The_Capt

FFS are we still on about this? Have you invested in a landmine consortium of some sort? “There were 90 of us. Sixty died in that first assault, killed by mortar fire. A handful remained wounded,” So whose landmines were they? We have heard no reports of Ukrainians employing them so they could have been command detonated claymores. Or they were attacking through their own minefields. So this entire episode reinforces my points. The minefield cause initial attrition but did not block the assault. It slowed it down but mortars did the actual killing. Mines may have had a supporting effect but were not decisive. It is just as likely that these Wagner convicts were forced to assault through one of their own minefields, which is an additional issue with their employment. But hey you are right no one is marching in the streets in protest so clearly the logical thing to do is start planting millions of AP mines all over the place. I mean if we are throwing out the book because we are done with “precious pearl clutching” let’s bring back napalm and carpet bombing. Why not supply Ukraine with chemical weapons? If it going to be a race to the bottom and killing Russians is the only consideration to the exclusion of all else, some bio terrorism in the backfield along with some good old fashion Vlad-style impaling should do the trick. Ukraine sinking to the same level as Russia is a terrible idea in so many ways. We are the “good guys” and the second we forget that we may as well toss in the towel.

Even at 50% of the declared number we are talking 2 BTGs per day (1600) - but I am not sure the BTG is even a formed unit anymore for the RA. Have to wonder what the Russian medical system looks like at this point.

A lot of parallel narratives with MacGregor, except for the somewhat meandering journey through Iraq. - "Why can't win, we should stop trying. We should have never have started." And somehow this would make the world a better place? The flip-side to the flip-side: - "We didn't start this, they can't win. We should double down."

If those are KIA, it will be 3-4x injured - so say about 3200 cas per day. Well the whole “Russians don’t lose wars of attrition” theory is going to be tested at those rates.

It is ok, all a natural phase of life. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/male-menopause/. Mood swings are a main symptom. Just know that we are here for you, all in this together and take solace in the fact that when dementia sets in you won’t even remember what “an Internet” is, let alone the nuances around mine warfare. You will refuse to buy Russian vodka and not even know why. And then we will all sit and wait for death playing “Combat Mission - Extreme Fishing VR” after Steve cashes the company out.

I guess I am somewhere in the middle then. The battlefield utility to my mind is in lethality and logistics/sustainment. It has been noted that we do not have an infinite supply of PGM for deep strike manoeuvres-by-firepower so DPICM would make an effective fall back option. So I am not talking about LLFs burning impulse to chop waves of poorly mobilized infantry into hash, I mean the stuff that ends war quicker like CPs, Comms, EW, ISR and logistics. Sustainment is fewer rounds to push forward, less wear on guns etc. Sure Ukraine has won but they have not ended this yet and DPICM may assist in making that go faster. Now post-conflict, Ukraine is going to have a generational RoW problem. A few thousand DPICM rounds are going to make it worse but could offfset that if they can assist in ending the war sooner. Unlike tanks, DPICM make logistics easier, can be employed right away and can do some good at a level high enough to accept risks. But as you say, ultimately a Ukrainian decision.

UXO, tell me about it. I had a driver take about 3 inches of steel through his right lung from a 155mm whoopsie…that was a crappy night. It is not that DPICM are “no biggies”, the angry little bastards can really make a mess. It is that they are not a relative biggie in context of the current situation. I stand by the point that their risks are offset by battlefield utility and gains. Further they were conflated with AP mines for crowd funding reasons as opposed to actual reality - but they are also likely in their twilight of utility so no point really marching in the streets. I suspect that precision (there is that word we love) HE is making DPICM moot. Now you need only fire 3 HE rounds and you kill whatever you are shooting at. But we also do not have enough precision on the battlefield either, so putting DPICM on the menu is starting to look like a good idea, especially when plugged into the C4ISR architecture the UA has. If we want to meet @LongLeftFlank’s bloodlust, then DPICM will do it without making thing dramatically worse than it already is. Right now I would not feel safe wandering around anywhere in the Donbas for about 150 years.

And this bring up another couple issues to toss into the debate - 1..The UA would have a very high interest in recording any DPICM usage for post-war clean up. 2. It is not like the UA is going to be lobbing these into virgin fields where children play, most of the battlefield in Southern Ukraine are highly contaminated right now anyway. The RA has fired a lot of ordinance and planted mines all over these areas, so the additional contamination problem of DPICM is likely pretty minimal compared to the problem that already have.

Sure let’s play “bad lies and statics”, it is Saturday. Sure but DPICM are a fired at a very small percentage compared to HE. During the Cold War the best that the West could muster was something like 15% of ammunition stocks. So we basically have an order of magnitude more HE being fired than DPICM. This is also because DPICM is more deadly than HE, about 10-15 times more effective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-purpose_improved_conventional_munition So in your example you would need only need to fire 2 DPICM rounds to the 30 HE. So 6 UXOs on the high side. So sure you get 10 UXO DPICM for every HE but you are firing 10 times as many HE to get the same effect. And these are the old non-self neutralizing DPICM rounds, one would hope the US would cough up the newer ones. Now if in this war the UA we’re to suddenly be given all the old stocks and started firing them on par with HE you could have a point but I am not sure we are going to see that because we already did Lebanon. As to “digging in and hiding quietly”, personal experience does not line up. Having done live fire Cbt Team training in places like Suffield I can tell you that a lot of 155mm UXOs do not conveniently tuck themselves away. Driving around them is no joke. At one point we were spending as much time marking them as we did in attacking. And to my original argument, you would have to fire a LOT of DPICM to get anywhere near the level of contamination an small AP minefield has, but this has not stopped the Anti-cluster munitions crowd from pushing this apples to oranges issue. I am definitely not a fan of handing over 40 year old junk DPICM to Ukraine. But the more modern self-neutralizing stuff meeting the US militaries less than 1% guidelines makes more sense.

Now, now, we can’t have German bashing day without “America and EU political Yabbida Day” fair and equal air time etc. We just had “Russian apologist/It is all the US/NATOs fault Day” so we are on track in the rotation.

The other problem is that intervention got hijacked by the liberal humanism crowd and R2P. So it was no longer a pragmatic interventions based on national interests and became “who will think of the children!!!” I am not a cold hearted bastard (no heart left to be cold) but interventions to save people very often caused more problems than they solved (e.g. Somalia). The problem now is that an unstable state or situation is an opportunity for US competitors. So if the US contracts we don’t get natural course of evolution, we get China. There is no argument on “what the US has to offer”, it is the greatest and most powerful empire in the history of humanity. The question - as an extremely rich vassal state next door - how do we keep it that way?

https://www.wita.org/ustrade/us-trade-trends/the-us-trade-deficit/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-trade-deficit-widens-goods-exports-10-month-low-2023-02-07/ That is nearly a trillion dollars. No argument that US manufactures some critical stuff, but talking pure value the US is vastly consumer nation. And this matches historical records as well, empires did this all the time. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187936651630032X#:~:text=Pliny described a considerable financial,destined to India alone!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_economy The other issue is the US has priced itself out of a lot of growing markets like Africa - the exception being entertainment. This is what winning looks like.

I think the one thing that a lot of Americans do not understand is that fundamentally being at the top of the heap of a global order means that in order to stay on top you are going to have to "sort out everyone else's messes" or it just comes back to bite you later. That is because as a global super power everyone else's messes are in fact your messes. Sucks but it is reality. A lot of it has to do with economics that frankly I do not understand. The reality as I understand it is that the US does not really sell anything substantial anymore (at least not compared to what it buys) other than the idea of the USA. That idea makes the USD the world currency reserve and it underpins a lot of foreign investment into the US - from buying your debt to investing in selling things to you. The underpinning idea is that the US = safe. And that safety extends well beyond your own borders. I am pretty sure citizens of the Rome had the exact same sentiment - "why do we care what happens in Britannia? Why are their problems suddenly ours?" Well the answer is, look in the mirror - you should see an Empire staring back at you and this is what being an Empire means, always has. The major issue with the US as I can see it, is that the vast majority of its citizenry do not understand this at all. As you have pointed out repeatedly, a lot of Americans do not even understand their own democracy and government systems, let alone how it links directly to far flung locales. There have been proponents of the "let it burn and contain" strategy within the US, but I think the risks become to high in a globalized world. If the US simply stands back and lets things unfold, they can quickly spiral out of control. Some places like Rwanda just make everyone feel bad, others like the Balkans can see a regional war explode into a larger one and that will definitely hit your bottom line. We just saw how incredibly fragile and interconnected the world is during COVID, I think the idea of playing hand-off is a particularly bad one given that experience. Finally, the current strategic reality basically states that if you do not get involved and fix their messes, someone else will. It is a competitive race right now so any and all options to stand back and let nature take its course are pretty much dried up. In fact within defence circles is how we can clean up messes while someone else is trying to mess with us.

So two dimensions to consider - annihilation through dislocation or attrition. Annihilation through dislocation is the breakdown of cohesion leading to collapse of organization as a fighting force. To do this the RA will need to demonstrate a break in, break through and break out success. Only then could the gain deep manoeuvre to cut UA supply lines and C2. In doing this they would need to sustain a tempo faster than the UA can cope with. Frankly my assessment of the RA pulling this off is near zero. Annihilation through Attrition - degradation of the UA at a worse relative rate than the RA leading to systemic collapse of either Will or Physical capability. I think this is the one that concerns people the most but I also do not think we have enough data. First off I am not sure that the RA actually has more people then the UA. There was a lot of heat and light on RA mobilization but Ukraine has been mobilizing for nearly a year with the full support of the west. Equipment wise the RA has lost an entire army’s worth of hardware on par with Iraq during Desert Storm. Now these are not divorced concepts, for example attrition can lead to degradation that leads to manoeuvre and dislocation. Massive dislocation can lead to heavy attrition as a force is cut up piecemeal. People here often throw in Exhaustion but this is something different. Strategic Exhaustion is more akin to Germany at the end of WW1, it is larger than the military component. Neither Ukraine nor Russia appear to be showing symptoms of strategic exhaustion, at least not yet. Russian economy could be showing signs but we also have contrary predictions. So as to this offensive, the thing to watch for is break out. If we do not see this at an operationally significant level then we essentially still have a stalemate. This phenomenon should be visible in either an attrition or dislocation scenario.

No they shredded his logistics system, C4ISR and cause him to implode at an operational level at least twice. The density you would have to lay AP mines to get the effect you want would likely get more people killed than you would in fact inflict on the enemy. They did an experiment back when I was at CFSME and laid a standard NATO AP strip in a training minefield. They then had two entire courses run back and forth a half a dozen times over the minefield man abreast. It created 2 casualties. So the density you would have to lay these at would 1) stress the logistical system, 2) expose troops while putting them in place even given RA ISR and 3) not likely work like you want as the first 2-3 guys would get hit and then the rest would just charge over their bodies. Mines are not some magic sticky carpet we can stick out there like mouse traps. Just think about a company sized position, so 500m across because this is dense fighting. So that is 500 sq meters in a single line, so if you want high density you are probably talking 4 mines per square meter, that is one mine in a 1/4 meter box. That is 2000 AP mines to deny a strip 1 m deep. Want to make that strip 10ms and we are talking 20000 mines. 100ms, so the stopping power your are looking for, 200000 AP mines....for 500m. Oh, and then in a month or two you have to counter-attack over the same minefield...whoops. It would be far better to use area command detonated systems which are already outside the Ottawa Convention. Political cost - I have noticed a trend here to "poo-poo" inconvenient political realities on both sides of this war. Russian supporters or fearers wave away Putin's real political pressures and hazards that limit his actions (e.g. mobilization). Doing it on behalf of the UA is not any better. The UA might get away with it, but lets take Canada for a second...peace loving maple syrup slurping socialists that we are. So we are in a minority government situation right now with the far left NDP actually holding the Liberals in power. So consider for a moment what they are going to do with the sudden wide employment of AP mines by the UA as we send Ukraine billions of dollars in military aid in a post-pandemic economic crunch....I will let you mull it over. The moral here, is that within politics risk is not simple nor straight forward - it is also highly connected. So while you may wish to dismiss the issue, I am pretty sure the Ukrainians have not. They have not given notice to withdraw from the convention, nor have we seen any evidence of violations...and they are fighting for their lives. So 1) they will not do what you want, and 2) the risks are very real and frankly not worth it given point #1. You want to make Russians die in numbers, how about just keep doing what they are doing because it seems to be working.

What is stark here is the level of RA operational level assets being lost. Stuff like satellite comms, EW, engineering and CPs. That stuff is supposed to be well in the back most of the time. Either they got unlucky pulling this stuff forward (and why anyone would need to push a sat comms veh forward is beyond me), or the deep strike game is still playing out. Lotta guns on the RA side too. The UA lost a few trucks and maintenance workshop (which actually hurts a lot) but the rest is F ech stuff which is supposed to get broke.

Little harsh. I guess my question is "what would have happened if we had not pulled the Baltics and Eastern European nations into NATO?" I mean the strategy above basically relies on Russia not freaking out and spontaneously "inflaming anti-Western and militaristic tendencies", and I gotta be honest Russia does not have a good track record in that regard. On the flip side there is the question of "When is containment become smothering?" But Russia was not "smothered". Didn't we just get lectures on how powerful and resilient the Russian economy was/is? I mean apparently they were rich and powerful to the point that western sanctions do not matter...not sure how this translates to "smothering". There is a lot that does not add up in the whole "Just Leave Britney..er Russia alone!!" narrative. The biggest is the assumption that by doing so Russia would reciprocate.

Desertion = 10 years !? We have "life" on the books: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/n-5/page-11.html#:~:text=Conviction of Cognate Offence&text=133 (1) A person charged,of being absent without leave.&text=(2) A person charged with,of being absent without leave.

Payload is about the only thing that large manned fighters really still have left; however, there has always been a precision offset to payloads. We are seeing this in artillery outputs in Ukraine right now. There is a case to be made for high altitude strategic strike, but it comes with a lot of its own baggage wrt profiles. "High enough to stay out of effective range of MANPADs" This is also a problem. MANPADs used to be 5000ft but they are rapidly increasing in altitude: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starstreak Starstreak has a service ceiling of 22000 feet, so we are well into medium altitudes. Now mount a Starstreak on a MALE already at 15000 feet and you can see the problem. So the trend is small self-loitering munitions/UAS plus precision ranged fires in place of CAS, deep strike precision strike missile systems and long range UAS for deep battle (operational) and very likely manned motherships launching unmanned systems for strategic strike from very long standoff. So we are into very high altitude aircraft able to fly well above, with stealth, very fast as still really the future of this part of the game - again, ironically the aircraft that will realistically do the mission in Top Gun II was presented (and crashed by Tom Cruise) in the first 30 mins of the movie. There is going to be an unmanned airpower race, that has already sparked up and despite what will no doubt be a desperate amount of lobbying by industry who have sunk costs, traditional fighter/bombers are going to be looking at significant pressures to survive as is. Edit: Oh yes and speed. The trade off with unmanned systems is persistence. I do not need speed if a supporting air platform is already there.

Man, talk about "cashing in".

Don't oversell AP landmines here. Having been in minefields and witnessed some of the carnage you describe personally - and a lot of years as a combat engineer, I think I can play the "expert" card here. AP landmines were always designed to harass and attrit - both physically and psychologically. The only ones that were approaching lethality level to be decisive are area systems like claymore or bounding mines (especially when in daisy chain...nasty). So their utility in warfare is not zero but it is also 1) upside down and 2) backwards: Upside down - like most engineer obstacles you are trading work for time. A LOT of work up front to buy a few seconds minutes later. Making those minutes second count is what all arms defence is all about. AP mine as part of that overall system is a very junior player in the modern age. The vast majority of AP mines simply are never detonated. They do support force multiplication but pale in comparison to AT systems. Main reason is that mechanized made modern warfare - we will see how long that lasts - so kill the vehicle and a modern army is back to WW1. AP mines were there to make clearance of those AT mines difficult and to kill engineers. In some conditions they were still used for final defence, but in order to really have an effect you have to employ a very high density. Go read on the Falklands War accounts of the final attacks on the Two Sisters. The Brits hit minefields on the assault, took hits and just kept on going. So as the modern era progressed the amount of effort to put out enough density in AP became entirely secondary to the AT problem. Back in training, before the Ottawa Convention, we would plan for a lone single strip in a massive AT minefield that was frankly an enormous pain in the a@@ and did basically nothing. We did employ them for nuisance minefields but these were last on the priority list of engineer works. AT, AT and AT was always the priority. So the value of AP outside of very narrow circumstances really began to drop to the point that when the landmine ban came up, we kind looked at it and went "meh". We still retain the command detonated point defence systems, like Claymores, so the ability really mess people up is still there. And boobytraps/anti-handling devices exist in a grey area so if we need to deny critical systems in a withdrawal scenario we still could. The old AP mines - "toe poopers" - really kind became old-school extra work that we really did not miss. Backwards - The other problem with the old dumb AP mines was the fact that they killed/injured more people after the war than they did in the war itself. This drove the costs of these systems way outside the battlefield gains. Cambodia was really the eye opener, and then the Balkans, Afghanistan etc. We saw that the post-war impact was like GDP-level harming - the cost of removing these weapons, especially if they records are lost or never made, was orders of magnitude of the weapon system itself. So from a military strategic perspective these were literally cutting off the nose to spite the face. They were never going to be decisive on the battlefield, and the post-war costs were enormous as we were seeing large swaths of agriculture, tourism and development areas were totally denied for at least a century unless a nation in post-war recovery could spend millions on clearances that would take years. So frankly, AP mines do not make warfare economic sense. They may feel good but Ukraine sticking its neck out on this one is not worth it. They will kill a few more Russians, but not enough to balance the blowback or post-war impacts. The RA has demonstrated a stunning ability to feed people into this thing, so they are simply going to ignore any AP minefields, accept the casualties and move on. DPICM is fundamentally a very different problem. The issue here is the "peace community" really functions by fund raising and to do that they need "wins". The AP Convention was a big win, so they were searching for a high profile follow up - enter Lebanon 2006. Israel in a bafflingly bad military operation - it basically killed the credibility of their famous design approach - decided to start lobbing old stockpiles DPICM at hybrid forces who were fighting from within communities...what could possibli go wrong? Well the whole thing blew up in their, and our, faces...literally. Old stockpiled DPICMs had embarrassing dud rates - although, reality check; those dud rates do not even come close to the numbers of AP mines employed in older conflicts. More modern DPICM systems are seeing lower dud rates than the HE being tossed around the battlefield today...but if it looks like a landmine and can generate crowd funding like a landmine... So the Anti-Cluster munition thing was born. We in military circles knew that it would really go nowhere because DPICM has far more battlefield utility and in many circumstances it could be decisive. So they bolted together a convention but there are holes one can drive a truck through and all the major players simply refused to sign off - although the US made some hand over heart promises. So what? Well DPICM essentially takes HE and distribute it widely and more efficiently. When shaped charge rounds are employed the lethality goes up as well - plenty of studies out there, and we read a lot of them for CMCW. So unlike AP which is a nuisance to an attacking combined arms unit, DPICM can kill it. For Ukraine, and the US, the employment of DPICM is entirely legal, even if it makes some people queasy. Neither nation signed the thing in Oslo and can legally employ the weapon systems in accordance with the Geneva CCW. Modern DPICM have extremely low dud rates as they are built to be self-neutralizing - we are talking 95% and above, far higher than standard HE. Now as PGM enters the battlefield en masse, my bet is that DPICM will also go the way of AP mines. If we need to kill 10 attacking vehicles, we fire 10 PGM systems. DPICM cost/benefit will very likely shift- along with a lot of systems - after this war and into the future. So the entire thing may become moot, but we are not there yet. So DPICM will have political costs, but I think they are mitigatable and are outweighed by critical battlefield utility. AP mines, no; DPICM, yes.

I am in the “no to AP mines”, “Yes to DPICM” camp. The reason is cost versus gain. Ukraine could simply withdraw from the Ottawa Convention and has some pretty good justification to do so, but they would take political hits. These hits could impact post war, which is already going to be a careful navigational exercise. The utility of AP mines is actually pretty limited, they were always more of a harassment device to add friction to your opponents operations. Sure they would cause some attrition on RA forces but I think would be the political cost outweighing tactical gains. DPICM are a different matter. Ukraine in not a signatory of the Oslo Protocols, so we would basically be holding someone outside the agreement to our standards while they are fighting for their lives. DPICM utility on the battlefield, especially when combined with C4ISR advantage is not small and can be decisive. Further as ammo stocks of regular HE drop DPICM is a good substitute. DPICM does come with risk of UXO but here careful recording and reporting comes into mitigate. That and the areas that they would be employed are already likely heavily polluted by UXO already.

So the system you describe, like the tank (or heavy mass), appears to be having parts of that system critically impacted by changes on the battlefield. The big one appears to be SEAD. Modern SEAD is designed for an integrated AD network, these are pretty large enterprises that have to be penetrated and suppressed. And then an opponents air power has to be countered both in the air and in depth (eg airfields). But the issue is that AD is distributing and dispersing, and so is C4ISR. So the best SEAD systems in the world, like the best tank systems in the world, cannot solve for 2 man teams armed with very long range fire and forget lethal systems using passive targeting sensors. What we are seeing in Ukraine is massive air denial - which basically equates to both sides denying entry costs into airspace. And they are both doing it through a lot of dispersed AD. Now the UA are also plugged into a massive C4ISR architecture that can detect Russian fighter/bombers from take-off in Russia, which gives them time to react and pre-position AD, further complicating the air problem. In the future cheap highly effective AD technology is going to jump on the unmanned bandwagon. C4ISR is going to look like a massive cloud that goes from space to sub-surface. So, like tanks, large centralized air power systems are going to become very vulnerable largely because they are highly visible. And as you note, not just the front end, but the entire air power system (e.g. refeulers). This will likely push the older larger manned platforms further back, much like we are seeing in both sides of this conflict. At that point air platforms are essentially firing munitions from stand-off. Now these can be precision munitions, but at these ranges they are basically competing with ground based deep precision fires which are much, much cheaper. Like mass on the ground, mass in the air will likely need to disaggregate and become more dependent on many-small-unmanned systems where the platform becomes a munition in itself. Like the tanks, we will likely spend billions trying to figure out how to protect these legacy systems to the point they become so expensive and limited that we simply move on. Right now, opponents of the western world are taking notes and if you have a spare bit of change invest in air denial technology/industry because it is going to be insane after this war.

Looking like time to run or commit.

I am kinda here on this one too. There is a post war argument to build up the Ukrainian Air Force, and frankly the introduction of a new fleet of aircraft is on that sort of timeline anyway. If you want boom-boom at 100s of kms by the end of next week just jump over the line and send in ATACMS. I am not sure if manned fighter/bomber aircraft are going to survive this war as a concept to be honest (and people are wringing hands about tanks). Unless someone can break the Air Denial paradigm and actually achieve air superiority, which fighter they have may be a moot point.