chrisl

I think he was referring to the relative involvement of the Chicken and the Pig in a bacon and eggs breakfast. The Chicken is involved, but the Pig is committed. It's not all that common of an analogy, but I've heard it come up a few times. Except many of the NATO Chickens are committed to support because they're worried that dinner will be Chicken & Waffles.

Yeah, looks like maybe hit the rear of the tank. One of the comments suggests ERA+external fuel tank to get such dramatic explosion and fire while still having the crew survive.. All the black smoke suggests there's a lot of oil burning. If you scrub through the video it looks like the driver got out first, then the commander and gunner. (beat by both dan/california and akd. gotta read all the rest of the new posts before replying to these...)

FWIW, I don't think there's any paper in my office less than about 5 years old, and I get in trouble any time I need a pen for something. That's been one of the best things ever, because the admins always complained about my overflowing mailbox that I never emptied. I still don't empty it, but nothing gets put there, either, except the occasional envelope with a piece of physical schwag in it. And don't get me started on crypto... You and The_Capt are both right as far as once you've got enough EW drones in the air for the phased array to spot everybody you should send them something that explodes instead of sending them an electric field that confuses them.

It's actually very redundant, because once you have multiple units per target, each improves the suppression on *all* the targets - if you lose one out of N in the swarm, the suppression on all the targets is reduced by 1/N. So unlike an area denial system that's just radiating a huge amount of power that says "shoot me first!" you have a bunch of little radiators and you have to hit each one individually, with hitting any one of them not giving you much improvement in getting your signals through. And while you have to have a lot of them, they can probably all be pretty small - essentially a plague of locusts. Or maybe sparrows. You might be right that it's easier to just shoot everybody who's radiating because you've found and fixed them - with a similar but smaller network of detector sparrows you can localize everybody. The space part is kind of interesting. Basically if you can afford to launch something like starlink you can do it from space for signals that are going up to space. The time lags and beam spread (unless you have ginormous antennas) will make it hard to do hyperlocalized suppression from space.

You actually need multiple (at least two, more to be more effective) jammers per system being attacked, or more like multiple antennas in a phased array, but the array can be a bunch of drones scattered around if you can sync them up. You would have multiple drones, each with multiple transmitters on it, and phase them so they mess up the signals at your target locations. But we have $$$ to impose an asymmetric environment. Not easy (and harder to do with everything moving), but doesn't violate any laws of physics. You can do it with a speaker system where you have a bunch of speakers in a space and put a microphone at some point where you want to cancel the sound (where someone's head is in their workspace), then send phased signals from the speakers to cancel all the sound in that small space. Outside that cone of silence there will be all sorts of crazy noise where the speakers' sounds add up in weird ways. And with a bunch of speakers you can do it in multiple locations at once if you're careful. Same thing, but with RF.

You don't (and can't without a lot of work) spoof the data, but you can spoof the carrier and put garbage on it - there will be patterns to make the radio sync properly and modulate data bits. You won't know what the bits are, but you can probably see the patterns in how they're framed and turn the radio signal into garbage by sending appropriate garbage in sync. Encrypted signals are much more susceptible to noise than unencrypted systems. They'll have a lot of error checking in them, but it takes a lot less noise to mess up an encrypted signal than an unencrypted one. It's like the radio equivalent of noise cancelling headphones - you can flip bits without having to interpret the content. If you had quantum computers for decryption you might actually be able to feed fake data, but that's a ways off.

I agree that the bolded part is key. It's about creating an asymmetric environment for the uncrewed systems to work in (and using uncrewed systems as part of creating that environment. Hello, Skynet!). re: The_Capt's comments on EW: Current EW uses a ton of energy because it's very crude - basically put a lot of noise in the air and saturate the receivers with ABBA songs at levels many orders of magnitude higher than they can tolerate. A fleet of EW drones might be more subtle, and rather than saturating the receivers with a ton of noise, they might detect the various carrier signals and inject spoofed signals that look like the real thing (and are synced with the real thing) but are garbage. That's one of the ways that GPS denial works - you don't have to swamp the GPS signal, you just have to inject lies into the data stream that the receiver is expecting. Until recently this was difficult and expensive and likely took large pieces of hardware. With the proliferation of software defined radio I suspect that it's gotten very small, low energy, and cheap, particularly if you know the general operating parameters of the signals you're trying to mess up. Countering sensors is similar - the hardware with the sensor has to transmit signal for it to be useful. If you can triangulate to locate all the transmitters, you can saturate their input sensors with lower energy, more focused beams so that you aren't melting m&ms all over the battlefield.

The UA experience is that drones only last a few missions and are essentially disposable. Use the full battery capacity.

They’re up on YouTube for the interested, and still funny. Search on “SNL Land shark” I watched one the other day - Belushi played Dreyfus better than Dreyfus.

In a decade or so when this is over and details start leaking out of the UA we're going to find out that someone in a key position in Ukraine was a CM player and it influenced all their post 2014 development.

If your EW is good enough you can make your opponent play Iron with multiple players who aren't allowed to talk to each other.

Yeah - you can already buy a lidar to hang on a drone for a few $K (or less) that's suitable for patrolling & mapping an area the size of platoon or company battle area. The difficult part ends up being how to deal with all the data - either process on board or transmit large volumes back to base to look for things out of place. Get a bucket of drones and a bunch of different sensor systems that are all co-registered, send their data back to home base and make a near-realtime multispectral map of what's going on in a region and nobody's hiding anything from you.

It's the nature of Science Fiction/Fantasy, which gaming is kind of on the edge of. While you're spending your days trying to figure out how to simulate the fog of war that real armies experience, the guys who have to live the reality are looking at your game and saying "Dude, how do we make the real battlefield like *that*?". And the time scale is about right. CM:BO came out 20 years ago and there's been a whole generation of people playing CM and its ilk and having it influence what they wanted to develop in reality.

The important thing about the iphone example is that it's only possible economically because of enormous production of very small scale microelectronic processes. The development and fab setup costs are huge, and they get amortized across huge numbers of civil and defense production units to become very inexpensive if you're allowed access.

Concentration of mass will have to happen more like flash mobs on targets than traditional massing and then moving together. Bunches of uncrewed vehicles will converge from multiple directions to coordinate attacks on focus points and then disperse just as rapidly. It will depend on extremely good communication and coordination, with a lot of switching between mission command and detailed command on the fly - something like CM with borg spotting, but with hopefully better AI from units that have broken comms, and keeping your units staying farther apart until they converge.

Sensors will continue to win for those who have the money to develop fancy sensors. The production cost of fancy sensor systems is generally nowhere near the development cost, and the better/faster your computers the fancier sensing you can do with sometimes rather bad sensors. So the sensing benefit is always going to go to the side with the advanced microfab capability. Real AI is a thing, and it can do real detection and tracking, but it's also not trivially available to everybody, either. I've had people working on low SNR detection and tracking for very different applications (all imaging problems are the same once you get them onto the sensor array) and even with getting people from the black world the detection and tracking can be inconsistent.

It's a surprisingly good article for a non-technical audience. Multispectral sensing that gets integrated and fed to reasonably well trained computers is going to be hard to beat. It's tougher on the ground than in the sky in many ways - if you're in the sky and you can eliminate any radar return you just look like the rest of the sky. But if you're on the ground and eliminate radar (or lidar, or simply optical) return you look like a big hole in the environment and are obviously something interesting. You can camouflage yourself in one band, but it's likely that at the same time you make yourself stick out like a sore thumb in another band. Similar with emissions - if you're functioning you're using energy and emitting waste heat. It's not enough to have something that simply reflects your own thermal emissions - that heat has to go somewhere. It's either heating you up or something outside you (like your camouflage on one side while it keeps the other side cool, or it's slowly conducting itself to the surface of your camo. You also have to match your external environment across the spectrum so you don't stick out like a sore thumb or a black hole. That's why battery, or at least hybrid power is going to become more valuable - if you can turn off the heat generating internal combustion engine when you're not actively moving, you produce a lot smaller heat signature.

I told you that a long time ago. knock knock ”who’s there?” ”candygram” “Candygram?” (land shark chomp)

You can buy a variety of radars and lidars that will fit on a drone. The radars are available in mm wave, so you can get fairly high resolution with that. A combination of drone and automotive applications are driving the size and power down.

Smoke is also less useful if your opponent has IR optics. Russia could use it, but may have logistical issues stocking it in the right places, and then at least some UA forces (many drones, some ground units) will see through it anyway. Ukraine could arguably use it more effectively, but they seem to use mass fires much less, for a combination of logistical and doctrinal reasons (essentially as you describe)

Give the mortar a round that's got a small amount of guiding/targeting ability and an EFP, have its fire directed by drones, and it's a bit like a ground based Apache Longbow, but potentially cheaper, stealthier (give it an electric motor and it doesn't make noise when stationary), and able to carry more rounds.

If they leave it that size to get the gun elevation it might make a nice little drone carrier/charger. Little ports like a beehive for little drones and a rear ramp or roll up door for the bigger ones. The first step towards a Borg cube. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

I think the western armor remains a distraction. The shaping is already going on with the destruction of RA high value targets, particularly things like AD/CB radar and EW equipment. They're slowly blinding the RA further and making sure that UA remote operators will have free operating areas.

Was that a drone crew they were dropping on? The lower rightmost guy looked like he had a blackout visor on for being able to watch a display.

I don't think I've seen this NYT article linked here yet - it's about the difficulty the US DOD/MIC is having in ramping up to supply Ukraine while also maintaining enough in stock to protect Taiwan. Shouldn't be much of a surprised to anybody here, given how much it's been discussed, but it's getting higher visibility. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/us/politics/military-weapons-ukraine-war.html?smid=url-share