How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Battlefront.com]

3 minutes ago, kraze said:

Bonus russian corruption points if people responsible were assigned responsible by the actual culprits.

Yes, there is much fun to be had sorting that out!  Brings this to mind:

 

[Vacillator]

2 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

The electric car (EV) is more money up front, but it has just about no maintenance other than the tires and the battery.

Maybe brakes might be an idea too?  Anyway, this isn't the EV versus others thread so moving swiftly on... .

[Haiduk]

24 minutes ago, TheVulture said:

Railway bridge in Vasylivka, Zaporizhzhia region destroyed

 

 

Bridge was destroyed by Ukrainians as far as month ago, but Russian propaganda gives it like "Ukrainain nazi shell Vasilivka now and here - destroyed civil infrastructure"

[photon]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

Don't get me wrong the "tank" or something like it will likely stick around but it may be a CP or hauling batteries and spare parts for the unmanned systems instead of being at the front edge. 

It's like the transition from battleship-centric fleets to carrier-centric fleets. Battleships stopped being viable frontline units when the combination of submarines and carrier-based strike aircraft extended the lethal range of fleets (and airbases!) from the 40ish km range of battleships to the 300ish km range of strike aircraft. The logistical weight of battleships didn't help their cause either.

We managed to repurpose ours as floating artillery batteries. Tanks might see a similar second life as you suggest.

edit: And floating AAA batteries; I wonder if tanks can be repurposed to specialize in anti-UAV missions?

it is a collision of systems, one we recognize, the other is something else.

I think we're seeing in the Battle of Kiev something like the Battle of Taranto. Everyone should have realized that naval combat was fundamentally different after the British rendered three Italian battleships combat ineffective with cloth covered biplanes. But the British themselves didn't see the dramatic systemic shift and lost the Repulse and Prince of Wales more than a year later.

Edited April 16, 2022 by photon

[Battlefront.com]

6 minutes ago, Vacillator said:

Maybe brakes might be an idea too?  Anyway, this isn't the EV versus others thread so moving swiftly on... .

True, in an EV eventually your sudden/emergency braking system will rust from lack of use and will need to be replaced Regenerative braking is neat-o!

Anyhoo, the point of the analogy is that the smaller, lighter, and more simple a vehicle is, the less maintenance logistics (trained labor, parts, machinery, time, etc.) is needed.  I've owned a variety of tracked and wheeled vehicles, light and heavy, so it's pretty apparent to me how huge the difference is.

Steve

[Haiduk]

28th mech.brigade, Kherson oblast. Crew of Corsar ATGM destroyed four Russian vehicles, when they tried to make a probe in direction of one unnamed village, contrlolled by UKR forces. As result three Tigrs (one of them armed with AGS) and BMP-3 were destroyed. Infantry unit, which was together with ATGM dispersed survived Russian troopers with fire

 

ATGM Corsar - domestic light ATGM of battlion level, which in most units substituted Sovet 9M111M Fagots (AT-4C). It a RK-3 laser beam riding missile with tandem HEAT warhead with 500...550 mm rha penetration beyond ERA. The range - 2500 m. Unlike Stugna-P it hasn't remote module. In CMBS represented early version of Corsar with shoulder launch, but after test use in 2014 turned out in too heavy, so in 2017-2018 new version was adopted with light tripod. 

Edited April 16, 2022 by Haiduk

[Battlefront.com]

1 minute ago, photon said:

It's like the transition from battleship-centric fleets to carrier-centric fleets. Battleships stopped being viable frontline units when the combination of submarines and carrier-based strike aircraft extended the lethal range of fleets (and airbases!) from the 40ish km range of battleships to the 300ish km range of strike aircraft. The logistical weight of battleships didn't help their cause either.

Way back in this thread I made the point about battleships.  There were plenty of people saying that it would never die for almost the same reasons as tank guys say tanks won't die.  But battleships did die and nobody is saying that was a mistake.

One of the reasons battleships died is the same reason I'm saying tanks will (but not today).  Battleships stuck around despite all their negatives because they were the only surface vessel that could project power "over the horizon".  Even aircraft can't do that directly and also not under all weather conditions.  Then came anti-ship missiles and then cruise missiles, which could.  Combined with an aircraft carrier and subs... yeah, no need for a battleship.

But more relevant to the "tank will never die" argument... remember tanks replaced horsed cavalry.  I'm sure it isn't hard to find people saying that horsed cavalry would never die because of the mobility and shock it provides can't ever be replicated by infantry.  Even after the machinegun was starting to be put into use the argument was that there would always be a role for horsed cavalry, even if reduced in how it is used.  And yet here we are, no horsed cavalry on the battlefield.  We also don't have pikemen, archers, or the long sword either.

Steve

[db_zero]

2 hours ago, chrisl said:

 

There's some indication from reported ADS-B error signals that GNSS is being degraded over Ukraine, but I'm not convinced that it's Russia doing it.  When the US launched GPS, it was the only global satellite system available and "selective availability" was built in to give the US a military advantage.  A lot of the military turned out to be using consumer GPS in GW 1 and SA got turned off in 2000 partly as a result of that, partly at the request of FAA, and partly because other systems were coming online. There are now 4 GNSS systems (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou).  Anybody who's capable of launching such systems is also capable of launching systems that will degrade their performance from space by spoofing signals.  

The Soviet Union had a bad relationship with maps, in which virtually all maps were seeded with significant errors to cause confusion in case of invasion.  This bad relationship went on for many decades and was only publicly acknowldged in the late 80s, shortly before the dissolution of the USSR.  According to a friend who spent a bunch fo time there, inaccurate maps predate the USSR for similar reasons.  So it's likely that Russia was going into Ukraine with Soviet era maps, at least for some levels/regions, and they may or may not have recognized the problem with that.  Ukrainians followed what appears to be standard eastern European practice of removing and/or rearranging street signs to aid their attackers. As defenders, Ukraine doesn't really need high quality GNSS - they have people who know the area and their own maps.  So if some space-capable nation with EW satellites decided to inject a few hundred meters of error into the GNSS signals over the region, it would likely make a mess for out of town visitors without completely wrecking aircraft nav safety.  I've been on backroads in the mountains in the US where there might be two fire roads that parallel each other for a while before going to very different places, and even with undegraded GPS it's not hard to get yourself onto the one that climbs an extra 1000 m of elevation before descending into the town with no restaurants instead of the one that descends into your planned lunch stop.

As far as NATO aircraft along the Ukraine border- Rooks and Kings is probably right that they're not doing active EW from the Growlers, but if you watch ADS-B exchange, there are a lot of NATO aircraft loitering in the neighborhood along the Ukraine and Kaliningrad borders.  There are a few types that usually are transmitting who they are: several types of SIGINT plane (various RC-135 versions, E-3, RC-12, Global Hawk drones, others, ), lots of transports going mostly to Poland, and a large number of aerial refueling planes.  Who we don't see at all is who's being refueled, but there are probably a lot of them, given the number of tankers.  To see who's getting refueled you probably have to be in Poland or Romania with a pair of binoculars.

Be interesting to see if RC-135s or other assets are also operating out of places like Turkey or further north than the Ukrainian area to triangulate what they pick-up.

They’re getting real life training and practice.

 

[db_zero]

When and if the big offense takes place we’ll get a taste of what artillery is about. Some of the speculative article I’ve seen say it will be an artillery war.

[Haiduk]

Just now, db_zero said:

When and if the big offense takes place we’ll get a taste of what artillery is about. Some of the speculative article I’ve seen say it will be an artillery war.

This is already artilery war and was it since 2014

[chrisl]

1 minute ago, db_zero said:

Be interesting to see if RC-135s or other assets are also operating out of places like Turkey or further north than the Ukrainian area to triangulate what they pick-up.

They’re getting real life training and practice.

 

You can watch them at adsbexchange.com.  Click on the "U" icon to display only "interesting" (read: military) aircraft, "T" to show their tracks, "L" to show labels on each, and "o" a few times til it shows what you want.  You can mouse over or click on any aircraft to get more details.  They fly large enough swaths that I bet they can triangulate on anybody who transmits more than very intermittently. 

I don't watch all the time, but do keep a window open most of the time. They're mostly over Poland, Romania, and Latvia & Lithuania, but the Global Hawks also loiter over the Black Sea.  I don't think I've seen any crewed aircraft over the Black Sea, but that doesn't mean they can't be there, just that they're not transmitting ADS-B.  Even here in my SoCal neighborhood the military overflights sometimes transmit ADS-B and sometimes don't.

[Rokossovski]

24 minutes ago, The_MonkeyKing said:

[Snip]

- Nothing else available to replace the capability of the tank. (He also didn't really mention UGVs as an alternative.)
- Compares tanks to infantry. Vulnerable yes, but nothing else gets the job done [Snip]

(In the above quote The MonkeyKing was paraphrasing an argument from someone else, so, to be clear, my below comments are not intended to criticize The MonkeyKing in any way.)

I've been seeing similar arguments elsewhere as well: that there is nothing on hand to replace the tank, so therefore the tank is not obsolete.

When I read such arguments I think back to a book I ran across years ago in a university library. It was an English translation of a German book on tactics, published in 1914 just before the outbreak of hostilities. (I would provide a cite, but this was decades ago and of course pre-internet). The book's author described the history over the 19th century of increasing dispersion of infantry on the attack in reaction to increases in defensive firepower. The author stated that in his view further dispersion was not longer possible while maintaining command over forces, and so "therefore infantry attacks will be successfully made under current [1914] conditions without further changes." [Not a real quote, this was decades ago, but that was the thrust of what he concluded].

In other words, the author was stating that there was no available alternative to massed infantry attacks into the teeth of machine-gun fire, and therefore such attacks would continue to be completed successfully. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that the absence of a ready alternative to flinging infantry into machine-gun fire would not make such attacks any less foolish or costly. It would be the same reasoning behind the old quip that "something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done." 

The correct answer (that the 1914 author did not have the foresight to grasp) is that until alternatives to massed infantry attacks could be devised then attacks would generally not succeed. He failed to consider the possibility that in 1914 the correct answer to the question of "how do you successfully attack into machine-gun fire" was "you don't." 

Along the same lines it's possible that the statements "(1) we have no ready alternative to tank" and "(2) the tank is obsolete" could both be true.

I'm not actually sure that the tank has reached that point, and, even if so, it is also possible that an alternative will be devised. My objection is to the misconception that whether there is or is not a ready alternative to the tank has any bearing on whether it is obsolete.

[For the purposes of this post I am defining "obsolete" to mean "no longer capable of reliably performing its duties in a reasonably cost-effective manner" or something similar. Tanks are plainly still being produced and used, and so under some common definitions they are technically not "obsolete"].

[Commanderski]

1 hour ago, DesertFox said:

 

 

[Probus]

42 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Yup, UGVs need a LOT less maintenance than a MBT.  Both in terms of types of maintenance and the volume of it.

In theory maybe, but in reality, on a muddy, dusty, or wet, salty, or gritty battlespace, maintenance is very important. I'm retired with over 20 years of military maintenance and logistics. The more complicated the electronics, the more things that can go wrong. With robotics, that tends to go up exponentially. Murphy's law. 

Now I say all that, but there have been some amazing advancements in redundant circuitry. I worked with what we called SRUs and LRUs (Shop and Line Replaceable Units). We were beginning to see advancements where if a circuit card failed in the field, on a mission, a spare circuit card in the 'box' could be reprogrammed using FPGA technology. Without boring you with too much detail, it was pretty amazing stuff. 20 circuit cards in a 'black box', 15 were duplicates and programmed on the fly. 

  Mechanical parts, not so easy to make redundant I would imagine though. 

[Battlefront.com]

8 minutes ago, Rokossovski said:

Along the same lines it's possible that the statements "(1) we have no ready alternative to tank" and "(2) the tank is obsolete" could both be true.

Yes!

This discussion, including your post, got me thinking of another aspect of WW1 that directly gave birth to the tank.

I mentioned cavalry proponents thought it would continue indefinitely because there was nothing else that could fulfill its role on the battlefield.  The British quickly discovered that even if this was true, continuing on with horsed cavalry wasn't feasible thanks to MGs, trenches, mortars, artillery, barbed wire, etc.  Yes, there were still times when they could be used, but they were now relegated to sideshows or against 3rd world opponents.

As you say, "we have no ready alternative to horsed cavalry" and "horsed cavalry is obsolete" were both true at the same time.  There is no law in the universe I know of that says tanks are an exception to such logic.

Steve

[chrisl]

21 minutes ago, Haiduk said:

This is already artilery war and was it since 2014

Medium duration commercial drones + switchblades as CB could really change the artillery equation from the UA side.  

[akd]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

I saw someone post (or repost?) a comment about this sort of corruption issue within the last day.  Basically, if you have been falsifying the records all along you're going to keep falsifying them because otherwise you'll get arrested/shot.

This Tweet hints that someone senior has finally decided it's time to verify the reports from subordinate units.

Steve

This is DNR, not Russian Army, I think.  Isn’t “3rd Corps” the recently created formation filled with conscripts from occupied areas?

[Huba]

22 minutes ago, Probus said:

In theory maybe, but in reality, on a muddy, dusty, or wet, salty, or gritty battlespace, maintenance is very important. I'm retired with over 20 years of military maintenance and logistics. The more complicated the electronics, the more things that can go wrong. With robotics, that tends to go up exponentially. Murphy's law. 

Now I say all that, but there have been some amazing advancements in redundant circuitry. I worked with what we called SRUs and LRUs (Shop and Line Replaceable Units). We were beginning to see advancements where if a circuit card failed in the field, on a mission, a spare circuit card in the 'box' could be reprogrammed using FPGA technology. Without boring you with too much detail, it was pretty amazing stuff. 20 circuit cards in a 'black box', 15 were duplicates and programmed on the fly. 

  Mechanical parts, not so easy to make redundant I would imagine though. 

One thing I'd like add to this discussion is the implications of jamming on operations of all those UGV and UAV in the future. As resistant to EW as those might be, at some point you might not be able to operate them remotely, probably the closer you get to the line of contact the harder it will be to keep the link going, in a peer on peer conflict especially.

Logical solution is to give those systems a degree of autonomy, but it brings a host of moral questions, and ultimately leads to discussions about SkyNet type scenarios ( tongue in cheek of course).

Edit: we already gave this autonomy to seaborne systems, i.e. AShM with active homing vs CIWS. But on the ground where there is a much bigger risk of collateral damage, that's a huge psychological barrier to cross.

Edited April 16, 2022 by Huba

[Battlefront.com]

24 minutes ago, Probus said:

In theory maybe, but in reality, on a muddy, dusty, or wet, salty, or gritty battlespace, maintenance is very important. I'm retired with over 20 years of military maintenance and logistics. The more complicated the electronics, the more things that can go wrong. With robotics, that tends to go up exponentially. Murphy's law. 

Oh for sure the UGVs are not maintenance free.  That would be silly to say.  However, compare the logistics requirements to keep one UGV going compared to one MBT is not even in the same ballpark.  And don't even get me started on fuel!  An Abrams probably burns more fuel running idle in a day than a fleet of UGVs would go through in a high intensity combat op.

An Abrams weighs about 65 times more than a UGV.  The heavier something is, the more strain there is on its components.  We all know the King Tiger and Jagdtiger  

The Titan, for example, has 10 road wheels while the Abrams has 14, which means to do a seal change the Abrams has 30% more need than the UGV.  The size difference between the two is massive as well, which means each Abrams seal is larger/heavier than a Titan seal.  I bet 2 seal kits for an Abrams road wheel take up the same volume and mass as 10 for the UGV.  Maybe even less favorable.

Years ago when I had military vehicles some asked me why (at the time) you could buy a full MBT for about the same price as a restored WW2 Jeep.  The answer is that you can keep a Jeep in a regular garage and maintain it with light shop equipment.  A MBT requires a huge amount of infrastructure, easily dwarfing the cost of the vehicle itself.  Which is why I didn't get into MBTs

So anyway, what I'm saying here is that the UGV doesn't do away with logistical demands.  What it does do is dramatically reduce both the quantity and mass of support.  I also bet I could be trained to do routine maintenance on a UGV in a week or two vs. the months needed for basic Abrams work.

24 minutes ago, Probus said:

Now I say all that, but there have been some amazing advancements in redundant circuitry. I worked with what we called SRUs and LRUs (Shop and Line Replaceable Units). We were beginning to see advancements where if a circuit card failed in the field, on a mission, a spare circuit card in the 'box' could be reprogrammed using FPGA technology. Without boring you with too much detail, it was pretty amazing stuff. 20 circuit cards in a 'black box', 15 were duplicates and programmed on the fly. 

  Mechanical parts, not so easy to make redundant I would imagine though. 

Yeah, that stuff is pretty sweet.  Plus, if money is not really a problem you can have spare "brains" on a ready rack.  I have a spare "brain" for an older 4x4 truck.  If the computer for that thing breaks down then I just unplug it and stick in a new one.  Good to go in probably 10 minutes (they always bury those things!)

Steve

[kraze]

1 hour ago, Huba said:

I think that with the access to information average person has, even if it is as controlled as in Russia, the society wouldn't have the stomach for it to a degree it had say in WW1. It would break their morale quickly, especially as however you spin it, they are not defending their homeland there but are attacking. I might have too much faith in the humanity though...

The mentality of any serf is such that a serf is very aggressive due to being constantly subdued, but needs to vent that aggression somewhere and will agree in large numbers to vent that aggression in any war a tyrant starts - which is the reason you see such degree of atrocities committed by russians. Them being so xenophobic is also tied to that very reason - somebody, anybody has to be blamed for everything. Germans picked jews for that in their time, russians picked us.

However, being a serf, also means one is scared of someone stronger than him - so if that strength suddenly comes from the enemy, overwhelming and overshadowing the power projected by the tyrant - he becomes lost and scared. Which, I think, is the reason for such low morale even among elite troops.

Now soldiers are one thing. People, that just glue big Z on their cars and feel good about all the murder by their compatriots from the cozy comfort of their wooden barracks - are another the moment they are forced to hold a gun. They may break, dragging whole damned country with them to hell. Because if putin could announce full mobilization to crush Ukraine - he would do it without hesitation. But apparently right now the risk of that is way more threatening to his very existence than losing this war.

Edited April 16, 2022 by kraze

[Battlefront.com]

12 minutes ago, akd said:

This is DNR, not Russian Army, I think.  Isn’t “3rd Corps” the recently created formation filled with conscripts from occupied areas?

Oh for sure that tweet was about DNR (yes, I think prior to this there was only 1st and 2nd Corps).  However, it's applicable to the Russian Army because those DNR guys learned their trade craft from them.  I presume quite a bit of this goes on within the Russian Army in terms of personnel and definitely for equipment inventories.

Steve

[acrashb]

11 minutes ago, Huba said:

As resistant to EW as those might be, at some point you might not be able to operate them remotely,

Two things:

1) various improvements for battlefield communications are advancing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_Networking) and EW-resistant things like a laser communications mesh are evolving as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_mesh_network and https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44037/the-air-force-wants-laser-communication-pods-to-securely-link-fighter-aircraft-with-satellites 

2) as you say, autonomy.  Moral (more accurately ethical) questions or no, this is going to happen.  Phase one is partial autonomy, with a remote operator required to authorize target engagement, phase two is full autonomy.  I'm sure the industry has a finer-grained phase roadmap, but that's basically it.  It's creepy as hell, but going to happen.

Creepy:

 

 

[womble]

7 minutes ago, Huba said:

One thing I'd like add to this discussion is the implications of jamming on operations of all those UGV and UAV in the future. As resistant to EW as those might be, at some point you might not be able to operate them remotely, probably the closer you get to the line of contact the harder it will be to keep the link going, in a peer on peer conflict especially.

As I believe it's been surmised the Russians have discovered in Ukraine, jamming (enough to kill the enemy's C4) is a two-edged sword. And a jammer is a big signature waiting to get deleted; I don't think it's a big step from Javelin to "Local ARM" to be infantry-carried or mounted on one of the UGV swarm. I think the "inferior" UGV operator might try to jam the control channels, but the UGV organism will have antibodies to deal with the threat.

[Huba]

Just now, acrashb said:

Two things:

1) various improvements for battlefield communications are advancing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_Networking) and EW-resistant things like a laser communications mesh are evolving as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_mesh_network and https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44037/the-air-force-wants-laser-communication-pods-to-securely-link-fighter-aircraft-with-satellites 

2) as you say, autonomy.  Moral (more accurately ethical) questions or no, this is going to happen.  Phase one is partial autonomy, with a remote operator required to authorize target engagement, phase two is full autonomy.  I'm sure the industry has a finer-grained phase roadmap, but that's basically it.  It's creepy as hell, but going to happen.

Creepy:

 

 

I too think it's going to happen and am freaked out about it.

Regarding the various robust EW-resistant system, those are mostly of LOS type, like lasers and such. For UGV those are not gonna cut it, unless maybe through using UAVs as relay stations of some kind. Possible for sure.

A little sidetrack, but as far as armed drones are concerned, I always found this one to be particularly scary, though not very practical on the battlefield:

 

[db_zero]

1 hour ago, chrisl said:

Medium duration commercial drones + switchblades as CB could really change the artillery equation from the UA side.  

Looking at the 18 SP guns the US sent and the radar that tracks incoming rounds. 18 SP guns doesn't sound like much. My guess is 18 is a number that can be competently maned and maintained by the Ukrainians at the moment. These are not typical artillery pieces.

The 40,000 artillery rounds sent. Are they mostly HE rounds or are some smart rounds and rocket assisted too?

These 18 SP guns sent are designed to shoot and scoot with a high degree of speed and accuracy. They were designed for use in a fast moving environment in mind.

It may have been an artillery war since 2014, but I don't think what the Ukrainians have is in the same class of what the the US is sending in terms of digitization and integration to advanced fire control techniques.

Probably a reason why the Russians bitched so much about the latest shipments of arms. The last thing they want to see is Ukraine in possession of dozens or hundreds of modern US SP artillery.

These 18 SP guns will up the Ukrainians artillery game considerably. In layman’s terms it’s like going from a DOS PC running on a 1980 PC to a Windows X running on modern hardware.

Edited April 16, 2022 by db_zero