chrisl

You don't look for the pipelines, you look for the fuel trucks. Those are rather findable.

Would Ukraine have that hard of a time figuring out where Russian pipelines were given US ISR and analytical capabilities plus their own on the ground humint? Actually…no, they wouldn’t. That strikes me as one of those things that experts say to sound smart but…well….isn’t.

If you try to read UKR social media you can encounter with many mentions and memes about watermelons. This is almost a symbol of Kherson oblast, which supply with own famous variety of watermelons "Khersonskyi" - big striped ones all country ) So, phrases and pictures about watermelons mean our offensive in Kherson )
  

I've seen exactly one video that I'll probably never find again that showed a barrage of nearly all airbursts.  You could see the puffs of smoke from the shells and shadows on the ground, then the smoke drifting.
managed to find it:
 

Written in Russian.

Written in Russian.

Missing link?
And when does the Fall mud season start?  With the Russian GLOC stretched way out by their ammo dumps exploding for 100's of km and UA precision (and partisans) that can shut down rail lines, RU will be stuck trying to move tons of ammo just-in-time through hundreds of km of mud.  That may effectively silence their artillery within range of UA lines.  And given that ammo dumps on the Russian side of the border seem to be fair game, it could even silence the arty from the Donbas.

Or maybe precision has an insidiousness about it that will beat mass without big frontal assaults.  Do you need a major offensive with companies of tanks roaring across fields when you can write your name in holes on the bridge the enemy needs to supply ~20K troops?  Or level neighborhoods when you can fly a drone over their BMP or stolen car when they're on the way to loot the grocery and drop a grenade through the hatch or sunroof?  Why not "quietly" go about blowing up every supply cache bigger than a home depot bucket so the supply lines are stretched to 300 km to the depot and they're stuck trying to just-in-time hand grenades so they don't get blown up by some drone that's sloppy with its cigarette butts.  Eventually the undertrained guys in holes who aren't getting paid or fed or even supplied with bullets and are getting shot at and blown up might just up and walk the other way.

Or maybe precision has an insidiousness about it that will beat mass without big frontal assaults.  Do you need a major offensive with companies of tanks roaring across fields when you can write your name in holes on the bridge the enemy needs to supply ~20K troops?  Or level neighborhoods when you can fly a drone over their BMP or stolen car when they're on the way to loot the grocery and drop a grenade through the hatch or sunroof?  Why not "quietly" go about blowing up every supply cache bigger than a home depot bucket so the supply lines are stretched to 300 km to the depot and they're stuck trying to just-in-time hand grenades so they don't get blown up by some drone that's sloppy with its cigarette butts.  Eventually the undertrained guys in holes who aren't getting paid or fed or even supplied with bullets and are getting shot at and blown up might just up and walk the other way.

Or maybe precision has an insidiousness about it that will beat mass without big frontal assaults.  Do you need a major offensive with companies of tanks roaring across fields when you can write your name in holes on the bridge the enemy needs to supply ~20K troops?  Or level neighborhoods when you can fly a drone over their BMP or stolen car when they're on the way to loot the grocery and drop a grenade through the hatch or sunroof?  Why not "quietly" go about blowing up every supply cache bigger than a home depot bucket so the supply lines are stretched to 300 km to the depot and they're stuck trying to just-in-time hand grenades so they don't get blown up by some drone that's sloppy with its cigarette butts.  Eventually the undertrained guys in holes who aren't getting paid or fed or even supplied with bullets and are getting shot at and blown up might just up and walk the other way.

Or maybe precision has an insidiousness about it that will beat mass without big frontal assaults.  Do you need a major offensive with companies of tanks roaring across fields when you can write your name in holes on the bridge the enemy needs to supply ~20K troops?  Or level neighborhoods when you can fly a drone over their BMP or stolen car when they're on the way to loot the grocery and drop a grenade through the hatch or sunroof?  Why not "quietly" go about blowing up every supply cache bigger than a home depot bucket so the supply lines are stretched to 300 km to the depot and they're stuck trying to just-in-time hand grenades so they don't get blown up by some drone that's sloppy with its cigarette butts.  Eventually the undertrained guys in holes who aren't getting paid or fed or even supplied with bullets and are getting shot at and blown up might just up and walk the other way.

Is there any info out yet on the actual strength of the "fresh" 3rd Corps?  RU has been struggling since before day 1 to fill out its units to anything close to the full number of people.  Is this going to be the same thing, but with even less training?  They can send all the equipment to make it look like they're going to start an offensive in Donbas, but if nothing has more than a poorly trained driver and assistant driver, they're just going to get blown up in the parking lots.

Is there any info out yet on the actual strength of the "fresh" 3rd Corps?  RU has been struggling since before day 1 to fill out its units to anything close to the full number of people.  Is this going to be the same thing, but with even less training?  They can send all the equipment to make it look like they're going to start an offensive in Donbas, but if nothing has more than a poorly trained driver and assistant driver, they're just going to get blown up in the parking lots.

6 months is not a 'long' war, by any stretch. The only shorter one I can think of is the Falklands. And the Football War. Even GWI was longer, although granted not by much. And the French /were/ on the winning side in WWI.

We are taking a detour into a nuclear power discussion, but.... Grid disconnection was also a big problem at Fukashima. There just needs to be a new design requirement that nuclear plants  have a completely independent way to run there their own pumps and systems. You could do it by powering the pumps with steam directly, by having a separate small powerhouse that takes reactor steam and run it thru an appropriately sized turbine and generator, or even by the sort of fancy direct heat to electricity thermocouples that are used in many space probes. But if the reactor is hot there needs a to be a grid independent way to use that heat to run the systems that avoid bad outcomes.

That's where the asymmetry comes in.  Right now and for the foreseeable future, it takes a good fraction of the world's military spending to be able to set up the precision ISR/targeting/kill chain. That's not likely to change because a) money, and b) energy.  It takes enormous resources to put together the systems that make it possible, and it's not like there's a small, well defined set of stuff you can go buy to do it.  Given how distributed microelectronic manufacturing is, I'm not even sure if the US could do it alone within any reasonable future.  Countries will gradually figure out that wars of aggression are counterproductive and join the alliance, which might eventually be referred to as a "federation", gradually decreasing the number of wars on Earth to zero.  And then there will be Rollerball. 

But to me, you've just made the case for the opposite:  the purpose of trundling around all those tons of armour, using a huge finicky fuel guzzling engine and super heavy duty drivetrain, is to protect some squishies (crew), who in turn operate a large cannon (or whatever).
...So what if the crew instead hops out of their vehicle a couple of kms from the FEBA, takes cover with their gear (including drones) under some high tech ghillie suits and then maneuvers and fires the UGV remotely. Do you still need all that armour?
Pushing it even further, does our Mad Max Future look something like this? [/tongue in cheek, but only partly]
....The UGV war buggies are so modular, they are literally *designed* to blow apart, leaving certain components salvageable (rather than burning to the axles due to all that extra fuel and ammo cooking off).... Or the launcher is the bit that's designed to blow off, leaving the platform (hull down) able to pull back
...soon to come again, all shiny and chrome!  Witness me!!!!!!

That's where the asymmetry comes in.  Right now and for the foreseeable future, it takes a good fraction of the world's military spending to be able to set up the precision ISR/targeting/kill chain. That's not likely to change because a) money, and b) energy.  It takes enormous resources to put together the systems that make it possible, and it's not like there's a small, well defined set of stuff you can go buy to do it.  Given how distributed microelectronic manufacturing is, I'm not even sure if the US could do it alone within any reasonable future.  Countries will gradually figure out that wars of aggression are counterproductive and join the alliance, which might eventually be referred to as a "federation", gradually decreasing the number of wars on Earth to zero.  And then there will be Rollerball. 

If you can afford to do that, it’s easier to just make them economically dependent and run things indirectly.  Way easier, cheaper, and less unpleasant.  It’s really the way of the late 20th/early 21st centuries.

You can't park satellites in LEO over a location, but you can fill the sky with huge numbers of them (Starlink is just the beginning), pissing off the astronomy community and providing continuous hi resolution ISR.

From the perspective of someone who develops technology (I do aerospace, but not splody things, though I've been around some directed energy stuff), what you're trying to do is increase the amount of energy you deposit on the target, and ideally only the target of interest.  From 50,000 ft, there are two ways to do it - you can increase the energy density at the source or you can increase the energy density at the target.  Most of the history of weapons and splody things is increasing the energy at the source, with modest work on the energy at the target.  Bow and arrow to black powder to TNT to modern propellants propelling a pointy thing (kinetic energy only) or shell of black powder to TNT to tritonal, and increasing the amount of energy sent downrange by increasing rates of fire and masses of fire (lots of tubes, whether it's shoulder to shoulder lines of the Napoleonic era or bunches of 152 mm tubes today).
There appears to have been a major shift in western development that is all about precision of depositing that energy downrange.  There are a lot of reasons behind it, and it's been used and improved for decades, at least since GW1, but now we're seeing it in a peer conflict with Ukraine on the precision side and Russia on the mass side.  Some time ago, I worked on a space thing to do high precision astrometry - measuring positions of the stars to an unbelievable precision.  The US Navy was working on a similar mission at the same time, with a only a little lower precision - they and the USAF still do navigation by the stars (even if there might sometimes be a few layers of things in between).  I worked out what the precision mapped to on the surface of the earth: a few cm.  They didn't want to target a building, or even the door of a bunker like we saw on videos in GW1.  They wanted to be able to hit the doorknob.  If you can reliably hit a doorknob 1000 km away with a modest amount of high quality HE, you don't need to get 10x the energy density into the warhead.
That precision brings a lot of advantages. It makes your logistics a lot easier if you don't need to bring tons and tons of HE shells up to within 20 km of the front every day.  Way fewer trucks and truck drivers at risk, and less manufacturing committed to keeping that supply of trucks.  And so on..  And it reduces your risk of having the current Russian problem of those tons and tons of HE falling victim to stray butts because big tobacco has infiltrated your country. And it reduces collatoral damage - you don't have to bomb Belgorod flat and get RU civilians all worked up, you can blow up the ammunition dumps and the oil storage facilities without any stray shells (aside from what flies out of the ammo dump) going into civilian areas.  Increasing the energy of the splody part by making 10x more powerful HE runs you into the problem of having big ammo dumps full of stuff that you really don't want to be around when someone drops a butt in the wrong place.
And to get that precision you need a lot of resources - it's not just making a missile with a 5 cm CEP.  You need all the ISR to precisely find targets, the sensors for moving targets, the communication systems to convey that information to the control room or missile, etc.
You still need some mass, or at least ROF+retargeting speed.  Kind of like late in a game of Asteroids when there are a zillion asteroids coming at your one ship - if you can't fire and retarget fast enough, all the precision in the world won't help.  

From the perspective of someone who develops technology (I do aerospace, but not splody things, though I've been around some directed energy stuff), what you're trying to do is increase the amount of energy you deposit on the target, and ideally only the target of interest.  From 50,000 ft, there are two ways to do it - you can increase the energy density at the source or you can increase the energy density at the target.  Most of the history of weapons and splody things is increasing the energy at the source, with modest work on the energy at the target.  Bow and arrow to black powder to TNT to modern propellants propelling a pointy thing (kinetic energy only) or shell of black powder to TNT to tritonal, and increasing the amount of energy sent downrange by increasing rates of fire and masses of fire (lots of tubes, whether it's shoulder to shoulder lines of the Napoleonic era or bunches of 152 mm tubes today).
There appears to have been a major shift in western development that is all about precision of depositing that energy downrange.  There are a lot of reasons behind it, and it's been used and improved for decades, at least since GW1, but now we're seeing it in a peer conflict with Ukraine on the precision side and Russia on the mass side.  Some time ago, I worked on a space thing to do high precision astrometry - measuring positions of the stars to an unbelievable precision.  The US Navy was working on a similar mission at the same time, with a only a little lower precision - they and the USAF still do navigation by the stars (even if there might sometimes be a few layers of things in between).  I worked out what the precision mapped to on the surface of the earth: a few cm.  They didn't want to target a building, or even the door of a bunker like we saw on videos in GW1.  They wanted to be able to hit the doorknob.  If you can reliably hit a doorknob 1000 km away with a modest amount of high quality HE, you don't need to get 10x the energy density into the warhead.
That precision brings a lot of advantages. It makes your logistics a lot easier if you don't need to bring tons and tons of HE shells up to within 20 km of the front every day.  Way fewer trucks and truck drivers at risk, and less manufacturing committed to keeping that supply of trucks.  And so on..  And it reduces your risk of having the current Russian problem of those tons and tons of HE falling victim to stray butts because big tobacco has infiltrated your country. And it reduces collatoral damage - you don't have to bomb Belgorod flat and get RU civilians all worked up, you can blow up the ammunition dumps and the oil storage facilities without any stray shells (aside from what flies out of the ammo dump) going into civilian areas.  Increasing the energy of the splody part by making 10x more powerful HE runs you into the problem of having big ammo dumps full of stuff that you really don't want to be around when someone drops a butt in the wrong place.
And to get that precision you need a lot of resources - it's not just making a missile with a 5 cm CEP.  You need all the ISR to precisely find targets, the sensors for moving targets, the communication systems to convey that information to the control room or missile, etc.
You still need some mass, or at least ROF+retargeting speed.  Kind of like late in a game of Asteroids when there are a zillion asteroids coming at your one ship - if you can't fire and retarget fast enough, all the precision in the world won't help.  

From the perspective of someone who develops technology (I do aerospace, but not splody things, though I've been around some directed energy stuff), what you're trying to do is increase the amount of energy you deposit on the target, and ideally only the target of interest.  From 50,000 ft, there are two ways to do it - you can increase the energy density at the source or you can increase the energy density at the target.  Most of the history of weapons and splody things is increasing the energy at the source, with modest work on the energy at the target.  Bow and arrow to black powder to TNT to modern propellants propelling a pointy thing (kinetic energy only) or shell of black powder to TNT to tritonal, and increasing the amount of energy sent downrange by increasing rates of fire and masses of fire (lots of tubes, whether it's shoulder to shoulder lines of the Napoleonic era or bunches of 152 mm tubes today).
There appears to have been a major shift in western development that is all about precision of depositing that energy downrange.  There are a lot of reasons behind it, and it's been used and improved for decades, at least since GW1, but now we're seeing it in a peer conflict with Ukraine on the precision side and Russia on the mass side.  Some time ago, I worked on a space thing to do high precision astrometry - measuring positions of the stars to an unbelievable precision.  The US Navy was working on a similar mission at the same time, with a only a little lower precision - they and the USAF still do navigation by the stars (even if there might sometimes be a few layers of things in between).  I worked out what the precision mapped to on the surface of the earth: a few cm.  They didn't want to target a building, or even the door of a bunker like we saw on videos in GW1.  They wanted to be able to hit the doorknob.  If you can reliably hit a doorknob 1000 km away with a modest amount of high quality HE, you don't need to get 10x the energy density into the warhead.
That precision brings a lot of advantages. It makes your logistics a lot easier if you don't need to bring tons and tons of HE shells up to within 20 km of the front every day.  Way fewer trucks and truck drivers at risk, and less manufacturing committed to keeping that supply of trucks.  And so on..  And it reduces your risk of having the current Russian problem of those tons and tons of HE falling victim to stray butts because big tobacco has infiltrated your country. And it reduces collatoral damage - you don't have to bomb Belgorod flat and get RU civilians all worked up, you can blow up the ammunition dumps and the oil storage facilities without any stray shells (aside from what flies out of the ammo dump) going into civilian areas.  Increasing the energy of the splody part by making 10x more powerful HE runs you into the problem of having big ammo dumps full of stuff that you really don't want to be around when someone drops a butt in the wrong place.
And to get that precision you need a lot of resources - it's not just making a missile with a 5 cm CEP.  You need all the ISR to precisely find targets, the sensors for moving targets, the communication systems to convey that information to the control room or missile, etc.
You still need some mass, or at least ROF+retargeting speed.  Kind of like late in a game of Asteroids when there are a zillion asteroids coming at your one ship - if you can't fire and retarget fast enough, all the precision in the world won't help.  

From the perspective of someone who develops technology (I do aerospace, but not splody things, though I've been around some directed energy stuff), what you're trying to do is increase the amount of energy you deposit on the target, and ideally only the target of interest.  From 50,000 ft, there are two ways to do it - you can increase the energy density at the source or you can increase the energy density at the target.  Most of the history of weapons and splody things is increasing the energy at the source, with modest work on the energy at the target.  Bow and arrow to black powder to TNT to modern propellants propelling a pointy thing (kinetic energy only) or shell of black powder to TNT to tritonal, and increasing the amount of energy sent downrange by increasing rates of fire and masses of fire (lots of tubes, whether it's shoulder to shoulder lines of the Napoleonic era or bunches of 152 mm tubes today).
There appears to have been a major shift in western development that is all about precision of depositing that energy downrange.  There are a lot of reasons behind it, and it's been used and improved for decades, at least since GW1, but now we're seeing it in a peer conflict with Ukraine on the precision side and Russia on the mass side.  Some time ago, I worked on a space thing to do high precision astrometry - measuring positions of the stars to an unbelievable precision.  The US Navy was working on a similar mission at the same time, with a only a little lower precision - they and the USAF still do navigation by the stars (even if there might sometimes be a few layers of things in between).  I worked out what the precision mapped to on the surface of the earth: a few cm.  They didn't want to target a building, or even the door of a bunker like we saw on videos in GW1.  They wanted to be able to hit the doorknob.  If you can reliably hit a doorknob 1000 km away with a modest amount of high quality HE, you don't need to get 10x the energy density into the warhead.
That precision brings a lot of advantages. It makes your logistics a lot easier if you don't need to bring tons and tons of HE shells up to within 20 km of the front every day.  Way fewer trucks and truck drivers at risk, and less manufacturing committed to keeping that supply of trucks.  And so on..  And it reduces your risk of having the current Russian problem of those tons and tons of HE falling victim to stray butts because big tobacco has infiltrated your country. And it reduces collatoral damage - you don't have to bomb Belgorod flat and get RU civilians all worked up, you can blow up the ammunition dumps and the oil storage facilities without any stray shells (aside from what flies out of the ammo dump) going into civilian areas.  Increasing the energy of the splody part by making 10x more powerful HE runs you into the problem of having big ammo dumps full of stuff that you really don't want to be around when someone drops a butt in the wrong place.
And to get that precision you need a lot of resources - it's not just making a missile with a 5 cm CEP.  You need all the ISR to precisely find targets, the sensors for moving targets, the communication systems to convey that information to the control room or missile, etc.
You still need some mass, or at least ROF+retargeting speed.  Kind of like late in a game of Asteroids when there are a zillion asteroids coming at your one ship - if you can't fire and retarget fast enough, all the precision in the world won't help.  

Gonna climb up on a hill, dig in and say we've been watching the offensive for the last few weeks or so.

It's just getting hard to draw a line between traditional pre-offensive shaping operations and the potential for the long-range precision deep battle to be decisive in and of itself.