dan/california

APS radar automatically detecting and tracking a missile flying directly at you at 900 kph seems more straightforward than detecting and tracking something circling around you at 90 kph. The latter seems like it would be subject to more false signals, like a car driving past for example.

We have seen soldiers using shotguns to some effect against drones on the battlefield. Its really not a far cry to assume that a mounting for a shotgun type weapon that uses Trophy's detection system can do a decent job of defeating drones coming at it. 

I am sure we will see quite a bit of testing for such systems in the next few years given how prevalent FPVs are. 

Animarchy making a fantastic point about the survivability of MaxxPros, or at least keeping their people alive inside. 

I think APS is part of a solution, but the problem is - as we just saw by Sumy - one has to put APS on everything.  No point having gold plated protection for mech/armor if the logistics are still running around in trucks with no protection.  We learned this in places like Iraq and Afghanistan bit no one wants to spend the kind of money that will be needed to upscale it to the levels we are seeing in this war.
There comes a point where our legacy systems just get too costly to try and keep in motion. 

My honest guess - and it is a guess, as good or bad as anyone else’s- is that it would be a curb stomp but a far more costly one than we are used to. The US still has enough power to tip something like this over but the costs would have been extremely high, much higher than we have seen before.
Now US versus China in Chinas front yard? That one could get interesting - but I suspect the nuclear equation would kick in quickly. Two nations on the planet I would not want to play nuclear chicken with as we do with Russia: NK and China.

“We will build a better tank/IFV.  It will basically be the same one we had before but now wrapped in layers of protection (that will not solve the main issues) that will drive the costs of the vehicle by 2-3x”
The answer is a counter-system, not a more expensive platform.

That is the question of this war.  I would add: and how much of this is applicable to all wars fought in the future?  My sense is that any future peer on peer war will have elements we are seeing in this one.  I suspect symmetry will re-exert itself but it will not look like the symmetries we had before this war. But it is very hard to predict - To my mind this is WW1, and as we know everyone thought WW2 would be the same but it was very much different, even though many of the same elements from WW1 were present.

Tend to agree.  Arms manufacturers will come up with something very complex, very expensive that under ideal conditions works flawlessly....  Then someone will velcro an explosive to something and it'll be useless as we've seen.  Without the pressure of actually being in the fight I'm pessimistic about what comes out in the short term.  I'd be more inclined to look at what solutions the Ukrainians are coming up with themselves for things that are practical.  But then I don't have any Rheinmetall shares in my portfolio

Rheinmetall recently promised to present a new anti-drone turret at the next mil trade fair, both as a remote weapon platform for existing vehicles and independent on a smaller UGV chassis or a transportable stationary platform
It will consist of twin gatling guns in 7,62mm with guidance electronics for the turret to either automatically engage threats or to lock on and wait for a human input to fire.
Still, this all seems like the "putting more expensive stuff on existing expensive stuff to maybe shoot down an FPV drone once, if it gets spotted by sensors, until they send two from different sides" approach.
The main question will be whether  a) militaries will solve the problem of comm channels, which currently prevent using more than one drone within a certain radius with Ukraine's commercial / modified commercial models. 
b) how dynamic a programmed / autonomous swarm can fly

Galeev mentioned once (I have no other confirmation) that in the late 1940s there was a mass euthanisation of heavily disabled Red Army veterans who'd somehow made it home.... expensive to keep and bad for morale for the next war's recruits to look at. 😞

The article is about Mexico, but the first paragraph makes it extremely clear that the lessons from Ukraine are being learned far and wide, not just by the good guys either. 

I am inclined to agree with a lot of this.  Further we are seeing the same behaviours on both sides.  The UA holds armor back only releasing them for short sharp missions. They were down to small company sized actions last summer too. I have to believe that a military that had a combined arms doctrine and training before this war just spontaneously drops it in favour of a grinding attritional approach…just because.
Add to this the whole air situation - mutual denial for conventional tac avn and fast air, Wild West for UAS. The excuse that both sides in this war have somehow forgotten combined arms and manoeuvre really stretches credibility, particularly on a 800km+ frontage. Russia is clearly moved to straight up attritional/positional warfare. My personal hypothesis is that they did so because they had to given the realities of the environment and their own constraints.  Ukraine has done a version of the same. High concentrations of forces do not work in this war.  Every time we see them build up, they are interdicted for either side.  So Ukraine has gone on defence, likely for force preservation.  While Russia is trying to burn through by pure brute force.
There is no more room for fancy footwork, this is a straight up game of smash face.

The article is about Mexico, but the first paragraph makes it extremely clear that the lessons from Ukraine are being learned far and wide, not just by the good guys either. 

Is it just me or does the RA seem a little more ragged lately?  We have been here before but there seems to be a steady stream of some weird signals again.  I am starting to wonder if they burned themselves out over the Winter-Spring trying to show everyone that they are not burned out.

Now there could be something to this line.  Putin has played up heritage and Russian history a lot.  The reality is that Russia for the average Russia was not great place to live.  The rich, and Moscow were doing fine for the most part but the rest of the nation was kinda backward and economically lagging (to be polite).  Putin was banging on the history drum pretty hard - he even thought it would be a good idea in that stupid Carelson interview.
So maybe the logic here is to give disenfranchised people something to fight for.  A vision of a Russia which was still “great”.  It explains that video we saw of the Russian officer telling his men that “they will be remembered”.  This is not an existential war, it is a crusade (which is often framed similarly).  A crusade to push back the west and retake Russia identity.  That is some powerful stuff.  Unfortunately it also boxes this thing up further as the only way for Russians to walk away is to reject Putin’s version of Russian identity.  Which could mean walking away from it entirely.  The man is playing chicken with his whole society.

The way that mount is vibrating the CEP must be the best part of a kilometer.

This actually brings an interesting point up. The Soviets during WW2 had at least a counterpoint to their soldiers suffering greatly, namely that they were quite honestly in a fight to the death. Many of said soldiers had seen their homes occupied and horrible abuses suffered to the people who were left behind, to say the least of the general death, misery and displacement even before death squads arrived. There was a wide and pretty profound desire amongst Soviet soldiers not only to fight and stop this but to also gain revenge, especially as they retook lands and discovered the true extent of what had been happening. That undoubtedly helped with their overall willingness to put up with a lot of hardship: there was no other choice. Fight or die. 

Compared to today? Putin can call this an existential war all he likes, and while some might buy the whole nazis in Ukraine propaganda that permeates media channels. But at the end of the day everyone knows that Russia is really not in a life or death situation (Putin is probably though). No one is going to invade their actual sovereign territory with the intention of permanent occupation. One wonders just how much patience the even heavily censored Russian people have for what is in effect a offensive war of conquest against a country that plenty of Russians have personal connections or family in. Already heard some pretty depressing cases where families have one relation in the AFU and others in the RGF. 
Outside of that, they have been told since day one that the Ukrainians will 'collapse any moment now' and that just one final push is all that is needed. Based on how soldiers reacted to that attitude during the first world war, there is a breaking point that might be reached sooner than expected when the bubble of lies finally bursts. Its not going to be pretty when it does.

Further to this, the Russians talk up a lot about their 'Slavic stoicism' compared to others and how it will win them the war, while completing ignoring that the Ukrainians are quite literally of the same heritage. They certainly suffered just as much during the second world war as anyone else in the Soviet union, and their capacity for resilience has been clearly demonstrated by this point in this current conflict. The Russian propaganda also seems to conveniently ignore that they were very much at their limit in 1945 in terms of manpower and cracks were really starting to show. (Average rifle division strength at that point was getting shockingly poor) The same propaganda seems to forget that Russia today is not at all like the soviet union was and probably has a far poorer ability to endure this conflict. 

I would again suggest that while RU culture, generally, devalues the lives of others, I am quite sure that individuals value their own life just as much as anyone else.  I suspect what we see are men trapped by circumstance, seeing no way out, and hoping they are in the small percentile that survive or receive a wound that will take time to heal but not be too debilitating.  
This reminds me of what germans said about RU soldiers in WW2 -- they don't value life like the west, they are impervious to cold and suffering, etc.  What germans were seeing was the apathy of those trapped by circumstance and misinterpreting it as giving life no value -- did the germans not understand that the russians were not going to complain to their captors, and why would the captors care anyway?  US did same with japanese early on, believing they had magical jungle fighting powers despite none of them ever seeing a jungle until 1941, and believing they could live on tiny amounts of rice and be fit and happy (totally untrue, of course).

This may shock and amaze you but this is not a binary thing. HVTs just outside of GMLRS range are probably going to have to go through a different authorization process than other strikes but still have an approval process. All strikes into Russia will likely be heavily vetted. This will all be part of a pretty robust ROE regime if the UA wants to use US weapons.  
And another shock...maybe everything happening does not show up on the news.  
Any and all strikes on Russian nuclear architecture will be very much off the table because the grown ups are not stupid.
Of course I have concerns about nuclear escalation...and so should you.

Yes, but as the Two majors eloquently informed us, dying is a bigger one. One of the overriding lessons of this war is that you can disperse or you can die. It is going to take a total rethink of military doctrine to work thru that. Starting with the elimination of the word  and concept convoy.
BTW whoever is writing that is disturbingly competent and needs to get on the GUR's list.

Incidentally the Washington post article I recently posted noted that the GMLR being cleared for use wasn’t that big a deal cause Russian EW was rendering it ineffective…..welp, no one told the S-400 that. Yep, ATACMS are prohibited still, I assume cause a missile launch looks like a missile launch? 
tbf I saw a video of a set of Ukrainian trucks bunched up together, getting taken out by FPVs, dispersal is a universal pain. 

I don’t know how to disperse when you have FPVs come at you from all directions.  It looks like the pulled into tree lines which is right in line with our own doctrine.  They likely abandoned the vehicles because once illuminated, there was little they could actually do against FPV travelling faster than they can.  Which way is “the enemy” when being hit from all directions?

Or it was an ATACMs strike, or on the outer edge of GMLRS and the UA did some quick repositioning. I have a serious problem with the “Russia Sux” line of thinking.  It is a lazy heuristic that gets tossed around far too often to explain phenomenon.  Sometimes it may be a simple screw up but Ukrainian targeting has been profoundly improving over the last year, as a bunch of burning scrap metal at very long ranges demonstrates.
Russian complacency is far too convenient in this case with so little actual evidence of what happened. Regardless, the UA spotted and struck a HVT that was likely 10s of kms inside Russia.  They did so before the target could move, so likely first salvo.  Let’s not write the whole thing off to “Russia Sux” just yet.

From the map looks like about 2.5kms from Ukrainian border, well within FPV range.  Why send an expensive HIMAR to do the job of about 100k worth of drones.  RA likely thought they were safe in Russia or took a wrong turn.  Of course we are looking at logistical trucks, can’t disperse these like AFVs/IFVs at the best of times.