The_Capt

So this is something I have been mulling for some time - reverse political effect. So 5-EYES has China, the US has basically pulled us all in and said “pick a side, now.” And look we here in Canada have a new bolder Indo-Pac policy. So our end of things is going to stay interesting. In NATO and Europe specifically, the truth is that Russia is getting destroyed. The scary Rus threat bear turned out to be a half starved mangy thing now covered in it own poop. A small power is handing them their behinds. This opens the door for some serious political wiggle room. The greasier political operators are going to figure out that Russia won’t be a serious threat for years - unless it totally collapses, of course. Bad Russkies, shame on you, symbolic sanctions will continue but a whole lot of political leaders are really hope this headache would just go away. So with a toothless Russian threat the game is going to become for some “look like we are doing something, without really doing anything…as cheaply as possible.” And a lot of politicians are really freakin good at this. So we will likely see beefing up in the Baltics and some very loud defence spending announcement followed be weasel delays and slow rolls. I can’t wait to what happens when the bill for Ukraine reconstruction comes due.

To question 1 I would add “identity”. As we have discussed here the one thing Russia cannot tolerate is an identity crisis - losing this war could trigger a fatal one.

Looks weird to me. It is harder to fake dragons teeth then it is to just pour dumb concrete and cure it properly. I mean the dragons tooth is not the height of obstacle sophistication.

We kinda beat up on this theory over the spring when this article was written - it came out around the same time as the bio labs. Problem is that everything Ukraine has pales in comparison to what Russia already has. Oil and gas was the main one but Ukraine has a small fraction of Russian oil and gas reserves. This would be like attacking a neighbour for the change in their couch. Then there is the cost of infrastructure repair and construction to get it out of the ground, on top of war damage. And then finding people to work that infrastructure. Once you add up all those costs the investment equation get pretty upside down very fast. Now we know Russia was planning for a rapid zero-cost war, so maybe the extra resources were in the calculus, but it was not like Russia was short on any of this to the point the needed to grab them. This one goes right up there with the Donbas being worth “20% of Ukrainian GDP” - it isn’t, more like 6-7%, they are actually pretty poor provinces. And as to offshore, well considering they controlled the Crimea there were a lot better options to grabbing offshore oil than a land invasion. Currently if one adds up the costs of this war on Russia, all those resources would take decades to recoup the damage, assuming you could find a market that didn’t take gross advantage of Russian isolation. This is invading a neighbour’s home, lighting it on fire…the fire spreads to your house and you get life-altering injuries during the ensuing fight, you are alienated from the rest of the neighbourhood, lose your job and have bank assets ceased…all for the change in the neighbours couch.

This. As we have seen in Ukraine, once contact is made and the shooting starts everything goes. In CMCW we have a lot of turret mounted .50 cals on the US side with the M60 series and they are definitely going to open up on enemy armor. AP .50 cal can damage enemy optics etc, as well ricochets can hit supporting infantry. The reality is guys are going to let loose on any enemy with pretty much what they have. Fire discipline will try and control usage rates but restrictions on target types is incredibly hard to enforce. Or worse, if you do somehow beat it into them you get troops afraid to fire and hesitate. As we expected CW is WW2 on steroids. The ranges and intensity of fires increases dramatically and tactics need to adapt.

Dan Simmons, now we are talking!

Now that is an excellent example of the consequences of impacting one’s own environment in creating evolutionary pressure. However, we seem somewhat unique, or at least in a smaller club, in our ability to create an artificial environment to drive our own evolution. While at the same time impacting the natural environment around us - can’t wait to see the carbon footprint of this war.

I would say we are applying our own cultural biases on what constitutes “half assed”. If the Aztecs can establish regional dominance around ideas then what is the difference between an idea and say obsidian as resources? Both needed to be sustained and employed in creating regional dominance. My point being is that as a collective species we may as well treat ideas and collective will as critical resources because the effect is the same - without them organizational cohesion falls apart. With them we can expand power in the cultural/human space which translates directly into the physical resource space and vice versa. There is no line between “the imagined” and the physical in the human dimensions - it is what makes us human in the first place. Ah, so this is where the “passive or implicit” term is important. Historically very small percentages of active will have been required; however, massive amounts of passive will was also required. In fact energy to keep the will of the masses passive has been a major venture throughout history. Within Russia the major resource idea appears to the that of Russian identity. And as we have discuss here previously, sustainment of that identity is as important as natural gas in keeping Russia functioning - I live in a country with a similar issue. I think Putin understands this very well and all his actions have been to reinforce that identity (an idea). Authority only functions I’d everyone buys in and identity is the resource Putin needs, it translates directly to political power. Russia’s problem is that the foundations of those ideas is weak, always has been. It has sustained itself as an empire by having to constantly flex and demonstrate to itself that it is an empire. This is another iteration. This is what makes this war so dangerous, and frankly also strange. Was there an identity crisis looming in the Russian psyche that triggered this thing? Or was it just in one old man’s head…maybe both. Either way the fragility of that idea needed to be reinforced for whatever reason, just as tangible as any other physical resource - and here we are in this mess. In fact one of the worst outcomes of this war, again we have discussed at length, is a total defeat of Russia without a soft landing. Russia is an unstable state molecule, largely because it mechanisms of collective will (e.g. identity) are unstable. If drastically challenged the whole deal could fall apart and we have 6000 nuclear weapons rolling around the floor.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/mongolia-genghis-khan-dna And now I am wondering about the role disease plays. War as an environmental construct affects more than men. Entire populations are impacted through secondary effects such as disease and famine. Further if trauma can be passed on epigenetically - https://www.psycom.net/trauma/epigenetics-trauma And there is a link between epigenetic and mutation -https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/epigenetic-influences-and-disease-895/ Then the overall effect of war on humanity is potentially much broader and deeper than one would expect from normal evolutionary processes. This also establishes a potential link between cultural evolution and physical evolution. Which apparently is being debated in the anthropological community - https://cpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/dist/7/8056/files/2019/12/2019-Majolo-Evol-Anthropol-002.pdf

All accept one - sustainable collective Will. I argue that the Kardashev scale is incomplete - https://futurism.com/the-kardashev-scale-type-i-ii-iii-iv-v-civilization Any collective intelligent species will need to develop unified and connected collective will before it is able to approach the K-civ requirements. If a species lacks collective will, even passive or implicit, they will never be able to leverage the required energy levels. We would need to unite human will to ever become a Type I civ for example. Russia key missing resource is sustainable collective willpower and Putin knows this - that was what he was seeking in this stupid war, more collective willpower at his disposal. Worse, Russias collective Will is fractured and poorly constructed from it foundation - it is baked into their identity issues. My theory is that all these people are dying so Russia can hold it together for another few decades under another strongman ruler.

No, I think it may be more fundamental than that. Couple points: Genetic evolution is pretty damned slow. However it is not a static rate and for humans has accelerated greatly in the last 80k years - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0707650104. (To be honest this is not my field but the summary seems clear - they link it to population growth, which of course also creates stress). Human cognitive evolution has not been a static rate either. Because our brains are pliable, we are capable of programming them differently and it is argued that environmental pressures could be the culprit to evolving how we think. This article proposes it went deeper than that to a genetic level as well: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-did-climate-change-affect-ancient-humans-180979908/ Environmental stress may be the culprit in how we evolved towards more complex thinking and speech. This was before broad scope warfare but the link is theoretically possible. Finally we have pushed ourselves to the point that we can essentially engineer our own evolution. We have been discussing bioengineering people for years now and a lot of that discussion has been around its uses in warfare. War has driven us forward along with other environmental pressures but it is one of the few we constructed artificially. It has propelled technology contributing to the point that we may very well take a direct hand in our own evolution. Cultural evolution, definitely but I argue it may go much deeper than that.

It is the wide structure of war, which we also evolved having started in much the same way as chimps, that creates evolutionary pressure. In order to do this at scale a species needs to pull out a lot more energy out of its environment. Chimps do it but we took it to a whole other level. As to the Three Body Problem series - definitely older school sci-fi and his characters were damned thin. His logic on the Dark Forest is interesting but taken to extremes. The faultiest issue was with the assumption that higher life forms would collide over limited resources while expanding - default interaction = wars of extermination. The level of energy available in the galaxy is enormous - albeit finite - to the point that only a Type III civilization would see other higher life forms as a threat. And of course a Type III civilization would have the level of sophistication to simply box up lower civilizations - pretty much like what happened in the books. Once boxed up a Type III civilization is simply going to ignore lower civs as irrelevant. Only two or more Type III civilizations would wage such a war over “limited resources”, but of course with the technology levels they have they could simply move to another galaxy. Unless Type III civilization is so common that every galaxy has one - and this completely disregards time dilation of light speed travel required to be a Type III civ - then the Dark Forest falls apart. Xixin had to effectively push the whole collision central to the plot when in reality two Type I civilizations have no fundamental resources based reasons to pre-emptively destroy each other and neither do higher level civilizations. Read the fiction of your competition and future adversary and you will understand how they think better. There are a lot of insights on how the Chinese see the rest of the world in those books and how they view warfare. Cixin is only one man but there are definitely shades and undertones in his writing.

True but I think we may be the only species capable of creating an entirely artificial environment that then creates pressures. War is very much an environment, and it is very much human-made. Not sure any other animals do it to this scale - ants maybe. We create our own pressures to the point we could extinct ourselves. I can’t tell if this is a natural filter to scrub out dangerous higher life forms or a way to propel a species to become more dangerous higher life forms - see Three Body Problem series.

Nothing dumbass about those questions. In fact the mainstream western analysis by people getting paid a lot of money relied a lot on metrics that have been rendered somewhat strained in this war. I have spent most of this war trying to figure out what the hell is going on because after years of western military programming the seemingly impossible happened. The only way I can see for Russia to freeze this conflict or reverse its course is a failure in western resolve. At what is starting to look like approaching a quarter million casualties and billions of dollars in losses, materiel and economic, one has to ask “how much is Ukraine really worth to Russia?” What it means to us is a shoring up of the western global order and our places in it, which is worth a lot. But western attention spans are only slightly better than teenage lust. We see cracks and rumbles throughout. Insular and nationalistic leaning political parties are less interested in “foreign border disputes”. A steady stream of pro-Russian lies and spins from some - in some circles - political darlings is not helping, All in the middle of a recession. If Putin did this whole thing in the MENA we likely would have kept making duck sounds on the diplomatic front and then went back to watching reality tv. But he decided on demonstrating hard power a little too close to us. This is likely the first real war of the 21st century colliding with the last war of the 20th. A whole lot is up in the air. Which kind of makes me wonder if every major war isn’t a collision of the old and new - a deadly theatrical demonstration of the evolution of human civilization every time. Of course if war is an evolutionary process, it begs the question - what are we evolving into?

I guess my point is more succinctly expressed as the RA may regain or regenerate tactical capability - I sincerely doubt it will be of a higher quality, but it is theoretically possible. What the RA is incapable of is the generation operational capability that is competitive with the UA. It will also be nowhere near the western support capabilities being provided directly to the UA. It is an unwinnable equation that time makes worse not better. In reality the RA will likely generate “more poorer” quality tactical capability that will further strain their already stressed operational system effectively making matters worse. Absolutely agree on the UA winter offensive. As we discussed, winter will likely favour the UA and seriously stress the RA - it is likely the better time to strike.

Ah, well apologies for the misread - thought we were talking about the RA pulling out a magic rabbit re: “250 independent Bns” RA getting worse, UA getting better. Well most of the evidence is on the battlefield. The RA began this war able to push (at least) 5 operational axis of advance, albeit clumsily with what looked like a somewhat modern coherent force. They had issues, lord did they have issues, but they advanced rapidly before stalling and dying in pretty large numbers. The RA then collapsed on its main effort - Kyiv. It does not take deep military theory to know that is pretty bad. Qualitatively the RA was probably at it height in the opening of this war and it has been pretty much downhill since. We saw evidence of this all spring and into summer, to name a few- Reports of ad hoc units, poorly supported. Leadership casualties and failures. Logistical contraction due to UA precision long range fires. Signs of logistical failure everywhere (e.g. abandoned equipment) Older Soviet equipment and munitions seen moving to the front Reports of poorly trained soldiers being used as cannon fodder, especially LNR/DPR. Appearance of more mercenary outfits. Plenty reports of RA friendly fire incidents. This plus baffling RA targeting, as reported in the RUSI document. Zombie operations that made no sense - likely driven by political micromanagement. The continual failure of the Russian airforce, while sustaining higher end platforms we know they cannot replace. Reports of mobilized soldiers receiving very little training and substandard equipment. Reports of RA cannibalization of equipment - particularly strategic strike. This, plus dramatic battlefield losses - failure to make any breakout in the Donbas, even while concentrations that rival WW1; operational collapse at Kharkiv, and withdrawal at Kherson. None of this points to a military that is qualitatively getting better. Their mass advantage has not and is not translating onto the battlefield because the UA, armed with western ISR and fires, has crippled the RA operational system to project protect ( - good one), sustain and C2 that mass into an effective weapon. These are issues they cannot fix in the time frame of this conflict, and they sure are going to have a very hard time of it under crippling economic pressure. Stuff like building a competitive ISR architecture takes years. Training troops to fight in this new environment also takes time. Finally, the RA’s biggest sin is a failure to learn at speed of this conflict. They are still playing the old game, which after 9 months clearly does not work for them, and they cannot develop the capability to play it better, let alone better than the UA. The UA on the other hand went from a scrambling very dispersed hybrid defensive, where we were pretty sure they would have to fold it into an insurgency. Instead we got something else entirely. We have watched the UA’s ability to extend the projection of lethal power from its own cities and frontline to the back of the Crimea and beyond. Then the UA followed up by demonstrating ability to project, protect, sustain and C2 not only a corrosive defence but then take back initiative and carry out two simultaneously successful operational offensives 500kms apart. From integration of western equipment and data, to clearly producing troops able to fight and win. This is it a force getting worse. Now China may sell Russia a bunch of kit but they are not going to be able to sell them a force generation system able to push out higher quality troops. They are not going to sell them C4ISR able to compete. And they are not going to sell them a better logistical system. The West is doing all that and more for then UA…and they are pretty much giving it away for free. So the RA is not competing with Ukraine on this - they are competing with us. I think the issue is one of how we measure strength. This war has indicated that the metrics of mass - XXX units/formations is no longer enough. It is how well one can connect that mass that appears to be the measure of true strength. On can argue it really always was but the “connection metrics” have changed, the bar is much higher. The Big Push has to be the Big Integrated Push or it is dead on arrival. And the “connection” is not just Command and Control, it has many more dimensions - awareness, understanding, self-synchronization, learning. In the end I think the UA is demonstrating the power of cognitive superiority supported by precision, and massed precision beats everything. The RA tried the “big push”, twice - opening invasion and Donbas. If they had a million poorly trained, supported and disconnected troops who ran headlong at the UA lines -deaf, dumb and blind; it would be a massacre of historic proportions. The UA can see the build up in real time. They can target the logistics of that build up. They can pull back and let the Big Push run out of gas. And then roll em back. Followed by a very rapid collapse of the entire thing…just like they did the first time. Edit. Saw this after I posted - https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/u-s-intel-chief-thinking-optimistically-for-ukraine-forces-1.6180237

The famous WW2 Soviet push-back that ended at Berlin has been brought up a few times in this war. It is the dreaded spectre of “Russian ‘real’ mobilization” and human waves of vodka soaked killers. A few problems with projecting this older model onto the current conflict: - The bar of effectiveness in modern warfare is much higher. One cannot simply push out burp-guns, grenades and unpainted T-34s onto farm kids and drive your enemies before you - well not so long as those enemies have what the UA are currently fielding. Even in WW2 the Soviets took horrendous loses before German attrition from many directions took hold. In the modern era all those ski troops will be seen from space and targeted along with their already broken logistical system. - Russia 2022 is not the Soviet Union - no matter how much Putin wishes it so. Russia does not have the demographic depth the Soviets had, nor the self-contained industrial base. Globalization cuts in many ways and Russia is feeling it. So a massive manpower surge has to be equipped, trained, projected, integrated and sustained into the fight - Russia has shown it is straining to do this with its force in being, let alone another “250 independent battalions”. The weight of that extra load would likely break the already fragile Russian military operational system. - Russia would have to see the Ukraine as existential. Putin and his cronies definitely see it as existential. Some on the nationalist side within Russia agree. How much does your average Russian? I mean when it really comes down to it, how ready is your average Russian teenager willing to risk death or life-long injury to invade Ukraine? The Soviets had a clear existential threat, zero confusion - modern day Russia not so much. So basically we have a nation that is not likely to make the sacrifices of WW2 in a situation nowhere near WW2 while completely lacking the ability to generate and sustain comparative capability - let alone competitive. If it wasn’t for the nukes this thing would already be over. Lesson: when you are down to nuclear power as your only real card, you are in rough shape. Finally, and I cannot stress this enough, time is on the Ukrainian side, not Russia’s side. Ukraine is the one who is getting force generation advantage - training, equipment and support. The longer this goes on, and the last 9 months demonstrates it quite well, the UA gets stronger while the RA gets weaker. The UA now has experienced formation commanders and has had time to build a western C4ISR enterprise. They have integrated western hardware into that and driven the might RA back dramatically. The RA has wasted the modern military is had and has no force generation advantage here. Large dumb mass is suicide under these conditions and the RA keeps proving it on a daily basis. The only way any of this changes is if western support falters or fails.

I am not as well steeped in maritime warfare theory as I would like; however, I suspect the answer is a cautious “yes”. The clouds of ISR, counter missile and protection and weapon ranges are becoming similar. I suspect a lot could be derived from the over the horizon naval warfare approach, as well as collective protection. However, the environment shapes both the capabilities and their applications. Naval warfare has much higher capability densities on each platform, this appears due to the nature of the physics of fluids. The maritime domain can do small and dispersed capability, however it is very limited in mobility ranges. Given that the navy has to basically haul itself very long distances, burning a lot of energy while it is doing so, they are forced to create much higher denser capability. Further, the surface in the maritime domain is dynamic - unlike the land, land has waves but they are essentially “frozen” in the timescales we are talking about. Maritime has to contend with a dynamic surface which means more energy per platform just to survive and move. Land warfare is much more distributed due to the fact that the ground can only bear so much practical moving weight, much less than water. So the primary challenge is moving all that distributed energy around in any sort of structure. Navies also have formation issues but with much bigger blocks, on land it is each individual soldier that must be kept in formation. Land warfare is therefore limited in how much energy density it can put in one place but it has better option for broad dispersion. In the past dispersion meant less lethal energy packages but that is changing. I think the “death of surprise” is definitely a cross-cutting theme. Navies have essentially lost the element us surprise for years - big hit steel on an empty ocean. Submarines the notable exception. Over the horizon initial engagements and unmanned leading edges are also likely a common theme. How each treats AirPower could also be interesting. To be honest I am not sure how much can be pulled over, at least as a start point but I am thinking of spending more time on naval warfare theory.

And this hints at the shining city on the hill that all theorists are chasing - predictive analytics. I am a grumpy old dog now and am skeptical it will happen in my lifetime, but it will happen. Someone is going to take all that data and be able to create predictive algorithms that actually work enough to give advantage. These are already in use in marketing, social media and politics, there use in warfare is just starting to emerge.

Sounds like we are definitely going to need a new CM engine. Seriously, we almost broke the current one with the CMCW maps and those ranges are nowhere near what we are talking about here.

Very good points and the technological issues will have to be solved. Makes me wonder what the UA have been doing because apparently they are already there. The only reason I can think of to give tanks the job of direct-indirect fires is mobility. Nothing in the artillery inventory can match the mobility of an MBT. So lateral battlefield mobility with a breakthrough option at medium ranges kinda sounds better fitting a tank - although as you point out not optimized. I suspect the new heavy will be a hybrid solution that has mobility and survivability but can hit at 10km first round kills. I also like the idea of heavy as the energy carrying platforms for light, particularly unmanned - so mothership concept. Particularly if UAS are really just ammunition, then heavy can carry and project that ammunition - this is similar to the carriers in the maritime domain.

And this is where military culture becomes a problem. Happened with cavalry and the tanks and aircraft carriers and battleships. We bake in entire collective identities into trades to reinforce organization and structural resilience but it becomes an impediment to agility. Of course tanks don’t do indirect fire, both the artillery and armoured corps probably threw hissy fits. The infantry are likely in for a bit of an identity crisis too - “Close with and destroy the enemy” is becoming “Sneak in like door mice and become the human in the loop as long range systems do all the work.” I think a lot of force development in times like these is simply getting out of our own way.

That is the big question. If the UA was fully upgunned they could theoretically corrode the Russians much faster. To the point everything would look like Kharkiv. However, in a more symmetrical conflict both sides will likely disperse and deny. Offence will become “being seen” and engaged by PGM at very long ranges - someone coined the phrase “manoeuvre by fire”. As both sides use long range fires to corrode their opponent faster/better they will also do everything to slow/prevent their own corrosion. The end result will likely be a protracted corrosion fight until someone’s ISR bubble collapses, logistics fail and/or they run out of deep strike systems…then things will move fast. Maybe? This condition will continue until some form of multi-spectral stealth is developed. Nanotechnology is another avenue I would keep eye on. As to AirPower, I am really not sure where that is going to go. Right now the UA is delivering equivalent AirPower effects without the need for airplanes. If they had ATACMS or the new even longer range missiles en masse they would extend that ersatz AirPower to strategic depths. I honestly think AirPower will become predominantly unmanned - manned crews will likely fall back to airborne C2 - but I also do not know how much air breathing flying platforms will be employed. No place to hide in the sky at some point. I do not think AirPower is going away, I am just not sure how it will be packaged and distributed. What is really interesting is that this really is about packaging lethal energy, or perhaps energy density is a better term.

The issue with ISR as that we really have only seen the tip of the iceberg. We are still using pretty large expensive platforms; however, as the internet of things and "everything is a sensor", along with battlefield ISR nets, swarms and whatever they come up - all plugged into ever-increasing processing power, and whatever AI turns into - the "eyes everywhere" battle is going to become just about unavoidable: the death of surprise. We will not be able to fully blind an opponent and as such our options are going to compress. As you note - going into a war with ISR parity is bad news and things are getting more symmetric as technology gets smarter, smaller and cheaper. I do not think heavy is dead at all. I do think it will 1) become re-purposed - e.g. tanks in the indirect fire role, matter of time until someone figures out a PGM indirect fire tank round, and/or 2) more specialized and saved for critical moments in operations - modern version of storm troops if you will. If anything is truly screwed I think it might be medium. As visible as heavy without the survivability. I think we are looking at a force rebalance, away from a heavy core with outer cordon of medium and a sprinkling of light. Heavy will be held back like the cave troll in LOTR, medium is likely going to hybridize towards light, and light will take on more prominence - IF the trends from this war remain consistent. There is a problem with anti-mass/corrosive warfare/denial warfare - it is slow. We are talking about fast precision attrition, but it is still slower than manoeuvre tempo-wise. It is very effective against dumb mass, we have seen this in this war several times now. But what happens when two dispersed forces meet each other - fog eating fog? We are likely going to see long drawn out affairs until one side gains enough advantage and then thing will go quick. Slow is not good and costs a lot, but in the emerging environment I am not sure what else will work. So long as we keep our heads up, eyes out and do not let the weight of military culture and pressure from industry drag us down there is opportunity to re-define modern warfare on our terms. I would much rather have the Chinese or whoever playing catchup to us than the other way around.

This one right here is what I am not sure of. So let’s take this war and transplant it to a fictional country but the Opposition are backed and supported by China. Chinese ISR and smart weaponry, unmanned…the whole she bang. We play our A-game and do Gulf War part deux all heavy and electrified. So first things I like to think we would establish operational conditions but in a decade that is going to get harder and harder as counters to a lot of our systems continue to develop…because China. But let’s just assume we do a better job of it in-country. Well none of that solves for Chinese ISR outside the country and into space unless we really want to automatically widen the conflict - eg what would our reaction be if Russia started hitting western ISR assets outside Ukraine? So what? Our opponents in this proxy-Chinese country still have access to hi resolution multi-spectral ISR being fed to them in real time. We, being the mighty west are 1) big, 2) hot and 3) hungry. We are easily visible from space, our logistics tail is larger than the RAs in this war and we are more vulnerable to shortages because everything we have burns energy like nuts. Our opponent may also very well start asymmetric hits outside their country that look a lot like Russian depots spontaneously exploding over the last 9 months as well. Air power. It is a fundamental assumption we have air supremacy in any war we will fight in the west. To the point Canada abandoned air defence entirely as a capability. Problem is that air superiority below 2000 feet is not a thing. The RA is baking the air with EW and cannot keep UA UAS from seeing them and pooping HE on them. If our opponent has cheap Chinese autonomous drone swarms with submunitions our multi-billion dollar air platforms are not going to matter. And that is if we can even get those platforms into theatre. SEAD is now every jerk with a MANPAD, which can hit up to 20+ thousand feet and is fed into all that Chinese ISR. Indirect fires. Last I checked, western hardware is allergic to MLRS as the Russians. So if our opponent has highly dispersed but integrated deep precision strike capability they are hard to find, while we very definitely are not. Our fuel and ammo is on trucks too and Chinese HIMARs hiding in a barn linked into persistent ISR we can’t do anything about is going to make us run out of gas…and we will do it faster do to consumption rates. Anti-armor/vehicle. So our opponent in this fictional war is armed with a whole bunch of Chinese Javelins and NLAWs etc. Dispersed they can hit us at nearly 3kms, fire and forget. They also have one-way loitering munitions…again all hooked into that ISR problem. Our hot, heavy and concentrated heavy formations are going get hit effectively at really long ranges. “Ah but we will have APS which will sweep those pesky ATGMs from the air”. Ok, assuming they don’t do sub-munitions, decoys and a raft of work arounds, sure. Next question: are we mounting APS on our entire logistics tail? Because we are back to it getting seen and hammered. Urban areas. We have been extremely lucky that all our opponents (Iraq) were dumb enough to mostly meet us in the open. An urban fight soaks up our western advantages really fast. An opponent who has time to prepare and is set up to defend home urban areas is going to really hurt us badly…and we are also back to logistics support to that urban fight. I have no idea what a modern or near future urban fight is going to look like with unmanned in the mix but “easier” does not spring to mind. Now maybe we have counter UAS and drone swarms of our own. Problem, our opponent is designed to fight dispersed…we are not. A few unit types are set up for it, but the main are not designed to fight as light infantry. In this little war our opponents are designed for this kind of work. So we will have a steep learning curve and in war most learning is thru dying. So what? Well western superiority is challenged in this scenario, on more than one level. Assuming we can get enough forces, and if we go the traditional route we are going to need a LOT of our forces, keeping them in the fight is going to be incredibly hard. This will be sticking a steel gauntlet hand up to the shoulder in a beehive. You would need to armor the entire length of the arm and you are still going to get stung badly as the bees get in behind things. The cost is very high as casualties in this scenario are going to be a shock. I am not sure we can even sustain let alone win urban combat. As you note, the insurgency, if we make it that far, is going to make the last ones look adorable in comparison. The political calculus for this in the west makes my head swim. In short, I see a side in this war that fights along the same approaches we do - and it isn’t the one that is winning. “Ya but we will do a better job” makes me really nervous as I am not sure what “a better job” really looks like given some of these trends. We may have stalled later. We may have pulled it off with fewer casualties and taken ground faster but I am not sure terrain matters when there is an urban fight at the end of a rainbow and you are getting hit along the entire length of your operational system. I like to think we could have isolated the country from its strategic support but that is not a sure thing either. I would be willing to bet that even with the western powers in place of the RA the war would last longer and be far bloodier than anything we have seen since Korea. To the point I am not convinced success is guaranteed if we continue to play be our current rule set. In the west, in some circles, I am seeing echoes of the European powers as they observed the US Civil War - “interesting but of course we do things better”…which they believed right up to 1914. If we are smart we will be op researching this thing to death and binning all our assumptions until they are confirmed or denied one way or the other.