The_Capt

Maybe a few trillion dollars in economic development will help: https://www.politico.eu/article/von-der-leyen-in-ukraine-ahead-of-enlargement-decision/#:~:text=KYIV — European Commission President Ursula,said on X from Kyiv. But you right…we suck. It is all our fault. That is the narrative to take and totally does not play into the hands of people who want to withdraw support.

Rumblings on mainstream: https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/exhausted-and-disappointed-with-allies-ukraine-s-president-and-military-chief-warn-of-long-attritional-war-1.6630107 It reflects what I have been worried about for sometime. What if the character of warfare has simply shifted? What if Denial has simply become too large for offensive action to overcome? What if Corrosive warfare has run out of runway? My fear is that there may be no way, no matter how many resources pushed, to break through. If the RUAF could not achieve air superiority, how are we supposed to build up the Ukrainian Air Force past that level? It takes years to create that kind of air power. We have written pages of analysis on the drone problem. More tanks are not going to solve it. The truly concerning reality might simply be that no matter what or how much we send, Defensive primacy has emerged. The implications of that are enormous. The technology and tactics to achieve deeper offensive objectives might simply not exist. So what? Well first I am not totally convinced we are there yet - but the UA CHOD and president’s assessment is not promising. They have essentially admitted the summer-fall ‘23 offensive has culminated. Unless this is also part of an information ploy. My sense is that Ukraine might just dig in and hold on while shaping negotiations. Or maybe there is one more rabbit to pull out of the hat. We may be at the “best of bad” stage. But let’s not forget that Russia is likely in worse condition. I suspect their recent tactical offensives are simply attempting to convince that they still got game. Those very well could have been the tail end of what the RA has left in the tank. Regardless, won’t change what we have been discussing the last couple of pages. One thing this war has taught me is that most wars end this way. The total victories of WW2 are an anomaly. Far more often wars end with no one happy. No complete resolution. Open wounds and a whole bunch undecided. We might have to re-learn how to live with that.

And this is how we snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. Ukraine will fight as long as it can and we should support them until that end. Here we are discussing one possible end - I am not sure we are even at probable but we need to be ready for it. Conversations well above my pay grade will land on how things finally resolve with respect to the war. After the war we need a modern day Marshall Plan. One for the history books. We turn Ukraine into South Korea in a month. Even if EU and NATO somehow remain off the table there are plenty of other ways to secure that nation. Not least of which would be stationing western troops on their soil a la the US 8th Army. We need to follow through or we risk blowing the whole thing. All the money spent to date will be lost if we leave Ukraine hanging during reconstruction. If we double down on this and turn Ukraine into a regional economic powerhouse…a friendly democratic regional economic powerhouse, that is how we cement this as a major strategic victory.

Gawd, right?! Let’s not give Russia a win it never earned. We could stop this thing right now and it won’t change what has already happened. This is 1905, not 1945. We take the strategic competition victory and make sure we do not screw up the follow through.

I will just pick this one. “Serious preparation”. Canada is talking about a Brigade in Latvia…under a Liberal government. Russia’s single biggest loss, beyond all the hardware and credibility, is that it did exactly what it should not have done…it unified the West. Further it pushed up to overcome our deep apathy. We did not care back in 2014 when Putin went “I want this”. Hell we argued about legality etc for years after a soft invasion that took the entire Crimea. Move to 2023 - the West no far how it puts its head up its own butt is not going to forget this. Further, there is too much money to be made ensuring Russia stays in its box. We spent billions ensuring Ukraine stayed independent. We will spend billions more to ensure it stay out of the Russian sphere and that Russia stays in that box. This is everything we should have done back in 2014. And here is the thing, that strategic corridor won’t matter to that calculus. I say all this with confidence because the wheels are already in motion. Money is being spent…a lot of money. Russia just put NATO back in business for the next 20 years. That is done. Decided. How is that for sober? Look guys this isn’t late game rose coloured consolation prizing, I have been saying it since last summer. Russia lost this war, badly…already. The blow to their prestige and warfighting machine is pretty bad. For example, Russian can produce about 200 tanks per year (ya, let’s pretend tanks still matter). That is over 10 years of expensive production to replace what they lost in this war. Their military is battered beyond recognition. Any professional talent they had is pushing up sunflowers all over Ukraine. What is left is hastily trained and mobilized recruits and that includes the officer Corp. These are not things one can fix over night…and they are not cheap. Hey if the UA can do a break out and cut that corridor - fantastic! But it is not a critical requirement. Russia was a scary monster and it just got mauled by a minor power supported by about as an ad hoc framework as I have ever seen. Russia will not recover tomorrow or the next day. They will remain a threat but one we will contain. They want dance in South East Ukraine again? Go for it. It only gets worse for them over time, not better. At some point the economics and drug deals with China will sour and they will run out of juice. At that point we may have other problems if Russia unravels. But this entire “Invincible Russian Monster Bear” is a myth. It died at Kyiv. It died at Kharkiv. It died at Kherson. It won’t be resurrected soon. Now the next big question that really matters: “what are we going to do with the time we have taken?”

Ok, how? How is it a “major strategic victory”? How is Russia’s position better than it was before this war if that is all they gained? Is it decisive? Does it create strategic options we cannot counter? It sucks and we all would like it other wise. But calling it a “major strategic victory” is hyperbole. I will even buy operational. Strategic would be half of Ukraine under Russian control and the other half held by a Vichy-esque puppet. While NATO starts falling apart. We got Finland and Sweden. We got political Will for a decade. We will get the rest of Ukraine. Russia got a corridor of land which will secure Crimea better but it cost them far more than that was worth. That corridor is an arbitrary metric. Right next to “all of Crimea” and “every inch of pre-2014”. They have sentimental value but in the hard calculations of geopolitics and military gains they do not mean as much as people think. The West is not going to fall because this war got stuck where it is. Ukraine is not going to slide back into Russian control. Hell Russia doesn’t have the forces to exploit that corridor for a long while yet. And by the time they do I am sure it will be mined and defended to the hilt. In war there is what you must do. Want to do. And hope to do. The trick is really understanding which is which.

So what does Russia sell? What sustains this gold throne? Oil and gas. The West ain’t buying it anymore and that is going to continue. So Russia sells to China or India (Iran has their own). 1) all the infra is going West so know they have an eastward problem. 2) China and India are going to guy Russia and undercut profits 3) A lot of expertise ran away and keeps running away. That brain drain is going to really start hurting. No, the Russian economy does not get away with this all scot free. Major market shifts are not painless. Can Russia still do Grey zone crap and play silly buggers, sure…but we already risked managed that for over a decade. It is going to cost Russia billions, maybe hundreds of billions to rebuild military power after this war. Will there be oligarchs? Yup. Will Putin stay rich? Yup. Will Russia be in a position to do Ukraine War 2.0 in the next 10 years…no freakin way. None of this is “good” but it ain’t all bad either. The dance will continue but Russia is boxed up and can only do so much. Our biggest risk is taking our eyes off this ball as we go all scope eye on China.

You are no doubt correct…but he is contained. Pragmatically the West political calculus is that this is a problem that cannot be solved. If we destroy Putin/Russia we have a whole other set of more dangerous possibilities. If we let him get away with murder (literally) we set ourselves up for worse. Russia just took “the 2nd most powerful land army” on the planet and smashed it to a pulp in Ukraine. Putin might not care about convicts and country rubes, but he does care very much about nearly 3000 tanks and a submarine. It will take the RA decades to come back from this mess. However, they still need to be enough of a threat to justify NATO spending targets and positioning. Conveniently a stalemate outcome supports this. A lot of you in Ukraine/Eastern Europe think we in the West “don’t get it”. We actually do, very well. What you do not understand is that our level of investment has a different end-state. We never wanted to see the complete and utter defeat of Russia as a state. The hazards of a nuclear power in complete free fall are simply too high. Putin can lie to himself and his people all he wants, but he knows that any hopes of Russian imperial expansion died North of Kyiv…he did that and everyone knows it. Will Russia be back? Sure. Or maybe we will get lucky and when Putin dies we get a more moderate jerk we can do business with. But for now, the US and Canada sell more oil and gas to Europe. We sell more weapons to Europe. And we contain Russia, just enough. Act 2: China. Would it have been nice to drive home the “point” a little further? Sure. But now Ukraine can support an insurgency in the occupied territories for a decade instead of Russia doing other way around. We know Putin doesn’t care and will continue to play his game. But the outcome of this war, even if it stops today, made want Putin “wants” irrelevant. He shattered is military means to achieve it. He also broke his Diplomatic and Economic means in the bargain. So we fall back on Plan Korea. We can live with that. Optimal? Definitely not. But when I said back last May that if the UA offensive goes nowhere over the summer and fall that “there would be difficult conversations”…well this is that conversation. I personally don’t actually think we are done yet to be honest. Let’s see where winter takes us. But the UA CHOD basically admitting we are at “positional warfare” - which is just code for slow grinding attritional warfare - then it is clear we can see those hard conversations coming. Next will be to see if there is any political movement on either side.

I don’t think it is nearly as cut and dry as the average person thinks. There are upsides to a stalemate at this point. To be totally brutal an endstate where both sides can claim victory (and defeat) often makes for the best outcome. Ukraine is still a free nation, our support ensured they stood up against an illegal invasion and largely repelled it when there should have been no chance of that success. Russia and Putin can claim victory as they took an additional 7% of Ukraine at an eye-watering cost. But this will likely keep ol Flat Face in power for a few more years before Time does its thing for us all. This avoids a Russian free fall experience, and we get the added bonus of Europe buying our oil and gas (or alternatives) while we righteously continue to isolate Russia -this is why it won’t matter who is in the White House post-war. A lose-lose starts to look like a win-win. US administration can point to all the upsides going into ‘24, plus we are looking at Armageddon in the Middle East which keeps the Bible Belt focused elsewhere. We hopefully do a whole bunch of reconstruction in Ukraine and go all South Korea on the place. Russia continues as downward spiral but slowly enough they don’t start WW3. And we can all focus on China as the next big threat worthy of trillions in defence spending on bloated military capabilities that probably won’t work. So you see, a stalemate is not the end of the world. In fact I would not be surprised if in some circles they are kinda pushing for it. The total and utter crushing of Russia has some serious risks. This outcome sidesteps a lot of them. Now everyone is both happy and unhappy. Sometimes no decision is the best decision. I for one am not convinced we are there yet, but we definitely can see it from here.

A bit more complicated but the sentiment is not entirely off. We did an exercise about 10 years back trying to figure out all the components of military value. In the end it looked like the Drake Equation, which was scary enough and then some egghead pointed out that some components were non-linear over time. Over all military value is a pretty complex beast with all sorts of tangible and intangible elements. So when considering something like a new platform one has to try and consider its value as a delta V to an overall system. How is X giving an entire system an advantage to an opponents comparative opposing system. So infantry in battle suits is not simply “how much does the suit cost versus the things that can kill it” it is “how does the system create effects advantage”. Cost becomes an attritional factor but is offset by advantage. So beating up on the poor tank. It isn’t the fact that cheap ATGMs or UAS can kill them that is driving their value down. It is the fact that ATGMs and UAS are killing them before the tank can deliver its military value on the battlefield. If tanks could survive long enough to create operational tempo and manoeuvre then we would not be having this conversation, even if we were looking at the same loss rates. It is the fact we are seeing the loss rates without the tank being able to deliver value. That is what is killing the tank. Making it worse is the cost factor and those tanks being eliminated by incredibly cheap systems compared to the cost of the tank. So if armoured infantry in battle suits can live long enough to create effect, force decision and sustain options then they have value that far outweighs strips cost. Of course there is a threshold for this, we see that in WW2 Germany. The Tiger was brilliant but far too costly to sustain even with the effects it could deliver. The Tiger 2 is like modern tanks. The damn things were very expensive and most could not even get to the start line. So is a military capability below a cost sustainment threshold? And does it deliver value for that costs? When and where that value happens is also incredibly important. In reality it is very complex - let alone when you factor in historical and cultural value. There is a Perun video (if he hasn’t already done one, that guy has to be in FD somewhere).

Mass.is.broken.

"Gainey noted that the electronic systems work “pretty good” against smaller unmanned systems, but he has previously said that the rise of autonomy in unmanned operations has limited the effectiveness of EW as “now you’re not cutting a link.” This is driving adversary R&D in full autonomy. They also do not have legal or policy regimes pushing back on this.

A little Eurasian centric, but then again these were the people "recording history". If (and it is a big if) I ever do a PhD, it will be on pre-historic warfare. That map would see a massive mist of small lights that was the background warfare of pre-civilization. Also there were very likely some very big battles in North America pre-contact...but of course no one wrote them down.

Big microwave oven trying to bake the sky goes boom. Good for point defence against asymmetric attack. Suicide in a conventional war. A lot of this technology sprang up when ISIL started messing with UAS about 5 years ago. It was built for a very different environment.

Damn it is hard to tell what is doing the damage in these videos. I think I see arty, mines and maybe an ATGM strike.

I think the race to fully autonomous unmanned systems is a given. The only communication requirements will be for battlefield situational awareness and some pretty hands off direction. EW is like tracers, it cuts both ways. Pumping a bunch of energy into the environment is “loud” and draws fire, Russians learned this the hard way. In the West we are heading towards a legal crisis - do we retain full human control of weapon systems or do we want to win? It is more complicated and nuanced than this but at the core we are facing a thorny issue.

Full body armour might be a start but an exco-suit would need to be able to carry the weight and still allow for movement. Body armour will solve for frag but likely not HEAT or shock, let alone EFP. Next gen suits could mask thermal signature, or more accurately would have to. No point armouring up infantry if they look like glow sticks on thermal. Going to need a lot of investment in materials research along with energy storage. Of course you would likely have fewer humans forward. They would be teamed up with unmanned systems to create synthetic mass. A small four person team with platoons of unmanned ground and air systems could be the new company.

Aw, now I miss John Kettler...

I was thinking more of that SMArt strike we saw yesterday. But the point still stands. One cannot "fix" on threat without becoming highly vulnerable to another. It is a confluence of Illumination, Precision and Persistence - all at a much cheaper cost than anything that can be fielded to break that confluence.

The best ones really are. Sure we can get into force ratios, attrition vs force generation. Opportunity costs. Risk vs Reward. Systems versus platforms. But in the end you will end up right back to the dilemma. AirLand Battle was a simple dilemma as well...concentrate mass, get killed by the air. Distribute to avoid airpower, get killed in isolation by land power. The central dilemma facing modern warfare revolve around the same themes - concentration of mass, signature/profile, distribution and support. We cannot realistically clear the skies below 2000 feet. You cannot fire enough dumb or smart ammo into it and we do not have the technology (yet) to do C-UAS with other UAS. Even if you could fire enough bullets into the sky, the noise you would make would immediately draw Deep Fires on these AD platforms and systems. If we do not sweep the skies or establish air superiority below 2000 feet those system can see and hunt making concentration of mass impossible. The dilemma is in cost. Platforms that can fire a lot of accurate bullets or munitions into the sky are going to be expensive. We are talking about detecting, tracking and hitting something the size of a bird, with better maneuverability, kms out. Both what they are shooting at, and what is shooting at them are much cheaper. A PGM munition and/or drone is a fraction of the cost of a mobile AA or SAM platform able to do C-UAS (we just spent pages on this). In an attritional exchange the sky cleaner is going to lose, badly. So we are back to deadlock. Until someone can design and deliver a technology or process that breaks it. A cheap and effective way to do C-UAS and C-ISR.

Not if they are fully autonomous. This is why autonomy is a race to the bottom. And we are currently losing.

It isn’t the bullets. Drones are cheaper than the things firing all them bullets to sweep the sky clean. And firing all said bullets at the Face of God is going to leave an ISR signature that will ensure retribution. Same goes for lasers or EM. It is classic military dilemma. If I stay quiet my opponent will hunt and kill me with UAS. If I blaze away at them, my opponents artillery will target and kill me.

Except for the part where shooting down drone swarms is nearly impossible with todays technology. And while you are blazing away at every bird, bug and flying squirrel for kilometres you are going to be visible from 53 miles west of Venus. So you had also be able to shoot down every mortar, artillery shell and sub-munition that is going to be lobbed at the Serbian New Year’s Eve party your ground forces have become. Short of air burst nukes we do not possess an realistic ability to clear millions of cubic meters of sky.