Tenses

"Tearing it down" is what Russia and other autocracies active in "Western" Information space is advocating. This would destroy us all and they could feed on the chaos however they would see fit. Unfortunately USA is not alone with this issue, this is general democracies flaw. We either change the democracy itself and the executive law that follows after it or we will join autocracies, possibly the hard way. The "bad guys" knows very good that the system is flawed at the moment and they exactly know how to use it.

In the long run I suspect that drone dominated battlefield will transform both tanks and artillery in a very drastic way. Drones can do job of both of these systems but are not as good as them in any of these. What drones can do: - Deliver precision guided munition of various sizes to the same range as artillery or even greater - Have good time to deliver(if planned upfront - loitering munitions) - Cover the square artillery mission if needed. Can be done both by having preprogrammed drones, but even better, by equipping drones with weapons containing dumb submunitions. This mission will only be viable in situation, when for some reason you can't do precision targeting by drones. The only scenario I can think of is when enemy finds a way to disguise itself from the drones so they will have to shoot blindly. - Drones are not limited in any way in size so the swarm can achieve even bigger barrage weight than artillery battery. We are long way from FPVs with better load than 155, but it is perfectly doable. On the other hand, enlarging artillery shell in any way is a World of Hurt. What drones can't do: - Have better time to deliver(if not planned upfront). When you don't have drones already in the air, artillery will always be faster. In theory one could create a FPV with jet engine enabling it to reach the same or even better time to deliver than tube artillery but this is just not economically/logistically feasible anymore. Such drone would have to go supersonic very fast to reach target before artillery shell so this kind of weapons will be rather restricted to much longer ranges(strategic fires, something like currently developed hypersonic munitions). To be honest there is not much, which drones can't do in comparison to artillery, not to mention the logistics chain and artillery maintenance costs. For me the obious solution is to merge tanks and artillery into one piece of equipment. Tanks will have to move further away from the frontline and start basing on non line of sight fires to complete missions. Direct fire support will become rarity. On the other hand, tube artillery might become more capable for surviving any unexpected engagements, like...direct line of sight one. Cutting logistics to save money is an obvious added benefit and might keep heavy Armored Fire Support Vehicle afloat.

Agreed, counter drone, which is reliable, cheap AND scalable would be a game changer. With that and Russian ISR removed, Ukraine could go back to late spring 2023 and smash Russians into the ground as soon as artillery ammo arrives. But currently I don't see that happening and as @LongLeftFlank mentioned Ukrainians, especially prepared and motivated, is not a resource which is infinite. I feel that something needs to change very fast to prevent further escalation of negative trend in force multiplier to give Ukraine a breath by properly training, equipping and rotating infantry. Massive counter drone is a holy grail, but what can be done in the meantime? Holy grails usually take some time to find, you know...

Taking a few steps back and looking at overall situation, what exactly do you think can really change the tide of this war? Beacuse even with these recent massive mechanized losses the pressure is pretty much the same and we know that when BMPs, BMDs and tanks will not be available, Ruzzians will just go on foot. We currently wait for(and Ukrainians die in the meantime): - ammunition to artillery/more artillery: This will provide support, which is badly needed, especially in defence, might actually stop most of the attacks but not for long due to penetration of Russian ISR up to and beyond artillery positions. - F16s : Just as above and might also have some impact on air defence. I don't see much usage in offence deep behind the frontline, definitly can provide good very close to the frontline air support. If will be properly used, with superior Ukraine ISR, can be hard to deal by Russian anti-air. The minus is that every mistake will be extremely costly and irreplacable(mainly the pilots, planes to the lesser degree). - air defence, anti tank weaponry replacements : this should assure keeping the quality of both of these on current, in my opinion, pretty high level Apart from these, which should come from the "West" exclusively we have the drone war, but is it possible to achieve quality+quantity=pressure of drone swarms to actually push back? I see that as currently the only option to do that but I am not sure, if gaining that high pressure is actually possible. It was analyzed here many times that using classical means for counteroffensive is generally death sentence. And if pushing back is not possible what are we looking at here? Either there is a plan to turn the tide or not, I would not count on Russia running out of something, even if it looks like it. It went for the ammo to North Korea, it went for drones to Iran, it produces a lot by itself, if real necessity arises I don't belive it won't get support from China in a meaningful way. And I think it is clear to everyone that China has no bottom, the current "Games of Hegemony" is exactly because of that. So, do we have a clear target here or just "wait and see"?

Remember that this is Russia. When 1000km range anti air drones will appear, we can be sure to see all russian military aircraft parasiting civilian airlines in no time. The question is actually, if Ukraine should care.

I fear that currently any new artillery capabilities like new howitzers or finally getting enough ammo for them, will not be anywhere close to the impact it made last year. As currently Russia has ISR capabilities allowing it to target the artillery effectively, it won't be able to do counter battery and support missions as good as it could in the past. The biggest indicators for this issue is HIMARS and Patriot being both hit recently. This would not be possible last year. From my perspective the priority has changed and now the wonder weapon is C-UAS capabilities on regional scale. If Ukraine will be able to successfully remove the enemy UAS, it will unlock all the other weapons to be effective enough to provide force multipler on a scale allowing for actual winning the war. All of the stuff, which is below air force is now locked by overwhelming ISR+drone/ballistics/whatever precision weapon you have. As winning by air force superiority is not an option, enemy drones needs to be beaten. Currently we have something like mutual destruction in regard to drone saturation and its effects on anything on the ground. With longer ranges, this drone dead zone extends far behind the frontline. Reliable, cheap, scalable and currently non-existent C-UAS technology needs to be implemented. Spending time and money on anything EW based is also waste of resources until it literally fries the insides of the drone. Looking at current developments, autonomous seems to be casual at the end of current year so lack of manual control due to EW will not be an issue. When drones will be done, artillery and all the other fancy stuff will shine again. Ukraine can't afford to wage war on equal terms in regard of technology so there is no option to just produce more drones than Russia to overwhelm it. It needs to actually fight the enemy drones to achieve its own drone superiority and all the other forces just after that.

My friend had a master thesis on sound indentification of different types of vehicles and it was more than 10 years ago. You don't need AI for that, but it will certainly help, especially to quickly populate database with new types of targets. Generally systems like that is a great example of how much you can achieve with almost no material investment. If algorithms are there, you can cover entire country with such systems and get cheap and precise alternative of radar coverage. Every country should have something like that. In time additional network of thermal imagers and seismic sensors should also accompany the radar, which is not always available and is not easily replaced. For current system I would put as a priority different information transport medium as cell network is not reliable. Optical infrastructure is a life saver in war as it is the fastest and immune to all types of interferences. Next step is to put automatic HMGs on critical locations and you can start to sleep better at least in regard to danger presented by Shahed class drones. For something bigger(and faster - recent "Zircon") you need big stuff but it is even more important to achieve faster response times. I hope that at the end of this war Ukraine will have nearly impenetrable air defenses(for a sane size of attack) thanks to your own developments and innovations.

Don't want to go farther into OT but at least for cargo we should have long ago switched to non-rocket systems. Rockets are good for humans, who are not feeling very well with 100G accelerations on their heads, but for any cargo like satellites, space station components, etc. we should instead fire them into space using electromagnetic catapults. Much cheaper, environmentally friendly and you can do launches all day long. There are some startups for that at the moment but when matured it could instantly replace anything what was lost in space due to warfare or natural reasons.

We need MALE class drones with laser dome zapping 10 small drones at a time at horizontal distance of 20km. THAT firepower, time to deliver and cost effectiveness would put as back at the point, where tanks(unmanned) and other stuff is back as a primary force projection in land warfare. As we are nowhere near this kind of technology we will have to make something up as a stopgap to avoid ugly brawl as we see now.

What I mean by saying that grain exports are not contributing to the war effort is that it provides money. From quick search it seems that agricultural exports peaked in its value in 2021 by adding 27.8 B$ to GDP(so it is not cash, just taxable economic value). Unfortunately money alone is not enough to pop out warplanes, tanks, drones etc. Of course having smaller deficit is nice and will put less strain on western countries, which at the moment effectively keep Ukraine afloat thanks to covering its deficits, but it does not change the situation of war effort by any means. If there would be no grain export, West would have to pay higher bill for keeping Ukraine up, but lets face that, money is of least concern, especially for countries like Germany, which are more comfortable with paying the bills than military support(not saying that they not help, just prefer to base support on money for various reasons). Overall the cost of covering Ukraine deficit is not a big deal for western joint effort. Much bigger problem would be, if entire north Africa started to starve. This was Ruzzians main target to create further disruption in the western countries by destabilizing masses of hungry Africans. They are actively supporting illegal African immigrants long before the war started so it would fit perfectly in this strategy. Any Ukrainian income, which would be hurt during the process was secondary target. In general, keeping the grain exports up is important for various of reasons like mentioned World food security issue, better economy kickstart after the war, etc. but won't help directly in any meaningful way in fighting Ruzzians. When Ukraine kicks out the last Ruzzian out of its borders, we can surely expect very powerful rebuild program, which should put the country back on its tracks despite any previous headwinds.

Exactly. The only issue I have with hating everyone is when I need to decide whom to help first. I won't comment on your insults and I don't really mind them. For me, your recent posts could be safely flagged as russian propaganda. You insist on suggesting that there are any problems with military and humanitarian support going through the border. Just as you suggest that grain export is in any significant way helping Ukraine. These exports are having close to zero importance for the war. All the fuss about it is due to fact that this grain feeds no small part of the World, so everyone are trying to help with that to avoid another humanitarian crisis.

Ok, I really have read enough of this. You are having serious problems with proper assessment of what polish society is and what is not. First of all I don’t like farmers, just as Beleg85 said, they are not likable in overall polish society. I guess that it might be something with millions of donations from EU, retirement system where they effectively have it granted for free and a couple of other things. When farmers across EU started their protests by blocking centers of big cities with farming equipment worth in excess of 1 million euros each, it also was not very understandable by people in traffic jams worrying that they will be late to their, oh so well, paid job. But overall this is actually nothing compared to how „likable” are agro-oligarchs in Ukraine. You are now standing in their defense and I would love to see how much of the money they earn is supporting the war. They basically try to abuse unfair competition on EU markets in order to make money, but looking at the financial statements, I don’t see anything like „war tax” in defense of their country, soil that have given them free money, could you please explain me this? How does that compare to billions in direct financial and material support from western countries? After 2014, when immigration to Poland from Ukraine has increased tenfold, the overall sentiment for Ukrainian people was not perfect in Poland during the start of the war in 2022. Especially among low paid workers, additional competition on job market with low wage expectations were seen as danger. Situation was similar to our US friends, who can elaborate more on overall sentiment toward Mexicans and South American people. Invasion started on 24th of February, my wife spent entire weekend starting 26th on the border, serving hot meals and distributing blankets to the wave of people in need. Week later we went for the local train station, looked around and took home a mother with a child, who have not even spoken a word in Polish/English. She stayed with us for half a year, when she found suitable job and shelter. My then-boss took a family of 8 and even took care of one girl, who was in the middle of chemotherapy, so she could finish it in Poland without problems. This is just a small part of what happened at that time, no one asked questions, no one was whining, because these were people in dire need. Do you think I liked to have a stranger mother with spoiled child in my home? I didn’t, but this is not the point in helping other people to like that. It is to do that effectively and provide whatever is needed despite your feelings or likening. If you will ever work with people like that, you will learn that this is no simple, nor nice task. Now you are telling me that polish people have showed that they don’t give a **** about Ukraine because they don’t want to give billions of Euro to your corrupted oligarchs, who are most likely closely connected with Russia. Not to mention some of their perfidious actions, which are gaining better coverage in Poland, which directly hit polish stock holders(so effectively all polish people due to retirement system). You must understand that Ukraine has a long way to go before it will be normal country and I am not even saying about the war. Believe me, Poland was on the same track 35 years ago, but it serves as an example that even if things are not perfect, it is doable. At the moment Ukraine is corrupted as were all post Soviet countries, but it is not that important as long as the war goes. This WILL be important, when the war finally ends to continue normal cooperation with the western countries and their business. Hopefully Ukraine will join EU, but it has so much work to do. And just as a reminder, borders were open to Ukrainian grain, which is not up to EU standards due to blocked export channel through the Black Sea. Now, thanks to marvelous work of Ukrainian drone fleet, this is not an issue anymore, so what exactly are we talking about? No military/humanitarian or other aid was ever blocked, save for some mistakes, nor will be. This is all about bunch of bastards, who want to profit from the blood of your countryman.

You also need to count in the shells, which are detonated before firing. Ukraine is very helpful with that to their Russian comrades. Saves a lot of effort with bringing shells to the frontline, when you can blow them en masse while stockpiled.

Just to cheer you up, USA are not alone. In Europe every single country has pretty much the same problem on a different scale. Above film about mathematics basics is just a presentation of the tip of the iceberg. This is a big, flashing red alarm to start treating weaponization of information seriously. Really, freedom of speech is NOT freedom of lies and manipulation. Either we act and demand scientific process of proving "facts" or we will drown in b*******.

As all the new toys are described by "Power", so our "P" you don't really have to consider, if they have capacitors( which is rather obvious) or not. High energy devices, which work in bursts always have capacitors(like for example roentgen lamps). With these lasers it is even better as usually when we talk about laser, it is described by effective Power. Unlike the usual way this is already describing how powerful is the laser beam itself, not how much juice is the device taking. So you don't get info on how much HP your new car have as for example 300HP might look a lot but only considering that you don't drive 20t IFV. You already have info on how fast it accelerates, omitting the useless stuff. In general I would not be too focused on how lasers warm the target as you don't know how highly focused they are and this is highly dependent on distance and weather. I would assume that in 300kW range you will get rapid ablation of the surface, whatever it is built from. For comparison you can get the famous 1MW airbone laser, which was supposed to destroy ICBMs in their boost phase from 500km range. From tests it was considered a success but after spending billions on that to the shock and awe of the constructors, they started to wonder how to get a boening in 500km range of launching ICBM. No comment on this part.

I don't think that restraining yourself from using some of the tech and depending on solo drone swarm, be it bomber or fighter types is a wise thing. Lasers will still be revolutionary due to some of it's capabilities. It is always easier to track the target than actually hit it and with lasers this is actually the same thing. If the laser won't be able to track the drone, then I don't see how it can be hit by your "fighter drone", without major technological superiority. Of course it seems not feasible to deploy laser wall along the entire front and do it artillery/bomb/drone proof but still these systems(fighter drones and lasers) are not competing with each other, they are supporting and providing overall much better and robust solution. Also in terms of costs be mindful that every successful employment of laser defense, when it shoots down multiple targets is bringing the cost per target down pretty fast. Deployment might be expensive but usage is dirty cheap.

I don't know, if anyone is interested but 10-year treasury yields are skyrocketing in US. This is already a serious crisis, nothing good will come from indebted country having so high price to borrow more money. Markets(global) are also in a World of hurt, if this trend continues or even stabilises on this level(4.84% at the moment). I would say that geopolitics are starting to show up on the bill. True battle for $ hegemony is about to start.

Ok, I will add another few cents to the "Tank wars" as this seems pretty hot. First the problem with "Infantry is cheap and easy to replace" problem. This is extreme oversimplification. From military perspective you can say that this is just a few weeks of training and basic gear but there is a problem with that. Young soldiers in their 20s will be having on average about 40 more years to provide value to the society(untill retired). This is a LOT of value in all western democracies. Nations, which don't care about their people like Russia might have a different bill for that, when they send prisoners or alkoholics to the front but for normal countries, price of a young man is much higher. I would not be suprised, if person with higher education on average provided enough value to build an MBT in their lifetime. One can keep things running and generally provide absolute minimum but the other might wirite a few lines of code for Google or whatever, which will bring hundreds of millions. This is economical perspective of course as generally I think this is clear for everyone that life is just priceless. Period. No one should risk anybodys life, if this is not absolutely necessary and there are no other options. Infantry will always be there but with technology it is having less and less on their shoulders, which is a good thing. Next thing is that tank is going to be obsolete like battleships or heavy cavalry. What needs to be understood is that battleships were replaced by carriers because they provided the same capabilities - long range sea based firepower. Carriers won because they do that a lot better, having much longer range, precision and a lot more firepower than even the mightiest of battleships. The only thing they lacked was the armour but it was actually obsolete with new longer range weapons(CAG). And heavy cavalry example is a bit funny as tanks actually replaced it. They did that because they provided the same capability in a better way. During history armour or defense in general was overmached repeatidly many times until a new solution appeared. We are in this situation right now and this is actually second time for tanks in their history, when this happens(I am looking at you Leo 1). This doesn't mean that we will leave our tanks, AFVs and all the stuff and go on foot because that is "cheap" and "logistics friendly". We will upgrade, turn to UGV, APS, Battlemechs, lasers, plasma cannons. Freaking force fields, I don't know. But certainly no infantry or drone swarms will provide the same capability as tank or whatever it might be called in the future. Drones are actually precision guided munitions and the only vehicles, which might feel threatend by it to be replaced is classical artillery, because(suprise) they provide the same capability. We can see by the newly announced plans for M1E3, what will be next direction. Lighter vehicle, with all new tech integrated by default like APS and remote controlled weapons. Might be optionally manned but this was not actually stated. This confirms that we are not seeing the end of tank, we are seeing that currently passive armour is overmatched by different threaths and we are building new Leo 1 for new battlefield. Will this be immune to drone swarms and PGMs? Of course not. Will this be more survivable and in effect, provide direct fire support as an apex predator in 2km range? Yes it will.

I think that this is a little too fast to judge(tank death). We have seen very fast progress of anti-tank weaponry such as FPVs in this war(just think of what were the capabilities and usage cases of drones at the beginning of this war and what are 1.5 year later), but not much was done in regard to defense. In my personal view, after this war no country from the "first world" would go to war unprepared for such threat. There are multiple responses to FPVs, PGMs and ATGMs alike as all of them base on two main characteristics to be effective: - they fly faster/slower and have more/less degree of manuveribility. - they carry exposives as a means to kill things These two properties make these weapons vulnerable and easy to kill by anything that CAN hit them, so the only problem is to deploy defensive weaponry, which actually can. My personal bet here are readily available ultra-short range AA by strapping together machine gun and visual/radar targeting. You can make it en masse and at least the usage is cheap enough to rip through any number of attacking drones. At least from economical perspective. Also personal rifles will HAVE to be able to shoot down small drone up to 500m or more without major issues. Rifles will slowly drift from offensive weapon to something like last resort defense. Ballistic computers should also be already able to provide something like that. For tanks and other vehicles we will se just evolution of APS + ultra-short AA as above. Dedicated AA vehicles will also provide some area cover just like normal air defense today. What I would NOT invest in is electronical warfare. We already see some attempts to make these weapons autonomus and this will be standard, if this war will take another 2 years or so, making electronic warfare against drones/PGMs pretty much useless. Welcome to Skynet World.

This. If Russia will be pushed out of the Ukraine pre-2014 borders, they will act just like on casual day, when some village had to be abandoned. There will be absolutely no change of mind or second thoughts. Wonderland will exist until serious internal collapse will happen. Small ones, like recent coup, are just noise in general flow of things.

There were a number of situations, where the wording pointed to some kind of breakthrough but in fact it was just a temporary gain. For Robotyne we can read a month back that it was reached and trenches were cleared but still yesterday another photo from the norther outskirts of it, showing that as some new gain. Generally it is increasingly hard to not only push forward but also to maintain captured positions so everything is going back and forth with artillery doing most of the work, when new enemy positions are identified during subsequent probes. There is also no indication that russians are getting weaker and I worry that this kind of grind will last up to the sea of Azov itself, which would take good part of next year to reach, if no major breakthrough will happen. From the good side it looks like efficiency of the probes have increased and UAF can utilize smaller forces to achieve enemy detection and following destruction with artillery. Counter battery is also working like a charm for longer than a month now. Artillery clash is THE most important aspect in this war and it has clearly turned in Ukraine favor for good. Slowly starting Western arms production machine is also promising as it is very slow to start but can grow very large and dwarf anything, what ruzzians can produce/obtain.

I think this is general feeling about current situation that Ukraine "will not make it". The upcoming weekend peace talks are also hapenning for a reason. I have already seen some high level figures talks about Ukraine joining NATO without lost territories so this is definitly on the table. Personally I think this would be Russia victory, which is unacceptable.

Were AIM-7 supplied before? I haven't noticed that in previous packages.

The only way to effectively deal with helicopter threat are AMRAAMs on western supplied fighters. NATO strategy to give up ground based AA and instead go for full air dominance is in fact clearly shown as a good one in this conflict. There is no other reliable way to shoot down enemy air assets other than with your own airpower. At least this was a case for last 100 years of air warfare history. Two major problems with any other approach is that you cannot catch up enemy plane with anything other than your own(interception) and that enemy air is always having energy adventage over ground based assets(range). Ground based AA should be considered as a last resort, which is sometimes enough like in a previous chapters of this war, when Ukraine was on defence and enemy air had to conduct dangerous missions inside AD sphere due to identification problems. As now UA is on the attack, identification is easy and enemy is right at the frontline so no danger present even for relatively easy to target(slow) helicopters.

What impact ATACMS will actually make currently? It just seems way too late to fix any major problems Ukraine is facing. Recently it seems that the counter-battery work is enjoing the harvest season so problem nr 1 in artillery is now only a mere shadow from a year back when HIMARS first appeared. The next issue on the list are helicopters in my book. These are mobile enough to provide support wherever a mechanized push is ongoing and coupled with minefields it is extremely painful. ATACMS will not change anything in regard to this issue and even more so with fixed wing threat, which is also deadly although not that much as gunships. What is now needed is mobile, long range air defense(F-15/16 anyone?). This will give enough time to slowly rip through the minefields with only major threat left being LOS based ATGMS and armor, which can be handled much better by mechanized units, even without fancy CMBS stuff. Apart from targeting strategic infrastructure with it, I don't see any major change with ATACMS(definitly not like HIMARS was last year).