dan/california

If we want the Ukrainians to be able to afford to make these little distinctions in how to kill Russians, all we have to do is commit NATO's air forces to this war. It will be over in three days, and we can all feel really good that the the Russians died burning in their own diesel instead of something incendiary we dropped. In the absence of that, Ukraine is fighting an existential war where losing means the some combination of rape, torture, a train ride to the a Siberian gulag, and outright murder of essentially the entire country. That is a proven fact, the Russians have made it VERY clear. Furthermore the sheer quantity of ordinance, whether mines or forty year old artillery shells with a 25% dud rate, used in the parts of Ukraine that have been fought over are already far past the point making vast areas unlivable, and unusable. Either the engineers come up with a better way to do de-mining or it is already a problem.

Well we have just more or less proven that the MOD is a factional mess and ninety plus percent of its combat power is in Ukraine dying. So if the FSB has lost it cohesion there is approximately nothing but habit holding the place together.

Finally!

Someone recommended this ~five pages ago, and I just got around to listening to it. It is an excellent view of the upper level currents driving the war. In Particular it actually explains Scholz's change of heart pretty well.

They didn't even bother to put ERA on the rolling coffins. That is if they roll of course, they might have to be towed to their crews final resting place.

If there are just one or two car bombs to start the party... Edit: As in all the things Putin is trying to do, Stalin was better at it. He did the purge BEFORE the war.

Quantity has a quality all its own said someone, somewhen. There are publicly available satellite pictures of Russian helicopters sitting in the on air fields in Northern Crimea. The issue is that repeated disasters have at least taught the Russians to disperse them. So Ukraine would only get one or two helicopters per missile. Whether or not that is a good deal depends on how many missiles you have, and how much damage the helicopters are causing. The choppers have proved to be a problem, so if there are enough missiles on hand... I think a lot of the ATACMS awaiting upgrade are currently DPICM war heads. They would actually be far MORE useful to Ukraine, for things like killing helicopters. We would just have to get over ourselves. While we were at it we could send Ukraine a few tens of thousands of the older M26 rockets for the HIMARS. The grid square deletion experience might have noticeable effect on Russian morale.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/world/europe/prigozhin-shoigu-gerasimov-surovikin-russia-military.html

The bases of those helicopters are flying from come immediately to mind. And then we have to see if the ATACMS come with permission to shoot them at the Kerch bridge. I suspect a combined attack on the bridge by ATACMS and Storm Shadow would be more than Russian air defense can handle, assuming it could handle either one. There is also the simple issue of maintaining the pressure Storm Shadow is applying now. Russian rail junctions have become very unhealthy places.

Yes, but those smarter mines have to be built and laid. Something that dealt with the massive cold war stocks of dumb mines would be VERY useful. But things worked in Kharkiv because there was no one present, sober, and awake to fire heavy machine guns and mortars at those light vehicles. The Russian army in the south has not yet reached that point.

There are a lot of terms like that.

There was an interesting case in Kharkiv in the fall where the Ukrainians sent very light vehicles thru an area without problems, and some follow on units in tracked vehicles triggered the mines the light units had driven over.

The mines and entrenchments matter very little unless there are troops to man them that are willing to fight. Even if they have bodies to put in those trenches, they count for far far less if their enablers have been burned away. So it really comes down to how fast Russia is losing the important stuff. How bad are its loses in artillery? How many counter battery radars, and wide area jamming systems does it have left? Even competent ATGM teams do not just appear over night like mushrooms. It all comes down to differential attrition in the systems that matter. Ukraine itself might be the best definition of a medium power, I would also give a nod to Vietnam. That works up until HIMARS was introduced successfully. After that it is all about not upsetting the Russians too much, now you can argue that is valid, but telling Ukraine that they have beat the Russians slowly, and slow walking them on EU, and NATO membership at the same time is just wrong. Biden's line about "we aren't going to make it easy for Ukraine to get in NATO" was the single dumbest thing he has said since this war started.

This, exactly this. Why was Ukraine left hanging for the six months previous to 2/24, when there was rock solid evidence of what was coming. It was because there was this enormous fear of Russian power, that anything we do will make it worse.Why were there not HIMARS in country in a month? Why was Western armor that is now grinding through mine field in the south not available to drive home the offensive in Kharkiv last fall? Why is the southern offensive not supported by fifty plus F-16s? The answer to all of those questions is that we gave Russia to much deference, to much credit, and to much fear.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rachman-review/id1504048545?i=1000618701113 Really good podcast, nothing completely new, but it lays out the post coup situation really well.

I think it would be way too slow. But I am up for testing anything and everything at this point. Just to sketch out my idea a little more, and it is just an idea, would be to have the high grade robot with a highly capable sensor suite mark the mines. the mines would be marked with some combination of gps coordinates, and a little tag like the ones apple sells to find whatever you keep losing. So the kamikaze robot dogs can do the actual breach at a dead run with minimal sensors. because you aren't getting them back. It might be work better to just have the fancy robot place the charges on each mine, but then it has to keep going back for more charges, and would just be that much easier to spot. There are a lot of possible iterations. The problem needs money thrown at it. Edit: cross posted, sorry

A bit of hacking that had the bombs landing squarely on the Russian positions in Oleshky would be truly hilarious.

A grand good time was had by all.

I don't think they are heavy enough to detonate an AT mine.

https://twitter.com/search?q=go1 robot dog&src=typed_query&f=top The harder I look at even the dumb mine problem, lets leave next generation smart mines for another day,the more a I think it has to be a small robot solution. My current back of the envelope theory would be to have a fairly capable robot dog, or UAV, mark the mines as stealthily as possible, and then have small army of the cheapest possible robots go kamikaze on the marked mines at the time of the assault. $1000 dollars per mine to get a breach in combat conditions works out to be a reasonable number when you aren't having to risk really expensive hardware or people to get it done. My math says that even if each mine took its own $500 dollar robot, a ten meter wide lane thru a field half a kilometer deep, with a mine density of 1 mine per square meter, cost $2,500,000. That is better than break even if you assume every breach using current tech cost you one one armored vehicle. If each robot could lay a a few charges before parking on the last mine in its assigned series cost would come down that much more. The twenty or thirty years we spent thinking we would never have to do this again are proving expensive.

The foreign policy blob seems to be splitting right down the middle on this one.

Someone needs to write these guys a blank check, or something close to it. Finding is only the very first step to actually breaching, but it an important one.

I am not saying either Steve or the The_Capt is wrong, in fact they are two of the smartest people on the entire internet on this subject. I do think two factors are not getting enough weight in the discussion. Putin won't live forever, so at some point there has to be a new Czar appointed/crowned. Given his age, health, and expanding set of enemies that could be any moment, literally. The second factor is that the Russian economy has been deeply damaged by this war, and thus the supply of gravy to keep the hyenas fed is getting smaller, perhaps by quite a lot. Thus the Russian regime is facing two relatively near term inevitabilities. They have to agree on a new leader, and they have to do it with a smaller stream of income to buy off the various interest groups. I am trying to advance at least the possibility that a long slow war makes these problems worse, not better. Giving Ukraine every single piece of gear it can physically make use of might force Putin to end the war while his regime has some semblance of state capacity, and agrees on who is in charge.