kluge

Your problem space, but a high resolution simulation that can express the difficulties armor and mech are going to continue to have is not a bad idea. Military mindset will pressure you to “fix the game” so tanks can still matter will happen but well modelled contemporary conditions are hard to argue with. Of course there will be some in the ATH camp that will demand that UAS, ISR and PGM be nerfed so that DF can still happen. But the disparity of their positions will become clear by how much you have to nerf. Hell CMBS played on Rookie is damned near what the battlefield looks like. Trying to move anything under those conditions is impossible. Add in realistic drone conditions and it gets harder and harder to argue. So put the tanks in. Stick them all over the place. Then when the player tries to use them and their behaviour starts to look a lot like this war, that is going to get hard to defend.
Of course you are going to get the zealots who will take a tank firing at a treeline or walking over barely defended minefields as solid proof that armor is still a foundational platform for manoeuvre, but there are many in the middle scratching their heads at all this. Simulation may be the only way to really understand a way forward and challenge assumptions. At least for most normal rational observers.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cwyl9048gx8t

Walkie talkies are now exploding across Lebanon, along with potentially other electronics. Either a lot of procurement was compromised or batteries overloaded I guess. Crazy amount of disruption though that could have implications for conflict elsewhere. 

Not a good week to be in Hezbollah...

I’ll definitely only be purchasing models of mobile devices without HE in them in the future.

Oh, boo-hoo for Ritter. 
That's it. That's my contribution for today. I'm sure we'll all be shedding a few tears over  toasting this news.
Dave

And you don't?
I served in the Canadian military for 36 years. Working strategic force development and procurement that crossed international lines. No ones hands are clean. Cold War ended and everyone wanted to get richer in the afterparty. We are now in the hangover. 
Now I do know of a lot of companies that wanted to "look clean." They put a lot of effort into that. 

There is one guy I'm pretty sure is going down, however: 
 

Interestingly, the two main players (Lauren Chen and husband) were not indicted yesterday. That's quite likely because they were indicted under seal months ago and became cooperating witnesses in exchanger for leniency. So while RT (and probably the SVR) are patting themselves on the back publicly, their internal assessment must be that for some significant period of time their operations were penetrated and heavily surveilled by US intelligence agencies. 
So, a necessary caveat to my prediction is that we may not actually see much of what is done with or to some folks but that there will be a lot going on nonetheless.

Your smarter than this aren't you?

The hybrid/propaganda war being fought in America right now is *also* the battlefield and it's crucial that we don't let the Russians win it so that Ukraine may continue to get the arms it needs to prevail. If that's partisan to some folks...well, I would argue that in that case they should think harder about the party they belong to. 

Well sure you have the twitter algorithm tuned to show you furry cats and cute babes. People that were using it for politics see a significant difference. People who don't have an account can see it too. People who study social media and or political engagement have documented it.
Everyone is glad you still get your fix of puppies and kitties - that is awesome truly it is.

As I recall the young  lad here was infantry who did some time in a sandbox back when. Comes home sparks up a YouTube channel on military affairs…”like and subscribe folks”. Problem is that an infantry grunt who fought in a small war has zero expertise or relevant experience when it comes to force production and operationalization. Nor does he have experience in logistic, C4ISR at the operational or strategic levels etc. What he has is a snappy sales pitch and cute flash screens.
And here is the really hard part for us military folks: even the multi starred generals and their long suffering senior staff (I.e. Me) have limited utility in trying to understand this war. Why? Because we have not seen one like this since the 80s (Iran-Iraq) when even the most senior 3 stars were you bucks. And we have not seen one in a European context like this since WW2…and my grandpa died years ago.
So one really has to be careful. This young fella might be a gifted “babe and suckling in the Temple” or he could be some shill pitching ground up unicorn horn. Buyer beware.

China is less brittle than Russia but certainly more brittle than your average Western democracy. After Deng, it has slowly morphed into a unitary dictatorship with yawning problems of demography and economy that threaten the vast successes he made possible. The party has largely completed the transformation from movement to racket and nationalism is the obvious alternative. 

"As President I will strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies." 
VP Kamala Harris tonight. I think we know where she stands now.
 

Well that should settle the "what can US C4ISR/all seeing eye" question fairly definitively.

A flying platform that carries a jammer more or less fits the description of an electronic warfare aircraft.

That being said, the typical small drone doesn't have a jet engine sized alternator nor does it have endless battery capacity, which limits the types of systems a drone can jam along with the duration and effective range of the produced effects.

A flying platform that carries a jammer more or less fits the description of an electronic warfare aircraft.

That being said, the typical small drone doesn't have a jet engine sized alternator nor does it have endless battery capacity, which limits the types of systems a drone can jam along with the duration and effective range of the produced effects.

In theory, this should be pretty easy as image classification is well known and widely studied.
Acquiring the data is a different story. Free data sources like FIRMS don't provide enough resolution to identify individual positions in any meaningful way. Commercial data sources have enough spatial resolution to identify vehicles, but generally don't have the temporal resolution to continually scan locations and doing so every hour is sure to rack up an eye popping bill. Government satellites definitely have the resolution, but that information is classified and its unclear if the US offers a direct data pipeline to Ukraine.

Not just good quality data. Good quality data that has been accurately labeled, and often in massive volumes and of high diversity.  Depending on your system, that can be very difficult to get - I do some optical systems where we're almost guaranteed to have low signal to noise (always working at the limit of our resolution) and are likely to run into things that are outside the training set, and we spend huge amounts of effort on both improving the repeatability of the acquisition (relatively easy), and automating the development of training data, which sometimes involves a lot of bootstrapping.  You think watching the scanners at TSA checkpoints is painful? Have I got a job for you...

You know it, babe 😙

 

I am confused.  Are we just talking about the Orlan?  Or the entire future of UAS?  I suspect the Orlan will be seen as a bi-plane by 1945 in a few years.

I don't think "knowing where the enemy is" is a problem if this war is a demonstration.  The ability to push small lethal drone swarms around on the battlefield only need to happen as fast or faster than your opponent can drive...or launch their own swarms.  Many ways to do this because each individual system is so light.  This means one can drop kill boxes at range and essentially deny an area.
As to sensors and processors.  Well we will have to see won't we.  Being able to fly through a bamboo forest autonomously looks pretty sophisticated to me and we are only getting started.  I honestly only see range and endurance as a local tactical limitation.  Operationally they can be packaged and projected at very long ranges by any number of systems.  A HIMARS cargo shell could carry a hundred of these small systems and deliver them 100kms away.  In place the little buggers could just sit on the ground until a target comes by and within range.  Trading off who pops up to take a peek or linked to other sensors that came with them (pigeon hearts anyone?).  5 fly up and overwhelm the target.  The other 95 stay in the grass.  I only need the little bugger to fly maybe a km.  Give them solar panels and they can recharge in place.
That is a major military problem. 

Just use dinosaurs, solves the problem. Orlan-10 and similar have loiter time in excess of 12 hours. Don’t be like Amazon’s drone program and insist on electric-only.
Yes, and no. Orlan-10 is pretty speed at 110mph. However, the current and next generation of these things aren’t maneuverable (especially the pusher prop ones), and have no capability to detect something targetting them.
Detecting, targetting and taking down these things without spending $1m is the real problem. You almost need something like an Orlan-10 itself that can loiter for a while and cover say a 40km square area, with some sort of micro missile optimized for cost and small targets, and a series of spectrum analyzers on the ground listening for control signals that are linked together.
Your air-to-air mini missile is not going to be expensive as far as real missiles go, but can you keep it under $50k? It needs to go in excess of 200mph (which has been done), and have 10km range, and have some sort of sensor head that can track the target. So yeah, that last one is the problem. Optical might not do it.
 
A book I recommend to everyone is “Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development” about how they developed Sidewinder on the cheapo.

A lot of incentive to solve the energy density problem of batteries:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/04/1066141/whats-next-for-batteries/?gad=1&gclid=CjwKCAjws9ipBhB1EiwAccEi1BVtyUUPriIA8d0KP2cg84dW41z0YN0FUllsukBpNjBKoZWhm2I20RoCHLoQAvD_BwE
This is much bigger than warfare and has eye watering levels of investment.  Time is distance.  So as loitering times lengthen, ranges are also going to stretch.  Time is options.  As loitering times increase so do the range of possible missions.  UGVs are waiting in the wings on this one too.
You best start believing in RMAs, Ms Turner…because you are in one.

Not to mention current loiter times. With half hour endurance a unit is looking at needing 48 small drones to keep a single unit in the air doing CAP 24/7. More if you count lost time for takeoff and recovery.

My guess it is the targeting.  Tracking, locking and hunting a small highly manoeuvrable object is a pretty high bar.  Basically trying to hit a magic bullet with a magic bullet.  Just because we have a similar system doesn’t mean we have the targeting capability to hit another drone.  And then one has to do it en masse. I have zero doubts that there are people working on this furiously.
This will set up an air power below 2000 feet arms race.  Counter counter UAS systems will then be developed.  I think a lot of people are starting to get that this is not War + Unmanned.  It is Unmanned Warfare.