Tux
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Posts posted by Tux
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1 hour ago, riptides said:
I'll start.
Russia wins by Putin remaining in power and occupying portions of Ukraine.
The collect west loses by the above. It loses more if and when sanctions are lifted in a return to "normalcy". Normalcy being defined as business as usual with Putins Russia.
So the West lost in 2014, then.
Someone aught to tell the Russians.
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sfhand, I was going to try and apply a scalpel to your posts to see if I could extract a point but then maybe we should address the below two items first:
2 hours ago, sfhand said:I didn't just arrogantly offer my views on the statements, you asked me for them. Instead of following up you then write your hagiography and attack my character. I can guess at your motives behind the switcheroo but that's not me. To each his own.
Steve asked for your views but implicit to that request was that you also add arguments and reasons for why you hold such views. That is the only way in which someone would be able to reasonably engage with you, really. You didn’t provide any such grist for the rational mill that this forum tries to be, so it has started to chew on you instead.
2 hours ago, sfhand said:Look man, I don't need to keep this going. Unlike some here I can agree to disagree and move on.
So… would the following be a fair summary all of your posts so far: ‘I partially disagree with some stuff but I’m happy with that and don’t want to discuss it any further.’?
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1 hour ago, panzermartin said:
With no intention to play advocate of sfhand, we have been many times wrong here about the "truth".
I remember the board being very trigger happy with Iraq 2003 for instance. To their defense they admitted later that G Bush administration was at wrong.
But we can't undo what happened now. Iraq for me was a pivotal war for the West. This is where the game of post cold war US playing the freedom/democracy bringer reached a dead end. Because of the lies, the bypassing of UN, the Bush cynical rhetoric, the scores of civilian casualties, the failed occupation /reform etc. ISIS was born out of this war, the refugee crisis ignited. Despite the quick win over Saddam, US reputation was seriously damaged there.
Imo Putin invasion wouldn't happen without US being so damaged in international reputation as a Democracy guarantee power. 2014 and green men wouldn't happen too. I dare to say even Trump wouldn't happen. US just lost focus and steam, started questioning itself, started polarizing etc.
The truth then was that Iraq was a threat to the World with WMDs and Saddam was an evil dictator (which he was). The war ended Saddam but opened a whole new can of worms and a crack in the western camp that widened with a lengthy and fruitless Afghan campaign.
Our truth now is that Russia is a military threat to the world, a threat to global democracy and our duty is to smash them to pieces before worse things occur. Maybe that's the right truth but I'm not convinced of the outcome of the path we have taken. I believe what we have in the West as spiritual descendants of Athenian democracy, European rennaisance, French revolution, American revolution etx, is precious and must be protected. If this escalating war ends up destroying all this, then this isn't the right war for us.
And beneath this war on the surface, there are deeper issues threatening our societies. For me rampant capitalism, privitization of health and natural resources, outsourcing everything to the East, cultural decay and the widening gap between rich and poor will be more decisive in people not believing or not joining the fight in a possible World War. Talking to everyday people not necessarily well informed about the war, there is a big percentage that secretly wishes Russia will win, not because they like a dictatorship but because they feel that this will deal a blow to a decaying neo colonial system that slowly suffocates their existence. They could be deadly wrong of course. But If you can't convince your own people that this is a system worth defending for, then it's already a lost cause.
Sometimes celebrating the small Ukrainian victories, the destruction of a spy plane, or sinking a warship seems so insignificant in the greater picture of events that could come. Russia has convinced its people that "evil West is stretching its dirty colonial hand to grab their vast resources" like they did a few times in the past. The more we get involved the more Russians are convinced this is another great patriotic war. For some this is a dead end against a stubborn nuclear power. For others, like most here in the forum, a frontal attack is the only way for West as we know it to survive.
This could be the only truth worth debating maybe.
I think there’s probably an interesting discussion to be had about how best to respond to a threat to a system which many people feel frustrated with or even disenfranchised from entirely. However I also think there’s a time and a place for that discussion and it probably ain’t while allies are fighting an existential war of defence on their own territory, almost explicitly for the right to try and join the threatened system.
War has a funny way of punishing equivocal responses and that cannot be the fault of those who are attacked.
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40 minutes ago, Kinophile said:
Seriously guys, why are we (yet again) feeding the troll?
I find reading walls of naked opinion (when it even gets that far) as tedious as the next person, so I don’t mean this to sound at all like a rebuke: however I would argue that it’s important for a forum such as this one, which prides itself on trying to be a rational and open-minded place, to at least engage with dissenting views for those first few rounds that may be necessary to determine whether they are trying to contribute in good faith, or not. Some people just honestly aren’t aware how to express themselves constructively or struggle to isolate coherent streams of thought if they have a lot going on in their heads at once. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have nothing of value to add, likely thought that admittedly does seem in many cases.
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Never mind.
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5 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Don't worry we will have nano Grey Goo to clean all that up...and eat humanity while they are at it.
Probably for the best.
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12 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Probably a matter of time. It would require full autonomy but I think that capability is already on the table. My sense is that in order to survive one will need to get quieter on the battlefield, not louder. I think decoys, deception and obscuration are also going to see a major renaissance.
Absolutely. I honestly can't wait for this bit. The instant autonomy properly arrives the race will be on to work out where the gaps lie in the enemy drones' target recognition algorithms and exploit them. Yellow/pink dazzle camouflage for infantry? Every solider wearing a pair of prosthetic arms to avoid being identified as human? Furry SPGs that grunt and let off an occasional puff of methane in an attempt to "look like" livestock to a particular type of 'walking land mine'?
Entire fleets of dirt-cheap drone decoys chirping and hopping around the place, attempting to deceive and absorb the enemy's dirt-cheap attackers faster than they can be produced: the ultimate expression of a war of economies?
As an aside, this is not the first time the discussion on this thread has made me consider the massive ****tonne of plastic waste that even near-future wars are going to leave lying about the place. Hopefully materials tech can get ahead of the game soon and provide viable bio-degradable solutions.
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41 minutes ago, Kinophile said:
Another soldier training with the new sight is Lance Corporal Harry Howes, a driver with 13 Air Assault Support Regiment Royal Logistic Corps, who was full of praise for the Smash sight.
LCpl Howes said: "The Smash sight is a simple piece of kit to use. It just takes a few goes to get used to how it works.
"You still pull the trigger, but the system fires the rifle when it is most confident of a hit – which it gets!"
Interesting kit. Bet it will turn up in Ukraine pretty quickly. In that second photo he's using a tripod, I assume for parameter control during range testing.
And of course, they must first solve for
If this works as advertised and production is quickly scalable I think we might be looking at the first real anti-drone game-changer.
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59 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
The largest drawback (and risk) in employing EM for c-UAS is signature. One has to pump a lot of energy into the sky with a large very expensive system to take down cheap drones. These EM systems are very vulnerable to detection because they are pumping out so much energy into space - you can literally see them from space. They immediately become targets for other fires. In many ways this is the major dilemma of UAS right now. Whether a bunch of soldiers open up with small arms, EM or even EW, missiles…they all have high signatures that give away position. So if you are firing away at 20 small, cheap UAS, you can get 90% of them but your position is given away and artillery can go to work on you. If you don’t fire and try to hide, the UAS will likely find you anyway and then FPV you to death.
This is why I am a big fan of low energy dispersed systems (like other UAS) doing the c-UAS job. Fight flies with flies, not a hammer.
Following on from this thread, do we have any ideas why we're not seeing more evidence of HARM-type UAVs, yet? LARDs ("Light Anti Radiation Drones"), if you will? From what I can tell it shouldn't be particularly complicated to make a drone which takes off and flies towards (and then into) the strongest local source of radiation at a frequency of your choosing?
Wouldn't such a design be equally capable of attacking enemy EW or other enemy emitters (soliders with radios, FPVs, etc.)?
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On 3/7/2024 at 1:51 AM, The_Capt said:
I am thinking that these unmanned surface vessels are probably going to evolve into platforms as opposed to suicide drones. They are fast (relatively), low profile and have incredibly long range. I suspect they are already working on using them for UAS or missile launching platforms. And I would not rule out small fast torpedoes. In the end they don’t even have sink the ship, only damage it enough and the effect is the same. That way these small sea drones can stand off kms and simply launch other systems until enough get through. At these ranges this will effectively deny sea space within the littorals and possibly further out.
Quoting this note only because it's the most recent one to touch on the naval warfare discussion and I wanted to add some thoughts to that.
On ideas for near-term development of Ukraine's naval drones:
- The aim is to destroy the enemy's ability to wage war on the sea. That will almost always mean that your target is the enemy ship, not the crew. At the moment exposed enemy crew members are not effective at preventing USV attacks. If you can get close to a ship you are therefore much better off pressing home a direct attack on said ship than you are trying to blow grapeshot into the face of some rube balancing an MG on the railings. This will remain the case until exposed crewmembers become a significant threat to your attempts to approach the ship (unlikely to ever happen imo) or until you are able to kill so many crew, so efficiently as to make it a better way of neutralising the ship than sinking it (ditto).
- Modern warships are already pretty focussed on mitigating the dangers presented by enemy warships, ASMs and torpedoes - those are obviously well-established as primary threats. To my mind then there is not much to be gained in terms of lethality by having USVs try to replicate those types of attack. The Ukrainians' current success is being achieved by threading the eye of the needle between their drones not being torpedoes, ASMs or warships but having features of all three: They are operator-guided and can see their targets from long distances like a warship or a missile and they cause damage on the waterline like various torpedoes or missiles can. The fact they attack on the surface also means they are too low down for conventional anti-ASM defences to effectively target but they are too small and agile for anti-ship weaponry to hit reliably, either.
- Given the above, I think it's only a matter of time before this capacility gap slams shut and effective countermeasures to the current generation of Sea Baby-type drones are popularised (although whether the Russians will be the ones to do so seems bafflingly uncertain). I've mentioned previously that I do think deployable netting/fencing could be an interim solution which could completely neutralise the current threat or at least significantly increase the number of successful attacks required to damage or sink a vessel.
Longer term, I agree that naval drones will become platforms for torpedo-type weapons (correctly noted already as basically the best way to sink something otherwise designed to float). Do we think future navies may start by looking to populate the oceans perhaps even exclusively with torpedo-toting, submersible drones? Presumably they may spend time at the surface to charge batteries, cruise more efficiently and/or to communicate but what combat advantages, if any, would a drone have on the surface if there is no part of it that needs to breathe?
Even further hence, I wonder whether the ideal future naval drone might be capable of both flight and submersible operations? Flight could be used for faster travel and to escape from enemy torpedoes; submersion would grant concealment, energy-efficient loitering, etc. You then of course need to start on a 'torpedo' design that can follow a target into the air and potentially back underwater again. Get a few of these machines fighting each other close to shore and you've got yourself a hell of a show, if nothing else!
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22 hours ago, Butschi said:
They can't seize and hold terrain, yet.
And how well will holding that terrain work out for the infantry in the future? Hell, how well does it work right now?
If we accept a combination of points raised by Butschi, JonS, Capt and others I think we probably agree that unmanned and autonomous weaponry will likely dominate the future battlefield to the extent that whoever wins the "drone war" may gain an unassailable military advantage over the side who are left without a functional drone force. That does mean that whatever passes as "infantry" will have little combat utility beyond supporting operation of the drone force. I would therefore agree that it probably doesn't then follow that infantry will be needed to "hold ground" in the traditional sense of holding it against enemy military action, since they will be incapable of doing so if the enemy still has a functional drone force capable of launching an attack.
However if we consider the non-military dimension to "holding ground", perhaps the primary role for human infantry in the future will be closer to a police force than traditional soldiery. They may have to be police officers, diplomats, counsellors, managers, teachers, engineers, artists, partners and merchants; everything needed to help, energise and build trust within a population recently scoured by warfare. I suppose you could call it COIN but really the "infantry" may have to be optimised entirely for winning the hearts and minds of any occupied or liberated population and barely at all for combat.
I know there are multiple people on this board who have experience in Afghanistan and Iraq - perhaps they can opine as to what the ideal "infantry" would have been in those theatres, if they could have taken for granted that basically all substantial combat functions were accomplished by autonomous drones.
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18 minutes ago, Harmon Rabb said:
Very interesting news.
I'm curious if the Su-57 is going to be making regular appearances or is this just Russia showing their new toys to the cameras, to save face because as we all know the skies over Ukraine have not been so friendly to them recently.
Remember that time we heard something about the T-14 Armata showing up on the battlefield and did not hear much about it again?
Anyway,If the Russians do keep using Su-57s this would be a good opportunity to gain some information on how they perform in combat for the future.
Good reminder to send the AFU more AD systems, they sure have used Patriot well so far.
I imagine there’s an element of “now we’re getting serious” posturing for internal Russian consumption going on, here. Perhaps timed to partially counterbalance the current air war narrative of Russian aircraft starting to take noticeably heavier losses.
I also imagine that ‘escort by a flight of Su-34s’ won’t be the only measure they’re taking to be damned sure a shot-down Su-57 isn’t the next thing to hit the headlines.
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45 minutes ago, Kinophile said:
You know what we haven't had in here for a short while? A nice nuclear punch up.
Interesting but I think several of the criteria listed have been met (or very nearly met) in Ukraine with no nuclear response, yet. The article leaves it until the end to state:
”William Alberque, director of strategy, technology, and arms control at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told the FT that Russia likely has a higher threshold for using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine due to fears it would likely "escalate the conflict and lead to direct intervention by the U.S. or U.K."”
Why does the UK always get highlighted like this? I don’t think we could meaningfully ‘directly intervene’ if we tried![Edit: Ninja Capt at it again. I surrender]
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33 minutes ago, Grigb said:
Looks like last night RU Nat got message from friendly comrades to be quiet. So far nothing to add to what I already wrote except umors that RU command is leaning toward UKR SF raid.
Not surprising. There are just so many things that seem wrong with the FF theory:
- The A-50, of all types, would be in constant contact with air defence units;
- An A-50 does not resemble a drone or missile;
- The A-50 was manoeuvring and releasing countermeasures when the ‘SAM’ in that video was launched - surely any SAM crew in the area would therefore be aware that the AWACS was being targeted and hold their damned fire?
- As far as I’m aware Russian SAMs do not have an IR seeker head, so the flares and a missile apparently striking one do not make sense;
and there are more…
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2 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
This A-50 shoot down is interesting. Too far into Russian airspace to think that a Russia asset shot it down (though it is possible), too far away to be Patriot or any other Ukrainian system based on Ukrainian soil. That leaves three possibilities:
1. A Ukrainian aircraft got through enough of the air defense system to fire at least 2x AA missiles
2. Ukrainian special forces got close enough by boat to use an otherwise non-portable AA system
3. The plane was flying low enough to be hit by MANPAD and a special forces group positioned themselves along an established flight path
I'm going with boat and significant ground based AA system as my first guess.
Steve
I might be able to believe number 1 was possible if this wasn’t a literal AWACS that got shot down - it was the air defence system!
I’m going with number 3. The people videoing it comment on how low the aircraft is flying and modern MANPADS can reach pretty high up in any case.
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15 minutes ago, Pablius said:
Why flares? Aren´t heatseeking missiles (mostly) short range?
My thought as well. I’m not aware of a long range SAM that uses an IR seeker. I assume either the A-50’s pilot was panicking and releasing every type of countermeasure he could think of or maybe he couldn’t choose between chaff/flares (i.e. he could either release both or neither). Both of those feel an order of magnitude more likely than that some enterprising Ukrainian pilot got within Fox-2 range of an AWACs 250km behind the front line, although at this point nothing would completely surprise me!
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12 hours ago, billbindc said:
FPV dog fights are already a thing:
And so, it begins.
[edit: dammit, Capt!]
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As well as pairing up, convoying, etc. I wonder whether we might start to see deployable torpedo net-type structures being retrofitted to slower/more vulnerable BSF vessels. These drone attacks look like they would struggle to cause much damage if a chain-link net that extends 2m above/below the waters surface could be extended to surround the target’s hull (say 10m out) during an attack.
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Nadezhdin’s out, although there’s something wonky about the numbers being reported:
“Refusing to give up, Mr Nadezhdin said on social media that he would challenge the decision in Russia's Supreme Court.
"I collected more than 200,000 signatures across Russia. We conducted the collection openly and honestly."
The Central Election Commission said that more than 9,000 signatures submitted by Mr Nadezhdin were invalid.
That left 95,587 names, meaning he was just short of the 100,000 required signatures to register as a candidate, commission member Andrei Shutov said.”
I don’t know whether to be encouraged based on the assumption he’s been rejected because the government think he’s too popular, or discouraged that he only managed to get c.200k signatures in the first place. -
52 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Why this matters and should be on this thread is that war is also a 2nd order chaos entity built on a foundation of fear and greed.
Nice.
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1 hour ago, OBJ said:
By Foundation you mean predictive history?
Fictional Mathematician Hari Seldon's theory of psychohistory, a new and effective mathematics of sociology. Using statistical laws of mass action, it can predict the future of large populations.
Yes, I mean something closer to that than to SkyNet.
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6 minutes ago, dan/california said:
You would be amazed at how difficult it is to do this.
I just mean the code (not to diminish how complicated that is), not step-by-step following the rationale behind each actual decision it has made. But point well taken - emergent AI may be emerging as we speak.
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10 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:
If it is an AI which is supposed to understand us better than we do ourselves, then by definition we would have no way of saying if it does well or not, if it indeed understands us better than us, or even if it understands us at all. We would have to go it on pure faith. I think religion is a better analogy than Foundation by that stage.
I think that, by definition, it wouldn't matter whether we believed in it or not. But in any case belief in it or its benefits needn't be any more based on "pure faith" than our assessment of any other new technology versus a hypothetical scenario in which that technology doesn't exist.
But we really are into describing pieces of our own pure imagination, now, so I suppose your assessment stands as valid as mine.
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33 minutes ago, dan/california said:
Emergent AI is already happening, the last generation or two of of big AI models have been able to do things which surprised the bleep out of the people that wrote them. They don't have a very good idea of what will happen when they turn up the processing power by another order of magnitude or two either. That is why people are running around with their hair on fire.
Yes we are seeing "emergent" features to AI models in the sense of unexpected outputs. The people that wrote them could still step you through the decision process the AI is supposed to follow though, right? I think there's a difference between that and an AI which is itself emergent and perhaps even dynamic with regards to the rules it follows, though.
I enjoy these conversations but am conscious that we are drifting perilously close to a purely philosophical discussion.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
The thing is all falsehood goes through the first two stages, as well. Unfortunately some even makes it to the third, even if only to a minority of people…
Come to think of it, the reason we value the scientific method and rational argument is because it forcibly applies the first two stages to information and so we hope that only truth makes it to the third.
Perhaps Schopenhauer should have added the word “thankfully” in there, somewhere.