photon
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Posts posted by photon
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37 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
Since the start of the Kharkiv move it looked to me to designed to get the Luhansk front moving (at a minimum) and not the other theorized reasons (buffer, taking Kharkiv, blitzing to London, etc). Accepting that premise the question is why they felt opening up a long closed section of front was necessary? The obvious answer is that they didn't think they could move the front in any significant way using their usual strategy of costly fights over a few KMs of ground.
The more alarming explanation is that they think they can sustain more resource sucking frontal assaults on the theory that they will run Ukraine out of something critical (manpower? western willpower?) first. The west seems allergic to the idea of any resource sucking frontal assaults, so perhaps the Russian theory of victory is the establishment of resource-sucking-frontal-assault supremacy?
My understanding of Soviet doctrine was that you reinforce success to produce operational breakthroughs, and the tear around in your enemy's backfield causing havoc. If you take the very idea of "operational breakthroughs" off the table, which I think makes sense given what we've seen, what does that operational art become?
Let's say we're convinced that no amount of success will produce an operational breakthrough (and I'm pretty much there; you'd have to blow a hole in the enemy lines that's like fifty kilometers wide to be able to exploit it without something carving up your logistics train, and at that point you've probably already won the war). If echeloning your reserve units to develop breakthroughs isn't a thing anymore, what do you do with reserve units?
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1 hour ago, The_Capt said:
tac aviation
So, what ever happened to the Russian helicopters? During the summer Ukrainian push it looked like the KA-52s were effective at their intended job of breaking up a mechanized breach, and the UAF was targeting them on the ground. Have they been withdrawn? Blown up? No longer necessary? Tac helicopters seem like another system that's ripe for disruption by cheap powerful compute at the edge.
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1 hour ago, The_Capt said:
We need this, precision small kinetic rounds at range in combination with CUAS CAP.
This is almost the combination the USN settled on against the kamikaze threat. Radar guided CAP at long range, proximity fused semi-automatic dual purpose 5" guns firing explosive shells at medium range for anything that eluded the CAP, 40mm automatic wing choppers at short range for anything that eluded the flak barrage. Scale everything down by a factor of 10 and you've got what you're proposing.
But the key to the whole thing was having a metric asspile of semi-disposable ships because some percentage of the attacks will get through and if that degrades your combat power too much you're in real trouble. We used DD picket sponges (we had approximately infinity destroyers at that point), an inner cordon of battleships (that could no longer project useful combat power, but could throw up walls of flak), and an inner-inner core of very vulnerable very cheap carriers mixed with less vulnerable big expensive carriers.
But the real key to naval operational maneuver was the Big Blue Blanket (tm). If you systematically suppress all the launch sites, then everything else is just backup. What does that look like in land warfare? I have no idea. There are too many launch sites, because the launch site is anywhere.
I could see a heavily armored legacy mech formation (hopefully with some sort of unmanned drive; we lost a lot of men in the picket destroyers) working like a drone-atgm sponge while other systems apply combat power to degrade the enemy operational system?
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35 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
when was the last time two warships had to board each other and cross swords on the quarter deck?
Not, perhaps, at all germaine to our present discussion here, but the story of the USS Borie's battle with U-405 is fantastic. It's about as close to crossed swords as you can get in the era of modern weapons. Morison reports that the crew of the Borie kept the Germans from their flak guns by, among other things, throwing knives and spent 5" shell casings at them and knocking them off of the sub.
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1 hour ago, LongLeftFlank said:
Say what you will about Russia sux, but.... I just can't imagine a US Army master sergeant of similar vintage (high school diploma late 1990s, maybe some college) being able to organise their thoughts in writing in this way.
Not a US Army master sergeant, but an Imperial Japanese officer in 1943 or 1944? Totally. The parallels are worrying for threading the needle of defeat-without-total-collapse. It takes a lot to shake a society to its senses once it's decided that glorious death is as good as victory.
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6 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Ok, well really hard to tell what that really means. Could be military socks for all we know - and don't turn a nose up at that one, good socks are a lifesaver in this business.
The whole report is an interesting read. Much of it will be familiar to the audience here. It seems like most of what they're tracking is not what I'd call military procurement, but really defense industrial base procurement. So CNC machines and the like.
The enormous jump in imports of basically everything in Feb '23 suggests that Russia was still hoping to win a fast war until then (?), or that it's DIB took a whole year to recover from the panic about the failed initial invasion.
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22 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
That's what the chart says. Another reason to take charts like these with a pinch of salt.
Steve
Ok - I think I found the source of the chart:
It looks like those numbers are not dollar values, but "transaction records" whatever that means.
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41 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
My initial reaction was "nope". But the US did pretty much this in and over Israel last week so there definitely has been a precedence set.
What I don't know is how far a NATO AD umbrella based in Poland and Romania could reach. I suppose the question is whether it's worth the escalatory risk to free up whatever Ukrainian AD is currently tied down in that backfield.
Ok - Patriot is good to 70km so even Lviv would be a stretch, so probably not worth the escalatory risk. Sigh.
Of course, it would be better to just give a more effective and larger AD umbrella to Ukraine and let them operate it where they see fit, but American policies is, as we've noted, totally dysfunctional right now.
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Another question I don't know the answer to. The consensus of the Thread so far has been that a NATO imposed no-fly-zone poses unacceptable escalatory risks (because it would involve NATO assets shooting down Russian planes). Does that escalatory logic hold now that essentially all (all?) of the Russian incursions into Ukranian airspace are unamanned? Is there strategic room for a more nuanced ruleset - something like, "We, NATO, will shoot down all unmanned aerial objects that are within 10km of a large conurbation or civilian infrastructure target west of the Dniper?
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1 hour ago, The_Capt said:
We will then build the remaining systems, some legacy others also new, around these new unmanned capabilities.
World War II at sea was a race to understand a similar shift. In the span of a few years we went from measuring naval power projection in "weight of battle line broadside" to "size of modern air wing". Heavy surface ships survived inasmuch as they were able to be useful to the air wing projection assets, which was mediumly, and then not so much.
That transition happened in less than a decade.
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2 minutes ago, Tux said:
I've already written about the "as long as possible" point but you mention retaining energy here and that's important. Retaining energy is physically expensive and should always be seen as a compromising factor. All else being equal you want to retain as little energy as necessary after launch in order to achieve your desired effect at the target.
I'm convinced. Thanks! This has been really helpful to me.
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10 minutes ago, Sgt Joch said:
Basically, because they are still situations where a gun is useful, whether stopping enemy/hostile vessels, supporting ground troops, etc. where a missile would not work or would be overkill.
You could maybe talk me into the main gun being useful for shore bombardment, but good gravy - if you're firing at hostile vessels, how many things have gone badly wrong by that point? I'm really curious when was the last time a ship fired its main gun at another ship in anger?
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22 minutes ago, Tux said:
I think what photon is admirably trying to do is observe the new, successful weapon systems in Ukraine and, instead of just deciding that "dronez rule every1 must has dronez!", extract the secret sauce of their success in more general, physical terms.
Unfortunately I (so far) think that the e-t profile and/or integral of same is a red herring; I think it's an emergent property of weapon systems that are able to lean into precision vs. brute force, rather than a deterministic property that can be used to decide the effectiveness of a weapon.
Thanks for explaining what I'm trying to do better than I could!
What I'm trying to articulate (somewhat hamfistedly) is a tension between a hard requirement and a thing-you-appear-to-really-want in a weapon system. The hard requirement is that you must physically transport some physical object to your target to deliver whatever effect you're hoping to deliver. Mostly I'm thinking about kinetic effects, but maybe others too?
The thing you want is to delay, as long as possible, the collapse of the weapon's time and space option space. For a thing like a rifle, that space collapses as soon as the bullet leaves the barrel. For an FPV drone, that targeting time and options space remains uncollapsed until either your battery runs out or you hit something. Because the energy isn't put into the weapon system all up front, you can use that energy to retain the targeting option space for much longer as the weapon moves from launch to target. I think when we talk about "precision", we're mostly talking about delaying the collapse of the targeting choice space as long as possible (which requires the weapon to retain energy as long as possible).
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1 minute ago, The_Capt said:
I strongly suspect - even thought it is still quoted as a mantra - that this war is demonstrating that the best thing to kill a tank is not another tank. It would appear that artillery, ATGMs and FPVs are winning that particular argument quite well on their own.
This seems true to me as well, and it's what I'm trying to make sense of with my time-energy curve musings.
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1 minute ago, holoween said:
Thats because HEAT doesnt have the required effect against MBTs and is significantly less accurate then APFSDS.
I'd be really curious what fraction of tank kills in Ukraine are caused by what. Has that started emerging yet? It seems like tank-on-tank fights are very rare? And often at absolutely suicidal ranges where well thrown rocks and sticks would penetrate armor?
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6 minutes ago, Tux said:
Again, explosives in the example I gave don't reserve energy, they add it. If two ballistically-identical projectiles strike a target with the same KE, one with an HE warhead and one without, the explosive one will deliver more energy to the target. That potentially translates into a larger option space while not changing the integral of the pre-impact e-t curve.
Really appreciate your comments. So, here I'm thinking about HEAT and APFSDS rounds. Their time-energy curves look really different.
For APFSDS, the object that delivers the effect is the arrow, it receives all its kinetic energy as it leave the barrel. It gradually loses energy in flight - your note that much of that energy is waste energy is right on - until it transfers the kinetic energy to the armor of whatever you're shooting at.
Compare that to HEAT. the object that delivers the effect is the copper liner of the shell that's (at the last possible moment) formed into a penetrator. At firing, the shell can have much less kinetic energy because it's carrying with it a reserve of chemical energy that, at the last second, gets converted into kinetic energy in forming the penetrator.
So the energy for the same(ish) effect is distributed differently along the energy-time curve, and for the HEAT shell, much of the energy is provided to the actual penetrator when it is literally touching the target. Because of that, as you rightly note, you have much less waste energy, so less signature. And it's more controllable, so you can use fins and whatnot to steer it in the terminal phase (like the modern Javelin).
Does that make sense? I might need to draw some of what I mean.
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19 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Hmm, not sure this tracks. They can be made less efficient through defensive manoeuver but naval warfare simply added volume. Up until modern missiles they were the primary weapon system for ships of the line. We still put them on ships for a reason. A/C took primacy due to range, even thought they lost volume. Missile offset with range and accuracy.
So naval gunnery expanded its options spaces through volume of fires effectively. Firing many salvos to reduce defensive options. This is how Jutland happened.
Just pulling these metrics together - range, energy-time, composition, accuracy, volume, agility. These are looking at lot like modern military High Level Military Requirements (HLMRs). To my mind these are the framework for an options space.
Precision as "small energy at the right time" of "smart energy" really resonates.
So, I'm genuinely curious why we still put naval guns on ships. I'd wager that there were individual minutes in some of the battles near Guadalcanal in which more shells were fired than have been fired in anger in the last fifty years. Am I wrong about that? I'll have to drag out Morison, but some of our radar equipped semi-auto six-inch cruisers fired a couple thousand shells per engagement (to the great annoyance of the fleet sustainment and logistics commands).
A good thing to compare is high level bombers with dive bombers. Both had range, but the dive bombers could apply energy to the weapon (laterally) very late in the time-energy curve. It was easy to dodge the high level bombers, not so much the dive bombers.
If you offered Jesse Oldendorf the choice between his battlewagons and a half dozen SeaBabys per enemy ship at Leyte, he's be crazy to pick the battlewagons. And if you offered that choice to the folks doing sustainment, they'd knock sense into anyone even considering the battlewagons.
You're right about volume of fire ameliorating the bad time-energy curve of naval gunnery. Look at the price of expanding that option space through volume of fires, though: huge logistical tail, vulnerable ships (big magazines), giant shoot-me-here sign when applying fires. And we've seen the Russians go for a replay of that in the artillery fight in Ukraine with modest (?) success.
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Just now, holoween said:
add a guidding kit to the naval shell and that suddenly doesnt work any more.
Time between weapons employment and effect seems to better predict defensibility
Right - so what you're doing there is reserving some energy to apply later in the time-energy curve. And as we've seen, even a small amount of reserved energy greatly improves precision and lethality.
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10 minutes ago, Tux said:
- How do you account for mines? Zero energy-time curve until the point of explosion (analagous to the point of impact of the projectiles you describe) but I wouldn't consider them to have a particularly large "option space".
- How do you account for explosives, generally? Two projectiles with identical energy-time curves apart from at the point of impact (i.e. one has an explosive warhead while the other does not)?
- Materials matter: If two projectiles with identical energy-time curves are made of hardened steel and tungsten, respectively, there are conditions involving armour plate which will cause the former to shatter on impact while the latter does not. This means the latter has a larger option space (i.e. can be used to successfully attack certain targets which the other cannot)?
- Shapes matter: two identical e-t projectiles but one is optimally shaped for target penetration while the other is not. The better-shaped one has a larger option space?
- How would you account for a directed-energy weapon?
I think maybe 'retaining maximal option space for as long as possible' (by which I assume you mean retaining the ability to manoeuvre and refine a targeting solution) helps humans to guide relatively small amounts of energy (kinetic and/or chemical) to enemy weak points, so probably adds efficiency to the energy applied in that sense. In a lot of other scenarios though I think it takes a bit of a back seat versus the nature of the projectile itself.
Ok - those are all really good questions. Let me try and tackle them.
1. I have no idea. They're some sort of boundary case. But the creepy-crawly mines that @The_Capt has occasionally described seem like an attempt to save some of the time-energy curve to the last possible minute.
2. So, I'd say that what explosives to is they reserve available energy to be applied much later in the time-energy curve. With explosive weapons, the shell itself is not the thing that delivers effects, but the fragments and gasses. By retaining that energy until late, you can choose when to apply it for maximal effects. Think solid shot vs. mechanical time vs. proximity fusing for anti-aircraft guns. If you have a reserve of chemical energy to convert to kinetic, you can apply it in a much more precise and effective way.
3. Agree. My theory doesn't speak to this.
4. Agree.
5. So, a pulsed directed energy weapon would have (functionally) a zero time-energy integral, because the time to target is effectively instantaneous. If you need to hold the beam continuously, your time-energy integral will be large, you'll have a huge signature, and it's counter-fire time.
It's both retaining maximum option space as long as possible, and minimizing the time-energy integral to minimize signature. The launch of a drone is a lot harder to detect than the launch of a missile, which is itself harder to detect than a 155 firing. The much larger energy spike for the 155 means the whole system has to be much larger (to contain and direct that energy). The more gradual energy spike for the missile means you can use a smaller system to launch it. The effective non-existent energy spike for the drone means the launching system is basically non-existent.
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10 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Ok, but doesn’t your second example invalidate your thesis? A naval artillery shell does not appear to have a flat energy-time curve but of all your examples it is likely the hardest to defend against. In fact ballistic weapons appear to be the hardest to counter and none of them have what I think you are describing as a flat curve.
Energy is definitely part of all this but I think how that energy is translated into effect is the core idea you appear to be driving at (we should leave aside effects for now as that is a pretty complicated concept in its own right).
So, I'd suggest that naval artillery shells are the easiest weapon system to defend against (of those available to navies). We developed a great system for defending against them more or less as soon as they appeared: steer into the splashes. Because all of the energy is imparted to the shell at once (in the barrel), you can predict, with great certainty, where the shell will go and when it will arrive where. It's option space for where it delivers its effect totally collapses at the time of firing. You have some large number of seconds to be not-there. Now, if you're at a range where that number of seconds is way too small, you're boned. But the size of the lethality sphere for naval artillery is well understood, so don't be there.
Compare that to a SeaBaby, where the travel energy is imparted very gradually. It has a much larger option space much later in its travel. That makes is much harder to avoid and so far, to interdict; Could a current generation CIWS even see a Sea Baby at the speeds it's moving? How do you separate it from the background noise?
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So, I've been thinking and reading, and want to advance a thesis for folks to hammer apart. It's a combination of @The_Capt's language of option spaces with battlefield physics. Maybe this is well known, but it's new to me. Here it goes.
The goal of a weapon system is to deliver kinetic energy (in the physics sense) to a particular place at a particular time. Let's gloss over how you pick that place and time (which is in its own revolution right now). You could think of each weapon system as having an energy-time curve that represents how much energy the killing bits have at a given moment. A couple of exampled:
1. A (ancient, thrown; not modern AT) javelin. The tip has very low energy until thrown. Steep curve (maybe < 1s) to get to maximum energy when just released, gradual decrease in energy as it follows a ballistic trajectory (maybe 5s), then it delivers its energy to the target.
2. A naval artillery shell. The case fragments have low energy while in magazine. Very alarmingly steep curve (< 1s) to get to very large maximum energy when exiting barrel. Gradually losing energy during long ballistic flight (30s+). Loses huge gobs of energy penetrating deck armor (< 1s). Shell explodes imparting large kinetic energy to fragments and gasses delivering energy to target.
3. An air launched cruise missile. The warhead has low energy on runway. Jet engines being to gradually impart both kinetic and gravitational potential energy (minutes to hours). The turbojet motor lights imparting a steady stream of kinetic energy as the missile travels (minutes to hours). The warhead explodes imparting large kinetic energy to fragments and gasses delivering energy to the target.
4. A grenade dropping drone. The drone takes off using the minimal energy necessary. It cruises to the target area using the minimal energy necessary for level flight. Grenade falls, explodes imparting kinetic energy to fragments and gasses delivering energy to the target.
Here's my thesis: the flatter the energy-time curve (i.e. the slower its area integral grows), the larger the option space for the weapon, and consequently the harder it is to defend against the weapon. Additionally, the flatter the energy-time curve, the smaller the signature of the weapon system, and the less it attracts counter fires.
I think we're seeing this dynamic in all theaters and modes of warfare in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are putting on a master class in developing weapon systems that retain maximal option space for as long as possible. It's just precision that is changing the battlefield dynamic, it's weapons that retain their option spaces much longer than even a decade ago.
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5 minutes ago, Erwin said:
It's debatable whether we in the west are exhausting Russia and China or if they are exhausting us (depleting our weapons reserves). China is the main foe. China is akin to Nazi Germany in the 1930's with Russia playing the hapless Italians bogged down in Albania. The Ukraine war is giving China (and others) excellent training on how the west fights and what weapons systems we deploy. That is a major reason imo why we are understandably reluctant and slow to provide the best weapons to Ukraine.
This is such a weird take to me as to be somewhat incomprehensible. Like, we seem to be operating in different factual universes. Italians bogged down in Albania? How is that an apt comparison?
What particular weapons systems are we depleting the reserves of? We've been culpably stingy with our second and third tier weapon systems. Your points contradicts one another. If China is learning to fight a western military that doesn't use any of its airforce, any of its modern deep strike capability, any of its naval capability, any of its modernized mech force... learn on, I guess?
On the contrary, everyone is learning that the shape of the battlefield has changed, and changed in ways that seriously favor the defender. The PLAN has to be looking at the videos of the SeaBaby double taps and thinking hard about what their losses crossing the Taiwan strait would look like.
Everybody is looking at the rise of low-energy precision fires and wondering how totally that's broken mechanized mass.
Everybody is looking at the totally illuminated battlefield and wondering how complete their ground-to-space ISR system is.
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4 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
I think Russian logistics are now adequate for what is expected of them.
Do you have a sense of how they're accomplishing this? It seems like they're doing things that need a big logistical footprint - still firing lots of shells, still using massed armor (?!). But I haven't seen as many videos in the thread of hits on Russian near-front logistical nodes. Just not newsworthy? Or are they more dispersed? How is their supply of trucks and fuel vehicles holding up? Do we have satellite shots of depos like we do for tanks? For a while they were using civilian vehicles for logistics. Has that eased?
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20 minutes ago, Vet 0369 said:
Ummmm, do you know that the U.S.Navy had already broken the Japanese Imperial Navy’s code previously and knew what the Imperial Navy’s operational plan was? The only thing the USN didn’t know was the actual target. They suspected Midway, but didn’t know, only that was coded as KT or something, so they had Midway send a message in the clear that their water processing plant was down. They waited, and intercepted an IN transmission saying that KT was running out of water. That sealed the intelligence, and the rest is history! Kinda similar to the U.S. warning Ukraine of the upcoming attack and additionally letting Putin know that we knew.
Sure - but there a lot about Midway we don't know. See Parshall and Tully for an explanation of how Fuchida's account can't be reconciled with the (scant) documentary evidence that survived. Parshall and Tully infer the state of the Japanese carrier's deck cycling rhythm from, like, two photographs. Heck, we're not totally sure which American pilots bombed which carriers with how many bombs. We have good guesses. Compare that to the video of the Ukrainian Sea Baby swimming into the hole blown by the previous one. Historians will know a lot more about this war than one less than a hundred years ago.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
Behold: the carrier battlegroup. I think this makes a lot of sense, and that the Big Blue Blanket that we saw in '44 and '45 is a non-crazy model for what a "mechanized" task force could look like in 5-10 years. To survive it needs:
1. Defensive ISR bubble that is bigger than the enemy's effective ISR/Strike range, which entails...
2. Ability to suppress the crap out of enemy ISR and fires in the same time zone, which entails...
2. Ability to concentrate effects from widely dispersed elements, which entails...
3. Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, and...
4. Underway logistics, to avoid operational chokepoints and maintain tempo, which entails...
5. Lots of cheap, semi-disposable platforms.
We built that out with the United States Navy 2.0, and could totally do it again. The hard thing is that at sea, there were finitely many locations you had to suppress to preserve your defensive ISR bubble. Not so on land.