BletchleyGeek

Good discussion here, team.
[replying to @The_Capt's last] In a business context I have found the most valuable practical use of Strategy -- however defined -- is as a 'screen'.
In other words, what are the Big Ideas we're NOT going to dissipate large amounts of our time and treasure chasing.  Hence, 'off strategy'.
So in the Ukraine war context, let's say your strategy (theory of success) is to achieve the battlefield defeat of the Russian army.
I might further characterise as a the enforced surrender or rout (e.g. Kherson was NOT a rout) of a Russian CAA army (which is more like a corps of 3 - 4 divisions in Western terms).
That implies you
1.  focus on the land bridge/Azov coast, which is the hardest Russian concentration for them to supply, support or reinforce
2.  cut the supply routes, both in and out (the sea one is hardest, but not invulnerable -- there are only a few ports) and within the zone
3.  assuming they've already stockpiled heavily and distributed, either destroy or make unavailable those caches (focus on the trucks with switchblades?)
That implies you DON'T
1. mess around in Belarus (unless the enemy gives you an opening). 
2. bother retaking northern Luhansk or even Kreminna -- the supply routes through there are already effectively cut
3. expend too many top quality forces holding Bahmut, unless you're truly bleeding away Russian forces at a very favourable loss ratio
... what else?

First off thanks to all those who have supported the Battlepack by purchasing it, and a shout out to those who have provided their support in the creation of this project – and a huge shout out to those who have freely given their feedback and additional support publicly via various means – online streaming vids, DARs, AARs and various forum posts etc, Its truly heartening to read and see these. 

It’s just as well, being Scottish, that we are renowned for being slow to anger and not prone to unprovoked outbursts. On a personal note a mahhoosive amount of work went into the battle pack, at my end. Work of which I am truly proud off. The lion’s share of research, mapmaking and AI plan stuff was devoted to the two campaigns and the Rakow and the Dying Sun scenario. These all involved painstakingly creating huge new maps from primary sources. Research turned up several ‘loose’ ends regarding accepted historical narrative and I’m as chuffed with these as the scenarios!

I digress… In short this sucked up a huge amount of time and I was also involved in several other projects (which I was keen to be involved in including CMFR and CMCW). Creating new content, AI plans etc for the Battlepack was a significant endeavour. So yup I used bits of various previous maps (which were my own creations and made available publicly) which I then significantly tweaked – mainly because I could not positively ID RL locations, or the fact is I thought the map – like Der Ring (which by the way took nearly a year to produce) to have a new life after some major tweaking. I’ve done this on previous game families with other maps. A few astute observers might have spotted them. 

But, and I should stress this, in the case of Der Ring it was heavily reworked and I created brand new AI plans (I had to as I’d chopped and reused bits) etc. So yes whilst some stuff is based on sections of der Ring they are more the offspring – rather than the map wearing a false wig and a pair of dodgy specs…

Re the rather offensive swipes about scamming, well,  re the master maps it’s pretty clear that as stated on the BFC website that they are “New maps based on maps from the Battle Pack missions”. 

Years back I used to be with a punk band – another life another story…. One of the bands (way more successful than we were) we did some gigs with, had their singer on one of their records state this quote, it was along the lines of – “Whatever you do they’ll slate you off and criticise you to the ground…” It’s stood me in good stead through life.
So aye happy to take the constructive knocks, but I’m less inclined to give credence tae whingers.
 

I'm pretty cool about it. The delay did mean being able to catch some later than last minute typos etc. Though totally get why others might be getting antsy. 

"Ukrainian army firing near Soledar, in the Donetsk region. UKRAINIAN ARMED FORCES/VIA REUTERS"

I am pretty sure that getting to a crisis point has been part of the game plan (as a contingency or a milestone I don't know) since the civil war in Syria started, if not from the day that Bill Clinton (and George Bush later) laughed off the question put forward by Putin to join NATO.  
Following up the discussions on logistics, saw a video of some Russian soldiers helping themselves to the shelves of a supermarket in Melitopol, and I remembered this very good article I read back in Xmas
https://warontherocks.com/2021/11/feeding-the-bear-a-closer-look-at-russian-army-logistics/
 

Things like Shahed don't really have sensors other than GPS antennas as far as I can tell - they're given GPS coordinates and they fly to them and blow up.  At shorter ranges (<93 km) they can be programmed to loiter and then be given an updated set of coordinates.  But it doesn't appear that they have any kind of target sensors.
Something that has optical or IR sensors could be blinded by a laser as long as it's in whatever passband the optics have.  If it's not laser guided, an operator might consider putting a filter for common laser wavelengths to prevent being blinded.  If it's laser guided you at least have to let the guide laser wavelength through.

Lasers are cool, but they have a lot of limitations, not the least of which are power consumption and the fact that they provide a very detectable return address.  Like a ginormous beacon.  And it may not be looking at 5 or 10 targets spread over 180 degrees (really more like pi steradian), but 50 or 100, some of which may be decoys just to distract it.  
The key word in autonomous defense will be "distributed", just like the attackers.  If you have a distributed defense system against them it's much harder to overwhelm and less susceptible to complete failure if just one gets through or you have a temporary malfunction.  And it can be distributed over a much larger kill zone before it gets to your capital equipment.
The first thing you need to be able to do is detect all the drones.  They're small, they can have few metallic parts, they may not emit much RF if they're truly autonomous, there will be a lot of them, and they'll be taking different routes.  You want a mesh network of sensors that all move around (on their own AVs), have a variety of complementary sensors, overlapping search space, and can communicate with each other.  If any single one (or ten) drop out it doesn't matter - you have a bunch of redundancy.  You have to have a variety of sensor types because  it will be easy to make a small drone invisible to any single particular sensor type, but difficult to make it invisible to many simultaneously and still keep it small and cheap.
As the mesh system detects them, the individual elements will communicate with each other to decide which one of them will kill any particular drone.  The sensor drones may or may not also be the killer drones, and there will be a variety of killer drones and mechanisms.  When they start shooting back at the attacking drones they'll take into account the risk that they'll give themselves away, and for a small number of apparent attackers might take turns so that one starts shooting at them until it gets identified and hit, then the next one, and so on.  A lot of the kill methods will be kinetic because it's cheap and you can store a lot of propulsion energy in a small space.  Some of them will be like dragonflys that just entangle the incoming drones.
If you do have a bigass laser or Phalanx type system, that will be the last resort and essentially located at your "AV carrier" to get the few the dribble through the mesh.  Ideally it will never fire, because as soon as it does it gives itself away and the next wave is headed straight for it.
 

Yeah, no.
But since the ammunition is quite old by now, it could be well past due date. Then we have to scrap it, of course. I guess in that case, Ukraine would win the call for bids.
? wut? No, we don't. Germany may be exemplary for some things, but it is definitely NOT for military spending. That is right in line with airport planning.

The stuff going "bang" at the pointy end is rounding error.  Making it so that stuff can be there to go "bang" at the right place at the right time for an enormous range of possibilities isn't cheap.

Sorry if posted already but man this is good....

Naval strike at Vladivostok by Ukraine, a nation with no navy at all would drop some jaws, I give you that
Another amusing idea would be to have this UUVs creep up to the shore and launch a swarm of Switchblade 600/ Warmate drones, against say an airbase, or any other vulnerable installation close to the shore. I bet a 40ft craft could easily carry a dozen or more.

Sorry to hear all of that mate. Bastards will pay ( if they didn't till now) and ulitmatelly victory will be yours, I am sure of that.
It reminded me of this documentary about escapes from Irpien made by W.Przedlacki, another in-the-trench reporter. Many people watched it here, and the young guy who bravely voluntarly drive a bus through a war zone back and again became well known symbol of Ukrainian civil courage in Poland. After this docu was aired in TV, various fundraising initiatives for UA skyrocketed for several days.
https://distribution.tvn.pl/offer-documentaries,1431,1/escape-from-irpin,348844.html
 
Interesting link regarding Iranian officers killed lately (in Iran) that media suggested were supposedly involved in drone supply. Author believes there is no evidence that their deaths were connected to Ukraine, and instead they fall victims of partisnas from Beludhistan (PL, autotranlsate):
 

If you are using Chrome, under right-click context menu there's an option to "paste as plain text" - it removes all the formatting of the copied text. Or use Ctrl+Shift+V.

Absolutely agree. What happens now is a shock therapy to our energy sector. Painful, but a therapy nonetheless. The only long term loss I can think of is for the chemical/ other industries that rely on the NG specifically, and not just use it as an energy source. For private residence heating, the solar/ heat-pumps are the way to go in the future, added incentive for insulating buildings will also only do us good in the longer term (although in countries like Germany and Poland, and I assume most of the northern EU, there isn't that much more to be done in this regard).
I'm also looking forward to a nuclear revival. Controversial for some, but it's already a done deal, at least in Poland - we just got offers for the second plant.

The last update from this guy's buddy in Ukraine had some commentary
 

That was such a good book.  In defence future thinking circles nanotechnology is definitely on the radar.

Didn't want this post by @Hubato be washed away... that's so interesting! In any case, if all this "Cold Winter" story ends up being just burning bullcrap smoke vented by the Russian propaganda machine (and its knowing or unknowing accomplices) I think that the resulting massive push for solar (up to a year waiting list in Spain for subsidized home solar installations) and basic things such as improving home insulation will be a net positive contribution to the welfare of the World.

Didn't want this post by @Hubato be washed away... that's so interesting! In any case, if all this "Cold Winter" story ends up being just burning bullcrap smoke vented by the Russian propaganda machine (and its knowing or unknowing accomplices) I think that the resulting massive push for solar (up to a year waiting list in Spain for subsidized home solar installations) and basic things such as improving home insulation will be a net positive contribution to the welfare of the World.

Didn't want this post by @Hubato be washed away... that's so interesting! In any case, if all this "Cold Winter" story ends up being just burning bullcrap smoke vented by the Russian propaganda machine (and its knowing or unknowing accomplices) I think that the resulting massive push for solar (up to a year waiting list in Spain for subsidized home solar installations) and basic things such as improving home insulation will be a net positive contribution to the welfare of the World.

Didn't want this post by @Hubato be washed away... that's so interesting! In any case, if all this "Cold Winter" story ends up being just burning bullcrap smoke vented by the Russian propaganda machine (and its knowing or unknowing accomplices) I think that the resulting massive push for solar (up to a year waiting list in Spain for subsidized home solar installations) and basic things such as improving home insulation will be a net positive contribution to the welfare of the World.

Killcullen is an expert on COIN (or at least as far as we got one in the last round) and was trying to translate that cache into Grey Zone and now modern conventional war.  Biggest problem is that none of the theories translate well between those arenas.  This is odd given that he wrote about complex warfare in the early days (wiki says he was sole author but in uniform things really do not work that way).
He is another really smart, highly educated and experienced expert who got this war wrong, largely because they have been in a war like the in Ukraine about as many times as the rest of us….never.  They employed old metrics of success/failure to make their judgements and were way off.  I suspect most will be big enough to admit it and the really good ones will spend a lot of time figuring out why they were so off the mark - expect a LOT of post-Ukraine war books.
Personally, I would write about this thread itself and how stuff like this was happening everywhere.  Open source analysis was all over the place but in some places they got a lot more right than wrong and that is worth following up on why.  Was it micro-perspective based on wargaming?  Was it the mix of expertise and backgrounds?  Was it having the right people like Haiduk on the ground pulling in stuff?  I am not sure but even with our recent “Russia sux” leanings this thread was very accurate and often contrary to the experts getting paid to dot his out there.

It's even funnier that this post suggests - it looks like we have too much gas at the moment, time to turn up the heating
 

yeah, Kilcullen has had a few holes shot in his various boats on the CMSF boards over the years. 
He's a super smart guy, spent enough time getting shot at to have cred, and also a good writer.  But his papers also tend toward that 'just so' Journal Article Unifying Theory, which I guess ensures a lucrative career for him.
Not a condition unique to the MIC by any means.

On other important news too