chrisl

And you question the precision vs mass thing? Here's the radio exchange: UA Drone Operator: "Dude, wiggle your rifle so we know which one is you" UA surrounded guy: (wiggles rifle). UA Drone Operator: You're totally surrounded. Don't move. UA Done operator: On the way.......splash..... Russians: (screaming).

There's a hidden assumption: complete control of the anything more than 6 feet above the ground. And maybe a second one of no high performance ATGMs in the trenches. In his text he points out the huge collection of vehicles on overwatch. The only reason they can be on steady overwatch is that they don't have to worry about getting blown up from the sky or artillery because the fly people have destroyed any artillery within range and all enemy air power has been erased. If the enemy has artillery within range and still has radios, the overwatch is in a much riskier position. For a nice example that doesn't involve trenches, read up on the details again of the US vs. Wagner fight in Syria. Death from above. The next generation of this, which Ukraine is at the leading edge of, is going to be small drones with increasing autonomy and a mix of ISR and destructive capability. See it and erase it without being seen yourself.

I think you underestimate how much the western ISR helped in both the initial defense and in the shaping operations that enabled Kharkiv and Kherson. If you take the asymptotic limit of the US approach, the goal is to have so much ISR and such precision that you don't need more individual munitions than there are opposing people and pieces of equipment, and might need less. See it and erase it before it sees you. So far, that's only been provided to Ukraine in bits and pieces, but just the ISR and older portable precision has been provided has let them take back a huge fraction of Russia's gains and made even tiny additional gains incredibly expensive. Time is on Ukraine's side in the sense that Russia will lose as long as Ukraine continues to fight, but if Ukraine wants to have something left when Russia leaves, sooner is better. Given everything we've seen so far, my impression is that Ukraine is making rapid progress in capability generation and would prefer to wait and do something decisive rather than struggle for millimeters of gain. Head-on pitched battles shouldn't be the desired goal of a military. Ejecting the opposing force with much less self-destruction can be achieved by other means.

Until we actually see chinese stuff showing up in quantity on the Russian side, I'm going to take "China is considering" the same way one should interpret "I'll think about that" from my graduate advisor. It translates to "I'm not going to say no, but it's not going to happen".

I have to disagree on a bunch of that. #1) I'm not so sure that defense is strongly favored. Ukraine wasn't prepared to fight a static defense and had to give up a lot of territory early to trade for time. If defense were heavily favored, Russia wouldn't have made the initial gains that it did. When Ukraine has been on deliberate offense (Kyiv, Kharkiv, then Kherson) they've made rapid gains. What they didn't do in any of those is attack head on. #4) "Ukraine has done brilliantly at seizing these openings" is incorrect. They've done brilliantly at creating those openings. As I pointed out in #1 - Ukraine had to trade a lot of distance for time and to let Russia overextend itself in order to make the counterattack in Kyiv work. They played that defense and counterattack to their strengths and took advantage of weaknesses of the RA (which were visible to the combination of UA, babushkanet, and NATO ISR). They used all that ISR to devastate the column headed for Kyiv, leading to the "gesture of goodwill". They used that ISR plus NATO materiel to create a situation around Kharkiv that Russia was forced to retreat from to avoid collapse. They did it in parallel around Kherson to avoid getting drawn into a slow and brutal urban fight. I suspect they're doing it again while Russia bashes its head against Bakhmut, and we'll probably see the effects when the ground gets solid again. #5) Ukraine has solved for large scale attacks against prepared defenses. The answer is "don't". It's more effective for them to corrode the Russian logistics train and keep pushing the supply depots further and further back as longer range weapons come in from NATO. The NYT thing I linked to had an indirect statement that indicated that UA CB capability has forced RU artillery back far enough that the UA supply route into Bakhmut isn't under RU fire control, despite the extent of the RU pincers (as an aside, I don't think RU has succeeded yet in any attempt to close a pincer of any size since Feb 2022) #6) I think it's pronounced "ISR plus action at a distance", and maybe spelled "GLSDB+ATACMS". It provides the equivalent action at a distance of a western air force, at the penalty of slightly less response speed and flexibility than you'd get with NATO style air supremacy. Air support is really just a flavor of very long range artillery. #7 & #8) I don't think we have evidence of difficulties of UA force generation other than them not throwing masses into frontal attacks. And that's something we've already seen that they don't really do. They are feeding reinforcements into Bakhmut at possibly a fairly high cost because they're getting sufficient information to convince them that the relative cost is much, much higher for RU. Aside from the body count videos, they also can get complementary information through various forms of ISR to verify the impact to the RU forces. It's really hard to say Ukraine is "struggling to hold Bakhmut". It's got essentially no strategic value as a geographical location to occupy. They aren't struggling to hold it. They're staying there because the see a long term advantage to the effect it's having in RU forces. RU started working on it in what, August? And they've gained how many kms at what price? I doubt that China is supplying 10k lancets, and it's even less likely that they'd supply as many NLAW/Jav knockoffs (which are going to be kind of sad for lack of IR detectors). I can (and sometimes do) buy a lot of cheap chinese electronics, but cheap chinese IR sensors are cheap, and there aren't expensive ones on the market. They have no reason to restrict their export to the US, other than to hide lack of capability, because I can get US/Canada manufactured sensors.

I guess someone at the NYT is reading the thread - they published a response today to my specific criticism from yesterday that provided accurate context, as well (and a picture of an SPG firing where you can still see the shell in the air) https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/03/03/world/russia-ukraine-news/ukraine-bakhmut-russia?smid=url-share

So is that actual rust on the radome of the A-50 that the drone is landing on? The picture is a little coarse, but it looks like there are perforations and peeling paint, too. But if that's real rust, why is Russia using steel for sheet metal parts in an aircraft? Particularly one that's not supposed to be operating where it might need any armor (which probably shouldn't be steel anyway)

And much of the news coverage has been "woe is Ukraine, they don't stand a chance" rather than "why can't the alleged second most powerful army in the world take a small town like Bakhmut in months, and why are they trying anyway?"

They've been more tankie than not through the whole thing. The short period where they were reporting accurately and seeming to support Ukraine was anomalous.

I haven’t had time to check the video- do they look like hipsters?

IR can see through smoke. If the UA forces are well equipped with IR sights and the RA isn't, then they can lay a ton of smoke right in front of the RA lines (less smoke covers more angle) and leave a bunch of vehicles with IR sights on overwatch to pick off RA vehicles that come out from cover while "concealed" by smoke to take shots. If the RA is reasonably well equipped with IR (unlikely) then it's pretty risky for the UA.

How many IR sights do the Russians have left?

I saw that happen to a guy on the street when I was walking in Boston one evening. He was going about 40 and the car spun when the driveshaft hit the pavement. He's lucky it didn't dig into a pothole and send him pole vaulting. But yeah, there are a lot of things that can make a vehicle stop moving that don't necessarily finish off the engine or happen immediately. So CM needs more zombie AFVs.

I can't tell if this sounds like a threat or an invitation:

It's not the first time I noticed, just one of the more dramatic. I've been impressed with the number of T-72s that someone presses the "start toast" button on and yet they keep rolling before they pop. Like the engines work, and the drivers maybe survived (or are stuck on the controls) while the turret gets ready to do its thing.

When I watched it my first thought was "I don't think I've seen a CM vehicle that suffered a mobility kill move that far before stopping. Please fix or do somefink."

Because the RU military already sent most of their trainers to die in Ukraine?

Months of shaping operations by Ukraine to achieve this geometry and cut it off 3 days after the anniversary of the invasion.

After the war it can be repurposed for delivering drinks on the beach.

It looks like it's copied from a bound book, so it doesn't seem like something they just came up with in response to the current situation. Is it an old soviet field manual that someone finally bothered to read? It must have been in the "restricted" section of the library and nobody could get permission to check it out earlier. And is there any evidence that the guys on the ground are doing any better than a half-assed job at implementing it, or getting any training in it that isn't live-fire on the two-way range?

Or if they set a lot of T-72s on fire.

They're still out there. (the pasted link doesn't retain the street map setting, so you should toggle that on). There's one little red dot on Bakhmut. The cold wet ground in itself shouldn't be a problem - they're just looking for emission in certain wavelengths, and with cold wet ground the contrast between hot spots and background should be better. I haven't looked into the details, but they probably aren't really sensitive to the individual shells so much as the aftereffects, like things burning. With fewer buildings left to burn in the heavily fought over areas, and the terrain being wet and/or frozen there's probably not a lot of brush burning, either. Get an ammo dump burning and that ought to show up. edit: Bellingcat has a fairly long article on using the FIRMS maps to look for artillery attacks. I suspect if you download the raw data you may also be able to tease out some smaller/shorter duration hot spots. It may need to be combined with data from other satellites to be effective at the small stuff.

The fire systems do create organized mass. One of the things they've finally learned is that it's much better to overmatch a fire when it's small than wait to see how bad it might get. We can go from zero to tens of trucks from at least 3 jurisdictions in minutes and a small city of firefighters in a couple days. It's pretty amazing to watch, though preferable not with the firefighters in your yard.

There are lots of people working on distributed sensor/actor systems that work like this with no humans in the loop at all. A big difference in issues around adoption is that they're generally intended to not kill people at all, rather than having to separate good and bad people to kill (c.f. The Evil Bit) That's essentially how incident command works for wildland firefighting at the urban interface. LA County has been doing it since before I moved here in the mid 1990s, but the basic principle is that whoever gets to the fire first is in charge until they do a formal handoff, and other agencies come in as fast as they can and take direction, basically ignoring pre-existing levels of authority (city/county/state/multiple federal) until they get a command center organized and do the handoff. San Diego wasn't doing that in 2003 and got themselves tied in C2 knots at city boundaries while the whole county burned. They got it mostly fixed by 2007 and had a much better response when the fires broke out then. It's also still a work in progress - LA County and the Forest Service had some conflicts about nighttime use of water dropping helos in 2009 that ended up taking a few years to sort out policies on, because LA City and County have better nighttime capability than the feds.

Hey - I edit bad novels as a side gig and I agree that I'd tell you to take it out.