The_Capt

Ya, not so much. They may mitigate but they are not going to "fix" anything anytime soon. First off APS does nothing to help against PGM such as SMART (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMArt_155) , DPICM nor do we know how they manage top down attack against thing such as Javelin and self-loitering munitions. To simply go with "a-ha we have APS, mischief managed!" is to go forward blindly as technology to kill big steel hot things is accelerate well past the technology to stop it. To my eye APS is the ERA of the 80's..neat idea that took about 10-mins to figure out how to beat. And we have not even scratched the surface of UGVs - imagine a minefield with legs. Second, APS does not solve for the entire system, it protects the front end of it and unless you mount it on every tank, AFV, artillery piece and engineer vehicle, it won't even do that. Oh wait, it gets worse. You need APS on your entire logistical and C4ISR chain as well - or you risk well protected F ech out of gas, ammo and spare parts pretty quick, something else the Russian demonstrated very well. Third APS does zero for the ISR problem, it might make it worse. A bunch of sensors and boxes is going to raise vehicle profiles, not shrink them. So I do not think we are forgetting about APS, we are simply recognizing that it will be a partial mitigation best. The whole "counter/Shield" technology boom is coming but we have a trend of advancing technology to kill each other faster than to counter it.

I was with you until this war. What Ukraine did via crowd-sourced ISR was frankly terrifying in its potential. We only have a bunch of social media/OS content and a few decent early analysis right now. However, what role did the cellphone and civilian cell networks play in Phase 1 of this war? I saw social media picking up Russian forces and then light Ukrainian infantry/SOF going out and hitting those forces...damn near everywhere at once. That is not a traditional military kill chain, but damn if it did not work - to the point that it led to Russian operational collapse. This leads to "What is the cost of the killchain?" and "What is the comparative/competitive costs of the killchain?" But right now this is conjecture until a full AAR can be done on that whole thing. My sense is that high precision killchain costs are going down, not up, as every element within them gets smaller, cheaper and more powerful. Unless you are a western military industrial complex that needs to spend billions on what a few thousand can already do.

So now we land on the concept of synthetic or artificial mass. The big advantage here is that it can remain distributed and very hard to hit while still delivering what we used to get from concentrated organic mass (i.e. steel). This has been played around with for years, the US had an experimental division back in the 80s but it never really went anywhere. The question is: has its time arrived? I am not sure. The theory would be to eat snow at a rate faster than it can be shoveled - hence deep strike as an operational manoeuvre. Once the enemy collapses, the theory is then that their ISR bubble would collapse too. So the requirement for the big protection bubble should reduce and traditional heavy manoeuvre is back on the menu...theoretically. However, as you note, Light is..er light and can move faster, with less logistical support requirements. If you empower this with ISR and precision, technically it could do what heavy used to be able to do, maybe better. I think the USMC is heading this way with the removal of tanks from their inventory. However, you really want to be sure. Could the enemy pull a 'bastion' at some really inconvenient geographic point that light could not handle? Would a now-possible heavy assault guarantee all enemy COAs better? A whole lotta unknowns and some leaps of faith there...hence why we are all watching this war so closely. I can tell you that at modern joint staff colleges the students are wrestling with this exact problem and only in the last year have I seen the answer change from what it has been for years - away from heavy towards lighter, but you need to guarantee massed integrated precision to some extent as a pre-condition.

I like the thinking, let's keep that up, however - there are issues Ok, so let's unpack this a bit . Area. So a mechanized combat team in the advance over open country has up to a 2km frontage - giver or take. We then need to extend that bubble to at least 8km, so double the range of the ATGM, so that the next tactical bound is secured, or at least scanned, before the mech force gets there. So adding that all up we are talking an op box of about 16 sq kms, or in more tactical terms: 16,000,000 sq ms. Why sq ms? Well a 2-man ATGM team such as Javelin, takes up about 4 sq m (and I am being generous - but maybe they have quad or buggy for quick get away). So the game here is to try and spot two humans, with little or zero vehicles that take up a 4 sq m area in an overall area of 16 million sq ms...and sustain it. Finding. Finding two humans in cover on the a conventional battlefield is still the third hardest ISR challenge that exists. Even with TI, which is not designed to find people it is designed to find vehicles, is going to be severely challenged in doing this. The average human being runs at 36 and change degrees C, which is only about 10 degrees hotter than ambient air in summer in temperate regions. Then they wear clothes, modern uniforms actually are designed for some of this (https://www.innovationintextiles.com/protective/hohenstein-develops-textiles-for-screening-against-ir-radiation-for-use-in-military-uniforms/). Next they are trained to stay under tree canopy, or dig into the ground, tall grass etc. So this is not like those wands at the airport that are going to squawk when they find your keys. A number of 500m was tossed around for a Tac UAV to be able to spot a human with TI, but I seriously doubt it if that human is half decently trained and equipped. UAVs are the best bet, but it will not be easy by any stretch. Those humans on the ATGM-side do not have the same problem as mech is huge, hot and loud - we can see them from space-based now - so this is not an advantageous exercise for the attacker from the get go...tale as old as time. Fixing. The next major problem with the proposal is the role of SF "infiltration" as the lead edge of this screen. I like where this is going, very hybrid, however: 1) that is a lot of "SF" - in reality decently trained light infantry would fill this role - to cover off all that ground, even doing "spot" close recce. They are also going to take casualties so they will need medivac and support, Sustaining this is not small but doable. 2) The entire mech force can now move at the speed of "SF Infiltration" which is damned slow compared to mech advances - think walking speed. So now a mech force which is designed to punch holes and advance quickly to an enemies rear areas to bring the righteous hand of gawd almighty to REMFs is crawling behind light infantry infiltration...kinda defeats the point of mech in the first place. Finishing. One big piece missing from the diagrams is indirect fires. The logic of spotting small ATGM teams and then dropping the sky on them - rinse and repeat, makes sense even if it is at a human crawl. However, that nasty indirect fire points in two directions. The logistics train for a 2 man ATGM team hiding on 4 sq ms is pretty modest - like bag of trail mix and some toilet paper, modest. The logistical train for this proposed hybrid advance mech model is pretty significant, and will also be seen from space. So unless that SF infiltration extends out past artillery range, the tail of this mech force, the mech force itself, and with HIMARs, the parking garage said mech force was hiding in before it moved out, are going to get lit up and blown all to hell before the ATGM teams stop bird watching and start shooting. So we are back at Fog Eating Snow. Why bring the mech force along at all? In fact until you completely break an enemy line past the artillery support distance, mech forces would be held back until pre-conditions are met, namely - degrade enemy ISR, degrade indirect fires, collapse logistical system and crack the line. This is firepower-attrition-to-manoeuvre, not the other way around which is in all our doctrine - [although honestly, I have to ask myself when have we ever actually done that? We always lead with an air campaign that makes the Valkyries look like a chicken dance.] Anyway, SF infiltration, yes...slow but proven one of the few real ways to advance in this war. Infiltration with all sorts of ISR to find, and then isolate any heavier force concentration - going to be a lot of screening battles, but their sneaky peeky ATGM teams do not matter...cause we didn't bring any "Ts" during this phase. Instead of WW1 levels of dumb massed fires, back up that infiltration with precision fires to shtomp anything that they can find with accuracy - rinse and repeat, and continue to support with deep strike on anything that even looks high value - particularly C4ISR, EW, Logistics and throw in an airfield or two for the sunbathers. You project this as a series of tactical undecidings of their operational integrity, until their system starts to collapse. Here breadth is likely more important than speed. You project corrosive force along their entire operational system, and when they buckle...then you send in the mech/armor to do the deep stabby work, before they can re-establish a defence line, tempo here will still matter...I think. It is a theory, at least. I have no idea if it would work - and it is not without problems of its own.

It is crazier than that, Light Infantry - which many thought an obsolete concept- have played a central role in UA success. Mech still has a big visible AFV attracting a lot of attention and fires, as the RA found out. We even had reports of RA relying on Light Infantry. No matter how one slices it, the denominator of war is still an armed human in a hole. I suspect we are going to see all sorts of Light Infantry augmentation technology booming. The big 3 from this war remain - light infantry, indirect fires - of many types and unmanned. All tied together (or not in RA case) by C4ISR.

Yes, yes and damn yes. The question left on the table is versus the West (with the US at its center...right guys? No, seriously...right?!) is that a peer war will only come from one place right now, and hence all the heat and light on it - looking eastward. Everywhere else, the question is "can a lesser power do a war by Denial, like Ukraine, with less?" Here the details of how much US/Western ISR has actually been handed over to Ukraine, and how much was homegrown/crowdsourced will be very important. Also as technology accelerates, remember most of what we are seeing is last generation, even HIMARs and Switchblades, and become cheaper - what can a smaller power do with that? Denial as a strategy - thank you naval warfare - is important as it imposes cost on the west that we frankly will likely not accept. 10000 casualties in ten years we can take, 10000 in a month and I am not sure we have the stomach for it, unless it is existential. So the world gets kinda broken into three locations: Places where we can and will do war, places that we can but won't, and places where we may or may not be able, but if we do, we must.

First off @sburke deserved the "parking garage lecture", I hope any an all reading this can see that now...and he does not need encouragement. So the US term is "operational energy", I think it is unspecific (we are talking military application) and too narrow, there is an institutional/strategic component here, Perun has glanced off this in his series. https://nps.edu/web/eag/operational-energy-essential-knowledge-for-military-officers https://www.acq.osd.mil/eie/OE/OE_index.html#:~:text=The Department defines operational energy,systems%2C generators and weapons platforms. And it is a parallel part of the overall arms race between nations.

Which ones, specifically?

A lot of assumptions that would have to link up here. The first one on alcoholism or alcohol consumption overall does not really add up: https://ourworldindata.org/alcohol-consumption Then there is the hypothesis on what alcohol does to motivation. It tends to remove inhibitions and contributes to anti-social behaviours as opposed to dampening them. Now if 40% of adult Russian males were hooked on opioids, maybe? But didn’t the US go through it own thing with that and I don’t think we can point to a national addiction apathy correlation. Idea really starts to feel stretched once one digs into it…

Someone probably blew a blood vessel when this happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_AH-64_Apache. Let alone whatever all this self loitering stuff is, or missile systems. Not sure there is much point to that service border anymore, but they tend to go on well past the point of sense.

B.I.N.G.O. And in a war of exhaustion the side that makes better use of energy has what now?

1) is in reality an output of 3-5 and directly linked to 2). 4) We have already put them onboard ships and as the get smaller and more portable it reduces the natures of logistics loads. Spare parts is a big one. 4&5 together begin to form a tailless logistical concept, which would change warfare more than anything we have seen in some time.…so maybe a bit more than “meh”. 5) Right now any military capability comes with an energy cost, to construct and sustain. One could argue that energy is a competitive dimension that drives logistics. The ability to generate, store and use energy is central to military evolution, always has been. Right now the three primary storage mediums are fuel, explosives and batteries -(this is different from previous centuries where food, water and animals were in that role). The density of those mediums created modern warfare as we know it. If we can develop higher density mediums, higher efficiency consumption and the holy grail…renewable and locally available. You once again re-write warfare. US has been all over this one, largely because they know direct energy weapons are a battlefield requirement in the future and they significantly drive up energy costs.

Well I learned at least one thing from my days in the Hindu Kush...you are doing well when you can get them to shoot at each other. This looks like a indicator of internal instability when viewed through that lens - could be why FSB is scrambling with this Ukrainian MILF super-spy angle.

So a few years back I was asked what to watch out for, my answer was "Big 5" of defence technology: - Unmanned - C4ISR - integrated and connected everything - AI/ML - next gen computing that can tie the first two together in ways we are still figuring out. - Additive Manufacturing - Military Energy

I can only hope the recent campaign of HIMARs/SOF/Workplace Safety Violations is contributing to this whole thing because no way does this go down in history as a Russian security "win". Beyond the fact that there may be a afterschool childcare crisis in Ukrainian SOE right now I am not sure what the downside for Ukraine is at this point. EDIT: Counter narrative - it was Ukrainian "Take your Kids to Work Day"

I guess I just don't get Russian mindset because I still cannot see the point of a false-flag op here - what is Russia undeciding that is in their interest? They did not need an excuse to hit Ukrainian civilians, they executed them in the streets FFS, we are kinda past a Russian "Just War" argument here. I get that this was clearly aimed at internal audiences, which could speak to some internal frictions as has been noted on this thread. However, for the life of me I again do not see the point. It has been well touted that 1) most Russians support this "special operation", up to a point and 2) the rest largely do not care. Russians have sat back and watched Ukraine get pounded for months, including civilian targets,, while a steady stream of (largely non-Moscow) dead Russian boys comes home. Do they need a false-flag to somehow shore up support? Where did that come from? What has fundamentally changed internal to Russia for them to start assassinating Putin supporters very publicly - in a freakin Moscow street(!?). Further the 'minuses' in this are not small as to the West, and no doubt Russians: from mainstream media it looks like a 29 year old mother took her kid on holiday, blew up a high-profile Putin supporter Tom Clancy style, and then walked back over the border to Estonia with her 12 year old daughter - that is the best they could come up with for a "false flag"?! None of this makes any freakin sense. The FSB and Russian internal security look about as incompetent as possible. Apparently one only need take the Kremlin tour and you can probably take a shot at Putin in the bathtub. Seriously, I am not even sure how they could make a movie out of this hit, maybe a Saturday morning cartoon - Tasha and Her Hot Mom take a Trip to Moscow - Singalong Roadtrip Someone in the know help me out - Is this an internal thing? Is this the best the FSB could pull out of their handbag because the truth is worse? Is this somehow going to convince the Russians to....dare we say it?....mobilize?!! [Seriously, I am not even sure what that would look like at this point - a mass of untrained conscripts in WW2 equipment, trying to cover off an 800km front?] So what if it was Ukrainian? I mean technically an act outside of the LOAC but so was blowing a guy off a balcony in Kabul. In fact if a Ukrainian version of SOE wants to start picking off Russian HVT how is that any different that all the decapitation strikes and attacks on the Ukrainian political level?

I have heard rumors that they are aiming at an "order of magnitude" as a reasonable target, but I do not know how much stock I would put in that. This is a big area of military R&D for obvious reasons. Now how long it is going to take to get there...? But I also do not think it unreasonable that by the time the PrSM gets to FOC they have managed to reduce weight by half and keep the same NEQ. If they were able to pull off x10, then a 40mm grenade now would have roughly the same hitting power as an 81mm mortar.

Lesson #1 from the modern era is "forget everything you think you know" (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336975512_Nanotechnology-Driven_Explosives_and_Propellants) Lesson #2 is "never forget what you knew" Lesson #3 is don't think too hard about the relationship between lessons #1 & #2, it is just how it is.

Fits the "quick lets do something, anything" strategy employed by the Russians so far. Could also be to "prove" the UA is not on the offensive - we discussed awhile back that Russia sees the defensive as a loss in this war because of the overwhelming certainty that Ukraine could never possibly attack them: "Ukraine is being obstinate and annoying but will never gain the offensive because they are less than us." Problem with the HIMAR theory is that even with just GMLRS, they would have to take Mykolaiv which is a city of 1/2 million. Severodonetsk was a fifth that size and it took the RA over a month to grind through it. The RA would be entirely relying on air supply by the time they even got close to pushing UA HIMARs (GMLRS) out of range - for ATCAMS the RA would need to push to the Moldovian border and about half way to Kyiv. What melts my brain is that the ATCAMS is actually very old tech (late 80s early 90s) and is being replaced by this monster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Strike_Missile Enough of those things and you do not need aircraft, and anything less than ground based high powered directed energy weapons, which come with their own problems, will not stand a good chance at countering.

Oh man I am going to steal that and then sue Hapless for plagiarism later… This is building on deep-strike as the new form of manoeuvre, and negative decision campaigning.

Ah now I get your point. Of course isn’t this a little weird (and ironic) for the country that invented the “suitcase missile”? The UA on the other hand does not have the same problem as the Javelin team can scuttle like a rifleman. If two guys in a tree line are being spotted at 500m then there is also a training issue at play, even with TI. Unless you are including the vehicle. Once again the Russian addiction to steel betrays them…very sad. Oh wait, we are addicted to steel as well…

Oh and before I forget there is definitely something to the porting over naval concepts. This is almost land warfare through Denial as opposed to anything else we would recognize.

Couple problems here: - Russia is not winning, so whatever these tactics are, gamer or evolutionary, they do not appear to scale upward. A CM match is fun but in war if you cannot tactical upscale then there is no real point - at least in theory. - This is drastically narrowing the role of the tank, to in-effect sniping TD. So what is filling the capability that a tank used to have? If the answer is nothing than Russian conventional warfare is broken. This is not gamey, it is all they can do. If the Russians are forced to hide their tanks behind buildings (or in the churches of sburke) to “pop up” shoot and move, they are not able to mass direct fires - which is kinda important cause it is pretty central to any form of manoeuvre. Russia may be fighting like a CM player; however, it is one on the worst end of a ROW tourney and can’t think of anything else they can do.

1. The answer in this was seems to be information superiority. A steady stream of micro-victories (T72 hole in one’s) all over social media punctuated by high profile tactical explody shows. It look like you only need sell that we are killing “them” a lot does the trick. However not sure if we can take that to the bank. 2. Tough one. A strategy tailor made for negative decision was subversion, which was Russia’s A-game right up until 24 Feb. I am not sure how else one could do it to be honest. Exhaustion and annihilation are kind of central to war. The only other one is extermination but that is the nuclear option which is also suicidal. 3. Textbook answer is C4ISR, but I am beginning to suspect it is a lot more than that. We may need an entire system overhaul if this gets big enough.

Now that is one helluva theory.