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Once again, this thread is valuable when it stays on the topic of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
(As a citizen of the United States, do any of you think my opinion of Dutch politicians, Australian politics, or worse, a combination of both, would either be pertinent or accurate?)
 

Pions worked very good, firing from position in 5 km from my house to Hostomel airfield (33 km by the map). Alas, their shell hit hangar with An-225 Mriya, destroying it, when dozens of Russian VDV vehicles gathered around it for refueling ( 

Once again, this thread is valuable when it stays on the topic of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
(As a citizen of the United States, do any of you think my opinion of Dutch politicians, Australian politics, or worse, a combination of both, would either be pertinent or accurate?)
 

I agree. 
Anything the 155 can do...the 203 can do bigger.
The 2S7 Pion has a 203mm gun with a length of 56 calibers. I'm seeing published ranges of 37km to 47km (I'm not sure if that's with rocket-assisted projectiles). I think RAP would tend to induce accuracy issues, but I am not an expert in that, just applying some "gut feel" to what a rocket motor would do to a ballistic projectile. Minor differences in the boost motor would affect the shell dispersion, IMO.
That's why the excaliber is so important: not only is it boosted (via base bleed for less drag, not a "push") but it has "glide" and guidance capability. That counteracts (and improves upon) any irregularities in the base bleed or fin extension system.
The US 155s are all L39 and show a non-boosted range ~24km.  Excaliber pushes it to 40km.
The European 155s are L52 and have longer ranges. PzH2000, non-boosted, about 35km.
(The experimental program to replace the current M109 with an L58 cannon, coupled with a RAP round, may have a range of 70km up to 100km (with other changes). They've got a new acronym for whatever the new SP Arty would be.)
I would think sustained fire is far easier to do with a cannon than with missiles or rockets.
A modern 8" cannon with excaliber-type projectile would be...impressive.

Having heard on the BBC (who just this morning got around to the famous bridging fiasco as breaking news) about how Russia is threatening to encircle Sievierodonetsk, I decided to summarise how the Russian 'threatening to encircle' reports have changed over the war so far:

Once again, this thread is valuable when it stays on the topic of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
(As a citizen of the United States, do any of you think my opinion of Dutch politicians, Australian politics, or worse, a combination of both, would either be pertinent or accurate?)
 

Once again, this thread is valuable when it stays on the topic of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
(As a citizen of the United States, do any of you think my opinion of Dutch politicians, Australian politics, or worse, a combination of both, would either be pertinent or accurate?)
 

Once again, this thread is valuable when it stays on the topic of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
(As a citizen of the United States, do any of you think my opinion of Dutch politicians, Australian politics, or worse, a combination of both, would either be pertinent or accurate?)
 

Once again, this thread is valuable when it stays on the topic of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
(As a citizen of the United States, do any of you think my opinion of Dutch politicians, Australian politics, or worse, a combination of both, would either be pertinent or accurate?)
 

Can you take a hint? Or about 5? Shut this down, now.

I live too far from the center of city. I suppose, there were some attempts to sneak on guarded territory of Govt. quarter, because even in our distant district I heard several clashes with short, but intensive sounds of rifles firing, so there really were many diversion groups around. But I have too little faith to the words of Arestovich about dozen attempts and "epic battles" near Bankova street with Russian diversion groups. 
My advice to you and all - never believe the words of Arestovich. Even he say something true it should be divided in many times. The mission of Arestovich is not bring true picture of war, but to calm population with heroic victorious tales. He is just a part of PsyOps for inner customer. 

Battalion “Kraken” clears Pytomnyk north of Kharkiv.  Captured MT-LB is from 200th MRB.
92nd Mech Brigade during road wars around Kharkiv:
A bit more on refuzniks:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/12/they-were-furious-the-russian-soldiers-refusing-to-fight-in-ukraine?CMP=share_btn_tw

Fascinating maps of how old history holds over even into the present day.
The English possessions in 100 years war vs. modern French electoral returns is incredible.
https://twitter.com/Valen10Francois/status/1524040715352817665?t=qtSf6xKyMMmESqNxNjC-AQ&s=19
 

LOL, barely visible on that black line....  Before / After

 

I'm a few hours behind, so forgive me for bringing up the bridge again. 
 
Here's an image of the bridge site, with solid blocks from Steve from what he (and others, @The_Capt included) seemed to be saying happened.

 
Obviously, that is a level of of incompetency that I could not believe. So, what I wrote above reflected how I thought it really went. Which looks like this (my bridges are outlined, not solid):

 
Well, then Steve posted a closup:

 
All I can say is, I will never again assume even the basest level of competency when looking at any Russian military activity in this war.
Stunning. Simply stunning. Basic combat engineering. Or so I'd thought...
 

Interesting map over roaming Russian SIMs in Ukraine.
 

LOL, looks like my pixeltruppen, when the AI decided for the enemy BMP coy to cross that river at the single available bridge all at the same time ...

Destroying of Russian SP-howitzer by 93rd mech. brigade in Izium area. Huge detonation and shockwave. There is unknown either single gun or some arty unit turned out in the range of this explosion
 

So this is a common thought, especially in the American artillery community about a decade ago. The issue is that valuing precision over mass briefs well, but only in certain situations. Against point targets or specific stationary systems (ADA, command posts), yes - precision is crucial! Much better to hit it once and be done. Guided rockets, laser and GPS guided shells, and other precision munitions are great tools. But that’s only the portion of the fight. The Excalibur or GMLRS capabilities sound good on paper, but the realities of its employment preclude individual targeting of maneuvering vehicles in almost all cases.   Even laser guided munitions can be difficult to utilize - the US Army had a laser guided round (Copperhead) but got rid of it due to usability issues. The artillery answer to maneuvering units is MASS - throw as many dumb rounds as possible and saturate the area. It is far cheaper and faster to throw dumb rounds at the enemy then try to conduct laser designation on individual vehicles. Imagine a vehicle in heavy tree cover, designated by a UAV sitting at a significant slant angle to avoid enemy ADA  - how can you be sure the laser is actually designating the right place? The reality is more complicated then you think. How can you refine a grid accurately enough to achieve effects with a GPS guided munition? A lot of effort goes into developing targetable data for guided munitions - otherwise you miss your target very precisely. 
You also have to appreciate the morale and suppressive effect massed artillery represents - even harassing fires can pin a unit in place, limiting movement and observation. It isn’t always about see target, kill target - your UAV may never see the ATGM team in the forest, but if you mass a battalions worth of artillery on that tree line for 30 minutes I guarantee whoever is there will NOT be looking for your tanks. Expensive and limited precision munitions can not replicate that effect.
This is where you can’t look at this and assume guided munitions, just because they achieved a direct hit on a vehicle. Howitzers can achieve this effect given enough rounds and proper adjustment… it’s just unlikely, but not impossible. 
 
I have some thoughts on this video in particular that I will address tonight. There are several other comments in this thread that I’d like to discuss as well (including most of your post BFC, I’ll get there I promise!) but I need to wait till after work to give it the proper attention. 

GPS tracker has each drone with a class more than a toy ) But COTS drones is mostly mortar battery levlel or small tactical units. Artillery mostly uses Furia winged drones, which can determintate targets geographical coordinates and translate it into square coordinates with transmition to operator. 

An excellent piece on an Ukrainian artillery unit, videos like this make me miss being a commander. The first several minutes are what really caught my eye, and I'll share some artillery minded observations with you.
First, this is obviously a direct contradiction to my previous claim that most units I see are in the open! I think that's still the case but highlights that drone footage isn't necessarily the ground truth of what is happening - maybe we aren't seeing the videos of artillery in treelines being hit because the UAVs aren't finding them. More on this later however.
Second, it seems that the officer, who I am assuming is the Battery Commander, is the primary person responsible for fire direction. This is a very European way of doing things, and is not really a surprise. The American military (to my knowledge) is one of the few militaries that has a dedicated fire direction section with its own officer that computes firing data. Of note, the American style FDC was "invented" during the interwar period, and allowed a single FDC to control multiple batteries or even battalion. There are stories during World War II of an entire American Corps worth of artillery conducting Time on Target missions. This is contrasted with other nation's FDCs, who had difficulty massing batteries on dynamic targets due to the decentralized nature of battery level fire control. History notes aside, observe that he is using a tablet and phone for what I assume is the calculation of firing data. Presumably this would be the GIS ARTA app discussed early, used to compute a technical firing solution to lay the howitzers. The actual computation of data is not hard, with enough time and patience I could take the American firing tables for a howitzer and put it all in a spreadsheet that spits out an answer as well. A pretty robust solution on the Ukrainian side.
Howitzers begin firing at about 30 seconds in. They are firing off the traditional optical fire control systems, and at 40 seconds in you can see the gunner looking through his pantel (panoramic telescope) to re-lay the howitzer after firing. Note that is highly unlikely that he is receiving new firing data as the narration later on suggests. I have yet to meet a howitzer crew, fire direction crew, or observer team that could accurately and rapidly re-direct fire on a maneuvering vehicle and have it land directly on top. I think this was a nice coincidence that was emphasized in editing to create a better narrative. A little example of the power of video editing that can lead to incorrect conclusions for those not in the know.
I'll take this opportunity to segue briefly into my previous comments about howitzers having to remain close together. One of the most crucial aspects of achieving effective indirect fire is accurate location and direction for the firing unit. Every howitzer in a firing unit needs to be facing the same direction, accurate down to the miliradian. It greatly simplifies firing data calculation, as you only need the data for one howitzer as opposed to 4 or 6 or 8 - all the other howitzers, since they are pointed in the same direction and generally in the same area, can fire that same data. The close you are to your "base piece", the more accurate the fire. So how do they get all the howitzers pointed in the same direction? Enter the aiming circle:

If it looks like a theodolite used by engineers for surveying, you aren't far off, the concept is the same. Through math, multiple rotating dials, and lots of shouting, the aiming circle operator relays direction to each howitzer until every gun is pointed in the same direction. A key part of this step is the pantel that I mentioned earlier, which is how each howitzer references the aiming circle for proper direction. If you firing is spread out in a tree line, or over a great distance, the ability for each howitzer to see the aiming circle with their pantel can be lost. This greatly complicates laying the battery. Additionally, units spread out or in odd formations reduces the accuracy of your barrage - remember, each gun is firing the same data, regardless of their position! Now, with modern computing technology, the ability to calculate firing data for each individual gun can be trivial - assuming you know the location of each gun, down to a 10m or 1m radius. In a GPS degraded environment, that can be quite difficult and time consuming. It's much easier to have everyone located together in a formation that can see the aiming circle and in close proximity to your base howitzer. Then you only need the location of one howitzer.
How do digital systems change this? Well, in a digital system like the Paladin and M777, each howitzer has a GPS and inertial navigation system that accurately tracks the location, but also the direction. The requirement to be laid by the aiming circle goes away, assuming your equipment is working, as the howitzer ALWAYS knows which direction it is pointing. Laying the battery and executing fire missions become simple tasks. You can have howitzers spread out over a kilometer and calculate firing data for each one at the press of a button. The reality is of course more complicated however, and the aiming circle and our "manual" methods still have a role even with fully digital howitzers, but I don't think I will get into that here for a variety of reasons.
Moving on from my not so brief segue, one more point I would like to highlight - at the end of their mission, they all jump into bunker, as a precaution against Russian counter battery that never comes. They have obviously made the decision that taking cover is preferable to displacement - a notion that goes against a lot of Western doctrine. And their cover is not overly complex - enlarged foxholes with trees to stop shrapnel. I suspect the reason we see videos with "abandoned" howitzers sitting in fields reflects exactly the situation illustrated in the video - crew live in bunkers in the treeline and occupy howitzers only when firing. If your howitzers are out in the open, they will be going for that, not you! Again, not something you'll see in a lot of Western doctrine or training. Still, I suspect the level of counterfire doesn't justify the time or effort required to conduct rapid displacements of artillery on a routine basis.
For counterfire I think a lot of what we could be seeing would be probably be described as cross-cueing of intelligence assets in the American military - firefinder radars pickup an enemy battery, but instead of unmasking your own artillery to conduct immediate counterfire, you send a UAV to confirm target location and disposition - greatly enhancing your ability to bring effective fires down on the enemy.

I probably have more questions then observations at this point. I don't think anything fundamentally has changed from previous conflict, even dating back to WW 1. Artillery is still a crucial arm of any modern military and is your only all weather, truly responsive means of shaping the battlefield. Artillery is the King of Battle, even with today's technology. I can't say I've been truly shocked at anything I've seen so far.
All of my observations are based off OSINT videos - I imagine most of the US military's observations of the conflict are still close hold at higher levels due to the sensitivity of collecting in an active conflict.
Drones have proven to be incredibly useful but I don't see anything revolutionary or fundamentally doctrine-altering with them - aerial observers have been a thing since the Civil War, and artillery battalions during WW2 literally had their own observation planes sometimes - we can just get them closer then ever before without risking a human. You still see a lot of "long range" observation from drones in these strike videos however - so there is definitely a real threat of ADA/EW that is keeping drones at a distance. It's harder then ever before to hide your forces from observation, but I imagine there are a lot of smart people churning away at a practical military answer to the UAV problem, and I think it will have an easier solution then the tank will have dealing with top down attack, fire-and-forget ATGM systems.
Loitering munitions I'm still not 100% sold on - probably useful for high value targets (radar, ADA, command posts), but seem hard to utilize at a more tactical level.  Honestly, it seems like a complex solution to a problem that isn't terribly hard to solve with more conventional and flexible fires. The Switchblade 300 is seriously unimpressive to me, a glorified flying grenade. Great for taking out an ISIS leader in the middle of a crowd, not so impactful in a war where individual casualties are a given and virtually meaningless in a tactical or operational sense. I don't think the Switchblade 300 is going to single-handedly stop a town from being lost. Would LOVE to see an actual statistical analysis on the effectiveness of loitering munitions, that isn't all buzz words and "ooooh scary kamikaze drones!!"
Armored vehicles seem to be more vulnerable to artillery then commonly believed in the US/NATO. Lots of footage of (what seems to be) destroyed vehicles due to rocket and cannon fire.
Not seeing much utilization of mortars. Not sure if this is due to a lack of use, improper characterization of OSINT videos, or a function of UKR/RUS TOE lacking a significant amount of mortar tubes?
Russian and Ukrainian artillery forces seldom use effective cover and are often lined up in neat rows in the open, instead of utilizing dispersion and tree lines. I think this is mainly a function of the manual nature of most of their artillery, which requires howitzers to be somewhat closer and more orderly for a variety of technical reasons I won't get in to (unless you would like me to). This is in contract to the digital, self-locating, self-laying howitzers the US military has, which have a more robust ability to "roam". Of note, the M777s we gifted to Ukraine do not seem to have this self-locating capability, as the two videos I've seen of the howitzers operating in Ukraine showed them lacking these digital systems. These may be the Canadian howitzers though. Will be following that one closely.
Lack of digital systems aside, the above does stir some questions in my mind on the actual effectiveness and feasibility of true "counterfire" - meaning a howitzer shoots, then immediately has to move to avoid rapid and accurate fires from an opposing artillery unit. I don't think UKR and RUS artillery units are so pig headed or naive to not appreciate the usefulness of emplacing in a tree line - I wonder if the impetus to do so is even there. What I mean by that is: how often are artillery units shooting and then immediately taking fire? I don't see many videos of fires being directed on artillery units actively engaged in shooting, displacing, or even moving between firing points. In fact, in most videos of fire against an artillery battery, I don't see any people at all! Just the howitzers. And videos I've seen of artillery units firing don't seem to have a terrible sense of urgency on the need to displace immediately, which raises even more questions for me on why that would be the case. Again, would LOVE to do a deep dive into counterfire procedures during this conflict, and the effectiveness of firefinder radars and whether we truly need to "shoot and scoot" after every mission to stay alive. From my limited view of things, I'm just not seeing the same counterfire fight our doctrine envisions us fighting - but maybe that's just due to the nature of what videos are actually released versus what is happening... would love to know the actual ground truth there.

Trent Telenko's posts on Twitter really bother me because he seems to take singular events and extrapolate them into generalities that sound good on paper and which people lap up. It started with his tires post, and if he saw the quality of some of the equipment I had as a battery commander (yes, including their tires) he'd probably have an aneurysm. I've also seen my own share of 40 mile convoys of stopped American logistical vehicles, the difference being that US soldiers got to go home after their training with some lessons learned, and the Russians didn't. And as an artillery officer I don't even want to talk about his observations about VT fuzes.

I'm not entirely sure where he is going with this thread, but having actually worked in a Division level strike cell in Iraq, processing missions from SOF, ground space owners, and targets developed within our own cell, the so called "JAG officer poisoned chain of command" is a gross over simplification at best. Yes, times to strike were lengthy, but it was designed that way and NOT due to JAG considerations, and we were certainly capable of being faster, and routinely did so when the situation required. Trying to compare a COIN oriented environment to the modern LSCO fight is ignorant, and as a OC/T who see units training Brigade level fire support in large scale combat operations on a monthly basis, we are certainly faster then the "hour" he claims we are at. From what he describes, the GIS ARTA app is very similar to the US Army's AFATDS system - designed to process a large range of target requests and associate them with a shooter. It's good to see Ukraine adopting this style of software, but it's hardly unique, and the realities of maintaining the digital communication linkages required for full functionality of the system can be hard in a contested environment. The US military has a difficult enough time doing that in the field, and we have much better comms equipment then Starlink and a lot less incoming rounds.
Sure makes for a good sounding Twitter thread though.

If this is true, I need to buy these hackers some drinks!