kluge

There are some speculations/ suggestions that the 4 aircraft that were shot down were in fact one group on a strike mission. Su-34 was carrying the gliding bombs destined for Chernihiv, Su-35 was providing fighter escort and choppers EW support. Makes sense in my opinion, similar strikes were being reported since some time. RU flying these missions repeatedly would be asking for an ambush to happen - add some new capability on UA side (either new SAMs or A2A missiles) and you have a recipe for disaster.

Something I've wondered about a bit is what those berm-enclosed spaces are for in the Ukrainian farm fields, like in the the picture that I left in the quote.  There was one near the battle of of the T, too.   They don't look like they're used as a divider between fields - the tree strips seem to serve that function. They look a bit like they could be seasonal reservoirs, but they don't have obvious inlets and outlets, or indications that they have variable water levels.  
They do break up lines of sight and make somewhat natural defensive positions in the open spaces.  
So does anybody know what they are/what they're called?

Steve is on the east coast, not the west, so he is indeed posting after 2am. I've never before met anyone who has a worse sleep schedule than me
 😴

IMO, a good chunk of the delay can be chalked up to the fact that the incident occurred in the dead of night. Propaganda is best delivered when audiences are awake. The several hour delay between the incident and the start of major news broadcasts would have given officials extra time to prepare a semblance of a coherent message.

If you look at Putin's history, his false flags have tended to be well thought out (as you note above, from his perspective) and have a definite and defined aim. When 2014 happened, Russia rolled out an entire campaign of soup to nuts propaganda. Before this phase of the war began, Russia had a slew of false flag operations and had done a ton of media work that allowed a smooth propaganda roll out supporting the effort. But those were big ongoing events.
The infamous apartment bombings are a better analogy and were also clearly presaged and followed by defined propaganda efforts. And more to the point, the accomplished goal was to create insecurity and then follow it up with a security clampdown that showcased Putin's ability to stabilize the country and justify his regime's right to rule. 
What do we have in this situation? Two drone attacks that were not publicized. The public found out because a local Moscow Telegram channel posted the video and then it fitfully came out followed by a series of ever morphing Kremlin statements and a frantic order banning all drones in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. There was no preparatory build up and by tonight it looks like Peskov is going to blame it on an alliance between Satan and Hunter Biden. Finally, there's no actual thing Russia can reasonably do to respond. Escalating to NBC has all of the drawbacks it previously possessed while escalating in conventional terms is already going full bore. 
Unless and until we see evidence of actual planning, Occam leans strongly towards not the Kremlin.

Hearing some pretty stiff critique of ISW for this update from Nathan Rupar publicly and privately from some pretty solid analysts.
ISW is making a determination based from what I'm hearing essentially on a hunch without any analysis or evidence to back it up. The May Day parade claim is a particularly strange take. Russia has already shown that it can put on big stadium events during the war. The Kremlin has a large, well funded and savvy events/propaganda team. If it lacked enough modern equipment for a normal May Day parade there's nothing stopping them from giving it a Great Patriotic War theme and rolling out whatever's floating around from 1945. Russia is a big state with plenty of internal security forces to parade for an hour or two. It wouldn't be in the top 50 of May Day parades but if they wanted a reasonably staffed/equipped parade it is doable.  
What can it not do? Apparently security. And the compact Putin made with Russians was that it was a "special military operation" that wouldn't seriously affect the lives of core empire people. What does it say to them that a May Day parade *in Moscow* is maybe too dangerous to hold? It would have been far easier to simply say "the boys are at the front and we are going to hold a day of quiet contemplation and church attendance instead". The idea that a big explosion at the Kremlin was the solution to that problem is preposterous. 

Are we there yet?
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What about now?
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Are we killing people yet?
Now?
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Why aren't we killing people yet?
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Can I have some more tank porn?
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Where is my world class analysis and assessment grounded in years of practical experience and theoretical study?
Are we there yet?
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Why aren't we there yet?
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More videos of dead people plz?
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So just so we are clear here. A drone attack that hurt no one but Putin's ego during a time of war that may or may not have even been launched by Ukraine, is a horrible terrorist attack . However, Russia killing 20+ Ukrainian civilians near Kherson today is just business as usual according to Russia.
This is why I'm for sending Ukraine F-16s and ATACMS.

As a journalist of my acquaintance put it "What are the going to do? Invade Ukraine?".

On your second to last point, it's pretty good information strategy...especially if deniable. People will...as we are doing...speculate endlessly on who/what/why in the absence of confirmation. Taken as a given that dictatorships under stress simply cannot afford to look weak, few will believe Putin did it to himself. So, the discussion will be of internal or external enemies, what it says about Moscow's vulnerabilities, Russia's military weakness, oligarch or military maneuvering, etc. In other words, a perfect way to accelerate Russian society's predilection for conspiracy and fear mongering.
So...no benefits for Putin but some very solid benefits for Ukraine and Zelensky...if he coolly denies it. 
PS: if we wanted confirmation that it *wasn't* a false flag, the fact that the Kremlin tried to keep it under wraps and had no orchestrated announcements or measures is pretty definitive. The Russian's don't take a dump, et cetera and so forth.

First example of Russian thinking outide the box during this war.

Don't believe the hype.
And there is no universe in which China, India, etc take what is essentially an embarrassing nuisance attack as a legitimate excuse to drop a nuke.
 

Mark Herman (who designed Gulf Strike) is designing a commercial board wargame on the first months of the 2022 invasion. Article here  >  First draft of history  and it shows the draft game map and some of the game materials. The article doesn't say who the piblisher will be, but the game is due out early next year.
The thread on Board Game Geek has a useful link to some of the other professional games being played or designed. The thread is here > Boardgame geek: modeling ongoing conflict
 

Except that if it IS emitting a signal it will also be dead in no time. You've just invented red-force-tracking, except the beneficiary is the enemy, not us.

Actually technology is getting to a point where a 2 man tank will be perfectly effective. The problem with 2-man tanks in WW2 was that the commander was overworked. He had to command the tank, spot targets, aim and fire the gun, and load the gun. One man was trying to be commander, loader, and gunner. Technology has eliminated most of that workload. Obviously the job of the loader could be automated since the 60s. But automatic target tracking is just about to a point where the job of the gunner can be automated as well. As I've said before, a human still needs to be in the loop because AI is still too stupid to be trusted with target identification and selection. But it can make all the targeting calculations and fire on a target that has been designated by a human.
Part of the job of the commander is already to look for new targets while the gunner is busy engaging the last target. And with modern hunter-killer systems the commander is already expected to slew the turret towards the next target for the gunner to engage, while he then goes back to scanning for new targets. With a modern 2-man tank concept a commander would just be modifying his old job description, so that instead of slewing the turret when he spotted a target, he would mark it for the FCS, which would then automatically engage and destroy it (human makes the targeting decisions, computer makes and executes the targeting calculations). With both the loader and gunner roles being automated, the commander of a modern 2-man tank would be no more overworked than the commander of a WW2 5-man tank.
The only downsides to this approach is that you have one less pair of eyes looking for targets, and you have one less pair of hands to assist in maintenance. The maintenance workload could probably be solved with some organizational changes, since there is no reason you couldn't have additional maintenance personnel in a unit that aren't necessarily tank crew (although perhaps they could be reserve tank crew, in case of casualties, sickness, leave, etc...).

The gunner can only not be in the tank if you are 6-sigma certain that nothing is going to interfere with their telepresence. Which is difficult when the enemy knows that all they need to do to render a critical weapon system (whether that's a swarm of UGVs or a single Citadel Tank) inoperative is to disrupt the comms. The more remote operation stuff there is, the more treasure will be spent on busting the comms links and the more treasure will have to be spent on hardening those links.
Also, if the gunner isn't in the tank, the rest of the crew aren't either, and field maintenance and repairs that the crew do "traditionally" become a new problem that will need solving.

Fair enough. Flying to and hitting the target is well within what modern technology can do. So kamikaze drones probably don't need a "pilot" anymore. I was thinking more in terms of target selection and identification. And in that respect we are still a long way from being able to take the human out of the loop. I think we are going to see three stages of autonomous weapons.
1. The weapon is smart enough to find its own way to the target, but the target still has to be identified and selected by a human. This is where we are today.
2. The weapon is smart enough to identify and select its own targets, but with a high enough error rate that a human needs to be in the loop to explicitly approve the target before the weapon can be allowed to kill it. I think we'll get here over the next decade.
3. The weapon is smart enough to be trusted as a fully autonomous system. We have a ways to go to get here.

The last piece of the puzzle that is defiantly not ready yet is identifying enemy vs friendlies.
Steve is right if you setup an autonomous drone in an area you know there are no friendlies all is good. If there is a chance the guys running for cover into the bunker (to refer back to the footage that started this) then you do not want an AI drone choosing to target or not.

I emphasize again, while I do think warfare is headed in that direction, it is still a long way away. As impressive as chat GPT looks from the outside, AI just isn't there yet.
Fully autonomous weapon systems are next decade's tech (at the earliest), not this decade's.

I'm going to wear my optimist hat again today.
I think we have identified C4ISR as one of the most important things in this war. We've seen that the UA has what could really be viewed as C4ISR supremacy. Corrosive warfare will most likely be what is used in the initial phase to create an exploitable weakness or even to clear the breach. We've discussed a lot about the fact that the lines are held by too few troops. If the RA does have available reserves the UA most likely knows what they are and where they are at. With the low headcount defending the very long front it isn't like there are many areas that have a defense in depth. So once the crust is broken there shouldn't be much to stand in the way. If the RA is operating with a severe deficit of C4ISR like we think then the advantage should be to the UA. If the RA doesn't know where the UA is it makes it a lot harder for them to contain or even move against a breakthrough.
A good case to show this is the Great Raid of 2014. A UA force was able to travel 470km behind the lines, complete their mission and get back out over a course of 22 days. So in 22 days the RA was unable to find, fix, and destroy a raiding force of a couple battalions. Not some 4 man Force Recon team, a couple battalions. This sort of situation gives me lots of hope, especially in the south.
If the UA does have 9 or so newly staffed, equipped, and trained brigades on a leash and can get them through a breach, will the RA be able to deal with that? The corrosive type slow warfare all along the lines gives the RA a situation they can somewhat handle as it is really slow. How will they handle fast? I'm betting it will look a lot more like Kharkiv than Kherson.
So there you have my sunshine and rainbows for the day.  

At the ranges involved in encircling something like Bakhmut, or Kherson, given UKR levels of C4ISR, GMLRS equivalents in sufficient numbers ought to be able to substitute for TacAir on eiher offense or defense, when deciding whether kettles might form.
Russia doesn't have the precision info they need, and UKR don't have enough rocket artillery. But even if they did (or had TacAir able to freely sprinkle their goodies over the battlefield, this:
wouldn't go away in a hurry.

What is weird about this one is that the UA did not need to construct the "most extensive systems of military defensive works seen anywhere in the world in many decades" and they held off multiple assaults that went on for months all along the line.  

The airpower conundrum.  So here is the thing with AirPower - it is only about a century old as concept and we do not know if it has been a transitory phase in the evolution of warfare.  Everyone assumes that it must be a thing because we can "do air" now, and this part is correct.  However, "how we do air" is really in its infancy when compared to maritime and land military domains (and they have been bouncing around too), and is by no means decided.
So the question as to Ukraine is a bit chicken and egg.  Is this what they have to live with, or is this just how things are now?  The issue is military economics.  Airpower is really expensive right now and built around projecting airpower mass.  Big planes with big payloads in big waves.  One side has it and takes it away from an opponent - Bob'd your uncle and the war is over in a bibby, accept for all that nasty uncon stuff which really does not count - unless we are talking places like Algeria, Palestine, Lebanon Vietnam, Afghanistan (both times) and maybe Iraq - but we are not talking about them.  In a real war airpower is definitive and deterministic to an outcome.
Ok, sure...right up the point it no longer works.  Now why is it not working?  We the problem looks to be similar to the problems of other military mass - a concentration dilemma.  Technology has created small little nasty systems that can be carried around that have suddenly gained ridiculous range and lethality.  They are also really hard to suppress and toxic to massed concentrations.  "Oh but we have all the SEAD".  Well true but even our SEAD cannot solve for things like MANPADs and IADS, especially when they are hooked into a C4ISR architecture that can see everything.  The cost gets too high very quickly.
"Well we won't go there"...whoops, that is never the right answer.  If we can't go "there" someone else will. So when we go there we will have to accept less than total air dominance, in fact we might have to live with air denial above certain altitudes.
And then there is the below 2000 feet problem.  It is the freakin Wild West for air power right now and no one is controlling it in any meaningful way.  We get some denial but those UAS are so cheap that they can just keep lobbing them at the problem indefinitely.  So we are looking at denial risks above 2000 feet and not being able to control below 2000 feet...none of this is good news that magic western might is going to wave away.  Someone is very shortly going to figure out how to mount a Starstreak on a modest UAS and then we have a whole new set of problems.  And then there is ersatz airpower in the form of long range strike.  No one has the technology for whatever version of Chinese HIMARs looks like ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHL-03 that took seconds).
Bottom line is that I, personally, do not think that the air denial and control problems we are seeing in Ukraine are specific to this conflict.  The technology is moving too fast.  We are likely going to have to accept that the airpower picture is going to be compromised and that we are vulnerable to whatever it is becoming and its cousins in long range strike.  We do not have a magic suite of capability that can erase what we are basically arming the Ukrainian's to do against the Russians.  I do no think the western assumption of air superiority, or space superiority, or EW/Cyber superiority or good old fashion land power mass and manoeuvre superiority are currently safe regardless of what conflicts we see them in. 

I think the problem with this sort of point of view is that it still assumes that annihilation through manoeuvre was possible. And even if it was, would it have been worth the costs at that point in the war? 
Russia got itself out of Kherson; however, 1) we do not know the full scope of attritional losses over time - how much critical equipment did they leave behind? and 2) how do those stack up with Ukrainian gains compared to their loses?  This point of view mirrors more than a few western pundits as “lost opportunity = loss”, but skips over the cost-benefit equation on retaking a regional capital essentially unopposed.  I strongly suspect that the UA looking to a longer game was not interested in bagging whatever was left of the RA at Kherson because the cost was too high for the gains.  Worst scenario for Kherson was a large urban battle that would still be raging.  If Ukraine had boxed the RA up into that city that is what likely would have happened.  Instead Ukraine left the back door open so the RA would simply leave - it was less about killing Russians there and more about liberating Ukrainians.
We keep making the error of looking for a western style victory in this thing.  I have seen more bold offensive arrows, both red and blue, being drawn all over the place.  What we have seen though is bold arrows of red collapse, with a blue follow up.  This is a war of Russian collapses and contractions, some better controlled than others.  This is what victory looks like, yet we keep demanding a Gulf War metric as an indicator of success, which does not track in this environment.  The losses are over time, erosion, not fast forced crushing.  It is the environment that drives this - death of surprise, mass dilemmas, long range and precision.   We are talking about a war where both sides have had to relegate their armor to indirect fire roles - something is happening in a fundamental way.
So what?  Well this does not mean that the 30k prisoner haul is impossible in this war, or the bold strokes we all want to see.  However, I strongly suspect that they are going to be a finishing stroke/final note at the end as a result of corrosive warfare, not the cause of the end itself.  The core warfare principle we in the west adhere to will become a punctuation mark, not the primary means of delivery of victory.  We should not hold Ukraine to a standard of success that I am not sure even exists anymore in this sort of operating environment.  This war is still about killing Russians, but it is all over the place, all the time, not in a single concentrated area.  Why, because concentration kills in this environment unless you have already eroded an opponent into collapse - be it slow or fast.
In the end Kherson along with Kharkiv were major corrosive warfare victories.  At Kherson the UA with nearly 1:1 force ratio pushed the RA across a major river because they made their position untenable.  They retook a provincial capital of 300k taking very few losses which was a major strategic blow to Russia - no one could call this war for Russia after Kharkiv and Kherson (or at least no one credible).  We should not apply our own western experience to this war because we have not fought one like this since Korea, and the rules of the game have shifted dramatically since then.
I for one am surprised that Kherson did not turn into a protracted bloodbath, there was a lost RA opportunity that speaks to an idea that perhaps Russian Will is not made of steel.  Now if Russia is finally so badly beat up that the old rules of warfare apply - a la Iraqi Army - then yippee!  But that 1) does not validate our western doctrines as “right all along” because that final stroke took a year of broad scope high speed attrition pruning ops and 2) will be a signpost, not a decisive point.  The result of months of shaping and eroding that has already occurred over the winter. 

Russia already did this from 2014-2022 and the sky did not fall.  They are very likely to be complete a@@holes no matter how this thing goes.  What I disagree with is the idea that Russia is somehow going to be willing to sustain complete Western isolation and grinding losses for the next century.  There is a lot of "Forever Russian Bear" myths floating around and this just feeds into them and gives Russia far too much credit and stamina.  It also runs paradoxical to other narratives of "backward Russians who wont do anything so long as they are fed vodka and propaganda", because decades of a slow burning war is a lot of "something".
"It's up to the loser to decide when a war ends"...nonsense.  Gulf War One, Korea, WW1, all of these were ended when both sides decided to quit, not the "loser".  Gulf War, US coalition decided to stop at Iraqi border.  Korea, both sides decided to sign the cease-fire.  WWI, Allies did not invade into Germany for a full occupation driven victory.  The loser decides when to stop resisting and the winner has to decide when to stop winning.   The history of warfare is full of examples where the winner went "good enough" and tied the thing off.  And plenty where the loser refused to quit and slowly petered out until they wasted away and were unable to continue - like the entirety of indigenous resistance in NA.
What Russia doesn't have to do is normalize with the West, this is not the same as negotiation.  We will very likely arm the ever living daylights out of Ukraine after this war and invest very heavily in its reconstruction.  One thing that has stuck in my throat since this whole thing began is a myth that the West is somehow weak and barely holding on against the might of an unassailable Russia.  "Russia will win this in a matter of weeks" (they did not), "Russian mass will eventually wear Ukraine out" (it did not), "Russia has escalation dominance" (they did not, we did), "Russia will decide when this war is over." no they won't all sides will have to decide that.  We could be fighting a containment and compression war against Russia for years and based on how the last one of those went I would be very concerned to be Russian right now.