The_Capt

IDF and Hamas are not symmetrical conventional warfare, which is good news for hybrid warfare and insurgents. Urban hybrid warfare is still unknown with respect to impacts….I guess we will see. If the IDF had 1 million next gen UAS capable of autonomous targeting, backed up by some nightmare Boston Dynamics thing out of Black Mirror I suspect it would be a lot easier to take Gaza. Having swarms and the C4ISR backbone behind them is not necessarily decisive…however, it is undecidable. UAS currently cannot take and hold ground. They have limited range but that is changing. As such they are purpose built for denial. We are seeing massive mutual denial in Ukraine right now and in 10 years this war will look like WW1 era AirPower with respect to technologies such as UAS and PGM…way too much at stake to not chase those. What we have not see is the full potential of swarms on offence. Here they will likely be part of an arms team - lighter infantry and deep fires seem to be the most likely suspects. Corrosive warfare is a theory, and it has limits. Manoeuvre warfare is nearly impossible if one’s opponent has working swarms you cannot counter and a C4ISR backbone behind it. We have seen more than enough examples of why this is. One could go for good ol Attrition warfare, seems to be Russias game. But these new systems are just so damned cheap. Short of Total War and crippling an opposing nations entire industry, it looks like one can swat UAS all day and never run out of targets. PGM are also getting cheaper, as is data. So we basically have a Big Undeciding in warfare. Air Superiority, Maritime Superiority - both metrics of Control vs Denial. Ground warfare was supposed to be the Domain of Decision, but it has become undecidable…until one can break an opponents C4ISR/PGM/Unmanned system while sustaining your own. An Undecision is a powerful thing.

APS ain't doing squat against that.

If one side has swarms that work and other doesn't or a means to deny them, the war is over before it starts. We are talking symmetrical conventional warfare here. Every military in the world will be scrambling in what will become an unmanned arms race. When two similar forces meet under the conditions we see before us Offensive warfare will be stumped. Denial and Defensive will take primacy, they have before. Until someone can solve for c-Swarm. The military term is "persistence", which is different than platform endurance. Endurance is dependent on battery life. Persistence is dependent on the capacity and resilience of the entire system to keep the capability effective and delivering effect. That is bigger than batteries. I can see a future battlespace where UAS are treated like artillery ammo (without barrel wear). Massed precision beats everything. Of course Unmanned are really just the last mile. What is creating major shifts in warfare is C4ISR. Illumination, Integration and Cognition. Even without UAS, these impacts would be significant. With them, along with PGM and we have a new ballgame in front of us.

Don't we kinda already have this? Modern ATGM guidance systems look pretty sophisticated in their ability to stay looked onto one large hunk of metal vs a burning garbage truck. "The tracker is key to guidance/control for an eventual hit. The signals from each of the 4,096 detector elements (64×64 pixel array) in the seeker are passed to the FPA readout integrated circuits which reads then creates a video frame that is sent to the tracker system for processing. By comparing the individual frames, the tracker determines the need to correct so as to keep the missile on target. The tracker must be able to determine which portion of the image represents the target. The target is initially defined by the gunner, who places a configurable frame around it. The tracker then uses algorithms to compare that region of the frame based on image, geometric, and movement data to the new image frames being sent from the seeker, similar to pattern recognition algorithms. At the end of each frame, the reference is updated. The tracker is able to keep track of the target even though the seeker's point of view can change radically in the course of flight. The missile is equipped with four movable tail fins and eight fixed wings at mid-body. To guide the missile, the tracker locates the target in the current frame and compares this position with the aim point. If this position is off center, the tracker computes a correction and passes it to the guidance system, which makes the appropriate adjustments to the four movable tail fins. This is an autopilot. To guide the missile, the system has sensors that check that the fins are positioned as requested. If not, the deviation is sent back to the controller for further adjustment. This is a closed-loop controller."

I have a physics degree and most of this is way above my head. One thing is becoming apparent though - if modern militaries cannot solve for unmanned air war below 2000ft then we are entering into an different era of warfare. Denial and Defence will rule conventional warfare until we can crack the unmanned problem. Military implications for this are enormous, especially considering we have built for Interventions/Offence for the last 30 years at least. Political ramifications of this are not small considering that entry costs for these technologies are low. Well if anyone is looking for a career, this sector will be booming for years.

Gawd. Guns. Neediest bad-girlfriend on the battlefield.

Aw, now I feel bad. It is some sort of swamp beaver, just looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutria

More likely this guy with his tail singed : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobak_marmot Good eating among the hill folk. And you can make a hat out of its fur! Whelp, that’s it. We have officially run out of things to talk about.

It is not worthless I fear, it is bad lessons. People will walk away with a bunch of factoids about mine breaching systems and suddenly are “experts” around the water-cooler. From this they can draw all sorts of really bad conclusions. The biggest reason why mine breaching systems fail is because someone kills them while they are trying to do their job. Watching that video can easily lead someone to think “well send them better kit” - we saw this with the tanks in spades. And then we send them better kit and it still doesn’t work. “Well they must be doing it wrong cause the YouTube guy said…” The entire point of putting up an information piece is to provide people with the knowledge to make better sense of phenomena. For this one needs expertise. We see the death of expertise in modern era. Anyone with a channel can suddenly be an expert in anything. For example, retired SF guys with YouTube channels talking about formation level logistics. They never served in a J4 staff or been trained as a professional logistics officer. But they rub SF “Ranger” patches and suddenly they know what they are talking about. This is just misinformation and in many cases is just chasing likes and subscribes. Problem is that it can easily slide into disinformation and outright fiction. The worst sin are people like Macgregor who know better but keep spreading false info regardless. I do not know what to do about it. I am not a social media expert…but maybe if I did a YouTube channel… I for one can only try to do the best I can in this little forum in outer rings of the information sphere. And on this one backwater thread on a tiny wargaming companies back…we can aspire to do a bit better. The rest of the internet will just have to sort itself out.

Right?! One of the first videos I saw was a Merkava getting taken out Ukrainian style. I expect it will be "low intensity/terrorist" handwaving like when we saw when ISIL do the same thing in Iraq. The military community will likely split up into camps on this whole thing - kinda like we did here. "It is a fad. We have heard it before." "Interesting, but we have counters...please say we have counters." and "Holy Sweet Mother of God! What just happened?" The people in charge tend to come from the first or second camp. The evidence is mounting though. Any professional worth their salt cannot be saying "it will be fine" after watching this war closely.

What a gong show. Some observations: -Density of minefield based on detonations is just nuts. - Mine rollers can sustain about 5-6 hits depending on the mine. They are designed for detection and proving, not clearing...as this tank found out the hard way. - About mid-way you can see them hit an AP mine strip (the small detonations) - Crew panicked and paid for it. One does not slalom through a minefield. One definitely does not turn around and try drive back through it. - Tank is by itself. Seeing more and more of this. Lone tanks rolling through minefields or being brought forward for discrete sniping job. This looks more and more like assault gun work. I expect someone is going to put a direct fire mortar on an IFV to do a better job of it.

We will try and negotiate with it. The threads of this negotiation are already there. The narratives of “Silly Ukrainians, Silly Russians” are all basically saying “well sure, in Ukraine…but we would do it better”. This sort of collective denial will be subtle and deep, at a cultural level. Then as evidence mounts we will try and take these new technologies and bolt them onto our existing systems and doctrine. In the west, our military tactics and units have not really changed that much since WW2. The TF/BG concept has had all new tech bolted onto it and Unmanned will be as well. We will spend billions on counters to try and protect that old concept. But as you note we won’t be able to, the shifts are too big. Next, we will get all “out of the box” and create experimental units and doctrine that looks good on the surface but in reality is designed to fail. This will validate that the old orgs and doctrine were right all along. We normally do this by half-measures - we do not build a complete coherent experimental system. We just take away the old stuff. Then we will hit a forcing function. A real world disaster that we cannot negotiate with or ignore. It will cost a bunch of teenagers their lives. Then we will scramble to try and realign. It will be expensive and brutal. After that, well the whole thing becomes a dice roll. It didn’t have to be, but this is where sunk cost fallacies get you. Air-Land warfare has changed. More, it is continuing to change. It isn’t just the pace, it is the depth. Fundamentals and foundational principles are challenged (eg Surprise, Concentration, Mission Command). This is not simply “a better tank killer”, this is stuff that breaks force ratios, tempo, and basic utility of what we thought was combined arms. The death of how we used to do minefield breaching ops is just the latest in a very long line of doctrine that look more and more obsolete. I strongly suspect that joint warfare as a whole is shifting under our feet. RMA has finally landed with a big enough bang to get our attention. What will follow the Russo-Ukraine war will be a decade long argument. But in the end, everyone in charge will have come up in the old system. Further, we do not really promote radical Tesla-type disruptors to be GOs in modern militaries. So we are looking at a pretty conservative bunch steeped in a conservative military culture and doctrine. Oh, and with a trillion dollar defence industry tooled for stuff we had for the last 80 years. Not a good start.

It does show a tactical example in this war. And the brutality is not something people should try and ignore. War has a cost and everyone should see what that cost is. That said, I would definitely not recommend to vets out there as it could be triggering. IED strikes look pretty much identical to be honest. Worst case was trapped in a burning vehicle and it happened far too often. Total nightmare fuel there.

The problem is modern ranges and defending forces distribution. So you pick a grid square for annihilation but mines are buried and very tough to over pressure (unless they are Russian and buried 2 inches from each other). Mines with legs can, as had been noted, simply fill back in. And ATGMs/UAS have ranges of kms so you might get those in the grid square but the rest can still reach out and get you while trying to breakthrough. And then there is the next grid square and the one after that in depth as you advance. So you would basically would need to carpet bomb a 10s of kms deep stretch of ground with Daisy-cutters/FABs just to get penetration…and still be dealing with stuff hitting on the sides kms out while trying to transit. And none of that stops the enemy using FASCAM to plug the holes - which is really what they were designed for. It might work if you could pick the right spot and exploit it…and got very lucky. Cratering in WW1 had limited success but breaking out was the problem then, as it would be now. Edit: forgot surprise. Another problem is that to exploit one would need a large breakout force. In the modern ISR environment it would get picked up from space so an opponent would know something was going on well ahead of the op. EW might give a Local Bubble but stand-off ISR is extremely high res and could even direct C-fires. Of course if you are going to go this way one is coming up on tac nuke solutions.

I think the SOB got a little more than kneecapped based on the size of the explosion.

And here we stand on the edge of the unknown. Doctrine says establish air superiority, EW superiority, kill enough artillery and then storm the gates. But looking ahead, very few long range ATGMs that do not miss, fully autonomous UAS and minefields with legs that can self re-seed could stop any conventional breach technology we currently have. This is before PGM deep fires get involved. I guess hover tanks would work, or teleporters, but we are having enough trouble with capacitors right now. And we are back to multi-domain, multi-dimensional Denial.

Kinda feels like you are fixating on a single factor here to try and prove a point. And missed the OPs point, which was that one can field more powerful systems that can destroy UAS faster by adding more energy and/or releasing what you have faster. Quick output capacitors enable the fielding of more powerful systems. True, but then one is dragging more capacitors around which adds to weight and profile...and cost. Adding capacitors will enhance other military factors such as endurance, but also come at a cost. In summary, having a big giant laser running around the battlefield to shoot down bird sized UAS that can each kill a tank is not workable for a lot of reasons.

“The maths” You barbarian!

You are baiting me, right? “Why they fail” is because this guy has zero idea what he is talking about. Maybe less than zero. As in, people lose knowledge just by watching his video. Starting with the flail is the first hint. A flail is for admin and rear area clearances. I know some militaries still have them on assault vehicles but everyone in the business agrees they are dumb. On the modern battlefield the flail is suicide anywhere but clearing parking lots for Bde HQ. Minebots - IED work, not for combat clearing. At least not yet. Rollers. Ok, these are not designed to work in isolation. In fact it is his entire problem. Minefield clearing is a team sport. This guy is pointing to player positions and trying to figure out which one is best at “playing football”. Plough and rollers are the primary breaching systems. Rollers are designed to 1) detect a minefield, normally through a strike, and 2) prove a minefield after a plough tank has done a breach. Every plough tank can only clear a safe lane “that every one must follow”. Sorry bald YouTube guy we have yet to invent an area clearance plough. Ploughs are at the center of mechanical breaching. But they are also tricky and terrain dependent. Ploughs and rollers are designed to work together in a team. With their friends, explosive breaching and engineering vehicles. So opposed minefield breaching is one of the hardest operations to pull off. Right next to amphib on the difficulty scale. You normally have multiple breach lane attempts that use the mechanical and explosive systems. Explosive systems still need to be proven after the breach, normally by rollers. And engineer vehicles for complex obstacles like AT ditches or dragons teeth in the middle of a minefield. Adding more systems ups the complexity a lot requiring a lot of training and skill to pull off in the time windows needed to be successful. Breaches fail when the breaching teams fail. However that is why multiple breaches are done…we expect half to fail from the outset. Further based on density and cover, one has to scale the number of breaches to try and get a single success. In Ukraine the densities are so high we are likely talking double NATO doctrine: so Cbt Teams are likely shooting for 4 lane attempts instead of 2. Of course this violates concentration of mass restrictions we are seeing on the modern battlefield. So one either goes small platoon bites and infantry infiltration. Or establish conditions for a major breaching op, and risk most of one’s breaching assets. Establishing those conditions has proven to be the hard part. Minefield breaching operations as we define them in NATO are failing because the battle space is denied to concentration of mass. RA ISR can even pick up large concentrations of forces and pick out the breaching vehicles. We have not created the defensive bubble to fix that. So minefield breaching is not failing because of individual systems. It is failing because land warfare as we know it is kinda broken right now. Until we either fix it, or figure out a new way to do these things…we are kinda stuck.

Kinda makes sense:

Weight, range and endurance. En masse I can see these being hell for ground troops. They look all terrain but the ground out in the front lines is really torn up. I am waiting for a hybrid system that can do both air and ground. “The Ratel S is a first-person view (FPV), electric four-wheel drive vehicle capable of carrying a 40-kilogram payload at a speed of 24 km/h to a range of up to five kilometers with a duration of up to two hours. It is remotely controlled by an operator, guiding it through the use of goggles or monitor. It uses an aerial drone to monitor its progress which may also be fitted with a signal repeater to increase the range of the drone.”

Good post. This line here is hypocritical BS of the highest order. We spent 20 years during GWOT doing extrajudicial targeting killings and drone strikes all over the planet. Ukraine does the same thing during an existential war and suddenly we grow a conscious? Do two points on all this. - The primary role of special activities/active measures/executive actions is to create negative decision pressure, not positive. This throws off most military experts and traditional policy makers with respect to warfare. Conventional military capability, strategy and policy is designed to create positive decision. We compress reality down to a node we want and collapse all alternatives that favor an opponent. Normally we create chaos and destruction upon an opponent while imposing our own order over any situation...we call it "superiority". "Special" acts as the inverse of this and very often why conventional military thinking has so many problems with it. What the Ukrainians are doing here is undeciding already established decisions within the Russian framework. Moscow is supposed to be outside of the war. A submarine captain who lobbed missiles at Ukraine is supposed to be out of it. Why? Because Russian certainty says the war is happening "over there". By conducting these sorts of activities, Ukrainian special forces are undeciding that certainty within the Russian sphere. This has enormous power. It projects uncertainty onto an opponent which can cause powerful inductive effects. All war is communication, and this communicates that "it is not decided they way you thought". - Uncertainty can cause collateral damage. I leads to over corrections for certainty. Russian's may run to Papa Putin when things start blowing up and people start dying while jogging. But deep down many will still be uncertain that he can protect them. Others will just remain uncertain and hope it stays out of their micro-social bubbles. Regardless, it looks to me like Ukraine is waging an special activities campaign. What is missing in this article is the really big shoe to drop: have they been successful in undeciding some elements of Russian society itself? We are talking about subversive warfare. Penetration of Russian society and activation of Russian resistance. You can shoot submarine captains all day but when I read this article what is glaringly missing is the real fight in the backfield - undeciding Russian social fabric itself. Now I know Russia is a "monolithic, apathetic homogenous block"...yeesh, that one has been beaten to death. No, they are not. They are a human society, which means that it has fissures, cracks and seams like any other. Finding and exploiting those gaps and seams is tricky business. Needs time and patience. It was in fact the Russian playbook right up until this little dance. I guess we will see where it goes. Problem may be too big, or it might be happening right in front of us. That is the thing with these sorts of efforts - you don't see them until they are already done.

Anything that is burning holes in the sky at those ranges is going to get lit up and hammered very quickly. It had better be able to move fast and be cheap enough to account for losses. I think it will be more point defence for strategic installations as part of a larger AD umbrella. Tactical is right out and operational has got some serious challenges.

Oh that is a good one. Forgot all about the strategic strikes on naval infra and ships tied up. Ya, that is a whole other spin. Ukraine basically does not have a blue water navy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Ukrainian_Navy_ships And it has done this: Edit: Yeesh, looked it up. The Moskva and Rostov were worth about $1B in total.

Well then we are really talking about Sea-Air battle at that point. I think for naval warfare the situation may be worse. The problems there are: - No cover, except weather. - Much larger concentrations of military capability tightly centralized. - Freakishly high costs per conventional platform unit. About the only thing it has going for it is stand-off range being essentially the horizon. For maritime warfare the air problem is not small as a big giant laser can only target one itty bitty Drone at a time. So still a really big energy pull but shipborne power can haul a lot more. I think in the open ocean this will be mitigatable but the littorals are going to become pure murder. That will change the naval warfare maps. And then there is sub-surface unmanned. In the old days we called them torpedoes, but the modern era is aching for a small fast system that can approach underwater...and then send a swarm of UAS at really close range. Likely won't kill the ship but do enough damage that it may as well have. Big problem with this sort of stuff is that the carrier group concept is not built for it. It is built for large aircraft stand-off strikes and ASW (which is hard enough). I honestly think naval warfare is in for just as large a shock, maybe a larger one. Small unmanned with ISR and explosives are going to re-shape naval power as much, possibly more than land power.