dan/california

If Wagner does anything from Belarus Ukraine can demonstrate the meaning of interior lines and go take Minsk. It would be glorious.

Yes a top grade 40mm gun with radar, infrared, and a 99% automatic targeting system can knock down drones in quantity. But as the The_Capt has discussed at length, that vehicle, with that gun, and that targeting system, is going to cost a MINIMUM of five million dollars. U.S./NATO needs thousands of them. given that guns have a relatively short effective range you need one of them for every mech platoon and artillery battery, at least one for every last 5k of a supply run, and, and.... It gets expensive rather quickly.

Like I just said...

Armored vehicles and artillery systems that cost millions of dollars keep getting killed by FPV drones that cost at most a couple of thousand. Most of the drones are lash ups of civilian toys and old RPG rounds. When someone gets a production line going to build these things for military use from scratch it is going to get positively hazardous out there, and then the next generation won't really need operators for every drone. At most there will be one guy for every ten or twenty drones clicking yes when a window ask him if the object in the picture should go boom. Edit: And there will a helpful AI iff system telling what to do in the window beside the first one. Two seconds of consideration will constitute "man in the loop".

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Origins-of-Victory-Audiobook/B0BZQCPLL1?ref=a_library_t_c5_libItem_B0BZQCPLL1&pf_rd_p=80765e81-b10a-4f33-b1d3-ffb87793d047&pf_rd_r=PKF68YGNKSNBYWX5GP72&pageLoadId=WuHv9sjCUO374tV9&creativeId=4ee810cf-ac8e-4eeb-8b79-40e176d0a225 I also recommend this book, which looks at four of the big technology transitions since the U.S.Civil War.

True but spotting and in command are not quite the same thing. I am not saying the game doesn't make a solid effort, but a lot of things that are now somewhat abstracted might benefit from being brought forward to the players attention, added in a fleshed out way. Runners and field telephones being the most obvious examples. There are vast array of factors in play when your comms depend a series of three drones forming a mesh network to get the signal back from your forward most robotic sensor systems. Combat Mission, Modern Electronic Warfare might need to be a separate stand alone game. Although there are also truly vast possibilities if they get real several people per side multiplayer worked out. Edit: to get back to the way doctrine has changed since 1865 we really need to play close attention to different types of command and control systems. They explain quite a few of the things that don't otherwise make sense.

I don't know if Steve thinks it is worth the time to code, but a much more detailed treatment of signals, runners, and the other nitty gritty of C&C would be great, at least at the higher difficulty levels. I realize the game actually models a lot of this under the hood now, but sometimes the way it is abstracted can make it hard to figure out what is going on. I suspect it is vastly worse for people who have never in even glanced at a field manual, or even the game manual. Just a better method to figure out why a unit is out of command, and the best way to get it back in command would be great. I am thinking as I type here, but if you click on an officer and see a circle that indicates his voice command range that would be very helpful.

Has something changed in EW or hacking of Russian systems, or are cluster munitions a LOT better.? There seems to have been a lot more of these guys being demilitarized in the last week.

It seems to me that fake tracks ought to be their own art form by this point. There isn't all that much you can do about leaving real ones.

The concept of ISR superiority in action. We see you, the minute you park, we will kill you.

George F Will of all people....

NYT's view of the war. Russia claims to have repelled attack. We shall see.

Murz is unhappy...

It is a truly great video.

The really interesting question is was he promised it by Lukashenko? Or Putin?

Lukashenko seems to think having Wagner in Belarus is real card to play. I will laugh to the point of bodily harm if Prig launches a successful coup against him, after barely failing to depose Putin. Edit: For triple points, prig could then hit the EU up for a five billion dollar bribe. Turn the country over to the people who actually won the last election, and retire to a heavily guarded compound in the luxury country of his choice. He would become the most successful mercenary since a condottiere made himself the Duke of Milan ~500 years ago. It wouldn't be much crazier than the way this war has worked out so far.

https://www.threads.net/@maks_23_ua/post/CvHM46forYy/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D 25 km range fixed wing drone for $3000, that is how you win the war.

This worth your time to watch from start to finish. At least 85% of it has probably been discussed in the thread somewhere, at some level of detail, but this pulls a great many things together in a VERY neat and tidy package.

The U.S.army is paying some attention to what is happening in Ukraine, at least. Hopefully they are planning to buy the drones they are simulating

They said that perfectly.

I have a suspicion the the Russians are attempting something in Luhansk simply because their supply situation is better there. If these troops were setn to the south they would overburden a supply system that is already shaking under the heaviest deep attacks the Ukrainians have, a system that has a lot of failure points that are difficult to work around. The Kerch bridge is merely the most obvious. On the Luhansk front a lot of that deep infrastructure is in Russia proper, and it is just more redundant.

And remember That Ukraine , and the AFU general staff in particular have lasted about 515 days longer than they were supposed to in this war. They get the benefit of the doubt about the quality of their planning.

I think this bit here is really important as a window into the mindset of a pre WW1 military. Close order drill had been the foundation of military life since rise of first the pike, and then the musket 500 years previously. It was simply how things were done, if you needed to give new orders you pulled your troops into close order to give them new orders. I strongly suspect that the use of more or less the same word for both things was not coincidental. The institutional resistance to giving up this world view was very strong. They only let it go when it became clearly suicidal.

It worth pointing out that on the Eastern Front in WW1 There were not enough bodies to man continuous trench lines, and the Germans used maneuver warfare to beat the Russians like a drum.

You Gentlemen have filled out my reading list for approximately forever. I think The_Capt is making a key point here. Grinding, attritional, trench warfare is is perhaps the least pleasant activity humans have ever thought up. Literally no one would commit to a course of action they understood in advance would wind up like the Western Front in 1916, or the front line in Ukraine today, no one sane anyway. Putin was selling a a three day walk over, not a couple of years of ruinous trench warfare with high tech extras. The only time I can think of where they admitted it was going to wind up in trench warfare is the Maginot Line, and of course then it did't work out that way at all. Although the people who built the Maginot also sold the idea that doing it their way would be more efficient with both money and lives. You Gentlemen have filled out my reading list for approximately forever