chrisl

I think it's related to the amount of handwritten and filled-in-by-actual-typewriter stuff we see when there are photos of official Russian documents, like some IDs, passports, shippers for the kerch bridge splody truck, etc. Despite pretensions to modernity, RU is just not digitized to an extent anywhere near what the west is, and because it's such an alien concept it doesn't really register in your brain. Their vehicles have mixes of a few modern radios that support digital encryption and a lot of ancient fully analog radios that don't. They seem to get paid with some sort of actual cash - that's presumably how the military unit scams work where they have more soldiers on paper than actually exist in a unit and the commander pockets the pay of the ghosts. At small unit levels, reliable radios are probably still relatively rare (and if not, they're probably compromised by being analog and so not used). They really are mostly technologically backward at the mass production level, but with the ability to cobble together small numbers of modern-ish electronics if they can get them. So if you have to coordinate an assault involving ~200-500 guys on foot, a half-dozen tanks, some artillery 10 km back, and a couple of helicopters, but you have compromised trash for communication systems, about all you can do is give instructions and specify a timetable. Imagine playing a game of networked CM where you're commanding a platoon in a battalion level action, but you not only don't have borg spotting, you only have view 1 and the rest of the people on your side are similarly commanding platoons in view 1. You're all in separate locations so you can't talk, and there's no chat function in the game or on your computer. Basically you're playing CM with slightly more feedback than Tommy. You get a map and a timetable, and if any of your squads get out of sight you have to communicate via runners. You half-expect them to be using mimeographed instruction sheets, with some lucky mobik back at brigade HQ cranking the handle on the mimeo machine to get the instructions out.

Just wait til the Chinese are using high altitude balloons to monitor Russian river crossing attempts...

Yeah, if Russia launches a huge missile attack for the anniversary of the SMO Imma go out and find the nearest "stop arming Ukraine march" and stomp around urging them to surrender. Oh wait. I don't think I've heard of a single march like that in the US, ever. This invasion has all the usual pacifists out calling their congresspeople demanding that we send tanks and missiles and all sorts of splody stuff to Ukraine.

Balloons are cheap. You can find hobbyist instructions all over the interwebs on how to launch high altitude balloons. I know people who have/would do that sort of thing. But they aren't going to spend the kind of money China can on a big solar array (if they can even afford a big enough balloon to lift one) so when the battery runs out it turns into a rogue balloon. When you're up that high and there's nothing around, it's also hard to estimate the scale of things. So now every random hobbyist (along with the aliens who thought they'd be able to investigate the Earth using balloons) has rogue balloons that a month ago nobody would have noticed and now are being chased down by F-22s. Pretty soon it will be a thing to put a camera on to record the balloon's last moments for TikTok, and then the FAA will start making people register their balloons like they do drones.

~800 KIA/day is a huge number. For a WWII comparison, the allies had ~4400 KIA in the first 24 hours of D-day with a landing force of about 160K.

The US doesn't mass produce cheap stuff, but there is still a lot of production in the US, particularly of moderate quantity, higher performance stuff. If I need to get 5000 precision parts made, it's actually cheaper in the US than anywhere else - shops here will have a moderate number of very expensive, high performance machines that are operated by one or two people who basically program and babysit them. If I want a few very high quality, at least partially custom, things, it's generally coming from the US or Europe, and even if I were allowed to buy them from Russia or China, it's unlikely that they'd be competitive on performance or cost. And the US produces enormous amount of information (and not just social media aggregation). A lot of the equipment and instrumentation that's used in manufacturing around the world depends on stuff made here.

The time and separation between #2 and #3 look kind of like a correction after #1 and #2. Could be a single gun firing 1/2, correct then 3/4.

That change was already underway in US forces with the retirement of the A-10 and using the F-35 as its replacement. The thing that the aircraft provide is a platform that can carry a lot of fuel to get more stuff closer to the target point faster - missiles are still limited by the rocket equation. Small UAVs for observing and as munitions are limited in similar ways by the fuel scaling. You can get them closer to the target on a more efficient first stage (the aircraft) that flies high enough to stay out of effective range of the MANPADs, while putting the much lower cost targeting drones at risk down near the ground, with those operated by the FOs. High altitude aircraft (with or without crews inside) with low altitude or ground (or space) observers will still be able to deliver tactical precision at strategic distances.

A breakout of a few hundred km from Vuhledar and they'd be out wading in the Sea of Azov! It's only 100 km from Vuhledar to Mariupol and a complete cutting of the famous land bridge. It will be interesting to see what Russia's response is and whether the UA has dialed in targeting of routes that would get RU forces from Bakhmut to Vuhledar.

I don't think the fighter/bomber is any deader than the tank (and probably less), but it's subject to the same kind of conditions as the future of tanks. The biggest is that it depends on asymmetry of technology and doctrine. The jets and aerodynamics are pretty mature all around, but attack aircraft are part of a system, just like tanks are part of a system. NATO/US don't just send fancy fighter/bombers off on their own - there are a ton of support systems, starting with the satellite ISR, then GlobalHawlks, and the various B707 based radar and command systems. E-3 for airborne monitoring and traffic control, the E-8 JSTARS to monitor things on the ground, EA-18s for SEAD, and so on. They're all part of an interconnected system that makes it possible to reach out and touch someone with as little risk as possible to the guys driving them around. Just like you can't just load up a bunch of M1 tanks on trains and ship them into Ukraine and expect them to be effective, you can't just drop off a bunch of F-35s (or F-15s, F-16s, or FA-18s, Typhoons, etc) without all the stuff that helps them do the things they do. But if you have that whole set of toys and the doctrine to suppress the defenses around a volume of space, you can then use that space to deliver very high precision pain.

So does that mean Prigozhin needs to stay away from windows and tall stairwells for a while?

Those kind of measurements are *really* hard to do from a balloon with any fidelity because there are a lot of outside forces acting on the balloon and it's hard to maintain an inertial environment somewhere inside. Local gravity measurements are tricky to do in a stable lab subbasement with good isolation.

for convenient comparison, here's the NYT report on the same battle: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/world/middleeast/american-commandos-russian-mercenaries-syria.html and the wikipedia summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khasham Massed precision + high quality C4ISR beats mass.

Haven't we seen that show before with the progressively shrinking pincer at Izyum (IIRC - it seems so long ago I had to go back and search through the thread)? It started out looking like it was recon and shaping and it turned out to be the main attack. If they've been throwing away a full strength BTG per day, they may very well have spent enough of the assault force that it's just going to fade.

Might as well throw in 30 years of brain drain, too. I know a lot of really good engineers and scientists from the former USSR. And they all work in the west now.

Russia’s entire annual military budget is about 1.25 Lockheed-Martins. And that’s Lockheed’s revenue during peacetime. And that’s just one company of the US MIC. And that doesn’t begin to account for differences in technical capabilities. Sure, people get paid less in RU so your ruble goes farther, but when you factor in the Russian corruption I suspect that cost advantage goes away.

Also curious that the balloon didn't seem to have a parachute. The conventional (and fail resistant) way to deploy parachutes on those type of balloons is just to hang the payload by the parachute with an attach point at the top center of the chute. Once the balloon is separated, the package starts to fall and the chute opens. Even with the remnants of the envelope attached you'd at least expect to see the chute flail around, even if the flapping envelope prevented proper inflation. Here's pictures that include the full chain of a long duration antarctic ballon. You have to scroll down a ways, and there's both pictures and a diagram after the lift/separation chain.

If a fail safe fails into an unsafe state it's not a fail safe... But that's a major screw up to not be able to drop the balloon and have it go over a foreign country with which you have a slightly tense political relationship. And then not warn them in advance and provide instructions for them to try to bring it down before it drifts over half a continent.

I think the main argument against technical error is that people who launch those kind of balloons generally build in a mechanism to vent the envelope and/or drop the payload if it starts to go out of planned bounds. The US has a few ranges in North America as well as arctic and antarctic. There are scientific ballon flights that go for weeks or even months travel across or around Antarctica, but if they went anyplace where they were a hazard I'd expect a) whoever controlled the airspace they're entering to be warned and b) them to get dropped if they were likely to become a hazard.

UA probably have a lot of cope cages that they could cut off captured/destroyed RU tanks, remove most of the cagey stuff from (leaving the frame) and then use to support netting.

On ADS-BExchange I've seen a couple E-3s and a couple Rivet Joints in the US Upper Midwest/Plains area, plus a Rivet Joint headed up to western Canuckistan, presumably to follow up on reports of another balloon spying on @The_Capt in his Yukon lair. They'll eventually figure out this is where he's posting and maybe stop sending balloons. You can be assured that every transmission is being slurped and recorded for further analysis (both from The_Capt and the balloons). It's pretty certain that US and Canada probably both have been watching the balloon for a while and only had to admit its presence publicly when it got spotted by regular people. I also read an unconfirmed report that the USAF does have the capability to retrieve the balloon. It doesn't surprise me that much - the basic tech is old and the main issues are size of the balloon and altitude. If they can snag the harness and snip off the balloon envelope behind the plain they can recover the whole payload intact. There's probably some interesting diplomacy going on behind the scenes to come up with a story, apology, and public response agreeable to both the US and China. Unless the balloon has a small telescope on board (possible) it probably can't really get anything you wouldn't get from google earth, anyway.

We used to do it all the time for film capsules on parachutes, but it was with big old C-130s and C-141s, and helicopters for smaller payloads with higher precision landings. I don't know that we ever had anything that could do it at 60K feet, particularly for that big a load. The balloon envelope is a mess of drag and fouling opportunity at an altitude where it's hard to get lift off wings already anyway.

You just described Cheesecake Factory.

If you look at the ratio of RU/UA losses on Oryx and assume that it's a similar undercount, Ukraine's losses are about 1/3 those of Russia. Which doesn't sound too out of whack with them being primarily on defense and having used a corrosive offense rather than a tank rush or other high casualty massed attack. But Ukraine is replacing their destroyed equipment with better equipment, and can send troops to train both completely out of reach of RU, but also to train with professional trainers, while Russia spent a lot of their experienced trainers at the front earlier in the war. I suspect that part of why you're perceiving Russian troops to be less dependent on their IFVs is that Russia is running low on operable units, so they just aren't available for troops to become dependent on.

I suspect #1 and #3 might be the leading causes, since Russia seems to be corroding itself at a time of year when it's least favorable to be on attack. If Ukraine is offensively corroding Russian forces elsewhere, it's probably shaping things for when the weather improves. Even if a lot of the Russians being sacrificed are Wagner prisoner troops, they still consume Russian resources to put them in the line of fire.