Holien

About 1-1,5 month ago video, how Russian "tankodesant" tried to burst in UKR trench on Kreminna direction. Three soldiers of 1st National Guard Presidental "Bureviy" brigade destroyed the tank and enemy infantry in the trench fight, one Russian surrendered
 

It's awfully close to what the US experienced in 2002 in the Millenium Challenge wargame, where the Red Team used an armada of small speedboats to get inside the pickets and first spot all the ships to hit them with cruise missiles, then later used more small speedboats on suicide attacks.  The Red Team sank 16 ships. If you don't have to find suicidal volunteers to drive the motorboats, it's easier to put more of them on the water to overwhelm the defenses.  The Navy's first response to the Red Team win was denial.  Not denial of the motorboats the ability to get through, but denial that it  was a valid and effective tactic.
As for the detection problem that he describes, I suspect the problem is worse than he describes.  It's not obvious that the US has really solved it with technology, particularly since there have been a few high profile major collisions at sea not all that long ago.  They depend a lot on the age old Mk I Eyeball all around the ship, and use further out ships and aircraft to extend the range of the eyeballs.  It's why big ships have historically traveled in fleets with smaller "sacrificial" ships spread out around them.  I've seen various systems for repelling the little motorboats (some of which depend on them having people in them) but not a lot of detail on detection systems, which I suspect are still hard for everybody.
I'm not a radar person, but a lot of the same things apply in the optical.  He doesn't go into technical details, but I suspect part of why the surface clutter problem is reduced at longer range is because the size of resolution elements gets bigger as you go farther (same angle per element, farther away), so it gets averaged over each whole element.  Plus the smaller reflected signals may be below a set detection threshold.  That all makes the screen look clearer at a some longer distance, but if the target you're looking for is down in the same size range and radar reflectivity as the clutter, it's also going to get averaged down and you're still not going to see it when it's far away.  The most effective way to see the little boats far out is going to be with a picket of helicopters (or now drones) that fly around and watch the sea far enough out to spot them from above at what is relatively short range for the pickets.  

Not really but maybe half way there….?  My point was that a societies military is a lot more than a lone political ideological data point.  If we somehow built a perfect Afghan military that aligned with their society and culture the outcome would have likely been the same.  This is because the issues with Afghanistan were deeper than defence and security.  The ANA was very often a domestic army of strangers because the locals were voting with IEDs. No equipment or training was going to solve that. Maybe a couple hundred years of social evolution but it really wouldn’t matter how we built a central military in that nation because it did not want to be the nation we wanted it to be.  Hell the Taliban do not have full internal security control and they are far better aligned to Afghan reality.  The failure to “graft” an Afghan security force was a symptom of a larger disease, not the disease in itself.
My larger point is that there is a link between a society and its military (obviously) but we should avoid oversimplifying that relationship or ignore a lot of other factors as we apply a nice neat template to the war in Ukraine.  When one is doing Military Assistance, you definitely have to take into account “how they fight” but one cannot bet on that single pony and expect success.  “How they live”, “Where they live”, “How they pay for it”, “Who they fight and fight for” and “Why they fight” are much larger than whatever political ideology is in play.
In reality this entire discussion is not about building militaries around the world, it is about intervention as a broader strategy.  Based on the last 30 years it has been the major strategy of the Western world, we are doing a version of it in Ukraine right now.  However, our successes in employing this strategy are spotty at best, with many high profile failures.  How much longer we are going to keep trying it?  Well that is a very good question.
 

Interesting post by Rybar on the current situation near Avdiivka. Some excerpts below:
https://t.me/rybar/58209
 
 

Despite your effort to boil the ocean here I think we are in pointed agreement once again, albeit coming at it from different directions.
If I read you correctly, you're saying that trying graft a western style military onto Afghanistan didn't work because their government wasn't compatible with that style of military. I agree with that, and if I'm understanding him correctly, so does @Kinophile. That is actually his main point, despite your effort to disagree with it.
Anyhoo, I agree. However, in Afghanistan's case I think the original sin was trying to trying to give them a military that looked like some weird amalgam^ of western expeditionary-ish doctrines that was never going to work in their context. The Afghan people can obviously fight, really well and really effectively, when they fight in ways that suit them. In other words, like you, I think there was a mismatch between the civil/political milieu and the indigenous military forces in Afghanistan, but unlike you I think that effort should have gone into creating a military that fit that milieu, rather than trying to impose or import a political ideology that would have been able to support "our" way of fighting.
Hopefully the relevance to Ukraine is obvious. And I think on that we definitely agree.
 
 
^ given the number and variety of different training teams from different nations they weren't even trying to adopt a single doctrine. Instead they had to try and make sense of all the doctrines at once.

Yes. Images like that exist for both sides.  That’s datum, not data. It doesn’t tell me anything about how numerously or effectively Ru is using FPVs.  If it takes them 100 FPVs to inflict the same damage as Ukraine does with 10, then they’re using them 10x less effectively. (Edit- I see the link below went to plots on attacks. It didn’t display inline on my phone.  Thats number of attacks, but not effectiveness)

That's 500 mil just for ammo production, out of a total of 2 bil for defense spending.
But more important than the actual numbers is the fact, that the EU as an entity is spending money on defense. AFAIK, that is unprecedented.

The sum was 500 million euros...
Finland made the same investment last year to our own plants alone

Quite a historic move for the purely economic union. 
 As I thought in the past, the EU should not be completely underestimated, although it is an entity without an army. 
It's a financial juggernaut and some EU parliamentarians are idealistic people (in a good way), motivated by the idea of a transnational effort.
 
 

Regarding recent Russian strike on Ukrainian AA column, Butusov channel confirmed it was Patriot launcher.
-2 launchers were destroyed (no mention of radar, but another vehicle was destroyed too) by overal 3 Iskanders.
- This battery was used very extensively in recent weeks, likely it was reason so many Russian planes started to fall down. This allowed muscovites to broadly locate the place of the radar; likely rest was done by visual confirmation by drones.
- Ukrainians knew in last moment that rockets zeroed on them, and according to journalist they did cardinal mistake here: instead of scrambling, they formed compact column that was to leave the place. It didn't manage on time. 9 crew members sadly died.

Outstanding summary…much better than mine.  I would add that “Air Superiority” is also about “range, reach and persistence”.  We relied on air power dominance for deep battle, which is critical to the western way of warfare.  If that is denied we run into serious trouble.  The Soviet system relies of air power more for, as you note, denial and strategic shaping.  The Soviets really did not have a CAS or operational air power complex like we developed in the west.  Even Tac Avn was seen as a firepower projection element and not an integral part of manoeuvre.
Beyond Air, the west relies heavily on multi-domain superiority.  We not only need to own the air, but also the maritime, space and cyber for our system to really work.  The major problem is, and will continue to be that potential adversaries are not stupid.  They know that if they cannot dominate a domain, they only need to deny it in order to create cracks in the western military system.  They have, and will continue to invest heavily into these denial capabilities.  The problem is that denial has become increasingly easy to achieve.  This has been due to several driving factors but miniaturization of processing power has been central.  By being able to load more complex processing power, and sensors to inform that processing…all cheaper and lighter.  It means weapons for denial have become not only smaller - allowing for greater range - but more autonomous and precise.
This is potentially enormous.  It redraws the fabric of warfare at some pretty fundamental levels.  In the past it was some very small things.  The ability to create overwhelming firepower in the form of things like machine guns and fast fire artillery had a massive impact on warfare.  But in reality the largest impacts on warfare were a rail line, signals wire and tin can.  Rail lines allowed for massive quick force projection on scales and timelines we never saw before.  Signals wire linked all that firepower volume together.  And tin cans meant we could keep troops in the field for 365 days a year.  Those three relatively disconnected technologies changed warfare forever.
What we are seeing on the modern battlefield is even more profound.  We are talking about artificial thinking and decision making.  We are seeing everything in real time and feeding it back to these systems.  To try and pin this on a Western or Soviet military school of thought is really not useful in my opinion as what we could potentially be seeing is so much larger.

So, reading the last couple of pages, here's how I'm reading the argument about western and soviet legacies. To succeed tactically on the modern battlefield, an army needs to establish fires superiority and ISR superiority (which involves denying both to the enemy and securing both for friendly operations). The legacy Soviet and legacy Western took different paths to achieving those two superiorities, albeit with some overlap. Neither seems workable on the modern battlefield.
The legacy western system relied on ranged precision systems to deliver fires. So, Excalibur, Javelin, HIMARS, Tomahawk, HARM, and the like. The legacy western system relied on dismantling the enemy's fires complex. This is a sort of pre-emptive counter battery, where we identified fires systems and targeted them as a precursor to tactical engagement.
"Air Superiority" is a misnomer. It's really ISR and fires superiority delivered by primarily airborne systems. One thing on the table now is whether the western fires superiority system can dismantle an opposing fires complex. We built our fires complex to targeting large, hot, heavy systems, not now a fires complex is much more distributed and made of much less energetic bits. Targeting a Pantsir? Doable. Targeting two guys with a backpack full of drones? Harder.
The legacy soviet system relied on mass to deliver fires. TOS-1, Grad, the abundance of tube artillery. The legacy soviet system relied on overwhelming the enemy's counterbattery complex to secure fires in a competitive environment. 
The legacy western system relied on airborne ISR to establish superiority, and on airspace denial to inhibit enemy airborne ISR. The legacy soviet system relied on recon in force (?) to establish ISR superiority, and on airspace denial to inhibit enemy ISR. These have both been blown up by high speed battlefield networking (!) and plentiful drones. Nobody has any idea how to deny dronespace. Also, the Russians appear to be using waves of expendable soldiers as a form of reconnaissance, which is horrifying, but appears to be sort of effective?
More to ponder here, and whatever system ends up able to deliver fires and ISR won't look like either the legacy western or legacy Soviet system, because the physics and geometry of a modern battlefield are so different.

Interesting analysis (the whole post, not just this snippet). Seriously.
If I may paraphrase you: militaries work best when they reflect the civil culture from which they spring and which sustains them. The more there is a mismatch, the less well that military will function.
Is that about right?
Hence, trying to graft a western-style military onto the Afghan government failed spectacularly. There are loads of other examples, positive and negative (Israel in the 1960s and 70s, Iraq last decade, Saudi Arabia, ...)

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.
 

For those interested in listening in on two world leaders talk about Ukraine before the war. More to follow....
 
 

For those interested in listening in on two world leaders talk about Ukraine before the war. More to follow....
 
 

For those interested in listening in on two world leaders talk about Ukraine before the war. More to follow....
 
 

Napoleon spirit inside Macron? )
Reportedly Macron ordered to deploy French troops on the border with so-called Transnistria and in Odesa. This can release some UKR troops from rear areas

"We have been negotiating as we could, but nothing to discuss with them. Ukraine must win. French troops will be in Ukraine. No more red lines. I'm president of France and I decide!"
Viva la France!
PS. I can't find these speech in original, but it shares by many UKR socal media. Maybe PsyOps, but somesing really happened 
 

    

Macron with the right idea. After months and months of Russia not de-escalating, its time for the West to up the ante. Clearly Russia has decided to opt for rhetoric of "existential" for Ukraine to fall, it is past time for Europe to recognize that should Ukraine fall, the door is opened to a age of conflict threatening the rest of Europe, and better to slam the door closed in Ukraine then in the Baltics. 
Shut it down in Ukraine or in the next 20 years we will have a renewed Russian Empire chomping at the rest of Eastern Europe. 
 
 

For those interested in listening in on two world leaders talk about Ukraine before the war. More to follow....
 
 

For those interested in listening in on two world leaders talk about Ukraine before the war. More to follow....