dan/california

And the fact that everyone of them wasn't Ukraine s a solid two years ago is absolutely crazy making. And yes I am in the tank is dead school, but in Fall 22 the Russians almost wobbled right off their bar stool. It would have mattered then.

Is there all that much point in trying to be stealthy with what is essentially a modified airliner? Or do you think you could put the sensors for what you are talking about on a stealth bomber of some sort?

How big of a data center could you stuff into a 767? When you think about power, and cooling, and the performance of NVIDIAS latest stuff?

Yeah that tech is already moving right along Watling''s book says AESA radar is not currently getting the press it deserves either. When someone with competence, resources, and the right clearances lets AI loose on AESA radar data at scale, You will get off the charts levels of information. Or maybe they already have, and just haven't told us yet. It is an interesting question if large surveillance planes can be protected when people are managing to put missiles like the SM-6 on airplanes, per the post someone put up yesterday. I assume the Russian's and the Chinese are attempting similar things. Protecting these platforms might one of the areas where laser based defense systems make sense, even if they have to be put on a second 767. I am sort of assuming a modern /near future AESA based AWACS can handle its own radar jamming. They will need an awful lot of defending from other threats though.

It doesn't take all that many revolutions to have a heck of an impact.

Given that rotations have been Ukraine's weak spot for the whole war, it seem whatever is worse than just nuts to attempt two of them at once, side by side. I am I correctly understanding that the guy that did this has been relieved of command?

Interesting that it doesn't even have a turret, a that I could tell in that film. As Steve was just discussing, its only job is to get the infantry in alive, and then hopefully go back for more. I don't think they could put enough armor on a T-90 chassis to take a Javelin hit, but it is at least possible they tried. I assume a final version would have a an engineered attempt at whatever the Russians think is the best cope cage/turtle tank superstructure. Indeed, if you realize you need the full barn like thing on top it would be great reason to skip the turret. No turret cuts cost, as well.

Hey JonS rained all over my parade for saying that two thousand pages ago....

Not obsolete, but a lot less useful. Neither side in Ukraine can more than barely attempt to fly a plane over the other sides territory. If the Russians could do much with their air force they would be winning this war. I realize that the U.S. has SEAD capabilities that no one else does, but a lot of the trends that are weighing on tanks are going to weigh on manned aircraft, too.

Great post!

This seems like an ambitious goal for an army that is going to have ~200 tanks, total. The Ukrainian battlefield would like to know what the plan is for the third week of the war. Technology is not determinant, except when it is. The machine gun did for horse calvary, period. And I have the strongest possible suspicion that someone wrote something that sounded exactly like this about 1911, about horses. Tank on tank battles have all but ceased to happen, yet Ukrainian battlefield are covered with burnt out wrecks. Javelins are expensive, but they are not exactly difficult to operate. So the message is out there, the question is who is listening. The best scenario in CMSF is about this very thing. More pertinently to the current discussion, if there is one thing drones have proven great at it is turning M-kills into K-kills. Why yes, machine gun bullets are quite detrimental to horses, yes they are. But horses are so useful we simply have to figure something out. Even though we are not quite sure what that something is. Several decades ago I was involved with a study about diesel car maintenance for the California air resources board. To make very long story short. The most important factor by far in the emissions of diesel cars, at least then, was the injection pump. As the pumps wore out the emissions just get worse and worse. But there was huge political pressure to bring the diesel cars into the extant state vehicle inspection system. But that program had a what in todays dollars would be a ~1500 dollar limit on what an owner could be forced to spend. The pumps cost far more than that. So the state put in the program am and annoyed the heck out of absolutely everyone for approximately zero actual emission reductions. Indeed they eventually figured that out and just banned diesel cars. That report read just like this one. It has been mandated that the army will have a tank force, here are all the reasons it is a terrible idea, but the army will still have a tank force....

We need to start work on a next gen system. That next gen system should include a plan for putting a up a whole new constellation in a week in war time conditions, and may doing that over and over again. The article also discusses ground based augment that the Chinese are apparently working on.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DroneCombat/comments/1dudq6x/two_grenades_dropped_from_drone_help_russian/ A bad grenade drop, but a truly funny film clip. All I can think of is that these guys were faking so their own second line wouldn't shoot them.

Whatever happened in the spring of 2022, the anti armor environment has gotten a LOT worse during the course of this war. If the Ukrainians had had the current drone tech then, the Russian offensive would have dissolved in some unpleasant mix of acid and elemental fluorine. None of this new tech is going away. Before we spend tens of billions on a drone defense plan there has to be some real proof that it can beat both what is out there today, and what is very surely going to be out there soon. They FPV drones Ukraine is flying cost under, usually well under a thousand dollars, and are basically repurposed toys and agricultural stuff. What can someone do with a ground up design and a $5,000 dollar budget? If it takes ten or twenty $5,000 drones to kill a new thirty million dollar tank, that is still a heck of a deal for the side with the drones.

This is an excellent development. Someone in the military industrial complex has their head on straight. So the unclassified range estimates on the SM-6 are anywhere from 150 to 350 or more miles. I realize anyone who knows cant say. But very theoretically what is the boost in range it gets when fired from 50,000 feet at mach 1.2? Or perhaps more relevantly for the Ukrainian environment, At an altitude of a couple hundred feet at mach .6. I am kind of bummed that the first public appearance of this did not involve the expolsive disassembly of several SU-34s. But I guess the slow boil is still in effect.

Just allow me to repeat. Tell a platoon from Magyars Birds that they get PAID if they can paint this new wonder weapon yellow with paintball warheads on their drones. If it can pass that test, maybe we can talk.

So we now have tanks that cost AT LEAST thirty million dollars, and have had their armor redistributed to BARELY stop an RPG warhead. The bad guys, and anyone else who wants to win a war are now incentivized to get back to working on these little monsters. It is basically the metal dart from an tank KE penetrator on the end of a rocket motor. Velocities can actually get considerably higher than main gun rounds. Give me one really good reason you couldn't mount this on a heavy quad copter and have ten of them at once pop above a tree line five of more kilometers out. The drones could even be controlled by fiberoptic cable since all the have to do is go straight up until the missile has LOS. Or put them on a UGV. The fact that the low speed threat has suddenly become deadly does not mean that the high speed threat can't make advances, too. APS is not dealing with three kilometers per second threats anytime soon. I assume that the only reason this got canceled, besides Rumsfeld having a snit fit, was the fact the Javelins had proven to work perfectly against existing threats. That might have even been a good decision at the time. But the tech exists, or could be recreated.

And the cost for a good enough version of both is falling through the floor. The cost of the countermeasures is increasing exponentially, at least so far.

What you need is massive stocks OF precision weapons, and the less precise ones that are proven to work. The cost of things like smart artillery shells has to be brought down, the West can't afford to order this stuff in penny packets anymore. We have to pay for the construction of factories that can turn this stuff out at reasonable per piece prices, even if the up front cost is excruciating. That goes for everything from ATACMS class missiles to the autonomous kill bots that are replacing FPV drones as we watch. The list of older things that have absolutely proven to work unfortunately involves telling the Amnesty International types to find something better to do with their time. Because the two things that have absolutely proven to work in this war are cluster munitions, and land mines. You simply can't have to many of either. Edit: And mines that be delivered by artillery, don't forget those, need a few million rounds. See below See below But this conversation is not about how Russia blew it in March 2022, it is about what happens next. Because the NEXT attempt at shock and awe, whoever does it, is going to face whatever FPV drones evolve into in truly massive quantities. I would argue that makes the supply route problem almost infinitely worse. even with current tech a small team can can deploy drones from five to ten kilometers, and with very little signature. Next gen they will be able to scatter drones on random warehouse roofs or whereever, and launch the the next day. Next gen for purposes of this conversation might be a year, BTW.

It doesn't help that there are now several different ways to throw new mines into the channel you are trying to clear, and keep clear.

This is one of the more promising concepts I have seen. Although why the drones can't go in the back of a Toyota High Lux is beyond me. If you are carrying the drones on a UGV, you want the cheapest one possible unless I am missing something.

I am guessing we will see large scale use by fall. This horse has left the barn, the farm, and the county.

Sadly there are lot of people that ought to see the inside of a prison cell forever, b ut probably won't In the short to medium term I think smart fires are going to move away from GPS. Either laser designation from drones. Or smart submunitions with infrared sensors like the Smart/Bonus rounds. This type of submunition is going to get put on ATACMS, HIMARS, and similar as well. There is also no reason you couldn't do a fragmentation version for infantry and light vehicles.

I just want to throw out there that mines are still an unsolved problem, too. And people have been beating their brains out on at least parts of that problem for twenty plus years with very limited success. And now we see them exert a massive influence on the battlefield in Ukraine. It is not remotely sustainable to lose thirty million dollar tanks to thirty dollar antitank mines.

They might have been better off than if they stayed in North Korea. Note better is not the same as good.