chrisl

I'm thinking that the biggest thing holding the UA back is a lack of guns and ammo. We've seen that the killers in this war is the combination of ISR and indirect fire. The UA doesn't have near enough systems or ammo to cover the entire front at once, more less to dominate anything other than a small operational area for a short period of time. Looking at the southern front this summer that seemed to be the MO, but the constraint was limited support. 
So I agree, it probably doesn't matter how many tanks are sent, but the number of tubes and shells can make a meaningful difference. I think the tanks and IFVs are still helpful for the final attack and support to clear the objective of whatever is left after a good pummeling, but without solving for air superiority (below and above 2000 feet) it would probably be suicide to do an actual breakout. So it is down to eating the elephant, one bite at a time. If the UA had enough support that process could be sped up and expanded to the point where they could do it faster, but it is all about controlling an operational area with ISR and fires. The assault element is now pretty much relegated to clean up.
As for attacking with conventional mass, it looks to me like all that is left is speed. Surprise is pretty much gone. Armor able to stop anything above shrapnel and small arms appears to be unnecessary (anything sitting still or moving slow within arty range or atgm range is killable). So if you do want to attack in the conventional combined arms mode you are going to have to do so at speed and with the mentality that you are going to lose a lot to take anything. It is the only way I can see mass being successful and from the videos of the RA attacks they might as well "Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead" as the choice is to die slow or die fast, but at least you might get the chance to get on top of the defender if you go fast.
Or the good ole RA model of having enough mass to overwhelm, like Bagration style mass. Where there is so much going on that the defender can't address everything and multiple breaks occur leading to collapse. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a bloody awful mess, just that it might be the only way for mass to be viable is a metric shat ton of it all over at once. Or it would be the Somme, hard to tell at this point.

And much of those $76B are dollars that were spent in previous years to build equipment that was sent and won't be directly replaced by new production of the same or similar equipment.  That's some value that's being carried on the books for that equipment, and most of it won't be replaced by new orders. Most of it will likely be replaced on a schedule similar to when it would have been replaced by new designs/technologies anyway.  The artillery shells and recent model rockets of various sources are the things most likely to be replaced by new spending.

And much of those $76B are dollars that were spent in previous years to build equipment that was sent and won't be directly replaced by new production of the same or similar equipment.  That's some value that's being carried on the books for that equipment, and most of it won't be replaced by new orders. Most of it will likely be replaced on a schedule similar to when it would have been replaced by new designs/technologies anyway.  The artillery shells and recent model rockets of various sources are the things most likely to be replaced by new spending.

And much of those $76B are dollars that were spent in previous years to build equipment that was sent and won't be directly replaced by new production of the same or similar equipment.  That's some value that's being carried on the books for that equipment, and most of it won't be replaced by new orders. Most of it will likely be replaced on a schedule similar to when it would have been replaced by new designs/technologies anyway.  The artillery shells and recent model rockets of various sources are the things most likely to be replaced by new spending.

For folks freakin out about the expenditure from the west, it might be good to have perspective,
In Afghanistan the US alone spent some 2 TRILLION dollars.  The gov't sitting in Kabul right now is the umm err Taliban.  As of July we had spent about 76 billion in Ukraine.....  For the return on investment, it is hard to say the West hasn't got a financial windfall in kneecapping the Russian military.

And if you've ever given someone a little push to get over a hill while using a power meter, or been pushed, a few tens of watts can make a huge difference in your fatigue and recovery by keeping you from having to go over AT and recover repeatedly.  

And if you've ever given someone a little push to get over a hill while using a power meter, or been pushed, a few tens of watts can make a huge difference in your fatigue and recovery by keeping you from having to go over AT and recover repeatedly.  

A good amateur cyclist can do 300W sustained per hour. A properly doped up Grand Tour winning cyclist does 500W sustained. A sprinter is doing about 2000W, but over 10-20 seconds only.
Tesla batteries (Panasonic laptop batteries last I checked) are 250WH per kg.
If you can give a soldier for the cost of say 5kg in batteries an extra 50W for 24h, that’s actually a lot of power.

EDIT: This obviously implies 100% efficiency, but even at 50% this is not an insignificant benefit.

Article on a Russian former engineer involved in ICBM design.
There are caveats to their understanding and breadth of knowledge but very interesting insights to the production and readiness of the deterrent forces. 
TLDR -  deeply corrupt procurement and manufacturing,  strong probability of failure in a significant percentage of built missiles- but certainly still enough to annihilate us all. 
 

A bit more complicated but the sentiment is not entirely off.  We did an exercise about 10 years back trying to figure out all the components of military value.  In the end it looked like the Drake Equation, which was scary enough and then some egghead pointed out that some components were non-linear over time.  Over all military value is a pretty complex beast with all sorts of tangible and intangible elements.
So when considering something like a new platform one has to try and consider its value as a delta V to an overall system.  How is X giving an entire system an advantage to an opponents comparative opposing system.  So infantry in battle suits is not simply “how much does the suit cost versus the things that can kill it” it is “how does the system create effects advantage”.  Cost becomes an attritional factor but is offset by advantage.  
So beating up on the poor tank.  It isn’t the fact that cheap ATGMs or UAS can kill them that is driving their value down.  It is the fact that ATGMs and UAS are killing them before the tank can deliver its military value on the battlefield.  If tanks could survive long enough to create operational tempo and manoeuvre then we would not be having this conversation, even if we were looking at the same loss rates.  It is the fact we are seeing the loss rates without the tank being able to deliver value.  That is what is killing the tank.  Making it worse is the cost factor and those tanks being eliminated by incredibly cheap systems compared to the cost of the tank.
So if armoured infantry in battle suits can live long enough to create effect, force decision and sustain options then they have value that far outweighs strips cost.  Of course there is a threshold for this, we see that in WW2 Germany.  The Tiger was brilliant but far too costly to sustain even with the effects it could deliver.  The Tiger 2 is like modern tanks.  The damn things were very expensive and most could not even get to the start line.
So is a military capability below a cost sustainment threshold?  And does it deliver value for that costs?  When and where that value happens is also incredibly important.  In reality it is very complex - let alone when you factor in historical and cultural value.  There is a Perun video (if he hasn’t already done one, that guy has to be in FD somewhere).

An enhanced  soldier with as much destructive power as a tank would be impressive but surely they really have to be cost effective against the UAVs that might kill them (see UAVs chasing Russian infantry passim). Unless our 10 Starship Troopers come in cheaper than the number of UAVs needed to defeat them then these are still losing margins.
As a latter day 'Arithmetic on the Frontier' might have put it.
"Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can— The odds are on the cheaper man drone."
 

I think the race to fully autonomous unmanned systems is a given.  The only communication requirements will be for battlefield situational awareness and some pretty hands off direction.
EW is like tracers, it cuts both ways.  Pumping a bunch of energy into the environment is “loud” and draws fire, Russians learned this the hard way.
In the West we are heading towards a legal crisis - do we retain full human control of weapon systems or do we want to win?  It is more complicated and nuanced than this but at the core we are facing a thorny issue.

Yeah, but those are old tech.  The new version will be artillery launched like that, but be able to loiter until a target is visible in case it has the ability to pop out, shoot, hide faster than you can get shells there.  Like in old Bugs Bunny cartoons.

That results in denying yourself space-based ISR, too.  Anti-satellite without making a big mess is possible, and for most satellites (i.e. those not designed to avoid a predatory satellite) probably not really much more difficult than doing it the messy way.  Possibly easier, because you can do it with higher certainty.  
The problem with the pre-war Russian attempt is that they wanted deniability with respect to taking out US/NATO allied satellites and so they had to make a big mess out of one of their own so they could say "oh, noes!  we didn't mean to make that big mess that took out all your fancy electro-optical systems.  We were just trying to remove our sad, useless satellite from the sky so it wouldn't bother anybody else, but Igor grabbed the wrong jar, and now here we are..."

Gotta be honest. Kind of where my head goes.  Big problem with energy density here.  A battle suit that basically makes the individual soldier the platform would solve a lot of this.  Combined with nano-tech it would mean that an individual soldier could carry more combat power further and faster while providing protection.  It add the ability to distribute that mass very widely. 
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powered_exoskeleton
But how do you power the damn thing?  An exo-suit with armor will have a lot of weight and the only thing with enough energy to power one is fossil fuels, which is really problematic for many reasons.  So we would need something that can meet or exceed existing fuel energy density to power these things.
This, or one starts looking at human augmentation and/or genetic engineering but if one thinks unmanned is a tempest, just try and dive into that snakepile. 

Repeating myself, but there is zero reason that exact same stand off EFP warhead can't be delivered by drone instead of 155. In fact it would cost a lot less since it wouldn't have to survive the G force involved in being artillery delivered. Pretty surprised we haven't ALREADY seen this, but we surely will soon.

Later versions even have a laser rangefinder in the submunitions.
Enough pieces already exist to do lots of these things we're talking about, at least as far as the swarm of loitering platforms goes.  For most of them it probably just comes down to someone in DOD getting the motivation to throw some money at doing it and making it a big enough pile of cash that the MIC frees up the right engineers to do it. 

Yeah, I'm very aware of that, and I suppose that's a cue for getting a little into why we don't have anti-drone drones.
There are two parts to the anti-drone drone: detection and attack.  The detection is the hard part.  Destruction is easy - we already have no end of systems that can very accurately destroy anything that you give them coordinates of.  We can accurately fire projectiles, exploding projectiles, exploding projectiles full of razor sharp hoops, high energy beams of photons, rings with chains on them, rings with strings on them, giant wads of gooey stuff, or anything you want to take out a drone.  But you have to detect it.
For an anti-drone drone, there are sort of two categories of drone you're targeting: open loop (no comm back to the sender) and closed loop (some comm back to the sender, whether full two-way control, occasional updates, or whatever).  
Detection of the first type (no comm), which includes Shaheds, is tricky - unlike the F-35, these *start* with the radar cross section of a goose* and then you can make that even smaller.  These things are all small on visual and radar cross sections because you can paint them and they don't have a lot of metal.  You're going to track them with frustrating "visual" algorithms, where "visual" can mean different things in the optical vs. radar wavelengths, but you're still trying to pick out changes in the scene to decide where the thing is.  I'm not going to spend much time on it, other than to say that unless you have really high signal to noise and high resolution (both of which the target is trying to reduce), it's a lot harder than you think, and in general you're not going to get there with simple image differencing.  And this problem exists for commless drones whether you're using another drone, a gun, or a death ray to take them down.  Shaheds at least have a very characteristic sound that you can probably use for detection and targeting once they're within audible range.
Detection of the second type (active comm) is easy.  It's transmitting, and transmitting enough to get clear signal back to its operator, who is farther away than you are if it's attacking you.  Triangulation is old technology.  Piece of cake: you lock onto the frequency, have some kind of sensor so you know your own orientation relative to the sensor, and just maneuver in a way to make the signal from the drone stronger until you hit it and destroy it with whatever mechanism you prefer.  Or have a few sensors that are networked to give you the position (helloooo MLAT) and shoot it with your favorite method of action-at-a-distance.
Except for one problem: whose drone did you just destroy?
In the Ukraine environment, IFF is the hard part of doing radio based anti-drone systems.  There are tons of things flying around, as evidenced by the daily releases of yet another view of every bit of ground combat we ever see.  It's not quite Diamond Age concentrations of them, but they're working on it.  And they're all sorts of random drones, including commercial drones, custom drones made with commercial off the shelf parts, custom drones with a mix of commercial and special mil parts, totally custom mil drones, and who knows what else. And they're all using similar frequencies, because the combination of physics and the atmosphere force you to the same frequencies if you want a particular range and data rate at powers that you can reasonably supply to both the ground operator and drone with batteries.  If you don't sort out the IFF thing and you set an autonomous anti-radiation based anti-drone system loose, it's just as likely to attack its allied drones as the enemy drones, because it has no way to tell them apart.  That means you have to have your complete drone ecosystem integrated (ring that cash register over at Lockheed/Northrop Grumman/Raytheon!!) or you're just going to be attacking your own stuff.  
And part of why we aren't seeing even rudimentary versions of it in Ukraine is that it's not a function that people were already spending much effort on for commercial/hobbyist drones. You can't just pop over to Robotshop.com or Alibaba and order tunable RF sensor kits (or a few thousand of them) the way you can other types of sensor, or actuators for operating your 3D printed grenade dropper.  It's possible to get relatively inexpensive software-defined radio modules that are small (that's what feeds ADSBExchange so you can see who's flying around Ukraine), but the environment is so variable, along with the need to confirm what drone you're attacking, that at least for now you're going to need a human in the loop, even if you can semi-automate your remote control drone sensor.  And even with a human in the loop, nobody is painting national flags on their drones, so unless you know "this is one that our side makes" after you get up close to it (assuming you're doing that, rather than sending a death ray at it from 5 km), you really don't know who you're shooting down.  So the basic tech isn't all that hard, but because it's not just point and shoot or point and drop, it's a lot more dependent on integration of the whole system to be usable.
*geese, like all waterfowl, are incredibly mean and probably deserve to die. That's why there's a book entitled "Ducks and how to make them pay".  If we can do an autonomous system for drones, it should probably be immediately applied to geese and ducks.

US/NATO almost certainly aren't giving a direct data pipeline, but Ukraine probably wouldn't be able to process it as well or as quickly as they're likely getting pre-processed from US/NATO.  The US has had electro-optical/digital (non-film based) satellites since the mid 1970s and has a lot of infrastructure built up for the processing/evaluation/distribution that would take a long time and a lot of trial and error for Ukraine to replicate.
Commercial sources actually have very rapid revisit times these days - that's the big selling point for Planet Labs - moderate (0.5 to 3 m) resolution at very high revisit rates.  If you look at the whole Maxar fleet, they can revisit anyplace every few hours, and it looks like you can probably get commercial SAR at similar return rates.

In a very narrow domain.  Low SNR tracking of large numbers of objects at the resolution limit of my optical system using (deliberately) underpowered computers has been a headache of mine for the past decade. This is for targets entirely unrelated to anything of defense interest, but it's defense-adjacent, and there aren't good general solutions floating around out there.

That's always the hard part.  Not just enough training data, but the right training data.
If you're Google and just trying to squeeze another fractional percent out of your ad revenue, you can use half the internet to train and the other half as a test set.  And you only need a tiny improvement in performance to make it worth the effort to get mediocre results.
If you're Tesla it's trickier. You can put cameras on cars driven by people with excellent driving records and then correlate the video to the drivers' actions and hope you got it right.  Sometimes they seem to drive into firetrucks, though. (Dude, where's my LIDAR?)
At the low SNR, barely resolved limit, the tracking is easier than the detection - once you identify all the things, figuring out who is who from frame to frame isn't terrible if you've got a high enough frame rate.  But at low SNR the noise and the signal look very similar in any frame, so you have to watch things (noise) move around, and then throw out things that only exist for a few frames in a row because they're noise.  (or maybe they're drones popping up above the weeds to take a shot and then disappearing)
All of that isn't so bad to do if you're looking for large targets, like vehicles, and trying to separate them from bald monkeys and buildings. Maybe even separating trucks from tanks from IFVs.  It's a lot harder if you're Russia and don't have an internal semiconductor industry base.  I wouldn't be all that surprised if they had well developed algorithms derived from open source, maybe even partially trained on video data, but not enough hardware to go past a few prototype units.  But they'll have a terrible time doing it for drones - there are multiple pieces of silicon that you need to put in a row that are practically free in the west but will depend on some unreliable machinations in Russia.  
Which reminds me that I saw a spoof prototype of The Captain's wandering mines over on the site formerly known as twitter, but didn't notice it here or have time to link it before it disappeared in the ether.  Someone did a little photo sequence pointing out that the Russian AT mines look like they fit neatly atop a Roomba, with the obvious extrapolation.

I'd think the Russians training waterfowl strapped with mines (two birds with one mine?)  would probably be more effective than anything "autonomous" that they can field today with their current resources.  Automatic?  Sure, that's Shahed.  Automatic with a basic IR sensor for picking out warm targets?  Probably, but not widely available.  Truly autonomous and using some kind of AI to pick targets?  Bring in the trained ducks.
Air defense against the Diamond Age swarm isn't going to be any single system - it's going to have to be many layers dispersed over a large volume, and insensitive to any particular node or 20 being knocked out.  Basically attack of the killer bees on both sides.  
Ground hugging drones is a nice approach for anything that can be a lightweight payload.  Lots of background to make them hard to pick out, but without the mobility issues of a UGV. Arguably a dumptruck full of ground hugging drones will be more effective than most UGV concepts.

Nah, enslavement is really the one thing we don't have to worry about. If the machines take over they do because they are already smarter and more efficient than we are in about everything. What would they gain by enslaving us?
Exterminating, yes, if we are competing for resources or just because they can. Then again we might get lucky and they keep us around for sentimental reasons and pamper us. Or keep us as pets. I mean, a cat's life isn't really that bad, right?

It's certainly a doable thing - it's by no means a magic technology, and probably doable with public/private keys without even having to add another transceiver.  The catch is that you have to implement it across all your drones, and the dronespace seems to be too diverse and moving too fast for it to get integrated without being in the way in Ukraine.

That is true, of course, but I think that makes driving more complicated in some aspects, not simpler. Sure, you usually have lane markings but your system can't just go off road in situations where they are suddenly missing. You have a lot of rules from which you can build a model about how your surroundings should look and how traffic participants should behave. You can't just run over a pedestrian because he crossed the road at a point where he technically isn't allowed to, though. Plus, you also have to stick to all those rules: From my experience, teaching the vehicle to just follow the road is easy compared to teaching it to following the road and yielding. Or identifying to which lane a specific traffic light belongs, identifying its state and acting accordingly.
Of course, finding a vehicle on a battlefield is difficult compared to finding a car in a normal traffic situation because cars are usually found on roads... Then again, on a battlefield you don't have to yield to other drones, noone cares if you fly too fast or at the wrong height or above road. Your only task is finding and hitting your target. That is the difficult part. The whole planning and prediction part that makes driving difficult is non-existent.
Detection is a different issue. Sure, finding that one-pixel tank is not easy. But that is related to sensor resolution and you have that same problem in autonomous driving. (I remember calculating what minimum camera resolution is necessary in order to identify pedestrians at a distance far enough away so that I can always brake comfortably when driving at a certain speed)