The_Capt

Information as the New Mass. This was in context of how Ukraine appears to be violating the rules when it comes to conventional military mass. They are consistently a much smaller force (mass wise) on both offence and defence, yet they are succeeding. How? I was thinking that if one treated information as mass, Ukraine’s ratios start to make a lot more sense. And here I mean as both a resource and effect - much like conventional mass. First there is the amount of data being collected. The UA is linked into a collection system backstopped by the US/west. We could literally compare the terabytes of data each side of this are able to collect and my bet is Ukraine is orders of magnitude higher than Russia. Next is the ability to turn that data into usable information in prosecutions of the war. Again Ukraine is being backstopped by a powerful information enterprise - “big data”, capable of taking a whole bunch of data and rendering it actionable. Again, this competitive space is very likely in favour of Ukraine in ability to creat more-better information and use it. And then we get into knowledge and learning space as information is used to build better understanding and underlying theories of causation and effect. The RA can learn, but is has been noted repeatedly that they are not able to learn as fast as the UA. The answer to this is pretty simple through a lens of Information Mass - Ukraine has a far higher information mass ratio than RA to draw from and translate into learning. Last point is Information-to-Effect. The weaponization of information. Here we can see the mass advantage almost everyday as Ukraine is waging an information war for the history books. It has been noted we are in a social media war, a crowd sourced war and the information mass equation very much matters in this space. Propaganda is likely the most obvious example of Information Mass. The interesting thing is that information can self generate if it resonates - something conventional mass does as well but it takes a lot longer (eg I take resources with tanks, those resources let me build more tanks). Information becomes rumour which spreads and multiplies like a virus, self generating mass at far higher rates than physical. My hypothesis is that at the beginning of this thing everyone was tossing up diagrams of force comparisons of conventional mass - how many tanks, AFV, guns and airplanes, and Ukraine was “totally screwed”. But nowhere did I see (and nor was I clever enough myself) a diagram of each sides effective information mass. How much bandwidth could either side employ? How many bytes could they collect and effectively process? How connected and resilient were their networks? For me, I knew something was very wrong for Russia when we could see UAS feeds all over social media a week into this war. It basically meant that Russia was unable to establish information superiority, which is just as critical as air or sea domains in modern warfare. If one adds information to mass equations then the RA did not have a 12:1 advantage at Kyiv. They did not have a 1:1 at Kherson. And they do not have a 3:1 at Bakhmut. Information kills, a lesson the Russians keeps learning in hard ways. In fact Precision and the massing of precise effects is entirely reliant on information advantage - at least for now. The word itself comes from “to cut” (https://www.etymonline.com/word/precision) which we all know needs measurement before the action to be effective. I guess my point is that one would likely do better to count IT servers, networks and AI support in the future as opposed to tanks and guns.

I am not really looking for same level of expertise. A level of rigor, maybe a few supporting opinions from credible sources? I mean we get a lot of "here is wot I think" which is something but unless one is an expert then sourcing one is normally a good idea to back it up. I am an expert and I still look at supporting sources because I am not an expert on everything.

China would absolutely face the same problem in a proxy war a la Russia in Ukraine. They have to be considering this with respect to Taiwan; however, geographically it is a different problem set. The difference is that China does not have a 30 years history of projecting military power to reinforce the global order that it built during the Cold War and then expanded after the Soviet Union fell. We are the ones with a history of interventions and force projection, so we will likely be the ones to see this up close and personal first. The Chinese method, up until now, has largely been Soft (or Sharp) power based and focused on the economic dimensions of power. Their military ambition is still really focused on their region but like Russia, they have convinced themselves the only way to be safe from US/Western influence is to arm-up and bare teeth. As to learning speed - yes, that is exactly what I am saying. The main reason is that our biggest strength is also our biggest weakness - unity. China is centralized politically and has been for generations, they also have a far different cultural focus with respect to unity. I do not believe for a second China is a homogeneous mass but when it comes to legislation and policy they have far faster reactions times than we do. Our strength is that policy reflects everyone (or tries to) and over time makes us more resilient to shocks than rigid centralized systems. We also undertake social change to sustain stability far faster, while China a lot less so. However, in context of military power, the west is woefully slow on legislation and policy development. Internally nations always lag military reality. As a bloc we are entirely mis-aligned most of the time (see: Guantanamo Bay) which causes a lot of friction when we try and pull military power together. Sometimes is works exactly as it should, at other times it is tenuous cat-herding. LOAC moves even slower. We do not have international agreement ROEs for cyber or IO (let alone landmines and cluster munitions) and we have had them for at least 20 years. So in my example, sure the military will learn lessons - however history has shown we will double down on legacy technology and wear new technology like an accessory until we realize it is probably bigger than that. But even if we do, we will still be bound by policy and law. So UAS, sure we will buy more and employ them but laws will prevent full autonomy for some time while China has no such problems. China is taking a lot of notes on this war, as we are now how fast those lesson translate into actionable policy is likely in China's favour as they need less collective agreement. So what? Well if China invades Thailand they are going to be in serious trouble for all the same reasons we would be in Country X. Their policy and legislation mechanism will likely move quicker to cover off their blind spots and gaps but I suspect their military doctrine is more rigid and less improvisational. They would hurt and bleed, but their political will would likely outlast us in the same spot. If we try and invade/intervene in country X we are screwed under our current policy and legislative frameworks in many ways. So we would have to policy by CONOP or simply have to try and do it with hands tied while political calculus scrambled - just like the last time, except instead of insurgency we are talking empowered proxy hybrid warfare. The mitigating factor (which I think is what you are shooting for) is that we can keep a technological and doctrinal edge IF we pay close attention to this war and not get lost in confirming our own military dogma and sense of superiority. We can adapt very quickly within our policy framework, however, we also need to generate military advice to policy quickly and coherently to kick start those political processes.

I am really glad you took this one, needed a coffee break. One thing that is starting to grate on these drive bys is the complete lack of effort or accountability. And not to beat up on poor ol LLF here because we tend to get these every 50 pages or so. Someone waltzes in here and interjects some sort of off-note counter-argument, sticks around to get mauled up a bit and pulls back. I think we need counter-arguments and counter-factual discussion or we risk becoming a true echo chamber. However, those who are offering counter-narratives need to do at least a much work as we do in our ongoing analysis/assessment, and at least be as thorough in the back and forth. We get "Russia is winning, here is a single report from the IMF that proves it!". We write a half forum page counter with about a dozen links and refs and get "Yadaa yadda...info and stuff...but Russia is going to win!" So the bar for counter-arguments is nowhere near high enough in my opinion, and I have yet to see a lot of it being delivered on anything that resembles to level we are actually conducting analysis of this war. To be honest LLF is probably one of the better ones, as at least he appears to actually be following what is happening - if applying a somewhat cracked lens at times. And then there is accountability. We called it back last Feb within a week of this thing starting - almost everyone else was getting ready for the end of Ukraine and we said "hey wait a minute, what about all those abandoned vehicles?" We then saw the Northern Front collapse before it happened. Everyone was preparing for the "Siege of 100 Ukrainian cities" and we were counting the actual guns the RA had and quickly noted that there was no way they could keep this up. Operational collapse was inevitable. Last summer, we heard all about "Russia has re-framed this war to their strengths" and pincer movements everywhere with bold red arrows. We looked at the ground, what was left of the RA and said "nope, not likely". Last Fall, Kharkiv surprised me, Kherson did not and the whole UA taking back offensive initiative and kicking an overstretched RA that had burned itself out at Severodonetsk was a surprise to no one here. For this winter we had hoped for a UA winter offensive but it didn't work out. So if we want to be really nasty we are 4-1 so far in that the winter offensive did not happen. The failure of the Russian offensive, which barely qualifies as operational as it is really focused on a few tactical areas, is another one we have been calling and now it looks more and more likely that the RA is running out of gas, so 5-1 scorecard (and I am probably missing stuff). The UA is signaling a spring offensive, that is no secret. The strategic and operational conditions have not fundamentally changed - the RA has not established air superiority, they do not have ISR superiority, and last I checked their logistics services have not somehow magically been reconstructed. They have not demonstrated any new capability sets that would lead one to believe the metrics of this war have fundamentally shifted in their favour or that they have re-framed this thing in any way. So here is what is going to happen. The UA will go on the offensive and it is very likely the RA line will collapse where they do. The RA will fall back and cling on somewhere else while the UA keeps the pressure one. How far the UA gets will determine what happens next - no one is predicting that. We will end up being 6-1 after spending a lot of time and effort answering these weak drive bys, the sponsors of these counter-narratives will evaporate like the Russian members of this forum, will simply shrug and go "oh well, watcha gonna do?", or pull a Kherson and point out that the UA spring offensive did not push the RA back to Moscow so "Russia is gonna win". I would like the drive-bys to put at least a little effort into this and actually do some work for a change. At this point I think I could argue their points better than they can, which is a clear sign we either need a higher counter-narrative bar or may get some better counter-thinkers in here.

Mass beats isolation, precision beats mass, massed precision beats everything. When it comes to the NATO/western way of warfare question, in this war if NATO showed up and fought Russia, totally agree. Would have been bloodier, likely much bloodier than the Gulf War but outcome would have been pretty much as you describe. This is because NATO has both quantitative and qualitative overmatch on the Russian military. The UA only has qualitative overmatch, so its road to success is much longer. What is blowing minds is just how impactful qualitative overmatch is on the modern battlefield. By all conventional metrics this thing should have ended in favour of Russia in the first month. For the west the concern is not fighting an opponent who fights like Russia, it is fighting one who fights like Ukraine. So we need to do a military intervention op in country X. But they are supported by China, so a lot of the same stuff we gave Ukraine - NLAWs are pointed at us. They have ISR we cannot blind. They have unmanned all over the place. That is the scenario that worries me. Right from the start is changes things. We could not send in the same force size we would have a decade ago. We would need much higher levels of overmatch, which takes time to build and project, which in turn gives more time for China to put in deeper support. We go in and the opponent fights like fog - hybrid distributed on a civilian backbone IT network. We target that network, and then get told by the lawyers we can’t because it is what they use for their entire civilian commercial and medical systems. So now we have to do precision cyber and EW to try and only hit the military support sub-networks (which keep re-wiring themselves because everything is a freaking hotspot because the entire nation is on Chinese built 5G) and then China gives them a sat backbone we cannot touch because it basically means war in space, which the lawyers also remind us is out of bounds. So while all that is going on, our F echelon is getting mauled by distributed light infantry, SOF and uncons armed with the Chinese knock off Javelins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HJ-12), along with IEDs and mines because classic rock never dies. They have UAS all over the place, dropping shaped charges and playing merry hell in our rear areas - we basically lose air superiority below 2000 feet. Our LOCs are hot, long and visible, so now we have to roll a lot of combat power just keeping other combat power fueled…and we need a lot of fuel (see larger force requirement to start with). They keep hitting us in the a$$ while ghosting us in the front. They are a lot harder to see because they are in small fast moving dispersed teams while we are in big fat western formations. We now need to worry about every tree line for 4kms out, so that is going to slow us down. Hard to “shock and dislocate” when you are moving at a crawl while trying to secure 4kms either side of your advance. We have APS but not mounted on every vehicle. We try EW to jam UAS but the damn things are fully autonomous with no direct link to a human operator because no one in China wailed about “killbots = landmines” for the last 10 freaking years. So we have to go with direct kills on something the size of a seagull flying in the trees. We are shooting all over the place, which of course lights us up in the process. Ammo expenditures go through the roof putting more strain on our LOCs. We still advance deep into this country, taking a lot of hits as we do. We get to urban areas and the politicians say “nope” when we give them the cost estimates for fighting in that terrain, and then say “nope again” when we suggest using firepower. Arguments within the coalition ensue as half the force plays the national caveat card because “there is an election next year”. So we bog down some more. We sit outside major urban areas, while watching out multi-million dollar aircraft getting downed by cheap Chinese next-gen AD, mounted on some UCAVs. We get told to go attack their AD infrastructure, but find out it is basically in garages and barns all over the place…enter lawyers and a “proof of righteousness” targeting requirement for the ages. And then China flies in whatever knock off HIMARs system they have developed into a neighbouring “neutral” country. These systems are given to our opponent but are directly linked into Chinese ISR. They drive them just over their border and fire a missile with a 400km range that goes up 120,000 feet and comes down at Mach 5. They then dip across the border to reload, we go to engage…but lawyers. That missile is about 24 inches across and we simply cannot hit them easily…stuff starts blowing up way back on our LOCs, they hit airfields and sea SLOC nodes. They of course employ good old terrorism as well. So there we are in all of that and suddenly this guy shows up with a 40mm AGL on its back: Not so freakin cute now. This all blows up all over social media because soldiers are on Tik Tok telling it as it is, and our opponents are blasting gory evidence of our losses all over the place. We have bad shoots and now dead children are on the news. China scolding us at the UN while inflicted trade pain and punishment. So how long do we think the deep resilient western will is going to last in all this? How quickly is this going to get turned off, or worse we do the math and are told to not even bother with the mission in the first place, the entry costs are too high. Outcome, Chinese influence in Nation X solidifies, nation X regional power grows - while we sit around and blame each other. That is the emerging 21st century military problem.

Ok, it is Saturday. End of a busy week and I just don’t have have the energy to beat on poor or Lefty Longshanks again. If this is your assessment well then so be it. I for one do not share it and would argue it has very large blind spots. I am going to pull on that one up there. So how is Russia “winning”? Right now? What political and/military strategic goals are they achieving or look like they can achieve? The original goals of the SMO, both stated and unstated are long gone. So what does winning look like for Russia right now? Find me a scenario where Russia comes out ahead. And before you point to the current lines on the ground, I will even cede hypothetically Russia does not move one more step back. Sitting where we are on the ground today, conflict frozen, tell us exactly how this is a “win” for Russia…over to you.

C4ISR assets, logistics, engineering, EW, aircraft, guns/deep strike and specialists. We are wailing at our industry for the lack of depth in the western magazines. Russia had depth but found out it was largely filled with garbage. Every time I see an Oryx report that shows a maint depot or SIGINT or very expensive AD assets, it is equipment that the RA will take years to get back (if ever), and it was low density to begin with. These are the things that make the machine work. Without them all those shiny new T62s are pretty much useless. A military operational system is like a human body, it can take a beating but once critical organs start to fail it triggers follow on failures. The UA loses stuff but it is backed by the deep pockets of the west (and yes, they are still deep in comparison to Russia if one takes into account quality). China is the only life line for the RA on this sort of stuff as its own industry cannot keep up and is being hit by sanctions. But China hasn’t shown it is going to jump into this with high end support yet, and it likely isn’t going to go “all in” considering it has its own region to worry about.

"Happening in the fight now is that the attrition exchange rate is favorable to Ukraine but it's not nearly as favorable as it was before. The casualties on the Ukrainian side are rather significant and require a substantial amount of replacements on a regular basis," You know, no one was saying that Bakhmut was a cakewalk, but I honestly think the UA has been waging a corrosive campaign on the RA, but it was defensive at Bakhmut. The UA lost things they can replace or know is coming on line, the RA lost things they cannot.

Absolutely. In fact it takes on a "key rate if systemic attrition" aspect. Here ISR and precision become key. However, if the UA runs out of ammo for this sort of fight, they likely will not have enough for a big offensive action either. Slow pace by conventional standards is also a clear factor - we saw this at Kherson. This is a case of western biases and lack of understanding on how these wars unfold driving advice to political will. Someone just posted an article on some expert decrying the UA for not having enough "mission command". Frankly looking at how this thing is going I am not even sure mission command is the right way to go, but in the west we have pushed it into an almost religious dogma. This advice get to the political level and becomes pressure on the UA to "fight and win like us" when we have zero proof it would even work given the same constraints/restraints. So the western political level needs and education on war, let's face it no one has had to fight one like this since the 50s - maybe parts of Vietnam. The good news is that Russia hasn't either. Corrosive warfare will take longer and will need to be more deliberate. It is in effect precision attrition. It takes time to break a military operational system and in a lot of cases we really do not have all the metrics or indicators figured out. But door #2 is to try and force generate enough mass to overcome the ISR/strike problems and then project and protect it in this environment. We have watched the RA struggle with this for over a year and fail. The UA will likely corrode and then use mass when the shaping phase is done. Everyone in the west seems to be expecting Gulf War but I think it will be more like Kherson, or Kharkiv if we are lucky.

So an ICC indicted person could technically sit at the head of the UNSC? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_the_United_Nations_Security_Council#:~:text=The president represents the Security,UNSC and decide voting order. Getting a whole League of Nations feel at the moment.

So this highlights what appears to be a modern warfare dilemma forming up - concentrate force and get detected and hit well before you can use it, penny packet smaller profile forces that are harder to detect, but risk being unable to project enough mass and get cut up by inches. It is basically the AirLand dilemma without the airpower...and now everywhere, all at once (not a bad movie, not sure it should have won) as opposed to discrete regions of the AO. So we are back to what has worked, corrosive warfare. One does not form up large mass, one erodes an opponent en masse until their system buckles and then break in, through and out. I suspect the entire play at Bakhmut has been a corrosive play, much like Severodonetsk et al last summer (which also drew a lot of fire at making "no sense" and UA troops poorly trained and supported). The UA is not "following the Russian lead' they are also constrained in the battlespace because the RA still has some ISR and strike capability which make large mass formations suicidal right now. The UA will likely keep "eating snow" until the RA cannot hold up on it own and then mass - and smaller mass than we are used to - has, and may very well work. So I disagree that the UA needs to solve for "larger scale" attacks, they need to solve for deeper scale attacks, but I think they have a head start on this.

How does this FUBAR the whole Russian taking over the UNSC chair thing?

And this is the problem with Russian strategy overall. I am reading Strategiya by Fridman right now and the Russians come from the same western school as we do. They have cultural spins but they are basically on the same pages (at least as far as I can tell being about half-way in). So if it is an escalatory control buffer zone/strategic that Russia is trying to secure then why pursue strategies that run directly opposite to that end?! This gets to the heart of why this bloody war makes no sense. Even if they took Ukraine, they would never be able to hold it. We would have turned it into a grinding resistance with safe havens in NATO treaty nations, so their "buffer zone" would have become an open wound for years. And then there is the Sweden-Finland effect. Russia goes all off menu on hard power and literally drives its desired buffer zone right into the arms of its opponent. It is at this point I call BS on the whole line of thinking. It is far more likely that Putin is engineering "buffer zone" crisis for domestic consumption - "see I told you they were all against us". The endgame is to keep himself and whoever he picks as successor in power for another 50 years.

That is not the issue. Of course out of control escalation of this conflict is a worry. What a lot of people in the “must not start WW3” side of things tend to forget is that Russia is just as afraid of WW3 as we are. Proof: despite severe setback and bleeding at historic levels, Russia has not turned to WMDs in this war. Now we know that they do have red lines and we cannot forget that; however, we should also remember that we have red lines too. There are lines that are worth escalation and Russia (as well as ourselves, apparently) need to be reminded of that. Controlled escalation to be sure, but if we’re are too terrified to act in a measured response to escalating Russian aggression we basically cede the strategic initiative. This would give Russia de facto escalation dominance in this conflict. FDR was right, the thing we need fear the most is our own fears. A measured but clear escalation to this drone nonsense is required and while we are keeping this war in a box, we also cannot let our fears - nor forget that they are just as nervous as we are - hold back deliberate action. ”But why are we not imposing a no fly zone/boot on ground/striking Moscow”. Couple reasons - all war is negotiation . Escalation ladders have rungs one can only use for the first time once, after that they become de-escalation options or norms of conflict. So we want to keep strategic options open. If we jump straight to no fly zones, we have a lot less escalation room before things get to a nuclear exchange threshold. Second one is trying to avoid inducing strategic panic on our opponent through miscommunication. A no-fly zone over the Black Sea may seem reasonable to us but rationality is relative. Russia may see this as a prelude to establishing air superiority for an invasion and panic. Putin needs a centralized and functioning control system on his own escalation and panic is toxic to that. So in this responses must be clearly communicated and demonstrated through signalling. So, for example, if one is going to employ offensive cyber to shut down Russian military airspace control, unlike in a Grey Zone/Subversive context, this action would have to be more clearly a communication of action - all war is communication. The primary mechanisms of that communication are cause and consequence. Attribution would need to be clear and message needs to be received that buggery out over the Black Sea against US assets has consequences. This speaks to the reality that the west needs to accept, this war is as much ours as it is Ukraines. With China now communicating along with Iran it is becoming clear that this entire thing is becoming a global decision point in just how the global order will proceed. We are not supporting Ukraine because Russia is bad (they are in this), or “the children!”. We are doing it because this war is an attack on the global order that demands a response or we risk losing that order itself. In many ways this war is already moving towards a global conflict as power poles invest in it as a proxy conflict - it is becoming an indirect WW3. And while we must do what we can to avoid a direct WW3, we cannot let that fear drive us to losing the war we are already in.

Well so far, you: - have applauded a Russian direct attack on a U.S. military assets in international waters. “Perfect soft kill” was your exact term, which is just wrong on a lotta levels…not perfect, sloppy because we have freakin camera footage…not soft, hard as it was very likely by kinetic impact and not EW jamming etc. - Argued that is was within some sort of justifiable ROEs because the US is supporting Ukraine while it fights for it’s life. It is not justified, at least until this war expands outside Ukrainian borders - hell we are tip toeing around hitting targets inside Russia but apparently international waters and airspace are the Wild West now. - Offered that we re-write international legal norms as they relate to international waters…reasoning and logic TBD. - Linked the current incident to another over Turkey in 2015 (unless you believe the Russian position because they have a good track record of being truthful in these matters). And somehow are trying to make the current situation, again, acceptable. - Made a huge leap between WW3 and a couple banks collapsing in the US. - And linked it all back to “elites” because we all know they run the world through a Star Chamber near the earths core…ok, I made up that last part but it really wasn’t that far off-narrative. But I will accept you are not in the “nut-camp”, however, when you decide to join us in the “grown-up, I am over first year philosophy and political science” camp please let us know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Russian_Sukhoi_Su-24_shootdown This? We are talking about this? No, this is a Russian violation of Turkish airspace that prompted a lethal response (that was a hard kill to btw). Ah, well you squarely have the Great US Satan in your brainpan today and look like are planning on a pretty wide scope logic journey while standing on the righteous hill of “it isn’t fair!” Can we expect a sequel of how the US and NATO forced Russia into invading a neighbour? Bioweapon black sights and sinister US oil interests? How all those people at Bucha were crisis actors? I mean if you are going to go all crazy in public, why do half measures.

Well, yes. US is free to provide bilateral direct support to Ukraine especially from outside the conflict zone. A Russian direct “soft-kill” on a US asset in international waters is technically an act of war. By the logic you seem to be proposing, Russia can conduct attacks on US personnel who are flying these things in Italy, or Nevada. So what would be an “international crisis” by your measuring stick then? Because is we do not have legally defined limits of what is inside and outside this conflict then we are very likely to have a lot of them. For example, Russia is flying their version of AWACS within Russian airspace who are directly supporting the targeting of civilian housing. Russia industry with links to defence outside of Russia? Russian military outside Russia? Tell me where the redline is then. (note: by military definitions this was not likely a “soft kill” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_protection_system. Looks more like a hard kill by ramming).

Good lord, here we go with WW3 again. Well there is an argument to be made we are already in a global level conflict: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_aid_to_Ukraine_during_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War Not sure how knocking down Reapers is going to make that situation any better for Russia, but hey it is a theory. Or is it that time of the week to roll down the nuclear escalation rabbit hole?

Did they really? They directly attacked a US assets in international waters. The US is now justified in all sorts of escalation and likely can generate the internal support to do it. The US has over 300 MQ-9s, a dozen or so with Stingers and Hellfires handed over to the UA would be appropriate right now. Maybe finally green lighting ATACMS to hit the airfields those MiG flew from. Oh and let’s not forget the fact that the US can do offensive cyber too. Said it before, will say it again - the west has escalation dominance here, not Russia.

It is their world, we just live in it.

Wow, Kazakhstan for the win. They team up with Mongolia again and we could be in serious trouble.

Well -1 now apparently. So does Wagner have airfields and infrastructure too?

So on Bakhmut, we are hearing an entire spectrum from "it is a deathtrap for the UA!! It will collapse at any moment, run away!", to "It sucks because we are not supported and untrained, arty is running out of ammo", to "It is ok and we are making it work", to "It is an RA graveyard, and we are crushing them, we have a lot of arty ammo". This tracks with these sorts of situations in the past. The truth is likely down the middle and the extreme POVs are happening but are somewhat on extreme ends of the experience (maybe). One thing we can say is that Bakhmut is holding, well past mainstream news media prepping for its fall. Ukrainian and military leadership appear united and in line on the battle. The RA is smashing up against this fight and moving slowly, the steady stream of video (which is skewed in the west) demonstrates that the battle is costly to the RA - how costly remains to be fully seen. My instinct, and history tells us that it is likely skewing towards "high". The biggest factor in attrition of combat power as a whole is the force generation competition. We are seeing older and older RA equipment and more reports of poorly trained troops. The UA has reports of poor training and support but also a video streams of newer (and western) equipment rolling into this fight. Add to the this the steady increase in UA asks for offensive equipment and it is clear that this whole thing is not close to being done yet. What I am looking for in particular is culminating points. The RA might actually be past theirs, which would have been last summer and this entire thing is a zombie operation for domestic audience consumption - there is a whole lotta "righteous sacrifice" narratives floating around the RA info sphere right now. The UA has not hit theirs yet, that point going to be key for how this war ends. Likely culminating point scenarios for the UA: - This spring in the event of an operational offensive that fails. Based on Bakhmut, I would say the ability to "freeze" this conflict is in Ukraine's hands right now and this would be on the table if this is as far as the UA can go for this war. - This summer with a successful operational offensive but no tank left in the gas for finishing off Crimea or Donbas - This fall, or next spring after retaking a pre-2014 region - my money is on Crimea because it makes the most military sense. - The whole perogy, likely as a result of a total RA/Russian state collapse and then we got a whole new set of regional security problems to deal with. Once culmination happens (and we are talking strategic here), this war could drag on but it will be more likely more in line with the 2014-2022 period of a nasty open sore while both sides try to reconstitute for another round in a few years. The question of how that reconstitution race would pan out is interesting.

Very glad it was unmanned, if the US had lost a live pilot this would be a very different day. This will create an interesting little ROE conundrum though - should we kill a Russian human to protect an unmanned asset?

Again, which "1" are we talking about? One thing that I have not seen from anyone is an actual assessment of combat power attrition at Bakhmut. Combat power attrition is basically how fast each sides operational systems are eroding in comparison to how well they can sustain and backfill losses. So this means the "ratio" is far more than just infantry in the grinder. Guns, logistics, ISR, C2, engineering, specialists etc. The US Army defines combat power through - Leadership, Firepower, Information, Mobility, Survivability. (https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm3-0.pdf), so the real question is what is the attritional ratio within those components? Followed by, what were their start states? How are they sustained? And what trajectory are they on now as a result of this battle? And remember this is a net and gross equation. Pulling out the old copy of War By Numbers by Lawrence (and again take with caution) and he outlines how attacking is historically normally more costly than defending...up to a point. Context is king here, was it an ambush or an attack against a prepared position? Ignoring the noise, the ratios should be in the neighborhood of 1.5:1 against the Russians as a start point and then move around based on historic figures. The biggest evidence of significant Russian losses is the simple fact that they have not been successful after trying for nearly 10 months that is a lot of failed attacks and failed attacks tend to skew losses heavily against the attacker. Now expand that out to a operational systemic level - and we know it is based on ISR and deep strike capabilities and we start to see what is in play.