acrashb

Nice.  "no one specified dead or alive".  Little gaps like that lead to - great movies

Mass.is.broken.

For general interest, "Timelapse of every battle in history".  It should say every _recorded_ battle, but is still interesting.  And the final frame showing all of them at the same time makes Europe look truly dangerous.
 
 

A little Eurasian centric, but then again these were the people "recording history".  If (and it is a big if) I ever do a PhD, it will be on pre-historic warfare.  That map would see a massive mist of small lights that was the background warfare of pre-civilization.  Also there were very likely some very big battles in North America pre-contact...but of course no one wrote them down.

Big microwave oven trying to bake the sky goes boom.  Good for point defence against asymmetric attack.  Suicide in a conventional war.  A lot of this technology sprang up when ISIL started messing with UAS about 5 years ago.  It was built for a very different environment.

Not if they are fully autonomous.  This is why autonomy is a race to the bottom.  And we are currently losing.

Krugman had a good day.

If we're looking at a battlespace where high signature vehicles are prohibitively vulnerable and low signature infantry is simultaenously survivable and lethal (via calling for precision fires), maybe the way forward is less to try and proof AFVs and more to boost infantry mobility and load carrying ability.

Or, in short: Heinlein probably nailed it.

Another indication that MBTs are finished.  Up to nearly 30km away, if the C4ISR loop is tight, boom.  Try APSing your way out of this.
Then the surveillance drone will fly to the next target, and boom again.
 

That was a standoff EFP.  Maybe one of these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMArt_155
Ya, tanks are screwed...calling it.
Edit: akd beat me to it.

heh this Ukraine thread keeps edging towards "let's solve all the world's problems"

The new reality is breaking thru, at least a little bit.

There others who are more subtle about destroying our society! Lucy Calkins for example has done more harm than just about anyone by destroying American literacy: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/us/reading-teaching-curriculum-phonics.html
On the left, I’m going to say the doors-wide-open immigration policies and the reformist-minded-approach to crime, which are both weird because in the end, they hurt the big liberal cities the most while the conservatives are just puzzled that if you wanted to live in a big city, and that’s where your voters are, why would you trash it.

For all of his vast array of flaws, McConnell has gone all in on the right side this time.

What is left of 'The West' anyway? Discussing about whether childeren have the right to chose their gender and emptying our churches, so they can be turned into mosques. And as one of the commentators so rightly put it, only interested in our wallet and the size of our car. We're in a Cold War, a collision of systems and ideals. What happens in the Middle East is peanuts compared to the war in the East. Part of Vlad's masterplan to divide and conquer. And it works, because of our stupidity and lack of focus.

APS ain't doing squat against that.

Another demonstration of the fragility of MBTs.  Down the hatch:
 

Another demonstration of the fragility of MBTs.  Down the hatch:
 

Instead of talking about tasty rodents (best boiled with goldenrod leaves for a bit of flavour):
Russia may have lost another ship, this time a support vessel.  Russia apparently has 43 'mine countermeasure' ships, but only eight in the Black Sea fleet.
If correct, they now have 13% fewer in the Black Sea.
 
 

This has the added benefit of driving a financial wedge amongst the Russian oligarchy.  They won't be getting their money back and they really will be paying for Putin's war.

Good...Russia should pay to fix what they broke. regardless if they want to do it or not. I always liked the approach of using frozen Russian assets to assist Ukraine. As a Western taxpayer I'm more than happy that my money is going to help Ukraine, but Russia should be forced to do the same.
Sorry too funny not to post. Orban looks like the kid at the playground who no one wants to play with. 😄
 
 

We will try and negotiate with it.  The threads of this negotiation are already there.  The narratives of “Silly Ukrainians, Silly Russians” are all basically saying “well sure, in Ukraine…but we would do it better”.  This sort of collective denial will be subtle and deep, at a cultural level.
Then as evidence mounts we will try and take these new technologies and bolt them onto our existing systems and doctrine.  In the west, our military tactics and units have not really changed that much since WW2.  The TF/BG concept has had all new tech bolted onto it and Unmanned will be as well.  We will spend billions on counters to try and protect that old concept.  But as you note we won’t be able to, the shifts are too big.
Next, we will get all “out of the box” and create experimental units and doctrine that looks good on the surface but in reality is designed to fail.  This will validate that the old orgs and doctrine were right all along.  We normally do this by half-measures - we do not build a complete coherent experimental system.  We just take away the old stuff.
Then we will hit a forcing function.  A real world disaster that we cannot negotiate with or ignore.  It will cost a bunch of teenagers their lives.  Then we will scramble to try and realign.  It will be expensive and brutal.  After that, well the whole thing becomes a dice roll.  It didn’t have to be, but this is where sunk cost fallacies get you.
Air-Land warfare has changed.  More, it is continuing to change.  It isn’t just the pace, it is the depth.  Fundamentals and foundational principles are challenged (eg Surprise, Concentration, Mission Command).  This is not simply “a better tank killer”, this is stuff that breaks force ratios, tempo, and basic utility of what we thought was combined arms.  The death of how we used to do minefield breaching ops is just the latest in a very long line of doctrine that look more and more obsolete.  I strongly suspect that joint warfare as a whole is shifting under our feet.  RMA has finally landed with a big enough bang to get our attention.
What will follow the Russo-Ukraine war will be a decade long argument.  But in the end, everyone in charge will have come up in the old system.  Further, we do not really promote radical Tesla-type disruptors to be GOs in modern militaries.  So we are looking at a pretty conservative bunch steeped in a conservative military culture and doctrine.  Oh, and with a trillion dollar defence industry tooled for stuff we had for the last 80 years.
Not a good start.

We saw in the video of the RA soldier being chased around some trees that you can't run from small UAVs.  I posited that you can't hide either.

This relatively well-hidden RA soldier gets knee-capped:
 
Of course there are counter-measures like chicken wire on all the gaps in your cover.  But that adds friction to the whole thing, cost, and is vulnerable to counter-counter measures.  Like a small UGV with good loiter time, waiting for someone to emerge from cover.

I’m sorry, but that was f’king disgusting! There’s no reason for showing vids of soldiers burning to death! When we show those, we become desensitized to them still being human beings.