chrisl

If they can hit the port in Sevastopol they can hit subs in port.

And sometimes everything in the world falls into place at once. This ad was just recently posted for an NYC rat Czar. It's a must-read Imagine someone creative enough to conscript the rats into minesweeping in Ukraine.

Spaceborne ISR is still very limited to a small set of countries. Partly because the technology that's needed is very export restricted by the countries that have it - Russia was in a better position than almost any other country to compete and was still limited to film-drop imaging into the late 2010's. China has quite a lot of assets in space, but it doesn't look like it even is at the performance of what's commercially available for rent yet. The benefit to them, despite the lower performance, is that they own it and it can't be shut off by another country that the commercial satellite operator might be based in. And there's probably not much that isn't at least roughly known to amateur satellite watchers, and well known to major space powers. It's very hard to hide satellites. You might hide one from amateurs satellite watchers for a little while, but the orbital debris people will notice it pretty quickly and then there will be a bunch of telescopes with adaptive optics looking at it to figure out what it does. If it's optical it's pretty easy to figure out its performance if you know its size and orbit, and if it's an active radar you can figure out its performance limits from what it's radiating. And that's from the ground. If you've got a bunch of your own stuff in space you can get a pretty good look, unperturbed by atmosphere.

The only purpose of heavy will be to transport energy for the light - it will be hosed in a fight, so it has to stay hidden, like a queen bee or ant. But rather than the workers bringing food, they'll come to it to refuel/recharge. It might be part of the long range transport for the light things, like an aircraft carrier for aircraft, but it won't be part of the fight. Heavy HE will come from long range, guided all the way in by the network of gnats (or rats with cameras). The heavy core probably won't be necessary for integration - most of the swarm will have enough compute on board to do networked coordination, like a flock of crows, with maybe a few swarm members having some extra compute on board to do some of the integration.

I know people who have attached cameras to the heads of rats. Pointed in at their brains. Putting cams on rats for ISR would be a lot easier.

Now imagine the UA guys have VR goggles that are spatially registered. They'd get overlays of the locations of the russians as they're sneaking up, even when completely out of LOS, so they can either accurately launch a few grenades out of the trench or wait presighted for them. Or the UA guys could just have left a UGV there and gone back to smoke cigarettes and watch om TV while the russians sneak up on it while it tosses grenades precisely in their midst. The UGV will be battery operated, so it won't have much thermal profile when it's not moving or shooting, and it will be dressed in local vegetation.

Didn't Peter Sellers star in the movie version of that in 1959?

I suppose the risk is that uncrewed equipment gets so effective that the game just gets tied to the ISR and the drones IRL and we never see it…

I don't think he's saying that one shouldn't have cost-effective anti-recon assets. It's more that he's pointing out that the NG solution in the video, while kind of cool, is just just a big (expensive) fat target for something coming from over the horizon, probably swarmed, and produced at a small fraction of the price of the gun platform. Armored vehicles in the future environment are going to be more like aircraft carriers are today - a big platform to get the smaller uncrewed things close enough that they can do their work, while keeping the base mobile, well protected, and difficult to detect. AFV-mounted autocannons may turn out to be part of the last line of defense, much like CIWS on ships, but they aren't likely to be effective primary anti-drone systems for very long, if ever.

From a CM perspective this is sort of ideal. It means that for modern titles they won't have to develop ways to simulate sufficient fog of war for the player because proper Borg spotting will be the norm for one side. The other side will simply see an empty field and watch all their stuff get blown up.

Erdogan, or maybe Xi since China isn't NATO, could do a Lawrence of Arabia.

He had another op ed in the NYT in July urging the US to work on negotiating a cease-fire then, presumably with something like the lines at the time. I saw the first one about the "weapons won't help" some time ago but well after Ukraine had shown itself to be quite effective and Russia not so much. None of his analysis seems to be based on much real insight into the actual situations he's writing about.

I can see Ukraine choosing to let the RA slip out the back rather than destroying Kherson. Post US election Russia isn't going to be getting much, if any relief from western aid to Ukraine, so they needed to bug out before winter. The UA could have plastered the shores at the ferry crossings to destroy retreating RA units, but that would have stopped the retreat and pinned them in the city. Then the choice would be for the UA to go in (bloody) or to drag out the siege into winter (brutal for civilians). All those Russians who slipped out can be HIMARSed later in open, or at least less dense areas, where a major city won't be destroyed in the process. Or not. How Ukraine did this is also a message to us in the west: "The UA is about retaking Ukraine, not vengeance, and if Russians leave quietly we can let them live." Now if Ukraine can finish off the Kerch bridge and get at least fire control over the land bridge, Russia might give up on Crimea.

It was part of the latest US aid package, sending underemployed crisis actors from Hollywood.

Since it’s not useful for anything heavy it’s only useful as a foot escape route for Russians. Ukraine seems to have enough control of the sky that they can conduct river crossings at will. Even more so after they move back into Kherson.

At risk of bringing US politics in: there's little enough change in the makeup of the US government that Vlad realizes he can count on Ukraine getting two more years of essentially the same support they've been getting. And there's no way the RA can survive that. For maybe the 3rd time since Feb 24 they're recognizing the reality of a macro situation.

And there are about 2000 faces on the length of that wall.

The hard part is really detection/sensing - if you don't know where it is you can't target it, whether with a servo or a kid playing a computer game. You sort of need layers of detection - a coarse network far out that gets rough paths and then more precise sensors as they get closer to your higher value targets. If you have its location/route early enough it's a cruising duck.

That's like an extreme version of the claw game. So you need your military to have kids who played mechanical arcade games, too, not just video games.

Lasers do need a direct LOS, or else a relay station (or a few of them) if you can work out how to do it with UAVs and make them switch among them while maneuvering. Weather is less of an issue if you pick the right wavelength. Optical fiber can actually be pretty tough. Bare fiber is extremely fragile, but with the right jacket it can be quite durable. It's still susceptible to all kinds of loss for things that don't affect wire, but you could probably spool out 500m of thin fiber and expect it to last longer than your launcher. Yeah, it always comes down to power (of the energy/time kind). I think making electronics launchable in an artillery tube is probably not too tough, but launching quality optics has some real challenges. The ultimate in nano-technology really becomes bio. When you get to tiny life forms, many of their parts are very machine like and even though they're made from chemistry they have a lot of mechanical features that make them do what they do. Making mechanical things at those size scales you have to mimic or incorporate a lot of those kinds of features. Conspiracy theorists notwithstanding, that's probably a very long way off (including any vaguely effective bioengineered weapons) - I don't think we'll have to worry about Wesley Crusher's nanites for a while.

Some of the comments in at least one of the threads where I saw it posted suggested it looks like a cemetery. If I scroll slowly, it sort of looks like there are monuments in the background, but it's hard to tell for sure. Filling a cemetery to the point where they're putting graves in the medians is kind of a lot, even if it's not so many that they're filling medians outside the cemetery.

Against Russia a 500m digital link would be great. Against a technologically advanced military maybe less so. A military that has sensors looking for radio signals that could indicate presence of an enemy position (e.g. for suppressing joysticked AVs) will be putting them on ground vehicles for similar purposes. They may not detect the operator, who will be mostly in receive mode except when the "fire" signal is being sent, but it will detect the launcher. A wired connection leaks a lot less signal for someone to detect.

More, and more expensive.

If you're a country that has rapid electronics development capability, you have a couple years where you can do SEAV with anti-radiation drones. Right now all the ISR drones are being joysticked, so both they and their operators are transmitting and giving away their locations. Russia has no effective capability to triangulate on those and hit them. There are people in Russia who know how to do that, but RU as a country doesn't have the resources to implement it, let alone have conscripts operate it. Ukraine could receive equipment that would let them do it, and their operators are showing a really good understanding of how their AVs work, so they could probably take AV suppression equipment and a couple weeks training and use it effectively. But that's only good for a few years, because the reality right now is that the ISR drones aren't autonomous - they're being joysticked. If you're up against an opponent that can give their drones a true autonomous mode it gets much harder because they don't have to transmit very often, and neither do their controllers. But one of the easiest things to make fully autonomous would be drones that just go and detect the transmissions of the enemy drones and their operators and bring fire on them, either with something organic to the drone or with a request to a missile from a few km back. It will get a lot harder when the drones get fancier and have to transmit less data (e.g a few bits with coordinates and an ID rather than continuous video). If they aren't transmitting, they're going to be hard to detect. And I'm not sure what you're going to do about the guys with ATGMs around the perimeter. Especially when the SEAV/ATGM owner has defined a geofenced area for the drones so that inside is a free fire zone for the drones and the guys on the perimeter are blowing up anybody who tries to drive.

Things like Shahed don't really have sensors other than GPS antennas as far as I can tell - they're given GPS coordinates and they fly to them and blow up. At shorter ranges (<93 km) they can be programmed to loiter and then be given an updated set of coordinates. But it doesn't appear that they have any kind of target sensors. Something that has optical or IR sensors could be blinded by a laser as long as it's in whatever passband the optics have. If it's not laser guided, an operator might consider putting a filter for common laser wavelengths to prevent being blinded. If it's laser guided you at least have to let the guide laser wavelength through.