dan/california

Well 2015 was the best time ,and the second best time is tomorrow morning. Literally pay somebody to build the factory.

They are legacy systems whose sensors probably never see the drones that are killing them, and ignore them if the do. Throwing out all targets that are moving below a certain speed is almost certainly one of the issues, there who knows how many others. The longer term issue is that if you have a thirty million dollar modernized Gephardt that can kill every drone for five kilometers you have keep it from being killed by 155 cluster munitions and and even higher level systems, for which it instantly becomes the number one target. We aren't going to build five thousand of those vehicles for this war. If we spend the equivalent of the F-35 program building them for the NEXT war, they had better be able to handle the full spectrum of threats.

You ever consider trying to collaborate with Perun? In addition to the book about Afghanistan you need to write with Combat_Infantryman, and your book length take on this war? Poor guy, it might be less work to NOT retire...

They both nailed it.

It is almost like signing up to be cannon fodder for an utterly amoral and autocratic regime is a bad idea. Who knew.

This is the important part. All the assumptions underlying the stated assumptions that strategy and force structure are based on are out the window. There are a lot of things that need to be rethought starting with a clean sheet of paper. Some of the answers that come out of that will be excruciatingly expensive. But the only that cost more than being ready is losing.

Bradleys, 155 guns and shells, GMLRS, And Javelins to name a few of these very important things, Oh and Patriot, IRIS-T, and NASSAMS. All of them have been absolutely vital, and worked as well, or in some cases BETTER, than advertised. With the exception of NASSAMS and IRIS-T, is there anything on that list that isn't twenty five years old, or in some cases MUCH older? And NASSMS is a nice system, but it fires legacy missiles. And whatever we have been doing for the last 25 years it wasn't making ENOUGH of any of the above.

You have to love how the mobiks huddle in a nice tight group to make things easier for for the drone/mortar that is surely on the way.

The military needs a formal, thorough plan for this. These restrictions will last about five minutes in a real war, and the side that is better prepared will have a LARGE advantage

This is the point about the Military industrial complex some of us are trying to make. There is better stuff coming out of Ukrainian garages.

GREAT POST!

This podcast is at least some evidence of hope that the military industrial complex is ingesting some of the lessons of Ukraine.There seems to be a delay in the development of the successor to the F22 while people try to figure if the idea makes sense anymore. It seems that the Air Force is beginning to realize that billion dollar platforms that they will never have even a hundred of are maybe not the way to go.

There are a number of unmanned drone/balloon systems built to operate in the upper stratoshpere that cando most if not all of the job. The trick is to order enough of them BEFORE the war so there isn't a blind panic, and gap in capability after someone in the "new axis of evil(tm)" decides to go out with a bang. Planning needs to assume losses even in expensive unmanned platforms.

If Israel at least partially blames Russia for Oct 7th? This would be about as good a start on getting even as I could think off.

The above is the introduction to an article about the British armies adoption of machine guns before WW1. It highlights many of the same issues we are discussing about drones now. It isn't just an issue of money (although money was certainly an issue), but organization, doctrine, reliability, and so on. Thus the British Army started WW1 with two machine guns per battalion. They eventually figure out that not quite enough. But there was a whole lot of dying before the adapting got under way. The Russians seem to demonstrate daily in Ukraine that dying is necessary but not sufficient. .The trick is make as many correct predictions as possible, and thus do as little dying as possible while the adapting is underway. I would argue that the U.S. Navy carrier force in WW2 was a success in this regard. Despite a continued belief the battleship, and battleship tactics, the USN had done enough with carriers that it didn't have to start the campaign in the Pacific by retaking Hawaii. Indeed it Won at Midway with ships built before the outbreak of the war. The the goal should be to get closer to the USN in 1941, than to the British Army in 1914.

So is the war in Ukraine for the poor bleeps in the trenches.

This book has a very good history of the development of carriers, including doctrine, and the naval exercises that helped develop that doctrine. This book takes an excellent first cut at it. He does a very good job with sensors, and the fact that combat is rapidly becoming a NLOS game. I think he underestimated the pace of drone development that we have seen in the last year, though.

It is brought up regularly, but so far they are both hanging in there. The world may literally hang on a badly assembled stage stair. We will know a great deal more about the election shortly, the first debate is TONIGHT. That is one of the two biggest inflection points in the whole campaign, probably. The other card that has to be shown relatively soon is Trumps VP pick, he can wait another month at most on that one. Once we see both of those we will know a LOT more. Edit: Trump can't afford a bad VP pick, at least not Sarah Palin/Dan Quayle bad. Edit: The thing is that even though both candidates are less than popular, if one of them did drop out that candidates Party would probably tear itself apart fighting over who got to replace them. That party might or, might not, be able to reassemble itself by election day.

Oh I think we will get to nano goo first, or some similarly effective way to off ourselves. But every time the tank is dead debate revs up I feel like David Drake is laughing his head off. I hope General Dynamics Land Systems paid the man...

I think a notable amount of the problem is that certain science fiction authors have influenced the debate excessively because they are GOOD authors, and they did a good job with their hand wavium while they got on with telling a story. Let me go through "Hammer's Slammers" hand wavium in some detail, just to make the point. The Slammers author(David Drake) posits a regiment wide integrated air defense system controlled by a central computer. Every vehicle has a secondary turret controlled by the air defense system unless the crew actively takes/is given control. We see something like this with the new German tank that started this discussion, and it sounds almost possible, right? The thing is that this is the least radical technology in the book. The second pillar of the Slammers ability to utterly dominate the battlefield are energy weapons whose effectiveness is off the charts, I mean effective all the way to orbit off the charts. Drake barely bothers to explain how this works, but it relies on ammo with an energy density that is somewhere between nuclear fission and anti matter, depending on a zillion assumptions that you have to make to figure it out. The third pillar of of the Slammers dominance is that their tanks don't need fuel trucks. They are FUSION POWERED, They not only can run for months on a single fuel load, they actually provide the electrical power that charges the high tech batteries that run everything else. So yes, if an armored force actually had all three of these it would be more or less unstoppable, except by a similarly equipped force. I think it is a at least a few hundred years out though

Two observations, the relentless Ukrainian campaign to degrade Russia's IAD system is having an effect. Also, that mans equipment is solid brass and so heavy I can't figure out how the plane took off.

I want to see the testing too, but the RIGHT testing. You take Magyars Birds best unit, make up some paint ball warheads, and tell Magyars boys they get paid if they paint it yellow. Pass THAT test, and i will begin to believe.

Two secondary turrets, four different ammo calibers, very few rounds for the main gun. Are they just trying to prove The_Capt right?

Other than maybe getting an artillery battery to expose itself to counter-battery fire, what happened in this video that couldn't have been done by artillery? This was not a coordinated combined arms assault, it was was bleeping dangerous gun run, and I would have see some medium strong proof it was worth the risk the tank took.