dan/california

Not good....

Exactly this! Edit: cross posted

The mess at the Dagestani airport is an indication of a loss of state capacity, not a Kremlin plot. There is at least a real possibility that the North Caucuses could become large problem for Putin. As always he brings enormous depth and detail to the subject. it is worth the listen.

Read the whole thread.

It is REALLY hard to line up the pieces for this if the other side has any deep strike left.

Well that would solve every problem but China instantly, because every other enemy we have would be flat broke. I mean actually starving levels of flat broke in many cases.

Is ritual suicide a an effective propaganda tool? Becuse that is the BEST explanation I have for some of these operations.

We are appproaching the point where drone operators highest priority target is other drone operators.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/early-bird-brief/id1644772953?i=1000633614797 If you feel the neeed to have your blood pressure go up by twenty points, forty five minutes of pro Vlad weasel words from this excuse for Republican Congressman will do the job just fine.

Personally I think Pogacar is a product of genetic engineering, the doping rumors are just too throw the press off the scent. If that doesn't make any sense you aren't a cycling fan, and please ignore the digression. A truly practical exoskeleton for front line grunts probably needs at least one materials science break-thru. I would simply point out that there are reasons to expect that AI might move those breakthroughs along. Let me just throw out some metrics we should should be thinking about. If the suit can either let a soldier carry twice the load, twice as far, or carry the current load out with half the fatigue you are talking real increases in combat capability. And since our armored trooper is running on battery power anyway he would probably have access to better comms and sensors. The real game changer comes in each soldiers personnel weapon can basically be used as a remote weapons station. So he can hide in the bottom of a slit trench with a few feet of cable connecting hi to his rifle/grenade launcher. Now I know everyones next statement is why does the soldier have to be there at all? But there are going to have to be some numbers of people far forward enough to verify the ground truth of what all the sensors and robots are sending back, or you are one hack from total, epic, failure. It is quite possible said armored troopers job is never use his own weapon unless the plan has gone to heck, if things are working as they should his entire job might be coordinating a squad or a platoon worth of robots, while doing his level best to be invisible. There is a real possibility this becomes the technological sweet spot in land warfare for how ever many decades it takes us to develop lethal robotic insects in quantity. There is also a nasty little sting in the tail for structuring your force this way. it would be almost useless for any mission that required much or any really contact with a civilian population. You would need completely separate units for a lot of low intensity, or consolidation missions, where there is more to it than a combination of extreme lethality, and extremely low signature right across the spectrum.

I think this was specifically testing the use of the auto-cannon on both planes. Aircraft doing gun runs is simply an obsolete concept. The number of things that can kill a plane coming in that low is simply ridiculous at this point. I mean it would be entirely cost effective to send up 50 or a hundred small drones on the off chance one of them can manage to get ingested by the planes engine.

Any chance of some bones about the new game for page 3000 of our little project?

Watling's book has an excellent discussion of many of the details it would take to make a force this robot heavy, and personnel light work. In particular he has a detailed discussion of how much bandwidth can be counted on in a EW heavy peer to peer environment. And of course the less bandwidth that can be assured, the more autonomy you need.

There have been a great many reports about Russian shells sucking eggs. Maybe they fired two in the hopes one of them would work right? Given that the Ukrainians were still alive it seems possible neither one did.

The money paragraph. And now we have to find a translation of this book.

Whatever the Russian excuse for a strategy is, it certainly isn't based on any military competence whatsoever.

Krugman had a good day.

Definitely not trying to say artillery is going away. Indeed somebody needs to be working on a 70 km version of that same munition. There also needs to be a GMLRS warhead that can deliver enough of them to delete a company of armor at once. It just needs to be hammered home continuously that drones are, at most, at the stage that airplanes were in 1915. We haven't seen anything yet.

Repeating myself, but there is zero reason that exact same stand off EFP warhead can't be delivered by drone instead of 155. In fact it would cost a lot less since it wouldn't have to survive the G force involved in being artillery delivered. Pretty surprised we haven't ALREADY seen this, but we surely will soon.

I wouldn't say this is a consensus view, but it is certainly a hopeful thought.

I have been arguing for this for fifteen years, literally.