chrisl
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Posts posted by chrisl
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1 hour ago, panzermartin said:
I hate where this is heading. Basically this tech can produce never ending wars not dependent on available personnel, even autonomous AI wars, constant terror attacks deep behind lines and other ugliness.
I hope someone comes out with a Uber weapon that defeats all frequencies used for drones and these people go out of business.
You can't even write a proper anti war novel, movie or song with these little creatures. Oh maybe Slayer can think of something. "Droone warfaaare"
The endpoint:
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17 minutes ago, dan/california said:
It is worth pointing out that you could basically reuse the same software, or at least big pieces of it. A lot of the work has been done for decades,
If you have enough lift you can even strap a javelin to the bottom of a drone.
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45 minutes ago, Offshoot said:
More auto-targeting drones, including going after moving targets. In the first case, however, it switches targets at the last moment.
Looks like it probably hit the vehicle anyway - the second one looks like it's coming in right behind and the vehicle from the first one is on fire, so it switches to follow the one on the road.
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41 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
Yup. Aside from all the other logistical advantages over artillery, the fact is that a gunner is going to have to get pretty damned lucky to hit a specific fast moving vehicle first shot. FPV? Well, that's what they are made to do.
The question CM gamers can ask themselves is... if CM presented you with a situation like the K-2 video of a fast moving armored column of 6 vehicle, which response option would you rather have?
- an artillery piece with 50 rounds of ammo and a spotting drone
- a drone team with 10 FPVs and a spotting drone
I know all else being equal I'd go with the FPV option.
For sure artillery still has a lot of usefulness on the battlefield that drones can't yet match, but in some instances (like fast moving vehicles) drones clearly are the better choice. Provided it isn't very windy, pouring rain, snowing like crazy, or -25 C
Steve
the smart choice makes for a not very fun scenario...
Bad weather drones is just a matter of time. They'll end up larger to deal with rain and wind, but for -25C you just have to bake them in the fire like potatoes and keep them wrapped in foil and a sweater as you send them off.
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55 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
It's interesting that we started this war totally impressed with how artillery could be better directed by drone. In this video I'm reminded how ineffective artillery is, compared to drones, against fast moving targets no matter how well directed it might be.
Steve
Two of the things I've usually considered an advantage of artillery over drones is speed of arrival and saturation. But that was sort of based on relatively small numbers of drones, where one spotter could call in a ton of artillery to arrive from 40 km away in a few minutes. But if there's enough spotting you can put a cloud of FPVs up in the path of an arriving convoy and pick them off like that, one by one. It mitigates some of the range and arrival speed limits. And they seemed to have plenty of FPVs to pick off the vehicles, and close enough range that they didn't have to get them in the sky in advance. What they really need is enough of them with enough range to destroy the rear echelons and reinforcements before they even get close.
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15 minutes ago, alison said:
It seems to me that open video feeds are still a risk when going up against a high-tech adversary. Let's assume and hope that the telemetry like speed, heading and GPS is already fully encrypted and "uncrackable" so it's only the analog video feed that's "in the clear". If we can scan the standard frequencies and find some of those feeds, then pipe those into another system which already has the terrain visually mapped out from its own overflights, it might be possible to geolocate the incoming drone before it's picked up by other detection systems. I remember someone upthread talking about lasers or autocannon targeting the sound of rotors, and if that's the state of the art then intercepting radio signals containing meaningful data is going to give you a much longer lead time.
Of course I am just hypothesizing here, but thinking about scanning radio frequencies looking for audio signals... I am sure that right now hobbyists could set a USB-sized SDR to auto scan, then feed the audio hits into a language model to have it quickly detect what kind of stuff is being discussed on each channel (railroad, logging, weather etc). Video is much more complex but the building blocks are there. If these things travel 60km/h and you start to get signal 10km out, that's up to 10 minutes to figure out where it is and call in one of your anti-drone drones to take it out. Even better if your anti-drone mothership was already in the air taking live footage of the same area to feed back into the model. But as soon as their video feed is encrypted, it shuts down the whole (counter) attack vector.
From what I could sort through last night, it does sound like control signals for many (most?) drones are encrypted. It's a lot less bandwidth, for sure. But I also wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't really true and that a lot of them are encoded so that drones and bases don't get crossed up, but not actually encrypted, and the marketing people don't know the difference.
And I agree that putting together a map of every drone in the sky is probably not that hard, even for hobbyists. I have a cheap SDR mounted on my garage to pick up ADS-B, along with 50,000 of my closest friends around the country. It all goes to a server and I can look anywhere and see a map of every aircraft in the sky over the US with a lag of a few seconds. I know it's a few seconds because when there are brushfires I can watch the trains of planes coming and then know exactly when to walk into the backyard with binoculars and where to look to see some cool old aircraft that have been retrofitted for firefighting.
And it doesn't matter if they're actually transmitting ADS-B data. The ones that only send a hex code are accurately located by MLAT. And that's just a bunch of hobbyists with $30 SDR dongles and Raspberry Pis. If you're a military, you know your opponent isn't going to be nice enough to transmit hex codes in the clear, but they will have some repetitive features of the signal that you can use to generate positions with MLAT. And it's all done with small passive antennas that just need rough LOS to the area and computers that fit in the palm of your hand and only pull a few watts.
The endpoint is full or nearly full autonomy with minimal transmission. Any high bandwidth transmission will be optical or relayed through a high altitude relay aircraft (or low satellite constellation)
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42 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
I fully agree. These days there are so many suicide drones in the air at one time it would be impossible to hack all the signals and figure out what they all mean in time to offer ample warning to the hundreds of (probably) already determined targets.
The other thing is that the FPV operator knows (for the most part) where the target is and how to approach it. Anybody else watching the feed won't have that information. Even a small sector of front line is a big area relatively speaking. There are likely many potential targets at any given time. And the friendly side watching the video will never, not even with the US military, have the knowledge to know where all the threat points are. Not to mention have the ability to issue meaningful warnings.
There's only one possible use for tapping into FPV drone feeds that I can envision. And that is if you know you have an operation underway you could concentrate resources on watching local feeds to know when FPVs are in the air and potentially headed towards vulnerable forces. Not that there's all that much that can be done about it, so we get back to the "it's not very important" aspect of intercepting FPV feeds.
Steve
I think it's only going to be reasonable to leave suicide drones unencrypted for a little while longer. If you're facing a force that has NATO-like SIGINT capabilities, it won't be long before the guys in the back office watching all the friendly drone feeds also have a "red desk" watching all the enemy drone feeds to both guide the anti-drone activities (that still don't really exist) and warn people to duck. There are going to be data siphons in back, and they'll be hard to hit because they can be entirely passive.
If you want fine guidance to the target but want to keep the target secret, you have two modes - encrypted "cruise" mode where you move the cloud of FPV drones into position and then when Serhei is ready to drive one onto Private Conscriptovich he picks an available drone from the cloud (and there will be a cloud of them) and gets it pointed in the right direction, and then flips it into "low lag" that sends him an unencrypted low-lag feed for the last 20-30 seconds of its trip. And any drone that's going to hit a static (or big and predictable) target won't even need that - it will start with "last 500 m autonomy" where Serhei picks his cloud drone, picks the target with a cursor, and it just goes there. That's really not far off at this point, and probably closer than dual-control mode.
Fancier countries will also have the drones networked so that they can transfer target information either directly or with a couple clicks from the back office controller. The overwatching hi-res encrypted drone with optical comm back to HQ picks out targets and then transfers coordinates (and possibly images for image matching) to the kill drones that then don't round trip realtime video, or at least not for most of their trip.
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40 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:
Yeah DJI encrypts the data, but FPV racing drones don’t (lag), and most hobby drones don’t because it’s more complicated. Specifically, it’s really easy to send a control signal (and encrypt it), but for video it’s more work, and sending analog video is really easy in terms of hardware and software.
Pumping video over WiFi isn’t hugely hard, but it’s more work in terms of software, chips etc, and then your FPV goggles need a way to hook up to Wifi vs just receiving an analog signal etc.
And it sounds like DJI is also backdoored so that anybody who has their Aeroscope system can spy on them. Ukraine has disabled some of that access because they knew at the start that the DJI systems were backdoored.
Encrypting also consumes more energy than not encrypting. So if you're in an environment where you know Pvt. Conscriptovich doesn't have an aeroscope and probably doesn't even have a radio to hear from someone who has one, then you can eke out a little extra range without encryption. It also simplifies your conops if you're working with all ad hoc equipment so you don't have to worry about the handshaking of the controller/drone pair to sort out keys. A lot of what Ukraine is using are drones that are literally homebuilt by people who have boxes of various COTS parts. And after a bit of poking around (certainly not comprehensive) it seems like hobbyists have mostly not cared about encryption.
Some commercial drones, mostly for gov't, law enforcement, and big corporate clients who can afford to spend a lot of money for a small number of drones with data security seem to have it, but it's not widespread beyond that.
I'm sure we'll start seeing at least moderate encryption of the video feeds in Ukraine. It's not a hard thing to do, but it's not the default for hobbyist drone kits.
This video has some recent discussion on how widespread data security is for drones (it's not), and commercially available ones are expensive and not what you want to use for FPV bombs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5-wF63lCXw
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3 hours ago, alison said:
Do we have any radio grogs in the house? When I was stuck in rural Canada during COVID I messed around with an SDR listening in to local railroad and logging channels, but I was under the impression that anything serious (law enforcement and certainly military) was both digital and encrypted nowadays. This guy is talking about using non-standard frequencies, but surely that is more about mitigating jamming than interception?
In my day job it would be (and has been) front page news everywhere if someone was able to reliably intercept encrypted networking protocols, so how is it not a big deal that FPV video feeds are apparently getting hacked so easily? Are they not encrypted at all? Or is it just the custom-built CCP backdoor special version of "encryption"?
Not really a radio grog but I've taken a few E&M classes...
Back in the day, most of the internet wasn't encrypted, either. It cost computing power to do that, and it's relatively recent that everything travels with TLS/SSL.
Most of the drones on both sides seem to be either consumer drones or built with consumer parts, and there has mostly not been a lot of incentive to make the video feeds encrypted. Strong encryption requires computing power, and that takes energy from the battery that could be used to fly longer. And at the start of the drone war it's likely that that neither side had a lot of people or equipment available to eavesdrop on drone transmissions. March 2002 was like the beginnings of WWI aviation where enemies could just wave at each other, or maybe fire a pistol.
Even adding some relatively weak encryption (that maybe requires less compute) would probably be sufficient for tactical security as long as the keys are unique and random for every flight - it only has to be secure against being broken in an hour or so to keep eavesdroppers from seeing what it's doing in realtime. A reasonably capable attacker could record all the encrypted signals and break them later to look for patterns, but that doesn't help them dodge any FPV right now.
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1 hour ago, dan/california said:
GPS jamming seems to be reaching a degree of severity where I would expect to not work in more places than it does, at least in places you might want to shoot cruise missiles at. You could obviously have the drone/missile use GPS as well, but I would expect you would want to tell it to always believe the terrain following system in stead of GPS if they diverged. You would need GPS over water obviously. How to deal with GPS jamming over water is an interesting question actually. I mean obviously you still have inertial guidance, but it is plan B for a reason. And of course there are all the questions with classified answers regarding the actual effectiveness of jamming, counter measures, and counter counter measures.
Historically I think creating the pathing/guidance info for the non GPS guidance system was very labor intensive, but that seems like something computers would be a lot better at now.
On a clear night you don't need GPS over water - you can use stars. It's a little trickier to do with the amount of extra optics you might want to put on a drone (vs a ship, a plane, or a cruise missile), but detectors with lots of pixels are cheap, and if you're a quadcopter you can pause periodically to stare at the stars and orient yourself.
Terrain relative nav has to be much easier now than the early days of cruise missiles - both space imaging of the earth's surface and the quality of image sensors for mobile devices have gotten orders of magnitude better. Along with *way* faster computers for doing the matching. The recent Mars landers do terrain relative nav from a couple miles up *on another planet* and they're using a computer that's equivalent performance to a 1998 low-end mac laptop. A couple models down from the one I started playing the CM:BO demo on. More modern cell phone processors with dedicated image processing can do *way* better at still very low power.
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7 minutes ago, Joe982 said:
Pay wall. So, what did Macron say?
Here are the key parts. Basically Scholz may come across as waffling on materiel support to Ukraine, Germany is the second largest supplier after the US and Macron doesn't want to be shown up. I think this gets Germany a handful of get-out-of-bashing-day cards.
Quote“This is a serious moment. A new era is dawning, and we’ll be there,” Mr Macron said after the three men locked hands for the cameras. “To support the Ukrainian peopleto the end is a strength for us, our peoples, our security and our Europe.”
Mr Macron, who has a fondness for disruptive grandstanding, is engaged in a power struggle with the more cautious Mr Scholz that is throwing a spanner in the Franco-German “engine” of European policymaking.
At the heart of the battle is the French president’s sudden transformation from Ukraine dove to hawk.
Mr Macron’s comments about the possibility of sending European troops into Ukraine at a hastily-convened Paris summit in February represented an astonishing about-turn for a president who once warned against humiliating Moscow and insisted on keeping diplomatic channels with Putin open.
To understand the reasons behind this unexpected volte-face, The Telegraph spoke to numerous sources in the Elysee and the Bundestag.
They paint a picture of a leader desperate to be seen as the dominant power in Europe amid a shifting political landscape, both internationally and at home.
Germany has repeatedly made it clear it does not think that France, the EU’s major military power, is pulling its weight on weapons supplies – a view reportedly shared by the US.
When Mr Scholz gave a speech in February urging European allies to step up their “insufficient” efforts to supply Ukraine with crucial arms, it ruffled French feathers.
Mr Macron responded by recalling Germany’s initial derisory offer of helmets to Kyiv two years ago when the Ukraine war broke out. He has also highlighted French donations of long-range Scalp missiles and urged Mr Scholz to follow suit with its Taurus missiles, considered one of the Bundeswehr’s most modern weapon systems.
The German chancellor, who has a track record of dithering over arms to Kyiv, has repeatedly refused for fear of escalating the conflict, with the Bundestag this week voting down the third proposal so far this year.
Berlin sources point out that Germany, unlike France, does not have nuclear weapons, making it more exposed to Russian retaliation.
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3 hours ago, Haiduk said:
The drone, launched allegedly from Odesa oblast hit not operational Mi-8 helicopter in unrecognized Transnistria, Tiraspol airfield.
Transnistria had 5 Mi-8 and 6 Mi-24 helicopters, but as claimed Moldova they are all in poor conditions.
So, what a sense to strike broken helicopter it's unclear - either this was "false flag", but what consequenses after this? Transnistria will attack Odesa? It's ridiculous. Or this was probe of Budanov to see reraction. About year ago unknown drone already attacked some object in Transnistria, but nothing apocaliptic happened.
Non-operational aircraft can be useful for spare parts to keep others running. This one not so much anymore.
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1 hour ago, billbindc said:
I don't have a Telegraph sub so I can't read the article but while Macron's shift is surprising...LePen's is far more surprising still. If I were a betting man, I would throw some kopecks on the square that says that the French government came into possession of some information regarding Moscow's efforts to undermine the government that shocked and that information exposed the LePen and her cohorts in such a way that they had to make a swift and decisive choice.
Watch this space.
I don't have a sub either, and it let me see the whole article. If there's a monthly limit try using a private browser window or clearing your cache.
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26 minutes ago, dan/california said:
But there no reason at all the UUVs can't come in slow and quiet. That is why I agree with The_Capt about big ships, unless somebody makes a major breakthrough.
On the plus side if Taiwan gets on this bandwagon the way it should, the bill the Chinese would have to pay to invade would be astronomically higher.
Naval dolphins may become a MUCH bigger thing.
Even slow boats have fast screws - little propellors don't move much water per turn, so they need more turns, and you have to stay ahead of the currents and wind. If they want slow drive noise they'd have to go with big paddlewheels, or robotic rowboats that have big flat surfaces that move a lot of water per stroke or per paddle board in the water and probably have a big reflective radar signature. You can do steam or compressed gas powered for the final couple miles, but those will also have an acoustic signature.
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1 minute ago, dan/california said:
A couple of years from now I expect that anything we now consider a major surface combatant will have a continuous circuit of drones somewhere between two and ten kilometers out. I suspect that looking for the wakes of the USVs might be one of the more effective strategies, at least until the start to operate underwater full time. Barring a full bore physics/engineering miracle I am not sure underwater USVs are a solvable problem. And a tech break thru that size would be truly world shaking since I suspect it could https://www.threads.net/@meme.lawd.kenya/post/C4kOhTDs1VO
The underwater USV problem is basically what it's been for at least 80 years - listening for the high speed screws of torpedos with passive sonar. And watching for their wake if they're near the surface. I don't know that there are a lot of other options - RF won't work through the water. Active sonar won't have the speed or spatial resolution, and advertises your position. Navies have done various things to make active and passive sonar more effective, like using towed buoys so they're spatially separated from the ship, and helicopter dropped active and passive buoys for the same reasons. But water sucks to look through.
Maybe sharks with laser beams.
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5 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
I remember hearing about that ex, caused quite a stir. They ended up re-setting and re-floating the fleet. I think we are going to see hybrid surface/sub-surface systems. Sub-surface for long range positioning and then pop them up and go fast for close in kill. Very small USV/UUVs are hard to pick up on sonar and impossible on radar. Once they get close enough surface and go hydrofoil or somesuch and swarm. Not a bad idea to launch a bunch of air systems at the same time. Like UAS only way to really counter this will be a screen of ones own USVs.
This approach basically takes the strength of sea mines but makes em a lot more mobile and flexible. Further it allows for offensive employment. Like heavy in land warfare, large expensive platforms are at risk of becoming liabilities as opposed to assets in this sort of environment.
the funny thing is that they refloated the fleet (because he destroyed it on the first day of a two week exercise) and he did it again. Then they just kept changing rules until they validated that they could defend themselves from conventional attacks that they were designed for and pretended attackers would do what they were asked. Or something like that.
Fixed targets like the kerch bridge are somewhat easier to defend against drones. Basically a lot of nets. Torpedo nets to several meters deep and up a few meters above the surface for the speedboat drones, birdblock/deer net for the aerial drones (probably so much plastic it will consume a month of russian oil) and radars/missiles for ships and planes. Like a huge aviary. Ships basically have to be turned into minesweepers/fishing trawlers with nets hanging from bow mounted cranes to get the same kind of net coverage. On the positive side, they can probably feed the crew from all the sea life they sweep up in the nets.
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6 hours ago, hcrof said:
Relevent video for the previous sea drone conversation. Defending against them seems like a hard problem to solve, especially when you are in a peer conflict and you can't just be pumping out radiation all the time to try and spot drones.
Having watched the video, I tried to think of solutions to the problem he described. A tethered observation drone might help, but quite easy to spot if it is emitting radar and less effective if it relies on passive measures. Sonar may be the solution but it limits your speed and is only really usable by high-end ships with quiet propulsion. Finally the defensive sea/air drone swarm may work but also limits your speed and is resource-intensive.
It's awfully close to what the US experienced in 2002 in the Millenium Challenge wargame, where the Red Team used an armada of small speedboats to get inside the pickets and first spot all the ships to hit them with cruise missiles, then later used more small speedboats on suicide attacks. The Red Team sank 16 ships. If you don't have to find suicidal volunteers to drive the motorboats, it's easier to put more of them on the water to overwhelm the defenses. The Navy's first response to the Red Team win was denial. Not denial of the motorboats the ability to get through, but denial that it was a valid and effective tactic.
As for the detection problem that he describes, I suspect the problem is worse than he describes. It's not obvious that the US has really solved it with technology, particularly since there have been a few high profile major collisions at sea not all that long ago. They depend a lot on the age old Mk I Eyeball all around the ship, and use further out ships and aircraft to extend the range of the eyeballs. It's why big ships have historically traveled in fleets with smaller "sacrificial" ships spread out around them. I've seen various systems for repelling the little motorboats (some of which depend on them having people in them) but not a lot of detail on detection systems, which I suspect are still hard for everybody.
I'm not a radar person, but a lot of the same things apply in the optical. He doesn't go into technical details, but I suspect part of why the surface clutter problem is reduced at longer range is because the size of resolution elements gets bigger as you go farther (same angle per element, farther away), so it gets averaged over each whole element. Plus the smaller reflected signals may be below a set detection threshold. That all makes the screen look clearer at a some longer distance, but if the target you're looking for is down in the same size range and radar reflectivity as the clutter, it's also going to get averaged down and you're still not going to see it when it's far away. The most effective way to see the little boats far out is going to be with a picket of helicopters (or now drones) that fly around and watch the sea far enough out to spot them from above at what is relatively short range for the pickets.
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11 minutes ago, Kraft said:
Imagies like this exist for both sides
Here is the data
Yes. Images like that exist for both sides. That’s datum, not data. It doesn’t tell me anything about how numerously or effectively Ru is using FPVs. If it takes them 100 FPVs to inflict the same damage as Ukraine does with 10, then they’re using them 10x less effectively. (Edit- I see the link below went to plots on attacks. It didn’t display inline on my phone. Thats number of attacks, but not effectiveness)
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14 minutes ago, Kraft said:
Keep in mind a large portion of FPV are used on a single MG, AGS, or even just an empty dugout. Its a systematic way how defenses are continously degraded more than can be replenished before attacks.
What makes you think so? There are plenty people who count FPV attacks and russia is just a sliver behind in the number of attacks, and completely dominating with artillery.
If you arent seeing the gruesome results, its because you are not frequenting russian TG channels I assume.
Because if RU is both dominating with artillery AND using FPVs as numerously and effectively as Ukraine, then Ukraine would be consistently suffering higher casualties than RU. And I don’t think there’s any indication that that’s true.
I don’t spend time on Russian TG, and nobody has posted numbers here to suggest that russia is doing as well with FPVs. If you’ve got data, post it or link it.
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On 3/11/2024 at 6:33 AM, cesmonkey said:On 3/1/2024 at 1:30 PM, Kinophile said:
I've been trying to keep up with the thread the past couple weeks and haven't really had time to respond to things, but a few things went by without generating very many additional comments:
The first is the number of FPV drones that Ukraine is producing: 100K/month. The second is the number of drones it takes to get a hit. I've seen various numbers in the past 30 pages and also in some searching, and they're all consistently less than 10 drones per hit, 1/3, 1/5, and 1/7 all showing up. That's a major step towards massed precision.
If you multiply it out and take the conservative 1/7, that's about 475 hits/day of something, and over 14,000 hits/month. Those are all either damaged/destroyed vehicles of casualties, or some combination. If each hit on average damages two people/things (not a big stretch, since most successful FPV attacks we see are on a vehicle or small group), that's 28K casualties or vehicles/month that have to be replaced, and 170K/year. Just to break even. And it doesn't depend on tubes that wear out or a heavy logistics tail moving a bunch of 152/155 HE around.
The third is the 350K artillery shells per month that RU is producing/procuring/refurbing. If we assume that RU has fired 10K shells/day through the war to get 31,000 Ukrainian KIAs, and assume 3 WIA/KIA, those shells are producing about 170 Ukrainian casualties/day and it's taking ~275 shells to produce a single casualty.
These are all approximate, and I'm not really comparing apples to apples (the drones are counting hits that can include both vehicles and troops, or one or the other, and I'm only counting troop casualties for impact of RU arty on Ukraine), but it's showing a picture of a transition - Ukraine is substituting drones for artillery and doing so very effectively. And steadily improving. Russian artillery effectiveness is roughly constant, if not decreasing as quality of tubes and shells decreases, and not all that different from WWII era artillery effectiveness numbers I've seen. If the Ukrainian FPV effectiveness is closer to 1/5 or 1/3, that starts to get into the "1 munition per opposing troop" kind of massed precision. And many of the FPV drones don't cost much more than a single artillery shell.
The effectiveness could also drop as they have to have more troops with less training flying the FPVs, but it will also come back up as those "pilots" get practice. And using FPVs instead of "meat in the seat" pilots means that the pilots just continue to gain experience, even if their missions fail, because they're not put directly into harms way during their sorties.
One of the biggest limitations of drones vs. artillery is range - drones are still mostly 10 km or less, and often limited to aerial LOS. They need bigger batteries or an artillery boost to get to longer range, and a relay drone (or multiple relays) to be controllable farther out.
The other thing that's not making a lot of sense are the various claims that Russia can make or buy even more FPV drones than Ukraine. We're not seeing the same kind of effectiveness - if they were just as numerous and effective as Ukr drones we'd be seeing 4 or 5x higher Ukr casualties than we are. And I don't think we have reason to think that they are that effective and it's just good Ukr OpSec keeping us from hearing about it.
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4 hours ago, dan/california said:
With four spares as standard equipment, so they can just literally send the next one out the turret hatch at need.
Edit: and fully automated target pass thru for engaging targets out of LOS. There have been a couple of tapes of Bradleys using improvised drone directed fire. It is a good trick to have.
Not out the turret hatch. Out of the drone garage slung on the back. No need for any human to get exposed to let the drones out. And if the drones survive to make it back, they'll park on an auto charger.
You'll also see ability a Bradley to punch up video from another in the platoon if it's better placed to take shots.
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4 hours ago, Grigb said:
RU Nats close to Girkin (including his wife) say it is not true. Lets wait.
He managed to find a window to fall out of?
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3 hours ago, Kinophile said:
Anyone familiar or aware of this system?
https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1650470511695085568?t=Pyvz1WwwpsQ8CZvX3diwOg&s=19
Wiki:
The United States Army Integrated Air and Missile Defense [IAMD] Battle Command System (IBCS) is a plug and fight network intended to let any defensive sensor (such as a radar) feed its data to any available weapon system (colloquially, "connect any sensor to any shooter").[1]: p.42 [a] The system is designed to shoot down short, medium, and intermediate range ballistic missiles in their terminal phase by intercepting with a hit-to-kill approach.[7][8][9] IBCS has been developed since 2004, with the aim to replace Raytheon's Patriot missile (SAM) engagement control station (ECS), along with seven other forms of ABM defense command systems.
My real question is when did this happen?
I suspect it's not a single "roll it off a C-5 and fire it up" system, but some framework for integrating everything that can output data. A little google shows that a lot of development and testing was still going on at least into late 2022.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if 5 or 10 years from now we learn that it amounts to tying the stuff NG has been doing for this into the Ukrainian GIS Arta, along with any other sensor networks they have, and it's been going on for as long as we've been sending aid (including pre-Feb 2022, at least at the command level in Ukraine). The UA was the recipient of a lot of realtime intel from allies outside the country in 2022 and did a very fine job of exploiting it in a timely manner.
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2 hours ago, Kinophile said:
Yes majors = older, but more experienced people.
If there's another A50 loss then its crew could be potentially even heavier weighted to higher ranks, as they pull in older reserves to make up the numbers.
I particularly like that this was a brand spanking newly upgraded unit (2019).
After 2-3 more A50, if that's possible, Maybe we'll see the A-100 thrown in.
Is staffing the A-50 one of those things where they make most or all of the crew officers because of the amount of education & training? The RU army doesn't really use non-coms like the west. Do they also not have anything like warrant officers to staff positions with specialized technical skills?
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
They're trying to show off their abilities so they can get set-dressing jobs in Hollywood and get out of Ukraine.