cyrano01

At the risk of dragging in more historical analogies, what you describe sounds remarkably like the original torpedo boats when they first became a thing in the late C19th-early C20th which similarly scared many naval thinkers of the time. That's torpedo boats before the long, slow evolution into torpedo boat-destroyers...destroyers...something about the size of a cruiser like, say, a Type 45. Whatever the white elephant type qualities of the aircraft carrier, British or otherwise, who fancies a bet that they end up as a means of conveying your swarm of UAVs into a lunch position where they can be unleashed on the other side's swarm of UAVs, or something.

Interesting question. The earlier item about shell shortages said that this was undermining the UKR counter-battery capability and I wonder about UAVs doing CB. If your opponent was moderately competent and willing to shoot and scoot then you would have to have your UAVs already in the air near the target battery already in order to get your CB mission away in a timely fashion. Artillery shells and rockets arrive a bit quicker.

Always tricky to pick out the right lessons though, and even harder to do so if they contradict your existing doctrine. The then Chief of the Air Staff(CAS), Sir Cyril Newall, described the Luftwaffe's support of ground operations in Spain as a gross misuse of air-power! To be fair to Newall he was subsequently CAS during the Battle of Britain so perhaps deserves some of Dowding and Park's reflected glory.

Double post

So, my current reading is air-power doctrinal development between WW1 and WW2, and this resembles the way (mostly) British and American, bomber-mafia airmen sold the 'knockout blow' between the wars to their political masters as the way to avoid all that attritional, positional warfare of 1914-18; only for it to turn out that a determined opponent with some air denial technologies could make air warfare just as attritional. John Terraine described the politics/doctrine circle with the phrase, 'if the RAF played a prettier tune than the Western Front of 1914-18, they (political leaders) would prefer to listen to that.'

Absolutely. it is also worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of other things that affect European elections than Russia and the Ukrainian war. Times is 'ard and, as a result, incumbent governments tend to take a beating. Since parties of the populist righthave largely been in opposition for most of the last couple of decades they will tend to benefit from this cf Meloni and Wilders. I can't speak for the rest of Europe but in the UK the top priorities heading towards the next general election seem to be the cost of living, the state of the health service, cost/availability of housing and immigration. The average voter probably couldn't identify Ukraine on a map and thinks Kyiv is something to do with chicken and garlic. The idea of a pro-Russian groundswell seems far fetched.

Exactly; when he said 'we are given a firing position' that kind of suggests maybe they are being guided into place by someone with a UAS.

Interesting paper, for some reason I had never stumbled across it. Entertainingly, the nearest defensive force ratio that BLH mentions to the 300 per km appears to be the Boers during the second Boer war. Complete with open veldt, no usable indirect artillery fire and rifle dominance, certainly part of the previous era of defensive predominance albeit with radically different technologies. Kind of hoping that the Ukrainian commanders are a bit sharper than Buller or Methuen, at least there's no danger they have old Etonians in positions of command.

Hell, at least we were in 'good' (for certain values of good) copmany in thinking that the Russian defensive density was breakable. here's RAND from July 2023 telling us that we are the Normandy 1944 rather than France/Flanders 1916/17... https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2023/07/a-winnable-war.html

My understanding is that, in addition to the above procedural measures, they will have a library of the known acoustic signatures of enemy submarines collected during peacetime (is SONINT or ACOUSINT a word?), possibly to the extent tha they can tell one Akula from another.

I see where you're coming from although I think, similarly to Karl Popper, that it is OK, indeed normal, to come up with a theory and then test it against the facts. What happens far too often in reality, is that only a carefully selected, favourable set of facts are considered in testing the theory. As David Morgan-Owen (British strategic historian) commented when discussing historical parallels for the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), if you're going to learn from history it pays to get the history right.

Clearly they need a 'New Model Army'

Tend to agree regarding our societal level lack of appetite for sacrifice in the 'West', that said a comparison with fin de siècle Edwardian Europe has its limits. Entitled those societies may have been but subsequent events did not show a lack of willingness to sacrifice, however badly directed or misguided. I've a suspicion that perhaps they were rather more cohesive and obedient to authority than today.

When I first heard it Zhukov with a West Yorkshire accent amused me greatly, sounded alarmingly like a Chief Technology Officer I used to work for.

This, absolutely in spades. Historians hat on...<hyperbole> responding to the demands of the Ukraine war by stepping up tank production would be akin to responding to the British 1915 shell shortages by increasing production of cavalry sabres and lances. </hyperbole>

Yes, you would have thought that the dangers of outsourcing strategic production would have been underlined both by the Ukraine war and before that Covid where getting hold of PPE (masks, overalls etc.) and vaccines on the international market suddenly got very difficult as national interest cut off free trade. If you want to step up domestic shell production you have to be prepared to commit resources to doing so and there are limits to which Western governments will do that when they don't see an immediate existential threat. Oddly enough I recently went to a local history talk (I'm in North West England) which touched on this very problem historically. The great munitions shortage of 1915 led to huge chunks of the local economy in this area, mostly textiles manufacture, being re-purposed to make military supplies. Local cotton mills were converted to churn out components for 18 pdr shells and Stokes mortar bombs. Short of that sort of national ecenomic mobilisation there are always going to be hard limits on the willingness to invest in munition production with theprospect of closing it down as soon as demand falls.

Mind you I am still trying to make up my mind whether Raglan, Cardigan and Lord Look-On would raise or lower the average quality of Russian generalship were they added to the current crew.

Yeah, I know, I just couldn't resist the 'Where Eagles Dare' quote.

All true and I'm not staking out ground as the Drone Ranger here. In truth don't really know where to start the analysis to determine whether our putative Starship Troopers stack up against a drone swarm. Soldiers, tanks, aircraft and ships aren't cost effective against those weapons but they may well be against the system delivering the weapon (anothe soldier, tank, aircraft and ship/submarine respectively). Would our powered-armour assisted infantryman be cost effective against the system delivering the UAVs (a man with a controller or a simple launcher for an autonomous UAV)? I don't know but it has to be open to question. Ah, ninja'd by The_Capt who said it far better than I would have done.

'This operation would make the charge of the light brigade look like a sensible military exercise.'

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

I was starting to think something similar but I can't help wonder about the likely cost and cost/effectiveness of MI troopers. At what point do the mobility-suited, infantry soldiers start to resemble one-man tankettes for practical purposes? How does their cost-effectiveness stack up against lots of UAVs, probably a mix of FPV and autonomous? Having seen the videos of indidual Russians being pursued by UAVs then how do we avoid "Hapless' Heroes" (I acknowledge we have work to do on your MI platoon name) spending all their time trying to avoid a one-to-one with a suicide drone? In truth I don't even know where to start in doing any sort of analysis here.

Totally OT I fear but I have a feeling that the two torpedo hits on the Belgrano were both direct hits. The MKVIII torpedo was essentially a pre-WW2 vintage design.

Sounds about right. Summed up to me in a 1980s tea-break discussion at a UK defence establishment, with an RAF Tornado pilot (whose role could have included delivery of the proverbial bucket of instant sunshine): 'You have to realise, Cyrano, that wholesale slaughter (of civillians) is part of the day job but retail is completely out of the question.'

Strike hard who cares — shoot straight who can — The odds are on the cheaper man unmanned system. There, fixed it for Kipling, although it doesn't quite scan.