornets, all on the same axis of advance.   This requires a different military mind-set, far more inductive reasoning and frameworks than we currently employ or select for.  It will require a new logistics model, C4ISR enterprises that now include a concept of "AI/ML superiority"...the list goes on.
So you can see how there is a lot more at stake here than the venerable old tank.

If my experience of gunnners is anything to go by they would probably reply:
Massed Infantry - Defeated by artillery
Machine Gun - Defeated by artillery
Tanks - Defeated by anti-tank artillery
Heavy tanks - Defeated by better anti-tank artillery (some of which may take the form of missiles)
ATGM - Defeated by artillery + drones
Drones - Defeated by AA artillery
EW AAA Light UGV Tank - To be defeated by precision artillery
Artillety - Defeated by ...nobody defeats artillery...Ubique.
 

Two things:
1) various improvements for battlefield communications are advancing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_Networking) and EW-resistant things like a laser communications mesh are evolving as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_mesh_network and https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44037/the-air-force-wants-laser-communication-pods-to-securely-link-fighter-aircraft-with-satellites 
2) as you say, autonomy.  Moral (more accurately ethical) questions or no, this is going to happen.  Phase one is partial autonomy, with a remote operator required to authorize target engagement, phase two is full autonomy.  I'm sure the industry has a finer-grained phase roadmap, but that's basically it.  It's creepy as hell, but going to happen.

Creepy:
 
 

My bold.
Yeah, that was me that linked this from Military History Visualized.
 
As to your points, here's a counterpoint: your UGV  IS the next tank.  It is the essence of mobile direct firepower. No one ever said the crew has to be inside it.   

To my mind it we seem to be missing the fact that "it" has already happened, as in past tense.  And by "it" I do not mean the death of the tank, I mean how we think about tanks, armored warfare and conventional mass.
For example, tank is a core part of a capability, one whose job it is to translate energy into effects.  Higher levels of warfare then link those effects into decisions, and decisions into outcomes; this is the language of the communication of warfare.  That language has shifted.  After this war we will not look at tanks the same way we did before it.  Tanks, like battleships/dreadnought used to be a known metric of potential military power; a metric of land warfare, it meant something to say "we have 1000 tanks". 
After this war "we have 1000 tanks" as a metric of how well we can communicate war will mean something different.  We cannot un-think that.  All the remains is trying to understand what that after-meaning is or is not.
I do not know, but I definitely will say it was not what it was on 23 Feb 22. 

Maybe brakes might be an idea too?  Anyway, this isn't the EV versus others thread so moving swiftly on... 😉.

I have considered this but I think the chance extremely remote.  
Also if any Russian command or staff are reading this then my advice is “quit now, surrender or mutiny and disperse”.   You are going to need a decade without a crippled economy to build the military they need to pull off this job.  Don’t do this job in the first place because it is a stain on the profession and historic disgrace.  You are not defending Russia, you are assisting in its destruction.  Get rid of the political rot in your government, they are driving you off a cliff out of greed, hubris and self-delusion.
And please come back to this thread for more free advice anytime you like.

Most convincing for me is the argument that "Russia" (at some level) was convinced that their 5th column would prevail, the centre wouldn't hold and all the (or at least enough) military districts would be neutralised by similar actions to what happened around Kherson.
Whether this didn't happen because of NATO/UKR intelligence successes, or GRU peculation/failure/overreporting-of-success, or because the RUS assesments were based on sheer self-delusion I don't have the foggiest  But it seems to me that Putin and anyone who could persuade him to take a different path were convinced that Ukraine was a house of cards that needed only a firm push to topple.

Maybe, but based on Russian reactions I am thinking the UA pulled it off.  Why not show video?  Any number of OPSEC reasons.  For example, it could be that it wasn't a Ukrainian Neptune missile but a western missile system that we have not "declared" or how the film would show how the UA pulled it off.  Remember that most of the social media we have seen is from irregulars and territorial defence, the conventional UA is pretty tight on this stuff.

All the while your LOCs are getting hit by laybacks and long range strike because you do not have the forces to secure or an ability to screen enemy ISR.  So you run out of arty ammo after the first day and now have to dismount infantry to sweep every tree line, taking hits the whole way.  With patchwork units glued together out of remnants and newbies who have had a weekend to train together.  What could possibli go wrong.

At least we (the West) are having this discussion.  This is another reason Western forces are so effective: they swim in and are culturally influenced by open societies and so can adapter faster than their counterparts.
Having said that, it took several years in the second gulf war for the US military to a) recognize that it was now fighting an insurgency and b) issue FM 3-24 to support counter-insurgency doctrine (re-learning British knowledge from the Malaya Emergency and the US' knowledge from the Philippine-American war, among others).  One hopes we collectively learn faster from this war; I am heartened by the recent, relatively timely pivot (at least in public announcements) from highly asymmetrical warfare to more peer- and near-peer to peer planning, doctrine, and force structures.

This is the ENTIRE reason why in the past there was a large effort to eliminate IRBMs and tactical (battlefield) nuclear weapons (and why my Army nuclear weapons secondary specialty is no longer relevant 🙂 ) They are destabilizing weapons. Back at the height of the Cold War when we had some 30,000 nuclear weapons to the USSRs 40,000, many, many of those were tactical weapons, and a fair number if IRBMs.
IRBMs are a problem because they naturally are closer to the the other guy, and therefore any warning time is much reduced, which means decision time (do we respond? what is this really?) is close to zero. No one thought back then that a it was possible to employ tactical/battlefield nuclear weapons and have it remain at that level, but rather than it would very quickly escalate to a full nuclear exchange. It was in both the US and USSR interest to eliminate them.
Which leads to the fairly recent hate and discontent about the IRBM treaty, which both sides accuse the other of violating, but more so the Russians violating. The administration's position was to just scrap the treaty rather than try to fix things, allowing more IRBMs, and reverting back to destabilization, rather than try harder to fix the issues. US objections were Russian tests of potentially nuclear capable missiles that violated the range limitations. Russia denied this but it's hard to hide missile tests. Russian objections were of our proposed ground based missile interceptors to be based in Poland (mostly). The objection was the launchers *could* be used as well for IRBMs. They were actually correct, even though there were no plans to do so. Pres. Obama received criticism for "removing" missile defense from Europe. However that missile defense did not yet exist - vaporware from the Bush admin - and replaced it with an immediately deployable and incrementally upgradable system, which also had the side benefit of eliminating Russia's objections.
Over the years there has been a lot of careful tiptoeing around nukes, all with the intent of making sure that they wouldn't be used carelessly (not sure that's the right word). Not to destabilize the balance that keeps them from being used. More recently there has been more belligerence over nuclear weapons, reinstating more tactical nukes, along with rhetoric indicating they could be used. Dangerous stuff that in the past was avoided.
None of which answers the question about whether Putin might use a tactical nuke or what the US might do in response - would we respond in kind by hitting a Russian column/depot, just over the border into Russia, in response to use against a country we technically, don't have an obligation to? That's uncharted territory, although, not for the US DoD, I'm sure. There are undoubtedly scenarios being discussed.

Dave
PS - most important thing I learned about nuclear artillery was how to safely blow them into little tiny pieces so that they wouldn't fall into Soviet hands as they overran us in Germany.

Sure you can, if you don't stay there for long. That's the whole purpose of mechanized forces. All fighting vehicles are NBC protected and should have no problem to roll through a contaminated area. It would be problematic for logistics though, that's for sure.
@Taranis But in other cases you mentioned, like direct targeting of NATO convoys or even some random use on chemical weapons (not much value to it apart from maybe Mariupol), NATO could react with conventional means. Not so much in case of tactical nukes being employed I think. The least they'd have do is to respond with own tactical nukes against Russian forces. But even if NATO would respond with conventional means, is still means a decision to get involved and risking being attacked themselves with tactical weapons, or risking  further escalation.
As for this war being a existential threat to Russia - if you equate the current regime with the country itself, as you might expect Putin to do, this war is very much an existential threat.

We'll get it when people finally learn the difference between ordnance and ordinance. 😜

From the article, "The cause of the fire is under investigation, the military department added." To briefly indulge in some fun, I suppose they are determining if it was a Harpoon, Neptune, or a thunder run by a John Deere.