chrisl

With more integration of the drone and individual spotting it could be basic training or even author test mode.

The level of discussion in this thread is extremely high, which is why I read it and am very thankful.  The knowledge, study and experience of several contributing posters is off the effin charts...which makes this such a valuable source of information.  However, it may also deter counter-arguments in that so few individuals have equal experience to voice counter opinions which then leads to...an echo chamber of sorts.
I could study and research a relevant topic for months, (outside of my own little business/supply chain domain), and guarantee you and a few others could argue my points better than I without any research whatsoever.  But, in my opinion, we still need those counter opinions/arguments--when presented in a logical and respectful manner-- even if they aren't at the same level of expertise as some others. 
Just my opinion. Peace.

I've learned to read much more quickly in Cyrillic from following this.  My Chinese is limited to a few sichuan food dishes.

Here R18 octocopter. It was developed by "Aerorozvidka" ("Aerorecon") volunteer unit in 2017 and launched to produce in 2019. Now these drones cost 45 000 $ each and are produced with donations

Each R18 can carry up to 5 kg of load, but usually it takes two, rarely three RKG-1600 bomblets (about 1,1 kg each), dropping from 100-300 m over the target. The drone has a range up to 8 km and 40 minutes of flight duration. Drone is equipped with thermal camera
You can donate on R18 fleet if you like to see such videos: https://aerorozvidka.ngo/r18/ (ENG page)
Except "Aerorozvidka" group, most skilled user of these drones is Special Forces of SBU
Because of this drone has limited range (first version had only 4 km), operators forced to launch them from "zero line" or even in grey zone to reach as far as possible, so they have great risk during their night missions.
 
 

@chrisl
RKG-1600 bombs (modified for drops RKG-3 HEAT grenades)

Mass beats isolation, precision beats mass, massed precision beats everything.  
When it comes to the NATO/western way of warfare question, in this war if NATO showed up and fought Russia, totally agree.  Would have been bloodier, likely much bloodier than the Gulf War but outcome would have been pretty much as you describe.  This is because NATO has both quantitative and qualitative overmatch on the Russian military.
The UA only has qualitative overmatch, so its road to success is much longer.  What is blowing minds is just how impactful qualitative overmatch is on the modern battlefield.  By all conventional metrics this thing should have ended in favour of Russia in the first month.
For the west the concern is not fighting an opponent who fights like Russia, it is fighting one who fights like Ukraine.  So we need to do a military intervention op in country X.  But they are supported by China, so a lot of the same stuff we gave Ukraine - NLAWs are pointed at us.  They have ISR we cannot blind.  They have unmanned all over the place. That is the scenario that worries me.
Right from the start is changes things.  We could not send in the same force size we would have a decade ago.  We would need much higher levels of overmatch, which takes time to build and project, which in turn gives more time for China to put in deeper support.  We go in and the opponent fights like fog - hybrid distributed on a civilian backbone IT network.  We target that network, and then get told by the lawyers we can’t because it is what they use for their entire civilian commercial and medical systems.  So now we have to do precision cyber and EW to try and only hit the military support sub-networks (which keep re-wiring themselves because everything is a freaking hotspot because the entire nation is on Chinese built 5G) and then China gives them a sat backbone we cannot touch because it basically means war in space, which the lawyers also remind us is out of bounds.
So while all that is going on, our F echelon is getting mauled by distributed light infantry, SOF and uncons armed with the Chinese knock off Javelins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HJ-12), along with IEDs and mines because classic rock never dies.  They have UAS all over the place, dropping shaped charges and playing merry hell in our rear areas - we basically lose air superiority below 2000 feet.  Our LOCs are hot, long and visible, so now we have to roll a lot of combat power just keeping other combat power fueled…and we need a lot of fuel (see larger force requirement to start with).  They keep hitting us in the a$$ while ghosting us in the front.  They are a lot harder to see because they are in small fast moving dispersed teams while we are in big fat western formations.
We now need to worry about every tree line for 4kms out, so that is going to slow us down.  Hard to “shock and dislocate” when you are moving at a crawl while trying to secure 4kms either side of your advance.  We have APS but not mounted on every vehicle.  We try EW to jam UAS but the damn things are fully autonomous with no direct link to a human operator because no one in China wailed about “killbots = landmines” for the last 10 freaking years.  So we have to go with direct kills on something the size of a seagull flying in the trees.  We are shooting all over the place, which of course lights us up in the process.  Ammo expenditures go through the roof putting more strain on our LOCs.
We still advance deep into this country, taking a lot of hits as we do.  We get to urban areas and the politicians say “nope” when we give them the cost estimates for fighting in that terrain, and then say “nope again” when we suggest using firepower.  Arguments within the coalition ensue as half the force plays the national caveat card because “there is an election next year”.  So we bog down some more.
We sit outside major urban areas, while watching out multi-million dollar aircraft getting downed by cheap Chinese next-gen AD, mounted on some UCAVs.  We get told to go attack their AD infrastructure, but find out it is basically in garages and barns all over the place…enter lawyers and a “proof of righteousness” targeting requirement for the ages.  
And then China flies in whatever knock off HIMARs system they have developed into a neighbouring “neutral” country.  These systems are given to our opponent but are directly linked into Chinese ISR.  They drive them just over their border and fire a missile with a 400km range that goes up 120,000 feet and comes down at Mach 5.  They then dip across the border to reload, we go to engage…but lawyers.  That missile is about 24 inches across and we simply cannot hit them easily…stuff starts blowing up way back on our LOCs, they hit airfields and sea SLOC nodes.  They of course employ good old terrorism as well.
So there we are in all of that and suddenly this guy shows up with a 40mm AGL on its back:

Not so freakin cute now.  This all blows up all over social media because soldiers are on Tik Tok telling it as it is, and our opponents are blasting gory evidence of our losses all over the place.  We have bad shoots and now dead children are on the news. China scolding us at the UN while inflicted trade pain and punishment.
So how long do we think the deep resilient western will is going to last in all this?  How quickly is this going to get turned off, or worse we do the math and are told to not even bother with the mission in the first place, the entry costs are too high.  Outcome, Chinese influence in Nation X solidifies, nation X regional power grows - while we sit around and blame each other.
That is the emerging 21st century military problem.

I wonder what those are up to?  And what they would be paired with in an attack?
There's been a lot of back & forth here about UKR capabilities, losses, etc, and I've been trying to step back from each and every report.  Guy does a driveby of front lines and says losses 10:1.  Another guy does same thing in different location and says 1:1.  Small UKR force, like platoon, gets hit on southern front, and we wonder whether UKR can actually do offensive operation -- seems like a small sample size from which to conclude much.  Maybe UKR can't do offensive, but really we have no idea.  Maybe UKR loss ratio is not good, we don't know. 
But if we think about the whole front the preponderance of evidence says loss ratios are greatly in UKR favor -- we know RU has been throwing men & machines into the grinder in attack, which leads to higher losses unless defenders are overrun, for which we have very little evidence.  Also RU attacks are lessening in number and strength across the front, and they can't seem to close the last few kilometers to cut off off Bakhmut.  If the losses were 1:1 wouldn't we expect RU to be more successful considering they have massed so much at Bakmut?
As far as offensives go, UKR hasn't even really tried as far as we can tell unless they actually have and we couldn't tell because they have no strength.  I think TheCapt is right, that there will be a lot of corrosion before UKR makes any big move, and why would they do this while RU can focus defenses on just the roads due to mud?
Another point that came up was overall strength b/w the sides.  But it's not the overall that matters so much. If UKR can defend w economy of force across the front while achieving significant local superiority, that's what matters.  Meanwhile, RU has a much greater fear UKR breakthrough because it's much more vulnerable -- only ~70-100km from sourthern front to the coast, and don't need to even go that far to cut off everything west of a deep salient on that front.  There were times on the WW2 russian front where there was relative parity in numbers while RU was able to build significant local superiority.  Part of this was because they weren't concerned w German attacks across most of the front -- infantry dominant areas weren't going to do anything offensively that would really matter, so RU could hold w minimum force.  
So sadly I can say I don't really know much right now.  I have my wishful thinking/bias, which is at least based on some evidence, but certainly I could be wrong and UKR is weaker than I think.
 

Happy St Paddy's Day
https://dnyuz.com/2023/03/17/russia-losing-troops-so-fast-they-may-collapse-by-years-end-ex-general/
“Russia is being attrited at such a rate that they may collapse before the end of this year, assuming the West delivers in time what we’ve promised. War is a test of will and a test of logistics,” Hodges tweeted in reference to an assessment by military expert Marcus M. Keupp, who leads the Department of Defense Economics at the Military Academy of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
During his interview with the German news outlet, Keupp agreed that the battle in Bakhmut illustrates the meaning of “war of attrition” in reality.
“The current situation in Bakhmut particularly symbolizes this fact. A look at the numbers makes this clear: In order to take the city, the Russian leadership sends out battalions in mindless frontal attacks, the units are quickly shot up. If they lose a battalion every day, they have to get replacements. But from where? So other parts of the front are being thinned out,” he said.
I would kiss that dirty old blarney stone if this could be made to happen. 

Absolutely.  In fact it takes on a "key rate if systemic attrition" aspect.   Here ISR and precision become key.  However, if the UA runs out of ammo for this sort of fight, they likely will not have enough for a big offensive action either.  Slow pace by conventional standards is also a clear factor - we saw this at Kherson.  This is a case of western biases and lack of understanding on how these wars unfold driving advice to political will.
Someone just posted an article on some expert decrying the UA for not having enough "mission command".   Frankly looking at how this thing is going I am not even sure mission command is the right way to go, but in the west we have pushed it into an almost religious dogma.  This advice get to the political level and becomes pressure on the UA to "fight and win like us" when we have zero proof it would even work given the same constraints/restraints.  So the western political level needs and education on war, let's face it no one has had to fight one like this since the 50s - maybe parts of Vietnam.  The good news is that Russia hasn't either. 
Corrosive warfare will take longer and will need to be more deliberate.  It is in effect precision attrition.  It takes time to break a military operational system and in a lot of cases we really do not have all the metrics or indicators figured out.
But door #2 is to try and force generate enough mass to overcome the ISR/strike problems and then project and protect it in this environment.  We have watched the RA struggle with this for over a year and fail.  The UA will likely corrode and then use mass when the shaping phase is done.  Everyone in the west seems to be expecting Gulf War but I think it will be more like Kherson, or Kharkiv if we are lucky.

Showing that quality of video is a bit of a flex. That resolution transmitted in realtime is no joke.  "this is the capability we're willing to show you publicly from these drones.  Think about what we aren't showing."

I think you’re missing a trailing zero on the number of MQ-9s in US service. 

The thing that should really be bumming Russia out is the quality of the video.  That's high quality, sharp, no rolling shutter distortion, and enough bandwidth to get it in realtime halfway around the world.

The thing that should really be bumming Russia out is the quality of the video.  That's high quality, sharp, no rolling shutter distortion, and enough bandwidth to get it in realtime halfway around the world.

Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was stopped at a light in an old Volare I'd inherited from my grandparents.  It had already been totaled by the insurance company because my grandpa had crunched a front corner, and they told him to do what he wanted with it, but he couldn't keep it if he wanted the payout.  I looked over to the right and didn't see a car.  Then I noticed a roofline below the edge of my window, and looked more carefully - it was a Countach.  It quickly went through my teenage brain that with one little twitch I could destroy a few hundred $K worth of car and it wouldn't leave a noticeable mark on mine.  I did manage to refrain.

The thing that should really be bumming Russia out is the quality of the video.  That's high quality, sharp, no rolling shutter distortion, and enough bandwidth to get it in realtime halfway around the world.

Probably more a case of testosterone poisoning on the pilot's side, thinking he's better than he is.

Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was stopped at a light in an old Volare I'd inherited from my grandparents.  It had already been totaled by the insurance company because my grandpa had crunched a front corner, and they told him to do what he wanted with it, but he couldn't keep it if he wanted the payout.  I looked over to the right and didn't see a car.  Then I noticed a roofline below the edge of my window, and looked more carefully - it was a Countach.  It quickly went through my teenage brain that with one little twitch I could destroy a few hundred $K worth of car and it wouldn't leave a noticeable mark on mine.  I did manage to refrain.

Unless your the pilot. Then you have a great vid of yourself smashing 30 million dollars worth of someone else stuff then walking away with a shrug.*
* Barring any damage to your jet.

I haven't done it for a long time but before CM the best combat simulators were flight simulators and it has been a long time since I have played in one but if I wanted to fly as close as possible to something else in the air the was going much slower than me you would sort of do what the Russian pilot did. They wanted to dump fuel on it so you have to pass close and above it.
You have to see it so you would start at a lower elevation and climb towards it with your aim point being just above it by the distance you wanted to miss. Being slightly off axis also gives yourself more space to miss it.
The fastest way to move yourself in the air jumpy fast wise is to rip back in the stick which means you probably want to be well above your stall speed which may exacerbate the speed difference. You only have two hands so one hand is one the stick and the other dumping fuel at some point so its not on the throttle. 

The video shows the fighter approaching from the rear (the drone's propeller is a pusher type).

Wow. Another joke?
I mean, yes it can.  It’s up to the Russians whether they want to cross the next line and attack said drone but I’m not even arguing that the attack was unwarranted, I’m arguing that it was done in a reckless and stupid way.  I feel like this isn’t a productive sub-thread though, so will probably leave things there.
Oh and I meant to say it would have been a major international crisis if the SU-27 pilot had misjudged and gone down too, which he could easily have done if he made contact with the drone any more heavily than he actually did. My apologies if I wasn’t clear. 

The AWACS and JSTARS seem to reliably fly over NATO countries, unless they're flying with their ADS-B turned off over the BS.  So an attack on one of them by Russia would be a much more overt act of aggression and likely leave them with an undeclared no-fly zone.

China is one of the few countries with sufficient individual heft that if they said "cut it out!", everyone involved would have to at least look up from what they're doing.
Not military heft (at least not yet, due to a lack of expeditionary capability), but economic.
It'll be ... an interesting inflection point if/when they start wielding that power, under the guise of peacemaker.

The AWACS and JSTARS seem to reliably fly over NATO countries, unless they're flying with their ADS-B turned off over the BS.  So an attack on one of them by Russia would be a much more overt act of aggression and likely leave them with an undeclared no-fly zone.

So on Bakhmut, we are hearing an entire spectrum from "it is a deathtrap for the UA!!  It will collapse at any moment, run away!", to "It sucks because we are not supported and untrained, arty is running out of ammo", to "It is ok and we are making it work", to "It is an RA graveyard, and we are crushing them, we have a lot of arty ammo".
This tracks with these sorts of situations in the past.  The truth is likely down the middle and the extreme POVs are happening but are somewhat on extreme ends of the experience (maybe).
One thing we can say is that Bakhmut is holding, well past mainstream news media prepping for its fall.  Ukrainian and military leadership appear united and in line on the battle.  The RA is smashing up against this fight and moving slowly, the steady stream of video (which is skewed in the west) demonstrates that the battle is costly to the RA - how costly remains to be fully seen.  My instinct, and history tells us that it is likely skewing towards "high".
The biggest factor in attrition of combat power as a whole is the force generation competition.  We are seeing older and older RA equipment and more reports of poorly trained troops.  The UA has reports of poor training and support but also a video streams of newer (and western) equipment rolling into this fight.  Add to the this the steady increase in UA asks for offensive equipment and it is clear that this whole thing is not close to being done yet.
What I am looking for in particular is culminating points. The RA might actually be past theirs, which would have been last summer and this entire thing is a zombie operation for domestic audience consumption - there is a whole lotta "righteous sacrifice" narratives floating around the RA info sphere right now.  The UA has not hit theirs yet, that point going to be key for how this war ends.  Likely culminating point scenarios for the UA:
- This spring in the event of an operational offensive that fails.  Based on Bakhmut, I would say the ability to "freeze" this conflict is in Ukraine's hands right now and this would be on the table if this is as far as the UA can go for this war.
- This summer with a successful operational offensive but no tank left in the gas for finishing off Crimea or Donbas
- This fall, or next spring after retaking a pre-2014 region - my money is on Crimea because it makes the most military sense.
- The whole perogy, likely as a result of a total RA/Russian state collapse and then we got a whole new set of regional security problems to deal with. 
Once culmination happens (and we are talking strategic here), this war could drag on but it will be more likely more in line with the 2014-2022 period of a nasty open sore while both sides try to reconstitute for another round in a few years.  The question of how that reconstitution race would pan out is interesting.