Sarjen

Anyone posted this?  First if genuine this is really impressive open source work.  Second, holy crap.
 
 

Russia has to upgrade their LSTs.
 

Russia has to upgrade their LSTs.
 

Russia has to upgrade their LSTs.
 

This makes more sense based on the visual evidence than Tochka-U or MLRS:
 

Perhaps it was a Switchblade 600

https://streamable.com/dme6ft

This one one looks like a clear MLRS strike (Tochka-U submunitions?). Lots of data and different angles. Someone is going to have their work cut out for them to piece this together.

As the old saying goes “he who has the gold makes the rules”
The US has already made the Russian tank force obsolete.
it’s been put on notice for some time that if your Russian tank force comes in contact with a well trained and motivated western armed force expect catastrophic losses.

https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/tm2s82/russian_landing_ship_orsk_destroyed_at_port/
 
excellent drone video of the aftermath. One Alligator-class total loss, two Ropucha-class retreating, both on fire, one significantly.

Machor,

For sure, I screwed up what I wrote the first time, but am so mentally fuzzy right now that, even after checking, am sure I got the TBs on the wrong side, but also a) which conflict is the right one, and b) whether the video creator got something crossed up. Regardless, apologies for the resulting confusion, but. the core point remains: Unless the reports are completely false, the Karushka-4 is either temporarily or permanently damaging or destroying mission-critical electronics on the Bayraktar TB2s, downing those targeted.

As it happens, I have some experience with such things as HPMs (High Power Microwave) DEWs (Directed Energy Weapons) from my Rockwell days. Indeed, was a co-founder of the DEWWG (Direct Energy Weapon Working Group). Such energies can do all sorts of unpleasant things: including fricasseeing missiles on aircraft carrier flight decks because of the energy from a plethora of radar and other transmitters gets inside via a tiny crack and fries otherwise protected microelectronics, detonate fuel and ordnance, burn out radar and ESM receivers, etc. What will jam a radar at long range can damage or destroy all manner of sensitive gear at lesser ranges. Recall, too, this is a weapon good vs ground, air and space targets. A Swiss Army Knife EW system, if you will.

The traditional Soviet approach was to field a jammer to defeat each active surveillance or bomb/nav system the opposition (led by the US) deployed, such as SLAR, JSTARS, TFR. By those standards, Karushka-4 is not evolutionary but revolutionary, because it combines so many capabilities into one devastating system. The transliterated Russian acronym for what we in the west call EW is REC, RadioElectronic Combat, and now the Russians have not just a jammer but damage inflicter, even a target killer. This is precisely why there is such urgency to get that van back to the US and begin meticulous technical exploitation to see what this immensely potent weapon system can do. Even lacking the combined intercept and jamming hardware, about which a great deal can be learned from the imagery, knowing power supplies and so on, the real secrets of Karuska-4 lie in the computers of the command van, for that is where we will learn the Russian understanding of our various targeted systems and what the strike against them looks like, in terms of frequencies, waveform, signal strength, pulse repetition interval, ERP (Effective Radiated Power) and more.

Regards,

John Kettler

I do computer simulations for a living, physics-based simulations, no human decisions involved.  I'd say the issue is not AI or quantum calcs or anything that fancy.  The issue is the data entered into the simulations.  If the russians and ukrainians were modeled accurately and the simulation 'physics' could handle the small scale unit effects, then it could be modeled.  The reality is that Russia was entered as steel when it's actually cheap plastic, while the ukrainians were entered as plastic instead of steel.

The other important point is that modelling in general (thinking in terms of scientific modelling as a whole, rather than anything military specific) is often not about "predicting the future" in the sense that most people think of it. More often, i is about seeing how outcomes change with changing assumptions and input conditions.
You might find that parameter A barely matters at all - you can change it by a factor of 10 and it makes 1% difference to the outcome. So for parameter  A, don't waste too much time trying to evaluate it precisely. While parameter B might have a large effect on the outcome for relatively small changes, which means that your prediction is only as good as your ability to measure B accurately (and tells you that you need to know all of its interactions very precisely). 
So often it isn't about predicting the future, it is about determining which the critical parameters are in your model, and what information you therefore need to be able to find out in order to make any kind of relevant prediction at all. It is about identifying the critical factors and understanding how they interact with each other.
We've all seen factors in this war that probably wasn't in many military models before, or were only just starting to be appreciated. The willingness of Russian troops to abandon important equipment. The ability of light infantry with modern ATGMs to be able to hit high value targets. The use of drones in reconnaisance, fire control and as weapon systems. Crowd-sourcing intelligence from a friendly population. Modelling can (hopefully) be used to figure out how important each of these are and how they interact with each other.

Bleep me, he called it chapter and verse!

Some humour is necessary after all. Enjoy Alexander Nezorov!
Uncanny predictions of Ukraine's war from April 2021 by former Russian MP Nevzorov
 
 

Mariupol is in ruins and I regret I never had the chance to visit south coast of Ukraine. The greek community there dates from the ancient times, and expanded after the fall of Constantinople and Byzantium from people that fled the ottoman purges. So much history lost in a few weeks, so sad. I wonder how trapped people there can still cope with no water, food or heating. The greek consul there was the last EU diplomat to leave Ukraine, and he compared Mariupol to cities that were wiped out from war, like Guernica, Aleppo Grozny, Stalingrad...

So this was from this board on 26 Feb:
"Overall Summary:  As of the first 72 hours of the war, it appears that the Russian military has overestimated its own capabilities and/or the capabilities of Ukrainian resistance and has not likely met the timelines it had set during pre-war planning.  The assessment is that the next 24-48 hours will be critical in the outcome of this war and if Russian forces are not about to take Kyiv and inflict some serious damage to the Ukrainian people's will, their own strategic center of gravity will become more vulnerable. "
That was 2 days into the entire thing.
Since then we have heard a lot of pundits and retired military folks try and wrestle with this whole thing.  I am not surprised formal DOD, MOD assessments are showing what they are to be honest because pretty much from the start of the this war just about everyone has been using macro-quantitative calculus to try and predict/model what has been going on. 
On a CNN video just a few days ago Gen Petraeus was describing the situation in Mariupol and why it matters.   He did a pretty good job describing the drive for a "land-bridge" between Crimea and the Donbas and why the Russians are trying so hard in this area.  Then he slipped right into the old macro-quantitative thinking.  He outlined how once Mariupol was taken it would free up Russian forces to advance north and cut off great swaths of Ukrainian in the East.  I have seen various predictions of Russian "pincer moves" and the like.  This all makes perfect sense if one is applying conventional warfare metrics, all largely based on macro-quantitative calculus of force sizes/ratios and combat power.
What they are missing, and frankly it is not surprising to see it emerge on a wargaming board, is a view through a lens of micro-qualitative calculus; playing CM, in all its versions, has changed the way we see warfare.   All CM veterans see the signs of something different at a micro-level: abandoned vehicles, loss of high value assets, loss of high level commanders, videos of embarrassing Russian cluster-f#cks and evidence of UA successes just about everywhere.  A lot of these metrics are qualitative and when combined with the macro-quantitative they create a very different picture. 
Social media has allowed us to see a macro - micro-qualitative view as well; we can basically upscale our micro-view through very wide sampling.  By doing this, a lot of us have noted that the texture of this war is looking very different.  It is one, for the Russians, of extreme friction caused by the UA approach.  The Russians are fighting in an operational tar pit, the entire battlespace is sticky for them.  Some of this is by their own shortfalls, while in many places it is by design by the defending forces. I do not know who the military master-mind is on the Ukrainian side but he has clearly been reading about Finland, Giap and the Comanches.  The UA has not only stopped the Russian military, they changed the fabric of the battlespace for them.
This thing is not over yet and will likely continue to evolve.  I am not entirely onboard with the Russian collapse scenario, but we are literally a couple key indicators away.

Machor,

The  missile sponge aspect is the least of the impacts. For starters, RuAF pilots get very little flying time, and their know-how toolkit is extremely limited in terms of what they can do. Free hunt is by far their worst historically in terms of fighter ops. It is, after all, the antithesis of rigid GCI (and these says, maybe MAINSTAY AWACS) control. Consequently, this requires the best and most experienced crews to fly the missions. These, of course, are the senior officers. Noticed how many of these guys are on the running dead and captured list? Not an accident!  These guys are already run ragged and now have a whole new unforeseen problem and a very angry customer screaming for relief from it. And. when people are tired and stressed, the already fundamentally dangerous act of flying a high performance aircraft becomes far more that way. This leads to crashes on the one hand and avoidable downings on the other.

Today's SAMs are not the SA-2s of yore and demand more more in terms of reaction time, proper CM selection and radical evasive maneuvers. Thus, the planes being flown by the best RuAF has in any unit fighting the TBs are not well postured to deal with UKR SAMs or even AAA, given how low the TB2s fly. 

But there's much more to cover.The Su-35 is, by Russian standards, an extremely sophisticated and complex bird, on par, say, with the US F-14A, at best, the F-14D. This is based on F-14 type (stolen) TWS radar, long range AAMs, etc. As of the late 1970s, the readiness rate of the F-14A was a mere 60%, a situation so dire that, in order to conduct strike ops, the US Navy had to rotate assignments between two carriers in the same battle group, with one doing nothing but strike, the other strike escorts and various CAPs. Yes, it was that bad! 

But remember, the RuAF squadron is 12 planes, not the 24 in the US Navy and Air Force, so there's far less resilience to any number of problems, including possibilities of cannibalization to keep planes flying. In turn, an entire aviation regiment of this type is 24 planes, one US squadron equivalent. The maintenance specialists are at regiment, not squadron level. And if an all-out effort to find and kill TB2s is the regimental combat assignment, that's where all the scarce resources and skilled people will be focused, sidelining most of the regiment as a result. In some ways, the Su-35 is even more complicated than even the F-14D, because it has thrust vectoring nozzles. All in all, the logistics and maintenance situation for an Su-35 unit is super demanding in peacetime and perdition defined in war. High tech is simply not the Russian strong suit, and there's much competition for technically qualified staff to keep high complexity, high leverage equipment operational. Those TOPOL-M COs, for. example.

Do you believe the RuAF is immune to the same systemic influences that have tires failing wholesale in the ground units? Do you believe that the Russian spare part situation is better than what the US has? Do you believe their supply chain is more efficient than ours? What is the RuAF fuel situation and near term forecast? How deep is the RuAF Su-35 level flight crew bench? What are the MTBFs for their FCS, engines, fly-by-wire, other avionics, etc.? 

All in all, it seems to me that Ukraine should do anything and everything to flood the sky with drones of every sort and cause the best RuAF units to wear themselves right out of the sky--in combat, in crashes by mechanical or electronic failures, exhaustion of flight crews, landing and takeoff accidents, not to cumulative wear and tear on systems and subsystems with far shorter service lives than, say, US aircraft of the same type. How well do unexpended missiles handle repeated takeoff and landing cycles? Crew burnout requires weeks of rest, might I add, to fix. The Soviets learned this the hard way in North Korea. But it's not just the aircrews that get exhausted, but the crew chiefs, techs, planners, tower personnel and more, with the resulting loss of efficiency, attention to detail, decision making and. more. The best pilots in the world can't fly if their crew chiefs and underlings can't function.

Regards,

John Kettler


 

it was only a matter of time
 
 

The thing that doesn't get enough press is how little faith we had in the Ukrainian Government before the war. It was just assumed that it was completely undermined by Russian operatives. This is now 100% proven not to be the case. The difference this makes is hard to overstate. If we had had this much faith in the Ukrainian Government six weeks ago we would have done a LOT of things differently.

Ah, now that I have recovered from busting a gut after that post re: Orville Peck secret identity....
Great stream of (mostly) curated picks from social media. My favourite today is this one by @Haiduk. I find remarkable how good UKR is at using conventional artillery as a stand in for eye wateringly expensive PGM. It looks to me that since UKR had to rebuild its military from scratch, had an opportunity to adopt new ideas and technologies dealing with little or no institutional inertia.
I wonder what the process is for those arty strikes, maybe something like this?
1. Drone controller has UAV loitering on suspected area of RF activity.
2. Controller spots location of RF assets, then registers the location by taking snapshots of target from several points and angles (see this for instance https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0926580518308641)
3. Photos, along with camera parameters and geo location info forwarded to fires coordination center. Firing solution calculated automatically and fire task assigned to friendly asset.
4. Fire task executed, drone controller reports damage assessment.
An iteration over the above wouldn't take very long at all, the most finicky part being that of maneuvering the UAV to take the measurements you need for registration.  And that could be automated too (the controller activates the "registration" behaviour and that's it).
The workflow above could be implemented with very few fancy equipment/algorithms, you just need good software and network engineers using pretty mundane hardware.
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On another topic, I am glad to see tactical psychology being used... the most efficient way to defeat an adversary is to destroy its will to fight. So far UKR has been fighting smart, they just need to keep doing so!

Have to disagree with you there Steve, they don't have our secret weapon:
Rooaaawwr!!  Get those engines running ladies....  

Russians at Bucha are surrounded. 
 
 

Russians at Bucha are surrounded. 
 
 

I hope they don´t fall for the trap to only take territory. That is meaningless unless they don´t take away huge amounts of enemy soldiers.

This is wrong photo. If this not our PsyOps operation, Russian tank driver brought to us T-72A. Knowingly, Russians use robbed cell phoes, so our ELINT units of SBU or Intelligence Directorate are sending on this cell.numbers SMS with a terms of surrender. As if one Russian tank driver communicated with Ukraianian side and told he is ready to surrender with own tank. As if other two crewmens alredy deserted, their unit have lack of food, chaotic command&control etc. Their commander threat to all other to shot out if anybody else will deserted.
Our SOF gave to him a place of rendezvous and when the tank appeared, the drone was took off to make shure this is not ambush. The tanker was captured and brought to safe place. Russian trooper reportedly will be interned to the end of war in comfort room with bath and TV. After war will over, he will receive 10 000$ of award for tank and he can apply for Ukraianian citizenship. 
Here the photo of catpturing.