LongLeftFlank

Armenians, and many many many other groups (too many to list) whose historical lands got 'solved' by war, progressively or all at once, might differ with that assessment.

Armenians, and many many many other groups (too many to list) whose historical lands got 'solved' by war, progressively or all at once, might differ with that assessment.

That deep strike drone thing cuts both ways of course, albeit with some lag and significant incompetence (to date) on the RU side.
At least until someone can scale down ECM jamming to squad level.
Depending on how 'deep' is deep, the Russian rail net seems like the lowest hanging fruit here. Hit trestles, culverts, etc., hit the stalled trains, hit the Pioneer repair crews, keep doing it. Every damn day.

Mortars are not in the same range bracket. They do not do 20-40 km deep bombardment missions. Therefore, they can't be far from the front line and do not have a hope of avoiding counterbattery by range. Unless self-propelled, they usually have less sophisticated gunsights and are not breech-loaded: hence the weight of the round is limited to what the crew can manually hoist up in their hands and slide in through the muzzle. For all those reasons, mortars are not good candidates for a gun/howitzer substitute - they are extremely useful and usually in huge demand, but they supplement, not supplant what the proper arty does.
Rocket artillery AFAIK nowadays Western rocket artillery has reached sufficient accuracy to do whatever gun artillery can do - but  more expensively. Rockets are more pricey than rounds.
 

the problem with artillery ammunition, and barrels, is that they have to withstand absurdly high stress. 
 
Above is a very technical article from decades ago proving that a slightly cheaper grade of steel was not going to work. Virtually nothing in the civilian economy operates at the same kind of stress levels. So there is exactly as much capacity out there as the government has been willing to pay for. The single biggest lesson of this war is that we weren't paying for even a fraction of enough. What makes this much worse is that production machinery, and the machines to make the production machinery are just as specialized, and the capacity for all of it has withered with three plus decades of very low demand. Resurrecting all of that is requires serious engineering AFTER we get of our rear ends in gear and write the checks, and contracts to pay for it. We have done an absolutely crap job of doing that in a coherent way, that admits this problem isn't going away next week. Rheinmetal and the various U.S. defense contractors need SIGNED CONTRACTS to even get started. Two years in many of those contracts STILL aren't signed. It is a an epic case study in refusing to admit there is a war on.
There is real engineering being done on dragging whole process from 1950s tech up to something modern, but please note the 2025 delivery date for the first new model shells.   Drones are pretty much the polar opposite in terms of the difficulty of manufacturing. Every single piece that goes into them is common civilian tech. The actual warheads are usually RPG rounds simply because there are warehouses full of them around. There is nothing particularly complicated about designing warhead for drone use that would be lighter, cheaper and more effective. Because drones do not undergo the enormous stresses that being fired even from a RPG, much less a 155mm artillery barrel impose. Any thin wall tubing would work just fine. Soda cans would probably work just fine. Someone just has to decide to order five million of the bleeping things and it ought to be possible to put together a factory in six months that can make a thousand of them an hour with out ever being touched by a human hand. Somebody just has to make a decision and write a contract. The Ukrainians seem to have been trying to get this underway, but nobody else is trying nearly hard enough. 
 
 
  In regard to the Ukrainian strikes against Russian oil infrastructure, it is has been known since 1945 that attacking oil infrastructure is most effective method of conducting a strategic bombing campaign. Refineries, and chemical factories, are the linchpin of the modern world. They are big, flammable, impossible to hide, and there are not that many of them. Ukraine should focus on them almost exclusively. The strike someone mentioned on a critical factory for Lancet production is the exception that proves the rule.  

Much faster, in theory. Frame is one piece, can be injection molded plastic or carbon fiber at large scale. Motors just drop in, same with compute module and cameras and warhead. Balancing it is a thing. Assuming sufficient supply of these components, an assembly line of a few people should be able to crank out a hundred per day. Transmitter range from base station (send control signals) , and transmitter range on drone (send video and diagnostics back). So if you have mast at the base station, you can get a few more km, and if you have a repeater drone, some more. But you figure these drones have 20-40m endurance at 60-100kmh speed, so there’s more possible range than is capable with a small, low transmitter. Autonomy is how you solve it. My personal opinion is repeater drones are probably the best option as they protect the operators better.

nah, it is going to make itself appear as Taylor Swift as it goes live during halftime at the Superbowl.  🤪  or sumfink like that....  

Hey grogs, for the benefit of refuXeniks (like me), it seems that the excellent mirror site Nitter has been killed by another policy change, perhaps for good this time. If you click on a nitter feed you get a 'certificate expired' error message.
Explanation is here (though I'm not a techie and can't verify the details).
"Nitter currently relies on the mass generation of guest accounts, a weird anonymous form of account that was only supported by old versions of the Twitter app. Creation of them was totally disabled today, so every nitter instance will be dead in under 30 days (when they expire). Scrapers apparently also relied on this, as every public nitter instance was being hammered by scrapers earlier. Instances will probably shut down quite soon unless someone finds another way to create tens of thousands of accounts in an automated fashion for free."
That said, there's another mirror site that still seems to work; you can follow the feeds, but can't get to individual posts (or comments):
https://n.opnxng.com/DefMon3
(or whatever handle you're looking for)

It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th
P

The term "AI" is doing a lot of legwork in this discussion and, I think, is being used to refer to different things a lot of the time.
As previously noted, "AI" of sorts is already integrated into weapon systems at the level of smart munitions and augmented feedback to operators of FPVs, for example.  The "AI" I think most people are concerned about/interested in in the context of the next few years is the kind of AI that will be able to meaningfully automate processes which have, to-date, been too complicated or nuanced to take away from human beings:  mainly target selection and prosecution within a defined combat zone.  That's all fine and those are the types of "AI" which will (I think inevitably) be integrated into our next generation fighting systems.
Beyond that there is the kind of AI that starts beying employed against the enemy's AI.  For me, this is where things start to get interesting.  I think at this point AI is at least as heavily employed in deceiving death swarms and Terminators as it is in driving them and that means that warfare will become extremely dynamic: the best way to defeat an AI-driven war machine is to make sure it doesn't recognise you in the first place and there are countless unimagined ways of making that happen.  War, warriors and weapons will only appear recognisable to our eyes for as long as AI doesn't get too good.  Once it does start to get there, we will simply change what they looks like (hold that thought).
And then we start saying things like:
Now please don't misunderstand me; I think that this is an interesting thought and idea to discuss but I also think that, in an effort to scout ahead, it has not-altogether-deliberately strayed a bit off-map.  "AI" does not mean the same "AI", any more.
If we ever get to the point when "wars are fought exclusively by AI systems" or when people are not involved in warfighting then I see that world reflecting one of two possibilities:
People no longer exist.  If they did exist then they would still throw shade, b***hslap each other and get into large scale brawls which would take the sociological place of whatever warfare is now that AI has excluded us from in the future and that would then become the new, real warfare.  In other words if we are ever excluded from "warfare" because AI is just too damned efficient and lethal then that will suddenly solve absolutely nothing and we will go somewhere else and start fighting again, without it.  The people who are unsatisfied by AI-controlled warfare will simply change warfare to be something else entirely.  Or; People get imaginative enough to realise that AI isn't best used to target enemy machines with explosives any more than a nuclear reactor is best used to heat the cavalry's stables.  If AI is in such a derivative state that wars could theoretically be fought by it to the exclusion of actual people then we should find a far better use for Marvin than what convention would currently consider the military domain.  If AI is this powerful it should be working primarily in the information domain, ironing out conflicting certainties (thanks for introducing useful terminology, Capt) at the level of the information people absorb and believe on a day-to-day basis.  In this way AI should be winning wars before we even know they've begun and yes, that means that, as far as we're concerned, AI should be preventing warfare altogether.  To the extent that such a thing may not be possible, AI should work to mitigate whatever level of conflict turns out to be necessary between human beings but that will probably still mean allowing us to do it ourselves in order to make sure something actually gets resolved in the process. Tldr: I think that, if AI advances to the point that it could exclude us from warfare altogether then the political and natural sciences, healthcare and economics will be the fields upon which those wars are won, not the trenches and treelines around Avdiivka.

Козаки йдут (feat. Анна Булат) - there's a pretty cool app called Shazam that I keep recommending, it's able to find titles of LOTS of random music I stumble upon after playing for few seconds

A screaming comes across the sky....
Good lord, mech really is toast, isn't it? absent a phase change in ECM
Time to get busy standing up those leg battalions.
...Well, maybe not entirely leg, mobility enhanced with these things and various other nimble hard-to-hit ATVs, plus the aforementioned jetpacks.
 
****
P.S.  Cool score on the video, any idea who it's by?

A screaming comes across the sky....
Good lord, mech really is toast, isn't it? absent a phase change in ECM
Time to get busy standing up those leg battalions.
...Well, maybe not entirely leg, mobility enhanced with these things and various other nimble hard-to-hit ATVs, plus the aforementioned jetpacks.
 
****
P.S.  Cool score on the video, any idea who it's by?

Hey grogs, for the benefit of refuXeniks (like me), it seems that the excellent mirror site Nitter has been killed by another policy change, perhaps for good this time. If you click on a nitter feed you get a 'certificate expired' error message.
Explanation is here (though I'm not a techie and can't verify the details).
"Nitter currently relies on the mass generation of guest accounts, a weird anonymous form of account that was only supported by old versions of the Twitter app. Creation of them was totally disabled today, so every nitter instance will be dead in under 30 days (when they expire). Scrapers apparently also relied on this, as every public nitter instance was being hammered by scrapers earlier. Instances will probably shut down quite soon unless someone finds another way to create tens of thousands of accounts in an automated fashion for free."
That said, there's another mirror site that still seems to work; you can follow the feeds, but can't get to individual posts (or comments):
https://n.opnxng.com/DefMon3
(or whatever handle you're looking for)

Well, I was too busy thees weeks, now I back ) 
France recently handed over 40 SACLPs. I veeery doubt 12 of them were wasted in such way
Local TGs yesterday reported missile strike hit three fighter jets Su-27 and Su-30, one of them was destroyed and killed at least 8 men. But today ASTRA TG claimed communication post of Belbek airfield was hit with two missiles. 
SCALP is impacting - SAM missile is launching %)
 

From one point of view, a basic mine is an autonomous drone with extremely low mobility,  a crappy sensor package (touch only), and the targeting decision logic is "kill anything you see" with no human veto in the loop.
Mines don't scare people as much as drones though because they don't come find you while you are sitting around in your trench. We have the illusion of agency,  where since it is our actions that trigger the mine, we can believe that we have a degree of control by making better choices. 
(A bit like why people distrust automation  in cars. Even if it was objectively safer overall, we don't like being in a dangerous situation where we have no input. We'd rather have some influence ourselves even when the data show that it's more dangerous for us overall).

Earlier still, imo. We haven’t seen an Eindecker, yet!
As much as I have also long been thinking of today’s drone war as analogous to the first year or two of air warfare (certainly in terms of the likely rate at which development will occur), we should note that there are several key differences:
1. Today’s first generation (or maybe gen 1.5) drones are actually apparently very effective ground attackers. It took until the development of PGMs for aircraft to become anywhere near as efficient.  In this sense it makes much more sense to think of drones as munitions than aircraft.
2. The vast majority of development focus seems to be on increasing drones’ offensive potential (again, “munitions”).  I’ve yet to see evidence of anyone trying to field a single type of defensive drone ‘fighter’ (as I’ve mentioned several times I think there’s a good chance we will see a modern-day “Fokker Scourge” when one does appear).
3. The entry barrier to effective drone use is spectacularly low, to the point that it seems to have been privately-bought and operated drones that did all the early running in this war.  This is very much unlike air warfare and may mean that national armed forces will struggle to maintain a significant qualitative edge over commercially-available drones for the foreseeable future.

The world's war colleges are busy analyzing what's going on in Ukraine and writing about practices that will shape future CM level battles.
Link to US Army War College
https://press.armywarcollege.edu/
USAWC has a Russia-Ukraine War Study Project
https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/5/
The first output I could find is linked below, Ukraine War experience relative to Recon-Strike-Complexes (RSCs), integrated AI, distributed ISR, deep strike attrition of enemy RSC to enable effective concentration of mass, and integrating relevant UAS ISR lessons from Ukraine, for near future major power conventional war. Multiple forum members individually have already some of these points.
https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss4/9/
'Implications for the US Army' starts at the bottom of page 31. - The lead para is on what is judged unique to Ukraine
"While the Russia-Ukraine War is an illustrative case, it is unique  in many respects. Both sides derive their doctrine from similar sources and  employ similar or identical weapons. Neither side can break the other’s  integrated air defense network—Ukraine for lack of modern airframes, Russia for lack of enough precision-guided munitions—meaning deep strike is primarily a missile-based phenomenon. Russia and Ukraine also field  armies with far less overall experience than anticipated before the war,  having gone through several rounds of mobilization, making logistical and command centralization all the more appealing and strikes against logistics and C2 nodes more fruitful. Russia has refused to deploy  kinetic anti-satellite interceptors, nor is there much available in the open source about satellite jamming, an undeniably relevant factor in future wars. Ukraine and Russia both defend some of the world’s most extensive ground fortifications—in the Ukrainian case, built over years of positional conflict in the Donbas. The US Army should not plan to fight the last war, let alone a war it has not actively fought."
The last two sentences are worth a repeat. Presumably the same would apply to US allies, some of whom experienced enemy attacks on their territory in the last super power conflict (WWII), some of which did not.
"The United States is unlikely to face an adversary it can defeat absent some consideration of strikes on its territory, at least if it hopes to win on a timescale more closely approximating months or years than a decade.  Two equally sophisticated RSCs, then, can increase the likelihood of mutual territorial strikes and the potential for escalation."

Tanks behaving like they often get used in CM games? As an uninformed tangent, I always got the impression that most players used tanks in CM (thinking WW2 games here) in a historically unrealistic way, where instead of tanks being the spearhead, in CM games they were more often kept hidden until the infantry had identified targets and enemy AT assets had been located.
In CM, this is the combination of:
(a) scenario balance means that if you've got a platoon of tanks, the other side very likely has the capability to kill a platoon of tanks (as opposed to reality, where an assaulting tank company might just roll through the enemy positions because they didn't have anything that posed a threat to heavy armour - but that would make a boring CM scenario)
(b) Borg spotting, perfect terrain knowledge and the players' ability to co-ordinate their entire force to a wholly unrealistic degree meaning that they can afford to keep tanks at the back because they will be able to scoot forward through defilade to a keyhole firing position to take out a threat in literally 1 minute, while in reality that's more like 15+ minutes with far more chances to screw up, go the wrong way, shoot at the wrong building etc.
So is it possible that the incredible C4ISR available, replicates in effect much of point (b): enemy positions are known pretty well in advance, real time drone observations funneling information back to units on the ground, and so on, mean that something closer to (although still far short of) CM player levels of planning, co-ordination and responsiveness is achievable, meaning small armour packets can be held back and used on demand with more effect than a full platoon could two decades ago - never mind the increasing number of things that can quickly kill an exposed and hard to conceal tank.
And on a higher level, the higher situational awareness, and prevalence of longer ranged things that can kill vehicles in particular mean that it is hard to create a situation where you can mass e.g. a tank force against a position that has no meaningful defence against it. They will see it coming, and tank-killers can hit from a much larger range, so wherever you attack there is going to be meaningful anti-tank capability, meaning you're always in more of a "balanced CM scenario" kind of situation in practice.

Bias…exactly.  Something is definitely happening, that much I can feel in my bones…exactly what remains kinda opaque.  What do we actually “know?”  Well:
- Mass does not seem to work like it used to.  ISR appears to be having a disproportionate effect on mass.  This is not just drone feeds but AARs and deeper reporting.  Weird densities, weird groupings and sometimes just bizarre packaging.  These all point to some serious pressures on military mass but the exact mechanisms remain largely unknown.
- C4ISR, first war in human history with these levels of C4ISR.  This effecting a lot more than just mass.  How deep this rabbit hole goes remains unclear.
- Artillery is still doing the majority of the killing.  We also know that “precision” appears to be making artillery more effective in rounds per effect (but that is still not proven), but both sides are still using an ungodly amount of fires, as demonstrated by ammo strain.
- Heavy is in trouble.  I think we have seen enough indicators that heavy forces are struggling. Enough reports of tanks and mech being held back or blunted have surfaced to call that one.  But is this forever, or just a temporary condition?
- Unmanned is definitely a thing and is accelerating.  But at this point I am still not sure how much is strike, and how much is ISR.  If we see some sort of data on just how much damage drones are actually doing in comparison to artillery it would help immensely.
- Corrosive warfare (or something like it) is a thing, but we still do not know its full parameters, assumptions, constraints and restraints.  We have seen it happen more than once but “why” it happened is still a bit of a mystery.  Was it projected friction, or was it simply Russian over-extension?
- Denial.  Definitely on the board, particularly in the air.  Some pretty good analysis on this out there.
- Deep Strike.  Appears to be a new form of manoeuvre.  Formerly it has been used to shape and set preconditions but en masse it appears as though it can directly create results, not simply enable them.
I am probably missing something but you will note most of these are only partially visible.  We have seen some possible indicators but no one has been able to pull up the entire UA summer offensive and show that 90% of the time they were using micro-groupings because if they massed above company level they were spotted and hit 82% of the time.  Nor can we see that UAS have outstripped casualties caused by direct fires and artillery by 23%.  All we really see by this point are shadows and hints.
So while I have working theories, they are pretty fluid.  I am getting firmer on some aspects… but watch that will be when things shift again and they are totally blown out of the water.  There was no way the RA was supposed to withstand the Summer offensive.  They were a shattered force that had bled all over Bakhmut at WW1 loss levels…but here we are.
Anyway…strap in, this ride ain’t over yet.

Ha, deep in the mists of Forum history, I recall a certain Calgarian (long departed now from these shores) blowing a gasket over CMSF not providing ladders for top down assaults, or allowing squads the organic capability to breach and mousehole walls or buildings anywhere they damn please, enter via windows, etc.

Perun did a recent video on recruitment which is a perhaps more detailed look at manpower recruitment 😀
Here is the first part of a summary 
Summary is generated using this site => summarize.tech: AI-powered video summaries 
Just pop in the YouTube URL and a few seconds later a summary is generated. Saves a lot of time working out whether something is worth watching or not. Or just getting the gist of a video.
Edited for inclusion!

Galeev backgrounder (short thread)
Punchline: 
1. This has nothing to do with "Russians protesting against Putin".
2. These are protests in an ethnic Turkic & Muslim region largely motivated by the disregard to local sacred places & ecology
3. And, to a certain degree, by the local nationalist sentiment
****
While I'm looking at Galeev:
 

Galeev backgrounder (short thread)
Punchline: 
1. This has nothing to do with "Russians protesting against Putin".
2. These are protests in an ethnic Turkic & Muslim region largely motivated by the disregard to local sacred places & ecology
3. And, to a certain degree, by the local nationalist sentiment
****
While I'm looking at Galeev:
 

Galeev backgrounder (short thread)
Punchline: 
1. This has nothing to do with "Russians protesting against Putin".
2. These are protests in an ethnic Turkic & Muslim region largely motivated by the disregard to local sacred places & ecology
3. And, to a certain degree, by the local nationalist sentiment
****
While I'm looking at Galeev: