Richi

The Pentagon may finally be getting it.

They are of course, exercise of this magnitude and complexity is not planned in 2 weeks. Coincidence but doesn’t take away from NATO confidently squatting in Russian backyard.

Airborne on top of airborne, six feet going to be shallow grave. 

I hate to repeat myself but I again encourage everyone interested in this to look up "the Invincible" by Stanislaw Lem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible 

What a symbolic take that would be! 🇺🇦

Amen. 
And there are hundreds of ways in which they can be taken out of the fight. For example - with the manned systems approaching USD 100 mil. per unit, I can easily see them becoming something like battleships, so costly that they cannot be risked on many missions, including those which would be feasible for cheaper platforms. For missiles there is a similar problem, already experienced by the Ukraine - once the Russians divided up the large ammo&POL depots into a multitude of smaller ones, they ceased to be economic targets e.g. for Storm Shadows because that would be exchanging "2000 pounds of education" for a "ten-rupee jezzail", to quote Kipling's "Arithmetic on the frontier".
Ultimately, the ground forces should be designed to be able to stand on their own, which includes developing a functional battlefield ADA.   

I don't think it's really a pay issue - contractors can pay whatever they want and throw around equity and if the gov't needs the service and that's the price, it's not that hard to write the contract.  Especially for creative development where you're going to hire a roomful (or even a small building full) of mechatronics people to build transformers.  They each might cost a lot, but even a decent sized small company isn't going to be that expensive.  Way back at the start of my career I watched someone who was only a couple years ahead of me leave a semi-gov't job (FFRDC) to take a job at a small company developing UAVs at ~3x the salary, plus they'd pay to get a helicopter license.
The harder part about attracting engineers to that is the working environment - going into the classified world tends to be a one way trip, or at least a deep rabbit hole that people take a long time to pop out of, and then they can't even show off their cool stuff.  And the whole working on the classified side of things makes it more complicated to find and pull in outside stuff that's supposed to be air gapped, but that might be useful to incorporate.
The big cost comes in paying for the production run and all the costs wrapped around that.  

Wake me up when it happens. I'd love to take credit for this idea.  
 
 
 

They were looking for Kuban Cossacks, but there was a mix-up and have recruited Cuban Cossacks instead.

I agree. It has in the past too. 

Apparently Russia has managed to recruit some small number of Cubans. I wonder if they will live long enough to freeze to death.

Personally, I didn't think the guns were too tight to begin with. There are trade-offs with everything, obviously, and with a gun position you want it to be as dispersed as possible, and no more.
Arguing for wider dispersion is the counter-battery threat, which itself varies by enemy, operational situation, tactical situation, and terrain. In general, the Ukrainians seem to have been following an active CB policy (ie, going after Russian artillery assets whenever they get a chance) over the last ... year? But it is unlikely that policy is consistent across the entire front, due to a lack of ammo, deception measures, and lack of sufficient CB C2 infrastructure everywhere. But as a rule of thumb, I expect the Russians would probably want to be more dispersed than perhaps their doctrine would suggest.
Arguing against wider dispersion are a bunch of factors.
Local defence - I'm not sure how porous the front is, or how often Ukrainian raiding parties are hitting battery positions, but a small tight position is MUCH easier to defend against a ground threat that a dispersed position.
Fire mission command and control - in my experience, each section (2 guns) is managed by a junior officer, and he has to keep shuttling between his guns to ensure they are doing the right things in the right way (bearing and elevation is correct, correct ammo, charge and fuse, etc). If the position becomes too dispersed, either those firing checks have to be reduced or overlooked (with consequent increase in risk), or the pace of fire missions drastically reduced. That's on top of the points @BlackMoria made about limited wire and/or radios. A lot of this can be mitigated with fancy-pants new kit, but these are D-30s. I doubt they are very fancy-pants, and I expect they are using methods and equipment that a gunner from the 1980s would feel intimately familiar with.
Terrain - @BlackMoria has noted that this clearing is quite small, which is true, but FWIW to my eye it doesn't appear to be too small for the number of guns being employed*. It's really hard to eyeball, but it looks to be at least 50m between guns, which is a pretty standard dispersion. Also, the entire clearing isn't available for use due to cresting issues with the surrounding trees - get too close to the trees at the front edge of the clearing and you can't safely depress the barrels enough to engage targets - you'd be firing rounds through the trees just in front of you and, um, that's a really bad idea. That's also why you can't just hide your guns in the forest to begin with.
Edit to add: Terrain part 2 - we can't see the wider area around this position. It could concievably be that this is the only, or one of the few, practical positions for this battery to be. Aside from out in the desert, the battlespace rapidly gets clogged up by all the things you want to be there - ammo and logistics dumps, engineer stores dumps, artillery areas, medical areas, helicopter landing zones, reserve fighting positions, staging areas for units moving forwards and backwards, maintenance area, routes for stuff moving forwards, backwards, and sideways, etc. Given that this area also seems to be heavily wooded and sparsely tracked**, there just mightn't be any other good spots for the guns to be, and the battlespace managers at the higher HQ haven't given this battery commander enough ground to be able to disperse they way he might want to.
 
Interestingly, there seems to be only three guns in this battery. I wonder where the fourth is? I'm guessing it is out of action - either broken, or perhaps destroyed in a previous CB engagement - although it could jut be tucked away somewhere out of sight.
Also, the CB mission as shown seemed focused on the guns themselves, which is fair enough because that's what the unaided eye (or drone cam) can see. But somewhere, not too far away - probably within 100m of the centre gun - is a command post. It's a shame they couldn't identify and target that either instead of one of the guns, or in addition to all of the guns. There is probably also an echelon park nearby - probably not more than 200-500m from the command post - with a bunch of trucks and mechanics and technical equipment and other paraphernalia. Replacing a couple of guns is hard. Replacing a couple of guns AND all that other junk, along with the training of the specialists you find there, is really hard.
 
* although, I suppose you could argue that it really was too small, given that all three guns seem to have been taken out. On the other hand, the Ukrainians seemed to be adjusting between the three guns as if they were three point targets. At that point it wouldn't have mattered if the guns were twice, thrice, or ten times as far apart - once the enemy gunners have the intel and time to accurately adjust between your positions you're screwed, regardless of dispersion. It doesn't matter whether that's a battery of guns or a dug in platoon.
** artillery units need access to good routes - ammo is heavy, and in a sustained battle an artillery unit needs a LOT of trucks coming and going to keep it fed.

Ukraine will get Scimitars from the UK. I think that's a new one.
 

Seems like a place to drop part of my overtime bonus. I'll add it to my trusted list.
It's a promise I gave myself in Feb 22. Whatever I earn outside of my regular pay eaxh month will go to Ukraine. There are many good causes all over the world which deserve attention, but I have chosen this one because it has special significance to me. And I'll continue each month this goes on, doesn't matter how many years it takes. I am in the lucky position that this is financially possible and I know it's not for many others.
The wife is already joking "And how is your true love, Ukraine, today". 

For contrast, Zelensky again near the front meeting the troops.  Whilst it is all well stage managed the troops are armed and in full (admittedly clean) battle gear.
 

Russian TG
Situation in Klishchiivka is lousy, reported from frontline.
Details will be further

UKR troops today activated on own left flank of V.Novosilka direction and attacked  on line Novodonetske -  Novomajorske - Shevchenko.
According to Khodakovskiy and "Batatlion Viostok" TG UKR artilelry shelling throughout several days has weaken minefields, so UKR armor quickly and almost without losses delivered infantry, which disembarked and could burst to trenches under cover of armor, shooting out trenches with point blanc shot. Then UKR armor withdrew to avoid artilelry strike. Allegedly after fierce fight UKR troops pushed back Russians/DNR forces (Khodakovskiy didn't say where). He claims UKR lost about four tanks disabled (there was a video with two disabled UKR tanks) and about of platoon of personnel, so UKR were forced to threw in the battle new 38th marines brigade from reserve %)
Close to the evening Russian TG wrote there is a battle ongoing for Zavitne Bazhannia village.
Just for illustration - situation in this sector on 30th of Aug
 

Natural resources count for less than you'd think (this isn't Hearts of Iron). It is very easy for a country which is rich in natural resources to still be militarily and economically weak. Just look at North Korea.
In fact there is evidence that natural resources can even hold a non-democratic economy back, since they provide a means for an autocrat to fund their regime without having to actually develop their economy.

I think it was the Cap'n who said
"Precision beats mass, mass precision beats everything."
Mass precision atm is a mix of very cheap and very expensive. The West has the expensive, Ukraine has invented the cheap. Both seem to compliment each other. China can give Russia only the cheap precision. The expensive precision seems to stay a trump card (but a trump card alone does not win a game, you need a good hand to accompany it).

Wet weather moves mines. Probably less so  in Ukraine than in places with significant elevation changes (Korea). There is a place I used to go hiking in Korea where the trails got swept a couple of times a year by ROKA engineers because it was near an old minefield and they wanted to make sure hikers didn’t get blown up by mines moved there by the monsoons. The picture is me about ten years ago on that trail.
 

Excellent article as always from RUSI:
https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/special-resources/stormbreak-fighting-through-russian-defences-ukraines-2023-offensive
 
Gives a detailed after action report and recommendations for how to improve western training efforts for Ukraine. 

Those tires are also gonna be flammable - just dump a Molotov cocktail on them and the plane will go up like a torch!

The one weapon on the battlefield that never runs out of ammo.

The hilarious thing to me is that these rubes think Putin gives a flying F about them.  "we need to report this to Putin, he would never stand for this!"  uh huh.

What a shame it would be if some former Wagner fighter with a name that is the Russian equivalent of Oswald, would get some ideas about Putin.