chrisl

At the operational level and down, information as a force multiplier and force as information multipliers are just M and 1/M and which side of the equals sign you put it on depends on whether you're trying to apply force or trying to communicate (cue any number of Star Trek scenes, from any of the series). But I'm not sure it fits quite neatly either way, because it can also let you avoid force entirely. That's been a big part of the value of space ISR since it started - having the ability to accurately know how many and what strategic weapons your opponent has and in what state (stored, doors opening, launching) has had a stabilizing effect in that it avoided a lot of potential pre-emptive use of force and "launch on anxiety" events. Maybe that's all a good argument in favor of thinking of force as an information multiplier, but I think it's more that force is an information carrier or transmitter (communication is information per unit time between two or more points, rather than bulk information), and better information helps you target that information transmission much more effectively (and I think we just developed a differential equation here...now we're all in trouble). Does putting your enemy's prize racehorse's head in his bed count as use of force to transmit information, or is it just very direct information on its own?

I was halfway through typing a long response to this and my computer spontaneously restarted, and both Steve and The_Capt got posts in first that provide supporting for what was writing (so thanks!) I'd frame it differently than @The_Capt (information has mass) and closer to Steve (information is a force multiplier) and say that it gives you efficiency of force (or efficiency of other things in other applications). The net effect is that when you're doing your calculations the old way, however one does those, you'd put in a dimensionless constant to account for the efficiency. That constant is the force multiplier. In practice, suppose you're Russia in 2022 and there's a platoon of UA defending 2 km of front. You're basically blind to their locations, so you get every tube and rocket rail that's in range and paste it for 30 minutes, then you send in the prisoners to do recon by death. And die they do, because massed artillery just isn't that great against a dug in defender. If you're Ukraine, you send up 3 or 4 drones and each time one spots a target, it calls in 2-3 rounds from one tube. That gets rid of a bunch of the defenders because they don't have time to take cover before the rounds start hitting *their* holes. A couple more drones fly around and drop grenades on vehicles, taking them out of the defense. When the PBI finally have to go in and finish things, there aren't a lot of well placed defenders left, and on a good day the Ukrainian PBI are getting feedback from the drones at a level of "a guy just went into a dugout in the trench you're about to go into, go up to the edge, move 3 m to your right, and toss a grenade down without sticking your head over". And the catch is that you don't need just the information, but the ability to act on it at a level commensurate with the information. If I know exactly where everybody is (Steve's example) but all I have is artillery with a CEP the size of the map, then the information doesn't do me much good. I'm still just going to plaster the whole map with all my arty. But if I have drones with lasers and laser guided munitions, I can send a drone up to point at each guy, fire one lgm, then go to the next. So while information is vital, and valuable, and adds efficiency, you also need equipment that has comparable precision. Some pages ago, I pointed out that the extreme limit of perfect information and perfect precision you need a number of munitions less than or equal to the number of opponents you have to deal with. It's like in science fiction where one good guy (e.g. Robocop) is in a room full of bad guys with machine guns (mass). He kills them all with a number of shots equal to the number of bad guys minus one (he gets two with one shot once), taking advantage of his IR vision (information) to see where people are behind concealment and precisely target them. Miltech is headed in that direction, where eventually every person on the ground will have augmented reality goggles that automatically integrate the information from all drones and all the other AR goggles so that every friendly and enemy shows up exactly in the right place, with appropriate shading/transparency to indicate that they're behind cover or terrain. The other catch is that you have to be able to do it all quickly - it doesn't do you any good to know how to do perfect information and precision if you can't deliver it faster than the other guy can kill you. Russia probably has a lot of smart people in universities and their MIC who can describe all this, but they don't have the resources to implement it much past pencil and paper.

And yer brain only uses 20-30 Watts most of the time, which is about the same ballpark as a ~$300 single board computer that can't do nearly as much fancy processing.

Yes. Yes it does. Somewhat trivially, the mass of one bit mbit= kBTln(2)/c2 Where kB is the Boltzmann constant, T is the storage temperature of the bit, and c is the speed of light. Someone else even wrote it up as part of a paper on mass/energy/information equivalence: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794 But I don't think that's what @The_Capt was referring to.

And they're already available: https://www.intelligent-energy.com https://www.unmannedsystemstechnology.com/company/intelligent-energy/ The main issue is probably fuel supply chain - it's easy to recharge a battery just about anywhere, but getting pressurized hydrogen is a little trickier. I dug those up because I wasn't sure how small it would scale because of the need for high pressure tanks, but it looks like it's reasonable at the current drone size. For larger aircraft, Airbus is looking at cryogenic liquid storage instead of pressurized gas.

With more integration of the drone and individual spotting it could be basic training or even author test mode.

I've learned to read much more quickly in Cyrillic from following this. My Chinese is limited to a few sichuan food dishes.

Probably the little shaped or EFP charges that they were showing off in a video a few pages ago. If they know they're tank hunting they know exactly what they need to penetrate and can pick the optimized explosives to drop. Drones have little enough payload capacity that it's worth the effort to do that, rather than carry all the extra frag mass of a mortar round.

It's essentially economic MAD. Neither China nor the west can afford to tank their economies. But don't be so sure about Chinese food independence: https://www.cfr.org/article/china-increasingly-relies-imported-food-thats-problem https://chinapower.csis.org/china-food-security/ The imports/exports are given in dollars, but based on your observations the exports are probably more high-markup processed foods, while the imports are staples, so the caloric ratio is probably higher than the economic ratio. The country could probably weather a major reduction in imports, but it would mean a major (and possibly healthier) lifestyle change for the middle class, with corresponding risk to the political leadership.

At what rate and at what cost? Suppose Russia actually takes Bakhmut and Avdiivka. How long is Donetsk airport actually out of shell range? Will the west suddenly supply ordnance that can still reach it? And with the diffusion of Russian forces out of other areas to take Bakhmut, how well can Russia defend against an attack somewhere else into its lines? Multiple attacks at relatively large distances from each other that force commitment of reserves to back one or the other? Unless China comes in with strong military support for Russia, Russian forces are on a downward trajectory. They not only don't have the manufacturing base, they don't have the technology base required to make the manufacturing equipment to develop the manufacturing base. And they don't have the economy or skilled workforce to support a ramp up of anything beyond late Soviet era equipment, if even that. Much of their skilled and educated workforce can sell their skills for a more comfortable lifestyle outside of Russia and have been doing so for years, with a recent acceleration. I don't think it's in China's interest to provide much more than small arms and strong words of encouragement. Russia is a nice gas station, and they might even sell decent snack chips and lottery tickets, but it's a lousy market for Chinese goods compared to Ukraine's backers. edit: China also has almost a billion and a half mouths to feed, with about 35% of its food being imported. Russia is far down on the list of suppliers of grain to China. The only major supplier of food to China that isn't backing Ukraine is Brazil. Ukraine has to pick a spot and sever the land bridge to Crimea, and then take out the Kerch bridge again. I suspect they've already got their eye on a few approaches to cutting the land bridge and the shaping operations are already ramping up.

I think you’re missing a trailing zero on the number of MQ-9s in US service.

Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was stopped at a light in an old Volare I'd inherited from my grandparents. It had already been totaled by the insurance company because my grandpa had crunched a front corner, and they told him to do what he wanted with it, but he couldn't keep it if he wanted the payout. I looked over to the right and didn't see a car. Then I noticed a roofline below the edge of my window, and looked more carefully - it was a Countach. It quickly went through my teenage brain that with one little twitch I could destroy a few hundred $K worth of car and it wouldn't leave a noticeable mark on mine. I did manage to refrain.

Showing that quality of video is a bit of a flex. That resolution transmitted in realtime is no joke. "this is the capability we're willing to show you publicly from these drones. Think about what we aren't showing."

The thing that should really be bumming Russia out is the quality of the video. That's high quality, sharp, no rolling shutter distortion, and enough bandwidth to get it in realtime halfway around the world.

Probably more a case of testosterone poisoning on the pilot's side, thinking he's better than he is.

To drop fuel on someone you have to be above and in front of them, so if it were matching speed it would have had to be above and in front of the MQ-9, in essentially the same relative positions as a refueling tanker and its recipient. What the SU pilot did was fly an intercept course from the side where he could probably see the upper bits of the "vertical" stabilizers of the MQ-9 up until the very last second. You have to extrapolate a bit from the video (and someone with CAD models of both aircraft could do it accurately very easily) because the camera on the MQ-9 is mounted under the nose on a swivel, so it's rotated to about the 135° position and probably as far up as it tilts (roughly horizontal), while the SU pilot is on top of his aircraft but can lean over and look to the left and down as he does his sweep. What you have to visualize is how much of the top of the MQ-9 is visible to someone stretching up and leaning left in the cockpit. He would have had a better view if he'd done it from above, banked slightly left, but then would have had to do a quick rotation to avoid slicing the MQ with his left wing. Instead he risked the belly of the plane (with a higher chance of a hit because of visibility) rather than his flight surfaces. Where he screwed up on the second pass is intercepting a couple feet aft of where he probably intended to (and of where he did on the first pass).

If we know even the approximate dimensions of both aircraft (and we do) then the camera can give us a very accurate sense of the distance between the two. And given the bent propeller blade, we have more indication that the distance between the two was zero.

It's the modern version of how the La Brea Tar Pits filled up with animals.

Which is why I don't think it's likely they'll target the bigger aircraft cruising over NATO air space.

The AWACS and JSTARS seem to reliably fly over NATO countries, unless they're flying with their ADS-B turned off over the BS. So an attack on one of them by Russia would be a much more overt act of aggression and likely leave them with an undeclared no-fly zone.

Twitter thread from RAND corp person who did a report on similar Russian signaling, with link to the full report in the thread:

So sorry that it landed on your bridge...

Short of shooting them down, what's an aircraft response team going to do? An MQ-9 costs about $30M - not worth getting into a direct shooting match over. Better to have something Russian quietly disappear.

The Bosporus and Dardanelles are closed to warships weren't already based in the BS before the war, so essentially no naval vessels in or out. In principle the US could send an unarmed civilian contractor vessel to recover it.

A little aside on the future of tactical equipment. The print version of IEEE Spectrum that just came has an article about giving people extra arms that are controlled by neural signals. This kind of thing has already been done for prosthetics, but they're proposing adding a couple arms on a backpack so you can have them work independently of your meat arms. That, in itself, would be useful for the super ghillie suit when the tank is fully dead - you could have the extra arms reach up over the cover to fire so your meat arms aren't put at risk. https://spectrum.ieee.org/human-augmentation But the same type of control and feedback could also be applied to personal drones. Individual soldiers could have drones that function like familiars (traditionally magic users have used things like cats/rats/bats/etc for this purpose) to act as their spotters. With neural feedback practice it would just go to where you want it while it follows you around. And re the downing of the MQ-9: That could potentially end poorly for Russian aerospace assets, but it may not be something we hear about for a few years.