The_Capt

And we are back to breaking the Russian war machine. Which of course will take more fighting men. There is no magic technology solution here. They can dig in and hope to attrit the RA enough for the Russians to stall and then shoot for some BS empty peace. Or they can go on the offensive and pay the blood price. The West can supply a lot but they cannot supply fighting troops or the will to resist. If Ukraine cannot muster this then no viable alternatives really exist beyond attempts to freeze this thing, which may very well fail due to Ukrainian “exhaustion”. That is an 800 km frontage, longer than the Western Front in WW1. They can reduce troop density requirements quite a bit but not to zero, not yet. There are no free lunches in war.

We bounced around some ideas a few dozen pages back. So to my thinking the key problem is denying enough space around a minefield to be able to breach it. The range of enemy ISR, UAS and artillery is making traditional breaching ops impossible. So the only way I can see doing this without getting back into jetpacks is to use light infantry to try and infiltrate past the mine belts but send them with all sorts of FPVs and supported by larger UAS. They will need EW and all the C4ISR and layering of indirect fires and deep strike. They will also likely need C-UAS UAS in order to create a space for breaching and larger forces to push through. So basically yes, small groups of FPV teams pushing forward and swarming as best they can and as deep as they can with a steady supply of new FPVs delivered by larger UAS, and supported by everything. Pull all that together along with a deliberate corrosive warfare campaign and basically the RA becomes over-extended by virtue of shaping and infiltration. Do a breach and then send the troops deep. Russians hate this and will fall back to re-draw the line. This is what momentum starts to look like. If the UA cannot do this then we are back to tactical leg humping and symbolic war porn videos of strategic strikes. In fact if the UA cannot do the above re: offensive, then they should simply go firm and dig in. Save all the expensive ammo and bleed Russia white over the next two years when best guesses are the Russians may run out of strategic gas.

I would very much like for the Ukrainian strategic strike campaigns to stop being “symbolic” and start shaping the battle space for re-engaging in offensive operations. Symbolism is great but destroying Russian abilities to effectively defend an 800km frontage with a highly degraded military are much better. Further, “symbolism” is not going to keep western support coming…operational gains that push the Russians back will. The thumbnail sketch plan: - Re-establish denial of air and ground. - Hit the RUAF hard and keep them well back. - Hit The RA where it hurts…logistics, enablers and C2. Prioritize artillery and EW. - Hit the SLOCs. Hard military targets that move all that hardware and people to the front and then up and down it. - Solve for offence. Stop using FPVs defensively now that artillery is showing up and use them offensively en masse. Saturate bridgeheads and try bounce crossings at scale. - Re-establish forward momentum and get the RA reacting to them, not the other way around. - Bite, grab and hold….repeat. Eventually, if we are lucky, corrosive warfare will work again and the RA will have to re-set like it did in Fall 22. That is one helluva bill to pay but it is the one in front of the UA and the West to support. Do not waste limited military high end hardware on “symbols”…use it to kill the Russian war machine.

To do what with exactly? Choke off the Crimea? Except for that whole strategic corridor problem of course. Screw that, the Kerch Bridge would soak up a lot of punishment for not enough gain. Russia’s ability to attack or defend is not dependent on it right now at all. Maybe if they got bottled up in the Crimea but that would take breaking the defence in the middle which is no small hill to climb. Nor will Russia fall by some weird symbolism. Use the damned missiles to hit strat LOCs, airfields, ports and C2 nodes to erode the Russia ability to prosecute the war directly. In the business we call it “shaping”. Then solve for those minefields and regain operational offensive initiative. The Kerch Bridge does little to support any of that beyond making us feel better.

That entire theory does not track at all. The UA already hit that damned bridge and Russia did not buckle. The idea that if we somehow hit it that it will be the starting gun to internal dissent is the sort of wild theory the critics on the right use against support of Ukraine in this thing. FFS the UA hit Moscow with long range drones and it did not increase internal dissent. Further if the Kerch Bridge is so symbolic that it can topple Russia, then why isn’t the opposite true and it drives support in Russia for this war to all time highs? I mean if the fate of the Russian people is tied to that bridge Putin should have dropped it himself as a demonstration of just how under siege the greater Russia is by the West.

Seriously this Kerch Bridge lust has to stop. Taking it out will be an annoyance and likely be spun as some sort of humanitarian disaster. It is not a war winner. So the primary difference between HIMARs and long range drones is that there is no real defence against HIMARs once fired. They can try GPS jamming but all those advanced ATACMs come with inertial guidance for the last mile. If you point an ATAMCs at something it is going to die. So if the UA were to take 25-50 ATACMs and decide to conduct a strategic strike campaign on the oil and gas infra in range…and then layered drones on top of this…they could severely damage the Russian energy industry. And do it at a rate that Russia could not keep up with. My guess is the US sees this as an escalation too far as it may trigger bad things we do not want. So these systems will likely be pointed at hard military targets…like airfields and C2….maybe rail/tn. The ‘so what’ is that the US has likely crossed a rubicon of providing targeting support directly into Russia. They may have before but when those ATACMs start to fly it will be undeniable. Edit: well that did not take long https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/ukraine-uses-long-range-missiles-secretly-provided-by-u-s-to-hit-russian-held-areas-officials-say-1.6860160

I would not be surprised to see that stuff was preposition in Poland waiting for the bill to pass. The President does not meet Congressional approval to push US military anywhere and I would be surprised if DoD was not directed to “lean forward” What is really interesting is the ATACMs. If the US is releasing the really long range stuff then it is also very likely providing the C4ISR and targeting support to the UA for those systems. That is an escalation and a very clear signal. It may also explain the whole “hey Ukraine wanna lay off Russian oil industry” narrative that popped up. I am pretty sure the US is not onboard with those missiles shredding the Russian oil industry.

Guess it depends on point of view. I want about 100 of these to walk over a minefield and then burn anything that resembles a Russian ATGMs in a 5km bridgehead while FPVs hammer anything that runs away from the flames. Toss in some EW and a dash of c-bty and one might have the makings for a breaching op that goes somewhere.

Dear Gawd, this one is so absolutely extreme that it straddles that line between genius and insanity.

Well if the pattern is consistent we should get a troll through here in the next week or so, shedding wolf's tears about the "inhumanity of this terrible war" and how we need to stop it now. Of course the way to stop it is to cut off funding to Ukraine and force them to the negotiation table. To which we will ask - just like last time - "What f@cking table?!"

Depends on the aerosol. If it is just plain old smoke…not really. Even cheap commercial drones can have multi-spectral cameras onboard, let alone the higher end stuff. If it is treated smoke, which is harder to make and more expensive, it could give IR protection. Problem with drones/FPVs is that they can fly under that layer unless they basically do it at ground level.

Now that is the question of the year…or maybe next year.

I think this has always been a bit of a Cold War pipe dream. The enemy is not stupid and will breach wire before obligingly follow it into an obvious KZ. The minutes it takes to breach are gold in suppression and a breaching lane is itself a canalization - albeit one of the enemies choosing. In reality even under Soviet Cold War doctrine the layers of recon would spot and map out all those obstacles well ahead of main bodies. And then a steel sky of artillery would drop on the entire grid square. I am not sure static defence would have ever worked back then, or at least not as well as we had hoped. Unless we could strip off the recce assets and suppress all those guns of course. In this war it is clear that a KZ is a mobile thing. One can swing guns and UAS rapidly and in essence project a KZ pretty much anywhere on the battlefield - within certain ranges of course. In the future we are likely going to have flying and crawling KZs that can deny large swaths of ground. Regardless, minefield still work for vehicles we have seen plenty proof of this. Wire is strangely absent so there has to be a reason why it no longer appears to be worth the resources and effort.

Looks like this thing may finally happen: https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/the-house-is-on-the-brink-of-approving-aid-for-ukraine-and-israel-after-months-of-struggle-1.6855230 Going to really have to play it smart with this package as it may be the last one Ukraine gets.

Hmm, well I will take your word for it but it really sounds like creative accounting. This is a bad example really, traffic accidents are more often expressed in fatalities, not cars. In fact one can have more car accidents but fewer fatalities (see: seatbelt campaigns in the 80s). To my mind one cannot discount the mass of the population as a foundational metric of the power of any given state. If Lesser Tonga decided to go back to a monarchy it will have far lesser impact regionally or globally than if China suddenly breaks out in Liberal Democracy; however, by these metrics we are counting "one". Regardless, as much fun as this side journey has been, I think we can agree that democracy has come under pressure recently - there seems to be wide agreement on this. Whether this is a blip or trend is kind of a red herring as it will either be a blip or trend based entirely on what we do right now. And more specifically how well the US defends its own democracy individually and abroad...like Ukraine. As a Canadian, I can say with a lot of authority that if the US democracy fails/erodes, we are not going to be able to write it off as a "single nation backsliding" in the global ledger. We are going to feel that impact on a very broad scope and scale. Further, the western world and champions of democracy, fumble the ball in Ukraine the impacts on global order and stability will also be felt far and wide. We cannot reduce this war to "one more in the lose column". More importantly "how" we win or lose this war is also very important. If we can "lose" in a Korean Peninsula scenario - which, I for one do not see as a loss but many will disagree - we can still preserve something of a global order. If we catastrophically lose through apathy and political paralysis it is going to risk damaging the democratic narrative and influence for some time to come.

But isn't populations the actual effective measure. I mean if we have 30 island nation states of perfect democracies but they only make up .1% of the global population then isn't using the state as the key metric misleading. To my eyes if India goes autocratic that is 1.4B people who have lost democratic freedoms, which has much higher weight than a single nation state backsliding. What matters is the people in those states not the number of states themselves...no?

Ya definitely a slippery slope. Something like Iron Dome - Ukraine is probably a possibility but again one is looking at western military personnel on the ground. What it could do is secure the backfield and then let the UA do the dirty in Russian territory much like they have been. But it would become so easy for us to get pulled in by this point. Western forces actively hitting targets inside Russia is the nightmare scenario that likely won't happen without a WMD release type of escalation.

My initial reaction was "nope". But the US did pretty much this in and over Israel last week so there definitely has been a precedence set. I think the major hurdle if positioning western troops on Ukrainian soil during the war to make this happen. To my mind this a western escalatory threat ladder rung. We could essentially declare a no-fly west of the Dniper but Russia is going 1) take this as a major escalation signal, and 2) milk it for all its worth to drive domestic support for this war upward. This could easily creep off-mission if manned Russian A/C start upping operations - we have to let them bomb Ukrainian civilians but shoot down the unmanned only. I think if we are going to call "no fly" we need to mean it and make damned sure we are justified in taking this next step. We are talking about global powers no longer prosecuting by proxy as we would be targeting Russian assets directly. Then if we make the call, do not be half @ssing it - just declare "no fly" like we did for Saddam and Gadhafi. Interestingly, the US president does not need blessing from congress for this as Commander-in-Chief. This would be a US military operation comin gout of in-year operations funding. I am betting it is an option on a whiteboard somewhere, but no one seems willing to take it just yet.

This really speaks to a political leader who simply does not understand how the modern world works. Of the US wants roughly the same economic footing it had pre-WW2, back when its population was about 125M, then decoupling globalization makes perfect sense. How many jobs in the US will have to go back to manufacturing and resources? Entire generations of Americans will have to go back to the coal mines and steel mills. Costs for everything will go through the roof, unless of course Vance’s plan is all JP Morgan and plans to pay future US workers next to nothing to do all the work that has been outsourced. And then there is the uncomfortable realities of the money markets and foreign investment. The US does not get to be large, powerful and rich without the global order that it built, fought for and now needs to keep fighting for. It baffles me that the average voter in the US does not really understand this let alone a senator.

Then I am doubting you know where Switzerland is on the map. Or maybe it is a colour green thing?

What data are you referring to? Everything I am seeing shows Switzerland as a full democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

And my point is that upward trend can only be sustained if we work for it and defend it. Democracy is not the natural state of large scale human affairs or political systems. History demonstrates quite the opposite. The hope was that literacy and enlightenment would allow for greater informed choice by the masses but as we have just discussed there are some serious issues in the modern age with this. Democracy using a much longer lens than even the last 100 years is a great experiment, not ordained by higher powers or a natural evolution that is enshrined in post-modern reality. It takes work and sacrifice, it is not an entitlement. Basically this could be the end of democracy if we sit back and let it happen. There is real danger in simply shrugging and declaring “slight dip” as if the upward trajectory is driven by greater forces. Democracy will only survive if we want it to and make it happen. We have seen it tried before in both Ancient Greece and Rome - albeit in different forms - and we abandoned it. We can do it again…unless we consciously do not let it happen.

You realize the article you cited from Our World in Data was: With a whole lot of data that counters your position. You picked the last hopeful line in that article when the entire thing was about the overall decline in democracy worldwide for nearly 20 years. Ok, I will play too. I think that history shows that autocracies have been the vastly more common political system. We have had democratic spasms in the past but they have always failed in the long term. I think this current spasm is about 200 years old and due to fold up completely much like democracy has done in the past. I don't think a 200 year increase constitutes am upward trend in democratization when viewed through a 6000+ year lens any more than a one year decline represents a trend in the stock market.

Ok if we are going to play "pick the data" then using the same chart democracy is a fad as of about 1850. We are just as likely to fall back into complete autocracies which have dominated human political affairs for millennia. Why can't autocracy recover in the long game if democracy can in the short? In reality this is kinda silly. It is clear democracy around the world is under strain. We have no guarantees it will work and my original point stands - we have abandoned democracy in the past (see Roman Empire) and we are at risk of doing it in the future if we do not protect it. I so not subscribe to the "it will be ok...because reasons" school of human affairs. Pulling it back to the subject of this thread, we are facing a test for modern democracy right now in this war and the USA is at the forefront. I honestly hope that democracy prevails but within the US right now some of those charged with protecting it are in fact attacking it. They are attacking it by "proving" (engineering really) that democracy is weaker in "getting things done." They are doing so to re-wire how power is distributed in the US and by extension globally.

Any chance you actually looked at the the other refs: This has been about a 20 year trend depending on how one measures "democracy". Your stated point was: "I actually think the jury is in. Loads of countries other than the US are democracies. It's obvious at this point that there are much better implementations of democracy than the US system (downsides of being first). But almost universally, people living in democracies (including the US) are better off than people living in autocracies. Democracies do collapse and revert to autocracies (and it feels like the US is currently skirting the danger zone on that). But autocracies also collapse and become democracies. And so far it appears that autocracies collapse at a higher rate than democracies. The overall trend so far appears to be towards greater democratization." 1. There is at best around 8 percent of the planet with true liberal democracies. And democracy is not in the majority by any stretch. 2. Democracies are not on the rise, they are in fact in decline and have been for some time. Liberal democracies have been on decline for nearly 20 years. Flawed democracies - like India and Pakistan - are also starting to decline. More bluntly put...the data does not match your initial opinion/position - which now seems to have shifted to "sure we are in a decline but can recover as we have in the past". Sure we might see a surge in democracies globally but likely not if the US continues a downward spiral. We definitely saw a Post-Cold War bump but the party appears to be over. This is why this war is an important test and has a lot at stake.