kimbosbread

To elaborate on why Kryki is a great spot for another Russian phyrric victory: Obviously it’s a pain for Russian logistics, but it’s hard to get their artillery in range without getting hit with all of Magyar’s pain/HIMARS. Because of this, glide bombs. But apparently roaming Patriot/whatever batteries are a thing in this area, hence all the losses we see. So they have to use meat, which unsupported, in a nasty slushy marsh isn’t going to do so well. So, ending the glide bomb threat: Russia started the war with ~150 SU-34 and has lost close to a quarter. If they are losing another 3-4 per week, that’s going to get real interesting. I don’t know how many were serviceable to start with, but what happens when there aren’t enough to go around and they’ve lost most of the pilots too?

A sustained commando raid? Piracy? Honestly if it isn’t too muddy, ebikes with trailers might be the ideal option. Good speed, good range, low signature, tiny logistical footprint. The trailer could hold a dozen or two FPV drones, or a mortar/AGL. Not sure how casevac would work though.

Oh I was always hoping for Valyuki (sp?) or whatever that little railway junction/military base town is just a bit past Kupyansk. Nothing much more ambitious than that; just force Russia to push the logistics back another 100km. Especially after the whole Russian Freedom Legion thing, I thought it would make sense to nibble a bit and establish some fortifications 1km into Russia proper, and mine the **** out of everything. Sure, it might force a mobilization, but the mobilization might force a bigger social collapse. Meh? Orlan 10 is already the right layout for maneuverable fixed wing drones (prop in front, vs in the back which lends stability). Maybe the Russians have had too much vodka.

Agreed 100%. The trick is where and when can they leverage their strengths to really change the situation on the ground. I’ve thought Kherson is best for a long time (other than a left hook into Russia proper), as it is at the far end of the Russian logistics chain, and closest to Ukraine’s air defences. And Russia’s air defences and radars are seriously degraded now. If we admit that a big offensive is not possible, and rope-a-dope where Russia has horrible outsized losses for insignificant territory, then maybe a more aggressive version of that is possible in Kherson, where Russia is forced to either expose their logistics chain and suffer even worse losses, or give ground. I think going after Hola Prystan is best, as it forces Russia to move more men the furthest. This is where F16s with JDAMs could have an outsized effect and Russia again has to choose whether to risk the VKS. The other thing I hope for is a landing of small groups of raiders in Yahorlyk Bay or Gulf of Tendra; doesn’t need to be big, but I think that would really be tough for Russia as they’d need to push materiel even further west.

Pretty much this. It’s really a “peace in our time” moment, while everybody else is arming up and preparing for the inevitable.

Russia manufacturers make (or made) their own multicam uniforms. Slavyanka was one IIRC.

Also, if this works even 25% of the time, it points in a good direction for FPV point defence on the cheap: A little unmanned shotgun turret with a camera and microphone on it, essentially. Hobbyists have built unmanned turrets a decade ago at least that could easily track people, so if the turret is cheap enough (a few thousand, so similar order of magnitude to an FPV drone) and has a 50% success rate, that’s not bad.

One of my favorite tv shows ever “The Boondocks” had a nice spin on this in the 1st episode with the trial of R-Kelley (for peeing on a consenting underage girl). The protagonist ends with the famous line: “I did battle with ignorance today, and ignorance won. I admit that I'm often... vexed at the behavior of my own people. Yeah, "vexed" is a good word.“

As my transnistrian-aficionado friend put it, in Russian “penis” is bad, and “pussy” is good. So anything “piz-“ is penis-related, therefore bad (ie pizdor).

Maybe you should be calling it “distributed arms and eyes”.

Yeah solving for ISR seems really hard if cheap sensors are a thing. Same idea as “el-cheapo thermal” on both drones and soldiers, how do you avoid this. I love the idea of a sensor mine… airdrop via drones/spies a ****load of little accelerometers with radios and solar panel and a week of battery life… maybe the size of quarter or something. Near every major intersection. And they phone home occaisonally if there’s interesting vibrations. How the hell do you avoid these, let alone find them all?

I dunno, a friend of mine was there not too long ago and the bottle he brought back was quite tasty. Also there is the novelty of a having a drink from an unrecognized separatist region that may not exist for long!

Why not fine Transnistrian brandy?

And here I thought the mention of SAT was gonna lead into an interesting dicussion of formal methods for ISR…

It’s an interesting idea, but I think you’d find the data to be sparse, both in space (area covered) and resolution (sent back from drones). Honestly dropping accelerometers all over the place (ie major roads) that would phone home every day or so would probably net you more useful info.

Lancet is 200-300km in a dive with its elegant missile-like proportions and weighs ~15kg. A regular old quadcopter can easily do 100+ kmh even with a bit of weight on it. So basically, much faster than most wheeled or tracked vehicles on the current be-holed, be-trenched and be-shrapneled mess of a battlefield.

We know what happens next. More autonomy and flexibility for drones and better munitions. Here’s a question: What would it take for drones to mostly replace artillery? There are obviously huge advantages in production, flexibility, lack of TBIs/concussions, logistics, training, autonomy add-on etc. But what is missing? Bigger boom? Faster boom? Related question: If you were outfitting a military from scratch, would you have more drone units than artillery? Would you have any artillery?

Because Robotnye is much better for sambushes and closer to the Ukrainian strongpoints ie Kherson/river. Donetsk is kind of surrounded on several sides which is less than ideal. In areas that are surrounded, the aerial bombardment (in lieu of artillery) works well. I don’t think Robotyne is nearly as feasible for this unless they want to lose a lot more jets. And F16s in theory are coming quite soon. Well, depends on the AO. I think Robotyne is way less favorable- not as favorable as Kherson, but way better than Donetsk- even without F16s and a lot more SAMs.

I want to second this in particular. This makes me more optimistic for the rest of 2024. EDIT: If Ukraine can bait Russia into a series of Phyrric victories, that would be amazing. Hopefully Robotyne has been properly fortified, and just as importantly given some real air defenses. Without glide bombs and with supply routes that are more vulnerable, it seems like the perfect place for another 50-100k Russians to die.

Please remind me when did the Republicans took the house. If I’m not mistaken, Biden’s admin had almost a year where they could have done almost anything they wanted in terms of aid… but they didn’t. The slow-rolling of useful equipment, and refusal to give aid in quantity (cluster shells that we aren’t using, old ATACMS, all of the old Bradleys, F16s with volunteer pilots, a cruise missile for every missile that caused a civilian death etc.)… that’s entirely on the executive branch. We’ve all been complaining about this since the beginning of this war.

Biden makes himself look weak and bad. The idiot House-Republicans are not the central problem here. If he wanted Ukraine to have more weapons, he would have gotten them through earlier, and he would be using all the dirty tricks available to do so now (ie declaring value of a lot of our military aid is $0).

I wonder how hard it would be to rig up an ersatz dual-stage storm shadow style warhead on these boats vs just going deerka deerka (I say this with zero insight into what type of warhead they have). I bet the next evolution will be to go semi-submersible for the final stage,with a little snorkel, and maybe slow speed for minimum wake.

Meh already happened, we’re just seeing the corpse twitching. Nuclear non-proliferation was dead and done the momement Russia invaded in 2022.

I agree with the “Waiting for Scipio” strategy (where Scipio can be poverty-wunderwaffen ie el-cheapo-long-range-strike-drones and/or the definitive military genius of our age).

I mean, without Congress taking their part of the balance of power seriously, what is the Executive Branch to do? A functioning Legislative branch has been a pipe dream for a decade and a half. This is a good and interesting question- and you are right, it’s a lot less than the right claims. Not to sidetrack too much, but… I would argue Biden’s election mandate was “Just don’t be Trump”, where “Trump” isn’t exactly a hard right Republican. The rich west coast liberals I know had basically hoped for a centrist government, so basically “Same same but not Trump”. Which it is in many foreign policy respects (China, Afghanistan), but not being a giant orange douchebag. Unfortunately, on the domestic front there was definitely a push towards several different things, maybe not all true “left”, but definitely not “center” or “right” as far the usual US policy spectrum goes: - Petroleum production (cutting thereof) - Explicitly following a racial quota for his supreme court pick (I’m actually very happy with the idea of a public defender being on the court to be fair) - Student loan forgiveness - Giant economic stimulus - etc etc The problem is less perhaps left vs right and that a lot of it was kind of a mess. I think both left and right have appetite for an intelligent approach to immigration reform, and insurance, and many other things. But Biden’s team somehow felt he needed to please everybody, where really all he needed to do was not make mistakes, especially in an era of high inflation, and sell himself better (which is hard, cause he is the worst public speaker we’ve had as a president in my lifetime). Maybe that’s the problem: We have a lot of populist problems, and Trump appeals to those people, and even one semi-decent administration just can’t fix enough things to satisfy the demand.