Maciej Zwolinski

On the other hand, at this stage putting thermals on drones seems something of an issue. There have been reports from the Ukrainian side that they have been relying on Russian drones not having night vision and scheduling resupply runs, troop rotation etc. for nighttime when they are relatively safe from drones. Also, Russians have been reported to order from China drones with image intensifiers as a cheaper substitute. So there must be some problem for now with putting TI on drones, either with technology or cost.

Presumably it is not only the issue of friendly fire, but also the drone being susceptible to camouflage. I suppose the cheaper and smaller the seeker is, the easier would be to fool it by throwing a camo net over the tank

That was already happening in Zaporozhe in August-September this year. Especially at the tip of the summer offensive (Orichiv -Tokmak axis) the UKR were winning massively the counterbattery battle and heavily attritting RUS tube artillery. There were reports that Russians are shooting back mostly with lancets and glide bombs released from 50 km behind the front line. Obviously with the pressure in Zaporozhie lessened, they will supplement the traditional artillery in those units, but that is going to be in addition to the lancet launchers present in place. Also, in the latest reports from AFAIK Andreevka direction Mashovets mentions artillery brigades and Lancet launcher units side by side as equally important elemets of RUS fire support. Since it is probable that at some point Russia will encounter bottlenecks in production of artillery barrels but they can keep churning out cheap suicide drones the drones are only going to take over more and more of artillery's job in the Russian army.

Out of all real estate contested in this war, the corridor is big freaking deal. It messes up the Ukraine's sea lanes of transportation really bad and includes two of the Ukraine's biggest cities. Also, morale effects are going to be huge. Good luck telling Ukrainians they have won the war if they get to lose Melitopol and Mariupol.

That is a deeply unfair and frankly insulting post. You are talking about a man who is living inside Ukraine and who bases his pessimistic view on his assesment of war weariness level of the ordinary Ukrainians. Something you by definition would not know about, and the Western press would not report about - not newsworthy enough. Frankly, In this forum on this subject only the opinion of Haiduk and Zeleban matters, as they are the only ones who can take a measure of that metric. And you are saying that Zeleban thinks that people he meets every day are losing the will to fight not because he sees the symptoms of that, but because he has been "inadvertently convinced by Russian propaganda"? What hubris! Shame on you.

Good old C2H5OH. Looks dead drunk to me.

That is very interesting in light of your critique of the conservative mind a few pages back. This is a typical conservative position, based on empiricism and intuition (instinct even, and the most basic ones: the survival instinct, the reproductive instinct and preference for "us" vs the "other"). Whereas the left-wing (in US English: liberal) mind is the one more likely to result in the "pereat mundus, fiat [insert the preferred moral value]" view as a result of deductive reasoning from abstract moral axioms, which is a typical "rational" mental process.

Most of it, yes.Just like the Russian propaganda.

Why not? As recently as the Covid pandemic anti-vax communication was suppressed in a million of formal and less formal ways. The West is no virgin which would be suddenly debauched by this. BTW from today's perspective there is no doubt that McCarthy was mostly right.

I have been waiting for this. Return to WW I fighting methods is now almost complete. Only the gas is missing.

Why necessarily UGVs? Could this not be done by drone UAV dropping those spiders as currently they do mortar bombs?

Well, no. Have you seen the size of it? Most of Russian stratregic targets are out of range

Good luck and happy hunting!

Good. Sic semper traditores.

How about fighting electronics and computers with raw high explosive power - putting a rocket engine & rudimentary guidance kit on a couple of CBU-55-type devices, establishing local EW superiority over a corridor say 15 km long just to protect them on the way and firing a salvo of thus-created GLHMEB (Ground Launched Huge Motherf***ing Explosive B****ard) towards the enemy trenches? According to Wikipedia, a CBU 55 was dropped only once in Viet Nam, it managed to create a 4-acre fireball and kill 250 Charlie (or Charlies? Was it ever pluralised)? It would clear mines, fill in trenches, throw dragonteeh around and suffocate Russians left, right and center. A can of instant desert. Somewhat similar shock and awe effect to the one achieved in WWI by mining under the enemy trenches and blowing up whole corridors filled with TNT. Just without waiting for weeks.

Anyone in doubt who really designed the exploding cat crate?

Unfortunately, in the current conditions it is so easy to create a strong defensive line just with mines, trenches, drone operators, guns & Lancets behind and just a handful of people in the first line that even heavy losses in personnel do not really undermine the ability to defend in place. People have been wondering why Russians are so stupid to waste infantry, tanks and IFVs just to take a slag heap at Avdieyevka. I am not sure if it is just stupidity or the Russian lessons learned from the Zaporozhe campaign. My hypothesis is that they concluded that in the current defensive paradigm: 1) any attack will require heavy losses and will be slow to progress; this has to be accepted; AND 2) on the contrary, defence can be set up using mostly low quality personnel in low to moderate numbers, provided that artillery & Lancet support can be ensured; THEREFORE 3) most of the manpower and part of the equipment (tanks, IFVs) is only necessary if one wants to attack, and otherwise will be superfluous; THEREFORE 4) it is better to use the soldiers and equipment up in attacks which will yield modest territorial gains, rather than forego any territorial gains, have the mobiks rot in the trenches and possibly go bolshevik out of boredom. This hypothetical line of reasoning, while very inhumane, is not without internal logic. Moreover, the slag heap near Avdieyvka is not such a bad terrain objective, if RUS command concluded that the days of big advances are over, and the desirable endgame for the Russians is just to keep status quo in Zaporozhe and Donbas. Eliminating UKR salient from which Donieck can be conveniently bombarded is as good an objective as one can reasonably find in this situation.

No, it rather means that a conventional mechanised warfare will be largely obsolete and replaced by drone warfare. I imagine a full-scale non-nuclear conflict (assuming no war in space and no significant naval element) would have the following aspects (in the chronological order): the air phase- the drone phase- the conventional phase- the assymetrical phase. Whoever wins both the air war and the drone war, will have sufficient control over the battlefield, that the opponent will be reduced to digging in deep and trying to survive for as long as possible. No offensive action other than local counterattacks mostly on foot would be likely. The winner of the air war and the drone war will still have to reduce the loser's strongpoints , Zaporozhe style, which leaves some room for conventional warfare as we knew it: with tube artillery, unguided MLRS and a smattering of tanks and IFVs. This is were the non-loss-averse side could have some advantage, as they could last under the enemy fires longer. But most likely the one who controls the battlefield through drones would win eventually. Once this conventional phase is won, then the loser could stop defening ground and resort to guerilla warfare.

EMP does not have to be generated by a nuclear explosion, so there are ways to do it in a non- escalatory way. On the other hand, AFAIK it is fairly easy to harden equipment against it, provided that someone remembers that stuff must be hardened.

Also, a lot of experts are yearning to see a large scale mechanised attack because that is what they think proper war looks like, and everything else must be an aberration or at best, coping with inadequate resources. I imagine a French or Prussian liaison officer looking with disdain at the Union attack at Cold Harbor in 1864 and shaking his head at the inability of the colonials to press home a bayonet charge or better coordinate attack columns etc.

Late August 1917-early September 1917. After Pilckem Ridge, before Menin Road.

I am in favour of a drone-delivered "synthetic MCLIC" for want of a better term. Say a dozen drones, protected by multispectral smoke and ECM, fly in a single file into the minefield, and from low level drop mine clearing explosives direcly on the ground, close to one another, and quickly withdraw. Once the drones are in safe distance, the charges are detonated as if they were a massive MCLIC. Repeat as necessary.

Do you have access to the paid stuff? If yes, is it worth the price?

I am confident we will not see that either at all or maybe sometime in the last month of the war. In the present conditions, it is about as likely as the grand cavalry charge prepared in expectation of breakthrough and exploitation before the Loos offensive, the Somme offensive, the Cambrai offensive etc. in WWI. Finally, when the Entente were in position to exploit a breakthrough, they did it with hundreds of tanks and the war ended in a few weeks. I like the brief summary from a new Wavell Room article https://wavellroom.com/2023/10/13/countering-tactical-kamikaze-drones-ideas-urgently-needed/: "Ukrainian counter-measures: keep your distance A tactical counter-measure (employed by both sides) is the withdrawal of platforms and systems from the frontline i.e. 10-15km where they are at least out of range to FPV drones. This has created an inverted frontline. Units in contact are now dug-in infantry with their supporting organic weapons such as mortars and anti-tank missiles; drone operators; and the ECM detachments seeking to disrupt or down the other’s drones. Communications are constantly degraded by the saturation of jamming systems. Self-evidently, such an abnormal frontline is the opposite of manoeuvre warfare. Neither side is daring to manoeuvre, except in very favourable circumstances, because the cost is too high. ‘Going over the top’ has become prohibitive in lives and materiel." I think it is exactly to the point. Now a large number of troops on the attack can be stopped by a very low number of troops on the defence, extremely dispersed and supported by massed fires. There is therefore no sense in massing units on the attack, unless to increase own losses, because it is so extremely easy for the defender to achieve sufficient force ratio for a successful defence anyway. The numbers on the attack are used for rotation and replacement, not for overwhelming the enemy. In these circumstances, how can an attack look like? Theoretically, speaking Infiltration and probing by dismounted infantry +counterbattery+ deep fires on the enemy rear to interrupt the flow of ammunition to support the counterbatery effort +ECM, again to support the crucial counterbattery effort. Once the counterbattery battle achieves success, then fires can be partially shifted more to the enemy's first line so that those dispersed, camouflaged and fortified infantry outposts can be whittled down. Then repeated infiltration and probing combined with indirect fires is carried out until those infantry outposts either withdraw or can be stormed. Then the process has to be repeated on each new defence line because its inherent slowness means that the defender will ALWAYS be able to create and man another defence line behind the previous one. Which to me seems exactly how the Ukrainians are fighting in Zaporozhe. The only potential way to progress from this to a more efficient system I see in 1) massive attrition of RUS artillery combined with some way to degrade RUS drones AND discovery of technical means to deal with RUS obstacles, AP mines included;. if the RUS finally run out of tubes AND become unable to substitute them with Lancets and FPV drones, AND the Ukrainians find a way to quickly go through even massive minefields, then the attacks can be started instead of lengthy counterbattery battle, with a simultaneous engagement of many defensive outposts over several defence lines with supressive, not necessarily destructive artillery and PGM fires, and Ukrainian attack hopefully will be able to continue without too much of a pause through several of those lines. Either by way of mechanised assault or on foot, Keiserschlacht style. The 2nd way out is IMHO the general morale failure caused by combination of massive losses cumulated over years on the entire frontline with the war weariness on the home front. The "1917 moment". PS. I am aware of the ubiquituous caveats, that all historical analogies are deceitful, and this is not World War I, etc. but taking them in stride I think that at this moment, it basically this is recreated World War I. And the technical and organisational developments which happened since 1918 have combined to make it even more of a stereotypised World War I than the real World War I was.

That one is actually a bit of Schroedinger's slur, which may or may not be derogatory, depending on where actually the Irish gentlemen are intended to be travelling...