dan/california

How long can the Russians lose nearly a thousand guys a day? And this is before trench foot, and frostbite really get going good.

I am deeply curious about how to rework a BIG phased array radar for jamming. By big I mean Aegis cruiser/AWACS big. They can just give them a bleep ton of money in the lame duck session,and be done with if if they have any sense whatsoever. There will be plenty of other crap to fight over.

A real counter to this A real counter for this thing needs to become a top of the list action item!

Is anybody else having issues with embedded videos today?

A "fire one missile command" would go a LONG way.

There is another Sci Fi series that posits that various countermeasures are so effective that ground combat is conducted with only the simplest possible firearms, because anything with a chip or a battery just stops working. I think that is the Dosai series. Great books conceptually but not the best flow to the actual writing.

From the wikipedia page Interlude: Table of Organisation and Equipment, Hammer's Regiment[edit] List of units in the Slammers. These include the Regimental headquarters with the command staff and the Regiment's Fire Central fire control computer, which can take control of any vehicle-mounted powergun that bears on a target, usually airborne, and eliminate it; the training battalion that turns recruits into soldiers of the Regiment; the supply and support battalion; the Regiment's artillery batteries; the infantry, mounted on battery-powered single person hovercraft called skimmers; the combat car companies; and of course the regimental fist, the Slammers' tank companies. It also includes the Regiment's field police company, the "White Mice," mounted on combat cars and commanded by the dedicated and deadly Major Joachim Steuben, thought of by some in the know as Hammer's personal hatchetman. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ It is good military sci fi. I don't think the physics are particularly well done, but he lays them out, sticks to them, and tells pretty good stories. The air defense bits really do track perfectly with the current discussion. Technology resolves such that big capital platforms with VERY large energy sources can just clear the skies more or less completely. It is obviously and unanswered question if that is how it is going to go in the real world. One the unanswered questions is how much can you trust the machines, and how far forward do the first squishy parts of the machine need to be. The answer to that question maters a great deal for overall system design. So does the development path of small UGVs. Mine, sensor, or shooter, it all comes down to how well does UGV hardware work. The forward edge of battle in a decade or two might be competing lines of UGVs the size of a small dog. Then there comes the question of defending ANY capital system, at ANY depth. Is this doable or not? Again the answer is somewhat up in the air. But this war has proven that if the the other side has effective drone directed artillery, and you don't, it is all over but the dying. Winning looks expensive, until you add up the cost of losing. Losing is currently costing the Russians something like two complete BTGs a DAY. Not to mention that they are eight months into what was supposed to be a three day war. You can discuss the consequences of getting conquered with the citizens of Mariupol, if there are any of them alive come spring. SO much of this question comes down to how trustworthy the communication network for small drones is? If we commit 100% to the low mass, all small drone plan, and the bad guys crack the network, the outcomes are POOR. I still think we are going to see $100,000 ghillie suits for actual soldiers, but as with everything else in this discussion that needs rigorous testing. The importance of red teaming all of these developments HARD is impossible to overstate. ChrisSL mentions communicating by lasers instead of radio. Can this be blocked by some sort of fancy smoke round? All tye questions go on forever. But again the penalty for being wrong is being eight months into a three day war with ~75,000 KIA Lock some engineering graduate students and some grizzled special ops guys in building somewhere and tell them if they can come up with a way to break the new toys the get a million each, and six months vacation. Because the other side will.

Did you steal that from the Hammers Slammers Sci Fi series, or reinvent it on the spot? That is exactly how that author did it. They were just much better guns. One small refinement is that every gun in the battalion could be slaved to the battalion air defense system at need. That might almost be possible now, and allows separation of sensor and shooter. The new Abrams computer controlled airburst round might actually be pretty good for AA work if the turret could be slaved to an off board radar. The possibilities go on forever. We are going to have to do some expensive experiments to see what can actually be made to work. Someone needs to explain to Congress in advance that not all the experiments will work.

Alright, you have convinced me you need to be in charge of this project, not kidding, start a company. I will apply. But my main point stands. The bleeping things are going to be popping over the tree line in unpleasant quantities, and we had better have a plan. The arms race this going to become will be COSTLY.

Everything Kinophile just wrote will be SOP, but it won't be enough. The overwhelming difference between this war and the next one will be that they will never send just one the next time around. Flights of five or ten or fifty are just going to be table stakes. I really don't see any wayway to kill them fast enough except with a laser system. Maybe lasers and then something like a Gephardt to kill the leakers. I realize that is a really expensive package. But the cost of these Shaheed 136/lancet drones is going to get down towards ten thousand dollars when countries start ordering enough of them for the real benefits of mass production to kick in. And those orders are at least being planned as we speak, by people who know they can't win a tank on tank engagement with Abrams, and don't particularly want to try. This is a really nifty system, but the designated victims were not exactly flying a pattern designed by someone that wanted to win. And guns just have range limitations. If the drones are incoming in a spread out pattern at 180 kilometers per hour, they will cross a 3 km kill zone in a minute. That is not a lot of time to engage five or ten targets spread out over the best part of 180 degrees. I just keep coming back to build a laser system that WORKS, or don't show up for the next war with anything bigger than a really high tech ghillie suit. And you need one of those laser/gun combos for every single mech platoon, artillery battery, and supply company. Which is why i don't see the defense budget declining anytime soon.

There are also huge new expenses coming up, we are at the beginning of the drone precision AI revolution, not the end. If you can't deal with something AT LEAST as good as a Shahed 136 in swarms of several hundred at a time, you are not ready for the next war. https://www.nammo.com/story/the-range-revolution/ Just the number of guided and extended range 155 that is necessary to be ready for the next round is staggering. I am going to make this my sig line "ammo is expensive, until it is PRICELESS"

Because mobilization is going so well?!

Due West from Nova Kakhovka would expose the guns to far less counter battery fire though. Virtually nothing the Russians have on the left side of the river would be able to shoot back

Drop small samples in the mobik trenches by drone. There might mass surrenders.

My first guess is that it is a range thing mostly. The quad copters that do most of the dropping just can't get far enough behind the FEBA. Maybe this one happened as the Russians were getting pushed back somewhere?

~50 kilometers from Nova Kakhovka. One more push and the 155 starts raining down on the dam in quantity. I still predict that the entire Russian position on the right bank will roll up like a rug when that happens. Assuming the Russians aren't already evacuating.

This seems to be about the most useful piece of kit the Russians have. The amount air defense that an army is going to need going forward is just staggering. There are going to have to be gun/missile/laser coverage everywhere.

BANG!

But every time they contract it lets the AFU bring more fire onto the river crossing points. Getting smaller just doesn't work. it has taken longer than I thought it would, but the Russians are leaving one way or another. And we still don't know what it has cost them to hold it this long, either. If the last effective units of the VDV have been pushed to the point of being combat ineffective just to drag this out for a few weeks it will actually shorten the war.

Could the Chinese be using North Korea as a cut out? There will be things check from now on when the Ukrainians over run a Russian Ammo dump.

NamEndedAllen, got it, my brain misfired the first time I read it, and just stuck there. Edit: So sorry, meant to say that the first time...

There is quite a lot of evidence the Ukrainians are orders of magnitude better soldiers than the Saudis. If the powers that be are absolutely certain they need a three or six month work up then we need to start the process. Actually we needed to start six months ago. As you just pointed out we gave Abrams to the Saudis and the Egyptians. The world didn't end, and the Russians clearly haven't learned a bleeping thing about tank design. If you think the Egyptians haven't given them a complete tank I have bridge to sell you. Letting Ukrainians die in forty year old junk is stupid and unnecessary. Everything we send to Ukraine is killing the army it was always meant to kill. If we just can't stand the Ukrainians slightly unorthodox style I am sure they wouldn't mind at all if NATO just got in the war. It all comes down to trying to boil the frog slowly instead vaporizing it with conviction. Name_ended_Allen is making a reasonable case that real long range strike would work better, and faster. I am totally open to that argument. One way or the other though the Russians have to get the message that they just are not winning this, and ought to consider going home while they have some semblance of an Army left.

If the lights go out Moscow the day before Christmas, and stay out until new years Putin might show up on January one with a whole new attitude. I do think Moscow and St Petersburg are the only cities that matter, Russia has made it perfectly clear by how it treats its own soldiers that what happens in the rest of the country is simply irrelevant.

Unfortunately letting the best be enemy of the good is not a pick we can make right now. Getting Russia OUT of Ukraine, and Sweden and Finland IN NATO are nearly absolute short term priorities. Nothing Turkey can do to its east and south compares at the moment. Doubly so considering the entire area is a disaster already.

I really can't wait to see these in action. I will just point out the Chinese are taking notes, and in the medium term we need a plan to deal five hundred or a thousand of these in a single wave. I don't like Erdogan, I don't trust Erdogan, BUT if we can keep on board long enough to get to Russians out of Ukraine, and Ukraine in NATO it is worth quite few concessions somewhere else. It isn't like the people running most of the places to Turkey's south and east are any better. "For my friends everything, for my enemies the law", Machiavelli, I think. Prigozhin suddenly emerging as prosecutor general in addition to his day job has to be the clearest case of this ever. As the nifty bit of Polish kit below demonstrates, the possibilities of different kinds of sensor networks enabled by what is fundamentally cell phone technology are just starting to be explored. And when do we see these beauties on Donetsk front? I mean the Poles have sent everything else .