Monty's Mighty Moustache

I keep seeing people commenting on Steve’s priorities like they know exactly what he’s working on and how he spends his time. But none of you do, unless you work closely with or know him well.
Now you can comment on the “impression” you get of how what he is working on, that’s fair, but to say he needs to sort his priorities out based on that is ridiculous 

As far as I'm concerned people have not experienced great cinema, until they watch The Thing at night in the dead of winter with a glass of J&B in their hand. I think that movie is the main reason I have been drinking J&B scotch for over a decade now. 😀
Anyway, back on topic. Another one bites the dust!
 

Yeah this sort of “omg they’re not doing anything and they don’t care” nonsense always gets kicked around when there’s been few releases. Nothing new. Just because Steve talks about the Ukraine war doesn’t mean jack squat. You’re equating two things that are completely unrelated. It’s not logical. Does he need your permission to talk to his relatives on the phone too? How about running to the grocery store for food? 😗

I keep seeing people commenting on Steve’s priorities like they know exactly what he’s working on and how he spends his time. But none of you do, unless you work closely with or know him well.
Now you can comment on the “impression” you get of how what he is working on, that’s fair, but to say he needs to sort his priorities out based on that is ridiculous 

People on the internet telling someone that he should tweak his priorities. It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.

Yes, but at the moment I am guided by the 0.7 liters of Madeira I drank. Rain outside the window, live concert of Depeche Mode 1993. And the lack of obvious successes of the Ukrainian armed forces. 
Many of my childhood friends are afraid of this call. But I think. that this is the duty of everyone who lived carefree in the 90s

I can say that I am not afraid of death or injury, but of the stupidity of my command, or of my future colleagues

Be that as it may, I can say that times have changed. compared to last year. I had a development project. But because of the war, I decided that civilian projects would not benefit my country and decided to join the Ukrainian armed forces. Moreover, recently chronic diseases are not considered an obstacle to recruitment

I like it when a plan comes together! 
I was rather chuffed that this close assault by my SPW mounted panzer grenadiers worked.
Took some previous suppression fire and ensuring I'd KO'd any enemy AT guns, then drive at full speed onto the position, all guns on board blazing.
It does not often go quite to plan like this...
 

If I had a £1 for every time I heard that, from those I have managed IT projects for, I would be very rich.
I will leave it to Elvis to decide if he wants to adopt your suggestion.
Maybe it's really easy....
😉

Is the choice of Forum optimal? Probably not.
Does it really matter enough to keep derailing the discussion? Definitely not.

Something I can't believe I never thought of before: distant low flying aircraft can be engaged by MANPADS at a shallow angle... for example, out a window. Maybe best finding a much bigger room to absorb that backblast though.
 

Another interesting one:
Raises some questions to me:
Have people started painting the top side of drones yet? That Zala was ridiculously easy to spot and would have been less so even if the topside was just matt green or something. Are drones so expendable it's not worth it? Is the EW capability there to allow the use of friendly drones but jam the enemy? Does the profusion of COTS drones on both sides prohibit that because they all share similar frequencies? How easy are drones to operate? How easy should drones be to operate? Assuming the operator/team was destroyed in that shack, how easy are they to replace? Are they specialists that need specific training, or can you grab anyone who played a modern games console? Or... does someone in the Russian army consider a drone, operator and team eating a precision munition an attritional win for them? Either way... someone should probably explain that counterbattery rules apply to them too. I can remember plenty of videos of Ukrainian drone operators being very careful about retrieving their drones. It would be interesting to find out how the Ukrainian drone was in the right place at the right time to pick them up. It could be sheer chance, but did they chase the Zala? Intercept it after getting information it was heading in x direction? Were they lurking in anticpation based on SIGINT?

Too early.  That is a really tough one without being inside the UA staff and knowing the details.  Of course there was political pressure, we were talking about a UA offensive months before it happened.  But there were also military factors.  How long do you let the RA dig in?  How long to replace losses from their failed winter offensives?  What was the force generation trajectory for UA reinforcements?  How are sustainment and enablers holding up?
My guess is that 1) the UA knew the RA was pretty badly mauled, 2) was creating a Putin line of defence along their most likely axis of advance, and 3) they were in about as good a shape as they were going to get.  Alternatively, perhaps the UA knew the offensive would take much longer to yield results and wanted to get to those benchmarks before Winter.  
The UA tried a western style larger push at the beginning and they all got blunted pretty badly.  So they switched to Kherson style small bites, which also would have been programmed into any options analysis.
Finally, the rules of war are all up in the air.  I am a broken record on that point.  Take any metrics you may have about how war is supposed to work and throw them out the window.  We have never had a war operationally like this one since Iran-Iraq in the 80s.  We have not had one strategically since Korea.  We did learn that minefields, ATGMs and stand-off tac aviation still work for the RA, even if their arty has been degraded.  It appears that even basic tac ISR is working for the RA in holding a line.  The RA are leaning on what they are good at…lots of troops dug in.
What is surprising is RA morale.  How on earth they are holding it together after last winter is beyond me - I guess that Russian steel is still out there.  They have also managed to keep an operational system floating after horrendous losses.  As we discussed, the bar is much lower on defence, but still…
So here we are, waiting for something to happen.  Or not, which is still something.  Can the RA still break?  Definitely. Can the UA fail and lose initiative?  Definitely.  Is you favourite pet platform going to make a difference, probably not, but we should probably keep pushing it anyway.
 

Guys, gotta get out of your own heads. 
Russian strategic aims:
- Full subjugation of Ukraine, pulling it in as a puppet state a la Belarus. 
- Division and weakening of NATO in order to give breathing room within Russia sphere
- A united greater Russia under a new Czar
I don't care if Poppy Orange gets in and cuts off the taps - that up there is not going to happen without the entire world abandoning Ukraine, and whole lot more to be honest.  Could we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?  Sure, but it is a reach to see things failing that badly.  Even if we do abandon Ukraine, it is a country of 44 million and really...really...p$ssed off right now.  They will dig in and fight like badgers because they have seen what the alternative looks like. 
After Bucha et al, Ukraine is never going to embrace Russia.  NATO has secured unity and defence spending for at least a couple decades because now there is a threat that isn't a few idiots in white Toyotas in countries we didn't even know existed.  And Russia is a mess, and will likely remain one.  There will be no western normalization with Russia after this, or if there is, shame on us.
US Pol is not the driving factor in Russia achieving its strategic objectives (stated or unstated) in this war.  It is a driving factor in how badly they lose it.

Final death count - 51. 
This is Denys Kozyr and his wife - former serviceman of AFU, who participated in this war, but recently retired by health problems.

His father went to front with him and was killed. The son, returning to home decided to move the grave of father from Dnipo city cemetry to his native village. As this costumary in out villages, many people came to memorial dinner in this cafe and around. Obviously some local taritor sent information to Russia that "funerals of "Aydar" nazi will take place and many nationalists will be expected". This is not in first time. About half year ago Russians launched Iskander at funeral procession of "Azov" fighter in Dnipropetrovksk oblast, but then Russians missed and only several people were wounded. In this time missile hit precisely. 
Almost all Kozyr's families (his and wife) were killed in this strike as well as almost half of current village population. Russian media and TGs initailly celebrating "perfect shot, sending many Aydar nazi to Bandera", but when cadres of dead civilans appeared, Russians as always rebooted in air and became to clame this is Ukrainians launch this missile to have arguments to get more weapon.  
After this and today Kharkiv strike, it's ridiculous to hear from Scholz about "escalation if we give Taurus to Ukraine" and "Taurus is very complicated for target programming" (I remember this "Western weapon is too complicated to Ukrainians, it's nees years to learn it" in first months of war)

Thanks guys.  Guess who got tagged to do a Future of Joint Warfare piece at work?  Yep, the guy who won't shut up about it.  If Steve was particularly profit driven he would charge a membership fee for this thread.

Ukraine hitting the nail on the head again:
 

Evacuation bus of volunteer medical unit "Hospitaliers". Usual passenger bus redone in medical, equipped for donations. It carries wounded from stabilization points in frontline rear to hospitals, usually it's a Dnipro city.

Short answer seems to be a combination of ISR, PGM and Unmanned systems.  The actual job of a tank is to take a big gun, move it around the battlefield, point it at the enemy and hurl a slug/shell at them.  They carry a lot of armour and other system to allow them to survive.  Ok, so let’s just break it down:
- Mobility.  Small unmanned systems have already demonstrated extremely high mobility on the battlefield.  Even with the counters and their vulnerabilities the sheer volume of those systems combined with their small size and manoeuvrability basically positions them everywhere.  A tank has mobility but it is limited in comparison.  They can roll across the battlefield at 60-80 kph, but never really do for obvious reasons.
- Survivability.  Big heavy armour no longer equals Survivability.  Distributed, redundant  cheap systems equal survival.  A force can lose 10 drones a day and still sustain that entire system, tanks cannot.  Being small and many essentially means that entire unmannned system, plus ISR is more survivable than that of armour.
- Lethality.  That big old gun projected energy like no one else’s business…whammie.  Nothing else can put a slug down range at an opponent at over 2kms per second.  Thing is that big guns performance is not the only measure of lethality.  As far as Range is concerned, PGM have far out ranged the tank gun, in some cases by an order of magnitude.  As to actual energy transfer, well chemical energy on the target at point of impact is extremely portable and distributable.  In the past the only thing keeping chemical energy in place was accuracy.  A tank gun is extremely accurate and things like artillery were not - they were considered area weapons.  This war has demonstrated in spades what PGM can do - massed precision beats everything.
So basically we are seeing a distributed systems of chemical energy-based weapons able to move and survive -as a system- and kill with better precision and range than a tank gun, at a fraction of the cost.  How many times have we noted that it looks like the UA is maneuvering via Deep Strike?  We have seen massive trends of Denial based on the combination of ISR, PGM and unmanned.  
The tank has not been replaced by a single platform, it has been replaced by a swarm…at least for right now.  If we need to move death rapidly around the battlefield that can precisely kill, well we are seeing it. If technology shows up that can sweep unmanned systems for the sky or defeat PGM well then we are back to a new-old ballgame.
The proof of this has been building in this entire war.  How many time have we seen either side try to mass mech/armour and fail?  Tanks are noted right now as fire support.  They are either being pulled forward in 1 and 2s for sniping.  Or standing off 10kms and lobbing in shells.  Why do you suppose both the UA and RA are doing this?  Is it because both sides suddenly forgot how to put 16 tanks into a squadron and smash them at an opponent? (Btw, that is the working theory for some).  Or is it because they already tried that, multiple times, and it failed to deliver?
What PGM, ISR and unmanned has not been able to deliver is breakthrough in 2023…yet.  That suite of systems is not able to provide rapid break in, through and out of an opponents defensive.  But neither can the tank, which was its primary job.  So we seem stuck in a mutual Denial situation.  What I do not know is where it goes from here.  Are we looking at Denial/Defensive primacy in warfare? - we have been here before.  Or is this a blip until PGM, ISR and unmanned fully mature?  Can we actually build the counter-systems rapidly enough to regain a level of symmetry?
We do not know.  This entire back and forth about a single ground platform is in fact silly, but not a bad way to pass a weekend.  The reality is that land warfare, maybe all warfare is likely fundamentally shifting. This is an earthquake in military affairs.  We do not know if AirPower works the same.  We do not know if Offence works the same.  We do not know if combine arms as we knew it works anymore.  Manoeuvre Warfare, Mission Command, how we force develop and generate…they are all looking like they may be in the wind.  Hell based on the last week, I am not sure Naval Warfare as we knew it is going to survive.  Trying to figure out what still works, what does not and what will work is going to be the central challenge moving forward.  Unless we fall back on “Russia Sux” and “Poor UA just don’t get it”, which we will of course.  It won’t be until some NATO force gets crushed in some 3rd party nation that the lights will go off…or maybe we will buck the trend and get out in front of the change…we have managed it before.

Oh very clever.  Ok let’s have it out on infantry vs tanks moving forward.  Infantry are extremely cheap.  Putting human life aside, Russia has demonstrated that infantry, though soft and squishy can be replaced in the tens of thousands.  Tanks are big expensive and hard to manufacture at scale.  Infantry as humans do need a lot of support - likely why we will see more unmanned.  But they also do not need a recovery vehicle that also weighs 40tons, nor do they burn tens of thousands of gallons of gas per day.  An infantry soldier can survive on a few kilos of support per day (food, water and ammo), a tank needs hundreds of kilos all on vulnerable trucks.  Infantry can be pushed to keep going, when 50tons decides to stop moving it is done.
This whole “infantry can die to” as a counter argument to the continued trajectory of obsolescence of heavy mech and armour is not only illogical it is deflecting.
Infantry can disperse, dig in and hide.  They are able to cross terrain impassable to tanks.  They break down but are easy to replace.  They can fight in built up areas.  They do not weigh 50 tons each and give off enough heat to be seen from space.  They are cheap, light and now armed with ISR, comms and weapons systems that can kill a tank out past 4km (and with NLOS tens of kms).
Infantry have completely different roles on the battlefield and we have yet to find technology to replace infantry…we may never.  So come on the board and bleat all you want about the life left in heavy armour but for the love of gawd can we put that stupid “infantry die too and we are not getting rid of them” argument in the ground?  As soon as we can produce thousands of fighting tanks per week out of a global civilian tank population of 8 billion you may have a point.

Keep hitting them as they leave. Then if they don't stop with the terror attacks keep hitting them after they leave.

Pretty intense, wallshaking bavovna after 0000. Massive and long. No sirens/alerts, no shelters opened. Informational vacuum in the dark of the night. Seems to be happening all over the place.
Here's to low CEP errors and reliable hardware. 

No. This is particular situation of one regiment. But such units on southern flank of Bakhmut much more than UKR forces. A guy from 3rd assault brigade told UKR advance in this area is unique because this was offensive, when UKR troops had MUCH less troops than defendeing side. He also told UKR forces are phisically and moral exhausted, they suffered lack of armor, but they and other assault units advance forward just on motivation  and fury