Livdoc44

For those folks who think there's anything like stability within the Russian state:
 

Not sure this one has surfaced here yet:
Obviously there's a lot of focus on the positives of drones, but how often do we think about how much they can encourage higher commanders to micromanage?

Bet those seaside apartments across the bay are really cheap these days...
 
 

Few points on EW - it has been effective in this war in eroding unmanned systems range and effects, but it likely won’t in the next one.  First off EW is very “loud” as one is basically pumping a bunch of EM into atmo.  These basically look like giant beacons to ISR designed to pick this up.  So in a peer conflict where one side is not being starved of long range precision fires, EW systems are going to be hunted by other systems.
But we know it has not been effective enough.  EW has bought neither side an ability to regain freedom of manoeuvre for mech forces.  So while it can erode UAS it cannot achieve denial or superiority.
And then there is autonomy.  No matter how many videos get posted people still have a block on this one.  UAS in the next war are all likely to have levels of full autonomy.  Whether it is complete or partial, no military is going to leave its unmanned arms vulnerable to falling out of the sky just because someone turns on EW.  Right now the UA has a bunch of civilian UAS they have repurposed to effect but a war in 5-10 years is going to see widespread us of fully autonomous systems…why?  Because everyone is watching this war.  Industry is going to explode in these areas because the advantages are simply too high.
So basically in this war we have a bunch of drones bought online with RPG7 rounds gun taped to them pulling off a 20% success rate (which is damned high) in what is likely one of the most potent EW environments ever.  The fact that some are looking down noses at the fact it takes more than one strike for these systems to kill a multimillion dollar tank shows how upside down we are here.  These systems are not only working, as challenged as they are, they are shaping the battlefield.  No large mech concentrations.  Tanks staying back 10s of kms right next to tac aviation.  When we actually see a tank shooting another tank it is a rarity to be highlighted, which is nuts from what we envisioned modern warfare to look like even 3 years ago.
UAS are not a fad, they are breaking war as we knew it…and frankly we should have seen it coming.

From a Ukrainian Telegram, quoting mostly from a NYT article:
“I’ve used everything we have. Unfortunately, we don’t have anyone else in the reserves” - Budanov in an interview by the New York Times
“The situation is on the edge,” Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, said in a video call from a bunker in Kharkiv. “Every hour this situation moves toward critical.”
His bleak assessment echoed those of other Ukrainian officers in recent days, that the country’s military prospects were dimming. In addition to being outnumbered, the Ukrainians face critical shortages of weapons, especially artillery ammunition, and $60.8 billion worth of arms from the United States — approved three weeks ago after months of congressional gridlock — has barely begun to arrive.
Like most Ukrainian officials and military experts, General Budanov said he believes the Russian attacks in the northeast are intended to stretch Ukraine’s already thin reserves of soldiers and divert them from fighting elsewhere.
That is exactly what is happening now, he acknowledged. He said the Ukrainian army was trying to redirect troops from other front line areas to shore up its defenses in the northeast, but that it had been difficult to find the personnel.
“All of our forces are either here or in Chasiv Yar,” he said, referring to a Ukrainian stronghold about 120 miles farther south that Russian troops have assaulted in recent weeks. “I’ve used everything we have. Unfortunately, we don’t have anyone else in the reserves.”
General Budanov assessed that Ukrainian forces would be able to shore up their lines and stabilize the front within the next few days. But he expects Russia to launch a new attack further north of Kharkiv, in the Sumy region.
Full article here (without Paywall)
- Note: After this article was published, Budanov has stated that the expected russian attack in Sumy has not taken place as the enemy had originally planned, due to "problems" that they have experienced in Kharkiv.
You would think that admitting you have no more reserves left is something you don’t want to announce to the world, but I suppose they reckon Russia more or less knows anyways.
That aside, it’s not looking great. By all accounts it seems that Ukraine has committed most or all of its reserve troops, while Russia can still throw quite a bit more into the fight.
We talk in this thread about war exhaustion,  and unless something dramatically changes it‘s looking increasingly likely that Ukraine and not Russia will run up short first. For all of Russia‘s internal problems, it seems their government‘s crude but persistent ruthlessness is working. They may lose scores of tanks each week and their men may die like dogs, but they keep finding more.
In Ukraine there is lacking a similar kind of ruthlessness. Zaluzhny said last year he needed 500k men, by the looks of things on the frontline right now he was probably right. But it seems like the Ukrainian government and military leadership are either unwilling to accept the realities on the ground, or aren’t prepared to do something that could potentially push the country’s internal situation to potentially unstable levels.
Is there a solution to all this? Honestly it’s hard to say. The Ukrainians I know seem to be mistrustful of their government and pessimistic of the overall situation. And unless they get a lot more men, or the tactical situation swings greatly in their favour, then I’m not sure if they can ever stop the Russians from steadily munching away at their territory so long as the fighting continues.
Regardless of the outcome, it’s times like these where I’m sure every NATO country is breathing a sigh of relief to have the collective support of many other powerful countries at their back to deal with the Russian menace. Because if the war in Ukraine is proving anything, it’s that there may be not a single European country that can indefinitely hold back the Russian tide with its own reserves of manpower.
But I maintain that if every NATO country got involved in a conflict with Russia, offensive or defensive, that the latter would be wrecked as devastatingly as they deserve…

And we are back to why it is not "ok" for fighting aged males to be hanging out in other countries while Russia mauls their home nation.  Regardless, we will have to see how this develops.  What is odd is not only how the Kharkiv thing has gone off, but why there?  A major urban center is not a place to try for a break out,  There is a lot of open country side on this extremely long frontage, so why move there.  Obvious answer is to freak out the Ukrainians and force them to push resources to respond.  Straight up war-by-terror, threaten large civilian populations, get a reaction that forces resource reallocation.
So my next thought is "to what end?"  If the RA can actually pull the UA back enough they might get an operational collapse they can exploit.  But what does that look like?  The RA has not demonstrated any acumen on operational level manoeuvre since Feb '22, and "acumen" is a gross overcompliment based on how that went.  Since then they have collapsed, harassed, denied, and made minor tactical gains.  So we really do not know if they can really exploit what they are doing here.
But let's not drink the copium too deeply. This is strategic/operational shaping by the RA. The fact that they still have the initiative and are able to do this is not good news.  Now shaping is not an immediate sign of success - ask Lee at Gettysburg - but it definitely demonstrates that the Russians are still in this thing.  The UA needs to remobilize and quickly.  They have ISR but it appears to be watching the RA walk forward.  They need capability at this point to counter.
No matter how one spins it, this proxy war just took a weird turn.  So here I agree with FancyCat - West needs to stop playing grab @ss and get back into this game or things could get very bad, very quickly.

This is almost the combination the USN settled on against the kamikaze threat. Radar guided CAP at long range, proximity fused semi-automatic dual purpose 5" guns firing explosive shells at medium range for anything that eluded the CAP, 40mm automatic wing choppers at short range for anything that eluded the flak barrage. Scale everything down by a factor of 10 and you've got what you're proposing.
But the key to the whole thing was having a metric asspile of semi-disposable ships because some percentage of the attacks will get through and if that degrades your combat power too much you're in real trouble. We used DD picket sponges (we had approximately infinity destroyers at that point), an inner cordon of battleships (that could no longer project useful combat power, but could throw up walls of flak), and an inner-inner core of very vulnerable very cheap carriers mixed with less vulnerable big expensive carriers.
But the real key to naval operational maneuver was the Big Blue Blanket (tm). If you systematically suppress all the launch sites, then everything else is just backup. What does that look like in land warfare? I have no idea. There are too many launch sites, because the launch site is anywhere.
I could see a heavily armored legacy mech formation (hopefully with some sort of unmanned drive; we lost a lot of men in the picket destroyers) working like a drone-atgm sponge while other systems apply combat power to degrade the enemy operational system?

It you see the problem of course, an automated massive gun on a heavy platform.  Gimme a good old M2 on some cheap truck with an auto targeting turret.  Then if we get it wrong it does not cost a multimillion dollar platform.
The idea of an automated turret is not a bad one but this was a clear BS demo as it manages to shoot down drones flying in a neat little line.  In reality they are going to come in fast and low from every direction.  That Boxers turret will be spinning like mad.  Or we will see a ground formations like B17s blazing away in all directions.  Better than nothing but not the solution.  
As I have said before the damned solution is other UAS that can track and engage incoming FPVs, likely fully autonomous.  Put em up like CAP and go from there.  Now what we put in the center of the bubble remains the major question. Could be Boxers, could be lighter armoured track like those BVs.
Why is it some people appear to take this personally?  Look at the battlefield.  Look at what has been happening for over two years now.  More important look at was not been happening.  This is not like we have seen a few snapshots and are wildly extrapolating. We have watched hundreds, maybe thousands, of examples, too many to fake. The evidence is too great here that the battlefield has shifted…ok, so what?  We get on with dealing with it.

I wish I could say that love of a platform or system is only an amateur wargamers disease.  I have already seen the reflexive signs of the upcoming arguments.  We will dress them up but in reality we have built identities around these platforms/systems.  Asking someone to change a strong identity, one designed to weather war, is a tall order.  We have generations of senior officers who grew up with the tank as the core of the land warfare tactical system.  Hell, we were still counting them as a metric of combat power in the lead up to this thing.  Even now, I think they are still a threat, but more like nukes...if conditions get to the point that they can be employed, this war is already over.  If the UA collapse and we see a ring of steel outside Kharikiv, or if the UA drives tank columns into Crimea, these are not a sign that "tanks work!" They are a symptom of a much larger collapse. A collapse that had little to do with the tank, or even mech itself. 

Yeesh, I do not even know where to start on this one.  Autonomous unmanned systems aren’t 21st century pigeons we send over the trees to see in a few hours. The whole thing is still hooked into an integrated C4ISR network. I mean if you deny that then the guns or anything else are just as useless.  
As to “calling them up”, well couple ways to do this much faster than guns. First is to do battlespace management as opposed to in the loop human targeting.  This would see a glorified JTAC building kill boxes and then assigning resources to them.  Fully autonomous UAS carry their own ISR and targeting abilities and would be let loose within a kill box. Deconfliction and prioritization are going to be tricky but nothing algorithms cannot solve in time.  This is basically a mobile flying minefield.  One can do it with both air and ground systems.  Or you let them off the leash in hunter killer mode and do sweeps along an entire frontage.  See something, kill it.  That nightmare is right around the corner.
So basically one automates the entire OODA loop at a certain level.  There are variations of this - last mile etc, but the concept is essentially the same. Endurance is the other issue but here the individual platforms are more akin to ammunition. Ukraine and Russia are putting hundreds of thousands of these systems per month into the air right now, that is how they are solving for persistence.  Future systems could be hybrid, waiting on the ground pulling in solar power, while spotters fly up to illuminate and receive any new peer to peer targeting data.
Everyone seems to be getting all wound up on the platforms and hardware, this is a mistake.  The revolution is the impact data and processing is having.  Smart everything’s are hunting individual Russian soldiers down right now. Ukraine built an ad hoc JADC2 hooked into western C4ISR that is denying a bafflingly large frontage, ground and air, to a much more conventionally powerful opponent.  UAS are the new bullets, but it is the underlying C4ISR system that is going to shift warfare forever.  How long until we see unmanned guns?  Mortars?  ATGMs?  The combination of networking and cheap, light powerful forward data processing is the big “wow” here.  It is what makes what we are seeing with UAS possible.
Finally back to OODA loops.  So I think it is the other way.  The side clinging to human-in-the-loop down at too low levels is going to lose the OODA race.  Autonomous systems can detect and react faster than a human based system - it is why we invented missiles.  So while one side is happily holding onto the good old radio and gun crews, the other has already released loitering systems that can target and strike without the need for a human being.  Who do you think is going to win that race?

It's not really the drones that are killing the tank, it's the ISR.  Drones are (sometimes) the immediate part that blows it up, but the root cause is the ISR.
There are also ATGM crews on quads and motorcycles, artillery with PGMS, artillery that can precision-ish place AT Mines, standoff drones that can paint tanks for laser guided artillery,"smart" uncrewed roadside ATGMs, and eventually @The_Capt's roombas with AT mines, and gawd knows what else.  Probably palletized missiles full of air launched smart-ish EFPs  that you can push out of a transport plane 50 miles back and paraglide across the FEBA to catch them while they maneuver into place.  And their supply trucks, too.  
But the key is that you can't move anything the size of a bicycle without commercial systems seeing it within an hour or so. And some states can see if you moved a big-gulp cup, though without quite the same revisit rate.  Tanks are big and hot.  Even small tanks are big and hot.  Electric tanks are big and cold until you move them, but hiding even them from someone with spectral imaging capability isn't easy.  And the logistics tail for tanks will also be big and long and hot - you can't move things without leaving a heat trail.  So even if you make the tanks like Wonder Woman's invisible plane, the supply chain will lead you right to them.  Or the supply chain will get hit so that the tanks can't move.

These comments do not make any sense:

First off the RA would need to push an encirclement nearly 200kms long.  That is being attacked from without while trying to take a city of 1.4 million and 350 sq kms of urban terrain.  For reference, Mariupol was 166 sq kms and the Russian were controlling it for hundreds of kms both land and water side...and it still took them over 3 months and an ungodly number of losses to take.  In fact there are some theories that Mariupol tied down so many RA forces that their summer '22 failed and it set the conditions for the losses in Fall '22.  Kharkiv is 3-4 times the problem, and the UA was nowhere near as well armed and experienced back in '22. "Encircling Kharkiv" is so militarily stupid that the Russian's might even try it but it may cost them so much as to create conditions for operational collapse elsewhere.
As to LOCs, one need only look at the map to see all of the interior lines that are still open. There is both MSRs and rail.  As to terrain, a quick look shows that the terrain to the west of the city is the same rolling tank country we have come to suspect...with no tank play likely.  To the east there is a major water obstacle that will tie in a right flank tightly.
I mean unless the UA collapses completely this is a major operation to pull off...think a couple hundred thousand troops and air superiority.
Finally, this is the double standard.  The UA establish a bridgehead south of Kherson and it is "a minor raid".  The RA make some minor bridgehead gains on the border and "they are encircling Kharkiv!" In reality this is a secondary front that the RA is trying to open up, likely in the hopes it can take some pressure off the south.  But like everything else, RA offensive-wise, these will likely be nips and bites.  Unless the UA collapses completely, at which point this is all pretty academic in the entirety of Eastern Ukraine.  Of course we have no indications of impending UA collapse, but hey why let that stand in the way?

We've seen a lot of videos of AFU Bradleys using their 25 mm cannons. Here is a new video of a TOW in action. 😎

This sounds about right.  The reality though is that this is a poor strategy in many ways.  This is betting a lot on a single highly chaotic horse.  Not only does a Trump admin need to sign off on forcing Ukraine into a disadvantaged peace, it needs to begin renormalization with Russia under a Putin regime - this may or may not happen.  And even if it does, the EU still gets a vote.  The EU has already pulled away from Russian energy (at least directly) and no western company is going to be eager to jump back into Russia after watching what happened to companies stuck holding the bag back in ‘22.  And forget about loans to Russia from the West, or possibly anyone else for that matter.
So Russia’s military and economy are seriously degraded from ‘22 levels and they may very well remain isolated. That is not a good start point for planning a second invasion in 4-8 years.  An invasion would need to be after Trump leaves office otherwise Putin risks making him look like a weak chump who got duped, and Putin definitely does not want to do that.  So Russia winds up in an overall weaker and more vulnerable position post-war while gaining literally meters of blasted wasteland that have no real strategic significance.
This could very well be the beginning of a slow motion Russian collapse in the making…and this is Putin’s best scenario.  In reality Russia and Putin are the ones running out of time.  Most assessments put a 2026 best before date for Russia before things start to really fall apart.  So what happens if Biden wins?  What happens if Trump decides he can make a better deal elsewhere?  Basically this reduces Russian option spaces down to a singularity, which historically is never a good thing.

OK, my answer to the question "what is Putin actually up to?" (which should be read with a massive dose of skepticism, as it involves making a theory of mind of man having massively more information and usually thinking in massively different way than I; i.e., a wild guess)
1. Putin thinks the war will end through Donald Trump becoming the President of the US and successfully implementing his plan to pressure Ukraine politically into armistice on the basis of status quo in early 2025.
2. Therefore, the war has a probable end date in early 2025 which is based  on external political considerations and not dependent on any actions of Ukraine or Russia. All territorial gains must occur in 2024 and on the other hand, the risk of all losses is also limited in time to 2024. Timeline after early 2025 does not matter much - Russia is not worried about NATO or the Ukraine rekindling the conflict at any reasonable time after 2024, and even if its army is generally wrecked, it thinks it will always be beenough to defend the armistice line (even provided that NATO and the UKR muster political will sufficient to even think of restarting the war). 
3. Therefore Russian army is going all in to maximise territorial gains in 2024, particularly in the Donbass area which Russia claims to be its own, but has not conquered it yet. If they are successful in Donbas or if they statemate in Donbass, they may try to do the same thing in the Zaporozhie area. They do not care about the losses, they do not care about the war materiel stocks (they know they won't be attacked) and they do not care that much about their economy either, which they think will somehow limp through the rest of 2024 anyway, and Russians will start rebuilding it in from 2025.
 

Fun fact: you can also use a Mig-21 to drop a nuke.
Of course Ukraine does not have nuclear weapons of any kind due to that Memorandum which they signed in 1994.
Don't know about everyone else but I'm at the point when I hear those silly Moscovites employ this kind of ridiculous rhetoric regarding a specific system, I'm less worried and more convinced that we are doing something right.
Just shows that they are worried about the introduction of F-16s to the battlefield.
 

Now let’s not suddenly forget the real reason why China has risen to power…western greed.  We exported manufacturing and every other hard/increasingly expensive job to China because they would do it for a fraction of what western workers were demanding nor was governed by pesky workplace safety regulations.  We wanted cheap everything from Tshirts to running shoes to cellphones.  We did not admit China into the WTO until 2001 and by then we were over-invested in China for our lifestyles that no one could slow that train down:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_World_Trade_Organization#:~:text=China became a member of,changes to the Chinese economy.
We had started this trend back in the 80s.  There was nothing altruistic or generous about any of this, it really was simply an extension of western benign (and sometimes not) imperial doctrine.  The Western Rules Based order was really designed to keep the West on top. China figured this out and used that system to rise to power.  They did it using Western money, not charitable intent.  China conducted a series of pretty radical economic reforms and the outsourced the industry we downloaded on them to places like Bangladesh and Vietnam.  They then reinvested in their own high tech and bolstered it with an historic industrial espionage campaign.
None of this was “western misguided liberalism gone wrong” it was straight up pursuit of profit and reinforcing our own consumer based economies.  By the time we realized the problem in the mid ‘00 it was too late.  No politician, even Trump, could simply “drop China”.  Since then we have seen attempts at a gradual uncoupling but we are still too dependent on Asian manufacturing and industry, the pandemic showed this in spades.  And now we are stuck.  We either keep funding Chinese rise to power or try and roll the clock back to 1960, which we can’t do with current standards of living and economic realities.
None of this was generous or high minded.  Anymore than British rule of India was.  It was a 20th century version of economic colonization, which like a lot of colonization came back around to bite.

To restate the points I made earlier in this thread:
Bolton and others have said directly that Trump had planned to pull out of NATO in a second term and there is no evidence that he now intends the contrary. Trump has also quite publicly rejected the Pentagon’s top generals who restrained him from this direction in the first term and there is no constituency in Trump world that has a stake in European stability. Quite the opposite, in fact, as they can anticipate making enormous amounts of money off of the Russian oligarchy should the US swing into acquiescence to a Russian dominated Eastern Europe. Don’t kid yourself. If he wins, NATO is very likely to die.
It is also a canard that Putin was holding back on Ukraine before Trump left office. The reality is that Putin’s regime was involved in a full court press to pressure Ukraine into subservience with the willing assistance of political appointees in the White House. Russia hasn’t gone to war because Putin didn’t think he needed to and clearly the Russian government expected Trump to win a second term. War was decided when it became clear that Biden had won and the immediate focus of American power was going to be on containing Moscow. Putin’s clique imagined that the US was still too shaken politically from the previous four years and too involved in Afghanistan to reorient rapidly while the Ukrainian military wouldn’t be able to put up significant resistance. Virtually wrong on all counts. 

The US Congress added an amendment to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requiring consent from 2/3rds of the Senators or an Act of Congress in order to leave NATO ( Congress passes bill to prevent the president from leaving NATO without approval (msn.com) 
A President could sort of leave by not co-operating, I suppose.  

Possibly because he bashed the threads into mush? Just a thought 🤣
They do seem to be trying to fuze rounds but it obviously is not going well, to say the least. 
The one with the view down inside appears to be empty, completely empty. You should just see an open area just big enough for the base of the fuze. Looks like you can see all the way to the base. That one will only hurt if it actually hits you, like a 1700s cannonball.
That guy in the cartoon is at least trying to not destroy everything. See how the screwdriver is at the side - trying to get it to turn, not smash everything. 
[edit] Looking at the cartoon again, he's doing it wrong. The screwdriver should be on the other side. "Righty tighty, lefty loosey"
Dave

This really speaks to a political leader who simply does not understand how the modern world works. Of the US wants roughly the same economic footing it had pre-WW2, back when its population was about 125M, then decoupling globalization makes perfect sense.  How many jobs in the US will have to go back to manufacturing and resources?  Entire generations of Americans will have to go back to the coal mines and steel mills.  Costs for everything will go through the roof, unless of course Vance’s plan is all JP Morgan and plans to pay future US workers next to nothing to do all the work that has been outsourced.  And then there is the uncomfortable realities of the money markets and foreign investment.
The US does not get to be large, powerful and rich without the global order that it built, fought for and now needs to keep fighting for.  It baffles me that the average voter in the US does not really understand this let alone a senator.

Hmmm we in the UK have personal experience of this and it has cost us dearly. A very expensive mistake...
I hope for the world's sake America takes note that tearing up years of work and cooperation doesn't magically solve anything and creates problems no one was told would happen...

It is potentially worse than that.  This sort of dysfunction does nothing but feed anti-democracy sentiment.  Democracies die due to abandonment, history demonstrates this quite well.  If the system is seen as "unworkable" democracies often choose suicide.  This is the threat to the US and global stability.  Trump and Greene are symptoms of something far deeper and dangerous....apathy that leads to despair.