The_Capt

Oh this would definitely drift into EW; however decoys and spoofs would drive EW detection crazy. You could be receiving false signals and fake minefields all over the map from simple transponders. You would need ISR and cover on safe lanes which would pull resources back to secure LOCs, even if they were automated. And the you have combos with dumb, mobile passive and mobile active - so stand off with EFP. These are not problems that can be solved with more EW without putting so much energy out that one becomes a priority target. As to cost, well the question will be “how badly do you want to deny?” Peripheral and lower pri approaches could be covered by dumb fields, just enough to slow down. Hi priority routes and choke points would be tailor made for these sorts of unmanned mixes. Cost is directly related to value. If a mixed unmanned mine field can deny major approach then the cost is worth it. Sure dumb mines work, the same way dumb arty still works but if you want to truly deny an area it will likely be a combination of unmanned networked systems backed up by a lot of noise makers. By the time ones AI support can figure out which are mines and which are spoofs, you could very well have already repositioned the entire field. We are talking about being able to spot 1000 shoebox sized UGVs in terrain, each one can kill a tank - that is how offence dies. And this is before the UAS swarms who have been parked on the ground form up to create a kill box. The bottom line is that processing has grown exponentially while miniaturization and cost reduction have kicked in. The MG when it was mounted like a cannon could only do so much, once they miniaturized and mass produced at lower costs warfare changed forever. We are staring down the barrel of another shift and unmanned and precision are at that forefront as they build the last mile of what information technology and processing started.

Muphry's Law is alive and well!

And you can do both you know. The problem with old dumb mines is that once you clear them, well that is it really. The whole thing become useless beyond killing civilians and making lives hard post-war. My bet is they will start small, only for key defenses and then grow from there. The main reason we will do it is that it can deny better and be mobile in that denial.

Didn't they say the same thing about UAVs back in the day...and now look where we are. This stuff is going to get cheaper and cheaper. Take a look online, they are also getting smaller. The chirping would be great as you could now trick out entire swaths with dummies and decoys. We might just deny ourselves out of land manoeuvre at this rate.

So wouldn't that still be a defensive blocking exercise? I mean unless you are talking about advancing minefields to take ground...now that is an interesting idea, offensive denial.

LOL. Now there is a sig line.

It is a different task and requires much higher levels of AI. And there is the issue of scale. On defence I need only tell a UGV swarm to identify gaps collectively and shift over a few units who will park, dig in a bit and wait for someone to drive over them and explode. We basically have that now. On offence it is - sniff around, identify something the size of shoebox as an enemy system, target and destroy. This is far more complex as it is challenging not to have the AI attacking rocks. Scale is "here is 1 million sq meters lads...good luck." You would need a UGV swarm to cover that area which gets into interesting cloud-edge contacts. At which point the damned tanks are pretty much irrelevant. When one looks at Defensive primacy historically, it tend to come into play when things like integration, range and firepower technology advance faster than survivability and mobility.

And now we are at Defensive-Denial primacy. It is much easier for a UGV minefield to shift to close a gap than it is for offensive AI to find, fix and finish UGVs hiding underground.

As in CM, combat engineering (less C-IED) has been largely sidelined and unloved in favour of big shiny new tanks and AFVs in modern military force development. That is because we largely have written off this sort of war ever occurring..whoops. To answer your question more directly - do not think such a system has been invented yet, at least not for this sort of combat environment.

I am talking about bottom attacking UGVs that simply wait for the bridgehead, or even follow on and then 12 hours later shift to close the safe lane. Now you have F ech on the other side of a mine field with legs. It means a re-breach, which of course can be targeted, again. You get through that and 12 hours later it does it again. Nothing dramatic as chain guns or lasers - just continual grinding defensive pressure on your LOCs as your heavy stuff get cut off from gas and ammunition. You could have 1000 simple smart systems that can assess its own gaps and then fill them. What you are describing are close-in strike UGVs - like modern day mine dogs or war pigs...that is a whole other nightmare. We are talking about detecting and "picking off" something the size of a small lawnmower with legs that can hide anywhere and decide to strike from a few meters. What happens when these little bastards can dig in a foot or two and simply lay dormant until they find a target? They can be armed with offset EFPs so they really do not even need to go under the vehicle. This is not science fiction, we are likely talking in the next 5-10 years.

Another good example: So a moonscape but those craters with the large fresh looking dirt halos are very recent strikes. This really looks like a single battery mission of maybe 1-2 rounds. This is really weird for the RA as they are still essentially an artillery army...or at least were. I would expect to see an iron sky drop on UA forces stuck in a minefield. Now as has been mentioned could be a lot of reasons this did not happen but I am getting the growing suspicion that something is up with RA artillery.

First RA arty I have seen yet...and a little tepid, but it is there. A minefield normally has pre-sighted targets within it and when a breaching is happening the sky falls on top of it. That looked a lot more like harassing fire...and no PGM (thank god). Lord my BDA course was an age ago. So craters are really tricky. The fresh ones - and there are some in that pic - have the gray dirt rings around them but those, as can be seen, vary in intensity. Stuff like dead grass and water are a give away that those are old shell craters - days to weeks. Even the faded dirt rings are likely hours-to-days old. Now there are some fresh strikes on this pic, which match the video but not at the concentrations the craters suggest. More like harassing fire than a heavy concentration to kill a combat team. Other give away is no DPICM. Minefields were made for DPICM strikes, it is the fastest way to kill a force concentration of combat vehicles. And some craters are minestrikes, very hard to tell those apart as they too are basically HE going off at ground level. The real BDA guys can get out the measuring tapes and figure out the caliber and what direction etc. But I am not seeing heavy concentrations of RA artillery this sort of operation merits. Now if we can get some new video showing that, or different reports then we can re-think.

Do you have vid on this? I saw no detonations. I do see a lot of craters but this whole field is a freakin moonscape and a lot of those impact craters are older. I am not seeing concentrations one would expect for a bunch of clustered vehicles.

This is a solid point. APS is not a magic force field but putting them on the breaching vehicles in this case makes a whole lotta sense. Now as a thought experiment - what happens when each mine is a small kamikaze UGV and the mine field can self re-close?

You see how easy that was? You have a bunch of possible indicators of the RA problem right there. Artillery density is too light. They kept it back because they know the line is too long so maybe they have gone with hardpoints. Maybe the guns are wearing out and ammo is becoming an issue (lots of reports out of the Winter offensive on artillery issues). None of these are "copium", they are viable answers to why we are not seeing guns in the initial contact videos...and none of them are good news for the RA. Artillery is a critical component of this war and if the RA is running out or unable to concentrate it, at least not initially, well that is something to keep an eye out for. Either way, this is not a doctrinal defence in the least. Gun coverage is normally assigned directly to obstacles and is one of the first thing one sees in a breaching operations...it is why all them there tanks and stuff are made of metal. Now will we see it deeper? Well if we do then we know we are into the MDA of the RA. If we do not then there is something very bad happening to RA artillery support. As to point #4 - I do not see a crafty RA master plan here, lets not go the other way - which has also been a cognitive disease in this war. A sparsely defended initial line where an AH/ATGM crews got lucky and a UA fumble is not a reason to start thinking the RA is the master of the battlefield either. If that entire Cbt Team got wiped out, bodies everwhere...(you know, kinda like all those RA offensives we saw for months?) then I would be far more concerned.

Ya could be. I mean "DO NOT TRY AND MANOUVRE IN A MINEFIELD" is pretty much tattooed on the inside of my skull, and I think the UA just highlighted why in this instance. In the other videos of the US leopards though, we can clearly see successful mined area breaches - it is why those tanks are staying on the dirt tracks and not in fancy formations. In fact in this failed one, I think they almost made it, but bad happens...trick is to not make it worse. In this case we see bad decisions leading to more bad decisions - a Devil's OODA loop. Now the to the CO in charge these may have all seemed like good decisions at the time, but clearly things spiraled...happens all the time.

Ya, that is not how it works. Once you have an entire enemy Cbt Tm in a minefield, one does not hold back...you try and kill the entire thing. The only sense in "holding back" is if one is 1) short on resources or 2) very concerned about c-bty. Yes one can draw some pretty good conclusions from a major obstacle not being covered by indirect fire...in fact it would be a intel indicator that staff are looking for. Now why that fire did not come could also be a result of poor ISR and fires integration which we have also heard rumors. What I see are the majority of kills as mobility and a direct result (hell we have one on vide) of mine strike due to a lot of weird shuffling going on because my bet is the AH hit the breaching systems. I do not see catastrophic results of effective indirect fire support. Now maybe some video will come out that counters that but this is all reinforcing the RA artillery issues we have been hearing about for months. This entire affair has the hallmarks of a UA sh*tshow, hence why in my original posts I mention the "Devil's OODA Loop" but what is missing from the RA to turn it into a full blown massacre is potentially telling. Minefields are largely useless unless they are effectively covered by effective fires and, at least here, that appears to be missing.

Hmm, really weird and likely a rookie mistake. So the two lane breach for a Cbt Team makes a lot of sense. Looks like one lane stalled and the commander tried to swing assets to that lane down a cleared lateral road and got really bogged down, that UA left breach is a total mess. The only way this makes sense is that contact with the RA was light...and then it wasn't. First rule of being in a minefield - drive straight at the other side.

Ok, you are going to have to post some proof of this - I have not seen effective massed fires on an obstacle yet. The craters in the videos/pics I have seen are not fresh, nor concentrated. Most of those vehicles are showing clear signs of minestrike (blown tracks) and relatively few casualties. I watched a 4 min video of UA troops in the middle of a minefield that they took ATGM hits - so RA overwatch - as they de-bused and were extracting and not a single RA indirect fire round came in. That is way too long. This is not "copium" it is professional assessment that I am not seeing effective RA concentration of fires on an obstacle, which is pretty fundamental. This on top of continuous reports of dwindling artillery rounds per day during the winter offensive, along with gun losses and reports from the Russian side of lacking fire support and dwindling ammo. If "copium" means "seeing what is in front of you and not what you are afraid of" then guilty as charged.

I am not sure we have solved for ATGMs and ISR. I mean if one can do break through and out in heavy mech, definitely go for it. But this mess in the minefield was likely caused by an AH and maybe ATGM teams (in that one video the Bradley was shooting at something in the treeline). Now if one can get a bunch of light infantry onto the other side of an obstacle, your opponent does not have effective artillery - one leg of the modern tripod out - then you can do corrosive until collapse and then go all heavy mech to exploit…theoretically. That, or take out RA ISR but that is really hard with UAS.

Hey look minefield breach lanes that worked. And again, no RA artillery.

This single action has really been beat to death. It looks like a Cbt Tm breach (still does not look like a major assault to me as there was a single lane and no explosives). It runs into an attack helicopter/ATGMs and then loses vehicles to mines in the extraction. And still after all the videos, I have yet to see a significant RA artillery/indirect fire response countering the minefield breach. Everyone is too busy freaking out on the fact that western gear is allergic to explosives as Russian stuff; however, the lack of RA indirect fire support is far more interesting. If RA artillery capability has been, or is being eroded then the impact on their defence is going to be significant. We may also see a slower more infantry-based offence from Ukraine. Not surprisingly western gear is also big, hot and visible so one needs to establish conditions before one can really get mileage from it.

Whatever happened to that guy who flew by with the “Russian Economy is Bulletproof” noise?

Not sure which part of UAS and self-loitering munitions are really, really hard to counter is being lost here. No one has invented a “complete AA umbrella” against these systems yet.

The only way this makes sense as a trench “assault” tactic is if most trenches are empty or extremely lightly manned. This looks more akin to trench clean up operations than front line assaults. I suspect the RA dug a lot more holes than they can actually man if this is the case.