chrisl

Watch for a thread from Trent on poor maintenance of seals on Russian tanks. Rubber does go bad over time and seals need to be replaced. Fancy synthetics can last much longer. Could water have leaked into the engine intakes all at the same rate so they all got the same distance in the water? You'd think if the engine were running ok, you could be sitting in a lot of water leaking in and collecting at the bottom of the tank and still get across. It might suck, and you might have a lot to clean later, but you'd have a decent chance of getting across.

The smoke will hide you from some drones, but some with IR will see you just fine. And unless you can stage and bridge in a couple of hours between SAR satellite revisits, they're going to see exactly where you're putting the bridges. Attempting multiple sites would also have to be done with enough separation that a single battery can't hit both of them - at least it will slightly reduce the rate of shells coming in once they spot you from the sky. Given the slowness of bridging, the availability of IR cameras, the revisit rate of SAR, and the range of modern artillery, they would almost be better off sending a couple battalions of very light infantry in canvas boats (after hiding them all in a warehouse and loading them into white vans that roll after the satellite passes) to get across and hike until they could find and neutralize all the UKR artillery. And don't forget to fold up and hide all the boats under trees so the SAR doesn't see them.

I'm familiar with him, and actually sat next to his former book agent on a plane a week or so before this past xmas (by dumb luck). We didn't talk about Zubrin, but I think we did talk about space. Russia is probably 40-ish years behind in space ISR assets, much like they're behind in things like microelectronics and NVG. Most of it has the same root in the Soviet Union failing to try to copy Silicon Valley from the 70's on (and probably earlier). The USSR and later Russia were/are fine at building big things made of lots of metal that spit out fire - tanks, missiles, rockets. But without microelectronics they can't keep up with the kind of data volume that you can collect and integrate if you have relatively cheap high performance sensors and cheap, fast computers. They've been able to buy some of those things to an extent, like the Thales targeting systems, and presumably microcontrollers for various things, but they can't do the kind of mass production that makes fancy chips appallingly cheap. I came across an article (linky here) a while ago about when the big divergence between US and USSR capability happened in space. It's by one of the space journalists who figured out the capabilities of the first KH-11 in 1977 (launched in 1976) and sat on it for a year until a spy sold the details to the Soviets. KH-11 can do about 10 cm (4 inch) resolution on the ground, and there are 5 of the latest few versions in space right now. And the NRO is giving away telescopes that size to other agencies, because they presumably have better. One of the things that the Aviation Week journalists held off on publishing even longer was the existence of a second satellite network whose sole purpose was to be able to relay images in realtime from the KH-11. So the US had realtime 10 cm resolution on the ground in 1977. Russia was still returning film capsules in 2016. And "New Space" has changed things drastically - commercial companies can give you multiple daily revisits of any location on earth at resolutions between 20 cm and 3 m. Basically, kids in a garage in the US can make and launch cube sats cheap enough to do 3 m resolution more or less hourly. If you have several billion dollars you could do half meter resolution that often, and there's probably a commercial market for it. The stuff you need to do that is export controlled, and just about all the high res imaging companies are US based for that reason. The USG is the largest customer for those data. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is becoming comparably cheap and there are multiple companies doing that, too. And it can see through clouds. And those companies also tend to be US based for similar reasons to the optical imagers. There were some twitter posts early on about likely degradation of GPS over Ukraine, figured out from looking at the errors reported on ADS-B data. There was speculation that it was Russia doing it, but it seems more likely that it was the US/NATO. Ukrainians know where they are and have maps, but the Russians appear to have lousy mapping and were using some commercial GPS units, so even being able to mess them up by putting them a couple roads over from where they were supposed to be could help UA. And that doesn't even get into the SIGINT and ELINT stuff. But three things are happening to ISR from space right now - the cost of launch is going down fast, the cost of making stuff to launch is going down fast, and the size of the electronics you need to make that stuff work is going down fast. So the west has tons of space ISR going on, both commercial and government. And Russia, well, doesn't. They have two optical satellites that are getting old and probably don't have anywhere near comparable performance to western stuff. They probably have some SIGINT and ELINT satellites, but the lack of a microelectronics base makes it likely that those are very limited in capability. All of which leads to the Russian anti-satellite test in November. There was speculation at the time that it was intended to produce a ton of debris to blind the west so that they could do exactly what they did. They did succeed in making a mess, but didn't take out any significant satellites. And even if they took out a few, there are so many that they wouldn't be likely get them all, and the three letter agencies tend to keep some sitting around on the ground for launch-on-demand, so they could launch above the debris if they needed to. edit: here's where Russia is with ELINT/SIGINT satellites and SAR, which is basicaly nowhere:

So in post 12-13 of the @Danspiun thread, the third picture shows some interesting things if you look close. To the left of the "C9K" box and just above the No 17 box, it looks like there's another fully submerged hull that's missing a turret. It also looks like there may be a few more fully submerged IFVs as you go down and to the left from No17, based on the bright bumps that show up along the bank, probably including one to the left of the No17 box, too. Also, in the first pic of his 8-11 post, there's something he calls "#A Building" that looks like it might be an old pier from a bridge that may have existed there in the past. Given the presence of the power line roads, possibly some other fire roads, the shape of the banks, plus the structures on both sides, I'd guess that some time in the past there was a bridge there that was eventually abandoned and mostly removed except for some of the concrete piers. The power lines might even have been initially run when the bridge was there to make it easier to install and service them. Those might also show up more clearly on the SAR images. Edit to add: And you have to wonder how they motivate more guys to drive their vehicles into that disaster area when there's not a sign of a single Ukrainian who did that to them? This was entirely action at a distance from the friendly Ukrainian artillery who had that spot zeroed and clearly had eyes to know when to shoot. (and wishing a little that I was in radar instead of optics...) And more edit - if @Danspiun has the count right, and he seems close enough, that's pretty close to a complete set of vehicles for two full strength BTGs plus the bridging equipment (full bridging Btn?)

I wanna say it's shopped, but they did a pretty good job of it. If you look at the the earliest pics we have with the blue (third) crossing site in place and partially sunk, on p733 of this thread, and more clearly in Steve's post, none of those tanks are there, and there's one set of tracks going into the water just to the right of the UKR side of the landing. The shadows from the guns are suspiciously sharp compared to other shadows in the pic. But there are tracks in the mud for every turret sticking up, and they look like they got the water level in the tracks to be consistent. I think this twitter thread is from the post by @akd on p 733 and the third bridge is there, but most of the tracks aren't, nor the sunken tanks. Conceivably it's from another attempt at that bridge, but I don't know why they'd reverse all the tanks into the water like that intead of just getting blown up. (edit just to note that I didn't realize that @akd posted both the original that I referred back to and the post I was quoting. doh!)

You probably will before Russia does, in every sense.

Even if sanctions don't stay in place, an awful lot of that stuff was developed and built in the Soviet years, and the time since then has not been kind to Russian technology. There was an immediate sucking sound of brains to the west in the early 90s, and it's continued steadily since then. Anything that hasn't been in production for a while may depend on information or equipment that's been lost in the meantime. That even happens in the US, where a few of the wrong people retire at the supplier of some critical component and it becomes a crisis to their customers if something goes wrong and part of a process is lost. It's even worse when all your educated people are leaving the country because the employment opportunities are orders of magnitude better.

You could probably have autonomous truck-hunting drones by tuesday of next week if you're willing to accept some constraints on their deployment, like they may not be all that picky so you have to constrain them to areas with no friendlies. And your point defense of the artillery and its train will have to not only be able to spot and eliminate drones from the sky, but probably also detonate incoming arty high enough that all the explosive energy behind the shrapnel is spent before it gets to the ground.

The RA doesn't seem to grasp how thoroughly they're being spotted from the sky. In restrospect, it really looks like the Russian space-trash event in November was an attempt at taking some of that out of comission. AFAIK, it hasn't taken anything out yet. But for the guys on the ground, they can't move anything bigger than a bicycle without getting noticed within an hour or so. Mobile bridging equipment is big and obvious even for the lowest res commercial imaging, so you have to either have a lot of it, or have a lot of decoys, to have any chance of even getting to the river bank without getting arty rained on you.

It does look like it was used more for evacuation than getting BTGs across - the mud tracks on the UKR side indicate vehicles were going from that bank to the RUS side. If vehicles were coming out of the water more than off the bank, they'd probably be dripping enough to rinse those better. Also, that bank on the RUS side looks like the steepest of the three attempted points. The had to put that pair of ramps there to keep from chewing up the bank too much and may have needed to do some winching to get up it anyway if it was really muddy.

Two of the pics at least look like a different (and steeper) spot. Third pic from a distance looks like the actually got it straight across at the “blue” crossing point, but this time it sank on the origin side.

If they keep trying, eventually they’ll just be able to drive across on the wrecks.

It looks like all the tracks by the blue crossing are from clearing the brush to get the bridge segments in - it's very brushy still when there's the one collapsed bridge, but has been scraped pretty clean for the second one to go in.

It's 40-ish km from the border to the outskirts of Belgorod. A quick look says that the old 152 mm guns don't go much more than 30 km. I don't think they have any kind short/medium range cruise missiles that they could use, so they probably aren't going to be able to hit Belgorod with anything but helicopters and aircraft. It's more a question of how much Putin will freak out at the thought of it, realistic or not.

I don't think Ukraine would even consider trying to take Belgorod - it's more a question of how much is Russia going to feel like they need to defend it, just in case, and will that pressure cascade into pulling troops from Donbas to reinforce. All Ukraine has to do is deny the Russians the use of the rail line, and they can do that from within Ukraine. They may also need to lob some HE across the border if the Russians decide they're going to fire arty from within Russia.

So if Ukraine doesn't cross into Russia, is having forces, especially artillery, on the border enough of a threat to make Russia pull forces from the east to block the route toward Belgorod? From the Ukraine perspective, there are a lot of good reasons not to send troops across the border, even if they're willing to rain shells on military targets. But from the Russia perspective, how confident can Russia be that the UA won't start driving all those captured tanks toward Moscow?

The video is the same location as the attempted Gerasimov hit about a week ago, and looks like it's from the same attack that got posted on the 8th. So there's hopefully a different attack and someone is just linking old video with it.

I get about 43 vehicles destroyed within a stone's throw of the riverbank in the four picture set from Oryx. Most of them catastrophically, so there won't even be signs of whoever was inside, but that could be 150 right there. If there were more vehicles that got away from the crossing - the 50 to 80 that got caught on the wrong side after the bridge was gone - that could double or more by the time they're all casualties. So not 1500, but 300+ is plausible, and at least one, if not two BTGs rendered useless. From the RA POV it's probably better to lose all of one than half each of two, so they don't have to deal with the friction that comes with merging the remnants.

And just noticed that the overhead pic in the Twitter thread from Maxim only shows the bridge that has the mud tracks on it, and maybe fewer burned vehicles on the far side. The "clean" second boat ramp was a later attempt.

Unless you're Oryx and have to try to ID them all.

It looks from the choice of spot like they intended to make it straight and then couldn't, either because the boats were dead or because they came under fire before securing it (which is consistent with the twitter story) and just tried rushing vehicles across before they managed to secure the far side. And after not too long it didn't really matter. Except that by not securing it the vehicles that made it across had no retreat path, either. edit: and now I realize that the righthand ramp has tire tracks on it, as if they were rushing vehicles across it, while the lefthand one doesn't. Maybe they did a rush job with the first one on the right to get guys across to help with and protect the far side while they set the second one. And on the right bank there are a ton of tracks going into the water downstream of the righthand boat ramp - did they cross all the floaty vehicles there while they were setting the bridge??

I would absolutely love to have video in the 800 nm to 2.5 micron range. And so, I’m sure, would the RA.

Seems like way too many direct hits on moving vehicles to not be guided. Or local ATGM fire mixed with artillery.

I suspect it's a bunch of things, and Telenko may be thinking in the right direction but for the wrong reasons. The RA seems to be bad at using their defensive radars - there were a bunch of reports early that their SAM systems were being destroyed while sitting around inactive, and then that enabled further destruction by TB2s. Moskva reportedly had its radar essentially spoofed by giving it targets in the wrong direction and exploiting its limited simultaneous view/tracking ability that was known to Ukrainians because of the shared soviet history. Ships have far fewer mass, volume, and power constraints than trucks, so a shipborne radar should be far more capable of tracking incoming stuff than truck borne. And Russia has very limited microelectronics capability compared ot the west, so while they might be able to make a perfectly fine RF generator and detector set, they likely don't have the capability to track hundreds, dozens, or maybe even tens of individual incoming targets and discriminate them. There are actually different algorithms you can use that are much less computationally expensive for getting the shared trajectory of a set of unresolved objects than you would use for tracking 20 individually identified rounds. And while Russia has limited semiconductor capability, they historically have excellent algorithm development dating way back to Soviet days. So it's entirely plausible that their CB capability is very limited because of a combination of poor training and limited technical capability. Re using drones for precision spotting - if you have really good maps you can use cheap drones and sort out the angles on the ground. It would help to have software that overlays your drone view with your Google earth - I haven't seen such a thing, but it's certainly possible. The capability is shown relatively crudely every day by the community of people who are geolocating every barrage, and even geolocation of individual rounds shown many pages earlier here. And precision maps don't even matter much if you have IR guided rounds like KVITNYK. If the video below is actually artillery (and I suspect it is, because there are a few big misses) rather than an ATGM platoon, then it's probably being IR guided by drones with IR cameras that are also viewing through the smoke. The timing between rounds is consistent with "I have 10 vehicles in this area at this speed, give me 10 KVITNYKs on 10 second intervals," and then the drone operator just moves from target to target waiting for the rounds to come in. If you had NATO kind of money you'd be able to program the drone to track 10 vehicles and it would rapidly bop from vehicle to vehicle with the laser, displaying a different code on each one, and they'd all explode at the same time.

And I'd sort of make the same comment he did, but about EO/IR/Hyperspectral GEO/IMINT. There's a lot more imaging capability in orbit than one would guess from how little gets released to the press. Very little of it is Russian. It's probably about time for the aid to include a lot of transport and fuel trucks in addition to all the weapons systems. Given how UA seems to be able to exploit all the information they're given from many sources, including a lot of their own, they seem to be doing pretty well with comms. It doesn't mean they can't do better, but they seem to have come pretty close to hitting Gerasimov, which must have taken a lot of fast transmission of information to the right places.