The_Capt

AP landmines are really more of a nuisance than a denial weapon in conflicts like this. If we were talking a very long term conflict zone where each side has had years to lay down AP belts, maybe; however, AP mines need a lot of density to stop dismounted infantry - and even then you are not going to fully stop them. The numbers of AP mines would be insane to cover these frontages and the RA simply has not had the time to plant them. So dismounted infantry penetration is still likely a viable option and I am betting the UA is doing it. Problem is getting the vehicles across to sustain and support them.

I am - been away from the trade doing other things for some time but one never forgets. I am not sure how to solve for minefields in this war to be perfectly honest. Tradition methods are likely a way to go and may work if one can establish the right conditions. However, establishing conditions is the really unknown part: air superiority - apparently not so much, ISR - surprise is pretty much impossible, establishing a bridgehead - will have to be huge to counter increase distances. My guess is that the trick to beating minefields in this war is not to focus on the minefield itself but those who are observing and covering it. So focus on enemy ISR, C2 and logistics until a level of tactical collapse occurs, then go for a breach. Dispersed infantry likely across first, use precision fires to isolate any enemy and kill them. This is what we saw before - infiltrate, isolate and defeat…rinse and repeat until something really gives. Once that happens the breach has a much better chance because the lethality of the modern appears too high to try the old fashion way. This will take time so no really dramatic breaches and breakouts until the RA are so badly mauled that they collapse operationally…it goes slow until it goes fast. Or maybe we will have another mutiny/coup and all bets will be off again.

This has to be US terminology. In Canada breaching is essentially creating a safelane that can be trafficked by F through B echelons. “Clearing” is getting rid of the entire minefield and is part of a larger demining program. Breaching can be done by hand - but don’t forget anti-handling triggers, mechanically (rollers, ploughs and flails) or explosively. A breaching operation of any covered minefield ranks pretty high on the risk meter because you are basically trying to push entire mech formations through some pretty narrow defiles where the ground will explode on either side. Given how this war has gone so far and with the levels of ISR at play I would honestly be looking at manual breaching ahead of an assault. Done at night by dispersed sappers or pioneers and you may have a better chance of getting through. That or go explosive hard. Line charges and rollers - very high profile but probably the fastest way to go.

You are very welcome. Some of these smaller scenarios were among my favourite to design and build. They may lack the massive scope but they still capture the tactical dilemmas and dramas we all look for in a good game.

I am not so sure. The overall concept was that offence could be sustained through supporting fires. The problem was fires were not integrated nor mobile enough to make that happen. They had entered into an age of Defensive primacy and did not adapt their doctrine to match. The infantry role of "take and hold ground" was reduced to "hold" but that did not stop them from throwing away thousands on the first part. I strongly suspect at the highest levels they understood this and recognized that this had become a war of exhaustion, as wars of Defensive primacy become (e.g. Sieges).

I seriously doubt that it would. Napalm has little blast pressure as it is basically gelled gas. So now we are down to heat. Surface laid mines might get scorched, if you hit really lucky maybe even detonate a few. But buried mine systems would pretty be much immune. Napalm is pretty hot but doesn’t really last that long. It isn’t a question of either/or dumb mines or UGS-mine systems, it is both. A UGS-mine system could effectively close lanes after a breach has an occurred. Also UGS allows for far more effective use of EFPs as they can be sighted dynamically. Smart mobile mines in combination with dumb mines is likely where this is going. Add in small UGS with ATGMs with layers of UAS overhead and you get into a pretty hard denial scenario.

The place was originally owned by a Canadian that should tip everyone off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House I do not care if they have Jesus himself on the board, on this one they are advocating playing pretty fast and loose with what most consider a dicey situation. Honestly if we want to remove the political risk dynamics within Russia and firmly believe that Russia will back down in a nuclear confrontation then the answer to end this thing in 24 hours is pretty simple - screw ATACMs; give Ukraine nuclear weapons...that is where these absurd lines of thought take us.

Weirdly my sense is that the liberal humanist are some of the loudest warhawks in this whole thing - saw something very similar back in Kosovo days. They work very hard to convince themselves that the worse could never happen while at the same time try to down-play the consequences if it does. All so they can uphold a doctrine of hard intervention to re-establish a global liberal human security centric order. Responsibility to Protect kinda falls apart in a proxy war situation against a failing nuclear power. We are in a nation or state security situation and a different set of calculations needs to be employed. The risk when viewed through a probability/consequence lens might be LOW for probability (which I very much doubt, in fact I think it quite the opposite) but the consequences are EXTREME. As in “worse than the war itself” extreme. A risk assessment like that cannot be ignored or wished away. Now it cannot hijack the proceedings either, it could have very well shut down any western response but instead a highly united incremental strategy was selected (or emerged). This one is right up there with Russian nuclear response - sure we think it is pretty darn low but we are still not doing overt NATO strikes into the Russian homeland for a reason.

“Yet there is no evidence that disintegration of the state would be likely. The preconditions for a break-up are lacking: the regions lack the political leaders, resources, ideologies and instruments to challenge Moscow. The centre’s tight political and economic control, including of personnel and security agencies, provides the regime with significant – though not inexhaustible – capacity to persist, even under extreme stress. Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, is believed to have worked hard behind the scenes to defuse the Wagner Group tensions.” This is the central argument and it is not only weak, it is inconsistent. “Putin or a replacement cannot pull out of Ukraine as risk to his regime with the Ultra Nats is too high”. “S’ok though because his grip on his country is so tight that Russia could never fall apart.”….? Beyond a clear demonstration last weekend the primary condition for a serious uncontrolled collapse of the Russian Federation is the fact that it is a brittle authoritarian regime. If that fails, and basically it really needs to in order to achieve a Ukrainian victory, the condition for free fall are already built into the system as it basically has a single point of failure. If you read the rest of Fallacy 6 we get “the republics really don’t want to leave Russia anyway because Chechnya” And “there is nothing we can really do about it anyway.” That is what we are going to hang this entire thing on?! This is not grown up thinking. Russia is very vulnerable to an uncontrolled collapse because every state on earth is as well given the right conditions. If someone could offer a single coherent mitigation to this in the short term then by all means let’s end this now. However, I have yet to see one that either does not severely downplay the risk based on confirmation biases or simply dismisses it as “unknowable and un-influenceable” fatalism. If Russia has so much built in resilience then they would have cut bait and pulled out a long time ago. A sudden came rapid defeat will likely cause serious political consequences - hell threatening to take away a mercs toys led to a freakin March on Moscow. Russian defeat must be engineered in a manner where it can negotiate with that defeat without blowing itself up. This has led to an incremental pressure approach, which frankly we are still not sure will not result in a sudden failure anyway but it seems to be the best plan available.

So this right here is where I argue that western militaries should have seen this coming. Perhaps it is unfair and overly hindsight driven but the fundamental issue was the massing of fires was no longer with the riflemen. It was with artillery and machine guns. The firepower reality changed however military doctrine had not - and no small part of this was cultural bias. The battlefield was no longer one of superiority but mutual denial. Advantage went to who ever could deny the longest hardest. I fully agree that European militaries were kind of half way there by WW1 but they had failed to make the critical leap to realizing that the fabric of warfare had changed. We are possibly living through another version of it today. Mass and control of firepower may no longer be with mechanized combined arms. It may have shifted to PGM and unmanned.

It is one of the great shortfalls within the west - articulation of strategic ends. I think when Ukraine wins or at least the final lines are drawn a true test of western unity will occur. In my opinion as a min: - Russian conventional forces must be pushed back out of Ukraine. Russia needs to hold its sh#t together however it can post-war and we have to be ready to shape that if required. - where the final lines are actually drawn should be an internal matter for Ukraine to sort out; however, a democratic process must be employed and some international support/oversight will likely be required. - Russia must agree to regime change, war crimes prosecution and reparations before normalization with the west can occur. This may not happen for a very long time given political realities in Russia, so buckle in we are likely in for a long haul. - Ukraine’s security must be guaranteed. Not some squishy Russian promises or weasely UN type of thing. We are talking NATO for formal collective defence binding treaties. - Ukraine must be rebuilt, they did the bleeding to blunt (and maybe break) Russia, western reconstruction in that country must be historic. Rebuilding also means economic agreements and long term sustainability. - Russia must be 1) contained through strong military, diplomatic and economic deterrence, and 2) made more China’s problem than ours (so should North Korea for that matter. China wants to be a big boy, it needs to take responsibility and accountability for its power pole (lord knows the US has been wearing theirs for decades). - The West needs to recognize the world that we are in, not the one we want. Stop in-fighting and petty bickering, and defend the bloody international order like we mean it. Will we get all of these? Seriously doubt it. Should we be shooting for them, yes.

And there we have the perversity of war. See my previous post - there is nothing good in this and as much as we would love to push the easy button and end this whole thing by next weekend…we are in the suck. It is all bad and innocent people get to pay the price. All war is personal…we very often forget that one.

That is exactly the plan from what we have seen so far. A death by inches so that Russia can come to terms with it. All war is negotiation and that also means the players must negotiate with themselves. The fact that Ukrainians have to die to make this happen is something we had better not forget when it comes to guaranteeing their security and rebuilding their nation once this war is over. We are killing Russia softly while Ukraine pays the bill and we owe them a lot for it.

Well yes and no. I am not sure Air superiority means what it once did. It traditionally pushed back an opponent and gave security to the breaching operations. But I am not sure if that applies to long range PGM and UAS environments where a breaching op can be seen from space and targeted from the next time zone. And AirPower will not solve for small portable weapon systems that are very hard to detect and defeat like ATGMs - remember we have never fought in an ATGM environ like this one, we had a lot of theories of how it would go but this is the first real test of those ideas. In the trouble we have seen in the UA cases it was actually only (as far as we know) a single tac heli and what was likely a couple ATGM teams with very light artillery support and the entire breaching op collapsed.

You can cut the sexual tension with a knife….

So I have wondered about a crossing in the Kherson sector for most of the winter. The issue is not really the amount of mass they need to push. That sector is very lightly defended and we have seen light mobile infantry do a lot of damage when supported. The issue will be sustaining them. Any crossing must be sustained and that will be visible even for a modest sized force. Tac aviation in any volume is out so it will be land based. So the risk for Ukraine is getting a bunch of troops cut off and then captured, which would be a narrative disaster - hell they can’t lose a half dozen vehicles without half the internet declaring “the UA has stalled!!” (Good gawd it is hard to believe our grandfathers fought and won two bloody world wars given how jumpy we are these days). A raid is definitely in the cards but that would likely draw more RA to that sector, which could be a plan but they do not want to do that if they are serious about using this as an major thrust. I am pretty sure the RA figured all this out and hence why they blew the dam. We read that water levels may drop in mid summer so maybe a major op could become viable by then?

In that they can create an autonomous kill box definitely. The major difference is physics. Mines with legs (a form of UGV) have different requirements than UAS - main one is that UGVs can rest just about anywhere for as long as their batteries last. Someone is going to create a hybrid UAS that can sit in the bushes and self activate to be sure. We went from the Age of Rifles, to the Age of Fires, to the Age of Steel, to the Age of Information in warfare…and we are entering into the Age of Unmanned: it will change everything before it is done.

Well you may be correct on the first count but I do not fully buy into the second. And we are back to Uncertainty. A slow bleeding lose allows for reorientation and adaptation which we may be able to shape somewhat. The uncertainty is more manageable. Of course the counter to this argument is the human ability to ignore and delude ourselves into thinking something is not happening, if it happens slowly…right up until the point it happens fast anyway, but let’s tackle on mess at a time. Fast is a bow wave of uncertainty that becomes auto-catalytic and in humans creates panic. When we panic we lose the capacity to effectively process information and begin to act on programming, even if it is totally misaligned with reality - this is how people in a fire manage to clog up doorways and everyone dies. Rapid escalation of uncertainty in the Russian system will very likely see the total collapse of macro-social structures, plenty examples of this throughout human history. Once that happens micro-social takes charge and a couple hundred people who go tribal and feral start to act in their own interests pretty quickly. That would normally be hilarious except for the part where those couple hundred people could get their hands on some very powerful weapons. The macro-social structures that control those weapons no longer exists so we basically have the power of gods in the hands of scared primates…what could possibly go wrong. Micro-social exist in a state of relative rationality, which means what may look totally insane from the outside, makes perfect sense inside. This means a level of macro-anarchy, which is just really micro-rationality. In a slower descent theoretically the macro-social structures have time to adapt and retain a level of control - we saw this at the end of the Cold War. People can try and downplay the problem (it won’t really happen that way, but don’t they need expertise to use those weapons?) or skew/mitigate it (well surely the Russian or Western governments will swoop in and focus on securing these systems). But the reality is that once the macro-social structure fails pretty much everything is up for grabs and we have never had a P5 nuclear power completely fail before. If we are going to, I would prefer for that failure to be in slow motion than fast. It absolutely sucks and is unfair to Ukraine to have to live with this, but here we are.

Ok so what is the plan then? Crush Russia and hope they whatever happens all those WMDs somehow stay under a centralized control? Think about what happens if those Chechen goons got their hands on even just chemical weapons. You realize the Ukraine urban centres are going to be likely first-targets because Russians are generally a spiteful bunch. The “Goldilocks Solution” is the one where we do not take massive risks with a nuclear power in complete free fall - why do those baying for Russian blood keep skipping over this little inconvenient issue? If we do not have a theory for Russian defeat last weekend is going to look like a reminder of a simpler and gentler time.

Yes. Modern line charges have a FAE version - name escapes me. They detonate or destroy a lane through over-pressure. However it is very high risk to simply drive through without proving. Now if we are talking airdropped, apparently someone already tried it and it did not work out too badly, with PGM this could be onto something. However, I am willing to bet the system may be defeatable by simply adapting the fuses of the mines. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA251392

Modern mine ploughs are actually pretty complex but your are likely correct. The only other viable method is to do hand breaching by hand, normally at night. Here you risk a few infantry/sappers as opposed to millions of dollars of equipment. It is harsh but true that people are cheaper than hardware at some points in warfare.

Yes and likely to get worse not better. Cluster munitions to clear…not a viable solution. One would need to basically saturate a minefield with them and even then you would not be sure of the clearance. Conventional artillery….also not really viable. Delay fuse munitions particularly heavy stuff does make nice big craters but they are just as likely to push or flip a mine as to destroy it. To clear one would need to hammer a line through the field and in doing so would be creating a new anti-vehicle obstacle in the process. We use explosive line charges which use massive overpressure to detonate mines in a lane, but even then it has to be proven by a roller. Minefield breaching has been, and will continue to be a very dangerous operation. Right there on the “avoid if you can” shelf with amphib and water x-ings. The problem is that it takes a lot of moving parts to pull off and in many cases if a single node fails the entire thing collapses - we saw this with the infamous minefield disaster the UA had a few weeks ago. Add to this smart landmines or (god help us) mobile ones and minewarfare is likely going to up its game beyond “obstacle” to area denial.

Follow up…ok, I think I have got the only solution that makes any sense: Putin and Prig are in love but cannot admit it to each other or themselves. Only a rom-com scenario makes any sense in what we have seen - hear me out (and yes I am sober as I type this) Prig and Putin have known each other for years - him a working class ex-con trying to go straight, Putin a golden haired princess who is so lonely at the top. They have been sharing stolen glances and smiles for years but neither has the courage…their worlds are too far apart. Prig is desperate to get Putin to really see him, instead of a boom box outside in the rain he rolls up to Moscow with T90s and MLRS. It was a romantic gesture of the highest order. A demonstration of power and masculinity while being vulnerable at the same time. Putin, like a sexy fox, flees to St Petersburg to hold up with a couple girlfriends…he can’t cope with all this - it is too much too fast. He is into Prig but the man is both intoxicating and terrifying. Putin throws out threats but he really does not mean them, inside his heart is pounding - should he? He mustn’t. He is so confused right now. Should he call in airstrikes or run out on the M4 into his man’s arms? Prig is wailing into the night with an electric guitar (and AD systems), he is in love so hard it hurts. He bashes out With or Without You by U2…Russia holds it breath, the two star crossed lovers both in love and hate at the same time. They resent each other for making that love into something that threatens to consume them both. Finally Lushenko, a girlfriend to both from way back I the day talks them both off the ledge - “you are both love struck fools, stop now before you say something you cannot take back!” Prig realizes it first. Putin is a fox to be lured and must feel in control. Prig has come on too strong. He dials it back, goes back to the dorm and tells all the guys “he totally scored” but inside he is tortured by the waiting game. Putin has fooled himself that he is back in charge but deep inside knows it is too late. He says strong words but everyone at work knows the truth - FFS would they just do it already. Their love is self-destructive and wholly doomed but neither can look away - it is a storm that must happen….to be continued.

I really try to avoid getting pulled too deeply into conspiracies. In my experience humans, while capable of complex and intricate plans within plans involving many players, more often lean into far simpler and lazy calculus - despite what Hollywood and the Internet say. That said this whole thing right now feels like an exercise in 1) demonstrating that the Emperor is naked and 2) an intermission in a bigger play. Prig appears to have gotten way further than he or anyone else thought possible. Putin ran, demonstrated that he is not a god and his noodle is hanging out in the open for the world to see. So this entire next set of theatrics really feels like everyone is coming to terms with a new reality and figuring out what to do next. Putin is making the same duck sounds and his cronies look like they are at a wedding where they all know it won’t last the summer. Everyone is going through the motions because that is what they do but they cannot unsee what has happened. It has gotten weird and everyone looks like they have one eye on their gun and the other on a back door. All except Prig, who is still parked down south with still enough firepower to really mess up someone’s day and acting like there are exactly zero f#cks given when by all rights he should already be dead.

And vice versa. Maneuver and attrition are both sub-strategies of Annihilation according to Randal Bowdish, and that resonates. They are sides of a coin, as are the command methods that tend to be employed for each - Mission and Detail (sometimes called Task) Command. The art of warfare is the employment of these two methods in synchronicity, or more importantly at the right time and place. What we have seen in Ukraine (and not wanting to hijack this thread…go to Hot Thread for more) is a new hybrid form of attrition referred to as “corrosive warfare”. This is essentially a form of manoeuvre-by-ISR&Fires. An opponents entire operational system is rapidly attrited on key nodes along its entire length faster than it can be shored up. The end result looks like that system collapses under its own weight. However, this is really a hypothesis at this point and needs verification. Weirdly some of this is shifting C2 methods as well as we see an almost inverted C2 type approach at times in support of corrosive warfare…and Amazon-like distribution of violence-typo-order. We also see elements of Subversion strategies at play in warfare in combination with the others - forms of Reflexive Control. And even Deterrence at play. In short, warfare has a lot more going on than “Manoeuvre…yay!” Our failures in the west to really embrace it and widen the education of our officer corps is a key shortfall in the modern era…in my opinion.