chrisl

I've been thinking about this since the MC/DC discussion came up, and struggle a little to fully agree with this. My first thought was along the lines of what you wrote here: if you have "perfect" ISR and comms, then you can run DC very effectively. In principle all the way down to the individual level with Borg spotting. And then as you lose ISR and/or the ability to get it to the pointy end, the pointy end has to shift to MC, with the caveat that they need to have some "far point" to keep them from getting too far out in front of the rest of the mission. But then I thought about RU and the timetables. Aren't they essentially using DC in the near absence of C4ISR? At best they seem to have C2.5R, and even that's questionable. So they give a detailed timetable and punish flexibility, leading the lower echelons to just keep throwing meat into the grinder until they run out. The difference, of course, is training. RU has more rigid training to start with, apparently less combined arms training than a box of CMBO, and has to resort to fairly crude DC because that's all they can do. "Go that way, annihilate anything in your path, be at point X by Y time, then stop. If you turn around, Wagner will shoot you." So what you really need to train is the continuum and the transition. If we take the extreme limit with the totally integrated battlefield, you start out with DC, but even there, if you micromanage/DC too much you might as well just have robots/UXVs, each controlled by an individual far back from the lines. And then those robots need autonomy to switch to their robotic version of MC when they lose C2. Ideally it's progressive autonomy that fills in little gaps when the comm loss is short, and increasing, including a defined mission goal and maybe local meshing to neighboring bots who are also out of comm back to the rear. We don't have that level of AI yet, so we send "robots with wetware" - well trained infantry who can work with DC when it's available and understand why that's a good thing, even if it sometimes doesn't make sense, and then transition smoothly to whatever level of MC is necessary as the integration disintegrates.

"Dude" is gender neutral. (edit: when used in the second person) FWIW, it doesn't take long to get used to using NB pronouns, especially "they/them", since it's already a fairly common thing in English anyway.

It's a general design and manufacturing QA thing. As an example: Almost all bicycle frames sold in the US are made in one of 3 (maybe fewer now) factories in mainland China, even relatively high end aluminum framed bikes. They're generally fine and reliable. But essentially all high end carbon fiber frames and parts are made in the US or Taiwan. There are carbon frames made in mainland China, but they break easily (which bike frames really shouldn't do all that much, but the cheap ones do) and people find things like that they're stuffed with newspaper, where there should have been removable pressure bladders to compress the CF during curing. Or cheap CF handlebars just break during normal use, which is a very bad thing. Properly made CF frames are as tough as metal frames - I've broken more steel framed bikes than CF bikes, and the one CF failure I've had was in a metal component. Improperly made CF will fall apart quickly if a little load is put on it in the wrong way. Today I have to go to the home depot to return a faucet pullout replacement hose made in China. It's a cheap hose that has threaded fittings crimped onto both ends. Except that the fitting on one end doesn't have any threads! I've also run into furniture kits that had pieces of allthread as part of the assembly where some of the "threaded" pieces weren't threaded into a spiral thread, they were just a series of grooves/ridges along the rod that didn't form a continuous thread. But it was the same depth and pitch as the threads, so non-obvious without tracing it or trying to match to a threaded piece. There were enough fully threaded pieces, too, so I suspect they got a batch of the nothread and it was cheaper to put the bad pieces in shipped product as extras than to pay for disposal.

There have been tons of spinoff companies around the big US MIC companies who have been developing all kinds of UAS for several decades. Probably most of them were mostly selling prototypes and small quantities to the bigger MIC companies until recently. Now they're probably all under contract to build as many systems as they can as fast as they can.

If they don't have enough trucks for the guns then: a) how are they keeping them supplied with shells? Just piling them up next to the guns? That's going to end rather dramatically. b) how are they avoiding CB? Even if Ukraine doesn't always have CB sensing capability, they're going to figure out locations pretty quickly. See (a) for the ending.

I think it says a lot about his training and/or experience. My direct experience is sports, but the principle is the same - you train over and over and over so that when you're totally wrecked and barely functioning, the skills you need to keep moving are just automatic. He kept a steady flow and variety of stuff going smoothly and didn't eff up. That comes from a lot of practice in less stressful conditions.

Maybe community service repainting it with more appropriate road paint

Yeah, I'd wait to see what they actually send and shows up in Russian hands rather than listening to what they say. Xi is at risk of taking over the Mutter Courage role by dealing equipment to both sides in return for cash or fossil fuels. I'm not convinced he's as foolish as Putin, and he knows very well how much Chinese well-being (and thus willingness to tolerate his regime) comes from the west vs. from Russia. So he may say a lot of things publicly that are politically expedient, but his actions are what's important.

Much of that $30B (and the many $Billions more committed) that will get recycled into the US economy was spent years ago (in the US) building stuff that we sent/are sending/will send. Some of which was/is essentially retired and never going to be used again anyway - it's probably cheaper to ship it to Ukraine to get blown up and recycled there than to pay for disposal in the US. It's not like all the big defense companies just have parking lots and warehouses of materiel to send if we send truckloads of cash - we're sending it mostly from long since paid-for stock. And then most of the rest of the military aid will get spent in the US, too, because where is the US going to buy high end US military equipment from other than the US MIC? The main actual cash outlays that go overseas are humanitarian aid and some fraction of the shipping cost.

It’s also accelerated onshoring of manufacturing technology that we spent the last 35 years offshoring.

Be careful what you wish for. I’m sitting about 1500 feet from a poutine stand on the west coast. It probably doesn’t travel well…

But a nice time for some action at a distance on supplies that might be exposed and immobile.

That’s where the autonomy needs to advance- you lose radio control in tunnels and caves like that so the UAV needs to be able to take over targeting on its own.

I suppose it could also be an RU ploy to see how many radar planes NATO puts in the air and which ones. But does RU have enough capability to detect them all the way across the Polish border?

Invented by Germans in response to word count limits in academic abstracts... Just remove all the spaces and call it one word. England took the opposite extreme and paid by the word and gave us Charles Dickens.

I'm not sure that rickety old barnstorming fighter jets are a thing. Those things take a ton of maintenance to be able to get off the ground and stay there long enough to do something useful. Sending waves of old jets piloted by barely trained mobiks seems like a great way to make big pile of recycleable titanium and aluminum at the end of the runway.

Now I'm going to have to bash Germany for not requiring each major company to use a word that starts with a different letter after the "Deutsche". I thought y'all were much more organized than that. That would limit you to 26 big companies with two word names, but you can always go to three or four to keep the abbreviations unique.

I was going to make a similar comment. DB is just acting like a bank and doing the things that big banks do.

Or they realized that the AF is entirely useless if they don't fly, and only mostly useless if they do. So they're going to send them to act as AD sponges to make it easier for some missiles to get through.

I've spent some time "directed energy adjacent" and nobody's going to tell you that stuff until there are videos of it happening all over Twitter or whatever replaces it. People working on some of the key parts don't know anything about the systems they're going into. It will be hard to get actual numbers until you can buy them at Big 5 for hunting. Things like range through atmosphere are going to be tricky and variable. You can do back of the envelope estimates on some of it yourself based on the powers they were tossing around. I wouldn't be surprised if early models end up in Ukraine, or maybe the Polish border, for "testing", but that's definitely not going to show up on the aid list. And the more successful they are, the less you're going to hear about them. Any video that leaks out will get gaslit with some plausible explanation that doesn't make sense if you look too close.

The other podcasts on that page are good, too. There's a two-parter on microelectronics and national defense systems, and there are a bunch more that look interesting.

You’re west of the pond, so you should bash Europe. Those east of the pond should bash the US.

You have a decimal point problem in the first estimate- it should be 90 per day by weight. Which is not out of whack with reality.

Don't leave out Bulgakov. Or that they provided inspiration for the Klingon vs Federation theme in ST:TOS.

Balloons with cube corners seem like wishful thinking as decoys. A vaguely modern radar will get its speed and direction pretty quickly - velocity along the beam should come for free from doppler. And if the radar is mounted on an E-3 or an E-8 flying on the other side of the border, Russia can't go taking shots at it.