cyrano01

Lifting of these restrictions, while in themselves eggregious examples of political stupidity and well deserving to be scrapped ASAP, is not going to help much. The Ukraine is now waging a very conventional war (possibly paradigm-shattering drones excepted, but we are not there yet) with a very big country capable of sustaining a big army. It will not create a strategic bombing campaign via drones and ATACMS able to destroy Russian warmaking capability. This is an expensive way to wage war, and UKR will not get the funding for this. 
What they need is very simple, but they need a lot of it with guaranteed delivery without limitation in time. Artillery munitions (they cannot manufacture locally); SAM munitions;  funding for drone production, better still outsourcing the production itself to  the sanctuary countries (PL, Romania; in the future maybe Slovakia again); SPGs; HIMARS or equivalents; long- and mid-range SAM's; ECM/ECCM land-based equipment; ATACMS; some tanks, in numbers to replace losses; IFVs, in higher numbers than tanks; APCs more than tanks and IFVs; some ATGMs; small arms munitions; trucks and logistic vehicles; finally (and I have been convinced of this by the recent Russian successes with glide bombs) some fighter aircraft, with the understanding that they will all be shot down at some point. Also, the UKR need to have their stuff in order and find a way of mobilising soldiers for war, Zelenski's chances for reelection be damned.
The only theory of victory in this war that I can see is exactly the same as could be formulated in every conventional war  with a very big country capable of sustaining a big army, provided that the war has not been resolved via a France 1940 type offensive or a Nomonhan 1939 type counteroffensive in the first months: invest all resources you can and try to hang on in the war longer than the other guy, while always keeping an eye out for a potential technical paradigm shattering solution (Project Manhattan) or a potential opportunity to asymmetrically hamstring his economy (ref. bombing of ball bearing and synthetic fuel factories 1944).
Or, as the Duke of Wellington put it: "Hard pounding this, gentlemen. Let's see who pounds the longest"

About developing of warfare by spiral again %)
Since Russia unable to use A-50 AWACS close to our borders, it flooded our space by long-range recon drones Orlan, Zala, SuperCam, which with rotations are may to observe large squares of frontline and in the deep rear. Reportedly only for one day up to 200 UAVs can be spotted behind out lines. UKR side just hasn't enough radars, EW assets and SAMs, SHORADs etc to cover all frontline to prevent penetration of such number of drones in the rear. Except all of this we have large lack of anti-aircraft missiles of all types, including SHORADs and even MANPADs 
Yesterday likley as experimental act of desperation training Yak-52 was use to shoot down two Russian drones over Odesa oblast. Like in WWI times second crewman takes LMG in the cabine to fire at the drones. BTW this flight was successfull - two enemy drones were downed. And this is obviously more cheap method, than waste missiles. There is a one problem - risk of friendly fire, because small aircraft can be similar on radar to the drone

Videos of "dogfihgt" with Orlan-10
So, if some have operational P-51, Spitfires, Bf-109 , it will be useful

 

I don't think so until counter drone is solved for. The defender would still be able to send their drones to bust up the offensive operations, ISR for arty, etc. Until one side can deny drones I don't think there will be much movement. 
 

they didn't have a receipt so had to make a direct visit to the store.... too bad they didn't order through Amazon 🤪

US design for maintainability is generally pretty excellent. It makes for expensive procurement and high maintenance budgets (ie, swap the entire Abrams power pack rather than fix the fault lòcally) but it does that in order to increase availability rates at the pointy end.
Given that general approach, I'd be surprised if the Patriot was an exception. Given *that* I'd assume there is more internal damage that both can't be seen in a photo and can't be fixed in Ukraine.
Or, alternately, the priority to date has been on pushing end-user equipment into Ukraine, and not on the support systems that keep them operational and in users hands. Edit: So what would be a simple field repair for a US unit has to go back to the States when its operated by Ukraine.
But weighing against that second conclusion is the existence of USAREUR; if it was conceivably fixable forward at Grafenwohr or Kaiserlauten (or by any of the European operators of Patriot) then they would. That it wasn't suggests significant but non-obvious damage.
I think.

Russians gradually have been learing of Ukrainian experience of artillery fire control. If in 2022  - mid 23 we have seen typical Soviet style of whole batteries and even battalions of side-by-side standing guns simultainous work, that now Russians are more and more shifting to dispersing of artillery and work by single guns of a battery with individaual targeting for each.
Here is google-translated post about changes since 2022. "The work was carried out in areas with a low coeeficient of UAV use" - means "ineffective area fire with low UAV usage", though for summer 2022 it's not always could be true, or soldiers then reported about dozen Orlans and Zala, ajusting fire. Probably ajusting was inefefctive or come on too long command chain, which made it ineffective.

 
And addition to this post by other Russian artillerist with my translation:
I'l throw my 5 cents:
Regimental artillery tied on artillery chief (of regiment). He, sitting on command post (let's call it in such way) together with chief of recon, watch streams from UAVs (and intercepted streams of the enemy). Spotting the target chief of artillery transmits it to battery commander or senior battery officer  [he is commander of 1st artillery platoon also] and they transmit this data to the gun. 2-7 minutes for targeting of the gun, the bird [drone] in the sky. First shoot - the fire ajustment from artilelry chief directly to the gun. Or artillery chief opens the map, come into communication with gun commandr through the radio and gives the targeting (angle, azimuth, lines). The gun crew lives on position 2-5 days, further a rotation is coming. Nobody drink on position, it's taboo, else they go to "zakrep" [probably those who have to hold the ground after assault] - and this is more scary than to stormers. 
We don't work with mortars since new year. This is no longer relevant becaus of crews life preservation purposes. Drones already fly on 10 km in the rear, so they clicks them at once  

And here Russian feedback about CAESERs

Plus ca change...

I really don’t see that stopping an FPV with an RPG round strapped to it coming in at 80kph.  And it definitely won’t do a damned thing against this little monster:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214914714000348
 

Here are the key parts.  Basically Scholz may come across as waffling on materiel support to Ukraine, Germany is the second largest supplier after the US and Macron doesn't want to be shown up.  I think this gets Germany a handful of get-out-of-bashing-day cards.
 

Even slow boats have fast screws - little propellors don't move much water per turn, so they need more turns, and you have to stay ahead of the currents and wind.  If they want slow drive noise they'd have to go with big paddlewheels, or robotic rowboats that have big flat surfaces that move a lot of water per stroke or per paddle board in the water and probably have a big reflective radar signature.  You can do steam or compressed gas powered for the final couple miles, but those will also have an acoustic signature.

I've been trying to keep up with the thread the past couple weeks and haven't really had time to respond to things, but a few things went by without generating very many additional comments:
The first is the number of FPV drones that Ukraine is producing: 100K/month.  The second is the number of drones it takes to get a hit.  I've seen various numbers in the past 30 pages and also in some searching, and they're all consistently less than 10 drones per hit, 1/3, 1/5, and 1/7 all showing up.  That's a major step towards massed precision.
If you multiply it out and take the conservative 1/7, that's about 475 hits/day of something, and over 14,000 hits/month.  Those are all either damaged/destroyed vehicles of casualties, or some combination.  If each hit on average damages two people/things (not a big stretch, since most successful FPV attacks we see are on a vehicle or small group), that's 28K casualties or vehicles/month that have to be replaced, and 170K/year.  Just to break even.  And it doesn't depend on tubes that wear out or a heavy logistics tail moving a bunch of 152/155 HE around.
The third is the 350K artillery shells per month that RU is producing/procuring/refurbing.  If we assume that RU has fired 10K shells/day through the war to get 31,000 Ukrainian KIAs, and assume 3 WIA/KIA, those shells are producing about 170 Ukrainian casualties/day and it's taking ~275 shells to produce a single casualty. 
These are all approximate, and I'm not really comparing apples to apples (the drones are counting hits that can include both vehicles and troops, or one or the other, and I'm only counting troop casualties for impact of RU arty on Ukraine), but it's showing a picture of a transition - Ukraine is substituting drones for artillery and doing so very effectively.  And steadily improving. Russian artillery effectiveness is roughly constant, if not decreasing as quality of tubes and shells decreases, and not all that different from WWII era artillery effectiveness numbers I've seen.  If the Ukrainian FPV effectiveness is closer to 1/5 or 1/3, that starts to get into the "1 munition per opposing troop" kind of massed precision.  And many of the FPV drones don't cost much more than a single artillery shell.
The effectiveness could also drop as they have to have more troops with less training flying the FPVs, but it will also come back up as those "pilots" get practice.  And using FPVs instead of "meat in the seat" pilots means that the pilots just continue to gain experience, even if their missions fail, because they're not put directly into harms way during their sorties.
One of the biggest limitations of drones vs. artillery is range - drones are still mostly 10 km or less, and often limited to aerial LOS. They need bigger batteries or an artillery boost to get to longer range, and a relay drone (or multiple relays) to be controllable  farther out.
The other thing that's not making a lot of sense are the various claims that Russia can make or buy even more FPV drones than Ukraine.  We're not seeing the same kind of effectiveness - if they were just as numerous and effective as Ukr drones we'd be seeing 4 or 5x higher Ukr casualties than we are.  And I don't think we have reason to think that they are that effective and it's just good Ukr OpSec keeping us from hearing about it.
 

From what we can tell..."not really".  The modern Russian military system employed at the beginning of the war looked a lot more western in composition.  Since then, it does look like Russia is rolling back to the Soviet Divisional construct at least for force generation.  As to EW employment specifically...who knows, but I suspect the Russians are falling back on volume.  They definitely appear to have upped their ISR game somewhat.
In the field both sides are down to multiple small unit actions to go anywhere - this is why Adiivka likely took months instead of days.
Why that is happening has nothing to do with the strengths or weaknesses of the Soviet era systems.  It has to do with profile and time.  We have seen plenty examples of detection of forces well back from the front line.  So if one tries to marshal anything bigger than a company your ISR signature is going to get picked up very early.  Hell the troop positioning movements alone will likely get picked up.
Second element is time.  It takes maybe 30 minutes to get a company group or combat team lined up and into action.  Less if you have drilled it.  A Battalion can be an hour or more.  A Brigade can take hours to days to get into position and lined up for an operation.  An entire day sitting with a lot of highly detectable assets in range (now being +50kms) of strikes is suicidal on this battlefield...so neither side is doing that.  This has little to do with upscaling ability, or Soviet era C2, and everything to do with battlefield illumination and long range strike at a tactical level.  If you want to lose a Brigade, sure deploy it within 50kms of the front in concentration and try and get it shook out for a major operation.
So both sides appear to be de-aggregating in order to have some chance of actually getting forces to the front.  This has resulted in corrosive tactical scatter in a lot of cases.  In the few areas where we see concentration (e.g. Russian assaults at Adiivka and Bakhmut) we still saw small scale actions, just a lot of them repeated.  We also saw horrendous losses.
There is a very real possibility that behavior on the battlefield is a result of the environment and not legacy shortfalls in C2.  This scares the bejezzus out of the west as we have bet the farm on the superiority of our own system.  The real lesson for the west is: "do not fight in a war like this one".  Which is a great idea, unless all war is headed towards versions of this one, at least for the next while.
I strongly suspect we are headed for something even worse for the western system to be honest.  The trends pulled out of this war speak to a completely different battlefield dynamics, much of which we have not figured out.  We could have entire volumes of doctrine that have been overtaken by events, and nothing scares a modern military more than that.  

This actually made me chuckle.
I expect it had no problem making contact with the ground.
 

I have never fully bought this reason for the UA or RA difficulties in this war.  It got rolled out after last summer to try and explain why the UA failed while trying to employ western doctrine and equipment: “well you see it would have worked but the Ukrainians struggle to coordinate above company level.”
Problem with this theory for both the UA and RA is that the first year of the war had plenty of examples of larger operational level coordination for both sides.  Russia pushed in a 5-6 axis attack that saw successful penetration up to 250kms.  It wasn’t a lack of coordination that stalled and killed these attacks it was the levels of friction modern C4ISR and weapons can project on conventional forces.
The UA coordinated two nearly simultaneous offensives roughly 450 kms apart at Kharkiv and Kherson successfully.  Kharkiv demonstrated Brigade level manoeuvre and Kherson started that way be devolved to Coy level actions the forced the Russia withdrawal more slowly.
Finally, there is nothing in the infamous “Soviet system” that precludes higher level coordination.  In fact it is quite the opposite.  Soviet doctrine was all about mass and scale.  Mission Command does not magically create upscaling.
We watched western doctrine and equipment fail very visibly back in summer ‘23 and our immediate reaction was “well it is clear they are doing it wrong”.  Based on the evidence we see, nearly daily, do we think perhaps there might be other reasons that are forcing both sides of this war to adopt multiple small unit actions as the primary mode of offensives?  After 2 years of this war, perhaps they understand and are employing what works as best as it can due to battlefield realities better than we do?
 

The Boeing guy in charge of doors just got a job there.

Following on from this thread, do we have any ideas why we're not seeing more evidence of HARM-type UAVs, yet?  LARDs ("Light Anti Radiation Drones"), if you will?  From what I can tell it shouldn't be particularly complicated to make a drone which takes off and flies towards (and then into) the strongest local source of radiation at a frequency of your choosing?
Wouldn't such a design be equally capable of attacking enemy EW or other enemy emitters (soliders with radios, FPVs, etc.)?

They can't seize and hold terrain, yet.
And how well will holding that terrain work out for the infantry in the future? Hell, how well does it work right now?

I've been thinking about this post most of the day, and keep coming back to "Neat. Now what?"
Which got me thinking about how other step changes in military capability were handled. The two obvious ones that come to mind are tanks in WWII, and airpower during the Cold War. Now, clearly, in both cases they existed early, but they only really became effective/worrisome/"game-changing" some decades after their entree to the battlefield.
For the infantry, in both cases, the response became basically the same: very small infantry units became fully capable of anti-ing the other thing, either anti-tank or anti-air.
During WWII anti-tank rifles, bazookas, fausts, shrecks, Piats and hearty grenades gave platoons and sections an ability to defend against or attack against tanks, pretty explicitly at the detriment to the nominal role of the infantry, which was to oppose and defeat enemy infantry. That trend was significantly enhanced during second half of last century with things like RPGs and M-72s. This is at the point now where with weapons like Javelin tanks perhaps have more to fear from infantry than the vice versa, even though lugging Javelin around is a royal PITA especially for light infantry.
The introduction of air power, and especially effective CAS, started us on the road to the fully illuminated battlefield, where nowhere is safe and to be seen is to die. During WWII the only real counter that the infantry had was to dig on, or hide, or both. But during the Cold War a lot of effort went into MANPADS, resulting in the Stinger in the 1980s and with other systems following soon after. Just like their anti tank weapons, lugging around anti-aircraft missiles is a PITA which detracts from the nominal role of engaging enemy infantry, not to mention the drain on budgets and training schedules. But on the other hand now every platoon and section is capable of destroying any tank or aircraft that wanders into it's little tactical AO. And once the air and armour battle is won - either locally or globally - then the rest is just mopping up. The degradation of the infantry platoon and section's ability in the infantry-battle doesn't really matter, since while that bit remains hard and unpleasant, it is incredibly harder and more unpleasant in the absence of either air or armoured support.
So you can probably see where this is going.
Assuming UAS remains in play (and why wouldn't it?), then the role of infantry platoons and sections will change again. Instead of being little nodes of anti-tank and anti-air goodness,with some residual anti-infantry capability, they will become little anti-UAS nodes, with the weapons, training, mindset and purpose to defeat enemy UAS in their local area, and also protect or project friendly UAS capability around themselves. If an enemy tank or aircraft turns up then the section or platoon mightn't be able to deal with it themselves, but they will be networked to someone who can - guns, missiles, friendly armour or air, or friendly UAS. And they'll still, you know, carry rifles. Mainly out of habit and tradition, as well as giving the NCOs something to inspect every day. But most of their weaponry, and sensors, and just the general claggage they're carting about will be geared towards winning the UAS fight, because winning that will mean that the rest is just mopping up.
In other words, the infantry will be able to concentrate physically and cognitively on the UAS battle because it won't be their role any more to win the tank, infantry, or local airspace battle.

Just stop it.  This war would be over in a day if the US and West fully slammed down...and then we would be dealing with the next war right behind it.  In what universe do you imagine Russia quietly skulking back over the border, avoiding all eye contact and gracefully accepting defeat if the West rolled in all the dice?
Should we support Ukraine, absolutely.  Should we fight this war for you, no freakin way.  Don't believe me?  Ok, let's take a look at the last time two nuclear powers got involved in a conventional war...oh wait, there really have not been any.
Closest we ever came was here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_wars_and_conflicts
And this skirmish was within a year of Pakistan becoming a nuclear power (maybe).  So in human experience we have gone to incredible lengths to keep nuclear powers out of direct conventional wars...why do you suppose this is? 
Cut the "West is to cowardly" and "nukes are not a thing" BS because it clearly is an underlying calculation in this war and just because "you think so" is not going to change that.  

A common western critique has been that Ukraine "needs to upscale".  Last summers offensive appeared to be penny-packeting - "why can't they get mech to work? Must be because they do not know how to do Bn level manoeuvre.  It is their Soviet tradition (which does not even make sense with respect to upscaling)"  
I am in the camp that after 2 years of war the UA knows how to fight this war better than we do.  It looks like they have picked their "upscaling" effort.

I think even with just 5 confirmed, we can count this as Sukhoi February.
(Sukhoi mans dry).

Ok, well let’s start there then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington's_crossing_of_the_Delaware_River
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plunder
And of course the big one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Overlord
And let’s pull some doctrine in: https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/3-90-12/fm3-90-12.pdf
So adding this all up, essentially it has and can be done but there are a lot of caveats.  Ultimately it is a question of weight.  How much weight is being projected across the river as combat power?  How much weight is needed under combat conditions to sustain the weight of the combat power on the other side?  There are multiple ways to get that weight across a river other than a fixed bridge.  Fixed ferry, unfixed ferry, tac aviation and now, UAS.  Forward foraging and cannibalization etc.  
Now doctrine agrees with you, the best is solid fixed LOC bridging but any crossing operations, even conventional ones come in phases.  The opening phase is very often lighter more mobile resupply methods until the bridgehead force can push the enemy back far enough that it is safe to build a series of fixed bridges.  Essentially almost every opposed military river crossing in history began with what we are describing south of Kherson - light forces establishing a bridgehead, sustained and then heavy force link up once conditions are established.  D Day being an exception as were other amphib operations which all had to be sustained by air and sea.
So “sustaining a scale of operation” without a bridge is not only possible, it is really the only way to get many water crossing started in the first place.  Now as to “how long and how far?”  Well that depends on a lot of factors.  If the UA stays light it keeps the logistics bill low.  They might not need a fixed pontoon bridge if they can advance - as you say - “10-30kms”.  Pontoon ferry’s might be able to sustain them as they did for the RA for quite some time before the RA withdrew.
So basically as an engineering and logistics problem what we are looking at south of Kherson is not new or novel.  In the current environment it is going to be challenging and dangerous but it is not the thing being invented from zero in all this. 
 
Ok, so this one opens up the question of how well prepared are the RA forces on the other side?  Light forces have proven pretty important in this war.  They were critical in the first month pretty much everywhere and at Kharkiv constituted the breakout force.  If the RA has built a heavy line of defence as you seem to indicate then you may be correct.  But have they?  We really do not know, but the fact that a small bridgehead at Krynky for months - no massive RA armoured c-attack, and a few maps of force lay down estimates may help:
https://features.csis.org/ukraine-war-map/
https://militaryland.net/maps/deployment-map/
These seem to suggest that the RA have accepted risk in this sector exactly because there is a river there.  So how dense are those RA fortifications?  That map appears to show roughly a single Division covering off 100 kms of frontage.  That is - and let’s be really generous and say that RA division is at full strength - approx 10,000 troops, or 100 troops per km..which is extremely thin.  Estimates of the rest of the RA line are around 300 troops per km.  100 RA troops per km means that there are massive holes in that defensive line.  Light troops can not only cross, they can infiltrate between forces and get into rear areas, which will force the RA to react.  So we are not talking the Atlantic Wall here, we likely have RA hard points on obvious crossing sights, small c-moves forces and a bunch of RA ISR.
So indications are that RA force density is quite low, which makes the light dispersed option a good fit.  Now the UA has much better intel and will have to plan according to that but based on what we can see, the employment of light forces over that river in strength is not only possible, it is viable.
An and now we get to the crux…but you kinda answer your own question here.  “What can these light forces actually do?”  Well at Kyiv they stopped the RA cold.  Elsewhere they have been instrumental in causing the RA to collapse - please find me one major tank battle in this war?  Hell it is hard enough to find a decent mech battle.  This is a war dominated by fires, not manoeuvres.
So the answer to your question is right in your post:
”RUS regroup, reassign reserves to the zone, pile on the drone/artillery/aviation support”.  
That is exactly the objective of a bunch of light forces running rampant in the backfield.  Why?  Because the RA will have to pull these (shrinking) assets from somewhere else.  This is the minimum objective by the way.  If the RA cannot or does not have “reserves” then an opportunity to redraw the lines south of Kherson presents itself.  If those light forces can actually establish a bridge head then options open up for heavier forces and other crossing options.  By that point the entire left end of the RA line is in trouble. But let’s leave that all as a branch plan and stretch goal.
So the real question is not in your response or reasoning.  They are not “can it be done” or “will it do anything?”  The real question is: does the UA have the forces and capabilities to do it at scale?  This we do not know and will have to simply wait and see.

I honestly don't think Russia would respond with anything more than rhetoric. They've pulled key assets from the Finnish border and even key air defense assets from Kaliningrad to replace losses in Ukraine already. The leadership knows deep down that NATO is not an offensive alliance and they have no worries about being attacked by them without a provocation that couldn't possibly be ignored.  If they didn't truly believe that, they wouldn't still be in this war fighting a "second rate" power and wasting all their hard to replace assets that would be critical to the defense of their homeland in the event of a NATO attack. 

https://www.ft.com/content/10df6f24-7ce6-407f-8509-76c65ec6e740
.....I don't get it, if its so bad having German soldiers setting targets up for it, why not just give it to Ukraine with the training to use it? ****ing hell. incoherent. makes no sense. whats next, a german train carried the missile to the Polish-Ukrainian border, therefore, no missile for u (could describe all German aid to Ukraine, im surprised he let it get that far). Idiotic. Makes mockery of German support for Ukraine when Scholz acts like Ukrainians are barbarians who dont know how to program a missile, or cant be expected to align with German reluctance to strike Russia proper (when they have acted as such with other weapons), or even worse, scared of saying out loud that targeting of "supposedly" Ukrainian occupied territory in Crimea is a red line for Germany.....which is just bravo, just so on par, for 10 years of occupation to be enough to erase sovereignty. 
Can't wait for occupied Donbas to be the red line 10 years down the line, then occupied Ukraine another 10, then Baltics another 10. absolute idiot. The partitions of Poland took 23 years to pan out, im sure Putin is so glad Scholz and Germany are content with 10. 

Why flares? Aren´t heatseeking missiles (mostly) short range?