photon

How has rolling stock held up in the war so far? I was reading the U.S. Army 1944 instructions on converting a boxcar to carry 500lb bombs and it struck me that a hit from even a small FPV drone would be absolutely catastrophic. How are both sides moving ammunition trains without losing them?

Question asked out of total ignorance - since the helicopters seem to be flying very very low, what would rapidly retargeted 155mm airbursts do to them? Would they be able to range to 10km past the line of contact? Would good coordination with a Caesar or PzH2k battery deny helicopters the relevant airspace?

Dick Black was a Virginia State senator from Loudon and Prince William counties, which are not particularly rural and politically moderate. He retired in 2020 and now focuses his attention on giving unflattering foreign policy interviews in Russian and Iranian media and arguing that students should not be called by their preferred pronouns in Loudon county schools. Seems to be a real nutbar.

I don't understand blowing up the dam now, unless they thought it was now or never? It seems like blowing it now buys the Russians some operational annoyance having to evacuate Kherson for a week, and possibly a week's worth of operational delay for a potential crossing. Unless the AFU was mid-stream (literally) and has maintained good opsec on that? If the AFU isn't launching an amphibious crossing, keep your dam powder dry for when they are. What am I missing?

Step 1: Undecided the enemy's defensive theory as a denial of service attack agains his decision making apparatus.

I guess he's too young to remember the buildup for Overlord.

The Fleet in Being moves to deep strike.

It really seems like Russia has decided to speed run the Japanese strategy in the Pacific, and that the Ukranians have learned well from the American counter-strategy. The Russian strategy at Bakhmut mirrors the Japanese in the Solomons (a brutal attritional campaign for territory that was of very limited strategic value once the idea of a blitz was off the table), and the Ukranians, like the Americans, held on while simultaneously developing a second fighting force off the line. The recent actions perhaps portend something like the Battle of the Philippine Sea, where the results of American corrosive warfare (both in the Solomons and the underwater blockade) became obvious for the first time. In particular, the battle revealed the different first derivatives of pilot training and quality. It also revealed the effects of American ISR dominance, which increased the second derivative of the difference in pilot training and quality. That battle collapsed the Japanese perception of their own option space, as it revealed the inability of their naval air arm to effect any strategic results. As the Americans realized this, the Big Gray Ball was free to maneuver strategically and force the sort of hard choices about dislocation on the Japanese that the Ukranians seem to be forcing on the Russians.

On the one hand, this isn't super surprising. The US spends an arm and a leg maintaining up to date maps, and even then infrequently used ones can go a long time between refreshes. I once worked on a map update project where the most recent ones were from the 1960s. It's faster and easier now that there's abundant good open source mapping, but still time consuming and expensive. That said, we did that map refresh because we thought we might have to intervene in a year or two in a particular country. The idea that you'd intentionally invade a country with thirty year old maps reveals a focus (like the IJN) on the cult of the shiny object, and not on the boring but essential things that make an army work.

I wonder what platform the Ukranians will launch (are launching?) the Storm Shadow from? Have they adapted it to their Soviet platforms like the HARM?

This is a really fascinating idea. There are different kinds of losing as well: - Popular Destruction: the winning power exterminates the losing power's people entirely (common in the ancient world, less so today). - Cultural Destruction: the winning power destroys or remakes the losing power's culture (USA -> Japan) - State Collapse: the winning power dissolves the state of the losing power (Allies -> Germany) - Regime Change: the winning power replaces the government of the losing power (USA -> Iraq, round 2) - Military Defeat: the winning power demolishes the military of the losing power (USA -> Iraq, round 1) Each side is attempting to impose one or more losses on the other side, and each side negotiates what sort of losses are acceptable for itself. For example, the Romans often targeted their adversaries with a regime change. Local elites will be replaced with Roman elites, or local elites will swear allegiance to Roman elites, leaving all the substrata more or less intact. If an adversary proved faithless in that, the Romans rapidly ratcheted up to imposing a cultural or popular loss. For this conflict, the Russians have projected a wild variety of strategic aims, at times indicating that they want to impose a regime on the Ukranians, but also communicating that they want to impose either a cultural or popular loss. Conversely, Ukraine has to aim for more than just imposing a military loss (which they've either achieved, or are close to achieving), threading a fine line between the collapse of the Russian government and the collapse of the Russian state. The Russians ought to be aiming to contain the loss to the level of a military defeat, but their own rhetoric is making that harder to do, as they've couched Ukranian/NATO objectives as state collapse, popular and cultural destruction.

About two thousand pages ago I suggested that the best analogical comparison to the Russians was the Japanese. The Russians really do appear to be emulating the Japanese playbook, which puts us somewhere after Pearl Harbor (the failed attempt to decapitate Ukraine and win in three days), the Solomons campaign (analogical to the attritional summer Bakhmut offensive), after the beginning of Cartwheel and the push up the Marianas (the one-two punch of the Ukrainian fall offensives), and around the time of the battle of the Philippine Sea, when the declining quality of Japanese aviators really began to tell (perhaps Vulhedar and that failed river crossing). The Russians even appear to be attempting gyokusai-like assaults in the Donbas. To me the open question is how to convince the Russians to abandon a war that they've already lost. It took firebombing, nuclear weapons, and the undersea blockade to get the Japanese leadership there, and that almost resulted in a civil war. How does the west communicate to the Russians that they've lost without similar loss of life?

Yikes. In order for that to be anywhere in the neighborhood of a good idea you'd have to be very confident in your procedures for not accidentally lobbing a missile with a warhead still attached. Nothing I've seen suggests that the Russia armed forces should be confident in that particular way.

I wonder whether our staff colleges teach the Odyssey, which is all about informational warfare?

So, my thesis is that the Russians are trying for a speed run of Japan's WWII strategy right now. Phase 1 was a replay of Pearl Harbor but aimed at Kiev - an attempt at a decisive victory that hinged on the opponent giving up. Phase 2 was the incremental march in the Donbas; a grinding attritional campaign that mirrors the fight in the Solomons. Phase 3 was the loss of strategic initiative and transition to static defense against an adversary who can attack on two axes; the Hollandia campaign and the Marianas campaign. All throughout, the quality of Japanese equipment and training faded while the quality of the USN improved. Japanese strategic thinking ossified to a policy of inflicting suffering while dying. If we think of war as communication, it took the annihilation of the IJN, the undersea blockade, the firebombings *and* two nuclear weapons to break through to the one person we had to communicate our resolve to. When Hirohito decided for surrender, the war ended (though this was a close run thing). I think what no one has identified in Ukraine yet is how to communicate to the Russian equivalent of Hirohito that our resolve is such that the war should end on terms unfavorable to the Russians. We also aren't sure that there is a decision maker in Russia who could end the war. If Putin signaled surrender, would it stick? The Ukrainians don't have signaling tools equivalent to what the Allies had either, which is tricky.

I wonder what the captured equipment recycling system is like? For thinks like a modern BMP-3 taken intact, I imagine it makes it back to the front quickly. And there are workshops refitting other captured equipment in western Ukraine and Poland, right? Does NATO already have copies of all the Russian equipment, or would they want to "borrow" things like the EWAR vehicle for a bit before returning it to Ukranian service?

These maps are really helpful understanding what's going on. Thanks for making them.

Oh definitely - the carrier is worth the protection if you can armor the deck without reducing the size of the air wing or making the ship unstable. But if you had to choose an armored deck or 20 more Hellcats, I know which Spruance would choose.

The difference I see is that we had one 3rd/5th Fleet, and the Japanese had a small number of immovable logistical nodes. While the chain is analogically similar (in some ways), to me the question is whether it can scale down. Like, you can build a 10GW nuclear plant to power a country. Can you build one to power a car? No. You can build that protective chain for a fleet of a hundred ships. Can you build it for a group of thirty tanks? I'm not sure?

I suppose the answer depends on what effects the "tank company" can produce? The reason we built that protective bubble around 3rd/5th Fleet was to upend the conventional pre- and early war wisdom that islands defended by aviation assets could not be reliably attacked outside the range of land based bombers. The theory was that in a fight between an island and a fleet, the fleet loses because you can't sink islands. And Japan built its defensive structure around that theory. We proved it wrong. So if you've got a defensive theory built around the idea that mechanized offensive loses to light infantry fog (which seems very true right now), what would it look like to build a maneuver element that was protected the way 3rd/5th Fleet was protected? I'm not sure it's currently possible; we had enormous industrial advantages by the time we sorted out the big blue ball of death that would be hard to replicate today. And if you could do that, what effects would it produce and are they worth the cost?

APS strikes me a bit like armoring the flight decks of aircraft carriers in the 40s. It's a fine idea as far as it goes, but it won't stop a dedicated attacker, it marginally improves survivability, and it reduces the plane handling capabilities of the ship. If you need the deck armor, something has already gone catastrophically wrong in the chain of things meant to prevent your carrier from coming under attack. The protective chain for 3rd fleet looked something like this: 1. Degrade Japanese air capabilities by destroying plane production facilities/materials. (No planes, no attacks.) If that fails... 2. Degrade Japanese air capabilities by destroying planes and airstrips. (No operational planes, no attacks.) If that fails... 3. Be somewhere unexpected. (3rd/5th fleet could move around the Pacific faster than the Japanese could reallocate reinforcements) If that fails... 4. Use ISR superiority to vector swarms of Hellcats at incoming planes. (Active defense beyond standoff range.) If that fails... 5. Dedicated fleet elements throw up walls of flak. (Active defense within standoff range.) If that fails... 6. Drive like a drunken sailor at top speed. (Displace to avoid attacks.) If that fails... 7. Hope the deck armor or torpedo blisters take the hit. What would it look like to build a protective chain like that for a company of tanks? What does a CIC look like for a tank company? Radar picket destroyers? CAP? I think it's all analogically applicable.

For great Justice take off every HiMARS indeed. It's interesting how effectively Ukrainian communication has minimized showing human casualties and focused on material and memes. There's a fine line there that they've done a very impressive job walking. Are there categorically similar memes being produced by the Russians for internal consumption?

Oh - and Toll is indeed fantastic. But I still tip the hat to Morison. In the same way that this forum has a better understanding of the generalities of the current war for understanding the particulars of things, Morison's detailed account of every action the navy undertook is fantastic for understanding the war as a whole. You just have to saddle in for 10 kilopages of text...

That's what I'm not sure about. There's a great anecdote about MacArthur at the end of Toll's Gotterdamerung, that when he landed with his command staff in Japan, he told them to leave their sidearms in the plane. Practically, what're you going to do with a 45 against millions of Japanese?, but Toll notes that the real motivation was a flex: we have beaten you so thoroughly and you know that we have beaten you so thoroughly that we don't need to carry firearms. The decision was decided in a way that the Japanese would not undecide. And it stuck. The Japanese, for all their ferocity of weeks before, stopped. So the real end of the war was a decision by the Japanese not to continue it (driven by the Emperor's decision to stop the fighting after Hiroshima). Even if the Ukrainians push the Russians back to the border, that doesn't end the war. They Russians have to decide that it is over, and that they'll cease lobbing cruise missiles at civilian areas and firing artillery across the border, and that they'll allow free passage of the Azov sea. How do you compel them to decide that given that marching to Moscow is off the table? That where I think the role of indirect communication and information supremacy will be really important. Can projected friction alone do that? I don't know. The point of a decisive battle is that everyone sees that it's decisive. How do you shape opinion without that?

I think it's time for all the folks who have been focused on land war to read some naval history! In particular, Ian Toll's The Conquering Tide offers an example of exactly the sort of friction projection leading to collapse that you're describing at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. It also details how we build a military that was built around anti-friction capabilities. At the tactical level: The friction of having to fly their Zeroes down the slot to engage Henderson field meant that a huge fraction of Japanese aviation losses were operational as opposed to combat for the duration of the Solomons campaign. Weather was the real killer. We projected more of that friction on them by degrading airfields further down the slot so that the Japanese would have to engage at long range. We built a system robust against that sort friction by incorporating self-sealing fuel tanks and by aggressively using PBY Catalinas and submarines to rescue downed airmen and return them to flying units. At the operational level: we ran two offensive operations - the push in the southwest pacific under MacArthur towards Hollandia and Rabaul and the central pacific under Nimitz towards Saipan. This tick-tock operational cadence forced null decisions on the Japanese: the couldn't decide which offensives to mass against and consequently kept their battle fleet in being. That null decision also meant that the Japanese moved their ships around frequently without committing them to battle. More operational losses (and submarines!) and wasted fuel, which they had little of. At the strategic level: our undersea blockade imposed enormous friction on the whole Japanese war industry - it's better to sink oilers than capital ships because without fuel, capital ships are lovely hotels. The Japanese navy bemoaned this, calling it the Hotel Yamato, because it would be too expensive to have it sortie regularly. Once the 3rd/5th fleet got up and running, that undersea blockade became something like modern deep strike. We could hit anywhere in the Japanese Empire with little warning, and we chose to disrupt their plane production and staging infrastructure regularly. That forced the Japanese to concede lots of territory without fighting for it, and to fight ineffectively and without reinforcement where they did decide to fight. The whole Pacific Campaign was cumulativist friction projection onto the Japanese until their war machine collapsed into an armed mob. Of course, we could do that because our industrial might allowed us to put together the 3rd/5th fleet, essentially producing two whole additional US Navies during the war. Here are some stay thoughts: 1. If your strategy is negative-decision focused, how do you maintain home-front morale without decisive battles? Abstract friction is great if you understand it. How do you sell that to people? 2. In WW1, the negative-decision strategy was one of exhaustion. Is there a negative-decision strategy that can win without that? We ultimately did engage in annihilational battles against the Japanese because we badly overmatched them by '44, and it still took a pair of nuclear weapons. Can you win without exhausting your enemy of without the shock and awe of some sort of annihilational capability? 3. What does a modern anti-friction capability look like in a military? What's the equivalent of self-sealing tanks and PBY Catalinas?