panzersaurkrautwerfer

No, see, I'm all about blood for oil and world conquest. I salivate at the chance to show Ecuador who is it's daddy. You're the one from Russia claiming there's no invasion despite by your own admission Russian soldiers are in the Ukraine. My objection isn't military adventurism, it's lying about it and hypocrisy. Which are some things Russia is certainly pretty good at.

Huh. Perhaps you should share this wisdom with your government?

Then why are there two continues, and why did the Russian supported government shoot all those Ukrainians in Kiev? Which gets to the heart of the issue I feel, for the Russians, the Ukraine is the long lost family member, missing from great Empire. For Ukrainians, it would appear the opinion is quite the opposite, for their desire for independence long predates the EU, and will likely continue so long as Russians illegally occupy portions of it. I know! It's just brother come to visit. Put boots up on Ukraine. Pay no mind. Why you hang with that EU person? Is bad man, bad man. Say, brother sorry he starve you and touch you in no-no places. Why not you move back in?

The Ukraine appears to disagree with that sentiment.

Just saying, I've called for both. If I could call for CAS from someone who wasn't from the USAF, I would in a heartbeat. And the difference was not rotary wing vs fixed wing, it was spatial awareness on the battlefield, and a common operating picture. As illustrated in the video I posted, the USAF apparently lacks both, and from my interactions I got the general impression they were going to bomb the first thing that looked about right before heading back to base. You're speaking to the process of how a plane gets on station, not to the reality of on station to bomb release. And I'm saying in that gap between "plane arrives" and "plane leaves" the USMC is superior in coordinating with the dudes on the ground, while I was never sure if the USAF guys were going to dive on me, the OPFOR, the other training area over, or go chase friendly helicopters because they might be OPFOR helicopters! To that end I've worked with multiple branches and agencies in different training and other situations. The USAF outside of their technical guys (like the computer dudes, support agencies) was hands down the least helpful, least useful, and often most dangerous to work with. Which is not to say totally lacking positive experiences, but by god were the negative ones memorable (I can distinctly recall the look on one of our JTAC's face the third time the CAS made us cease fire during a live fire exercise by departing from the safe approach lanes, and misidentifying targets) If I've just been followed by the two or three worst pilots in the USAF, my apologies. But clearly something is missing from the USAF's CAS implementation, and I would rather be able to blame someone in house, than someone who tapes over their gun camera footage.

It's really pretty easy. Like not I could walk out and do it myself right now, but the blast patterns are pretty constant. The the shell is coming at an angle, so the distribution of fragments and impact damage of even an airburst shell is going to vary based on the approach angle. From that it's pretty easy to just math your way through it to a loose range and firing location. We used to it in Iraq fairly often to verify points of origin* if the counter-battery radar had issues with it (we were in an urban area, there was a lot of clutter and interrupted LOS that might make a track less accurate). *immature random fact: Point Of Origin got abbreviated to "poo" quite a lot, which lead to much shenanigans when asked if someone out on patrol had found the poo in sector yet.

That's why I said practices. The procedures are by design, joint/multiserviceblahblah etc. The implementation of those procedures, as in the actual practice is better when the USAF is not part of the process. The USMC Fixed/Rotary Wing coordination is vastly superior to the USAF-Army interaction, and the Army rotary wing to Army ground forces coordination is very good. In practice from my experience while US Army rotary wing was less capable in terms of damage than fixed wing CAS, it was many times more effective in terms of actually supporting ground forces. And the USMC fixed/rotary wing interaction in practice is both much tighter (given the integration of the air wing into the ground forces planning cycle), and significantly less likely to bomb the hell out of the supported forces given the shared operating picture and CAS centric training focus. USAF does CAS. It does not do it as well as the Army could given the CCA/USMC template for air support. And they'd never have to try to retire the A-10 ever again. Seems win-win unless you're the USAF looking to use CAS funding to keep the B-1 in service.

I prefer real time because a lot of stuff that would be on a platoon leader to figure out becomes your problem in the game. So when in reality giving some broad intent would get a wider selection of stuff done, in game you really have to make nearly all the choices, and the minute long blocks of gameplay are just too long for my tastes in terms of trying to plot stuff like that out.

Simply a light hearted jab at how many of these threads seem to turn into "well in 2015 Aramta will....." threads. When the thing actually rolls on May 9th, and exists outside of strongly being implied to exist, I'll be more interested, but it's feeling a lot like the old FCS at this point in terms of a wundertrack that's all of so many months away from being available/capable/etc.

My apologies to all. I've managed to catch something and it's rather messed with my sleep patterns, so I'm a bit all over the place. Coherence is a goal, if not an accomplishment right now. Again, it sounds like you are strictly talking about a control system in terms of radios and voice data. If required the same fire mission data, like locations targrety, and guidance telemetry can be shared freely across Battalions, Brigades, and military services on the various US systems. So to that regard if there was a mission that required 36 guns (there are not many targets that would require that with the current CEP on 155 MM), having one target designated by a US unit in contact through a FIST type vehicle (or even shared via a BFT unit) is sufficient for all batteries, battalions, and other fire assets in range to fire on. With that said, even without the GPS guided rounds you're still talking about first round fire for effect accuracy with all US tube artillery at this point,* so I'm hard pressed to think of a target that would require more guns than 6-12 (again, the kill radius on the various US 155 MM shells is something like 50 M, so when you're talking about the coverage a battery level barrage provides, it's not a small amount of ground being covered, and covered first salvo on target). *Small exception, I know the M777 and M109 equipped units all have the proper systems for semi-precision fires, I'm not sure if the IBCT 105 MM guns have a similar system because I was never near an IBCT, and their role is much less relevant to a conventional shooting war. Re: CAS You're shooting footage from 1991. The blue on blue we're discussing occurred in 2003 during the day. Eyeball acquisition, and later model targeting pods were potentially a factor. Additionally the fact the gun camera footage was "accidentally taped over" sort of builds on the ground to air distrust. Because they have to do that to remain relevant. There's no targets to do any of the other traditional USAF missions. In terms of practices, the USMC is frankly superior given the cultural mindset, training, and emphasis on the CAS mission. It's on call, it's synced well to the ground controller, and its focus is on "what can we provide for the ground force?" instead of "what can I do to get back to buying more F-22s?" The wide gap between customer and service provider is strongly evident in the "B-1 as CAS" example simply because it's one of those "This is what the USAF actually thinks" moments. The distinction between "I am dropping bombs on bad guys" and "I am dropping bad guys in support of good guys" is something the USAF doesn't appear to make the distinction on. There's absolutely nothing (nothing) lost by releasing the CAS mission to the Army vs the Air Force. It's an artificial artifact of the USAF walking off with anything that has guns and wings in 1947, and we would all be better serviced by an Army that has its own CAS and a USAF that's left to focus on distinctly air based/strategic depth style missions.

Honestly starting to wonder if the Armata field kitchen, and Armata armored administrative vehicles will live up to expectations.

Sums it up rather nicely. There's also the amusing tendency of some Russian sources to twist anything the west does to something intended to affect Russia. ABMs located in a place that stands no practical chance of intereception Russian launched missiles? PLAN TO INVADE AND NUKE THE BABIES! Intervention in Libya? THIS IS A BLOW AGAINST RUSSIA. etc, etc, etc. I mean prior to Crimea Russia hardly registered much above the actual Ukraine in terms of international policy concerns.

Re: CAS Nothing looks like the AAV from space. It's huge, looks like a sandcrawler, and next to the Abrams it is the least threat looking vehicle. It really should be the litmus test to see if someone is blind. Either way had the A-10 and FAC been better integrated there would have been less friction. And you don't read much about Harriers and USMC F/A-18s ripping up friendly forces, so I thinking maybe they're doing something right. Closer integration of CAS is never the wrong answer, and the USAF is not especially interested, or good at the integration compared to the USMC model. If they're not interested in doing the CAS mission, then well why not let the Army handle it for itself? It's not like CAS being an Army mission will cause the USAF to collapse, and the budget provided for CAS platforms ultimately is money that supports Army/Marine assets anyway isn't it? Edit: Hit reply too early. Again it's not dissimilar to the way the US Army runs it, but the ability of the US Artillery Battalion to rapidly shift left-right in terms of command and control is a force multiplier. And it does not sound like you have the integrated digital fires network which limits interoperability, and again sounds like you're talking about strictly a radio network at this point, which just simply isn't efficent in terms of multi-echelon fires management. It's the putter as a nine iron thing. You're making a less efficient system work by putting more force into it. In terms of definition, yes those are correct. Broadly speaking FM radios are your average military radios, HF is similar in appearance but you're often looking at near theater level range in transmission/reception given means of transmission. Wires are field phones or similar, and sat is indeed bouncing stuff off things in splace communications.

In terms of communications architecture I'm referring to the systems the various systems the Russian military uses to talk, how they interact with each other, and how information is transmitted. So like, AFATDS lets everything that's a "fires" piece in the Army share the same information allowing artillery units to coordinate across units, space and time (so you could fire a ToT barrage using battalion mortars, your BDE's artillery battalion, the neighboring BDE's artillery, and the USMC gun battery across the road without anything more than the authorization to do so and clearance of fires). I have not seen similar capabilities in literature concerning Russian military forces which seems to indicate you're still largely stovepiped up and down (your battalion talks to your BDE's artillery, which takes to BDE, which then talks to the next BDE who then talks to their artillery BN to coordinate cross fires). The number of guns is also less relevant than how they are employed. I mean if you shoot a man ten times or twenty times, in some circumstances the additional ten bullets matter, but in most cases it's the first 1-5 bullets that were the relevant ones, and the rest are just excessive. As a rule and from the alignment indicated by the OOB it looks like the question is not a matter of massing, it is a matter of ensuring each element has access to a similar number of gun systems, with the difference being the American system is designed to leverage superior fire coordination to ensure the 18 guns for each maneuver battalion is the same 18 guns across the board, while the Russian model allocates distinct packages of 18 guns to each unit. Which is why I'm curious about the architecture of the command and communications of the Russian army. Re: M829A4 No idea. They weren't testing them near where I was tanking, and in the professional sense at the officer end it's not as important that it's so many meters long, nearly as much as what it can do, so I haven't bothered to look/inquire. Re: CAS In practice while working with the A-10, they're a lot better at the coordination piece. In practice the A-10s try to establish where you are, where they enemy is, and have a better picture of what they're about to drop on. From my limited run ins other fixed wing, it was much closer to you're somewhere down there, and they're looking for a target to drop a bomb on. While it was just NTC we had a somewhat darkly hilarious conversation with an RAF Typhoon that was certain one of our platoons was the set of enemy technicals he was looking for. ("I see five times trucks on ridgeline, are those it?" "Negative target is two times trucks vicinity grid 12345678 village" "Are you postiive it's not five trucks on a ridge line? I see dismounts with weapons" "Negative, we are the five times trucks with guns on ridgeline." "Oh.") It's why I have such a hardon for Army controlled CAS, because CCA (the magic special made up US Army term for attack helicopter CAS) is just so much better at coordinating. And it isn't even a matter of different platforms, it's a matter of integration of the assets on hand. They know our graphic control measures. They know we are four times tanks, located vicinity PL Blue, and they know what an M1A2 looks like, and they know what PL Blue is. JTACs help with that, but JTACs don't actually live/work with the unit they're assigned to unless there's a war on, which really degrades just how effective they are at the integration piece. In terms of blue on blue you always confirm targets. There is literally nothing in the Iraqi inventory that looks remotely like an AAV-7. Nothing. Zip. Nadda. While reporting there are no friendlies across the river is good, the right response should have been "confirm last I think I see friendlies across river" not "Roger yolo, pickle two on jarheads." Both incidents highlight the risk at having poor or limited coordination across spotting platforms and the price that comes from it. If there were clear signs the USAF was concerned about this and was thinking about how to make it better, than cool thumbs up. But collectively the USAF response has been to shrug, "stuff happens" and move the CAS mission to platforms even more removed from integration or coordination the supporting force. CAS is great when it's on station and working. There's some problems with it though. And the USAF bluntly does not appear to be interested in fixing them.

It'd be interesting. If you're talking about wire/FM networks then okay got it for command systems. If you're speaking to the sat based or HF networks...maybe you should invest in some more exports?

That's interesting. Could you describe the communication architecture in more detail? Just as much as your putter will fill in for your 9 Iron if you hit the ball hard enough.

Indifferent. I haven't seen much good about the Russian communications type systems, BFT and AFATDS both are mature and I've had good results with both. Also I've had bad experience with automatic systems, anything that puts more variables in the court of the lowest bidder should usually be distrusted. Also if I'm picking location finding I'd rather be on GPS, less holes, higher fidelity, larger constellation. Our M1064s were about as responsive as you're going to get with good clearance of fires. The slowdown was making sure the mortar wasn't going to shoot down a wandering South Korean helicopter, not the aiming process.

It's more the implication that the sort of military spending for Soviet power supreme was eventually ruinous. Each brigade as a full battalion of artillery, towed 105s and 155s for IBCTs and SBCTs respectively with self propelled 155s for ABCTs. Additionally there's 120 MM mortars generally held at Battalion level, although the recon troops and stryker companies have those mortars at those echelons. As a rule rotary wing is pushed down to Brigade/Battalion level when available. Artillery, especially precision artillery is good. But the amount of hurt bombs drop, and large ATGMs are very useful. The destruction wrought by good CAS is widely out of proportion to what artillery can perform. Additionally when dealing with mobile enemies, CAS is straight up murder level effective. It's a good tool. Just it's something the USAF would rather not do, but that the Army is not allowed to do for itself.

Lies. The truth faithful have already been delivered unto the CMBS, and all that remain are the forsaken.

Waiting for the bread lines to get longer mostly.

So does the USMC F-18 fleet, but they're still intended for almost exclusively blowing up bad people on the ground in support of jarheads. Again if the USAF put the time and care into CAS and directly supporting the soldier on the ground, this wouldn't be a problem, but there's a pile of dead marines, and a lot of dead air that seems to indicate the USAF isn't terribly interested, and frequently not especially good at CAS. The USMC model, as much as it pains me to say it is the right model, with the CAS aircraft belonging to the higher echelon of the supported unit, not belonging to an outside agency that is not invested in the ground mission.

This does get to the heart of why having a dedicated platform matters though. The important thing about A-10s was they only really trained to kill stuff on the ground. Nominally at least, they know what an M1 tank looks like vs a T-72 (nominally, quizing USAF dudes on vehicle identification is sort of terrifying. There's at least some accounts that in both 1991 and 2003 the USAF largely relied on gun tube orientation. Additionally some A-10s of all things rather infamously shot the hell out of a bunch of Marines in 2003 because they weren't sure what the USMC AAV-7s were so they assumed it was hostile). Moving away from any sort of dedicated or well rehearsed and trained CAS is bad juju. And F-35/B-1 CAS is not dedicated, well rehearsed or well trained.

The NLOSish round I've seen stuff on was closer to the ultra-STAFF round sort of thing, where it'd overfly something and dump a shaped charge through the roof well outside ATGM range. Post M60 tank gun elevation is bad enough to make indirect firing problematic. It'll be interesting to see how it stacks up vs semi-precision/precision mortars. The current generation of US SP mortar systems still require manual elevation/traverse, but it's cued off a computer once the location is fed in, and it already talks to the navigation/weather information, so basically once you stick the grids in, it'll tell you what to do, then fire mission go (and at that the mission itself can be transmitted direct from any vehicle/dismounted unit on the BFT infrastructure). Again it's interesting. I'm a bigger fan of mortars though given the sort of dead space inherent to a lower angle short range system myself.

Fire away, they're the wrong numbers. The serial number would tell you were the weapon went maybe, but the NSN and part number which is what gets people all hot and bothered is just the tracking number for ANY TOW missile of that model. Same number would be on the same type of missile in the USMC, Lebanon, Italy, my basement. The corresponding screenshot showing its a US military missile is just that, the reference page for what a "NSN 12345whateve" is in the National Stock Number system, not, again showing that particular missile was anything but made in America and given to someone. We've got enough RPG-29s, RPG-7s, and even various ATGMs from various sources. It'd be like Afghanistan if we were supplying them, we only started sending Stingers because SA-7s weren't doing the job. There's no reason to ship US military TOWs to Syria if we were to send military aid, and it's readily apparent when we DID send military aid to the Kurds it was largely from these stocks of second hand stolen/borrowed/seized from other sources stocks. It'd be dumb. Like giving BUKs out to untrained operators dumb.

Re: RPG-29s Gotcha. They were part of the middle eastern terrain, didn't know they didn't make it in the motherland Re: NLOS It still isn't a mortar. There's a practical crossover point where something not line of sight is too close to engage but sill lacks LOS to shoot in the first place.