chrisl

They should launch bottles with parachutes into the RU lines.

That looks like about a full platoon hoofing it out of Storozheve. And from the maps a couple pages ago, that's the second village back from what was the front line not too long ago, so it's maybe a platoon per village as the UA works south. That would leave another full company available at the main line, consistent with the earlier estimates of ~250/km. But it's nice to see video of them hiking back in a relatively disorderly withdrawal. No fighting retreat, and they don't look like they're organized by squads. And not waiting for vehicles to carry out their gear - just getting out of Dodge as fast as they can. Maybe the video will encourage other Russian units to do the same.

Another good "silence" ad:

I imagine that Ukraine has developed their plans based on all of those, combined with some confidence that they have better ISR (though multiple modes) than Russia and will be able to get rapid knowledge of where the RU lines are being thinned. Given Ukraine's internal lines and knowledge that they don't have to worry about controlling the civilian population in any area they retake (except maybe pre Feb 24 LPR/DPR), they should be able create, identify, and exploit some weaker spots without having to play their hand through recon in force.

Or ultimately immobilized...

So are there any updated estimates of RU force density? A quick search puts the last estimate at April 23 with an average of 250 men/km. I didn't trace it all the way back, but from the discussion I'm assuming that's combat-capable and doesn't include support personnel. That's two companies per km of front. Maybe a little lighter where there are (or were) water obstacles, and heavier where there's a logistics hub in the path. But if it's two companies per km, then the forward positions are/were maybe two platoons per km with a third in reserve near the front, and the same at the "main" line ~10 km back. So the first "main" line of defense is possibly not manned any better than the first line, and may just be dug in better. And can there be much between the main line and the Sea of Azov once the main line breaks? Possibly in some areas, but RU just doesn't have enough forces overall, and they can't concentrate them without getting HIMARSed/Storm Shadowed.

Do that and cut the land bridge, or at least bring it under heavy fire, and the outside lines to move between northern and southern fronts have to go over the Kerch bridge. Can 3 Storm Shadows take out the two rail lines and one road deck? Leave them a single lane of pavement to pull out of Crimea.

The resolution sucks, so it's hard to be totally sure, but it looks like at least 4, and maybe 6 or 7 towed guns. The down side if you're the guys with the towed guns is that now they know where you are and where you're pointed, so another drone can come and pick off a few more. Or send a HIMARS your way.

But do you know where it could fall in a couple weeks? Through the former reservoir bed that Russia decided to drain, and around the flanks of the RU defenses. There won't be any defensive works there, and Russia probably doesn't have the resources right now to extend defensive positions into that space under fire and while it's still muddy. But depending on what's on the bottom, if the UA can suppress Russian fire within range of it, it could provide access for a rapid flanking move.

Tangling is probably going to turn into one of the more reliable and cost effective anti drone mechanisms, particularly once anti drone EW pushes everybody to a lot of autonomy. Like submarine nets, but hanging from the sky. And able to chase you.

If they can put HE through specific windows in Moscow at will, that's some serious messaging.

But at this point most of the damage is done - it's like being less than the reaction & maneuvering time from a crash: you're in it, you just haven't felt it yet. Now that the dam is blown and the risk to the food supply has been realized. Even with a truce it will take years to repair the damage. I'm not sure it even matters if the ammonia pipeline gets hit if it was primarily supplying fertilizer manufacture for the areas served by the dam. It just becomes a big hazmat mess.

Right above an article that says that Russian forces destroyed 1500 Ukrainian troops, 8 leopard tanks, and 10^9 other armored vehicles. There are satellite assets that can give the water levels of all the reservoirs pretty accurately - there will probably be some geospatial hydrology grogs posting on twitter in a few days.

There's similar around here in the San Gabriel River. They hold the water in a series of dams in the mountains and have major releases when they need to make space for winter rains or spring melt. There's a section that turns into an off highway vehicle rec area when it's drained. This is likely a temporary help to Russia at best, and potentially makes things worse for them when the water settles.

Wait til the do a big blue police box and it's everywhere at once.

Wow - Scholz finally has some strong public words supporting Ukraine. Germany has been quietly ramping up the actual materiel support, but Olaf must finally be feeling like he's his coalition behind him on this.

Yeah, it could offer a big advantage in attack on multiple scales. Maybe something to watch for as the offensive becomes visible.

Does the "remote controlled armored personnel carrier" concept seem a little oxymoronic to anybody else? I suppose if uber can be headed that way for regular taxis, the same can be done with battle taxis and free up a couple more people.

More likely they're not shipping 40' containers full of Gen 3 night vision goggles. A lot of the NVG that are going over seem to be from private funders.

It's certainly a lot easier to figure out what's going on in daytime videos. CMOS and CCD sensors have some sensitivity in the very near IR (700 nm out to 1 micron wavelength) - basically what you get with consumer security cameras in the <$100 range. For most applications there's a filter in front of the sensor to take that out, but cameras intended for security cams often are unfiltered. They're not super sensitive, so most security cameras also have a bunch of IR LEDs to light up the scene - for battery operated cameras with a motion sensor they'll use whatever background light there is for sensing, then turn on the LEDs when there's motion. The catch with that is that the illumination is very short range - effectively tens of feet. You can work without the illuminators, but the sensitivity of the cameras is pretty low, so you won't get nearly as many targets as in the daytime. If the targets have bad IR discipline (which the Russians very well might), you might get a reasonable number of targets, but it will be relatively hard to navigate the drone without it showing GPS on a map. Longer wave IR gets more expensive fast - the sensors are more expensive (and more export restricted), and generally have to be cooled. Thermoelectric coolers are very low efficiency and will suck a lot of battery. There are some very small cryocoolers that are more efficient, but still likely to suck quite a bit of power, and use up a lot of the payload mass. So that kind of thing is probably more limited to the bigger and less expendable drones (and things like GlobalHawk)

If they're truly going through tens of thousands of drones/FPV munitions every month, they probably have enough of them to destroy every single Russian vehicle all the way to the Ukraine border and Sea of Azov. That's better than A-10s providing CAS - drones will appear to be everywhere, and loss of any one (or dozen) drone is insignificant to the Ukrainian effort. One truck on a road is hard to justify risking a CAS aircraft for, but a couple of drones? At least one of which is expected to explode anyway? Launch 'em. They can create a "no drive zone" 100 km wide all the way to the Azov (or up to and beyond the Russian border), they can severely limit resupply to any dug in defenders over a very large area, then go through and mop up in detail using all the fancy NATO ground kit after running the defenders low on supplies.

Send your firefighters to Southern California to learn. LA City and County have been using air assets at night for I think decades now, and about 10 years ago basically forced the US Forest Service to start night flying, as well. Forest Service had prohibited night flying since the early 70's due to a mid-air collision, and refused to revisit the decision as technology changed. LA County uses a civilian conversion of Blackhawks (Firehawks) for night flying, and I think LA City is still using old Hueys with NVG. But they both fly at night and close to fires - I've had fires near my house that were in very steep terrain that were suppressed entirely by helo drops before they could hike anybody to them. They also do direct drops on fires using fixed wings, which can be crazy to watch. I usually can only watch on ADS-BExchange so I can see exactly where the fire is. I think the search and rescue teams are using drones to some extent now, but nobody allows drones when there are helos in the area and there are enough helos around here that there's almost always one with FLIR during nighttime SAR. They're expensive to operate, and the terrain here can be very difficult for them to get close enough, so the idea of drones that are smaller and don't put any humans at risk until you load up the person to be rescued would be an improvement.

Drones should be very susceptible to EW, given that they need a two-way connection and are sending fairly high data volumes of video. The FPVs don't need super high resolution, particularly if there are other overwatch drones in the area, but they still need better than NTSC and the overwatch drones are all HD. Part of why Ukraine has been so successful with them is the Russia is so limited in their EW ability. They probably can't produce enough interference in the drones to render them useless without taking out their own comms (bad as those comms might also be). The next generations of drones for dealing with more capable EW systems will likely see a lot more autonomy, and also narrow field of view communication back to the controller. But autonomy will really be critical - get them into the right zone and let them loose. Not something that would have been suitable for most of the conflicts the US has been involved in for the past 25-30 years, where armed targets are hidden in populated civilian areas and often indistinguishable, but reasonable for a conventional war with battle lines, uniforms, and identifiable military vehicles.

Possible? Sure. But it probably takes a lot of luck. The radar signature of the drone will be really small, so that's not going to be that effective for a hit. The TOR system also can use optical tracking/guiding, but unless you can keep the drone in the crosshairs it's probably going to be hard to get a direct hit. Even if the missile has proximity triggers, they're probably not sensitive enough that a drone will set them off as the missile approaches.

But the video is a lie! There's just a still. I did find the video over on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingas****/comments/13zicbr/a_ukrainian_drone_operator_dodges_a_russian_tor2m/