Livdoc44

So basically older capabilities took a long time to die?  And yet they still died.  I know the myths of Agincourt but in the end cheap mass won out that entire argument.  And kept winning it right through to about WW2.
The fact that cavalry held on by fingernails in WW1 is not proof that they somehow were still a viable arm of manoeuvre.  In fact the narrowing of cavalry over the centuries could be what we are seeing in armour in much quicker time.
Firing line formations died at the Civil War, and yet militaries held onto them (and their ridiculous bayonets) for decades (we already argued this on that other thread).
One can “whatabout” it all one wants but military capabilities clearly have a failing trajectory.  There are elements of cost, effectiveness, utility and decisiveness at play in that calculus.  Large armoured cavalry as an example.  Its decisive role began to fade, arguably, in the Middle Ages.  Its utility was definitely compressed by the 19th century and by early 20th century they had been relegated to logistical support and flank security.  By mid 20th they were pretty much only logistical and after that ceremonial.  
You can trace any obsolete capability along similar tracks.  They take time to die…but they do die.  Cost effectiveness is a significant factor and cheap that can kill or deny expensive is on the right track to render it obsolete.  However, it is not the only factor at play.  Tanks look to me like they are in the beginnings of a death spiral, particularly if we are talking long term attritional warfare.  They take too long to produce, and cost too much for what they are able to deliver right now.  As Steve notes, they are also being supplanted by a lot of other things that are a lot cheaper to manufacture.
”Well infantry are easy to kill and have not gone obsolete”.  Well 1) they are a lot cheaper than armour, 2) they are actually really hard to kill.  They may be soft squishy humans but they are like sand and get into everything.  Hard to find and fix, and extremely replaceable. 3) They are also nearly impossible to fully deny..see sand, and 4) they have not been supplanted, in fact they have been dramatically augmented with modern UAS and ATGMs.  
Tanks on the other hand are really expensive, getting more so just trying to keep them alive. East to spot…big lump of hot metal and ceramic. Easy to deny.  Hard to replace at scale.  And now they are being supplanted.  However, like a lot of military capabilities they will take some time to die.  On could argue that have been dying since the 80s but I am not so sure.  This war has definitely not been good news for amour or mech and everyone knows it.  In fact it has not been good news for manoeuvre warfare itself.
Now modern militaries have a couple choices: adapt or hang onto legacy capability for “reasons”.  We are really good at that last one.

Well yes, and no.  Cheap bowmen rendered very expensive knights obsolete.  Not sure the cost of muskets versus pikemen.  A single machine gun has to be cheaper than a squadron of cavalry.
The question is less “can it be killed” and more “how much value does it render before it dies”.
The cost equation is one factor.  In warfare things become obsolete for what appears to be at least two main reasons:
- Denial.  The capability advantages of the thing are denied to the point it becomes a liability - see Battleships v Carriers.
- Replacement.  The capability advantages of a thing are replaced by a capability that is not denied - see Battleships v Carriers.
The modern tank is currently being operationally compressed…significantly.  It has become very apparent that one can wage Defence and Denial without tanks at all.  The big question is, “can one wage Offence?”  The modern tank is definitely seeing Denial in Ukraine, however, as an offensive weapon we are not seeing a replacement, yet.  I personally do not think the tank is entirely dead but it utility is definitely on a one way trip.  The role of the tank is becoming much narrower - currently a rapid, well protected indirect fire system.
And this is bigger than tanks.  We are not seeing a lot of IFV/AFV success either.  We do still see them in infantry support roles, however, they are also blunted.  The entire mechanized portfolio is currently getting compressed into a capability with a much narrower role.  
So where do we go from here?  It is weird how in times of disruption in warfare we always seem to fall back on basics.  In this war it has been infantry and indirect fires (including UAS etc).  These are two capabilities that still work.  Both sides appear to be wrestling with the fact that the other elements of mechanized combined arms are not working - armour/mech and engineering.  The modern battlefield also appears to be denying two major principles of war - concentration of force, and surprise.  This is not small.  
I suspect UGVs and some sort of Shield capabilities will be combined to break the deadlock, and get Offensive manoeuvre via mobility back on the menu.  We are far too deeply invested not to try and buy our way out.  My sense though is that others are too deeply invested in taking away the cornerstones of the western way of ground warfare.  So in the end the tank will become obsolete because there is a lot of incentive to make it go away.  Then the race to master whatever comes next will be on.

My day job is developing wargames for the USMC, and I wanted to address the bolded part above. Computer simulations are great, but they do not answer all the objectives of professional wargames, in fact many time the result is not even that important, many times the discussion and insights learned from going through the process are all that we are after. Computer sims also have a way of stifling this conversation, trust me when you have 50 professional Marine, Army, and/or Navy officers in a room, a table top game is the best tool for the job if you want to invite conversation and in-depth topic discussions.
There is also a dopamine hit players get from the tactile nature of a map and counter wargame and rolling dice that you rarely get from a computer simulation. That also has a value to get player buy-in, interaction, and enjoyment.  
Simulation based professional wargames are great when the results are important, testing a new tactical organization, weapon system integration, etc., but they usually turn into a series of in-depth planning sessions with a simulated vignettes occuring for flavor. There is also a stovepipe mentality with these types of games with different player cells huddled around their machines that is absent in table top games.
I've seen it all and there is value for all types of wargames in the professional setting and which is used depends on the objectives and research questions we are trying to answer. Table top games in professional wargames will not be going away anytime soon.
Bil

What air defenses? ;D
Apperently, there's less and less of them. BBC was pretty quick to report the local (my hometown) events, so you may wanna check that out.
No air raid warnings, no nothing. Nothing is happening, as always. Just bavovna and smoke. Even the announcer at the train station skips the usual "be observant and careful, careful and observant" this morning. How come, I wonder?
 
ps: I'm okay, and the windows are fine, for now.

copy paste from subsim hq

I like to think its at least partially due to their proximity to 'CM Pro' 

It's not a mist of suspicions....Musk has quite clearly demonstrated that he will take his own interests into account before any national interest. He has actively promoted the idea that Ukraine should surrender territory to Russia and that Taiwan should submit to the PRC. Elon Musk is *not* our friend. 

Right a bit more on topic and I was lucky enough to see Sir Anthony Beaver being interviewed by James Holland at "We Have Ways Fest" this weekend and he was being asked about the research into his Stalingrad book.

An excellent interview and might be on line at some stage. Some points that caught my attention that tie into the current war.

He mentioned that during his research at the Russian archives that he stumbled upon all the reports back to Stalin and that Stalin had demanded to know the whole truth warts and all... This was a gold mine for the book and gave a pretty good view of the reality of the situation to Stalin.

I wonder if x years’ time will we find that Putler is being told the truth warts and all?

Did it really help inform Stalin’s choices? We think Putler does not know the truth and he might do things differently but maybe now he knows the truth but he can’t change his choices and as noted is doubling down in the hope things will change…

Sir Anthony also mentioned how poor the food was at the canteen of the research place – his Russian researcher used to say he was too spoiled. But what he did get a laugh from is that he used to get excellent hot dogs from a certain person who fell out of the sky a while ago… That was a name we were not expecting to pop up in a Stalingrad talk…

Sir Anthony also made a big point about the Soviet brutality and how this really has not changed from WW2 to modern times. He talked about the feral starving Russian kids that were tempted by Germans for crusts of bread to go and fill their water canteens at the river. The Russian snipers were ordered to kill the Russian kids….

Quite a few other horrific examples were given and nothing has changed in Russia in regards to brutality…

A couple of tankers Waitman Beorn and Hamish de Bretton-Gordan gave at times an interesting talk and touched upon issues in Ukraine.

On a WW2 note a (then)18 year old Tank driver by the name of Richard Aldred gave a very entertaining talk about his experience in Normandy driving a Cromwell…

One to try and find on the WWW when it might appear…

Here is a newspaper article about the veteran...
https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/history/day-cornwall-veteran-aged-98-7472744

 

These terms have caused pretty significant debate among western militaries, especially in Canada.  The issue is really one of identity and culture, which of course has come under significant scrutiny in the post-Afghanistan, post-Iraq era.  For some it is no doubt a bit of macho flexing, for others it is holding onto core identity for very important purposes.  Up front, I personally fall into that latter category - but also recognized people are going to have differing positions.  So to try and break it down more simply:
- The term "warrior" [aside: 'warfighter' is in reality an attempt at compromise on warrior and largely has no other point of reference], has been mal-adopted and appropriated into toxic sub-cultures within modern militaries.  Of this fact there is little argument.  The most recent scandal in the Australian SASR and many examples of a warped or toxic use of that term are well documented.  People adopt all sorts of crazy ideas as to what a warrior means and how they behave.  This has to do with the fact that a modern warrior concept has yet to truly evolve so people look at history which was an entirely different context (eg we don't scalp anymore).
- The actual term of "warrior" has deep roots within indigenous cultures around the world.  In many it was a class of citizen with a clearly defined purpose.  You can read a lot on this but the most common and prevalent definition was in line with "One Who Does War" on behalf of their people.  A person whose role within a society is the function of warfare.  In most cases it became part of a cast or class system.  In some cultures this was seen as a sacred duty-to-protect bordering on a pseudo public service.  The recent bashing of the term has drifted into colonial insensitivity in some cases as it really reads like "white folks screwed it up, so now all 'warriors' are bad" when in fact indigenous cultures have employed the concept for millennia and many, like North American natives, still hold it sacred.
- The term is important because it incorporates a key pole of the two-worlds problem.  Militaries are not armed humanitarian aid agencies, or slightly better armed police forces.  Some nations have tried to go that way but they tend to be geopolitical anomalies.  The role of any military is state sponsored and legitimized homicide.  Dress it up anyway one likes, call it "self-defence", "use of force" or whatever helps one sleep at night but the core role is "murder for effect.  The second a military culture, or the society that pays for them, forgets that reality very bad things happen. 
- Militaries that get watered down for various social or political sensitivities tend to do several very dangerous things: 1) They forget themselves. This can lead to significant collective shock when war actually happens and generations of military officers and NCOs have basically become bureaucrats.  When that culture runs head long into warfare it is never pretty.  I lived through such a time in the 90s and trust me it is really bad. 2) Societies go into armed conflict with eyes closed.  Sanitization of war and its consequences becomes very easy when one scrubs out what it actually means.  This can not only dangerously shape political calculus, it can create major flaws in military advice to policy.  The reality is no matter where you may be in the kill-chain, there is blood on your hands. That is a serious burden. Those that forget it can start to make very poorly informed decisions quickly.  3) You cannot order identity.  Troops in combat or preparing for combat are going to adopt an identity and culture that will provide them survival advantage and cope - find me a war where that did not happen.  Problem is that if leadership does not define that identity, troops will do it themselves and sub-cultures form.  Those sub-cultures can become dangerously toxic very quickly.  So bottom line is, ignoring warrior reality comes with significant risks.
- Many like the term "soldier" better.  Feels more civilized.  The term it self actually comes from solidus or coin and refers to mercenaries.  The major historical difference between a solider and warrior is that a soldier stops fighting when they don't get paid.  Warriors keep fighting because they don't need to get paid, they believe.  There is an element of righteousness (and I do not mean in the religious sense) in the role of a warrior. Righteousness being a higher ideal held sacred (all war is sacrifice..."to make holy") by the people who sent you to fight for them.  Soldiers by definition live on a more transactional contract with society.  These are deep and important distinctions that often get lost in the noise.
- To your point, "machoism".  The problem we have with "warrior" is that we never actually define it.  It gets tossed around because it sounds cool but as an identifier we do not unpack it and then teach it to people when they enter the service.  It is all over the place, the US Army uses it all the time:  https://www.army.mil/values/soldiers.html.  Likely the closest I have ever seen is the US Army's Warrior Ethos:
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.
https://www.army.mil/values/warrior.html
Not bad, but not quite there either as it lacks definition of role as an extension of American society and elements of righteousness.  
So without a clear definition, the term gets hijacked into a macho "ra-ra" tag line.  The reality is far deeper in speaking to balancing our two worlds - war and peace: home and away.  As military we live within and are part of our own societies.  I have kids, bills and go to the same grocery store.  I watch the same shows and play the same game.  But that is only half of my existence.  The other side lives out in a place of conflict and warfare.  In many ways I did not get this until after my first war.  When I got home I realized that part of me would always be in those hills (and then years later, in the desert). 
As I see these young guys fighting and dying in Ukraine, I see them all fighting and dying in the tradition of the warrior.  They are the Ones Who Do War on behalf of their people.  To them it is more than a tag line and will be for the rest of their lives.
So we definitely need to develop a modern definition and concept here and build a concept that not only better fits modern society but resonates.  If we, as modern militaries do not, then we will get hijacked.  I have already been in discussions where terms like "aggression" are being scrubbed out of our ethos by academics and civilians.  If a modern military cannot define itself, someone is going to do it for us.  And they will very like not understand the two-worlds problem.  We are The Ones Who Do War and we need to get much better at explaining what that means in 2023. 
 

Pet peeve (and not at all aimed at you, or at Kevin, who you were quoting).
I really do not like the pervasive use of the terms "warriors" and "warfighters" that many, mostly in government or the military upper echelons, refer to service members. Statements like "We have to give our warfighters the tools to do their jobs" (which is another thing - sounds like we are talking about carpenters or plumbers).
It's like some macho thing to me. Maybe I'm an old fogie (I guess I am at this point!) Maybe it's just me and I'm the outlier, but it seems much too belligerent for a country that supposedly uses its military for self-protection, and the aid and support of other countries. 
I have no idea if this is common in other countries, but I find it very grating. 
Dave

Some information on the Leopard 1 training in Germany.
- done by Danish, Dutch and German instructors
- basic course lasts 6 weeks with 6 days of training per week and 12 hours of training per day
- its the fifth rotation in its fifth week of training
- there were multiple gunnery runs this day. within these runs multiple states of equipment failure where simulated e.g. aiming with and without stabilization or worst case hand crank everything using the backup optical sight and try to score a hit while moving slowly
- Ukrainians stick to 3 tanks per platoon
https://www.youtube.com/embed/NdpHjoPkS8M
 
English subtitles are available


 

Incredible footage. Honestly looks like something you would see in one of Dice's Battlefield games or a Hollywood movie.
I do appreciate that this is neither a video game or a movie and the Ukrainians in that video have balls of steel.

The_Capt, if you want to talk we want to listen. As I have said before we REALLY appreciate getting to audit staff college without  the push-ups, or the paper work.

I have largely ignored you because it is pretty clear that you are not in fact interested in actually learning anything on this forum.  However, in reality this is an honest question that some lurkers may also be asking.  Why can’t the US, or NATO or an alliance in between “win this war in 4 weeks and just end this brutal war?”  Don’t need an essay really:
-  Put the nuclear escalation to the side for arguments sake but we will come back to it.
-    A US direct incursion into Ukraine or this war is going to drive a massive amount of support into Putin’s arms, to the point he might actually get full mobilization support.  A fully mobilized and galvanized Russia is a scary beast particularly since they will likely be heavily backed by both China and Iran as they will see the entire expansion of the war as a chance to defeat the US by proxy.  So now the US has four weeks to push Russia out of Ukraine, could they do it?  Probably?  Would it end the war…no way.  It would likely expand it as Russia gears up for a serious fight because now it has reason to have one. The totality of your position is that you are in fact pointing madly at a “limited war” but your solution is “more limited war”…oh wait maybe you are not talking about a limited war.
- ok, to defeat Russia, truly defeat them, it means not simply driving them out of Ukraine.  It means total defeat of Russia as a nation.  The destruction of Russian Will to fight.  This means going into Russia itself and removing its ability to generate that Will.  So we are talking invasion, defeat in detail and occupation…of Russia.  The military force the US would need to do that is well outside the US military current envelope, we are talking millions of troops.  Let’s pretend Russia can be occupied, it is a big country (look at a map).  You now need to hold it until you can install a friendly government…and remember you brought up total war.  So the US and most of NATO would now need conscription to sustain a force that large…you feeling strong?
- “But we will stop at the border”, sure and Russia will now simply reload and incite as much violence and discontent in Ukraine…now filled with US troops.  What possible negotiated end-state is there where Russia can still function while massing for WW3? No, you cannot give Russia time to reload…that would be really dumb.  So now you would need to contain Russia…in the 21st century…with China on one of its borders…and Iran.  That is a massive problem.  The state sponsored terrorism issues alone will be intense.  Again, this is limited measures that won’t “end” anything but risk a lot worse.
- Back to occupation, the risk of a resistance from hell is incredibly high.  See the many lengthy posts on that issue.  Very angry and well supported by various powers an occupied Russia could make Iraq look like a weekend outing.  Oh wait, there is more,
- Russia might fly apart while you are trying to occupy it.  Not known for its shining unity, occupation could see Russia itself fly apart and the the US is trying to manage a civil war…and a possible insurgency.
- Ok, now the obvious one…WMDs.  Let’s pretend that Russia won’t use them on good old “Merican” boys as they counter attack into Ukraine and encroach on the Russian border.  They sure as hell will if the US invades Russian soil, which we have to now.  And even if they don’t there is no way in this universe we can guarantee we can secure them all.  Now we may have lose WMDs of many flavours lose in this mess.
To put it more simply and in words with as few syllables as I can: To defeat  Russia and end this war in 4 weeks the US would need to break Russia.  To break Russia is to engage in a major war, possibly global.  It would break the UN, it would shatter NATO because I can think of at least a dozen nations that would get off that train quickly.  Economically it would break the system as we are talking markets staring down the barrel of nuclear Armageddon.  Anything short of that is just more limited war with even slimmer margins than we are already on.
So when you declare that “the US could end this thing in 4 weeks” all you are doing is loudly announcing just how much you do not understand.  If you honestly want to learn, maybe stop typing and start reading more. 
 

Fully endorse this. The claim the Biden administration somehow blinked is, let's be entirely clear, idiotic. It played every card it could play within the political/military/strategic restraints that it could in order to avert the invasion. That the Russians decided to go va banc is on them, not on everyone who tried to stop it. 

So, warfare in the future is very much playing a computer game. Operator in some secure control room directing operations with drones and UGVs.

But does that blade not cut both ways? West has enormous C4ISR capability and enormous stand-off capability. US Navy can probably delivery hundred cruise missiles anywhere in the world in half hour, and more importantly knows where to deliver them. Lot of that capability was wasted on blowing up shacks with some dudes in middle east, but that doesn't mean it's not there.
I guess the most extreme case might be something like we see in Ukraine right now outside of ground fighting - the war of who can outproduce each other on air defense, missiles and suicide drones, all enabled by C4ISR.
As for SEAD/DEAD I think the really tricky part is that we don't really know how well does the prized stealth of NATO planes work in peer conflict. The planes might be literally invisible and untargetable and make everything very very one-sided, or it might actually not help at all, or anything in between. We don't know.

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 

Worth to remember this short clip- Mordvichev is trying to position himself as hardliner and distance from putchists. But sole fact that this new narration of "collecting Russian lands" as historical mission is gradually being accepted by top muscovite militaries and wider society (and not just state propagandists) is telling by itself. Year after year it will become less fake and more genuine, even if they lose this war.
So it was just about time to start arming ourselves on Eastern NATO Flank.
 
 

Strike hard who cares — shoot straight who can —
The odds are on the cheaper man unmanned system.
There, fixed it for Kipling, although it doesn't quite scan.
 

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.   

ISIL bought civilian drones on Ali Baba and loaded them up with cluster munitions and mustard gas.  Partner forces started taking hits from that.  And then they started using them as ISR platforms for mortars.  Western and Iraqi forces (Kurds too) did not have a counter.  So while we owned the sky above 2000 feet we were buck naked to observation and taking hits from below 2000 feet.  All of it was precursor to this war.  I can recall a commander basically declaring “we just lost air superiority below 2000 feet” and it was barely a blip as the RCAF merrily kept arguing for F-35 - shoulder shrugging “drones, not our problem”.  Needless to say there was a scramble to field C-UAS tech, we never fully solved it back then - not going to discuss state now in detail but it is fair to say no western military has the problem entirely solved and fully unmanned AI is going to make it a lot worse, can’t cut the link between operator and machine if there isn’t one.
Good news was ISIL could only get their hands on so many and we basically just killed them all at Mosul.  They are still out there but all fractured into the Syrian sh#tshow.  Then there was Nagorno-Karabakh, which really start to fry some minds.  And unmanned is just getting started. Once UGVs come into play en masse warfare will be an entirely new ballgame.  As usual we got it wrong.  Cyber kinda got locked up and blunted but unmanned broke warfare…it is always the one you don’t spend billions on.
If I could list the big changes driving this:
- C4ISR.  The UA are already fielding an ersatz JADC2 (entirely networked) system without spending billions. The rest of the western architecture means we are talking an entirely illuminated battle space.
- Unmanned, see above.
- Precision at range.  Ridiculous hit-kill to ammo ratios.  This is in land and in the air.  What used to take large heavy systems (eg TOW) is now being done with man portable.  Artillery is madness in how can be swung and put on targets.  The RA sucks but even they are demonstrating they can do it…why?  Because even though their ISR is crappy and C2 is constipated they can still see and react faster than they are supposed to.
Pull these all together and you appear to have a wicked combination that is pushing Denial into battlefield primacy.  This basically means the cost to do anything goes up dramatically.  The counter appears to be Corrosive Warfare but even it may hit a limit, that is what I am looking out for.  If the UA cannot break this Denial dynamic then we could be looking at a WW1 situation where nothing will really be able to happen until one side breaks the code first….or runs out of gas - pure Attritional Warfare.  I for one, think the jury is still out.  But that training post to my eyes is just another in a long line of indicators that “something just ain’t right”.

On the training post: a lot of what is in that story rings true.  The issue, which we have pointed out here before, is that western troops have no frame of reference for this war.  The more I hear descriptions of company operations in this war, the more they sound like a SOF action as far as C4ISR goes.  A GF Comd does pretty much what they are describing as a Company Comds role in this war - pulls back and manages the engagement from a pan C4ISR node.  Conventional military experience does not do this.  Tactical commanders get more feeds but pretty much fill the same roles as they did 30-40 years ago.  The Battalion TOC has changed a lot but the mass use of UAS for ISR is still not at the forefront.
The offensive focus also rings true.  I got into an argument a long while back on modern war and the offensive doctrine of most western militaries.  A lot of doctrine was built during the Cold War and then adapted to the insurgency wars we fought over the last 30 years.  The few times we went conventional, the opponent was so overmatched that we kind of confirmed a false positive - offensive primacy.  This war is showing the holes in that theory.  This is a war of Denial - drones and artillery.  That takes a fundamentally different training approach.
We all “yay’ed” when western troops began training support, and we still add a lot of value in some skill areas.  However, we may very well be teaching  bad lessons.  For example, that well documented and broadcasted failed minefield breach back in Jun. To my eyes it was a textbook western mechanized breach.  It looks like it got stopped by enemy UAS, a couple helicopters, a few ATGM teams and some pretty tepid artillery.  Our minefield breaching doctrine has not been refreshed since the Cold War and it ran headlong into 2023 reality.  Our impulse is to declare “well the UA is doing it wrong,”. Of course this assumes we actually know how to do it right in the first place.
I can only hope the AAR process is firmly in place and is capturing these observations.  However, in most cases the AAR guys are cut from the same corporate cloth as the training delivery guys so there are going to be biases to overcome.  We likely need to adapt the training significantly.  SOF may need to take over infantry tactics training because the reality is closer to their environment than our conventional experience.  However, SOF are pretty low density.  Conventional can focus on equipment (eg “night driving”), it still does this better than anyone else.
I have brought up the point on this war being as much about competitive learning as much as about actual warfare before.  The UA learns very fast, Russians slower…but they do learn.  The question is, “how fast are western militaries learning?”  They are part of this war too, they make up a significant portion of the Ukrainian force generation stream.  As such they should be in a direct feedback loop from the front line. We need to be learning at a better pace than the Russians - “EOD is taboo” (likely because we have framed them as exclusively a COIN thing).  This will mean breaking out of our own boxes, which is a damned hard thing to do at the best of times.  In reality we should be getting then UA to train us on how to train them.

It's gonna happen one day. I can't see KA-52s being close to the front, especially behaving so apparently nonchalantly, so this is a really good illustration of just how deep drones are getting.