BletchleyGeek

This picture sums up quite well many of the things that are wrong with this war. Last week a VICE journalist dashed into Irpin capturing many images of randomly murdered civilians. I guess now is evident to all the magnitude of the carnage in those suburbs of Kyiv. Perhaps not an orchestrated evil like Srebrenica, but likely to be the work of the thugs on Putin's "leibstandarte" troops. Eternal shame on the perpetrators, I hope that justice finds them all. I agree with Kraze in one thing. The most likely peace that comes out of this war will just be the end of the first round in a series. French- German enmity played out across 150 years, and six wars (counting separately the Napoleonic ones). That's a grim baseline to compare with. I don't think democracies can do much about this, right now, other than provide the material to Ukraine that ensures the defeat of Russia as quickly as possible, and to prepare as well as possible for the next one.

The real bottleneck with today's tech would be for filtering out false positives from the potential targets identified and prioritising them so it suits operational needs. I guess, just guess, that if a fire request came right away from ground forces it would put in a queue and processed automatically as fast as spotting drones and tubes were available, with no need for a "human in the middle". In any case, the integration of UAVs, computer vision and automatic scheduling and planning transform artillery into a fearsome "precision" offensive weapon.

This video is a "must watch", very articulate and reasonable analysis of how the Ukrainian "People's War" has played out at the start of the war. Many points to think about here's some of my main takeaways: - Territorial Defence/Irregular forces have been very useful defensively, fighting around their cities and villages, and using their knowledge of the terrain to go out at night and surprise Russian Federation forces. The counterpoint to this is that they also make "elementary mistakes" when compared to what professional forces would do (incorrect employment of anti-tank guided missiles, ambushes that are too close, etc.). While they are effective operating on their own, there is no formal structure/organisation to integrate them into a "plan". He calls this "defensive mass". His remark regarding "handing a rifle to anyone who's willing isn't a sensible national policy" echo my earlier thoughts on this thread regarding the very early stages of the Spanish Civil War. - The not very often considered role that civilians are doing in support of the armed forces: digging, repairing & salvaging equipment, providing real-time ISR streams from the front-line, or just hauling around supplies, weapons, ammo and injured. As he says, there's 30 million eyes following every step of the Russian forces. This is a massive contribution that since it is difficult to quantify doesn't appear on any "strength comparison" charts. - Contested airspace was the real surprise of this war for everyone. The Ukrainian mobilization plan probably was predicated on the assumption that the Russian Federation forces would dominate it (and make very dangerous impossible to move personnel and cargos along railways and highways). - Fighting the right war is the precondition for winning wars. Fighting the right enemy, on the right place, and with the right forces. Kind of obvious, but everyone keeps forgetting. The "West" needs to consign offensive warfare to history, imho. Here I may well be proved wrong, but the technology trends and the facts of industrialised countries (urbanisation, motorisation, nuclear weapons, etc.) indicate that the defence is the superior option at the strategic level.

Now they are sitting on the RF loc for sure... I am now imagining how Lavrov is going to spin this as a great example of "trading space for time" or some other nonsense.

The Ukrainian army now has what looks like a good jump off point to abort the Russian offensive on Izyum pushing along the road Chuihuiv-Shevchenkove-Kupiansk. Maybe just the fancy of the armchair general, but maybe there is an unseen reserve available as @Bil Hardenberger was musing about. Also, there is on liveuamap a report of the RF forces blowing up a damn on the river Oskol, just east of Izyum. What is that about?

He had interesting insights on Russian political landscape and dynamics, and tried to put all of that into a historical context. But he goes off the rails quite a bit too... I haven't really checked him out in three weeks or so.

Thanks for the (very interesting) factoid. Any ideas where could I find more about the story of how the Slovenian government got those anti-tank weapons?

I subscribe entirely this sentiment of fascinating horror @The_Capt. I am not talking much about what I am watching and reading about to anyone else (other than in these forums and a few email exchanges) because it is just awful. My family and friends aren't up to absorb all of what is happening: my partner saw yesterday for the first time the footage from Mariupol maternity by those AP journalists that escaped and she was very upset for quite a while, when the narrator explained what was going on as the images of a pregnant woman whose pelvis was broken and carried a dead baby in her belly were coming up. I kept to myself that Vice News video about Kharkiv. I am worried that I am becoming insensitive. Those videos depicting POW mistreatment are just awful, and probably depict a war crime. I say "probably" because I can't help wondering 1) why shooting them in the first place and 2) why record it on your phone. If politicians get busted because of stupid dick pics, or your neighbor gets their private porn posted on Facebook accidentally, I would have wanted to believe that people has become more educated about digital media spreading uncontrollably. Unless this was recording for bragging purposes, of course. In any case, a war crime is a war crime is a war crime ... In the East (and the Southwest on the road to Krivoy Rog) we have seen quite decisive local counterattacks by the Ukrainian forces, ending up in the destruction of large combat units. I say "local" because they're very localised in terms of frontage (along one road). The counterattacks against the Russian "horns" threatening Kyiv, especially on the western side of the city, do seem to be quite general, spanning a front of about 50 kms (I may be getting my scale slightly off, but not by much). It is very difficult terrain (urban, forests, many water obstacles), and from what I recall from the latest map with Ukrainian unit details from Jomini of the West, involving mostly Territorial Defence Forces (no need to post here sensitive data to tell me how wrong I am about the force composition, send me a private message!). Correct me if I am wrong re: what are the ideas of the US Army about this, but to bring about an operationally significant result you have to 1) breakthrough and 2) cut off the LOC of the enemy (or some variation of the above). And this works like a Russian doll: step 1) actually breaks down into smaller scale breakthrough-envelopment engagements. Looks like a hybrid force is entirely capable to achieving the infiltration/breakthrough part at a local level. But if you want to force the Russian army to retreat, what you need to do is to breakthrough (with hybrid forces or traditional "massed fires") and then have a mobile force to maneuver and sit on the roads that bring supply from Belarus. Then you plan for defeating the more than likely counterstroke or breakout attempt. Maybe the terrain is not good for deploying armour (thinking that you want that armor to run into the enemy depth and cut the line of communications), or maybe those assets are being employed elsewhere (Kherson, JFO are of operations). Or maybe the tactical breakthroughs are too fleeting to be exploited in time by mobile forces, if those are available. Not too early to start formulating the questions @The_Capt. Will check out Bousquet's paper (available on JSTOR): https://www.jstor.org/stable/25144928 PS: To my colega @Fernando. Salas-Larrazabal book was first published in 1973, and there is only a second edition from 2006. Looking at the reviews of the 2nd edition, the publisher just reprinted verbatim the 1973 text. Salas-Larrazabal is an interesting character, who was motivated to bring about a "balanced" account of the performance of the Spanish Republic army during the Civil War. I say "balanced" within the contex of the late days of Franco's dictatorships. So when you say "the book dispels" many myths about the Spanish Civil War... I guess that was for someone of my dad's generation (born in 1946), not for someone of my generation, raised and educated under our current Democratic regime. As for the question of how well has Salas-Larrazabal stood the test of time.... not quite well. One of his tenets - that the Spanish Republic was flooded with heaps of military equipment like Ukraine is now by NATO countries - has been proved false and based on the intelligence assessments of the National Army. Recent research - as I requested, from the last 20 years - such as this one (https://eprints.ucm.es/id/eprint/38179/) does a very good job of tracking where was the Spanish Republic sourcing critical military equipment (surprise, surprise, via black market and smuggling!), the very expensive and highly publicised purchases in gold of tanks and aircraft from the Soviet Union notwithstanding. Miguel Campos has gone on to writing a book based on his Thesis https://www.planetadelibros.com/libro-armas-para-la-republica/343864 I don't have the time to go over every other of the 6 or 7 thesis of Salas-Larrazabal introduction. Going to the bottom of the specific details of the very early stages of the Spanish Civil War (we're in Month 1 of the Russian War of Aggression on Ukraine) is off-topic. Yet the topic is informative towards the discussion re: people's army/hybrid vs. conventional army, as it is the impact of sanctions and weapons embargoes. For instance, If the West had embargoed weapons as it did back in 1991 - ensuring the temporary military superiority of the Serbs over Slovenians, Croats and Bosniak - to Ukraine, I am pretty sure we would now be watching Yanukovych or some other convenient cat's paw sitting in the Presidential Palace in Kyiv.

Thanks for the efforts to break through the language barrier @Haiduk, it is much appreciated.

So article is BS? Maybe my comment rubbed you wrongly, but the facts are that the Russian advance culminated weeks ago at least (according to the open source maps) and signs of a counterattack in NW Kyiv have been turning up since at least one week ago. So, I think it is "slow". Whether that is by design, or because of friction, I don't know.

Perdona, pero eso que el 50% de la tropa de las columnas milicianas fueran policias, o fuerzas de seguridad - de forma uniforme por todo el territorio bajo control Republicano, desde Asturias a Catalunya pasando por Malaga, no se de donde lo sacas. Que habian tanto tropa como fuerzas de seguridad que unieron a las columnas de la CNT/FAI o el POUM esta bien documentado. Pero que fuese el 50%... Si no recuerdo mal el Estado Mayor del Ejercito Popular no se establecio hasta el final de 1936... Ni de broma en Agosto de 1936. Asi que no me vengas con que habia uno o dos ex-capitanes de la Guardia Civil al mando de una columna... porque eso era un plus si quieres, y para organizar un contra-ataque no sirve de mucho. Como los hechos historicos demuestran, ya que la primera contraofensiva eficaz de las fuerzas de la Republica fue en Guadalajara en Marzo de 1937, una vez que la fase inicial de caos y DIY transiciono a una estructura mas estable, que no necesariamente mas eficaz politicamente. Si hay investigacion reciente que demuestra lo que tu propones, con ejemplos claros en sitios tan dispares como Catalunya o Malaga, por favor, o lo enlazas o te retractas. Me sorprende no haberme enterado de esto, ya que basicamente tira por el suelo bastante investigacion que a lo mejor no es tan reciente (empezando con el trabajo de Hugh Thomas), y sigo en contacto con mucha gente en el campo de la historia militar en el homeland. ------------------------------ I am sorry, but that "usually half of the troops were regular soldiers" is a statement which is demonstrably false, if it is referring to the whole of the territory under control of the diverse factions(?) supporting - or rather, opposing those wanting to topple the Spanish government in July to September 1936. I skip the middle paragraph, use Google Translate But the gist of my comment is that without professional staff work, a military force has a difficult time pulling out a meaningful operational result (regardless of the esprit-de-corps or whatever martial qualities you can assign to each individual soldier). If there is recent research, like 2000s research, that uncovers evidence of what you are stating, with clear examples in places as distant and diverse in conditions as say, Catalunya or Malaga, either you provide a link to that research, or please, retract from such a statement. I am surprised to have not learnt about this, as it contradicts heaps of existing literature on the topic (starting with the classic work by Hugh Thomas), and I am still in close contact with a lot friends in the homeland who are military history nerds. Thanks for that @Haiduk - so what about the statement in the article about this unit being disbanded in 2019? Could you offer some perspective of that? Was that a result of the result of the general election in 2019?

The Guardian catching up with Aerorozvidka https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/28/the-drone-operators-who-halted-the-russian-armoured-vehicles-heading-for-kyiv Some interesting takeaway points from the article: So: - Completely DIY, no idea how they link up with artillery (maybe over Watsapp?). If the war effort around Kyiv and Chernihiv is so DIY - very much like the opening stages of the Spanish Civil War, with the Republican forces being militias organised in "columns" endorsed by parties, trade unions or civic associations - then one possible reason for the counterattacks NW of Kyiv to be developing slowly may be the inability to coordinate offensive operations. - The Ukrainian army doesn't support these initiatives very much or at all. Which leads me to think that perhaps, just perhaps, they are as surprised to have stopped cold the Russian Federation war machine as many people is. Like perhaps @The_Capt should write a letter to the Ukrainian general staff collating his thoughts, when they are less busy with the fighting in the East (where I think the "command capacity" of the Ukrainian army is being applied).

I think this analysis did have a influence before the Russian Federation made war (Japan never bothered with formalities to China in 1937) without a formal declaration of war and openly invaded Ukraine (and probably in 2014 it had some influence too). Now we're all looking out for the "Pearl Harbour" moment: cyber, chemical or nuclear.

I totally missed the drone on drone aerial combat. They had an unidentified uav flying over them and then a (rather friendly) German Sheperd comes to check on them...

That was an excellent talk, thank you for forwarding it. Definitely a procurement & planning guy, the joke about Robert McNamara was really funny.

Now that was a hard watch, but necessary I guess. Cheers to @Canada Guy for the article and thoughts on the post too.

In the early weeks of the war there was a lot of buzz about Russian Federation forces being picked up on radio. The open source guys were looking for journalists to help them make sense out of the material, and the result is that report (pretty good one too).

You are quoting Maréchal Lannes there, Steve. There may be earlier people recognising this but I am not aware of them. One factor to keep in mind is that professional wargaming often is conducted "manually", the players must be the "computers" executing the game rules. So you can't really ask from people to be switching between "compute shortest path" think mode to "design and evaluate courses of action for a formation of units". Back in the day there were minions moving pieces and doing the menial work, but I think that nowadays things are more democratic as in "everybody gets to do fun things". So if humans are the computers, there is a strong incentive towards "streamlining" to speed up play and get player's focus on "what matters". Following up the @TheVulture comments, the designers then have to choose what factors and interactions to keep and which ones to drop to avoid exceeding the "computational complexity budget". As with narrow AI, this process of "making ends meet means" most often leads to games/models to be very sensitive to changes in the "conditions" and "task", as you say. Interestingly, nowadays you get computer based wargames that are split between having black box abstractions that boil down units to a few numbers (average is 3 or 4) or games that pretend to be "white box" abstractions where units are modelled down to every element but the data used to describe them are often a "best guess" or an ill defined concept (e.g. "ROF", "accuracy"). I think both approaches are dead ends, for different reasons. It is interesting that in the 1960s there were interesting middle grounds being explored. Look up an old RAND Corporation war game called TACSPIEL.

That was a great post. Also, MultiVAC isn't going to happen... We were looking forward to Rosie the Robot and we got instead Roomba. Which is useful and saves us time and effort but if your dog makes a mess on the carpet be sure Roomba doesn't get close to it. We have pretty good and steadily improving narrow AI: pick a task T under X conditions and we can come up with a program (by hand heuristically or via automatic optimisation with guarantees) that is very good at T. Change T to to a very similar yet different T', and X to X + d, d a small change, and the performance of the program will degrade. To design an effective AI program, as @TheVulture says, you need to "identify the critical factors and understanding how they interact with each other".

Maybe those gentlemen should consider volunteering to jump on a T-72A fresh out of mothballs and try open up that overland corridor to Kaliningrad, if they are so incensed. I also found amusing referring to the opening of such overland corridor as a "local military operation", easier than the "special military operation" in Ukraine. At least there was a member of the panel that clearly had no words.

Ah, now that I have recovered from busting a gut after that post re: Orville Peck secret identity.... Great stream of (mostly) curated picks from social media. My favourite today is this one by @Haiduk. I find remarkable how good UKR is at using conventional artillery as a stand in for eye wateringly expensive PGM. It looks to me that since UKR had to rebuild its military from scratch, had an opportunity to adopt new ideas and technologies dealing with little or no institutional inertia. I wonder what the process is for those arty strikes, maybe something like this? 1. Drone controller has UAV loitering on suspected area of RF activity. 2. Controller spots location of RF assets, then registers the location by taking snapshots of target from several points and angles (see this for instance https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0926580518308641) 3. Photos, along with camera parameters and geo location info forwarded to fires coordination center. Firing solution calculated automatically and fire task assigned to friendly asset. 4. Fire task executed, drone controller reports damage assessment. An iteration over the above wouldn't take very long at all, the most finicky part being that of maneuvering the UAV to take the measurements you need for registration. And that could be automated too (the controller activates the "registration" behaviour and that's it). The workflow above could be implemented with very few fancy equipment/algorithms, you just need good software and network engineers using pretty mundane hardware. -------------- On another topic, I am glad to see tactical psychology being used... the most efficient way to defeat an adversary is to destroy its will to fight. So far UKR has been fighting smart, they just need to keep doing so!

ROFL

Sure there has been heavy fighting in the area for the past 72 hours.

This article on The Atlantic will sound familiar to readers of this thread https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/ukraine-is-winning-war-russia/627121/ When I visited Iraq during the 2007 surge, I discovered that the conventional wisdom in Washington usually lagged the view from the field by two to four weeks. Something similar applies today. Analysts and commentators have grudgingly declared that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been blocked, and that the war is stalemated. The more likely truth is that the Ukrainians are winning. So why can’t Western analysts admit as much? Most professional scholars of the Russian military first predicted a quick and decisive Russian victory; then argued that the Russians would pause, learn from their mistakes, and regroup; then concluded that the Russians would actually have performed much better if they had followed their doctrine; and now tend to mutter that everything can change, that the war is not over, and that the weight of numbers still favors Russia. Their analytic failure will be only one of the elements of this war worth studying in the future.

Yes, pretty much that's the country like along the Ukraine-Belarus borders, from the Polish border to the Dnepr. The Russian western pincer on Kyiv trusted everything to a few roads (two or three). And then they got hit by the most massive military traffic jam in the last 80 years or so.