The_Capt

Actually scratch that, I see possible craters now in the zoomed out shot: So maybe was just good ol HE? That is the weirdest crossing site, the bridge was diagonal? That does weird thing to the exits and stresses the bridge too.

Based on how many of those vehicles caught fire and cooked off, I am betting HEAT and DPICM could do that, theoretically. That or a whole bunch of Switchblade 600s. Or an air strike, but again no crater. Obstacle crossing is one of my areas of expertise and at some point I do want to jump into that conversation.

DPICM? On that first one, I think I see small impacts.

No I am envisioning a light screen outfitted very much like the UA SOF/Light. Armed with a lot of drones and ISR to do the infiltration, high resolution fix, and tight finish ops at points of breakthrough- a break in battle if you will. This done broadly provides opportunity for formation level breakout - that mass. One can ride that until it gets friction-ed up by an opponent and then we are into rinse and repeat. I am not so sure about that last para of yours. We had a lot of that and it showed particular weakness for light infantry armed with a lot less than what we are talking about for over 20 years. Now if a peer-adversary were able to put out a light screen of their own...and we are back to unmanned battle. I suspect against a highly trained and capable opponent in defence a combination of mass and precision will be required for the breakthrough. Remember they can see and hit to our depth as well, if we were to try and form up mass to do the job, we would likely get hit back in the assembly area. So there would have to be a blinding phase up front, and we are back to precision. The more I look at this precision and mass are mutually supporting, or should be. At different points the virtues of each will be needed. On the other axis will be manned and unmanned. And on a third it has to be information. Victory will likely be to the ones who can manage these axis the best depending on the point in time in the battle.

Yup, I think you have arrived at the same place but from another direction. To do a trench clearing as you describe will require a lot of precision up front. You need so have very high resolution to drop all those bomblets right into the trench onto defenders. In depth, you need to neutralize artillery and reserves, likely a combination but precision, particularly stuff like NLOS munitions would come in very handy here. Once breakthrough is created, back to mass to exploit it, and then as an opponent forms up a precision DLI (really like that term), you are back to precision to eliminate, until conditions are back to being able to employ mass. Trick here, and always the party pooper, will be logistics. You need it for the mass, and you need to protect it from your opponents precision weapons coming back at you. This is basically a new spin on tempo but now precision and mass are the driving factors.

As I understand it, the Switchblade acts like a drone right up until you lock it in and send it on its terminal attack. So it can loiter directed by an operator above a target until you get a clear fix and then hit. There is a time constraint though.

And this would be the precision argument. To do this you need very high precision. Also, at this point you are not slow and grinding anymore. A reinforce platoon in the defence gone in an hour is pretty near the metrics we had for manoeuvre warfare before all this, particularly if you can upscale it.

This is true, we have seen this. There was that one were they dropped a grenade right through a sunroof. However, this would have to be done en masse along a frontage right before attempting breakthrough. Oh man, that is a video I want to see.

Until those little micro-drones with DPICM can fly directly into those trenches and bunkers to clean house...no I think JasonC is correct. One could try to cut off logistics, but these are deliberate defence positions with stockpiles along really long frontages, so that plan would take more time than the Russians likely have. Tunneling?

Minefields with wings/legs/guns...what could possibly go wrong?

I think this is going to remain a competitive space to be honest. I don't see us being able to put unmanned back in the box after this war, there is to much to gain. That, and all the technology to try and knock UAVs out of the air is competing with the technology to keep them there. I have heard a lot of C-UAV discussion going on for about 10 years, and we have developed capability; however, UAV technology keeps sidestepping it. For example, jamming. We simply cut the link between operator and system...system falls out of sky...celebrate. Automation is way ahead of that. If we can have self-driving cars, completely autonomous UAVs are already here. That means there is no link to cut, the damn things can simply fly on there own. "What about weapons release...we still need a man-in-the-loop!". Sure we do but they do not...that is a race to the bottom in the making. We are likely going to see fully autonomous hunter killer drones out of China (if they do not already have them) immediately after this war. The there is "fry the thing in the air" with EM/lasers/masers/phasers. Really hard to find them in the first place, they can be shielded and direct energy weapons are way behind on miniaturization, as well as being highly visible...because of all that energy. Fine if one is facing ISIL and Amazon Drone Air Corp, something else against a peer-adversary. My bet is c-drone will be other drones...again fully autonomous hunter killers designed for anti-drone work. This opens up an entirely new phase of warfare, unmanned battle. Further, it will likely also include UGVs in the very near future as well. So land warfare has a synthetic phase, followed by a biological phase - weird. The contest will likely be "how many drones to expend in that phase and how many to leave in reserve". I would no be surprise to see an Unmanned Systems commander on the field before too long. And then there are integral unmanned systems, micro-stuff, that is going to be incredibly hard to suppress. Some of these are backpack sized and can fly for kms. And then even if you do crack the unmanned ISR bubble, you have space to contend with. Some of the satellite stuff we have seen is incredibly hi resolution, down to individual tanks. We don't have a realistic space superiority concept that I know of (talk about something that briefs well). All this to say that against peer-adversary, I am not sure we can fully blind them at range. We may be able to throw sand in their eyes but I think we need to be really careful with assumptions that we can sustain it. I suspect that anti-missile and indirect fire technology will also get a boost, so Iron Dome IV or somesuch, that can shield at a tactical level. This one is probably a ways off but this might mean we are trying to blind and overload automated shield systems. Such a system would negate this DLI thing, or at least the version we see, as all those ATGM could theoretically be swatted from the air. But then we are back to smarter ATGMs with micro-sub munitions, nano-treated explosives. Anyway, it is likely going to be a bumpy ride is my point.

Someone dropped a cigarette, because according to all those maps, that is Russian controlled territory? Well, at least we know that crew did not feel a thing.

Very good questions. And nothing wrong with Clausewitz, so long as one does not accept that his was the final word. I think one has to attack that light infantry system along its length as well. Cutting off supplies of relatively cheap ATGMs, and MANPADS, along with ISR (I have no doubt Russia would love to cut those western ISR feeds if they could), or all data for that matter, is a very important step. This would push the ranges and lethality of that infantry back to "harassment" levels. The CoG for this sort of defence also appears to be "integration and synchronization". Light infantry in ones and twos are a nuisance even with this weaponry. It is when they are linked and can get out in front of an attacker, due in large part to info superiority, that they become something else. If you can make that "two-guys in a treeline...in isolation" then I think we would be onto something. Airpower, yeesh. Some of those MANPADs we equipped the UA with have ranges up to 23,000 feet; that is also nuts. So high altitudes are likely still where we can operate freely; however, integrating airpower way up there to ground level will be the challenge. And I think this raises a very important point. What about UA offence? I am not sure if they are employing this light infantry approach on the attack. Something is definitely happening up around Kharkiv, but it is not clear if this is more traditional conventional operations or if they are doing something else. I am not sure how we would employ this on the offence, I suspect it may be that Infiltrate, Isolate, Destroy idea, but I would want to see it in action. I think if one employed the "simultaneous slow grinding pressure" idea until your opponent cracks, you could then swing back toward conventional offence. Right up to the point an opponent started using distributed light infantry defence in depth, then you become the hunted, not the hunter. This makes for a very interesting dynamic.

Right?! I also suspect it is what we saw in Ukraine. The Ukrainian defence created enormous friction for the Russians along all those axis, at the same time. That slow grinding, combined with deep strikes on Russian logistics created the conditions for that tipping point collapse in Phase 1, which Steve has been going on about for some time. I think the Russian's may be headed for another one in the Donbas. By creating simultaneous slow grinding everywhere the Russian system may have buckled under its own weight. It is a working theory at least, and a good one...good enough that I resent JonS for arriving at it before me. The next big question is, can it be used in the offence? And here the Afghanistan example suggests, "yes"".

Let me say, this is also good discussion because it has led to dilemma, and in my experience that is a sure sign we are onto something. So let me paint things out a bit (begs for patience): So back in 1945, infantry could basically effect about 200m versus tanks, and maybe 1000m vs other infantry. They had ISR in the form of intel feeds, which were often daily, and what they and those in radio range could see. Now in 2022, those same infantry, in modern militaries, are able to effect armor of all types out to 80kms (Switchblade 600, NLOS ATGMs such as Spike) and employ UAVs and other sensors to see at least as far. They also can do the same to other dismounted infantry; however, those are harder to find than armor, and infantry still need armor in the modern battlefield in order to attack (maybe?) So what? Well this means that, as we have seen in this war, that infantry - light infantry in particular - have far more range, lethality and accuracy than at any other time in human history. They are also just as hard to see. What has appeared to have happened in this war, at least as far as I can tell, is Ukrainian defence has relied on light infantry to do most of the heavy lifting. I have no doubt Ukrainian conventional mech has been engaged, particularly at key points; however, Ukraine did not, and does not have anywhere near enough conventional mass to defend the frontages it has - enter hybrid warfare. This is a game changer, as light infantry can essentially deny swaths of the land domain battlespace. Further, they now have ranges that inflict attrition and friction well past the formation level. When combined with integrated ISR, and their own through UAVs along with effective comms, and UA artillery, they have hammered Russian logistics to the point I suspect it broke - leading to the collapse of an entire front in the North. This demonstrates a much higher level of both tactical and operational levels of precision than the Russians have been able to muster. So What? Russian mass, in all its forms is not working. And based on this entire discussion, I am coming to a hypothesis as to why and it jumps from your statement up there: that is exactly how Russia fought and won in 2014, and likely thought it could fight and win in 2022. In 2014 they demonstrated repeatedly that they could bring their assets to bear faster and with more accuracy than UA forces. They believed they could suppress and then kill in detail with superiority like they did in 2014...so what changed? Well Ukraine developed an C4ISR system apparently, and one that can do one helluva better job at bringing assets to bear. I also suspect an organic C4ISR system emerged within local Ukrainian defence; Haiduk has already described how everything from sensing to logistics to killing has been crowdsourced in this war. This created a major dilemma for the Russians, and it would be for us too - how can we bring our assets to bear to achieve effects when they were designed for another opponent? You noted that we use mass fires to hit moving armor - what happens when your opponent offers you no moving armor? What happens when an opponent can hit your operational LOCs from that treeline? They can take out your lead F ech armor at a nearly 1-1 munition kill ratio? And because you are carrying so much mass, for miles behind you, they can see you coming for days...and you can't see them at all? The dilemma is that, and you are correct here, all-precision is not practical. Your slide example demonstrates that. However, mass as we understand it is not working and it is likely because how we have designed it was for a centralized mass-v-mass war...and people don't need mass to stop mass anymore, or at least that is what I suspect we are seeing here. In order to combat what we are seeing, yes we would need to blast every treeline OR we really up our ISR game to the point we can see a person in every treeline 40 kms out, which as far as I know is also not an option. In your case up above, those infantry died in their vehicles before we could even figure out which treeline to hit. I suspect that is why, as we have seen in other post the Russians are employing WW2 style approaches of "recce by death" to try and suss out Ukrainian defence. All this adds up to a really slow and grinding advance, while ones logistical trains are being destroyed. Ok, so I am not a Logistician either, but I do have a fair amount of experience in this field - I went through an Operational Support phase for about 5 years. Your example is perfect. Since WW1 Army's have been firing "unfathomably large amounts"...it is also exactly how Germany lost that war. It is trite to go with "professionals talk logistics" (I think Bradley was really saying professionals see the entire system); however, logistics is the critical path for warfare, and has been for a long time. Why? Because it is how one can sustain all that mass. Without it military mass breaks down and fragments, so many historical examples of this, a the Russians have re-affirmed this truth. Back in the day, I had the same sentiment - "they always winge about that but someone will figure it out." I suspect some Russian commanders had the same idea. Problem is that based on all that stuff I pointed out before re: light infantry -and frankly we should know this from 20 years of small crappy wars- there is no such thing as a rear area anymore. Russia has lost nearly 1000 logistical vehicles (https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html) and it shows. I strongly suspect they keep stalling out because their logistics system strains and then fails, which directly effects the Russian A-game of mass. This makes mass unaffordable, mainly because it is not working anywhere near quickly enough - it is in an upside down battlefield calculus. So what is our dilemma? We do not have an answer to what we are seeing in Ukraine right now. We have excellent C4ISR but it has limits and finding light infantry in bushes is one of them - we learned that one the hard way. We have mass but it won't help if we cannot find the thing to hit with it, and it creates weight we need to support. We have excellent logistics to support it; however, it is highly visible and vulnerable at the ranges we are talking about. We have airpower, but we even saw in Iraq that we can lose air superiority below 2000 feet. This lead me back to something that has been nagging me for about 20 years...what does superiority even mean anymore? We had all of it and it did not seem to matter. We do not have the precision to combat this type of fight, and our mass will not work either. We would no doubt do better than the Russians for all the reason we have explored here but I am more and more convinced that warfare has been shifting for some time and has shifted here again. This shift has pushed us into a dilemma space we need to figure out. Maybe it is not that bad, and we can mitigate with what we already have. Maybe it is worse than we think. All I know is that we need to figure that one out because the Chinese are watching this as closely as we are and if I wanted to really mess up a western proxy nation intervention in 5 years I already know what I would do.

Whoa, that is an idea....a good idea. I think the answer is yes with a "but". So in COIN, insurgents do exactly this very broadly; however, they normally do not result in quick operations. They can produce broad and simultaneous effects though. I think you would need some things here to do this and higher precision is one of them. You would also need a nearly perfect theory of your opponent, knowing exactly where to apply all that slow pressure at exactly the right place and time. You would also need encompassing enablers and integration. This is why I keep coming on this forum, that is a very interesting concept - could we do slow grinding at the right place and times simultaneously to create critical collapse in an opponent at the operational level? Is that what we have seen in this war? Ukraine has not been employing rapid operational manoeuvre, they have been providing "slow grinding" almost everywhere and it has arguably led to the Russian operational system to buckle and fail.

I would say “yes”, I mean the idea of fast manoeuvre and quick decisive action kind of underpins the entire western doctrine of offensive manoeuvre warfare. If we cannot do that then we need another doctrine. This is based on the idea that speed and tempo equals initiative and options. Our entire system is based on that…so I would have to again say “yes”. I guess we (modern militaries) take the hit on cost but this depends on what scale we are talking. A fast war is very expensive up front but cheaper than a long one. I think that is what has driven us to build more expensive and harder to generate standing militaries, which has led to the “come as we are” warfare dynamic. Very cool idea to build an in-game scenario on this, I think simulations and experimentation is critical at times like these.

Here is a counter-point consideration, what if the Russian force in this invasion met the UA of 2014? I don’t disagree that this was a tall order and a bad plan but 200k troops well equipped and with obvious mass superiority would have likely had a very different outcome against the UA of 2014 (something they were likely counting to be honest). So something changed in 8 years, better training and organization, western ISR, next gen ATGMs…all those add up to what we are seeing today in this war. So I am not convinced that this is all on the Russians and their bad plan. I am convinced that something has happened, we saw glimpses of it in 2014, ironically from the Russians. We saw it in the Azer-Armenian conflict, and I am more convinced we are seeing it in this conflict. Remember Ukraine had to defend an entire frontier spanning two countries, that was something like over 2000kms long, with a regular standing force of what, 100k, that is a tall order…but they pulled it off. So despite the Russia failures, I do not agree this could only go one way. The Russians could concentrate force wherever they wanted while Ukraine had to try to defend everywhere. I am not sure how they stayed out in front of the Russians operationally, let alone beat them back along that kind of frontage -while having to plan for the Belarusians (who never showed up). Well it will give us something to study for the next 20 years, so there is that.

That deaf, dumb, blind army can’t play invasion pinball for crap.

And I think that is the problem we are solving for because we are not looking for slow and grinding, we want fast and quick. So how do we take these conditions and do that? I am basically at, if we had to the fight the UA current methods, how would we do that?

Well that is how to ISR a treeline, give them small DPICM charges and now we are onto something. And we haven't even started in on UGVs

Well this is another big problem. Two guys in a treeline that can kill a tank at 4kms. How on earth are we going to be able to tell it is that 100m they are in? At that point, we will need to see them or what possible low resolution method is going to tell us "there are two guys in that line, so hammer it". And if we can pin it to a 100m of treeline, why not just employ smart rounds to do the same job with half or even a quarter of the ordinance? This does not compute. We either have lo res and need to hammer every treeline for kms, because that is their lethality range, or we get higher resolution so why do I need to support tons of dumb mass to achieve what smart can do? We have seen UAVs drop grenades for pete's sake and do this exact job. My sense is that we need to solve for mass based on what I have seen in this war. I do not mean wholesale abandonment of the idea, nor radical "all light" (gawd help me the USMC thing is on the horizon) but we cannot walk into the next war thinking we are going to be "ok" because we are not Russian. Western militaries, are just as addicted to mass as the Russians are. "Oh but we are better"...well yes, but I am still not sure how to fight the UA arsenal. Maybe some sort of precision screen, able to find and hit with very high resolution and then massed precision fires for our own deep strike? With dumb mass in the chamber for breakthroughs?

Oh, I get that, trust me. If we are going to do this, then we have to list the downsides to massed fires. Targeting individual vehicles will always be a challenge with artillery, at least until technology jumps a long way. However, if all we need is "dumb saturating mass" then why invest millions in digitized FCS? I doubt we are going to see one-shot-one-kill anytime soon but faster more precise fires, has to be the goal here. Even a 50% increase in efficiency has enormous benefits, I suspect this is why it is competitive space. So let's take your example above (i.e. treeline). By that logic, based on the advances in ATGMs, we have to hammer every treeline for kms in order to advance. I am not buying "no need for Find...we will just hit everything" because it is not a practical solution. The biggest downfall of mass, is exactly what we saw with the Russian tepid attacks so far, they all rely more heavily on logistics. The more we need to pull on logistics trains, and mass means a lot of rounds and guns, the more vulnerable our entire system is. That, and for expeditionary militaries that means weight which adds to the force projection bill. Then there is the collateral damage bill. I know we all want to go back to "war in the old way" but the reality is that reckless destruction of civilian infrastructure is never going to "brief well" and we have had to get a lot better at this. I get it if massed fires is the only solution to the problem, we will have to eat the costs; however, at some point that will likely change, the question is "when?" I think you do hit on an important point, cost. Until PGM systems come way down in price (and they are) you are likely correct here. PGMs have gone from very special (i.e. SOF), to special to "well, not all the time" in 30 years. I have no doubt this war is just another sign-post along the way. Once the cost goes down and technology matures - not sure if this war is it or not - then we will see the shining city on hill - massed precision fires. I am not sure which GOs you have been briefing but in my experience it goes the other way. Trying to get senior leaders to trust new technology to the point that it replaces old doctrine never "briefs well" in my experience.

Recce by death, with mass fires follow up, is straight out of the WW2 playbook. If that is the Russian design, sure it should work as long as the Russians can keep feeding that bloody "Find" and keep up momentum. If the Russians are in fact much better than we have been led to believe, more in line with what we saw in 2014...then why are they not crushing the UA? I get all the numbers comparison hazards, but there is no getting around the fact that the RA had (note past tense) the clear advantage in mass. They also had their choice of where to put that mass at the beginning of this. So by all traditional conventional metrics, this thing should be over by now...and that did not happen. Quite the opposite. Maybe the opening phase was just a wild winger, and the UA got lucky; however, we have seen the same thing in the Donbas Offensive phase; Russian mass is not working...and it is supposed to if all the textbooks still have any value. My honest guess is that the Russian suck, but not as badly as we think - at least not initially during the opening offensive. And something the UA was doing basically negated that mass. I suspect it was a combo of ISR superiority - a lot of western strat stuff at play - UAVs everywhere, hybrid self-synchronizing tactics, all link back to integrated fires. My working hypothesis is that Ukrainian defence has, and continues to be able to create friction along the entire Russian operational system. This friction, along with Russia's own, has made all that mass nearly useless as it is dislocated and disrupted constantly. To the point that up north it may have fallen under its own weight.

Well one more thing about this war that does not add up. The Russians have lost at least 242 indirect fire systems, that we can count but these are from many sources, many look to be abandoned(https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html). UA numbers are less but that picture is much blurrier. As to comparisons between the two side artillery capabilities, well I will defer to an expert (guns are not my field). I guess we will need to see more proof on that one as western equipment and training makes its way into theatre. As to mass, this war almost looks like it has broken it. The Russians have all the mass, even now with their losses but it appears to be "dumb" mass, and likely blind. They have not been able to bring that mass to bear or advantage and no one has definitively been able to explain "why?" There have been a lot of theories, many center on "Russians Suck", but that is too simplistic to my mind. Massed fires are useless if your opponent is not there, and has no intention of being "there". Worse they strain the logistics system, which is also being hammered all the way back to the SLOC, and they make for great big targets. I do not get the sense that Russian artillery is very light on its feet, but there we could see some more proof too. I for one, am thinking that the old concepts of mass need a serious rethink. Take the guns, it is enormously inefficient and wasteful to employ mass, we do it because hitting/suppressing a target at 20kms is damned hard but that does not make it desirable. It strains the logistics system and weight too much, and let's not start on collateral. Precision over mass should be what we are looking for, problem has been "easier said than done".