chrisl

I've just passed to this page and read THIS. Guys, I though this was just a joke, but now my heart is melted down and I can't reject this gift. Though, I feel myself awkward... and also huge gratitude to all of you and Kinophile personally for idea     

That just has "Target" painted all over it, and for a technically advanced opponent, the lasers and radar are a screaming beacon saying "Yo, here I am!!!". The sensor system needs to be more distributed, which is at least plausible now with the speed and size of modern computing.  Basically everything on the field needs to be feeding data to a system that integrates it all to create Borg spotting.  Because it is, but without quite doing the implants.
Counter UAV will be provided by a distributed system that has multiple sensor types and multiple response systems, so there won't be a single "anti-UAV vehicle" that can be taken out to make the rest easy targets.  Counter drone would be "managed" from behind the lines using data gathered from everybody.   Counter UAV fire can be a mix of lasers, projectiles, RF interference, and mechanical (e.g. net dragged into the props), depending on the UAV and who's around.  Lasers are nice, but the kind of high energy lasers needed to take out UAVs at long range probably aren't going to be small for a while, will probably be fairly fragile, and are potentially big beacons.
 
Every soldier and vehicle should eventually have at least one drone that's coupled to their VR goggles.  The VR goggles will mix a straight through view of the world with the Borg spotting above, combined with eye tracking, so that when the soldier looks somewhere they get a fusion of direct view, a personal drone view, and the overlay from the fusion system telling them what's behind any obstacle in the direct view.  And they'll be able to target things that are out of direct LOS because the integrated system will be like Longbow on steroids - they'll target the tank before it ever knows they're there.  At least if the counter UAV systems worked.
 
More like Nicolas II...

90% FUNDED!
(I got excited and forgot I'd increased the level to $1500)
https://www.gofundme.com/manage/get-haiduk-a-laptop#
 

BTW, who'd be interested in a GoFundMe to get @Haiduka new laptop?
Not kidding.
I don't think there's anyone who's contributed more to our understanding of the war.
PM me to confirm interest.

I saw that article last night and thought it was weird that the reporters couldn't figure out that given the ISR imbalance and politics, nobody in the US admin can really talk about how much they might know even if they do have a lot of current detail. 

Propellent issue combined with the round's warhead being somehow jammed in the barrel - some combination of the two. The actual warhead is very unlikely to explode. To arm fuses in US artillery requires "setback" (the shock of firing) PLUS a couple of rotations of the round. There are 1.5 turns in the barrel of a 105mm. If I remember correctly it takes 3 turns to arm.
But let's say the barrel got "dented" somehow so there was a projection or bump on the inside. Now this would be hard to do. More likely a barrel will crack than deform. But that could jam the round. All that propellent gas has to go somewhere. The breechblock is most likely stronger than the barrel, so the barrel is going to give at wherever it's weakest point is. Small flaw, crack.
Dave

Someone needs to build this out in CM.

Thanks ) Just became some more of work, my wife turned back and often occupies PC because her work, also it's hard to live three months 24/7 as war news translator, so I took small vacations 

I saw a tweet a few days ago that claimed the UA now had more NATO caliber artillery shells than remaining Warsaw Pact caliber shells.  If the west hadn't stepped in and started pouring in equipment and ammunition it's plausible that RU was going to win at least a short term military victory around now just by running Ukraine out of ammunition, even at enormous human and materiel cost.  They'd still eventually lose because they'd be stuck with an insurgency that would never end, at much greater cost than their Afghanistan adventure, but they'd be in a position to at least temporarily claim conquest of Ukraine. The early success of the UA and the speed of western supply sort of flipped that on Russia - even with "full mobilization" at this point they'd be throwing progressively worse trained and equipped men into an effectively infinite supply of increasingly more effective weapons.

I saw a tweet a few days ago that claimed the UA now had more NATO caliber artillery shells than remaining Warsaw Pact caliber shells.  If the west hadn't stepped in and started pouring in equipment and ammunition it's plausible that RU was going to win at least a short term military victory around now just by running Ukraine out of ammunition, even at enormous human and materiel cost.  They'd still eventually lose because they'd be stuck with an insurgency that would never end, at much greater cost than their Afghanistan adventure, but they'd be in a position to at least temporarily claim conquest of Ukraine. The early success of the UA and the speed of western supply sort of flipped that on Russia - even with "full mobilization" at this point they'd be throwing progressively worse trained and equipped men into an effectively infinite supply of increasingly more effective weapons.

I saw a tweet a few days ago that claimed the UA now had more NATO caliber artillery shells than remaining Warsaw Pact caliber shells.  If the west hadn't stepped in and started pouring in equipment and ammunition it's plausible that RU was going to win at least a short term military victory around now just by running Ukraine out of ammunition, even at enormous human and materiel cost.  They'd still eventually lose because they'd be stuck with an insurgency that would never end, at much greater cost than their Afghanistan adventure, but they'd be in a position to at least temporarily claim conquest of Ukraine. The early success of the UA and the speed of western supply sort of flipped that on Russia - even with "full mobilization" at this point they'd be throwing progressively worse trained and equipped men into an effectively infinite supply of increasingly more effective weapons.

why I remember the day when your news came on a piece of paper - you could write all the comments you wanted... but nobody could read them... you youngsters.  Then we'd started yelling at the TV....

And is there any legal reason that NATO couldn't enforce a safe transit shipping lane/zone from the air?  It would largely be over international waters or NATO coastline, with just a very short zone in Ukrainian waters that could be easily protected by shore batteries.  It may or may not be politically viable, but giving notice that vessels attacking non-belligerent commercial ships in will be immediately sunk is probably legally defensible under maritime law.

A few decades ago I got to do sort of a controlled experiment to test that.  I was responsible for overseeing four teams of  the top scientists in a particular flavor of space research and engineers from four big aerospace companies.  30 to 40 people per team. They were all given the same amount of money and about two years to come up with all the possible ways to do a particular thing in space (totally unclassified, but not really relevant here), and essentially no constraints, and they were all kept firewalled from each other except for one review in the middle to present all their ideas and one review at the end of detailed studies of the top few.  I got to see them all throughout.  More than 95% of what each team came up with was duplicated by all the other teams, and there were really only one or two unique-ish ideas on each team.  They all narrowed it down to the same two basic distinct concepts, and we ended up with two groups each detailing versions of those.  Because as you say, physics is the same for everybody, so if you ask a bunch of different experts how to to do the same thing, or what's possible given certain information, everybody is going to come up with similar answers.     The situation in Ukraine is more complicated than physics, but there are also a bunch of people with relevant backgrounds trying to figure it out, and it helps that CM is heavily oriented towards being a quantitative model that gets a lot of testing against historical data.  

A few decades ago I got to do sort of a controlled experiment to test that.  I was responsible for overseeing four teams of  the top scientists in a particular flavor of space research and engineers from four big aerospace companies.  30 to 40 people per team. They were all given the same amount of money and about two years to come up with all the possible ways to do a particular thing in space (totally unclassified, but not really relevant here), and essentially no constraints, and they were all kept firewalled from each other except for one review in the middle to present all their ideas and one review at the end of detailed studies of the top few.  I got to see them all throughout.  More than 95% of what each team came up with was duplicated by all the other teams, and there were really only one or two unique-ish ideas on each team.  They all narrowed it down to the same two basic distinct concepts, and we ended up with two groups each detailing versions of those.  Because as you say, physics is the same for everybody, so if you ask a bunch of different experts how to to do the same thing, or what's possible given certain information, everybody is going to come up with similar answers.     The situation in Ukraine is more complicated than physics, but there are also a bunch of people with relevant backgrounds trying to figure it out, and it helps that CM is heavily oriented towards being a quantitative model that gets a lot of testing against historical data.  

A few decades ago I got to do sort of a controlled experiment to test that.  I was responsible for overseeing four teams of  the top scientists in a particular flavor of space research and engineers from four big aerospace companies.  30 to 40 people per team. They were all given the same amount of money and about two years to come up with all the possible ways to do a particular thing in space (totally unclassified, but not really relevant here), and essentially no constraints, and they were all kept firewalled from each other except for one review in the middle to present all their ideas and one review at the end of detailed studies of the top few.  I got to see them all throughout.  More than 95% of what each team came up with was duplicated by all the other teams, and there were really only one or two unique-ish ideas on each team.  They all narrowed it down to the same two basic distinct concepts, and we ended up with two groups each detailing versions of those.  Because as you say, physics is the same for everybody, so if you ask a bunch of different experts how to to do the same thing, or what's possible given certain information, everybody is going to come up with similar answers.     The situation in Ukraine is more complicated than physics, but there are also a bunch of people with relevant backgrounds trying to figure it out, and it helps that CM is heavily oriented towards being a quantitative model that gets a lot of testing against historical data.  

There is retaking Crimea militarily, but there's also making it unusable to Russia to the point where they have to give it up. I imagine the latter us much more doable with Harpoons and SAMs + the destruction of the Kerch bridge.

Schneider's cynicism is a bit weird given that we've just witnessed the most effective integration of intelligence, diplomacy and military initiative since WWII. Are there bumps on the road with allies? Sure. But in the end, the intelligence is driven by the US and there's not an ounce of slack in that system right now. NATO? Well sure...but that's not where the real game is happening.

So sounds like we'll need to have CMPV -- Combat Mission Polish Valor.  Poles w NATO/US kit fighting Russia.  I like it already.  I base this on the upcoming invasion of Poland that is so widely discussed by Russian pundits.

There are times you have to take a calculated risk, and accept that life isn't perfect. Every munition we send to Ukraine is being used to kill the army that those munitions were BUILT to kill. The only other two opponents that could really stress the U.S. military are China, and Iran.  And since I think the U.S. has ZERO appetite for another mideast war, that pretty much leaves China. Unless we are going to start shipping HIMARS to Taiwan in en masse, now, today, we need to start shipping them to Ukraine. If we need a whole new factory for GMLRS, then start pouring concrete. And yes I know it will take three years to get the first missile out the door of the new facility. But it will take 3 years plus how ever long we bleep around before starting on it, SO START.

Others have already poked at the other points reasonably well, but I think you're already wrong here.  Miltech favors the one who has it, and right now it's the defenders.  When UA counterattacks and RU is defending, it will be the attackers who have it. 
Russia doesn't have or have any way to get the sensors, electronics, and aerospace assets that are currently helping make the UA defense so effective.  RU may have started out with more UAVs, than UA, but a commercial DSLR doesn't give you the same capability as a modern purpose-built set of VNIR sensors, satellite nav, and laser guides if you want to drop rounds directly through the tops of vehicles from 15+ km away.  You also need those kinds of sensors and electonics to make things like NLAWs and Javelins as effective as they are.
RU also doesn't have the capability to create a broad encrypted comm network anymore - they have essentially no semiconductor industry of their own and China is largely prohibited from giving them anything modern, under penalty of semiconductor fabs moving from Shenzhen to Columbus.  
RU may be a space power on paper, but they've been unable to exploit their launch capability (propellant in tubes without bombs), largely due to their lack of VLSI.  They're basically 40 years behind in sensors and electronics.  They have two aging ground imaging satellites that may or may not still work.  They have no space based SAR and too little control of the sky to use airborne SAR in the unlikely event they have it. They have their own satellite nav with GLONASS, but can't even equip their own vehicles with RU-made ground stations - they depend on western COTS units.  And the west is capable of injecting error into the signals over Russia and Ukraine.  The lack of space obs and ELINT capability makes RU largely blind to anything they don't have human eyes on, and the lack of secure comm means that UA both knows what RU is doing and knows what RU knows about what UA is doing.  
They're really good at putting propellant in tubes with a bomb on the front. But even their high precision stuff isn't all that high precision, and they're likely to have a hard time making more of it as they run out.
 
And Poland might be about to ensure that Ukraine gets HIMARs.  I suspect Poland will be in it to the end - they've been there before and every Pole knows that but for NATO membership, they'd probably be next on the list.  And while the stuff the US is supplying is more than rounding error in the military budget, it's also all being used for exactly what it was originally designed for.  And most of the money isn't going to Ukraine, it's going to Raytheon, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, Teledyne, etc, and I'm sure they're loving it and would be happy to resupply the US with the very latest to replace the stuff that's being shipped off to the Black Sea and their lobbyists and marketing people are no doubt encouraging long term support of Ukraine.

The UA probably has more accurate information on the quantity and state of RU forces around them than the Kremlin does.

Others have already poked at the other points reasonably well, but I think you're already wrong here.  Miltech favors the one who has it, and right now it's the defenders.  When UA counterattacks and RU is defending, it will be the attackers who have it. 
Russia doesn't have or have any way to get the sensors, electronics, and aerospace assets that are currently helping make the UA defense so effective.  RU may have started out with more UAVs, than UA, but a commercial DSLR doesn't give you the same capability as a modern purpose-built set of VNIR sensors, satellite nav, and laser guides if you want to drop rounds directly through the tops of vehicles from 15+ km away.  You also need those kinds of sensors and electonics to make things like NLAWs and Javelins as effective as they are.
RU also doesn't have the capability to create a broad encrypted comm network anymore - they have essentially no semiconductor industry of their own and China is largely prohibited from giving them anything modern, under penalty of semiconductor fabs moving from Shenzhen to Columbus.  
RU may be a space power on paper, but they've been unable to exploit their launch capability (propellant in tubes without bombs), largely due to their lack of VLSI.  They're basically 40 years behind in sensors and electronics.  They have two aging ground imaging satellites that may or may not still work.  They have no space based SAR and too little control of the sky to use airborne SAR in the unlikely event they have it. They have their own satellite nav with GLONASS, but can't even equip their own vehicles with RU-made ground stations - they depend on western COTS units.  And the west is capable of injecting error into the signals over Russia and Ukraine.  The lack of space obs and ELINT capability makes RU largely blind to anything they don't have human eyes on, and the lack of secure comm means that UA both knows what RU is doing and knows what RU knows about what UA is doing.  
They're really good at putting propellant in tubes with a bomb on the front. But even their high precision stuff isn't all that high precision, and they're likely to have a hard time making more of it as they run out.
 
And Poland might be about to ensure that Ukraine gets HIMARs.  I suspect Poland will be in it to the end - they've been there before and every Pole knows that but for NATO membership, they'd probably be next on the list.  And while the stuff the US is supplying is more than rounding error in the military budget, it's also all being used for exactly what it was originally designed for.  And most of the money isn't going to Ukraine, it's going to Raytheon, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, Teledyne, etc, and I'm sure they're loving it and would be happy to resupply the US with the very latest to replace the stuff that's being shipped off to the Black Sea and their lobbyists and marketing people are no doubt encouraging long term support of Ukraine.

There's only a single country in the world that threatens NATO and it's Russia.
There's also a country that's fighting Russia alone against all odds and it's Ukraine.
Ukraine already knows how, but most importantly - is willing to defend against Russia.
The math is blunt here. Not accepting Ukraine into NATO will be a net loss for an alliance. Because it's the only way Ukraine (and whole Europe) gets true peace, while NATO gets an experienced, battle hardened force that will be more than happy to play ball with all the NATO requirements and demands once this is all over.

Schneckenschreck