chrisl

Exactly and this has been discussed 100x here, I am surprised to see someone still suggest "it's NATO's fault".  The only difference w/o NATO expansion would be that Putin would've invaded and conquered the baltic states before launching his attack on Ukraine.  As Steve and others have said (paraphrase), NATO expansion angers Putin because it permanently and completely takes territory off Putin's list of lands-to-be-conquered.  

This is one of those ho hum things that it actually kind of significant. It's the EU acting as a single entity in activity just adjacent to fighting a war. Imagine, if you will, a Russian negotiator's reaction working in that light on a final agreement to the idea that Ukraine will forego NATO but be in the European Community. That gives you a sense of the phase change that just occurred. 

These guys keeping it clean can also be a contributing factor to them not being as easily spotted by the Russian drones. A position with trash around it stands out and points to where the people are. Just another possible addition to the otherwise noted reasons why they have been able to stay in position that long. 
There has also been mention recently in some of the interviews posted on here about the Russians getting better field craft. I've noticed that in several of the drone perspective videos and trench assaults that there is a lack of trash in the Russian positions in comparison to what we have seen in the past. I'm sure it isn't completely gone everywhere, but it is a sign that they recognize this gives away their positions and are trying to conceal themselves better. 

Xi needs to ask himself if Russia is worth more to China and its goals dead or alive. The thinking a year and a half ago was definitely on the alive side. Russia brought a lot to the table for their shared goals. Since that time their military has been shown to not be a threat even to a single country 1/3 of its size. Its political clout and credibility has been shattered. If some of the experts are right, by the end of the year its economy will collapse and especially its fossil fuel infrastructure will struggle to produce anywhere near what it has. So what "advantage" does Russia give China from here on out, at least for the next 10-20 years? 
If the goal is for China to become THE world leader then this visit needs to be the beginning of political positioning. Siding with Russia and trying to help or save them would degrade China's position. Looking like they forced an end to hostilities where the west couldn't improves their position. The only way an "alive" Russia benefits China is if Putin agrees to cease hostilities, withdraw to the 2014 borders and start making amends with the world. Putin is not going to agree to that. It is suicide, probably literally, for him if he does. 
If Putin refuses that, what is the best end state of Russia for China? Dead. Broken up and non-threatening. A China with an independent Yakutsk and Siberia with military guarantees for their security in exchange for access to their mineral and oil resources gives them the "gas station" that they need without the ball and chain of Russia dragging them down. China is very good at expanding infrastructure quickly and would be able to develop a lot of energy and resource independence in a short time. 
From the Guardian picture that was linked by Dan, Putin doesn't look overjoyed by whatever Xi had to say. 
Right now if China goes to war they have to go to war with someone that doesn't have the ability to sustain blue water naval operations in the Indian Ocean. I believe over 80% of their oil is imported from the Persian Gulf area so it doesn't take much to choke them out. You cut the oil and you cut everything; military, agriculture, economy, energy, everything. That would be pretty catastrophic really quick. So China needs to have a 3 day war with Taiwan or it needs energy independence. Ukraine has foiled the 3 day war concept so if China ever wants to take back what they think is theirs they need that independence. 
With all that being said, I don't see China going all in to support Russia. It just doesn't make sense for them. All in is the only thing that would possibly save Russia from being defeated at this point and it does more harm to China than good. It doesn't really help them on the world stage at all and does nothing to improve their territorial or political desires. I'm betting that Xi has promised to help with uniforms, kit, small arms, rations and maybe ammunition at most. Enough to keep the appearance of a supporting friend but it will all be done through intermediaries like Kazakhstan. This meeting isn't going to give Putin what he wants or needs. 

That probably says a few things about the Russians besides crooked barrels:
- Limited real-time drone observation capability that would let them make corrections, even with crooked barrels
- Limited or no armed drones with remote control and cameras on them and a sufficient charge to take out a gun (switchblade 600 equivalent) or even quadcopters to drop a few grenades down the ammo storage hole.
- No CB radar.  I've been suspecting that their CB radar might have low enough SNR that they can't track single incoming rounds effectively.  So that combined with flat trajectories and probably having few radars anyway means they don't have to worry about that.  But with crooked barrels, they wouldn't be able to hit without a spotter giving corrections.
ETA: The guy also made some cryptic comments about the fuzes not working on the ice reliably.  I kind of wonder if they're using proximity fuses and either the low trajectory or reflection off the ice isn't giving them enough return and that's why they were putting on a VT.

My overall impression is of a disciplined and competent unit. Everyone was clean^, and actions were carried out deliberately and without stress or haste. Everyone appeared calm and relaxed (except that one guy), and they were all comfortable with each other – some banter, but a lot of pretty frank comments about how they’re feeling. The new guys seemed a little stiff, but that’s probably to be expected.
The fact they had some new guys was interesting in itself. Why are the new guys needed - casualties? Promotion? Courses? Relief for leave periods? Siphoning off some experience to raise a new battery?
A lot of the guys seemed pretty old, and kind of chubby? I guess that’s to be expected with mass mobilisation.
Overall this was a very tidy gun position with no trash or dunnage to be seen which is a sign of good discipline, and also an fairly comfortable looking position which is a sign of good morale.
They are carrying personal weapons at all times, which struck me as odd. Could be for the cameras, or could be because of the local ground threat.
I think they’re using encrypted radios? The blerp at the start of each transmission is a bit of a give-away. That’s not super surprising, other than that encrypted radios are not available COTS.

From a specifically gunnery perspective, they were firing at a very low trajectory, and with a time of flight of 29 seconds, which implies they were firing at around 10km (29 seconds time of flight, firing Charge 1 so probably around 300 m/s). But that’s a hearty guess since I don’t know the specifics of the gun/round/charge combos for the D-30. Low trajectory is good practice since it makes it harder for the enemy to sense any outgoing rounds.
The battery was set up in a woodland, which was unusual since it severely restricts your traverse - you can’t just bang a round away in any direction since it’ll probably slam into a tree a few 10s of metres away and really ruin your day. Given a static front that kind of makes sense – “all our targets are in a narrow arc in that direction” - but it does mean that this battery can’t really support any units to the flanks of the one it’s been assigned to.
It looked like they were using time fuses, although again I’m not really familiar with Russian ammunition. There was a shot where a guy was fiddling with a tool on the nose of the round at around 6:39, and the tool he’s using appears to have calibration marks on it. On Western ammo that’s the kind of thing you’d use to set the time fuze length^^, whereas switching between PD and Delay is a simple screwdriver turn between two positions and would be a completely different fuse (you can turn a time fuze into a PD fuse by zeroing the timer, but they usually don’t also have a Delay setting. Also, time fuzes are relatively rare, so you’d only use them when air burst was called for.)
It seems they are concerned about counter battery (CB) fire, since they moved into a shelter immediately after the mission, but not THAT concerned since they’ve been in the same positions for several months. There also didn’t appear to be much ground churn (from incoming rounds) but that could be due to fresh recent snow covering any wounds to the ground since there also didn’t appear to be many random tracks about the place. Mind you, that – the lack of tracks - could alternately be due to really good discipline and morale, and the guys really sticking to the track plan. Or discipline + fresh snow.
I didn’t see any evidence of vehicles – either trucks dug in or hiding under cam nets, or vehicle tracks anywhere. That implies the battery isn’t moving anytime soon, and also that the guys are having to hump ammo in from some distance away. It also implies that they – or rather their higher command – are confident that the Russians will not be breaking in or through anywhere nearby anytime soon. Raids; yes – they specifically talk about that. But no movement of the FEBA.
Given they’ve been there for a couple of months, I would expect that they have a very long list of pre-registered targets, which greatly reduces (effectively eliminates) the need to adjust before going to fire for effect (FFE).
Although only one gun was show I would expect that there was a whole battery (probably 4 guns) hidden in the trees thereabouts, although probably very dispersed. I think that because the battery commander was there, and the command post (CP) looked fairly substantial for something that was only controlling a single gun. I am assuming here that the film crew walked between the gun they filmed at, and the underground battery CP and the underground CB shelter. If, on the other hand, they drove between CP and the gun then all bets are off, but I think driving is unlikely given the radios being used – those small handhelds don’t have great ranges, especially in trees.
All the round detonations you hear are of single rounds. That suggests that this gun could indeed be a pistol gun off on it’s lonesome away from the rest of the battery, OR that they are engaging a very small or point target like an isolated building, OR in response to a very local probe. But given the weather – bright sun, middle of the day – I’d be a bit surprised if the Russians were up and moving about with small numbers of light infantry, so my guess would either be a destruction mission on a building or the like, or they’re doing a technical shoot to figure out exactly what the weather conditions are doing to the flight of the rounds right now. Those technical shoots are important since it means that engaging any targets off the pre-registered list can go to FFE immediately, which decreases the response time from ~5-10 mins to ~1min including time of flight. That would also explain the generally unhurried and relaxed attitude of the guys – when a battery is firing in support of friendly forces in contact there is a certain ... tenseness, which is absent here.
Jon

^ that could also be because they tidied up the house, washed and had haircuts before visitors came over. But I don’t think it’s just that – you can tell a soldier to go have a wash, but that wouldn’t explain the calmness.
^^ although the fuzes I’m used to have the time setting marks on the fuze itself, rather than the adjusting tool, so … ?

I was halfway through typing a long response to this and my computer spontaneously restarted, and both Steve and The_Capt got posts in first that provide supporting for what was writing (so thanks!)
I'd frame it differently than @The_Capt (information has mass) and closer to Steve (information is a force multiplier) and say that it gives you efficiency of force (or efficiency of other things in other applications).  The net effect is that when you're doing your calculations the old way, however one does those, you'd put in a dimensionless constant to account for the efficiency.  That constant is the force multiplier.
In practice, suppose you're Russia in 2022 and there's a platoon of UA defending 2 km of front.  You're basically blind to their locations, so you get every tube and rocket rail that's in range and paste it for 30 minutes, then you send in the prisoners to do recon by death. And die they do, because massed artillery just isn't that great against a dug in defender.  If you're Ukraine, you send up 3 or 4 drones and each time one spots a target, it calls in 2-3 rounds from one tube.  That gets rid of a bunch of the defenders because they don't have time to take cover before the rounds start hitting *their* holes.  A couple more drones fly around and drop grenades on vehicles, taking them out of the defense.  When the PBI finally have to go in and finish things, there aren't a lot of well placed defenders left, and on a good day the Ukrainian PBI are getting feedback from the drones at a level of "a guy just went into a dugout in the trench you're about to go into, go up to the edge, move 3 m to your right, and toss a grenade down without sticking your head over".  
And the catch is that you don't need just the information, but the ability to act on it at a level commensurate with the information.  If I know exactly where everybody is (Steve's example) but all I have is artillery with a CEP the size of the map, then the information doesn't do me much good. I'm still just going to plaster the whole map with all my arty.  But if I have drones with lasers and laser guided munitions, I can send a drone up to point at each guy, fire one lgm, then go to the next.
So while information is vital, and valuable, and adds efficiency, you also need equipment that has comparable precision.  Some pages ago, I pointed out that the extreme limit of perfect information and perfect precision you need a number of munitions less than or equal to the number of opponents you have to deal with.  It's like in science fiction where one good guy (e.g. Robocop) is in a room full of bad guys with machine guns (mass).  He kills them all with a number of shots equal to the number of bad guys minus one (he gets two with one shot once), taking advantage of his IR vision (information) to see where people are behind concealment and precisely target them.  Miltech is headed in that direction, where eventually every person on the ground will have augmented reality goggles that automatically integrate the information from all drones and all the other AR goggles so that every friendly and enemy shows up exactly in the right place, with appropriate shading/transparency to indicate that they're behind cover or terrain. 
The other catch is that you have to be able to do it all quickly - it doesn't do you any good to know how to do perfect information and precision if you can't deliver it faster than the other guy can kill you.  Russia probably has a lot of smart people in universities and their MIC who can describe all this, but they don't have the resources to implement it much past pencil and paper.

The most informative sentence ever written was
I might add that in Putin's Russia you might add his life to the balance. When you simply cannot figure out why something works the way it does, start here.

At what rate and at what cost?
Suppose Russia actually takes Bakhmut and Avdiivka.  How long is Donetsk airport actually out of shell range?  Will the west suddenly supply ordnance that can still reach it?  And with the diffusion of Russian forces out of other areas to take Bakhmut, how well can Russia defend against an attack somewhere else into its lines?  Multiple attacks at relatively large distances from each other that force commitment of reserves to back one or the other?
Unless China comes in with strong military support for Russia, Russian forces are on a downward trajectory. They not only don't have the manufacturing base, they don't have the technology base required to make the manufacturing equipment to develop the manufacturing base.  And they don't have the economy or skilled workforce to support a ramp up of anything beyond late Soviet era equipment, if even that.  Much of their skilled and educated workforce can sell their skills for a more comfortable lifestyle outside of Russia and have been doing so for years, with a recent acceleration.
I don't think it's in China's interest to provide much more than small arms and strong words of encouragement. Russia is a nice gas station, and they might even sell decent snack chips and lottery tickets, but it's a lousy market for Chinese goods compared to Ukraine's backers.  edit: China also has almost a billion and a half mouths to feed, with about 35% of its food being imported.  Russia is far down on the list of suppliers of grain to China.  The only major supplier of food to China that isn't backing Ukraine is Brazil.
Ukraine has to pick a spot and sever the land bridge to Crimea, and then take out the Kerch bridge again.  I suspect they've already got their eye on a few approaches to cutting the land bridge and the shaping operations are already ramping up.  

I was halfway through typing a long response to this and my computer spontaneously restarted, and both Steve and The_Capt got posts in first that provide supporting for what was writing (so thanks!)
I'd frame it differently than @The_Capt (information has mass) and closer to Steve (information is a force multiplier) and say that it gives you efficiency of force (or efficiency of other things in other applications).  The net effect is that when you're doing your calculations the old way, however one does those, you'd put in a dimensionless constant to account for the efficiency.  That constant is the force multiplier.
In practice, suppose you're Russia in 2022 and there's a platoon of UA defending 2 km of front.  You're basically blind to their locations, so you get every tube and rocket rail that's in range and paste it for 30 minutes, then you send in the prisoners to do recon by death. And die they do, because massed artillery just isn't that great against a dug in defender.  If you're Ukraine, you send up 3 or 4 drones and each time one spots a target, it calls in 2-3 rounds from one tube.  That gets rid of a bunch of the defenders because they don't have time to take cover before the rounds start hitting *their* holes.  A couple more drones fly around and drop grenades on vehicles, taking them out of the defense.  When the PBI finally have to go in and finish things, there aren't a lot of well placed defenders left, and on a good day the Ukrainian PBI are getting feedback from the drones at a level of "a guy just went into a dugout in the trench you're about to go into, go up to the edge, move 3 m to your right, and toss a grenade down without sticking your head over".  
And the catch is that you don't need just the information, but the ability to act on it at a level commensurate with the information.  If I know exactly where everybody is (Steve's example) but all I have is artillery with a CEP the size of the map, then the information doesn't do me much good. I'm still just going to plaster the whole map with all my arty.  But if I have drones with lasers and laser guided munitions, I can send a drone up to point at each guy, fire one lgm, then go to the next.
So while information is vital, and valuable, and adds efficiency, you also need equipment that has comparable precision.  Some pages ago, I pointed out that the extreme limit of perfect information and perfect precision you need a number of munitions less than or equal to the number of opponents you have to deal with.  It's like in science fiction where one good guy (e.g. Robocop) is in a room full of bad guys with machine guns (mass).  He kills them all with a number of shots equal to the number of bad guys minus one (he gets two with one shot once), taking advantage of his IR vision (information) to see where people are behind concealment and precisely target them.  Miltech is headed in that direction, where eventually every person on the ground will have augmented reality goggles that automatically integrate the information from all drones and all the other AR goggles so that every friendly and enemy shows up exactly in the right place, with appropriate shading/transparency to indicate that they're behind cover or terrain. 
The other catch is that you have to be able to do it all quickly - it doesn't do you any good to know how to do perfect information and precision if you can't deliver it faster than the other guy can kill you.  Russia probably has a lot of smart people in universities and their MIC who can describe all this, but they don't have the resources to implement it much past pencil and paper.

And
So projection and application of force is communication.  And so is projection and application of information.  Force can be applied either directly or indirectly - and here we get into the sweet spots of each.
Kinetic Effect (Conductive) - the direct application of energy in order to force change upon a system.
Non-Kinetic Effect (Inductive) - indirect application of energy in order to induce a system to change itself.
So horse heads definitely communicate directly - here is what we can do to you.  But having the mob boss wake up to his horse cutting off its own head (lets put opposable thumbs to the side for a moment) also sends a very powerful message - we can do this to get you to do this to yourself.  One is swinging the blade (effect) to send a message, the other is a message to create effect (whatever pushes a suicidal horse over the edge - think Alma from the Ring).
This is why I do not think one can cleanly separate the two into supported and supporting roles.  They trade off continually.  In operational planning exercises I always ask students - "Ok, what are you trying to communicate to the enemy in all this?"  And "what are they saying back?"  
Unless one is waging a war of total extermination (eg nuclear) where one is really only communicating with oneself.  This is what made apocalyptical groups like ISIL so impossible - there was no communicating with them, nor negotiation as they were following an eschatological doctrine where their will was derived by a supreme being.  So we wiped them out, and will continue to.  We had no need to negotiate, we just eradicated.  We negotiated with sub-groups who were not apocalyptics, or convinced a few to go other ways. 
 

At the operational level and down, information as a force multiplier and force as information multipliers are just M and 1/M and which side of the equals sign you put it on depends on whether you're trying to apply force or trying to communicate  (cue any number of Star Trek scenes, from any of the series). 
But I'm not sure it fits quite neatly either way, because it can also let you avoid force entirely.  That's been a big part of the value of space ISR since it started - having the ability to accurately know how many and what strategic weapons your opponent has and in what state (stored, doors opening, launching) has had a stabilizing effect in that it avoided a lot of potential pre-emptive use of force and "launch on anxiety" events.  
Maybe that's all a good argument in favor of thinking of force as an information multiplier, but I think it's more that force is an information carrier or transmitter (communication is information per unit time between two or more points, rather than bulk information), and better information helps you target that information transmission much more effectively (and I think we just developed a differential equation here...now we're all in trouble).  
Does putting your enemy's prize racehorse's head in his bed count as use of force to transmit information, or is it just very direct information on its own?
 

Yes.  Yes it does.
Somewhat trivially, the mass of one bit mbit= kBTln(2)/c2
Where kB is the Boltzmann constant, T is the storage temperature of the bit, and c is the speed of light.  Someone else even wrote it up as part of a paper on mass/energy/information equivalence:  https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794
But I don't think that's what @The_Capt was referring to.

The RUSI report that was linked several pages ago (here) has a nice summary of what Ukraine did from 2014 to 2022 that helped them enormously (and sometimes inadvertently), as well as how both home grown and wester ISR helped them at the start.  I'm only partway into the report, but it's an excellent summary.  They're often more generous to the Russians than we tend to be here (and I think they're accurate), but they also highlight the major failings of the Russians very well.  One thing about what Ukraine did from 2014 to 2022 that I marvel at is that Russia had *exactly the same opportunity* and squandered it. Russia was on the opposite side of the lines the whole time and gained far less from the experience.

The RUSI report that was linked several pages ago (here) has a nice summary of what Ukraine did from 2014 to 2022 that helped them enormously (and sometimes inadvertently), as well as how both home grown and wester ISR helped them at the start.  I'm only partway into the report, but it's an excellent summary.  They're often more generous to the Russians than we tend to be here (and I think they're accurate), but they also highlight the major failings of the Russians very well.  One thing about what Ukraine did from 2014 to 2022 that I marvel at is that Russia had *exactly the same opportunity* and squandered it. Russia was on the opposite side of the lines the whole time and gained far less from the experience.

At the operational level and down, information as a force multiplier and force as information multipliers are just M and 1/M and which side of the equals sign you put it on depends on whether you're trying to apply force or trying to communicate  (cue any number of Star Trek scenes, from any of the series). 
But I'm not sure it fits quite neatly either way, because it can also let you avoid force entirely.  That's been a big part of the value of space ISR since it started - having the ability to accurately know how many and what strategic weapons your opponent has and in what state (stored, doors opening, launching) has had a stabilizing effect in that it avoided a lot of potential pre-emptive use of force and "launch on anxiety" events.  
Maybe that's all a good argument in favor of thinking of force as an information multiplier, but I think it's more that force is an information carrier or transmitter (communication is information per unit time between two or more points, rather than bulk information), and better information helps you target that information transmission much more effectively (and I think we just developed a differential equation here...now we're all in trouble).  
Does putting your enemy's prize racehorse's head in his bed count as use of force to transmit information, or is it just very direct information on its own?
 

Yes.  Yes it does.
Somewhat trivially, the mass of one bit mbit= kBTln(2)/c2
Where kB is the Boltzmann constant, T is the storage temperature of the bit, and c is the speed of light.  Someone else even wrote it up as part of a paper on mass/energy/information equivalence:  https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794
But I don't think that's what @The_Capt was referring to.

I was halfway through typing a long response to this and my computer spontaneously restarted, and both Steve and The_Capt got posts in first that provide supporting for what was writing (so thanks!)
I'd frame it differently than @The_Capt (information has mass) and closer to Steve (information is a force multiplier) and say that it gives you efficiency of force (or efficiency of other things in other applications).  The net effect is that when you're doing your calculations the old way, however one does those, you'd put in a dimensionless constant to account for the efficiency.  That constant is the force multiplier.
In practice, suppose you're Russia in 2022 and there's a platoon of UA defending 2 km of front.  You're basically blind to their locations, so you get every tube and rocket rail that's in range and paste it for 30 minutes, then you send in the prisoners to do recon by death. And die they do, because massed artillery just isn't that great against a dug in defender.  If you're Ukraine, you send up 3 or 4 drones and each time one spots a target, it calls in 2-3 rounds from one tube.  That gets rid of a bunch of the defenders because they don't have time to take cover before the rounds start hitting *their* holes.  A couple more drones fly around and drop grenades on vehicles, taking them out of the defense.  When the PBI finally have to go in and finish things, there aren't a lot of well placed defenders left, and on a good day the Ukrainian PBI are getting feedback from the drones at a level of "a guy just went into a dugout in the trench you're about to go into, go up to the edge, move 3 m to your right, and toss a grenade down without sticking your head over".  
And the catch is that you don't need just the information, but the ability to act on it at a level commensurate with the information.  If I know exactly where everybody is (Steve's example) but all I have is artillery with a CEP the size of the map, then the information doesn't do me much good. I'm still just going to plaster the whole map with all my arty.  But if I have drones with lasers and laser guided munitions, I can send a drone up to point at each guy, fire one lgm, then go to the next.
So while information is vital, and valuable, and adds efficiency, you also need equipment that has comparable precision.  Some pages ago, I pointed out that the extreme limit of perfect information and perfect precision you need a number of munitions less than or equal to the number of opponents you have to deal with.  It's like in science fiction where one good guy (e.g. Robocop) is in a room full of bad guys with machine guns (mass).  He kills them all with a number of shots equal to the number of bad guys minus one (he gets two with one shot once), taking advantage of his IR vision (information) to see where people are behind concealment and precisely target them.  Miltech is headed in that direction, where eventually every person on the ground will have augmented reality goggles that automatically integrate the information from all drones and all the other AR goggles so that every friendly and enemy shows up exactly in the right place, with appropriate shading/transparency to indicate that they're behind cover or terrain. 
The other catch is that you have to be able to do it all quickly - it doesn't do you any good to know how to do perfect information and precision if you can't deliver it faster than the other guy can kill you.  Russia probably has a lot of smart people in universities and their MIC who can describe all this, but they don't have the resources to implement it much past pencil and paper.

Ok, now we are getting somewhere.  So what you are describing is a modern operational system (or components thereof).  Add in logistics, force protection/preservation, mobility and then institutional functions and we are starting to see the entire picture.
My only problem with "information as force multiplier" is that it boxes it in.  Information supports physical effects.  The reality is that the two are far more symbiotic.  Physical effects create information and in some cases are only conducted to gather information (e.g. spec fire).  The two concepts drive each other.  Better physical systems are a force multiplier for information - I can move, see and "cause" better than an opponent.
To my mind - and here we are at "all war is communication", physical effects/violence are simply ("milbits") of information themselves.  The act of warfare is knowing mare than an enemy and taking away their ability to be able to "know'.  As we see far too often, and trust me a tactical wargaming community is not alone in this, physical capability as the primary "way" of warfare, when in fact it is just another "means".  The primary way is information based via violent communication because warfare is all about human will.  Will is build on cognitive and conative frameworks housing...wait for it...information (well, knowledge really but why quibble).
So in many ways those mortars are force multiplying information superiority as much as it is going the other way. 

I was halfway through typing a long response to this and my computer spontaneously restarted, and both Steve and The_Capt got posts in first that provide supporting for what was writing (so thanks!)
I'd frame it differently than @The_Capt (information has mass) and closer to Steve (information is a force multiplier) and say that it gives you efficiency of force (or efficiency of other things in other applications).  The net effect is that when you're doing your calculations the old way, however one does those, you'd put in a dimensionless constant to account for the efficiency.  That constant is the force multiplier.
In practice, suppose you're Russia in 2022 and there's a platoon of UA defending 2 km of front.  You're basically blind to their locations, so you get every tube and rocket rail that's in range and paste it for 30 minutes, then you send in the prisoners to do recon by death. And die they do, because massed artillery just isn't that great against a dug in defender.  If you're Ukraine, you send up 3 or 4 drones and each time one spots a target, it calls in 2-3 rounds from one tube.  That gets rid of a bunch of the defenders because they don't have time to take cover before the rounds start hitting *their* holes.  A couple more drones fly around and drop grenades on vehicles, taking them out of the defense.  When the PBI finally have to go in and finish things, there aren't a lot of well placed defenders left, and on a good day the Ukrainian PBI are getting feedback from the drones at a level of "a guy just went into a dugout in the trench you're about to go into, go up to the edge, move 3 m to your right, and toss a grenade down without sticking your head over".  
And the catch is that you don't need just the information, but the ability to act on it at a level commensurate with the information.  If I know exactly where everybody is (Steve's example) but all I have is artillery with a CEP the size of the map, then the information doesn't do me much good. I'm still just going to plaster the whole map with all my arty.  But if I have drones with lasers and laser guided munitions, I can send a drone up to point at each guy, fire one lgm, then go to the next.
So while information is vital, and valuable, and adds efficiency, you also need equipment that has comparable precision.  Some pages ago, I pointed out that the extreme limit of perfect information and perfect precision you need a number of munitions less than or equal to the number of opponents you have to deal with.  It's like in science fiction where one good guy (e.g. Robocop) is in a room full of bad guys with machine guns (mass).  He kills them all with a number of shots equal to the number of bad guys minus one (he gets two with one shot once), taking advantage of his IR vision (information) to see where people are behind concealment and precisely target them.  Miltech is headed in that direction, where eventually every person on the ground will have augmented reality goggles that automatically integrate the information from all drones and all the other AR goggles so that every friendly and enemy shows up exactly in the right place, with appropriate shading/transparency to indicate that they're behind cover or terrain. 
The other catch is that you have to be able to do it all quickly - it doesn't do you any good to know how to do perfect information and precision if you can't deliver it faster than the other guy can kill you.  Russia probably has a lot of smart people in universities and their MIC who can describe all this, but they don't have the resources to implement it much past pencil and paper.

It is brute force simulation, but just open any CMBS scenario and play it on basic training. Go the extra mile and give yourself 10 or twenty excalibur rounds. It is so easy its boring after that. I have a fairly strong impression that when the full ISR stack is focused on your piece of dirt, and there precision rounds available it really is something close to that. Those are both big ifs that don't apply most places most of the time, but the capability exists in meaningful quantities. The Russian response seems to be to throw in more bodies that Ukraine has ammo, but their results are unimpressive to put it mildly.
Edit: Cross posted with Chrissl, he said it better.

I was halfway through typing a long response to this and my computer spontaneously restarted, and both Steve and The_Capt got posts in first that provide supporting for what was writing (so thanks!)
I'd frame it differently than @The_Capt (information has mass) and closer to Steve (information is a force multiplier) and say that it gives you efficiency of force (or efficiency of other things in other applications).  The net effect is that when you're doing your calculations the old way, however one does those, you'd put in a dimensionless constant to account for the efficiency.  That constant is the force multiplier.
In practice, suppose you're Russia in 2022 and there's a platoon of UA defending 2 km of front.  You're basically blind to their locations, so you get every tube and rocket rail that's in range and paste it for 30 minutes, then you send in the prisoners to do recon by death. And die they do, because massed artillery just isn't that great against a dug in defender.  If you're Ukraine, you send up 3 or 4 drones and each time one spots a target, it calls in 2-3 rounds from one tube.  That gets rid of a bunch of the defenders because they don't have time to take cover before the rounds start hitting *their* holes.  A couple more drones fly around and drop grenades on vehicles, taking them out of the defense.  When the PBI finally have to go in and finish things, there aren't a lot of well placed defenders left, and on a good day the Ukrainian PBI are getting feedback from the drones at a level of "a guy just went into a dugout in the trench you're about to go into, go up to the edge, move 3 m to your right, and toss a grenade down without sticking your head over".  
And the catch is that you don't need just the information, but the ability to act on it at a level commensurate with the information.  If I know exactly where everybody is (Steve's example) but all I have is artillery with a CEP the size of the map, then the information doesn't do me much good. I'm still just going to plaster the whole map with all my arty.  But if I have drones with lasers and laser guided munitions, I can send a drone up to point at each guy, fire one lgm, then go to the next.
So while information is vital, and valuable, and adds efficiency, you also need equipment that has comparable precision.  Some pages ago, I pointed out that the extreme limit of perfect information and perfect precision you need a number of munitions less than or equal to the number of opponents you have to deal with.  It's like in science fiction where one good guy (e.g. Robocop) is in a room full of bad guys with machine guns (mass).  He kills them all with a number of shots equal to the number of bad guys minus one (he gets two with one shot once), taking advantage of his IR vision (information) to see where people are behind concealment and precisely target them.  Miltech is headed in that direction, where eventually every person on the ground will have augmented reality goggles that automatically integrate the information from all drones and all the other AR goggles so that every friendly and enemy shows up exactly in the right place, with appropriate shading/transparency to indicate that they're behind cover or terrain. 
The other catch is that you have to be able to do it all quickly - it doesn't do you any good to know how to do perfect information and precision if you can't deliver it faster than the other guy can kill you.  Russia probably has a lot of smart people in universities and their MIC who can describe all this, but they don't have the resources to implement it much past pencil and paper.

Yes.  Yes it does.
Somewhat trivially, the mass of one bit mbit= kBTln(2)/c2
Where kB is the Boltzmann constant, T is the storage temperature of the bit, and c is the speed of light.  Someone else even wrote it up as part of a paper on mass/energy/information equivalence:  https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794
But I don't think that's what @The_Capt was referring to.

Yes.  Yes it does.
Somewhat trivially, the mass of one bit mbit= kBTln(2)/c2
Where kB is the Boltzmann constant, T is the storage temperature of the bit, and c is the speed of light.  Someone else even wrote it up as part of a paper on mass/energy/information equivalence:  https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794
But I don't think that's what @The_Capt was referring to.

And they're already available: 
https://www.intelligent-energy.com
https://www.unmannedsystemstechnology.com/company/intelligent-energy/
The main issue is probably fuel supply chain - it's easy to recharge a battery just about anywhere, but getting pressurized hydrogen is a little trickier.  
I dug those up because I wasn't sure how small it would scale because of the need for high pressure tanks, but it looks like it's reasonable at the current drone size.
For larger aircraft, Airbus is looking at cryogenic liquid storage instead of pressurized gas.