dan/california

There is no such thing anymore, outside of infantry in built up areas. The Pentagon probably knows the location of most of the Russian vehicles in Ukraine to the centimeter. They can probably integrate that with signals intelligence, which would be why being a Russian General is so unhealthy.

If Oryx is anything close to0 correct, the Russians are losing over a BTG per DAY. If their so called reserves are in as bad a shape as the last two or three pages of this thread indicate, how long can they do that? Steve's total collapse theory looking stronger by the day.

A regime like Putin's literally cannot appoint a theater commander because that commander might decide that the best thing he could do for the Russian people is make himself Czar instead of the current incompetent in that position. This is at least triply true for an operation/war being conducted so close to Moscow. It is only ~750 km by road from Kharkiv to Moscow. One long days drive. If the Russian army turned around and decided to change the regime that put them in this mess there wouldn't be time for Putin to move a lot of forces around to oppose them.

Please tell me it won't take until 2025 to Get a revised modern game out? Please... But if that is how long it will take to deal with the new flood of military customers we will almost forgive you.

Anybody know when we get the next pass of that NASA forest fire monitoring satellite that has been the best publicly available ground truth? Or did NASA decide it was better than anything the Russians had and stop releasing results for Ukraine?

Getting back to the current war, The Russians seem to have REALLY run their logistics into the ground.

The next big fight is so likely to be Taiwan we should be asking specific questions about what would work there. And I don't think it will be easy to get armor to Taiwan after the balloon goes up, so we ought to think really hard about getting it there first if we need it. I mean the first question we really have to sort out is are the Taiwanese willing to FIGHT not get subsumed into the communist blob. We have had two severely contrasting examples of how a western trained army can fight. The Afghans could not have done any worse, and the Ukraine is going down next to Sparta in the history books. If the Taiwanese are motivated we need to figure what needs to be permanently parked on that island to make it fatally indigestible. Ten thousand Javelins, and ten thousand stingers top the list, but that is just a small down payment. Xi and his generals need to understand that trying is just going feed the sharks in the Taiwan straight, and not much else. Edit: Whatever it cost to convince them not to try will be a lot cheaper than wrecking the world economy after the fact.

I think it means Macron is going to dare the Russians to start WW3, it is that or random hot air. We will have to see what they can pull together, and how quickly, in terms of an actual plan. given that the Russians have just demonstrated across the board military incompetence I am fairly sure they don't want to start WW3. In fact in the absence of nukes I am fairly certain the Finns could take Moscow, based on the Russian performance so far, and the casualties and breakage Ukraine has inflicted.

And ignoring the above facts is a GREAT way to lose the next war the way the Russians are losing this one, which is to say badly. Comparative cost are everything pretty much, not just the cost at the end of the assembly line but the cost of the logistical tale associated with a given unit. It gets tricky fast when MBTs can be killed by man portable systems that cost a fiftieth of what the tank did.

Quote function didn't work right... Two issue going forward with APS going forward. Does it simply cost two much to deploy at scale? And can the radar be jammed, and or itself be used to guide a missile to the tank.

Discussed earlier, but seems to be firming up.

The more or less suicidal ammo handling practices are just amazing, But I wanted to get back to what is next in ground warfare since the Ukrainian General Staff has more important things to do than keep us informed. Hopefully those things include the encirclement of several thousand of what passes for Russia's best troops. Things we seem to learned beyond all doubt in this war, tanks can't charge effective ATGMs being employed by competent and unsuppressed troops, it is literally suicide. Which ever side can turn drone data in an accurate firing solution first wins. You have to have ammo to implement said effective firing solution. The signals/ECM platoon is now the most important unit in the entire army. Going thru through a few thoughts on all of these, please feel free to skip it or tell me how wrong I am. Given that ATGMs almost completely dominate any fight where the opposing sides can see each other, how do you make them more effective. My little Idea is pretty simple. The missile needs to be able to crawl a 30 or 40 yards on its own and then be fired remotely. The Ukrainians have already demonstrated the effectiveness of their Stugna ATGM with a controller that has a few tens of meters of wire. So imagine a javelin with a similar set-up that could crawl the last twenty meters to the crest of the hill by itself. Imagine the javelin crawling out onto the balcony of a hi-rise building, While the operator is doing his best to be tiny and invisible in the hallway. The next level trick of course is for the sensor to do the crawling, and the missile fires from a 1/4 mile back. But I really think a Javelin with even a twenty meter crawl range would be game changing, and there is no "new" tech involved, just a nice integration of things that are pretty much out there. The next question is how can the infantry carry more of these missiles. Can we build a UGV with a load capacity high enough, and a signature low enough to be useful to an infantry unit that doesn't want to be the next drone target. I have read about some tests, but the cost benefit ration doesn't seem to be there yet. As several people have mentioned there are also a lot of programs out there that give infantry some version of powered armor, or at least greatly increased load bearing capacity, if tanks don't make sense anymore this needs a lot more money thrown at it, because if a guy with one missile is dangerous, a guy with three who can still move around is even more so. To paraphrase Steve, drones are the greatest effectiveness multiplier since breech loading rifles, so what does that look like going forward. First and foremost there are going to be a LOT of them, and the side that can keep more of theirs up for longer wins the whole battle. Second, you have to be able to kill these bleeping things, or you might as well stay home. The U.S. already seems to have several technologies under development to knock down drones, and whatever was being spent on this last month needs to be increased by somewhere between a factor of ten, and a factor of a hundred. As much as drones have mattered in the Ukrainian war, we still haven't seen them used in QUANTITY. By quantity I am talking about a five ton truck whose entire load is something very like a a bunch of switchblade 300s, and they deploy by the hundred. Maybe half of them are not much more than decoys with some sort of cheap jammer/ fake radio. It isn't viable to kill truly large numbers of drones with missiles that cost six figures, and in guns don't have the range, so what does work? Both lasers and high powered microwave jammers are under development.This is going to be its own arms race. If 12 or even two of the 100 drones you just launched are still up and feeding data to your artillery, we come to the next question. Do you have any artillery ammo to shoot at them. Some one who has actually worked in fire control unit needs to do some math about how many truly smart artillery round vs how many merely good conventional rounds is the ideal mix. Smart shells cost tens of thousands of dollars each, and not smart shells don't. Smart shells are certainly useful against some targets, but regular 155/152 seems plenty good enough in a LOT of cases. How much is cost difference effectively reduced by the logistics burden of getting rounds al the way forward to the guns? Is the "shipping cost" so high that they might as well all be smart rounds? Going one step higher what is the mix you need between really expensive loitering munitions, and tube artillery? The expensive stuff is great until you run out of it. Random extra thought about unguided artillery accuracy. How much would accuracy improve if the drone that was feeding you targeting data also gave weather info., wind speed, air density, and so on. Is it worth it for every drone in the force to collecting this all the time? Last but not least signals/ecm is not going to be on anybodies back burner for a long time. A real advantage here cascades though everything else for better of worse. I am not an expert at the details of radio frequency communications, but i want to put one simple idea out there. You need a better plan than the plan Russians are currently using when your radios don't work. I would stipulate the the plan in question shouldn't rely on radio frequencies at all. Some sort of laser based system comes immediately to mind, but there needs to be a plan B, just in case you are fighting someone competent. Again, feel free to tell me how wrong I am. Glory To Ukraine!

It is worth remembering that the ENTIRE self driving business/idea was kick started by a DARPA contest ~20 some odd years ago. The results of said contest were hilariously bad, but with steady grinding, an enormous investment, and the ongoing miracle of Moore's law, we are now getting close.

The Russians are objectively BAD at this whole war thing.

The people in Mariupol are fighting to THE LAST PERSON, and doing it bleeping well, too, for people who probably haven't had two meals in the last week. The only thing melting is the Russian army. We won't even discuss the Russians little naval disaster this morning. We ought to tell the Russians they are done and we start launching cruise missiles in eight hours. We aren't brave enough to do that, but as long as NATO keeps shipping ammunition to the Ukrainians, they seem quite able to kill the entire Russian army by the middle of June.

Yeah, the Saudis might, but the Saudis are world class BLEEEEEEEEPS. So maybe the Russians get the boot 17 to three instead of 19-1. I am not super clear on the rules of voting on your own expulsion. I am also very OK with a revised g20 that has some shred of standards for the member countries, which would boot the Saudis right out. In the medium term the civilized world just needs to get off oil. I realize that isn't cheap or painless, but it pretty much solves every foreign policy problem except China. Iran's bomb, and every nut and bolt of Putin's war machine, are paid for with oil/gas money. At some point we have to wise up.

The Russians seem to think that the"Black Adder" was giving serious advice...

I was unquestionably the best thing the NYT has done in the whole month of the war. I really hope they do more just like it.

They can leave anytime, meanwhile they can be made into sunflower fertilizer. I do hope the seeds are heat resistant.

Looks like the Ukrainians have closed the pocket, or at the least are VERY close. Do we have any idea how many Russian troops are cut off?

https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/tmp603/destroyed_russian_positions_on_eastern_front_of/ This may be another video of more or less the same fight.

Either the Russians have have just given up and abandoned their entire effort on the eastern side of Kyiv, or they are getting the BLEEP kicked out of them. Though I guess it could be both at once...

I would expect any number of flare ups in the various frozen conflicts that Russia has stoked around its periphery. The Tsar's mailed fist is looking unimpressive. Actually, it seems to be on fire and caught in an unfriendly hydraulic press, so anybody with a beef is going to think now is the time.

i almost hope he gets off the ventilator alive just so he find out how well it worked out, ALMOST.