Gpig

I know Steve told us to cut back on the China related talk, but this is cool what the Republic of China otherwise known as Taiwan is doing. 🇹🇼👍

A bit of statistics about this thread.
First post 11.2.2022.
Page 1000 on 7.7.2022, 2000 on 3.2.2023 and 3000 on 6.11.2023.
It took 146 days for the first 1000. Then 211 for the next and another 276 for the last. So we are slowing down.
With a bit of extrapolation, it will take 318 days for the next 1000 - that would be September 19, 2024. Let's hope we are discussion the end of the war by then.
 

I am pretty sure that automatically makes you a Canadian citizen.

And this is how we snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.  Ukraine will fight as long as it can and we should support them until that end.  Here we are discussing one possible end - I am not sure we are even at probable but we need to be ready for it.  Conversations well above my pay grade will land on how things finally resolve with respect to the war.  
After the war we need a modern day Marshall Plan.  One for the history books.  We turn Ukraine into South Korea in a month.  Even if EU and NATO somehow remain off the table there are plenty of other ways to secure that nation.  Not least of which would be stationing western troops on their soil a la the US 8th Army.  We need to follow through or we risk blowing the whole thing.  All the money spent to date will be lost if we leave Ukraine hanging during reconstruction.  If we double down on this and turn Ukraine into a regional economic powerhouse…a friendly democratic regional economic powerhouse, that is how we cement this as a major strategic victory.

An easy-ish way for the US and NATO to deal with drones would be to simply accept that its isn't practically solvable and therefore anything and everything under ~2,000' is to be shot down/destroyed.
Yes; that would mean denying themselves the use of drones. But given their dominance in all other domains of conventional warfare, denying drones to both sides would be a net benefit.

I get that you might be having a bad day but there is so much unwarranted angst in this post: absolutely nobody in “The West” argues that children should have the right to choose their gender.  No-one is emptying our churches (though there are many fewer people heading in) and less than nobody is “emptying churches so they can be turned into mosques”.
Reconsider the merits of whatever media source has told you these things.  You rightly identify that we are in a collision of systems but make no mistake: it is the enemies of our Western system who promote misinformation such as what you posted above in order to foster the very division you warn against.   Seeing through that, being less angry about things that aren’t happening and therefore being a part of a secure Western system is the best way to maintain focus and win. 

Yeah, I'm very aware of that, and I suppose that's a cue for getting a little into why we don't have anti-drone drones.
There are two parts to the anti-drone drone: detection and attack.  The detection is the hard part.  Destruction is easy - we already have no end of systems that can very accurately destroy anything that you give them coordinates of.  We can accurately fire projectiles, exploding projectiles, exploding projectiles full of razor sharp hoops, high energy beams of photons, rings with chains on them, rings with strings on them, giant wads of gooey stuff, or anything you want to take out a drone.  But you have to detect it.
For an anti-drone drone, there are sort of two categories of drone you're targeting: open loop (no comm back to the sender) and closed loop (some comm back to the sender, whether full two-way control, occasional updates, or whatever).  
Detection of the first type (no comm), which includes Shaheds, is tricky - unlike the F-35, these *start* with the radar cross section of a goose* and then you can make that even smaller.  These things are all small on visual and radar cross sections because you can paint them and they don't have a lot of metal.  You're going to track them with frustrating "visual" algorithms, where "visual" can mean different things in the optical vs. radar wavelengths, but you're still trying to pick out changes in the scene to decide where the thing is.  I'm not going to spend much time on it, other than to say that unless you have really high signal to noise and high resolution (both of which the target is trying to reduce), it's a lot harder than you think, and in general you're not going to get there with simple image differencing.  And this problem exists for commless drones whether you're using another drone, a gun, or a death ray to take them down.  Shaheds at least have a very characteristic sound that you can probably use for detection and targeting once they're within audible range.
Detection of the second type (active comm) is easy.  It's transmitting, and transmitting enough to get clear signal back to its operator, who is farther away than you are if it's attacking you.  Triangulation is old technology.  Piece of cake: you lock onto the frequency, have some kind of sensor so you know your own orientation relative to the sensor, and just maneuver in a way to make the signal from the drone stronger until you hit it and destroy it with whatever mechanism you prefer.  Or have a few sensors that are networked to give you the position (helloooo MLAT) and shoot it with your favorite method of action-at-a-distance.
Except for one problem: whose drone did you just destroy?
In the Ukraine environment, IFF is the hard part of doing radio based anti-drone systems.  There are tons of things flying around, as evidenced by the daily releases of yet another view of every bit of ground combat we ever see.  It's not quite Diamond Age concentrations of them, but they're working on it.  And they're all sorts of random drones, including commercial drones, custom drones made with commercial off the shelf parts, custom drones with a mix of commercial and special mil parts, totally custom mil drones, and who knows what else. And they're all using similar frequencies, because the combination of physics and the atmosphere force you to the same frequencies if you want a particular range and data rate at powers that you can reasonably supply to both the ground operator and drone with batteries.  If you don't sort out the IFF thing and you set an autonomous anti-radiation based anti-drone system loose, it's just as likely to attack its allied drones as the enemy drones, because it has no way to tell them apart.  That means you have to have your complete drone ecosystem integrated (ring that cash register over at Lockheed/Northrop Grumman/Raytheon!!) or you're just going to be attacking your own stuff.  
And part of why we aren't seeing even rudimentary versions of it in Ukraine is that it's not a function that people were already spending much effort on for commercial/hobbyist drones. You can't just pop over to Robotshop.com or Alibaba and order tunable RF sensor kits (or a few thousand of them) the way you can other types of sensor, or actuators for operating your 3D printed grenade dropper.  It's possible to get relatively inexpensive software-defined radio modules that are small (that's what feeds ADSBExchange so you can see who's flying around Ukraine), but the environment is so variable, along with the need to confirm what drone you're attacking, that at least for now you're going to need a human in the loop, even if you can semi-automate your remote control drone sensor.  And even with a human in the loop, nobody is painting national flags on their drones, so unless you know "this is one that our side makes" after you get up close to it (assuming you're doing that, rather than sending a death ray at it from 5 km), you really don't know who you're shooting down.  So the basic tech isn't all that hard, but because it's not just point and shoot or point and drop, it's a lot more dependent on integration of the whole system to be usable.
*geese, like all waterfowl, are incredibly mean and probably deserve to die. That's why there's a book entitled "Ducks and how to make them pay".  If we can do an autonomous system for drones, it should probably be immediately applied to geese and ducks.

Yes, but at the moment I am guided by the 0.7 liters of Madeira I drank. Rain outside the window, live concert of Depeche Mode 1993. And the lack of obvious successes of the Ukrainian armed forces. 
Many of my childhood friends are afraid of this call. But I think. that this is the duty of everyone who lived carefree in the 90s

(from Kriegsforscher twitter)

At least the X guy had the decency to admit he is a novice.  His analysis is a bit of a mess.  The objectives he lists are really all over the map (literally and figuratively).
I think it has been termed “The Death of Expertise”.  Social media, and now AI, has lowered the cost of information to the point that one no longer needs to demonstrate proof of work.  The problem is that information is not knowledge.  The ability to take information, or as we have gone on about - negative information (things that should be seen but are not), and synthesize it into knowledge based understanding is not something one can do with a Twitter account.  It takes years of study to create the critical analysis frameworks and foundational understanding that allows one to take new information and understand it in context.
We see this “college boy, eh?” type of thinking in vulnerable sectors of society.  Those that were not afforded the opportunity to gain expertise can now appeal that condition.  Further expertise can be wrong - that should probably be the first rule of experts.  In fact an expert will know they are wrong before anyone else.  Being an expert is not about being right all the time, it is about understanding what we know, what we don’t know and why.
So we have people who are facing enormous uncertainty and are compelled to try and solve that.  They form information spheres they trust and then use that to try and understand better…to be more certain.  It is what we have been doing here since Day 1 - world went nuts, we seek certainty in community.  Problem is when a community is built on biases or skewed perceptions.  We have walked that precipice on more than one occasion on this very forum.
In the end, it is not about “shut up and take what I say as gospel”, in fact any community that is doing that is probably toxic.  It is about clear and objective analysis of facts, due diligence in self-monitoring and correction and proof of work in making analysis and synthesis happen.  Everyone and anyone may contribute to this community, but it must contribute.  Signal not noise.  Not for me to judge noise, the meritocracy of the community (and moderators) do that for us.

Thanks guys.  Guess who got tagged to do a Future of Joint Warfare piece at work?  Yep, the guy who won't shut up about it.  If Steve was particularly profit driven he would charge a membership fee for this thread.

Almost looks like a Stuart
 

That's an interesting opinion on what's going on.  Except that we're spending nearly 800 BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR on our military.  OMG we're going broke because we used ~5% of our already spent money to actually try to do something, militarily, that will help the world be a better place.   What cumulative effect on our country??  This is just utter horses-t.  If we had just stood by & let Putin win in UKR would he then decide to not try to poison all the world's democracies?  Would he not use fossil fuels to extort europe every time he wanted to?  This is tankie nonsense.
We have mountains of gear gathering dust and that's a huge portion of what we've sent.
And just because I am on a rant on this:  How about we turn this around by saying "those that want to freeze the conflict haven't given any thought to the cumulative effect on the world of pulling Putin's *** out of the fire".  Gawd this makes my blood boil.  

This one is just bad enough that it may get the Speaker of the House to resign - that position is nothing like the ones in the US.  Right now half of the reporters in Ottawa are digging into that old guys past like mad and if they come up with anything really nasty, like the guys unit did some dark stuff, it could push the whole thing over the edge.  Gawd, but we look like the country rubes we are this week. 

I always loved that painting.

Aftermath of yesterday strike on Russian base in Melitopol. It's claimed Russian HQ was hit and allegedly commander and chief of the staff of 58th CAA were wounded along with other officers. 

They will be very disappointed by their new places, what with it being seven feet by three feet, and six feet deep. You always have read the fine print of the fine print in a Russian contract. You have to read it twice, carefully, and sober. 

At the operational level; sure. But at the intimate tactical level (you know, the level that CM deals with), minefields were kind of a non event. They explain why particular actions were fought where they were fought, but they didn't really influence the actions themselves.
SNIPE was fought 'on the far side' of the devil's garden, not in it.
8th Armd Brigade's inept reproduction of the Charge of the Light Brigade was 'on the far side' of the devil's garden, not in it.**
Tel el Eisa was fought ... actually, nowhere near minefields.
Alam Halfa was fought on the near side of the minefields.
Ruweisat Ridge (battle no.s 1 through to about 6 or 7) was fought before the minefields were a thing.
El Mrier didn't feature minefields.
etc.
There was some fighting for defensive positions on the night of 23 Oct, but those were mostly walkovers (= boring from a CM perspective). Most of the opening night consisted of extended lines of infantry plodding forward behind barrage lines across 2-3km of rocky desert in the dark, hoping like hell they didn't step on any 'slpodies. There were numerous platoon-company sized actions during that night to reduce defended localities, outposts, and listening posts (which could make for some interesting byte-battles), but as a designer there would be no play value in simulating the approach plod through the garden. Just cut to the good bit where the contact actually occurs. Then there is no need for breaching, and no need for artillery even since the barrage has buggered off into the distance.
All of which is to say that a tactical level look at Alamein without breaching is at least as do-able as a tactical level look at OVERLORD without gliders or landing craft.
 
** in the process clearly demonstrating that armour has been obsolete since October 1942!

Some out of the ordinary footage.  Seen from both first person and drone camera (with sub-titles)
Here's a link the full 13 minute video
https://twitter.com/73RDARM/status/1701334364817424587

. . . And failed on all counts.

All I can say is that in over 20 years being a member of this forum, I've never hit the Ignore button. Until today.

So this is what you got?  I teach “young warriors” and have led dozens in combat while you likely sat at home and yelled at the tv - you are no vet I can tell that from your first post.
Let’s stop the BS and call this what it really is - political platforming.  Your position is not all that difficult to read, pretty transparent.  Basically everything the current US presidential administration is doing is “wrong”.  “Right” is whatever “our guy would do as opposite”.  So President Biden is pursuing a deliberate incremental strategy to compress Russia, so your position is “more firepower” and “hard staring”.  Or you jump on the “this war is stupid, we must negotiate”.  Basically anything President Biden is doing is “wrong” and anything they are not doing is “right”.  That has been the sum total of your contributions to this entire discussing since you showed up (oh, and some bizarre social commentary on women and social justice for good measure).  That is it.  One long “very stable strategic genius” diatribe anchored on a single viewpoint.  If President Biden declared the US was going to “end this thing in 4 weeks” you would be here yelling that “this was the dumbest thing ever” and probably quote my points as why.
You know it is ok.  You are just another in a very long line of segments of the population that surrender their own agency in the face of uncertainty.  We invented the Church which has lasted over 2000 years on exactly that principle.  Agency and independent thought is to embrace uncertainty and most people really don’t want to do this, it is scary.
Problem is you wandered onto the wrong forum.  This place has been home to a lot of independent thought since before this war started. We have pursued the facts as we can find them and then conduct collective analysis and synthesis to try and establish a clear picture of what is happening.  No one here has surrendered independent thought to a political position.  We all have opinions, I for one think President Biden’s administration has done very well in managing this crisis.  Not perfect but considering we are well off the strategic map here, they have done as well as reasonably possible.  
I am not an American, I do not participate in your political process so I do not share your baggage.  I cannot fix you or even try to change your mind, you clearly have it all figured out.  But you are not going to find friends here. Your missionary work on this forum is a waste of time.  
But it is ok.  With this last, I promote you to Hot Thread “crazy guy”.  It is a honorary position that has been vacant since John Kettler left us (rest in peace John).  You can go on and on but we all know it is for entertainment purposes only.  I am even going to un-ignore you because I am going to be first to rub your unruly mop of hair and just smile at your incorrigible rapscallion ways.  Your are a stump thumping looney kevinkin, but you are our looney.  Try not to get banned because then we will have to find another.