How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Taranis]

As usual for History :

 

[TheVulture]

3 hours ago, kraze said:

No idea why western press cares so much if he has cancer or whatever else at this point. With modern medicine (and he gets the absolute best of it) he can easily live for another 10 or even 20 years. So no illusions there.

The press (and humans in general) love to take a series of events and turn it in to a narrative. It can't just be a series of events. It has to be a series of events with cause and effect connecting them. So if Putin has cancer then we have to invent a way to turn it in to either a cause or an effect of the war, of at least of some of his decisions during the war.

History is particularly prone to doing this.

[Maciej Zwolinski]

5 hours ago, dan/california said:

Did you steal that from the Hammers Slammers Sci Fi series, or reinvent it on the spot? That is exactly how that author did it.

There is another very good sci-fi book which projects drone warfare even further into the future, "The Invincible" by Stanisław Lem. I am not sure how well known it is outside of Poland, but it is very good. It is not military sci-fi, but unmanned warfare is a part of the plot, and it is scary as hell  (wont' say more not to spoil it).  Notably it was written in 1964.

[Maciej Zwolinski]

7 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

The Russian bloggers fascinate me for many reasons, but their ability to be detached from reality is probably the most interesting thing about them.  I suspect some know full well that they are lying their asses off, just like radicals do all over the world.  Others, however, are mentally unable to decipher truth from fantasy and lack basic logic skills.

Some of them must genuinely come from very different assumptions.  I think they may take it as granted that Russian army will suck for at least the first year of the war, and then will become gradually more effective through sheer Darwinian attrition. And may assume  that in a long war, Russia will just outlast its opponent simply through the depth of manpower and materiel and disregard for losses.  And that the morale of Russian units just works in a diffferent way, the threshold of lossess and general misery after which the unit surrenders, runs away or mutinies being significantly higher then elsewhere. Etc.

Obviousy, there is a large amount of bat**** crazy stories about Boris Johnson directing the war from Kiev or brigades of Polish mercenaries which are just that. However, some of Russian military bloggers' viewpoint must be at least partially based in reality, because Russians, while not getting closer to any kind of victory, are not losing quickly as predicted by many in the West.

 

[Huba]

58 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

There is another very good sci-fi book which projects drone warfare even further into the future, "The Invincible" by Stanisław Lem. I am not sure how well known it is outside of Poland, but it is very good. It is not military sci-fi, but unmanned warfare is a part of the plot, and it is scary as hell  (wont' say more not to spoil it).  Notably it was written in 1964.

Absolutely my favorite hard-SF book! There was an audiobook released some time ago, with Olbrychski as the captain, and narrated by Krystyna Czubówna, definitely worth checking out

Edited November 4, 2022 by Huba

[The_Capt]

4 hours ago, chrisl said:

I generally agree with all of the above.  Especially starting with just integrating the sensors to existing platforms and expanding from there (that I bolded).  It's not a whole lot different than how autonomous cars are coming about - they've been adding sensors for more than a decade and slowly increasing the amount of assist.  The crowded environment and liability situation for driving probably create a larger barrier to implementation of higher level autonomy than the technical details - it's probably easier to start slipping real autonomy into a military environment by offloading tasks from vehicle operators.

A big part of the autonomy has to be the drones moving along with the units and acting like overwatch in the process.  They need to be like your animal familiar that knows where to go in front of you, watch out behind you, and telepathically transmit what they see around the corner for you.  And it has to go to the master "borg spotting" model so that anybody else who wants to see the same place gets a view (maybe with transparency/fade to indicate the age of the information)

Never heard of it, either.  I don't read much SciFi - my day job is too close to writing it .  The idea with the mesh essentially lets you match any gun to any controller.  Really not a lot different from how the UA is doing "Uber for artillery fire" but at a more local level for anti-drone gunfire.

 

The only thing I'd probably disagree with is using solar near the front lines.  It's dependent on too many things to be ideal and stable to get decent power:  daytime, sun out, not too cloudy, not hiding in the trees, hills and ridges not in the way etc.  You'd stick that a little ways back to charge the latest generation of high energy density batteries that you could just swap or fast charge when things come back to base briefly.  Solar for recharging the "wait and watch" drones is more reasonable - they'd be cheap, plentiful, and you wouldn't use them much so you can live with letting time make up for the very suboptimal conditions they'd spend much of their time in.  If they're stealthy you not only wouldn't care if they sometimes got stuck behind enemy lines, you'd be glad they were there spying for you.

This looks like a great conversation on UAS, I wish I could add a lot more but have been on the road agin.  I would offer that you are all describing a defensive system that would be successful, at least for awhile, in protecting what I assume is a “capital core” that looks like an all arms manoeuvre team - so mech infantry, tanks, engineers and artillery in support.

Problem with this is at least twofold.  First is the cost and complexity of the defensive system - it is huge in both dollars and data bandwidth.  AI/ML support is a must, as has been noted, but the ability to essentially counter a lethal cloud in order to protect that “capital core” will end up costing more than core itself.  You would also have to add on some sort of c-indirect fire capability in this Iron Dome++ net system.  

Ok, but you do get the traditional conventional heavy capital core back on the battlefield with enough survivability to be able to perform its original function - firepower and manoeuvre.  Or will it?  As far as I can read (and apologize if I missed this) this highly complex and costly protection system (also consider we will need an offensive system to do the same to the enemy) can fend off fully autonomous UAS swarms or at least give a force a fighting chance.  But what about UGS?  What about UGS hybrids?  What about sub-surface systems.  I am talking about a minefield that can move itself in front of an advancing land carrier-like group - because you are going to be able to see it for space - lie entirely dormant until the capital core is basically on top of it, and then autonomously attack that core from multiple dimensions with zero notice?  So we have mines that will scuttle across the ground and attack from below. UGS mines that can pop up and do direct kinetic attacks from offset range. UGS mines that can become UAS and smart attack from above basically from under the feet of the capital core.

None of this is even close to science fiction at this point, hell I am not sure it is even Horizon 3.  My point is that at this point I am not sure the “tank is dead” because the entirety of vehicle based manoeuvre could be dead in this environment.  A sophisticated APS system could be like putting armour on a horse in 1914.  There will come a point when trying to keep our traditional conventional capital core alive stop making sense…so what? We reinvent firepower and manoeuvre.  

The cloud becomes “the core”.  People are simply systems within that cloud, likely dismounted and disaggregated, or virtual - we need the brain forward, not the trigger finger anymore. 

[akd]

Ukrainians cooperate closely with Russia on new cosmonaut program:

 

Edited November 4, 2022 by akd

[Billy Ringo]

A few random and simplistic comments from the non-military contingent that might be worthy of consideration, or not:

1. At some point, the cost of both the offensive and defensive components of this future battlefield as described in the last few posts is going to limit the number of participants.   Like--China and the US and that's about it and, at some point, even those two may not have deep enough pockets. Other countries may be able to craft components but not an entire battlefield arsenal.  Is it possible we've reached the point where pure financial considerations halt and/or limit what can be developed, tested and deployed in battle even if those weapons are known to be game-changers?

2. As Capt just mentioned, the undersea naval aspect of mass deployed weapons is a game changer.  What if Taiwan simply mined the Taiwan Straits with massive and diverse underwater mines/torpedoes that could be maneuvered strategically?  (Which may be already in place.)

3. How would a mass of drones handle a series of thermo barbaric or electro-magnetic blasts?  Could a swarm be taken en masse instead of trying to nail each one individually?   Could either of those techniques be used over an enemy's location before drones are launched to electronically disable them?

 

As always, a HUGE thanks to all the participants on this forum---amazing and informative content.

 

[Lethaface]

17 hours ago, danfrodo said:

funny!  But do you think they are less careful than the folks at fast food restaurants?  They cooked it all quite thoroughly, so just as safe as most places.  But I refuse to go negative on such a happy looking post.  Dude certainly looked like he knew what he was doing. 

I just thought it was funny they used the grenade on a stick to smash the chicken ;-).

And no I don't think they're uncareful or creating a food hazard for themselves, but that grenade will probably have some salmonella bacteria on it so there's that.

[Battlefront.com]

4 hours ago, kraze said:

No idea why western press cares so much if he has cancer or whatever else at this point.

Because if he is sick, very sick, this means uncertainty within the regime.  Uncertainty + stress = change.  Nobody here thinks that Putin dying won't make Russia a happy and friendly place on Earth, but it matters.  Things could get worse, they could get better, they might stay about the same.  We won't know until after it happens.

4 hours ago, kraze said:

With modern medicine (and he gets the absolute best of it) he can easily live for another 10 or even 20 years. So no illusions there.

Yeah, no   First of all, it seems he's been sick for at least a year if not several.  Cancer is not always treatable, especially not pancreatic cancer.  I live near the best cancer treatment centers in the world and I've known people that died not too long after getting their diagnosis.  In other cases people survive, but they are effectively invalids.

Western medicine is great, but there's plenty of diseases it can't do much about.  If Putin has a "bad case" of a nasty type of cancer, I doubt he'd make it more than 5 years.  And as I said, we don't now how much time is already on his clock (if he has it).

Therefore, the questions remain... is Putin really sick?  If so, what does he have?  And if he has something, what stage is it at?  I think there's enough evidence to suggest that he is definitely sick with something, so it really comes down to what does he have and how far along is it.

Steve

[Butschi]

33 minutes ago, Billy Ringo said:

At some point, the cost of both the offensive and defensive components of this future battlefield as described in the last few posts is going to limit the number of participants. 

On the contrary, I think. Latest generation hardware like MBTs and fighter jets, etc. are a very expensive (and comparably easy to track and restrict) and complex commodity. A Cold War era T72 doesn't do much good if the other side has Abrams.

Drones are cheap and far less complex and are produced already for the mass market. All the components for making them autonomous and connected are basically accessible to everyone as long as they have access to components for consumer electronics. Competitive chips are something of a bottleneck but not nearly as much as all the stuff in a modern MBT. A high tech military will have better equipment but generally, I think, the technology will make waging war more feasible for smaller budgets not less.

[Beleg85]

1 hour ago, akd said:

Ukrainians cooperate closely with Russia on new cosmonaut program:

Insane video. Trying to figure out order of commands for this ballsy Ukrainian AT soldier in CM engine...Move Fast-Pause-Target-Move fast

To change the mood into more sober, here horrific video (no thumbnail, watch at your own discretion) of Ukrainian APC followed by infantry squad being blown on mines. Description says its IED, but there are clearly visible two lines of AT mines directly on the road that were for some reason not seen by the driver nor the infantry. Really tragic incident, it seems most of soldiers here were killed or seriously wounded. Reportedly somewhere near Svatove.

https://twitter.com/wolski_jaros/status/1588273845001105409

Edited November 4, 2022 by Beleg85

[Taranis]

"Members of a Ukrainian artillery unit fire towards Kherson on October 28, 2022. BULENT KILIC / AFP"

* 2S3 Akatsiya

[acrashb]

15 minutes ago, Beleg85 said:

Trying to figure out order of commands for this ballsy Ukrainian AT soldier in CM engine...Move Fast-Pause-Target-Move fast

CM needs a shoot-and-scoot command for at least anti-tank squads.  Why would an RPG gunner hang out around the corner of a building after firing a rocket at a tank 200m away?  Because of the up-to-60-second delay on turn based.

Ideally the same thing for armour and, for that matter, regular infantry.  Pop up over a hilltop, a few seconds of automatic fire, and crawl / run away before every asset on the other side of the hill spots, turns and returns fire.

 

[Kinophile]

20 minutes ago, acrashb said:

CM needs a shoot-and-scoot command for at least anti-tank squads.  Why would an RPG gunner hang out around the corner of a building after firing a rocket at a tank 200m away?  Because of the up-to-60-second delay on turn based.

Ideally the same thing for armour and, for that matter, regular infantry.  Pop up over a hilltop, a few seconds of automatic fire, and crawl / run away before every asset on the other side of the hill spots, turns and returns fire.

 

This this this this. 

If the tank AI can scan and target within 15-30s then the infantry AI should be able to fire and move. I've lost many AT squads to the turn delay and it artificially (yes yes I know the whole thing is artificial) corrupts my "tactics".

Well  I call them tactics...not desperate  flailing at all at all... 

 

[Chibot Mk IX]

Actually, you can use the combination of pause and withdraw/fast order to make a poor-man's shoot & scoot command

 

But I also hope shoot-and-scoot be added into future CM game (Isn't this command in CMx1?) 

[kevinkin]

https://www.reuters.com/world/turkey-says-sweden-finland-not-yet-done-enough-under-nato-deal-2022-11-03/

At this point, maybe we should be more upset with an unpredictable NATO member than the all too predictable Swiss.

[danfrodo]

21 minutes ago, Chibot Mk IX said:

Actually, you can use the combination of pause and withdraw/fast order to make a poor-man's shoot & scoot command

 

But I also hope shoot-and-scoot be added into future CM game (Isn't this command in CMx1?) 

I've done shoot & scoot w javelin teams, especially in SF2, to great success.  But it depends on how well the team can see the target.  You might think you shoot & scoot just doesn't work, but the team takes time to spot & acquire depending on the visual situation.  My best success was javelin team goes up on roof w perfect visibility and shoots (pause) in 20 seconds, then then come down to safety.  

A better command in CM might be "go here until you shoot, then go here".  The pre-determined pause is the issue.

[TheVulture]

1 hour ago, Chibot Mk IX said:

Actually, you can use the combination of pause and withdraw/fast order to make a poor-man's shoot & scoot command

 

But I also hope shoot-and-scoot be added into future CM game (Isn't this command in CMx1?)

The problem with that is (as I'm sure you are aware) that you can't tie the scooting to the shooting. Half the time the guy won't get the spot quickly, will just be lining up the shot, and then the timer is up and he's off 2 seconds too early. Or spots and fires straight away and then hangs around for 15 seconds to await retaliation.

But it is a very hard UI problem to trade off giving players control over the they need once in a while, versus making the who interface unworkable complex. If you have to say 30 parameters before you can issue a simple move command, then that's useless. If you don't have 30 parameters, then you are going to run in to a situation where you can't give an offer that does exactly what you want, and you get to curse as your pixeltruppen die to a problem you'd foreseen but didn't have the tools to prevent.

[sburke]

CM commands aren't really relevant to the current state of war in Ukraine......  just sayin

[Huba]

New weapons package from the US. HAWK refurbishment is IMO the most important item on this list. I couldn't find any confirmation if US still has some in it's inventory - there were suggestions that all were scrapped. Luckily, this seems not to be the case.
1100 drones is a rather massive number too. And there's only one place to use these boats I guess - just announcing them puts pressure on the RU.

And on tanks:

Poland still should have around 300 T-72s in various stages on disrepair, other countries might have some too. I guess it's much easier to acquire such vehicles, compared to operable ones.

Edited November 4, 2022 by Huba

[Zeleban]

 

[sross112]

4 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Therefore, the questions remain... is Putin really sick?  If so, what does he have?  And if he has something, what stage is it at?  I think there's enough evidence to suggest that he is definitely sick with something, so it really comes down to what does he have and how far along is it.

Or maybe he isn't terminally ill. Maybe he just has some really nasty hemorrhoids (explains him holding onto the table fiercely while having to sit down and the sometimes odd, frustrated, in pain look on his face). 

He wakes up the other morning, starts reading the newspapers and sees that sources within his government "leaked" that he was terminally ill. He thinks, "I'm not terminally ill, just these damned thermobaric marbles hanging from my anus." Then the next thought is "Oh crap." because he realizes that forces within his government have just announced that he is going to die.  

Gives a good cover story for whoever decides it is time for him to die of lead poisoning. "Poor Vlad put up a good fight, but his old heart just suddenly gave out." It does appear that he is still very popular with the people and therefore there needs to be a cover story in place in order to have a smooth transition of power when the time comes.

[cesmonkey]

How good are those M1117 Armored Security Vehicles that the U.S. announced today?

[chrisl]

5 hours ago, The_Capt said:

This looks like a great conversation on UAS, I wish I could add a lot more but have been on the road agin.  I would offer that you are all describing a defensive system that would be successful, at least for awhile, in protecting what I assume is a “capital core” that looks like an all arms manoeuvre team - so mech infantry, tanks, engineers and artillery in support.

Problem with this is at least twofold.  First is the cost and complexity of the defensive system - it is huge in both dollars and data bandwidth.  AI/ML support is a must, as has been noted, but the ability to essentially counter a lethal cloud in order to protect that “capital core” will end up costing more than core itself.  You would also have to add on some sort of c-indirect fire capability in this Iron Dome++ net system.  

Ok, but you do get the traditional conventional heavy capital core back on the battlefield with enough survivability to be able to perform its original function - firepower and manoeuvre.  Or will it?  As far as I can read (and apologize if I missed this) this highly complex and costly protection system (also consider we will need an offensive system to do the same to the enemy) can fend off fully autonomous UAS swarms or at least give a force a fighting chance.  But what about UGS?  What about UGS hybrids?  What about sub-surface systems.  I am talking about a minefield that can move itself in front of an advancing land carrier-like group - because you are going to be able to see it for space - lie entirely dormant until the capital core is basically on top of it, and then autonomously attack that core from multiple dimensions with zero notice?  So we have mines that will scuttle across the ground and attack from below. UGS mines that can pop up and do direct kinetic attacks from offset range. UGS mines that can become UAS and smart attack from above basically from under the feet of the capital core.

None of this is even close to science fiction at this point, hell I am not sure it is even Horizon 3.  My point is that at this point I am not sure the “tank is dead” because the entirety of vehicle based manoeuvre could be dead in this environment.  A sophisticated APS system could be like putting armour on a horse in 1914.  There will come a point when trying to keep our traditional conventional capital core alive stop making sense…so what? We reinvent firepower and manoeuvre.  

The cloud becomes “the core”.  People are simply systems within that cloud, likely dismounted and disaggregated, or virtual - we need the brain forward, not the trigger finger anymore. 

The capital core provides two things: Energy storage and strategic direction.  And maybe the drone swarm can collectively manage the strategic direction part, like a flock of waterfowl, but that's probably further off unless we start hybridizing the drones with waterfowl (it all comes back to the birds...)

But really, it's all about precision vs. mass of energy transport (even now).  Low speed energy transport is maneuver: you're moving men and weapons and sensors into position using a lot of energy distributed over all of them and spending it slowly.  When they shoot at something you're moving a bunch of stored energy faster, with the speed variable depending on bullet/artillery shell/rocket and, for anything bigger than a bullet, with a bunch of stored chemical energy inside to be released *very* rapidly with a bang.  So fast energy use is firepower.  Those units also use energy to communicate.  And the problem of all modern civilization is really how do you get enough energy to where you want it to do what you want to do - there are limits to how densely we know how to pack it to make it useable for different applications (food, liquid fuel, battery chemistry, fission, fusion).

We have easily knowable targets on how energy efficient the drones have to be.  I'm totally guessing, but I suppose an active, competent infantryman needs to consume 5000-10000 kCal/day depending on size and activity level, and not including shooting anything or comms beyond shouting.  If you don't put that in regularly he becomes less and less useful until he becomes fertilizer.  But a skinny, lazy one on watch might need only 2000 kCal/day, if you can manage to organize your forces like that.  You can split a squad down to individual elements that use that much, but no further.  

But suppose I make 5 sensor drones that each have average consumption of 400 kCal/day - they maybe use most of it on day one locomoting to their station, then they just sit and observe, compute occasionally, and transmit. Not so different from my battery powered security camera system has fist-sized HD cameras that I only have to charge every 3-4 months if there's a lot of activity.  And they communicate everything they see back to a hub that uses much more energy (writing the data costs a lot more than transmitting it or computing with it).  So I can probably replace an infantryman on watch with a lot more than 5 of those AVs (and I'm using AV for autonomous vehicle to apply to air/ground/subsurface/subspace/teleport/whatever).  The thing they don't do is shoot back, but the "attack" version would probably need to carry chemical propellant and a small number of projectiles.  For a battlefield environment they might use lasers for optical comm - you can transmit data with a *much* lower power laser than to toast something. And if you stop feeding them a while they become as useless as the infantryman who you starved into fertilizer, but unlike him you can revive them by changing or charging the batteries.

[edit: and it takes 18 years and 8 weeks to make a basic infantryman to replace the one you forgot to feed. But you can take a couple hundred of those infantrymen, and really people of any age over about 15, to run a factory that produces thousands of those drones that replace them. You do need a full advanced civilization supply chain to support them, but they all get to live much more comfortably than if you gave them a rifle or a pike and sent them into the field]

And you can continue along that line for the various offensive AVs. We already have a baseline of energy transport and consumption so we need to make them at least that energy efficient.  And that's why I refer to the capital core as the "Drone Carrier" or "AV Carrier" like a modern aircraft carrier - just like today with getting MREs and ammo to the infantry, you have to get batteries and ammo to the AVs.  The things that you get from using AVs instead of people is a) you mind a lot less if a cheap AV is killed, and b) you can distribute that energy consumption into smaller and smaller units.  Artillery shells get smarter and smarter and you use the "bang" of the initial propellant charge to get them close to the target, where they communicate on who gets to blow up who at the other end (this was already in development in the 1990s)

A civilian analogy is deep sea (~10 km depth) science exploration.  I can't really send people that deep to do detailed observations and manipulation of small things. I also can't make a single precision AV (say the size of a housecat) that can go from the surface all the way down to the interesting spot on its own - it costs too much energy and the environment in between is too unpredictable. But I can have a ship on the surface burning bunker fuel (Main Capital Core) that manages a small fleet of large AVs that are each the size of a small car (Secondary Capital Cores A through F), and each of them can carry and supply a dozen smaller AVs the size of housecats or large fish (AVs A(i through xii) through F(i through xii)).  The ship goes out to sea to supply energy regionally, the large AVs go to somewhere near target sites, and the small AVs go back and forth between the precision target sites and the intermediate AVs to recharge and dump data.  Because the fish don't really organize to fight back they don't have to spend a lot of energy on autonomous defense, but if the fish had guns, I'd use some fraction of them to protect the core, some to fight the fish offensively, and a few to get the data.

So the tank isn't "dead" so much as it sits further back and is more of an AV tender, much like an aircraft carrier is mostly an airplane tender/floating airport.  

4 hours ago, Lethaface said:

I just thought it was funny they used the grenade on a stick to smash the chicken ;-).

And no I don't think they're uncareful or creating a food hazard for themselves, but that grenade will probably have some salmonella bacteria on it so there's that.

It's just the UA version of pineapple chicken.

3 hours ago, acrashb said:

CM needs a shoot-and-scoot command for at least anti-tank squads.  Why would an RPG gunner hang out around the corner of a building after firing a rocket at a tank 200m away?  Because of the up-to-60-second delay on turn based.

To get a video for TikTok.

Edited November 4, 2022 by chrisl