The_Capt

Terrain means a lot less, rethink of key terrain and vital ground Denial and control as transient concepts, not take and hold. Attritional based on a competition of overwhelming Shield capability Very long engagement ranges, over the horizon Power projection and shaping means something quite different, which calls into question decisive land outcomes. Positioning, not manoeuvre. These are just for a start.

Ok, coalesced into a deduction. It is naval warfare principles on land. Naval forces already live under these conditions, so how they fight is very different and extremely high stakes. We are talking a form of naval-like warfare on land. Very attritional.

Exactly, we cannot EW our way out of this. There are too many sensors everywhere. We cannot jam the entire battle space out up to…er, space. The amount of energy to even try is enormous and of course very visible. One would have to collapse the Sense snow globe but I am not sure how to do that, some sort of penetrating cyber maybe? Nanotechnology? Imagine trying to hit every snowflake in that globe, the amount of energy required to do that is crazy, even if you could point it. You cannot even attack processors as they would be distributed too.

So we are not talking about EW, or at least not just EW. We are talking about an ISR superiority bubble, that if collapses results in a quick ignoble death. A Sense bubble included data and information superiority. If everyone has these then 1) surprise is pretty much dead because we are talking decentralized bubbles not a singular big brain one can hit. You can collapse a Local Bubble but what about the rest? You might even degrade the operational systems but any given maneuver unit has enough integral capability to create their own bubbles. 2) You have to re-think manoeuvre warfare from the ground up. The whole thing is predicated on avoiding strength and hitting vulnerabilities, which is pretty hard if an opponent can see you coming miles off. Further a local Sense bubble collapse also sends a clear signal of effort, which one can also not hide. 3) Mass might be suicidal. As in Airland battle concentration leading to death does not necessarily flow from air superiority. By seeing high mass concentration from well back, or even at it is forming means interdiction can come from many vectors. This plus PGM means NLOS over the horizon massed fires before you even make contact can destroy concentrations of mass. This indicated land warfare might start to resemble naval warfare but distributed. And I think this only scratches the surfaces as that Sense bubble has to include a logistics tail or security is impossible. Honestly I am going to need a bit of time to digest this all, it was Hapless’ mention of snow globes that clicked it.

Someone write this down: "March 26th 2022, Slightly cloudy, chance of rain. Hapless kills all the contemporary theories of war."

I think this might be one of the key take aways from this war to be honest, the entire loss of an ability to surprise. It may be at the heart of what killed, or at least severely wounded Russian mass. I think our ability to process all this ISR data may have also caught up with our ability to collect it, or perhaps the UA distributed approach is one way to deal with it. We have been focusing on ATGMs/UAV strikes but these are just the end of the kill-chain. What may have crippled the Russian military here is the simple fact that they could not mass without being detected and hit...along with a healthy does of just plain old incompetency. I am getting a whole "they were ready for the last war" vibe.

This one has been bugging me as well. Disperse, get cut to pieces one at a time, concentrate and die together. There is an old saying here in the old country -"fog eats the snow". The UA looks and feels like fog, while the Russians are snow. I am not sure if it matters if they are a snowbank or a snowball the result is the same. Now if what if you have two forces with the same ISR capability now everyone can see everything. You accept it and entirely lose the principle of surprise, which then pretty much kills a some of the other principles like concentration of force and possibly offence itself. Or you basically have an entire phase of trying to achieve ISR superiority while denying the same to an opponent - a war of Sense. The fact we are even questioning the principles of warfare is a good sign that something is afoot. Of course if some are outdated, then what are the new ones?

I can remember about 20 years ago people talking about the totally illuminated battlefield, we all rolled our eyes and then spent 20 years hunting a##holes in the sand. Time to find the facepaint. Didn't the US admit to pushing ISR to the UA? Or is that a rumor? I would put money on the bar it is happening.

Ya I kinda figured, my point being that live feeds likely have better resolution and probably multi-spectral. Back to my main question, how does one hide on the modern battlefield? These, plus UAVs, SIGINT, ELINT, HUMINT, SOCMINT, ground based sensor and the human eyeball make hiding anything big really hard. We have been talking about tanks and I am starting to wonder if their biggest vulnerability is just being spotted easily. To blind an opponent you basically have to create a "dark box" from surface to satellite and then isolate it peer to peer. Then of course you have a highly visible dark box that signals something on its own. In the old days you just had tight radio discipline and cam nets, not sure if that is going to do it. This is not something we have been thinking a lot about for the last 30 years to be honest.

Daaamn, that is impressive and worse. Not much you can do with that. Is it just me or is hiding on the modern battlefield getting really hard?

Well the fact that these aerial shots are online for the entire planet to see, I would call that a problem. I am assuming this was a drone shot. This might work better when there are leaves on those trees but those tracks are a give away. Plus you can just hammer the treeline and then missile anything that is left...and we are back to ISR "eep!" moments.

This guy has to be in the business somewhere. Acquisition or Investment Planning is my guess.

I don't think I have seen this posted yet, apologize if it was. Pretty even handed:

Guys, So beyond the obvious competing narratives out there (nazis, bio-weapons, crisis actors etc) let's remember what this entire thing is, an egregious violation. There has been no, and I mean zero, casus belli established for this invasion. People are pointing to the US invasion of Iraq in '03 in some weird "well two wrongs make it ok to kill thousands of civilians", however, the US did take their case to the UN, they were attacking a strongman dictator who had; invaded a neighbor for "reasons", used massive oppression on his own people, and had even employed chemical weapons against civilians. So we are not even in the same strategic context here as Ukraine; a free democracy that had not even coming close to behaving like Saddam Hussein. I have stayed out of a lot of these conspiracy theories floating around but even if the wildest ones are true (which I do not believe for a second) and let's say the Ukrainians were employing a combination of recovered nazi-occult and alien technology to make all Russian bears impotent...in the modern world your first response to that is not rolling in 120 BTGs!! Worse, you cannot back that up with "well they were gently rolling in 120 BTGs"...no such reality exists. That much metal + ammo + scared teenagers is never going to equal "gentle violation of sovereignty". We can play the point-counter point game all day and try to gain political points but all of that is noise around the central and incontrovertible fact that Russia illegally invaded another sovereign European nation in a gross violation of sovereignty and global order...this is not "ok", this will never be "ok". Finally, I know there are theories floating out there that the Russian Restraint can explain the slowness and stalling on the Russian side. This is abject nonsense. It is much, much harder to try and do a soft invasion. The US military tried in Afghanistan and Iraq and they found it nearly impossible to avoid collateral damage and civilian deaths. I have seen nothing to suggest that Russian ISR and Joint Targeting is so sophisticated and disciplined that they have any idea what they are hitting beyond..."hit there". This baby hospital thing has been brought up, right sure....how exactly did Russian Joint Targeting know the hospital was empty (which it was not)? How did Russian C2 know this when they don't even know where most of their own troops are? So I am going to offer some simple rules that people can chose to adopt or not: - Precision is hard, incredibly hard. If your theory depends on greater Russian precision in anyway shape or form stop and think. - Organization is hard. If your theory depends on highly organized Russian capability...stop and think. - Conspiracies are hard, in this day and age nearly impossible. If your theory is relying on a "big secret"...stop and think. All western governments leak like a sieve and even the autocratic ones bleed data like a stuck goat. No government on earth, even NK, has an airtight seal on what information it leaks out. So if you are relying on a "star chamber" or "black sites"...stop and think. - If it looks like a Duck, stop calling it a Kitty Cat. War is incredibly hard so the simplest explanation tends to be the right one. It is the principle that has actually put this thread and forum out in front. We have avoided over-analyzing (I know right?!) compared to others chasing some theories. If Oryx has 297 open source pictures of destroyed/abandoned Russian tanks, well given the UA was outfitted with thousands of next gen ATGMs...it is not a hard squint to see the freakin quacking water fowl. This is not some photoshop campaign for the ages, the Russians have lost a lot of tanks. Is it 297, probably not could be more or Orxy might have some double accounting but it is a lot. - Assumptions, Factors and Deductions. All this comes down to Assumptions, Factors (or Facts) and Deductions. As I tell dead-eyed Majors, "make sure the line between these items is as straight and short as possible". Make damn sure your Assumptions and Facts stay on speaking terms and then do not under any circumstances let the line between Factors and Deductions turn into a Pollock painting. War is hard enough, complex enough and weird enough...it does not need your help in any of these areas. Go with the god of your choice grognards, and try and stay out of trouble.

Good question. I am looking for two indicators here, Soviet tanks such as the older T72/64 stuff, or even worse T62s. Or the infamous T14 (if they have more than 1) makes an appearance. Both would indicate that they are approaching a point of desperation.

We were talking about this about 50 pages back and we’re being generous with a 50% readiness rate. 10% is abysmal. That means if 2500 ready tanks were sent into the initial invasion (of which somewhere between 300-500 have been lost), the out of the remaining Russian strategic inventory of about 10000 tanks they can count on 1000 being operational for service. Worse those 1000 are buried in a mess of non operational tanks that might also need to be canabalized in order to make the 1000. This isn’t a paper tiger, it is a stuffed one, filled with toxic fluff. If this is confirmed Steves theory of total collapse just got a lot more realistic.

Well this was not a conversation about the carrier vs munition as I understood it. It was about the rising presence of unmanned systems on the modern battlefield and the overall effect that may have on modern warfare. You seem to be narrowing it down to carriers and munitions; however, it really much more than that. ISR, comms and eventually resupply, medivac and shield functions are going to follow. But hey whatever floats the boat.

Is that a 9mm heart attack?

@John Kettler, you just triple posted.

They already have a wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterbots But no war won’t be obsolete, it is the one thing we do extremely well and have found more creative ways to prosecute than any other creature on earth. My thinking is that we had better find aliens soon so we can take out our monkey war lust on them and not wipe each other out. I used to think this was a distant issue but as of late I keep looking up.

Well you are losing me there. So with modern MALE systems one can literally sit within an friendly AD bubble and strike an opponents rear areas. Eventually someone is going to mount a Switchblade onto a Class 2 UAV so now you have an airborne system carrying another system that together have an 80km range which means they can hit SLOC entry points in the theatre. Then someone is going to create a self-loitering system with smart DPICM and hit strategic targets like a ship or port…oh wait. S’ok though we got AA Guns.

Ok, so I think we are miscommunicating here, what do you define as a "drone"? UAVs are an entire suit of unmanned aerial systems, from the size of a very small bird/large bug to global hawk. The TB2 is a MALE (Medium Altitude Long Endurance) which we would call a Class 2 UAV. These things are literally everywhere and every service has Class 2 and Class 1 UAVs as organic systems. The really big stuff HALE like Global Hawk are held as strategic assets. So the TB2 might have a higher profile but a handheld but smaller Class 2s and Class 1s are like the small UAVs you can buy commercially which have much smaller profiles than any AH. So we are talking about a layered system of separate classes all plugged into a C4ISR system here. So even if you do managed to shoot down a larger Class 2, good luck with the smaller systems. Worse, those smaller systems include the NLOS smart ATGMs like Spike and self-loitering like Switchblade (which is about 2 feet long and weighs about 50 pounds) which you can fire into the air all day and not hit. Put this system into the air and link it to artillery and you basically cannot hide, or run for that matter. Your LOCs are very vulnerable - how do you knock down a 2 foot flying Javelin warhead that can hit a target at 80kms? How do you knock down 100 of them? And we have not even started in on unmanned ground vehicles, which are not that far off. Now you get a small, very low profile cross country rugged vehicle that can operate at distance...with a Javelin on it. It can not only park and wait like a lurker, it can move and re-position as well. If this was only about TB2s or even MALE UAVs it would be challenging enough, as aptly demonstrated by this current war, but add in all the smaller systems and self-loitering munitions and that is what we are talking about as a game changer. Finally even the Class 2 TB2 types are no where near the WW2 prop driven attack planes. Why? Because a WW2 CAS aircraft couldn't stand off 11km away and kill you with a Hellfire. That is farther than most MANPADs and even SHORAD systems so we are talking IADs, which the Russian had and they did not seem to do much for them. So western militaries are investing a lot to try and do something will all these systems but we definitely live in a gap right now. We will see how it goes.

I would be hard pressed to try and give a better description of self-synchronizing distributed hybrid warfare. This is literally embracing the chaos and making it work.

But it was by the TB2 - I swear there was video, hell the damn thing hit a train. And, more importantly ISR on that column. why the UA did not crush that thing remains a bit of a mystery but the obvious reason is that they did not feel they had to based on frozen feet and abandoned vehicles. The advantages of unmanned systems are a lot more than endurance by a wide margin: - Unit Cost - including up front and lifetime maint. - User Training - Logistical Tail - Losing Cost in terms of not losing a very expensive crew - Profile - they are much smaller and harder to find than an Apache - Ubiquity-ocity - All the above lead to a lot more of them per sq km than AH. Their major weaknesses are payload, speed, survivability (if you can hit them). But they have a lot of offsets for these most of it being in overall scale of use.

If we are talking about those "pop-up claymore" thingys, there are literally a dozen ways around this technology. Spoofs and decoys that trigger the system, smart munitions that carry smart sub-munitions - so DPICM with fins, stand-off EFP, stealth systems that the APS cannot see and failing that, how about just good old fashion PGM artillery cued and guided in by unmanned ISR. And that is just the flying stuff. UGV can do all sorts of weird stuff that APS is not set up to deal with. And then there is the harsh realities we are seeing in Ukraine, right now. I don't need to hit your fancy whizz bang tank with the Xmas tree-light defensive system, I just need to hit enough boring old trucks/re-fuelers until the M1000 super MBT runs out of gas, ammo or both. So now the problem is not simply area defence of my F ech, it the 100kms of LOC behind it, especially when the range of some of these system are capable of hitting at those ranges.