Tux

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.

One might say that denial primacy took hold in the information warfare sphere before it took hold in aerial operations.

Interesting visualization of a propaganda projection process. 
 

It's because they are all familiar with the default Combat Mission UI and think that rifles should be green. They are probably wondering if it turns yellow when the owner is injured.

I've noted before my intimation that the full reform of the Ukrainian military is where its true strategic victory lies - and not into the standard Western /NATO model but true reform that keeps what works from the old, Soviet model combined and transformed into a unique hybrid. I suspect that a military which reflects the the nature of and enables the latent power of the transformed society it springs from will be finally secure from Russia. 
As an inveterate autocracy, with the particular geography it contains, Russia will only ever have the type of military it's ever had - mass and power. 
Ukraine, being a society that is something more and different, has a generational opportunity to create a unique defence force. 
 
 

Whether this is their intention or not, they do it like in WW2: One thing that the bombing campaigns were effective at was keeping the Luftwaffe busy defending the cities instead of contesting the frontlines. Ukraine has to commit Patriots et al. defending the cities instead of shooting down Russian aviation near the front.

Once again proving that everything is funnier when there's a duck involved, no matter how unfunny it is at its core.

The idea that American analysts shouldn't be doing stringent cost/benefit analyses of whether the temporary effects of drone strikes on Russian refineries might be less important than avoiding a price spike that delivers Trump to the WH and Putin an outright victory is absurd.
In addition, we should not assume much about this revelation since we have absolutely no idea of what the context of the conversations were. And of course, by the time anyone reports that aspect of the story attention will have moved on.

Sorry no way this was from the 0.50. It's equivalent to the Iraqi with a 1909 rifle posing against a down Apache. 

Anything that makes the target look less like the training images. I guess we are going to see camouflage that is taylored to fool AI not humans. Adversarial attacks were all the rage a few years back, e.g. images modified in way that they look more or less identical to humans but entirely different to AI.

Assuming something smart at work here is probably over-interpreting the videos. The simple explanation for the first video is that the system got distracted by some dirt pattern (doesn't look like it's targeting the guy running) and in the second case the fire made the vehicle look different than the images the system was trained on.
Not saying the system can't be that smart, just that we humans tend to interpret more into those things than there is in reality. More often than not it's a bug, not a feature. 😉

This is a conversation I've had with my dad (he's a philosophy professor). When is it fair to blame someone for their actions, vs when do the circumstances around the action (mental health, broken home, etc...) add up to the point where it is no longer fair to blame someone? My father considers himself a pragmatist, so it should come as no surprise that his answer is that you should direct moral blame against someone when it works. His view is that the purpose of moral blame is to change a person's behavior. Humans are generally social creatures, so having a bunch of other humans telling them that they shouldn't do a thing should generally make them less likely to do that thing again in the future. Healthy humans are usually very uncomfortable with a bunch of other humans strongly disapproving of their actions.
He uses a thermostat as an example. If the room is too cold, you adjust the thermostat. If the thermostat is broken, then adjusting it won't work. So there is no point in trying to adjust it. If someone does something that we think they shouldn't do, we leverage moral blame to get them to stop doing it (and to deter other people from doing it in the first place). But if a person's brain is broken to the point that moral blame is no longer effective at getting them to stop doing the thing they shouldn't do, then there is no point in blaming them for doing that thing (I believe our discussion at the time was mainly about mental health).
So, when do the circumstances around an action add up to the point that it's no longer fair to blame a person for their actions? According to my father, it's when the circumstances around the action add up to the point that no amount of moral blame will be effective in deterring someone from doing that thing again under similar circumstances.
So, by this logic, can we blame the population of a country for their actions? Maybe? I think there is some precedent for aggressive ad campaigns saying "you shouldn't do the thing!" getting the population of a country to do a thing at lower rates. I doubt there's much we can do to change the behavior of the Russian population, simply because I don't think western media has enough penetration into Russian society. In any case, moral blame is certainly a much fuzzier concept for populations than it is for individual people.

I think the answer should be a big "No!". It would play right into Putin's hand because then he could just accuse the West of applying double standards. Something along the lines of evil NATO opposing Russia for bringing their brethren in Donbas and on Crimea home into mother Russia's arms after they actually voted to be part of Russia - when they themselves annex countries because they can.
Would also provide more ammo to the anti-NATO/US factions in the West (who don't necessarily love Putin all that much, either) who see NATO/US as just a bunch of warmongers.
If we want to continue playing this as "we are the good guys" then we really have to play by the rules. As hard as it is and knowing that Putin doesn't.

And it sounds like DJI is also backdoored so that anybody who has their Aeroscope system can spy on them.  Ukraine has disabled some of that access because they knew at the start that the DJI systems were backdoored.
Encrypting also consumes more energy than not encrypting. So if you're in an environment where you know Pvt. Conscriptovich doesn't have an aeroscope and probably doesn't even have a radio to hear from someone who has one, then you can eke out a little extra range without encryption.  It also simplifies your conops if you're working with all ad hoc equipment so you don't have to worry about the handshaking of the controller/drone pair to sort out keys.  A lot of what Ukraine is using are drones that are literally homebuilt by people who have boxes of various COTS parts.  And after a bit of poking around (certainly not comprehensive) it seems like hobbyists have mostly not cared about encryption.
Some commercial drones, mostly for gov't, law enforcement, and big corporate clients who can afford to spend a lot of money for a small number of drones with data security seem to have it, but it's not widespread beyond that.
I'm sure we'll start seeing at least moderate encryption of the video feeds in Ukraine. It's not a hard thing to do, but it's not the default for hobbyist drone kits.
This video has some recent discussion on how widespread data security is for drones (it's not), and commercially available ones are expensive and not what you want to use for FPV bombs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5-wF63lCXw
 

🫣😵‍💫🫢
do not, under any circumstances go past the eagle cartoon. You have been warned. 

There were other issues too
https://www.oglaf.com/ornithology/

Thank you for taking the time to answer. 
I feel I need to solidify my thoughts a bit more before discussing further, as several of the positions you ascribe to what I'm thinking are actually not my positions.
This is a failure of clarity on my side but there's also a easiness to lumping people into boxes of thought - but it's made easier by foggy articulation. 
I shall ponder... 
 
 
 

So, reading the last couple of pages, here's how I'm reading the argument about western and soviet legacies. To succeed tactically on the modern battlefield, an army needs to establish fires superiority and ISR superiority (which involves denying both to the enemy and securing both for friendly operations). The legacy Soviet and legacy Western took different paths to achieving those two superiorities, albeit with some overlap. Neither seems workable on the modern battlefield.
The legacy western system relied on ranged precision systems to deliver fires. So, Excalibur, Javelin, HIMARS, Tomahawk, HARM, and the like. The legacy western system relied on dismantling the enemy's fires complex. This is a sort of pre-emptive counter battery, where we identified fires systems and targeted them as a precursor to tactical engagement.
"Air Superiority" is a misnomer. It's really ISR and fires superiority delivered by primarily airborne systems. One thing on the table now is whether the western fires superiority system can dismantle an opposing fires complex. We built our fires complex to targeting large, hot, heavy systems, not now a fires complex is much more distributed and made of much less energetic bits. Targeting a Pantsir? Doable. Targeting two guys with a backpack full of drones? Harder.
The legacy soviet system relied on mass to deliver fires. TOS-1, Grad, the abundance of tube artillery. The legacy soviet system relied on overwhelming the enemy's counterbattery complex to secure fires in a competitive environment. 
The legacy western system relied on airborne ISR to establish superiority, and on airspace denial to inhibit enemy airborne ISR. The legacy soviet system relied on recon in force (?) to establish ISR superiority, and on airspace denial to inhibit enemy ISR. These have both been blown up by high speed battlefield networking (!) and plentiful drones. Nobody has any idea how to deny dronespace. Also, the Russians appear to be using waves of expendable soldiers as a form of reconnaissance, which is horrifying, but appears to be sort of effective?
More to ponder here, and whatever system ends up able to deliver fires and ISR won't look like either the legacy western or legacy Soviet system, because the physics and geometry of a modern battlefield are so different.

For those interested in listening in on two world leaders talk about Ukraine before the war. More to follow....
 
 

Agreed. Losing power from one engine on a four engine aircraft generally shouldn't be too serious an emergency. Even the weight shift and asymmetric drag from having it fall off would probably not be too hugely significant (the engine would likely be close to the C of G in that position), but the fire and whatever else may have caused it to fall off hints at other systems and structural damage...

So, the Germans have in fact given more % to Ukraine than US and have been hurt the most economically with Nord stream shut down etc. 
Let's keep this in mind in the next round of German bashing. 
 

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.)?

I image this capability will be bifurcated; ie the drone will consist of sub units, perhaps the main one capable of diving, the others for flying, for that nice one too punch. As always, range and payload don’t favor flying unless it’s on a suborbital trajectory!
Expense/lack of off the shelf components. All of the sudden it’s not just hobbyist parts, but fancy antennas/SDRs/EE degrees etc. Radios is not a simple domain.
This is where cyberwarfare will really come into it’s own. We need to basically figure out whatever Bloodhound + etc are, but for autonomous warfare. Maybe once I finish my current gig in 3 years, I’ll start a company doing drone network risk analysis.