The_Capt

It does and we can definitely see and hit, but so can China. Been researching Chinese military and close air support is 70kms stand off. I am not as to “stealth” never really been tested but for stand off fights it will likely work. So we are likely talking a change in what air superiority means. It is actually missile or deep strike superiority. Our biggest problem in the west is that we are addicted to big steel, all the services. In raw tonnage we are extremely heavy and concentrated…and expansive. If we run into an opponent who has gone “everywhere, all at once and cheap” the economics could quickly swing against us. It is all about cost. The price of our way of warfare looks to be priced out because we kept on the big steel train. Like Dreadnoughts our entire military concepts are all about big sharp mass. Again, I am not worried about an opponent who has been fighting like Russia, I am worried about one who fights like Ukraine. And none of stand off or missiles solve for small distributed and portable systems that all can kill heavy. I mean jury is still out but evidence is mounting that the fabric of warfare is shifting. Ukraine would be an anomaly if not for the trend lines extending backward. Our supply lines are extremely vulnerable, minefields kill our stuff just as easily as anyone else’s. I can see an opponent with similar C4ISR and systems grinding us to a halt just like we have seen in this war. So What? Well we simply are not built for a high intensity protracted conflict. We are not set up for a war of Denial/Attrition, we have always assumed that problem away. So what is the solution? Go light, go cheap, go smart, go long and go lots. Shift to a war of Attrition footing within industry and military strategy. Denial is the new Decisive. Drop your tools, shed the weight and get ready for a crazy ride.

There is one massive flaw in this logic..well maybe two. First is that SEAD and DEAD will work in modern context. Western SEAD is designed specifically to take out IADS, big complex systems built in layers. What we are seeing in Ukraine are highly distributed systems with more weight being carried by what we considered “point AD”. Problem with “point” is that it becomes “area” if you have enough of them and can link them together. We already see MANPADs capable of reaching up to 20000 plus feet, what happens when someone sticks a bunch of those on a UAS? Let me be very clear…western “superiority” as we we know it may be dead as of this war. The things we are seeing are on a very long trend going back to The Gulf War so this is not some flash in the pan phenomena, it is a building pressure wave. Second flaw…guns will keep doing all the killing. Guns are highly effective but they are big and have a very large logistical footprint. The trend appears to be more and more loitering munitions and very long range systems be they rockets and/or unmanned. Cheap, low footprint is the trend. Finally the primary driver for corrosive warfare and Denial primacy does not appear to be weapon systems or capacity, it is C4ISR. Our western forces have enormous logistical footprints that can be seen from space. An opponent that can find them first and then hit them via any number of methods is going to be able stop us cold. So what? The entry cost to fight a peer opponent has gone up dramatically. Stand-off and denial technology has gone into overdrive because (surprise, surprise) adversaries want to blunt western advantage. I am not convinced we have solved for any of this. I know we are working on it but old faiths die the hardest. UAS have nothing on UGV and that shoe will likely drop very soon. Western powers need to solve for Unmanned, C4ISR and Precision Defence very quickly. We won’t be learning Mandarin, we will be looking very long high intensity wars that our societies are incredibly poorly prepared for.

ISIL bought civilian drones on Ali Baba and loaded them up with cluster munitions and mustard gas. Partner forces started taking hits from that. And then they started using them as ISR platforms for mortars. Western and Iraqi forces (Kurds too) did not have a counter. So while we owned the sky above 2000 feet we were buck naked to observation and taking hits from below 2000 feet. All of it was precursor to this war. I can recall a commander basically declaring “we just lost air superiority below 2000 feet” and it was barely a blip as the RCAF merrily kept arguing for F-35 - shoulder shrugging “drones, not our problem”. Needless to say there was a scramble to field C-UAS tech, we never fully solved it back then - not going to discuss state now in detail but it is fair to say no western military has the problem entirely solved and fully unmanned AI is going to make it a lot worse, can’t cut the link between operator and machine if there isn’t one. Good news was ISIL could only get their hands on so many and we basically just killed them all at Mosul. They are still out there but all fractured into the Syrian sh#tshow. Then there was Nagorno-Karabakh, which really start to fry some minds. And unmanned is just getting started. Once UGVs come into play en masse warfare will be an entirely new ballgame. As usual we got it wrong. Cyber kinda got locked up and blunted but unmanned broke warfare…it is always the one you don’t spend billions on. If I could list the big changes driving this: - C4ISR. The UA are already fielding an ersatz JADC2 (entirely networked) system without spending billions. The rest of the western architecture means we are talking an entirely illuminated battle space. - Unmanned, see above. - Precision at range. Ridiculous hit-kill to ammo ratios. This is in land and in the air. What used to take large heavy systems (eg TOW) is now being done with man portable. Artillery is madness in how can be swung and put on targets. The RA sucks but even they are demonstrating they can do it…why? Because even though their ISR is crappy and C2 is constipated they can still see and react faster than they are supposed to. Pull these all together and you appear to have a wicked combination that is pushing Denial into battlefield primacy. This basically means the cost to do anything goes up dramatically. The counter appears to be Corrosive Warfare but even it may hit a limit, that is what I am looking out for. If the UA cannot break this Denial dynamic then we could be looking at a WW1 situation where nothing will really be able to happen until one side breaks the code first….or runs out of gas - pure Attritional Warfare. I for one, think the jury is still out. But that training post to my eyes is just another in a long line of indicators that “something just ain’t right”.

Heh, well I think they are smart enough, question is, are they imaginative enough? Free mass basic training is absolutely a key advantage compared to what Russia has but that post was concerning as it appears we have divergence on what the “basics” are in this war. We had all sorts of reason to believe NATO training would be superior…we tell ourselves this all the time. And don’t get me wrong is definitely has quality, it may be more a question of alignment. Not putting troops in a heavy UAS and arty environment is a key error, and one we could solve pretty damn quick. And some stuff like how to operate donated western vehicles are pretty much proprietary on our end. I can only hope the feedback loop is working and we have already adapted.

I honestly think that air superiority/supremacy is the Achilles tendon of the entire western way of warfare. You take it away at any altitude and our whole system become vulnerable. We need to start thinking about fighting in mutually denied environments. A big hint was when we lost air superiority to ISIL (freakin ISIL!) below 2000 feet in around 2016. We kind of wrote it off as an anomaly and more of an annoyance as opposed to a signal of trends and that was a major mistake. We know our opponents are already working on fully autonomous, which makes EW against them damn hard. We have a lot of guns but these are small birds, everywhere. We had better start thinking about denied and parity environments, which is something we have not thought of in over 30 years. That and simple lethality of ground systems. Air superiority will do deep battle on formations and units. But 2 guys in a treeline with a system that can hit and kill at 4+ kms at 80-90 percent is just nuts. At this point I am less worried about gaps and more worried about blind spots in western military thinking. That post highlights some of them at a ground level.

On the training post: a lot of what is in that story rings true. The issue, which we have pointed out here before, is that western troops have no frame of reference for this war. The more I hear descriptions of company operations in this war, the more they sound like a SOF action as far as C4ISR goes. A GF Comd does pretty much what they are describing as a Company Comds role in this war - pulls back and manages the engagement from a pan C4ISR node. Conventional military experience does not do this. Tactical commanders get more feeds but pretty much fill the same roles as they did 30-40 years ago. The Battalion TOC has changed a lot but the mass use of UAS for ISR is still not at the forefront. The offensive focus also rings true. I got into an argument a long while back on modern war and the offensive doctrine of most western militaries. A lot of doctrine was built during the Cold War and then adapted to the insurgency wars we fought over the last 30 years. The few times we went conventional, the opponent was so overmatched that we kind of confirmed a false positive - offensive primacy. This war is showing the holes in that theory. This is a war of Denial - drones and artillery. That takes a fundamentally different training approach. We all “yay’ed” when western troops began training support, and we still add a lot of value in some skill areas. However, we may very well be teaching bad lessons. For example, that well documented and broadcasted failed minefield breach back in Jun. To my eyes it was a textbook western mechanized breach. It looks like it got stopped by enemy UAS, a couple helicopters, a few ATGM teams and some pretty tepid artillery. Our minefield breaching doctrine has not been refreshed since the Cold War and it ran headlong into 2023 reality. Our impulse is to declare “well the UA is doing it wrong,”. Of course this assumes we actually know how to do it right in the first place. I can only hope the AAR process is firmly in place and is capturing these observations. However, in most cases the AAR guys are cut from the same corporate cloth as the training delivery guys so there are going to be biases to overcome. We likely need to adapt the training significantly. SOF may need to take over infantry tactics training because the reality is closer to their environment than our conventional experience. However, SOF are pretty low density. Conventional can focus on equipment (eg “night driving”), it still does this better than anyone else. I have brought up the point on this war being as much about competitive learning as much as about actual warfare before. The UA learns very fast, Russians slower…but they do learn. The question is, “how fast are western militaries learning?” They are part of this war too, they make up a significant portion of the Ukrainian force generation stream. As such they should be in a direct feedback loop from the front line. We need to be learning at a better pace than the Russians - “EOD is taboo” (likely because we have framed them as exclusively a COIN thing). This will mean breaking out of our own boxes, which is a damned hard thing to do at the best of times. In reality we should be getting then UA to train us on how to train them.

Ah my robot of the "deep state" (insert sarcastic and friendly smirking looking emoji here), I am a strong believer that "speed matters". A long slow fading of Russia is very different than a sudden snap. Human collectives can endure a lot so long as they are eased into it. A sudden shock can create very different effects. I think for right now the option where Russia enters into a sort of state-palliative care is a given and we are embracing the oldest strategy known to mankind: hope.

That is brilliantly put. I would only add “…lose too much.” However the longer this drags out I am less sure a soft landing or off-ramp exit for Russia is possible. They might just break themselves on this rock.

I don’t think this is because Russia “won’t” negotiate with their own defeat, it is because they do not know how to. Or at least the current power regime for Putin and the political power architecture he put in place for over 20 years, this is an unsolvable riddle. They painted themselves into a box they cannot escape. To admit defeat or even a negotiated end state is to declare that 1) Russia has no manifest destiny in its Near Abroad, 2) it was driven to a negotiation table by a minor rump state it considered an ersatz province, and 3) Russia is not strong, it is in fact incredibly weak. For Putin and cronies none of this computes and they will never accept it. As you note, even if they are pushed all the way back to the old border, they cannot quit if Putin is still in power. So What? They only way out is looking more and more like a regime change scenario. RA military collapse in the field may do this but there are other mechanisms. Problem will be, which ones do not see the entire thing fall completely apart and spark possible worse?

Really depends. Most AT mines need around 100kg of pressure to detonate. So mud could soften the ground and make that a bit harder. But Tanks and AFVs weigh tons so I would not bet the farm on doing doughnut drag circles in a middle of a minefield because it gets muddy. In fact it could complicate breaching operations for both mechanical and explosive systems. Solutions to minefields are the same as they always were: - breach the minefield - kill all the enemy covering the minefield - breakout Those first two seem to be the problem here as it looks like one has to spend a lot more time on the second before you can do the first.

It’s Chernobyl - no one is going to deliver bad news to the boss, who just blew a plane load of opponents out of the sky, so they try to ignore it. The human mind is fantastic at rationalization and that is what we are likely seeing here. There was no mass panic last Fall (correct me if I am wrong), it was written off as an “operational adjustment” of the lines. There wasn’t even a panic the previous spring when the entire Northern front collapsed. This is not likely stolid Russian steel will, it is simply denial. My sense is Russian forces could be dog paddling in the Azov Sea and Russian senior military and political leadership would frame it as a “reverse amphibious assault” to draw the UA into a trap. This is not good news in reality because it is signalling that Russia is not negotiating with its own defeat. There appears to simply be no outcome in their reality where they do not win. This really means there will likely need to be a complete collapse of the current political power system for this war to end - of course many were saying this already. The tricky part is quickly inserting a new political system into place to replace the old one before things unravel. It has happened before in the 90s, although was pretty dicey at times.

The one weapon on the battlefield that never runs out of ammo.

But gunners are right next to logisticians in the combined arms pecking order, unlike loggies they have to go forward for showers. But I supposed gunners are not a race, more a creed really.

Wow, way to make it all about you. Pretty sure people had the same complaint about the Roman Empire.

Steve, question on process. What latitude does the President as Commander-and-Chief have to take extant defence funding and shift it over to military aid? I have seen us play that shell game during Afghanistan (it is how we got the Leo 2s).

Well at least not yet. The key advantage of remote unmanned is the lack of danger for the operator. Doing stuff up close and personal turns every German tank into a Tiger and every 20 bad guys into a Division. You definitely need to get up close and personal to take prisoners, take physical intel/SSE and get the human sense of what is going on at ground level. However, as we have seen in this war, everyone is leading with unmanned to give an objective birds eye and then sends in close recon - hopefully after arty has killed a bunch of enemy caught by UAS. Finally, UAS are just one component of a massive ISR architecture at play in Ukraine right now. From boots and eyeballs in the dirt to space. Focusing on a single capability as the "reason" for anything is the hallmark of someone who really does not understand the business. Like you say could very well be taken out of context.

In the circles I swim in this is definitely not the sentiment. A lot of freaking out on the impact unmanned is having, and will continue to have but no one is saying "Hey you know what? Dial back on the UAS and send more people forward." In this day and age any field commander that decided to do recce by troops and keep the UAS parked is not long for command (and maybe life given the circumstances). Of course if one does not have UAS or can't substitute other systems like GSR you might be forced to go old school but the idea of send the guys forward to poke bushes as the primary mode of recon in this environment is absurd.

Its right up there with "be more manoeuvre-y!" and use mission command. We in western militaries have not been in a fight like this since maybe Korea. One cannot manoeuvre across obstacle belts kms deep. This is a straight up grudge attritional match until breakthrough. I am sure the UA has made mistakes but this continual stream of "well if you just did it like us" nonsense is both arrogant and completely disconnected from realities they are facing on the ground. UAS are integral to recon and SA building now. This would be like advocating to "rely on radios less" in this environment. The second I read that I thought that this was either some very oblivious US government hack, or a misinformation campaign.

That rings true. Not sure if every Ukrainian soldier receiving training feels this way but there is some truth to what this is saying. Last time we trained for this sort of war would have been in the early 90s. Last time anyone saw one like it would have been mid-late 90s. Most western troops of the last 20 years are “unshelled” by this wars standards. The Ukrainian recruits really need the old Cold War training we used to do but there are damned few left in service who remember it. I am pretty sure western troops are swinging their training back towards peer conventional conflict but it is largely theoretical for western forces at this point.

Like to see what twit suggested “stop using UAS so much”. Right, much better to send men forward to die while being spotted by the other sides UAS.

This is what happens when I leave you guys unsupervised. We were moving most of Aug…god I hate moving.

Damn is this thread still going strong? A real tactics and warfare thread? The anti-Peng? Well done guys.

You shut your mouth! Super sexy…almost too sexy. All covered in dirt and bad manners.

Poor Priggy - too crazy for Coup Town, too much coup in him for Crazy Town. Like a falling star he fell to earth after shining ever so brightly, and having a wing blown off. My sense is that although popular in some circles, I don't think he is going to become the martyr for a movement. Unless said movement is already well on its way and simply wants to slap his mug on the T-shirts. Keep aiming for the bushes Priggy, and say hi to Lucifer for us all.

Looking more and more like Tokmak is the overall operational objective for this years offensive.