TheVulture

Xi set the Chinese military a target of 2027 to build a force capable of being able to carry out an invasion of Taiwan. They are not remotely ready to do so yet. And even if they were, they have exactly zero experience of large scale amphibious assaults against a very well prepared peer enemy. Never mind sustaining a protracted campaign with a supply line across the strait of Taiwain. They're not about to make their first trial run the real thing; they'll almost certainly start with smaller scale attacks on smaller, more remote islands first as an 'exerice' to assess their capabilities.

I see that Shapps has now backed out of both of these ideas on the quiet. It's Conservative Party annual conference time in the UK, so this is now looking a lot like "announce loudly, gather the plaudits, slink off quietly" to try and boost his standing within his party.

UK Defence Minister Grant Shapps is discussing plans to send UK troops to set up training bases in Western Ukraine, rather than having Ukrainian troops come to the UK, and discussed with Zelensky how the Royal Navy could "play a role in defending commercial vessels from Russian attacks in the Black Sea" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/09/30/grant-shapps-to-send-uk-troops-to-ukraine/

Broadly speaking, yes. EM systems can range all the way from directionless to highly directional broadcasting and receiving. Your old fashioned radio transmitters and receivers are pretty much directionless: the transmitter sends the signals in all directions, and the receiver is sensitive to all directions. Although in practice even there the transmitter will probably emit more horizontally than vertically, and anyone who remembers fiddling with the antenna on a radio to improve the signal knows that they have some directionality. This kind of system is pretty easy to jam, spoof etc. - you just need a stronger signal than the source to drown it out, and thanks to the inverse square law, you can do that with a weaker transmitter if it is closer to the receiver (such as trying to disprupt a drone that is 10m overhead, but being controlled from several km away). At the other extreme, you have something like a high frequency laser with a tiny beam angle, and a highly directional receiver (e.g. a telescope) that is also pretty much only sensitive in the direction it is looking. This is pretty much impossible to disrupt directly via EW, because you need to get a transmitter in to the receivers field of view and be brighter than the laser. I.e. you need to get your own laser in the right place and pointing in the right direction. Which is pretty much not going to happen. The flip side is that it is also hard to keep the transmitter and receiver aligned in this scenario, even in ideal circumstances. Witness the loss of contact with Voyager 2 earlier this year (okay, 'ideal' might be stretching it) because a mistaken command made voyager 2 point its receiving dish in the wrong direction, meaning it couldn't be contacted to tell it to pint the dish in the right direction... And in a military context, stuff is just going to get in the way of the communication beam - smoke, trees, terrain, never mind having to keep the pointing correct due to wind, being rammed by another drone, or whatever, And as with voyager, there was a backup system to get it to re-orient. You can imagine some kind of emergency (non-directional) backup on a drone to re-establish communication, but that is necessarily a potential attack surface for the enemy to try and hijack control of the drone. The weak link in that kind of scenario is unlikely to be someone jamming the laser signal, it is going to be these other ways of disrupting communications or backdooring control in some way.

Does that mean that the main command center and reserve command center of the BSF have both been hit in a few days? (reserve on 20th, HQ today). Combined with the USV attack on russian ships and the dry docks, they are really turning up the pressure on the black sea fleet. Well, if it's vulnerable, and expensive to replace, then why not. And it helps drive home the point (along with the increasing attacks on Russian infrastructure) that this isn't a war happening "somewhere else" as far as the Russians view it, but something that is having increasingly large effects in Russia that were obviously way beyond what was originally advertised. Not that the Russians as a whole are going to be swayed by this, on current evidence...

As I understand it, existing stuff promised by Poland will still be delivered, in which case this is effectively "we won't announce any new aid". Which might be a giant nothing burger - in theory Poland can potentially still work out new aid packages, and deliver them on the same schedule, but just delay announcing them until e.g. after next months election. So best case scenario is this is purely political theatre for internal audiences that has zero impact on anything tangible. Less optimistic scenarios are also possibilities of course.

On the subject of intelligence ships, has anyone come across any further news on the Ivan Khurs that was hit back in May, It made it back to Sevastopol under its own power and without serious visible external damage. but that was the last I've been able to find. At the time, Russia said it would resupply and return to patrols soon, but I've not been able to find any mention of whether it left port again (under the circumstances, I'd have imagined that Russia would make at least something of a show of it setting out again to show that it was back in service). I'm curious as to whether it did get back to sea, or has been stuck in Sevastopol for the last 4 months for repairs.

Wikipedia humour is quick off the mark:

Curious article from Russian newspaper Kommersant about how Russian drone manufacturing is having problems because of Chinese restrictions on exports to Russia. Article is paywalled (and in Russian), but the free section auto-translated gives the outline. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6223010

I know I've argued before that using wargaming to predict the future - in the sense of "this is how this battle is going to play out" - is never going to give you good results, for all sorts of reasons. What wargaming does very well is allowing you to run the same scenario many times, and possibly with slight variations. This lets you build up a picture of what is important and what isn't (and by extension, what it is important to simulate correctly in your wargame to improve its fidelity). You might find from your wargaming that the primary limiting factor on your ability to advance is the keeping the logistics flowing. Or you might conversely find that your logistics are fine, but your communications systems are too vulnerable and that 90% of your failed offensives are because key comms hubs got whacked too easily. Or that your doctrine greatly over/underestimates the density of troops needed to hold a defensive feature. So maybe you learn that a) your doctrine needs to put more emphasis on protecting comms or having redundant capacity so that C3 is maintained for longer, and that simulations need to take care to model the effects of the presence or lack of effective C3, For a specific battle you might end up identifying a key terrain feature that wasn't picked up by intelligence map preparation, but which control of often ends up playing an important role in the wargaming. That kind of hypothesis testing and determining which are the critical inputs and which matter less, is what wargaming is great at. IMHO.

Was the Triumph S300/S400 strike prior to the sevastopol dry dock attack (as an enabler) or after? There have been a lot of stories in the last week or so of significant bits of Russian equipment going boom, which certainly make it sound like the Russian forces are beginning to creak under the pressure. Its that a narrative that is born out in reality, or is it more of a PR push where more is being made of stuff that is carrying on pretty much as normal? I'm not sure what to look for as evidence, beyond waiting a few more weeks to see how it plays out on the ground.

The second missile failed to ignite and just dropped off the plane. The first one was either defeated by countermeasures or suffered a failure in its tracking systems, presumably.

Pfft. The British army were still doing bayonet charges in 2011. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/bayonet-charge-foils-enemy-ambush

Looks like a 10-year old's project to build a plane out of carboard boxes at home. A very Australian approach to building a stealth drone. Got to love the cheap and cheerful approach that can be churned out in huge numbers for pennies.

While I'd like to believe that the Wagner mercenaries are going to start some trouble to avenge Prig and co., there's a very big tendency to see what we want to see. As soon as Prigozhin was killed, anyone who wants to see some Wagner reaction will start looking at every bit of news available, and interpret it in the light of their hopes. Or fears - it works both ways. For example, during the first 6-9 months of the war when there was concern that the Belarusian army might become actively involved, any movement of troops within Belarus was flagged up as as possible indication that things were about to kick off. While Lukashenko might have been making something of a performance in that direction, a lot of very normal stuff was interpreted as having a significance that it just didn't bear.

How far do they need to go before the corridor is effectively cut. My layman perspective is to wonder if getting to the H-30 highway (runs SE from Tokmak to Berdiansk) is enough - that would the railway connection and one of the two major roads that run across the land bridge here (assuming the railway is still meaningfully operational E-W here), and leave only the coastal highway, which would be within roughly 30km of the front line. Within arty range, but I've no idea how effective artillery would be at that distance at impacting supply routes along the coast.

And I think there's been unclear reporting on numbers too. There were 10 people on board: 7 passengers and 3 crew. Some places have been reporting 10 passengers (meaning people on board; crew plus actual passengers) and then that getting repeated as 10 passengers plus 3 crew for 13 total. Which is wrong.

Wot coastal defence doing? Sounds like a successful special forces raid. It's been a bad news week for Russia on all fronts.

Maybe it's just meant to make battle damage assessment harder: doesn't help the mobiks, but does make it harder to count how many are left, which might make the Ukrainians more cautious in the advance.

And preferably Utkin too since he was also on the official passenger manifest, for what that's worth.

BBC has an eyewitness video of Prig's planet going into the ground. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-66597449

And as an off-topic bonus, India successfully completed the tricky task of landing near the moon's south pole, just to rub some salt in to the wound of Russia's inability to pull of an easier lunar landing a few days before. Not something that matters in itself, but it's just another little reminder to Russians that Russia is not one of the world leaders in technology any more.

I did see a report on telegram that the Russian MoD claimed to have destroyed 3 drones in an attack on those same two ships, so it looks like we can be confident that an attack happened, although no confirmation of outcomes. https://t.me/bbbreaking/161854 Tonight, the armed forces of Ukraine made an unsuccessful attempt to attack the patrol ships "Sergey Kotov" and "Vasily Bykov" of the Black Sea Fleet with three sea unmanned boats, performing tasks to control navigation in the southwestern part of the Black Sea, 340 km southwest of Sevastopol, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. In the course of repulsing the attack, all three unmanned enemy boats were destroyed by fire from the standard armament of Russian ships.The ships "Sergey Kotov" and "Vasily Bykov" of the Black Sea Fleet continue to perform their tasks.

Ah, The Few Tall Hills of Mourne. One of my favourite songs. And you often hear "The Bogs of Athenry" echoing around Lansdowne Road.

There was presumably at least one vehicle near the explosion: a married couple were killed and their daughter injured IIRC. So it is possible that there was a burning vehicle at the explosion site which could be responsible for the blackening on the road sections. But that's just a wild *** guess with no actual evidence.