The_Capt

Militaries are living breathing monuments to the Sunk Cost fallacy. https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/the-sunk-cost-fallacy

Tank Fight!!! Steve already beat up on a lot of this. To which I would add: - C-RAM. If technology becomes mature that allows a force to shield hundreds of small sub-munitions coming in at 100s of m/s then the tank will be long gone already. In fact with that level of resolution and precision targeting anything larger than a field mouse (with a little helmet on) above ground is dead. You may as well cite Gandalf and the League of White Wizards. C-RAM tech is currently big, heavy and effective against very few incoming at a time, largely in a COIN or low level conflict context. To upscale to what we are seeing in Ukraine is…well…just not happening anytime soon. - ATGMs and RPGs are nowhere near the limits of lethality to weight. Do just a bit of reading on nano-treated explosives. https://www.army.mil/article/243587/army_argonne_scientists_explore_nanoparticles_for_future_weapon_systems. And that is not science fiction, prototypes are already in the works. -Integrated APS at platoon level - I should freakin hope so! You mean we don’t have this already?! It will buy some time I am sure but as we have seen sticking a lot of tanks close to each other is not smart on this battlefield, let alone the next one. A whole platoon popping off APS is going to draw a lot of heat (tee hee) but hey if it get you to sleep at night. - Logistics. This will be the fight for the next decade at least. How does one protect logistics lines? Self loitering and longer more precise artillery is going to push fights over the horizon (well out of tank fire range) and protecting logistics is going to be really challenging. Guns have the advantage because they are already well back. As to tank “driving back”…see movement=spotted=dead on the modern battlefield. Right now in Ukraine the tanks are largely already back near the guns. - Mech infantry and their kit: “You are always creative unless it is stuff you don’t like”. So you think all those unmanned systems might take some of that load off. I mean you are ready to lean on freakin Iron Dome force fields to hold off DPICM but somehow having unmanned offset infantry loads is just science fiction? -How have infantry been doing against ISR and artillery? Well better than armour but not by enough on the offensive, yet. But hey we get it infantry screwed, armour forever! Look everyone can go hug their stuffed tank while sporting their armoured corps pyjamas. I frankly don’t have a dog in this fight. What I am very interested in is ensuring we chart a military capability course based on reality and not culture or history.

Oh very clever. Ok let’s have it out on infantry vs tanks moving forward. Infantry are extremely cheap. Putting human life aside, Russia has demonstrated that infantry, though soft and squishy can be replaced in the tens of thousands. Tanks are big expensive and hard to manufacture at scale. Infantry as humans do need a lot of support - likely why we will see more unmanned. But they also do not need a recovery vehicle that also weighs 40tons, nor do they burn tens of thousands of gallons of gas per day. An infantry soldier can survive on a few kilos of support per day (food, water and ammo), a tank needs hundreds of kilos all on vulnerable trucks. Infantry can be pushed to keep going, when 50tons decides to stop moving it is done. This whole “infantry can die to” as a counter argument to the continued trajectory of obsolescence of heavy mech and armour is not only illogical it is deflecting. Infantry can disperse, dig in and hide. They are able to cross terrain impassable to tanks. They break down but are easy to replace. They can fight in built up areas. They do not weigh 50 tons each and give off enough heat to be seen from space. They are cheap, light and now armed with ISR, comms and weapons systems that can kill a tank out past 4km (and with NLOS tens of kms). Infantry have completely different roles on the battlefield and we have yet to find technology to replace infantry…we may never. So come on the board and bleat all you want about the life left in heavy armour but for the love of gawd can we put that stupid “infantry die too and we are not getting rid of them” argument in the ground? As soon as we can produce thousands of fighting tanks per week out of a global civilian tank population of 8 billion you may have a point.

How does one provide cover from smart-DPICM raining from the sky? This is a criticism I have about the entire "tank defence", it picks a few threats and goes "we can solve for that". What it fails to do is recognize: 1) The technology to defeat any counters is moving too fast. As Steve notes every time a solution is found, two more pop up. Ok, we layer APS on everything to counter those pokey and vulnerable ATGMs. Then someone builds an ATGM with sub-munitions, so Javelin 2030 (tm) splits into 6 smart attack vehicles and APS can't keep up. Oh wait there is more...standoff EFP. Worked very well for insurgents in Iraq and is aching for a comeback. Now you could have a ATGM that essentially explodes 50m out and drives a slug thru your tank. Now APS needs to push out even further. The trends of lighter, smaller, cheaper and smarter are accelerating anti-tank weaponry to the point that the tank is trending towards marginalization. 2) The entire tank system is too damn fragile. Even the tank itself is pretty fragile. The thing need only take a few sub-munition hits and one can knock out the engine, or the gun, or the track. Then all of the support systems from forward repair, to recovery, to logistical support are also heavy, hot and easily spotted. So now one has to bubble wrap that entire system just to keep the tanks in motion - even assuming away all the threats to the tank itself. I am pretty sure our gas trucks burn as well as Russian ones. The tank is being squeezed, along with the rest of mech. And it is also being replaced. If the job was to hurl energy at targets from 2kms+ back, well we kinda got that covered off without needing 50 ton behemoths to do it. Infantry support...this one is interesting especially in this war. Between ISR and UAS, infantry and artillery have formed an unholy union. Add in UAS attack capability and if infantry need something under cover to die there are ways to do it not involving a multi-million dollar vehicle that needs a Broadway production just to keep it rolling from A to B. I am sure people will still buy tanks. They built battleships for years even after they were pushed out. But the trend will be lighter, longer, lethal and cheaper. We will see militaries de-aggregate into lethal mist. If someone brings expensive, big, hot and heavy to a fight that mist will simply rust the entire heavy system to ash. No, mist on mist is where this is going.

I think overlaps could be the desired effect depending on fire mission (@JonS where are you?) - say neutralizing versus harassing type thing?

Well they did Euro-bashing day yesterday...time to keep moving in the rotation.

Not a bad idea either. Right now there is no guidance on these rounds. They only have drag ribbons to try to ensure they hit the ground fuze side down to detonate - I mean this is 60-70s technology really. Putting guidance on the little bastards is not really a high water mark of technology so I expect it is already on the books or out there. Mass production of that as we enter into a Precision Race is going to likely kick into high gear. And because it is a slow Saturday (except for what is looking like a pretty effective UA counter-C2 node campaign), now tanks are going to need umbrellas, and anti-ATGM APS, and EW, and ground fences, and C-UAS, and fairy invisibility dust...well you get the point.

Each one of those munitions is roughly equivalent to a 40mm grenade going off. So about a 10m diameter lethal radius and then chances to injury going out from there. A standard 155mm cargo shell can hold 88 of them (https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/m483.htm). So take a picture of the circle and start drawing 10m circles, then say 40m circles and you can get a pretty good idea of the effect. It should get heads down at least.

From my study of it, I suspect they can by varying the fuse of the cargo shell. Higher trigger would mean greater dispersal, lower a tighter grouping. There is a minimum height for DPICM arming so they can only go so low. The old style DPICM were designed for area saturation using salvos, not single shot precision. Now that we are seeing more of that, next gen cluster munitions will likely evolve to little PGM rounds (they were working on these systems already). Back to mech/armour mass, when a single cargo shell can drop 20 PGM DPICM rounds that can hit vehicles with 80% accuracy or be programmed for specific patterns/targets…well one can see how it is going to get more challenging.

Excellent reply - better than some staff college students I know. I would add that is also puts additional strain on the entire Russian military enterprise as they now have to worry about replacing what they have lost (they still have eyes on the bigger global game). And last but not least, it may give a level of freedom of manoeuvre for Ukrainian forces on the sea. Even modest raiding and SOF capabilities could drive the RA nuts and pushing their naval capabilities back is nothing but good news. My personal hope would be an amphib operation but I do not think that is under the tree for this year. Back to a central thesis, this creates Ukrainian options while taking options away from Russia…and that is how wars are won.

When the pandemic started I was tasked with a team to go off and do a quick and dirty study of the impact trends of pandemics across history and then translate that into potential risks coming out of COVID. We took about three months and I read more about pandemics than I ever wanted to know. In the end we came up with a long list of repeated observable trends and then translated them into modern context. The one thing I pulled from that experience is that every pandemic is the same, and every pandemic is unique. They all follow similar impact patterns and trends, yet they all were unique in the context of the event and what followed was highly shaped by their context. To my mind wars are exactly the same. They are all the same, and they are all unique at the same time. So while universal metrics exist they miss the context of the war in the time it happens and context matters very much. So if you want to measure the impact of a war…study the damn war in detail and in context.

That does not send encouraging signals.

Illustrates my point perfectly. I personally think Pinker is selling cool aid and using selective statistic to try and flavour. Considering the potential long term impacts of this war, I do not think a "well at least it isn't WW2" line of thinking is really all that helpful. The scope and scale of its impact are not directly related to body counts or any single metric.

You and Pinker are kinda making my point. Right so we firmly establish that this current war is indeed not A World War because it falls under a certain (arbitrary) scale on a single metric of loss of life. So what? Do we feel better? Do we have a better frame or lens through which to look at this war? How does that offer one wit of anything valuable to the analysis? And by fixating we are missing the larger picture: sure this isn't a World War (and no one has jumped in with legal of diplomatic definitions) - but it is a Global one. It is having global effects on security and collective defence, food security, human security, nuclear warfare deterence and the role of the UN and global order to name a few. This war will very likely change the cultures of Ukraine and Russia in ways we cannot even see yet. It is shifting power dynamics in a region which again has global repurcutions. Within the information space this war has gone global with open source and information warfare happening everywhere (even here). In reality, I am not entirely sure if a war can be truly "small" anymore; however, this one definitely is not. So beyond drawing arbitrary lines on narrow metrics todays fixation, like a lot of them in this vein, completely misses the point.

Ya kinda do and just demonstrated it. If one focuses solely on scale = body count then it is far too easy to miss other factors such as unconventional vs conventional. I strongly disagree with the entire position that one can ignore other dimensions/concepts and focus on single factors. It is like trying to dissect a symphony by counting the number of notes. One can focus on the melody lines of an set of instruments but it has do be done in context of the whole. So, yes the entirely of the concept does need to be taken into account in any discussion. This does not preclude focused concept development but it must be re-integrated into the whole. This is the entire foundation of joint warfare (i.e. no domain can be taken isolation), or mulit-domain (whatever they call it these days). So when discussing scale and hanging it solely on in-war body counts one risks doing exactly that.

My largest issue with his entire argument was reducing war to statistical deaths. War is violent but on many levels and more often the psychological scars on an entire society can leave impacts far beyond body counts. Vietnam had an enormous impact on the US collective psyche well out of proportion of deaths compared to WW2…and then we have Blackhawk Down. Pinker misses the relativity of war on a micro-social and then how that can spread to macro. So his entire thesis - we are getting more peaceful is not only statistically weak when looking on a broad scale, it also misses the trees for the forest on a smaller scale. There is an entire slice in the social and political sciences that bought into the idea that war was a disease we could be cured of a temporary phenomenon that sprung from upscaling civilization. In reality mankind has been violent with each other from pretty much Day 1. It is an impulse that is baked into us and will be very hard to remove, if ever. In the end Hobbes and Rousseau continue to wrestle for our souls…when in reality I think they were both right and wrong. We are creatures who have always lived on the margin. Suspended between order and chaos, thriving and self destruction. This war is no exception. It is the most wasteful and useless war in a long time. Russia was not running out of X. Ukraine was not an imminent threat to Russian survival (at least not that we can figure). This war hardly even counts as “policy by other means”, it is too personal and irrational to make that much sense. We just lived through a Great Peace and now it looks like it is over. Hard military power as a means of diplomacy is back on the table. Irrational and personal causes of war are back (they never really went anywhere) and we are leaning back to Rule of the Gun on a global scale. Or maybe that is just how it looks on a Tuesday.

So is a Solar System war = Deaths in the hundreds of millions? I never really found these weird metrics useful to be honest. Deaths are part of war but there are a lot of other dimensions: duration, scope, scale and impact/imprint. One could argue that the war between Christianity and Islam has been going on at some level since the First Crusade. At the end of the day a war is a large as the collision of certainties that is driving it. Those certainties can be measure in #s of people, however, they can also be measured in how deeply embedded a certainty is within a people. War is a deeply human expression and as such trying to pin down hard metrics is very hard and in some cases counter-productive: “oh this is a small war”, well which thousands of people died…how did they die, why did they die? These are far more important factors in conflict management than raw body counts. Even historically, a vicious small war can tell us more than a long drawn out slog. Finally all wars are huge for those fighting them. So even if one is in a “small war” the cultural impact can be significant and imprint it leaves on a society significant. Not to beat up on Pinker but war is never simple or reducible - like any other collective human expression it is a non-linear soup of emotion and memory.

Is it just me or has the Russian Navy been taking a lot of hits lately. Maybe the whole ground war was a distraction and the maritime war was the offensive?

Lebensraum, well that is a golden oldie. Good old fashion greed and conquest. Well at least they are telling the truth now and not trying to dress it up as anti-Nazi, anti-NATO, anti-whatever…it is a pure and simple land grab.

Getting rumours in mainstream here: https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/ukraine-fires-6-deputy-defence-ministers-as-heavy-fighting-continues-in-the-east-1.6565898 Pretty cold if true. Corruption can become a cultural norm in governments and very hard to root out.

There is always room for giant robots, no matter how absurd they would be as a warfighting platform.

RUSI is a gold mine of analysis for this war: https://rusi.org/news-and-comment/in-the-news/why-russias-cyberwarfare-has-failed-ukraine-remains-threat-uk https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/all-quiet-cyber-front-explaining-russias-limited-cyber-effects https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/promises-and-consequences-intelligence-contest-cyberspace Punchline - cyber is still happening but it is really something we need to relook at because it really did not have the overall effects we expected. Carnegie Endowment has some interesting stuff too. https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/12/12/cyber-operations-in-ukraine-russia-s-unmet-expectations-pub-88607 https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/12/16/russia-s-wartime-cyber-operations-in-ukraine-military-impacts-influences-and-implications-pub-88657 Quick scan and there seems to be a lot of apologist-ism occurring over cyber as well.

This really makes no sense. If a “tank” is simply the most lethal vehicle then right now an infantryman with an ATGM or artillery with PGM are “tanks”. A tank provides a combination of three things: survivability, lethality and mobility. They are all uniquely high but come at a high cost to produce and sustain in the field. The core issue is that Survivability is pretty much in tatters in this war. Tanks are highly visible and are being hunted into extinction. Too many things can see and kill them or their support system to easily. Mobility - see 1) minefields and 2) denial of the tank by long range systems that can see them and kill the at greater ranges than the tank can respond. Lack of tank freedom of mobility is a freakin hallmark of this war. Lethality - maybe the only thing the old girl has left but it is being replaced by precision artillery, missiles and UAS. Dress is up however one likes. Apologize for no air superiority all day long. Blame the Ukrainians and Russians for “not being combined armsie enough.” That equation up there is not going to suddenly swing back in favour of heavy expensive metal moving forward. We may even see a major armour breakout in this war but that won’t validate their existence, it will be a swan song. Finally from a strategic perspective other factors come into play but the biggest one is that tanks are just too damn heavy…blame gravity. They are hard to move and mount. They are very costly to support. Problem now is that an opponent can move and mount the denial system for the tank much faster than we can mount and move heavy forces. So What? Every time we deploy the armoured fist somewhere, cheap and many lethal systems to counter it will have been there for weeks. And the technology behind those system is going to be an extremely high priority because they can deny what is the core of our current western military ground force …they watched the Gulf War and Iraq 03 on tv same way we did. So add it all up. Tactical, Operational and Strategic - the whole thing does not look good for the entire heavy system. Lighter, faster, cheaper, deadlier and unmanned is a wave of change that no one is going to be able to stand in front of. In my opinion we are watching the re-definition of “combined arms” unfold in front of us daily in Ukraine. The re-design of what combat power means and warfare itself is going to be fundamentally changed.

Dude, c’mon. We know what tanks were for but nothing in this war aligns with our current doctrine. Armour has largely been relegated to a fire support role, and noted as no small amount of “indirect fire support”. The internet is filled with invest “tank-people” explaining and complaining right now but I have yet to hear a single coherent theory as to why armour has not worked as it should in this war. In fact there is a long list of stuff that has not worked as it should in this war - airpower, cyber, and engineering are also on that list.

Well modern day cavalry is looking a lot like UAS. Everyone is getting all hot and bothered as to armour and whether this war is an anomaly or a preview. All the while no one really takes about fundamental shifts. The next war NATO fight in will be fundamentally different than what we planned for before. It will likely have elements of this war but evolution of technology is happening very fast. What we do know: C4ISR has changed the game. Battlefields are entirely illuminated and surprise is pretty much dead. So is heavy hot mass, at least as far as being able to hide it. This is not an opinion…it is physics. Unmanned has changed the game. Combining with ISR, unmanned systems are going to spread and expand in scope as quickly as they are able. No military on earth after this war is going to try and go in without unmanned support. Precision, reach and lethality. Closely linked to the first two, the over the horizon capability of small (read hard to find) and deadly systems are going no where but upward. Ok, so what? Well the other shoe to drop is Shield. What can we do to better protect the force from these new realities? This is going to happen, definitely in the short term. We have far too much sunk cost in our existing systems to simply drop them and run. Shield will buy time to pivot. The challenge will be the fact that technology does not really help us here. The ability to put little brains on things that can be taught to target is just too far ahead of any viable counters right now…and it is getting worse. This war is no where near Spanish Civil War in impact. That war did see modern AirPower come out of the closet and we drew a lot of wrong (and some right) conclusions. The shifts being observed in this war are far more dramatic. Further they are all pretty much extensions of previous trend we saw in other wars. That all said, there are a lot of unknowns. For example, next wars might be even faster. If someone can achieve ISR, unmanned and PGM superiority they will be able to cut through an opponent very quickly - neither side has been able to achieve that trifecta yet in this war. AI has not made a full entry yet. A lot of what we are seeing in this war is last generation. Some of these systems are already being replaced. So, I agree, the next war NATO fights will not look exactly like Ukraine - it will probably be crazier and even further from what we recognize.