cyrano01
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Posts posted by cyrano01
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14 hours ago, LongLeftFlank said:
At the risk of being over my skis yet again here, can 152/155mm tube artillery be largely superseded in frontline use by a combo of:
-> drones for swarming or hunting mobile targets, and for nearly all forms of precision work and harassing fire
-> mortars for plastering attackers driven to ground by the drones. Are there cluster rounds for 122mm mortars?
-> heavy rockets mounted on a variety of mobile launchers, for demolishing fixed positions once identified
... with the other systems (HIMARs, ATACMs etc.) being used for more 'operational' targets. And remaining heavy tubes joining them in the long range PGM delivery category, ceding their longtime role as the high-volume 'fire hose' of the artillery arm?
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.
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2 hours ago, OBJ said:
To me from a future technical and tactical practice perspective, Ukraine is more like Spain 1936-39.
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.
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Double post
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2 hours ago, The_Capt said:
This is what selling manoeuvre warfare as a panacea over the last 30 years has gotten us into. Worse we sold it to politicians as “best” military advice - the political level loves low cost/low risk.
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Politics drove doctrine, which for follow on generations became dogma. The cold harsh light of reality is beginning to hit. The only question left now is: “how well do we adapt?”
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.'
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23 hours ago, Tux said:
What you think seems to be a reflection of Russia's own internal propaganda line - that the West spends all its time envying and plotting against the mighty Russian people. It's just bollocks (oh, there we are - the one-word response made it into print after all).
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.
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35 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Now link those two guys to UAS who can see all that hardware from 10kms away and tell the ATGM team exactly what field to be in. You heard the guy in the video “we stopped the column”. Two men and a single Javelin system.
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.
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16 hours ago, The_Capt said:
Another paper on the subject. Punchline is that we are way off historical norms for a high intensity conventional conflict:
At 300 per km, it really looks like a Bn is covering what a division used to in WW2 and what I suspect a Bde was supposed to in the Cold War.
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.
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41 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
I am not sure that Russian force generation was the defining factor. Those hastily trained troops should not have been able to hold those lines with the force density we saw. We are talking conscripts facing US C4ISR and modern weaponry. Standard doctrine says it takes about a full battalion - around 1000 troops to hold a km. That is enough for solid forward density, depth, a reserve, support and some sort of troop rotations.
Even with minefields. RA was doing it with 300 troops (from the Russi report from Sep). Tossing away rotations -because Russia- that means they had about a company per km with maybe a bit of depth and no reserves. Very limited support. Basically 150 guys with drones and ATGMs. A few tanks to pull up for sniping. And AH. With conscripts?! While being hammered by western modern artillery, deep strike and UAS. About the only thing the RA had was EW and that was not airtight.
So yes, the RA was able to keep up with losses. But the very low density of the original requirement simply does not compute. If I only need to replace 300 per km at pace, the bar is way lower than it used to be. Like at Kyiv, the UA likely had ridiculous force ratio advantages…and still could not break that line. If 300 mobiks are all that is needed to hold a mine belt something has fundamentally changed. Finally this wasn’t one attack. They did it for the entire summer. We are talking 800km of frontage. We know their vehicle fleets are badly depleted. Artillery is struggling. C4ISR must have improved - this matches observations. And yet they held.
We can’t even blame the UA. They are about as highly trained and equipped as we could make em. They held off the RA and collapsed last year with less. So I still do not know what is it. UAS + mines + standoff weapons? C4ISR integration. Or maybe as you say, it was a far closer run race than we saw.
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
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18 hours ago, JonS said:
Subs probably do have a version of this problem, but its solved though generally low density, coupled with very tight control over patrol areas - when you are in your box, you're the only friendly in there, therefore anything else is bad guys by definition (or possibly neutral) so no need for active iff. Plus, of course, there's humans in the loop.
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.
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57 minutes ago, billbindc said:
Point taken.
I guess a way to put it is that I would suggest starting with known facts and then working out your conclusions. Making a model from that, if you will. The problem with the Thucydides Trap, etc is that they go in the other direction.
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.
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On 11/20/2023 at 3:37 PM, Battlefront.com said:
The upshot of the ISW report is that even though Russia created, funded, and supplied the DLPR forces since their inception, they remained largely independent of Russian command culture (allegiance). Some 10 months after the official integration was announced Russia is STILL having difficulties with it.
The whole point of bringing this up is to support the argument I've been making that the DPR forces fighting in Avdiivka were not practically available for fighting outside of the immediate Donetsk territory.
This is an interesting situation for wargaming. Sometimes there are constraints on doing what is militarily optimal. In this case, the DLPR units are inherently territorial. Mindset as well as logistics. As much as Russia might want to transfer DLPR units to wherever they need them to be doesn't mean that they can.
Clearly they need a 'New Model Army'
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2 hours ago, The_Capt said:
So we can talk about Glass Dragons, real estate bubbles, Russian doomed trajectories and demographic statistics all day long. But until we recognize that our adversaries are willing to lose more than us in order to gain, we are in trouble. we can't get people to wear masks and take free vaccines in the middle of the worst pandemic since 1918, how can we expect them to endure famine and war?
My biggest fear is that by the time we figure it out, it will too late. We are like the European powers in 1899, rich entitled and heading off a cliff...all arguing about who should go first.
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.
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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:
And THANK YOU for reminding me that this has to go back to the top of my list of movies to watch. For some reason last weekend Ferris Bueller's Day Off rose to the top. Haven't seen that in 20+ years and it still entertained, but I want to see Jason Isaacs' interpretation of Zhukov again much sooner rather than later.
Steve
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.
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4 hours ago, The_Capt said:
Accept for the part where tanks don’t seem to matter anymore. The material war is in artillery, UAS, PGM and C4ISR. Not sure we should be investing billions in tanks at all to be honest. I cannot find a single operational level result that happened on the backs of tanks. In fact back in Mar 22, the RA had all the tanks and it got them exactly nowhere.
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>
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6 hours ago, poesel said:
I agree with him on the need of standardization. I guess it is not the lack of standards, but that there are too many of them. Probably national lobbying at its best.
Where I don't agree is the outsourcing part.
Firstly, manufacturing simple artillery shells is a simple manufacturing task. Any industrialized country can do that AND do a million other things. It is not clogging up any unreplaceable resources. If you calculate opportunity costs, it may not best the best choice, but you are still making money.
Secondly, if you strictly look for the market solution, our future shells will all come from south-east Asia. I don't need to spell it out why this will be an undesirable outcome.Standardize the stuff and build it locally.
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.
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1 hour ago, acrashb said:
Nice. "no one specified dead or alive". Little gaps like that lead to - great movies
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.
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3 minutes ago, acrashb said:
PS: the Charge of the Light Brigade was a problem of communications, not tactics. "The charge was the result of a misunderstood order from the commander in chief, Lord Raglan, who had intended the Light Brigade to attack a different objective for which light cavalry was better suited, to prevent the Russians from removing captured guns from overrun Turkish positions. " - Charge of the Light Brigade - WikipediaYeah, I know, I just couldn't resist the 'Where Eagles Dare' quote.
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1 hour ago, JonS said:
Soldiers aren't cost effective compared to a 5.56mm round. Tanks arent cost effective compared to an APFSDS. Planes arent cost effective compared to a sidewinder. Ships arent cost effective compared to a harpoon.
And yet, here we are.
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.
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1 hour ago, akd said:
More Avdiivka insanity (Oct. 10):
'This operation would make the charge of the light brigade look like a sensible military exercise.'
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49 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:
It’s all about the economics. If 10 soliders cost as much as one tank, but each one has similar destructive capability by themselves relative to the tank, then things are ok.
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
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On 10/31/2023 at 7:55 PM, Hapless said:
If we're looking at a battlespace where high signature vehicles are prohibitively vulnerable and low signature infantry is simultaenously survivable and lethal (via calling for precision fires), maybe the way forward is less to try and proof AFVs and more to boost infantry mobility and load carrying ability.
Or, in short: Heinlein probably nailed it.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.
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1 hour ago, Vet 0369 said:
This is exactly how the ARA General Belgrano (Argentine Cruiser) was sunk by the HMS Conquerer (UK Submarine) during the Falklands (Malvinas) war. The Conquerer detonated a torpedo under the keel of the General Belgrano and broke its back. There were more than 1300 sailors on the Cruiser when she sank.
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.
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8 hours ago, Rokko said:
Somewhat ironic.
Killing civilians: Highly illegal
Killing all the civilians: Well, that's a legal grey area.
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.'
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2 hours ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:
e.g. for Storm Shadows because that would be exchanging "2000 pounds of education" for a "ten-rupee jezzail", to quote Kipling's "Arithmetic on the frontier".
Strike hard who cares — shoot straight who can —
The odds are on the cheapermanunmanned system.There, fixed it for Kipling, although it doesn't quite scan.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
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.