photon

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.

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.

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?

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.

@The_Capt did this very thing:

Here's my take from reading the thread and a bunch of OSINT: This is one where I think it's meaningful to separate "Russia winning" from "Putin's regime winning". I'd suggest that on day 1 of the war, those two were in alignment: Russia wins by absorbing a large neighboring state into its sphere of influence with only targeted bloodshed (at the ruling elite). Putin's regime wins by propping up a vision of pan-Russian nationalism and empire building that cements Putin as Czar. On day today of the war, those visions of victory are no longer in alignment. Russia has lost - they will not absorb Ukraine into their sphere of influence with only targeted bloodshed, and have actively reinforced the global ruleset by pushing Finland and Sweden into NATO and reawakening Europe to the necessity of self-defensive capability. They've also offered the west a huge opportunity to figure out what fighting a 21st century peer war looks like. For Putin's regime, victory looks like staying in power. And he's been far more successful at that than we collectively predicted. Even Prigozhin's coup-like thing proved a manageable threat (for reasons that are unclear to me). Somehow recon-by-meat-assault isn't provoking civil unrest, &c. &c. So that one's not a loss for Putin yet. Economy still appears to be sort of functioning? Though it's hard to see how he can keep it that way indefinitely? For Ukraine, the day 1 objective was "remain an independent and free society". That still appears to be their objective, and they're doing a yeoman's job of that. Jury's still out, though, on what the end state looks like.

Whenever you suggest that folks do this, I sit down and make a list of questions I have that I don't think I've seen answers to: 1. Trains. Are there any operative trains in theater? If so, whose and why? Surely whacking locomotives with Lancets is better than hitting individual tanks or even individual C2 vehicles. We've seen both sides targeting fixed rail infrastructure, but I haven't seen videos of locomotives taking hits. Too fast moving? Both sides keeping them far from lines? 2. What do the Ukrainian fortifications look like behind the front lines? Seen some evidence of fortification in the north, and pictures of various types of pre-fab bunkers being tested out. Are the Ukrainians laying mines in volume? If so, where? 3. In the event of a breakout (which seems really hard to fathom right now), how would you secure GLOC against what would be a pants-crappingly terrifying insurgency/asymmetrical fight? 4. Inasmuch as Russia's been able to advance recently, it's by bombing everything down to the ground along the axis of advance. How, hypothetically, would either side take and hold a large urban area with an unfriendly local population armed with FPV drones? In contrast to even a Javelin, the drones have a very small launch signature and a longer range, so you're dealing with trying to triangulate their radio emissions?

One might say that denial primacy took hold in the information warfare sphere before it took hold in aerial operations.

Have you read the thread from day 1? The amount of open source information here - from all imaginable perspectives - is enormous. Historians will be able to make much more sense of this war than any in history. Would that we had this sort of information for the ancient world! Or the Battle of Midway!

So, reading the last couple of pages, here's how I'm reading the argument about western and soviet legacies. To succeed tactically on the modern battlefield, an army needs to establish fires superiority and ISR superiority (which involves denying both to the enemy and securing both for friendly operations). The legacy Soviet and legacy Western took different paths to achieving those two superiorities, albeit with some overlap. Neither seems workable on the modern battlefield. The legacy western system relied on ranged precision systems to deliver fires. So, Excalibur, Javelin, HIMARS, Tomahawk, HARM, and the like. The legacy western system relied on dismantling the enemy's fires complex. This is a sort of pre-emptive counter battery, where we identified fires systems and targeted them as a precursor to tactical engagement. "Air Superiority" is a misnomer. It's really ISR and fires superiority delivered by primarily airborne systems. One thing on the table now is whether the western fires superiority system can dismantle an opposing fires complex. We built our fires complex to targeting large, hot, heavy systems, not now a fires complex is much more distributed and made of much less energetic bits. Targeting a Pantsir? Doable. Targeting two guys with a backpack full of drones? Harder. The legacy soviet system relied on mass to deliver fires. TOS-1, Grad, the abundance of tube artillery. The legacy soviet system relied on overwhelming the enemy's counterbattery complex to secure fires in a competitive environment. The legacy western system relied on airborne ISR to establish superiority, and on airspace denial to inhibit enemy airborne ISR. The legacy soviet system relied on recon in force (?) to establish ISR superiority, and on airspace denial to inhibit enemy ISR. These have both been blown up by high speed battlefield networking (!) and plentiful drones. Nobody has any idea how to deny dronespace. Also, the Russians appear to be using waves of expendable soldiers as a form of reconnaissance, which is horrifying, but appears to be sort of effective? More to ponder here, and whatever system ends up able to deliver fires and ISR won't look like either the legacy western or legacy Soviet system, because the physics and geometry of a modern battlefield are so different.

Yeah - I'm not sure there are many ships afloat that could take a double tap like that and make it to a home port. Certainly not in the displacement range the BSF is deploying. I looked at all the pictures I could find of the Kotov, and it looks like no automated CIWS - it's a couple of HMGs and an AGL. I hope the USN is currently bolting AGLs and thermal imagers on every square meter of available rail on our ships. It also looks like there is another ship (?) or a terrain feature close aboard the Kotov that might be distracting the crew. And the moon is pretty near a new moon. I wonder if the USV attacks are timed to hit when there's relatively little illumination?

That's what I'm puzzled by. The notional maximum speed of that ship is 25-30 knots with the turbine boost, but it seems like it can only manage 12ish knots on its cruise engines. I wonder how long it takes to transition from cruise engines to combat engines? Maybe the maintenance and logistical tail can't support ships running on turbines the whole time they're at sea? It also looks like the USVs approach first from the rear, so I wonder if the tactic is: 1. First drone hits the rear of the ship, impairing mobility. 2. Other drones circle (!) setting up for sinking strikes. 3. Drone hits amidships opening a hole at the waterline. 4. Drone enters (!) previous hole detonating and causing catastrophic sinking damage in the unarmored interior. The USVs look to be pretty low observability and are operating in wolfpacks, so detection prior to the mobility kill is the whole fight. Once the first drone hits the rear of the ship, that's seems like the ballgame.

Question: what's the water-in-the-desert limited resource that would prevent the Ukrainian armed forces from establishing lots of small beachheads across from Kherson? I see a couple of candidates: 1. Units trained for light amphibious raid-disruption-corrosion operations. 2. Boats and drones to handle the logistics of more than one crossing. 3. Fires to support more than one crossing. 4. Suitable combinations of terrain and opposing force that render a crossing worth it. 5. Staff capacity to manage and support more than one crossing. Do we have any sense which of those would be the hold up? It seems like lots of countries are giving Ukraine small boats.

It's miniaturized sensors and higher energy density materials. Any time we get a discontinuous progression in either, military things get weird. And usually weird in the "scary and more lethal" sense of weird.

The ability to double tap a particular spot on a ship with torpedoes is absolutely terrifying. What damage control regime could possibly deal with that? None. The drones don't seem torpedo fast, so I wonder why the Russian ships aren't making better speed and zig-zagging all the time? Oh. Those Ropuchas have a maximum speed of 18 knots. That's not fast.

Actually, I do think there's been some change. For the most part now we can conceive of an international order where competition is not always war. That was unthinkable in the ancient world. For example, in the Second Punic War the Romans suffered something like 10% combat casualties as a percentage of their total population. That would be like the United States losing 13 million soldiers in World War 2, excluding civilian casualties. Having successfully concluded their absolutely devastating war with Carthage, the Romans took a break of... zero years, immediately entering into wars in Cisalpine Gaul and Macedonia. For them, war was the default, and peace an aberration. We don't think that way anymore.

That's fair. I'd include people in the stuff that you can fight a war-for-stuff for. I suppose I'm trying to grapple with the asymmetry in objective that we see in lots of wars. Like, the Roman wars in Italy where they left the locals in charge (but bound to Rome by treaty) feel different from the Roman wars where they annexed territory and deposed the local rulers.

Amateur historian chiming in, so take it for what it's worth: yes with a but. I'd suggest that there are two kinds of war, the second of which is relatively uncommon. I'd distinguish them based on what the victor gets at the end of the war. The first kind of war is a war-for-things. The aggressor wants to take some things (which can be abstract things) from the defender. The victor gets to keep the things. For example, when the United States fought Mexico in the 1840s, that was a war for things. The victor kept Texas and California. Or the Roman conquest of Gaul: Caesar plundered everything that was not nailed down, and functionally annexed modern France to Roman rule. These are pretty common, and World War II was, from one side, a war for things: Germany wanted Lebensraum, Japan wanted the rich resources of the indo-pacific region (particularly oil). Note that I'm defining wars-for-things in terms of the spoils, not the rhetoric that surrounds the spoils. I'd note that modern war is so mind bogglingly destructive that rational actors have concluded that protracted war-for-things is a suckers game. There are no things you can get that are worth the destruction on the things you want! The second kind, which is relatively rare, is a war-for-rules. The aggressor wants to impose (or maintain) a particular rule set on a collection of polities. The ancient examples of this would be Roman expansion in Italy (which ended with the defeated state bound into a treaty structure rather than obliterated) and the inter-Polis wars in Greece (which were by and large prestige competitions). The victor incorporates the defeated party into a particular rule-set. The objective is not to take things away from the defeated party. We've also seen asymmetric combinations of the two. For example, Gulf War I. Iraq was fighting a war-for-things against Kuwait, but the Coalition was fighting a war-for-rules against Iraq (we did not annex Iraq at the end of the war, we said, "no annexing neighbors, bad Iraq"). So the war in Ukraine is a combination of these two. Russia is fighting a war-for-things against Ukraine. They are attempting to take the whole of Ukraine's territory, and stealing grain and people. Simultaneously, Russia is fighting a war-for-rules against the Status-quo Coalition. The rule change they're attempting to effect is a return to the "annexing-neighbors-is-ok" rule set that preceded WW2. Ukraine is fighting an existential war-for-things against Russia, and wins if they exist as an independent state at the end of the fighting. The Status-quo Coalition is fighting an existential war against Russia as well: the absolute lynchpin of the status quo is that annexing neighbors is not OK. If that rule falters, it will blow up the international order and allow a renegotiation of lots of the status quo by actors not enamored of the status quo (the Baltics, Taiwan, Africa, the Middle East, &c.). Victory of the Status-quo Coalition is deterrent: showing everyone that attempting to violate the international rule set is *just not worth it*.

All yours. I'm very much in the land of confusion trying to draw analogies to history I know about (which is pretty good from 753 B.C. to maybe 200 A.D. and from 1939 to 1945 and iffy beyond that). But I can't shake the feeling that a lot of what we learned in the Pacific theater resonates today in terms of the physics of battle.

I've been thinking a lot about this. The physics of the battles in Ukraine feel like amphibious assaults everywhere all the time. In an amphibious assault you've got an illuminated battlefield (the attacker is a finite quantity of very visible ships and the defender is tied to a linearish boundary that the attacker can observe from offshore at leisure before the assault). The attacker can mass fires from behind the line of contact, but will have difficulty advancing those fires as their beachhead is in a pocket surrounded by defender's fires. But the precursor to a successful amphibious assault is the isolation of the beachhead from its LOC, either by naval blockade for islands or by tactical and strategic air for larger assaults. Those are both unavailable in Ukraine, so even a high-tempo high-casualty assault doesn't produce meaningful operational effects (unless you chain them together over and over in a way anathema to modern western sensibility). It'd be interesting to look at the ratio of troop density to weapon-denial-range. I think CM does a nice job of simulating that. Playing the CMBO beta Last Defense, I learned quickly that American bazooka armed infantry projected an armor denial zone about 75 meters in all directions. So if you want an impermeable defense, you need something like a squad every 150 meters of frontage in whatever depth you think you need. The first time I played CMBS Into the Breach I thought I was totally screwed because I was used to that sort of frontage. Then I discovered Javelins and had to reconsider. I'd say a modern infantry squad can project that denial zone hundreds of meters if not a kilometer or more. So has the troop density changed relative to the size of the denial zone it can project? edit: Also, what the heck with all the videos of IFVs and tanks engaging trenches at ranges I'd describe as "pants on head"? Why does that work? Are there lots of videos I'm not seeing of IFV's getting destroyed by infantry light AT as they approach?

In passing, Martin Gilbert's The Somme: Heroism and Horror in the First World War does a really nice job of illustrating the detachment of the commanders from reality as the Somme progressed.

That's fair. I suppose what I've seen in this thread is that tactical assaults (mechanized or otherwise) get shredded by precision fires (either indirect, direct, or drone). So you can have a smallish node of defenders "controlling" a few kilometer deep (in all three dimensions) battle space. I suppose it's something porous like mutual denial. In every war you've had a pretty sharp demarcation between controlled area -> no man's land <- controlled area. In an ancient battle the denied area might be measured in single digit meters. In the American Civil War maybe a hundred meters. Now it seems like it has a weird shape that's kilometers deep (and wide), doesn't exist under 2,000 feet, and then starts again above 2,000 feet in a conical shape stretching back from the line of contact. What would it look like to move from denial primacy to defensive primacy in your view?

One thing I've been thinking about is whether the transition to defensive primacy is uniform across scales. We've had wars where tactical, operational, and strategic primacy was divided. Here I'm wading beyond what I've read deeply about, so please correct me where I miss the mark. So in the civil war, you had defensive primacy at the tactical level, but offensive primacy at the operational and strategic. Armies would maneuver operationally to force their adversary to attack them in a time and place where they could defend tactically and break the adversary (Chancellorsville, Gettysburg). In WW1, you had attritional offensive primacy at the tactical level, but defensive primacy at the operational level: no one could translate tactical success into a breakthrough. I'm not sure about strategic primacy, but it seems to have been defensive? In WW2 European warfare you had tactical offensive primacy (attackers could breach positions), operational offensive primacy (mass allowed breakouts), and strategic offensive primacy (attackers could take an hold strategic objectives) for most of the war in most theatres. In WW2 Carrier warfare (1940-1943) you had tactical offensive primacy (deck strikes were essentially unstoppable), operational defensive primacy (carriers could raid, but not secure land based objectives), and strategic defensive primacy? The development of 3rd/5th Fleet in 1944 essentially flipped the first two. The advent of CICs and better flight detection meant that a carrier task force could interdict a strike group, and the development of the big blue blanket meant that a carrier task force could roll up on an island and secure it. So we're headed to an era of what appears to be tactical defensive primacy and operational defensive primacy, and strategic (?) defensive primacy. The advent of an illuminated battlefield (like the radar based CIC) ensures tactical defensive primacy. Precision fires ensure operational defensive primacy. There's been talk here about something like the big blue blanket making operational offensive primacy possible, but that seems a year or two out. Maybe the place for innovation now is at the strategic level. And at that level cumulative rather than sequential effects produce the most decision. So what can the west do to maximize the strategic options Ukraine has and minimize those of Russia? That seems like the question for the next year.

And if we think of economics in terms of decision space, democracies being a bit slower than autocracies has some active advantages. Japan's economy had very little slack in 1941, and consequently when the action war revealed that many of their economic priorities were misaligned with their strategy, they couldn't easily retool. Same story in Germany. But the United States had enormous slack and could therefore invest heavily in what combat revealed to be good strategic priorities. The war in Ukraine has revealed that we had lots of bad ideas about strategy and procurement. That offers the west the opportunity to retool towards things that will matter strategically. We need to take that opportunity, though.

I really like this. I'd add that in the debate between the sequentialists and cumulativists, it looks like the balance has shifted way towards the cumulativists. If there's going to a way to solve for offense in the current environment, it's going to be the cumulative degradation of the opponent's strategic option space faster than it can regenerate.