How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[kevinkin]

Not an expert, but the “Iceman” in the Alps (1991) was found with arrows that contained fletching. The find is dated to 5,300 and 5,200 years ago. I see reports that fletching goes back 10K years. It's not hard to imagine all cultures using these stabilizers once their enemy discovered them. Once everyone was using them the "arrow race" was over distance and power. (Long box; cross bow). History abounds with descriptions of the decisive use of light cavalry. Mobility and precision all in one system before fire arms took over. The Moguls had an almost unlimited supply of horses and arrows with terrain well suited for there use. Some say only the European forests stopped them, or their land became to expansive to administer. 

Edited March 10, 2023 by kevinkin

[Holien]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Not until we get into some seriously different manufacturing processes.

Not to sidetrack too much but I am sure you are keeping an eye on 3d printing....

This has changed the way places like Jag Landrover work and not too many steps to transition to factory level work...

 

[Battlefront.com]

Distilling a few different things from the last couple of pages, it looks like we're seeing the following:

1. Generally speaking, Russia has not given up on offensive activity even though the weather is turning bad and previous attacks did not go very well.  The same three general areas of attacks (Svatove-Kreminna, Bakhmut, Vuhledar-Avdiivka).
2. Wagner's importance in the Bakhmut sector is on the decline due to losses and being deliberately starved of resources.
3. Continuing offensive activities in Bakhmut are likely to be conduced by VDV and other units previously licking their wounds from Kherson.  Probably from the north as the south hasn't gone well and the center seems to be stalled because of the river.
4. ISW (and others) see the possibility of another push in Vuhledar, but some sources disagree with that assessment:
   https://news.yahoo.com/russian-offensive-vuhledar-currently-defence-104443414.html
5. There is information that Russia is moving the remaining units in Belarus to Luhansk, likely to rekindle attacks in the Svatove-Kreminna area.
6. The withdrawal of forces from Belarus indicates that Russia has "tapped out" the last of its mobiks gathered in 2022.
7. We are seeing more and more evidence that Russia is running critically short on ammunition, in particular artillery shells.  Whether it's that stockpiles no longer exist or what remains is more difficult to get into Ukraine is unknown.  What does appear to be true is that easy and plentiful access to artillery is over for Russia until a new source is found (e.g. North Korea or China).

Russia's manpower issues are of critical importance.  Indications are that Russian frontline positions are thinly held, especially given the large losses suffered this year.  It seems that Russia is committing the last of its on-hand reserves to the front, either as individual replacements or whole units that were rebuilding in either Belarus or Russia. 

If Russia expends these on fruitless offensive activities, then they will once again face the situation they had last fall when there simply wasn't enough bodies to stop Ukraine from advancing.  At that point either Russia conducts yet another rushed mobilization and deployment (days, not weeks) or we see another operational collapse at the very least.  Strategic collapse is very much on the table.

Steve

[Beleg85]

Latest Kofman podcast. Leaving aside issues with credibility of his analysis, they finally go into specifics of Ukrainian force generation, assessing it at two batalions a month of Western-trained troops (not sure if they can be viewed in the same category as soldiers lost at Bakhmut, though). Still barely started to listen, if somebody has more excerpts valid for topics we touched before on this board (pro/against) feel free to enumerate it there.

 

Edited March 10, 2023 by Beleg85

[Astrophel]

27 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

I'm talking explicitly about the defense industry's needs

A long time ago I thought the military world in the west had left behind the idea about special requirements for military applications.  State of the art applications are best based on consumer technology for quality, leading-edge performance, and price.  The old world of "military specs" (mil specs) resulted in too many failures in the field, obsolete performance, and huge costs - bit like the russian performance today.  

Probably this is not what you mean.  But for the military applications you describe we do not need state-of-the-consumer-art technology such as enabled by ASML (Netherlands).  At least not in the short-term.  Conceiving of China as a military opponent does change the equation as they are very familiar with consumer technologies - unlike the Russians - and can likely develop new weapons needing the features of the latest chip technology.

Drone technology is educative.  Simply applying readily available consumer technology with some smart software and basic robotics makes a big difference, as the Ukrainians are demonstrating.

[Battlefront.com]

46 minutes ago, Holien said:

Not to sidetrack too much but I am sure you are keeping an eye on 3d printing....

Oh yes, very much so   The problem with 3D printing is volume production.  Coincidentally I am watching the Amazon Prime show "Peripheral" where the main character about 15 years from now works in a 3D printing shop modeled after the brief period of "pre-press" shops in the early 1990s.  This is already happening.  A friend of mine teaches 3D printing in primary school students (in the US it is what is called a "charter school").  We are a largely poor and rural state, so I can only imagine how much more of this is going on in places like California and Massachusetts.

Fun fact... nearby is the largest 3D printer in the world.  It made a boat for the Navy.  Er, but be warned... if you think the music in Ukrainian combat videos is harsh on the ears, mute this video before you start!

And a look at the engineering (leave volume on for this one):

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

2 minutes ago, Astrophel said:

A long time ago I thought the military world in the west had left behind the idea about special requirements for military applications.  State of the art applications are best based on consumer technology for quality, leading-edge performance, and price.  The old world of "military specs" (mil specs) resulted in too many failures in the field, obsolete performance, and huge costs - bit like the russian performance today.  

Probably this is not what you mean.  But for the military applications you describe we do not need state-of-the-consumer-art technology such as enabled by ASML (Netherlands).  At least not in the short-term.  Conceiving of China as a military opponent does change the equation as they are very familiar with consumer technologies - unlike the Russians - and can likely develop new weapons needing the features of the latest chip technology.

Drone technology is educative.  Simply applying readily available consumer technology with some smart software and basic robotics makes a big difference, as the Ukrainians are demonstrating.

The most problematic issue for Western defense industry is a reliance on simple parts made elsewhere to keep costs down (think screws, plates of specialized alloys, etc.) and extremely specialized technological components (chips being the most relevant to this discussion).  There are laws which restrict how much of this can be done outside of the US, for example, but it's riddled with loopholes.  Ironically, many of the same loopholes that allow Russia to dodge sanctions are used by defense contractors to dodge source requirements.  Years ago there was a story on the TV show "60 Minutes" that exposed how the HARM missile was dependent upon foreign made parts even though technically there weren't supposed to be any.

It's a complex topic and I for sure am not an expert.  My point is that the needs are narrow, the volume relatively low, and the ability to throw money at the problem is viable.  The more difficult problem to work around is the reliance on rare Earth minerals that are extremely vulnerable to supply chain disruption.  Especially because Russia has so much of it under their direct control.

If you want to get scared, look up discussions on Helium.  It's not a fun topic to dive into, that's for sure.

Steve

[sross112]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Oh, I am NOT optimistic at all.  There are two reasons why China will retain a disproportional amount of industrial production no matter what the West does to "on shore" manufacturing.  The first is cost.  A tectonic shift in baseline costs would have to happen before normal market incentives lined up to justify domestic production.  The second is capacity.  Even if a Western country could somehow make the cost structure work, it would have to deal with the volume issue.  There's no way a country of a few dozen millions or even a few hundred millions can compete with the capacity of a nation with a billion people.  Not until we get into some seriously different manufacturing processes.

I agree in that I don't see the west being able to totally replace the manufacturing output of China for quite awhile. However, we are already seeing displacement in certain things back to the west. You mentioned the chips which is pretty high profile (intel started up two big factories in the US two years ago), but I think we will see the cheap stuff be the majority in the short term, then the heavy stuff, and lastly the tech stuff.

I say this because where my folks live in the upper midwest a Ramen noodle factory got built last year. It replaced the one they had in China. The labor costs there have increased significantly over the last ten years, supply chain issues, and cost of shipping all come together to the point that it is now cheaper to make it here stateside. This will probably become more and more of a trend due to pricing and others have said that China and Xi have become harder and harder to work with as well. 

With the heavy industry I expect it will shift back to the west as a lot of that was sourced out of Russia (pig iron, steel, aluminum, etc). The same factors of labor, shipping, politics, and supply chain issues apply to China sourcing. Mexico has been industrializing the past 10-20 years and might be able to absorb a lot of the manufacturing not to mention South East Asia. South America also has a lot of potential. India? So it isn't that China is irreplaceable, it just isn't replaceable in the short term. Give the rest of the world 10 years and a lot of what has made China important could be shifted to other sources. 

[danfrodo]

32 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Oh yes, very much so   The problem with 3D printing is volume production.  Coincidentally I am watching the Amazon Prime show "Peripheral" where the main character about 15 years from now works in a 3D printing shop modeled after the brief period of "pre-press" shops in the early 1990s.  This is already happening.  A friend of mine teaches 3D printing in primary school students (in the US it is what is called a "charter school").  We are a largely poor and rural state, so I can only imagine how much more of this is going on in places like California and Massachusetts.

Fun fact... nearby is the largest 3D printer in the world.  It made a boat for the Navy.  Er, but be warned... if you think the music in Ukrainian combat videos is harsh on the ears, mute this video before you start!

Steve

I've been working mostly in 3D printing (aka additive manufacturing, aka AM) since 2015, though leaving this job in a couple weeks after 22 years (to make robots!).  AM has great promise and also a lot of challenges.  One challenge is about DFAM (design for additive manufacturing).  People don't know how to take advantage of what AM can do and so just throw their injection molded or machined designs into AM, which is generally quite sub optimum. 

Other times, it's just people doing incredibly stupid things and then saying "look, AM doesn't work!".  Last week contact from an app engineer for my company in east asia who said a potential customer was making jig for factory use & it broke -- he said he was done w AM, we are trying to educate the idiot.  He took an aluminum part (E = stiffnesss modulus = 70,000MPa) and just switched to nylon PA12 (E=2000MPa) w same design.  Of course it f-ing broke!  They gave up 35X in stiffness!  To switch they would need more section to overcome the loss of stiffness, which is what my little team is doing right now.  

In general, AM will have less robust material properties than traditional methods, mostly in build direction (strength b/w layers), but you can design while accounting for that.  

Added note:  I've been to Oak Ridge Nat Labs AM lab twice, they were doing crazy stuff there, so impressive.  Like making molds for wind turbine blades, all kinds of things VERY large and regular size

Edited March 10, 2023 by danfrodo

[kevinkin]

East vs west manufacturing is similar to the miliary question "quality vs quantity". Can ill-trained masses outproduced a smaller number of well trained workers. Production is not counting the number of bars of soap produced. Production is measured in the value of products manufactured for consumers. Ideally, from the west's POV, China would (an is) producing necessities at a cost driven down by the Walmarts on the world. The west would be the designers of those products but also luxury items. Once a new luxury item becomes an old necessity, production is shifted to a low cost labor pool. The Apple model from 15 years ago. The issue is that China wants a piece of the design process and luxury markets where margins much higher than plastic xmas toys. They don't want to be seen as a tool for the west. Meanwhile, to keep costs down, they pollute their country and the west says nice and clean behind draftsmen tables or in air conditioned factories. China hates that. The west will never go back to a low cost sweat shop type labor force. So any inroads China can make in the west's hold on value added product development is all gravy. 

 

Edited March 10, 2023 by kevinkin

[sburke]

poor Lavrov.  You know he'd like to threaten but it just doesn't carry the same weight anymore.

Russia cautions regional allies against aligning with the United States (yahoo.com)

[sburke]

3 hours ago, Vanir Ausf B said:

I give little credence to crystal balls, but for what it's worth...

_________

The chief of Lithuania's military intelligence said Russia has enough resources to continue the war in Ukraine for two more years at the current intensity.

"The resources which Russia has at the moment would be enough to continue the war at the present intensity for two years", Lithuania's intelligence chief Elegijus Paulavicius told reporters.

Russia uses "long chains of intermediaries" to procure sanctioned Western technologies, and its army is being adapted for long-term confrontation with the West and will prioritize efforts to rebuild its military presence in the Baltic Sea region, where it will remain "a threat and a source of instability".

___________

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-can-fight-ukraine-two-more-years-current-intensity-lithuania-says-2023-03-09/

I saw this too and it left me confused.  We are clearly seeing signs the recruitment process is falling short in terms of maintaining both quality and quantity.  At the same time the shortage of artillery is becoming more pronounced.  Russia is starting to field T62s and T80Bs.  Exactly how are they rebuilding to be a threat?  I get this sense that the nations that border Russia see this as an opportunity to just completely bury Russia, so it has no capability to threaten for at least a couple generations.  Not a bad plan to be honest.

Edited March 10, 2023 by sburke

[Battlefront.com]

Article on the continuing problems Lukashenko and Putin have with partisan/resistance activities within Belarus:

https://news.yahoo.com/anti-russia-guerrillas-belarus-two-073519897.html

It would seem this problem is getting more consequential.  Certainly higher profile after the aircraft hit.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

 And just in time for the weekend... a bit of humor.  This is not only funny but it is quite detailed and shows the guys behind it are paying close attention to the war.  Enjoy...

Steve

[The_Capt]

Just now, Battlefront.com said:

Distilling a few different things from the last couple of pages, it looks like we're seeing the following:

1. Generally speaking, Russia has not given up on offensive activity even though the weather is turning bad and previous attacks did not go very well.  The same three general areas of attacks (Svatove-Kreminna, Bakhmut, Vuhledar-Avdiivka).
2. Wagner's importance in the Bakhmut sector is on the decline due to losses and being deliberately starved of resources.
3. Continuing offensive activities in Bakhmut are likely to be conduced by VDV and other units previously licking their wounds from Kherson.  Probably from the north as the south hasn't gone well and the center seems to be stalled because of the river.
4. ISW (and others) see the possibility of another push in Vuhledar, but some sources disagree with that assessment:
   https://news.yahoo.com/russian-offensive-vuhledar-currently-defence-104443414.html
5. There is information that Russia is moving the remaining units in Belarus to Luhansk, likely to rekindle attacks in the Svatove-Kreminna area.
6. The withdrawal of forces from Belarus indicates that Russia has "tapped out" the last of its mobiks gathered in 2022.
7. We are seeing more and more evidence that Russia is running critically short on ammunition, in particular artillery shells.  Whether it's that stockpiles no longer exist or what remains is more difficult to get into Ukraine is unknown.  What does appear to be true is that easy and plentiful access to artillery is over for Russia until a new source is found (e.g. North Korea or China).

Russia's manpower issues are of critical importance.  Indications are that Russian frontline positions are thinly held, especially given the large losses suffered this year.  It seems that Russia is committing the last of its on-hand reserves to the front, either as individual replacements or whole units that were rebuilding in either Belarus or Russia. 

If Russia expends these on fruitless offensive activities, then they will once again face the situation they had last fall when there simply wasn't enough bodies to stop Ukraine from advancing.  At that point either Russia conducts yet another rushed mobilization and deployment (days, not weeks) or we see another operational collapse at the very least.  Strategic collapse is very much on the table.

Steve

To this add the UA upward trajectory.  We are seeing more and more next-gen weaponry showing up on the battlefield.  Force generation is going strong in the backfield.  The UA is definitely taking losses but they are replacing them with better trained and equipped forces.  Ammo is the only real concern but I am really not sure how close the the actual line we are with respect to reserves.  Further, as the UA leans heavily on PGM they do not need as much ammo to get the same jobs done.  The RA is the one who was using WWI levels of fires to try and overwhelm defences - they had better saved some for the counter-attack.

 

[dan/california]

 

8 hours ago, DesertFox said:

 

 

The use of drones to drop grenades in disabled/abandoned vehicles is a brilliant low cost solution.

3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Oh, I am NOT optimistic at all.  There are two reasons why China will retain a disproportional amount of industrial production no matter what the West does to "on shore" manufacturing.  The first is cost.  A tectonic shift in baseline costs would have to happen before normal market incentives lined up to justify domestic production.  The second is capacity.  Even if a Western country could somehow make the cost structure work, it would have to deal with the volume issue.  There's no way a country of a few dozen millions or even a few hundred millions can compete with the capacity of a nation with a billion people.  Not until we get into some seriously different manufacturing processes.

For sure this is correct.  In fact, I read an article last night bemoaning the major decline in higher education enrollment as a "crisis" and "disaster".  I beg to differ.  The sooner we readjust our labor force to thinking the only jobs are coding or pouring coffee the better.  Of course this requires incentivizing people to take the jobs that are not being fulfilled.  The article said part of the "problem" with the declining higher education enrollment is that industries are now paying people to go to trade schools, offering signing bonuses, and paying them vastly higher wages than even a few years ago.  This is a problem how?!?

For most of it, yes.  But for munitions?  No.  That is a problem that can be fixed much sooner.  Especially if money is thrown at the problem instead of trying to do it on the cheap.

Having realistic expectations is the best way to avoid being disappointed.

The US can bring chip manufacturing back to its shores fairly easily.  The manufacturing technology, and much of the equipment, is already manufactured here in the US.  Unlike wind turbines, this means existing infrastructure needs to be scaled up rather than started from scratch.  As for costs of doing so, this is where government incentives (i.e. money) can make a huge difference.  As for the labor force, these types of jobs pay well and so it's not going to take a lot to get people to leave their jobs at Starbucks or forego 6 figure student loan debt to get them to apply for a position.

Munitions are similar.  They are already produced here in the US, so scaling that up becomes a fairly straight forward challenge to tackle.  The components for smart munitions, however, will be trickier yet totally doable.  The range of components needed for such weapons are narrow and the cost incentives high.  Free market loves that sort of dynamic. On top of that, volume is very small on the scale of things. 

In general the US defense industry is less dependent upon China than probably any other sector.  Money comes from the government and the people who control spending have a very different cost/benefit calculation than a for profit company does.  Volume is low, which means production capacity is not as problematic as it would be for other things.  And fundamentally the industrial base for producing defense products is already well established.  It won't be easy or cheap, but it is viable and in some ways fairly quick to realize.

The rest of the US economy?  Well, let's just say it's not like what I just described.

Steve

 

 

2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Looks like you and LLF are both misunderstanding what I'm talking about.  I'm talking explicitly about the defense industry's needs.  That is "easy" by comparison to trying to retool the entire economy.  And as I mentioned, and you did as well, there's a massive financial disincentive to try and ween the entire economy off of China, which means either governments mandate it happen or isn't going to happen proactively.  So this is not a discussion about cutting China out of industrial production generally, just where it matters.

And personally, I am fine with half measures.  Cutting out China by partnering with a friendly democracy is at least a better short term solution.  Taiwan, though, is problematic as in the event of a war with China that source becomes very insecure quickly.

There's three types of chip based technology that is making a massive difference in this war:

1.  chips used for communications equipment (everything from a hand radio to satellite coms)

2.  chips used for delivery systems (drones in particular)

3.  chips used for PGMs (HIMARs, Excalibur, HARM, Javelin, etc.)

If you took these three types of equipment away from Ukraine, this would be a partisan war on a grand scale.

Steve

 

Getting stuff into Walmart is a separate problem. But we have the ability to produce things like GMLRS, and 155 rounds both guided and not at at orders of magnitude higher scale. The catch is you have to write a huge check up front for the factory. But once you get the thing up and running you don't people to do much more than watch and perform maintenance on the machines. Labor cost become almost irrelevant.

The video below is from Tesla, forgive me.

 

Quote

https://www.google.com/search?q=giga+factorymovie&oq=giga+factorymovie&aqs=chrome..69i57j33i10i160i395l2.13403j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:b4c746a0,vid:7-4yOx1CnXE

You just have to START with a plan to produce a quarter of a million shells a month, and get over the front end cost.

[Bearstronaut]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

If Russia expends these on fruitless offensive activities, then they will once again face the situation they had last fall when there simply wasn't enough bodies to stop Ukraine from advancing.  At that point either Russia conducts yet another rushed mobilization and deployment (days, not weeks) or we see another operational collapse at the very least.  Strategic collapse is very much on the table.

I do wonder where Russia is going to get the bodies for a new mobilization. They were conscripting convicts and middle-aged men in the first mobilization. That's bottom of the barrel stuff. No offense to the middle aged men here but I'm 34 and left active duty for the reserves last year because I didn't think my body could take it for much longer. Taking dudes in their mid-40s, giving them a couple weeks of training, and throwing them into the fight is what Nazi Germany was doing in spring 1945 when they literally had no other choice.

[Sojourner]

There was an interesting report yesterday on the difficulty the US is facing updating the nuclear stockpile. It's not limited to sourcing parts and materials but also a  shortage of specialized craft and trade workers.

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/09/1162390573/the-push-to-rebuild-the-u-s-s-nuclear-stockpile

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

To this add the UA upward trajectory.  We are seeing more and more next-gen weaponry showing up on the battlefield.  Force generation is going strong in the backfield.  The UA is definitely taking losses but they are replacing them with better trained and equipped forces.  Ammo is the only real concern but I am really not sure how close the the actual line we are with respect to reserves.  Further, as the UA leans heavily on PGM they do not need as much ammo to get the same jobs done.  The RA is the one who was using WWI levels of fires to try and overwhelm defences - they had better saved some for the counter-attack.

 

Additionally...

Putin might act as if he's got everything under control, and perhaps he thinks he does, but militarily, diplomatically, and economically that is not the case.  It is absolutely screamingly obvious that Russia is desperate to achieve SOMETHING before Ukraine crushes them.  Contrary to the Western doomsayers who claim Russia's well of reserves and resolve is deeper than it is, infinite in fact, the facts show that is not the case.  Over the course of the last year we have seen Russia continually scrape deeper and deeper into its reserves and we've seen glimpses of the bottom.

Short of mobilizing a half million men all at once, Russia seems to have invested everything it has into this war.  It is not holding back anything.  Which means if we see a shortage of artillery, tanks, IFVs, cruise missiles, etc. it is because they are running out.

This is not the case with Ukraine.

It seems pretty clear that Ukraine is doing the same thing it did last year, which is to section off forces and supplies for a strike force to hit Russia at a time and place of Ukraine's choosing.  If that means taking a hit in the meantime, then it takes the hit.  Russia seems to have tried to disrupt this resolve and it doesn't seem to have worked in any significant way.

What I'm getting at here is if we see a shortage of artillery for Russia it likely means Russia is short of artillery.  If we see Ukraine short of artillery it is likely that it's deliberately being kept to the rear in anticipation of being used later on.  If I'm seeing this correctly, that means this summer is going to see Russia getting hammered by artillery and having little to respond with of its own.

Steve

[danfrodo]

Summary for today, sharing because it reports a UKR advance to Mayorsk, south of Bakhmut.  why do this I wonder?  Were supplies coming up from the south thru here?  But there's roads to the east already so doesn't look like it.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/10/2157289/-Ukraine-update-A-small-Ukrainian-advance-shows-that-there-are-more-important-positions-than-Bakhmut

 

[chrisl]

4 hours ago, Butschi said:

China has one big advantage: We are still dismissing them as supplier of cheap consumer electronics who can do nothing but copy western stuff and mass produce it with their enormous workforce. Frankly, this kind of western hubris, that at least borders on racism will hurt us in the long run.

Interesting study that sees China in the lead in 37 out of 44 critical technologies:

https://ad-aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/2023-03/ASPIs Critical Technology Tracker_0.pdf?VersionId=ndm5v4DRMfpLvu.x69Bi_VUdMVLp07jw

It's an interesting paper and methodology, but I'm not so sure you can interpret publication and citation counts to mean that any country is in the "lead" in a technology.  It would be better if they'd provided some validation of the approach.  A better interpretation is that those show the relative emphasis of those technologies for those countries, and some indication of the time rate of advancement of those tech areas.  The most interesting charts are the career flux charts that show the moves of researchers through their careers.  China has been experiencing a brain drain for a long time, at least since the 1990s, as people leave for school in the west and don't go back. Increasing US anxiety over the national origins of researchers and technical workers in defense related industries has been about the best thing that happened to R&D in the rest of the world.  Many people who would have been attracted here for school and then stayed for their careers are now not coming at all, or coming and then leaving for other countries for work.  A number of countries increased efforts to hire US educated workers starting in the early 2000s.  After the mortgage disaster in 2008, China made a huge effort to hire mid career US-educated Chinese back to China.  The back of Nature was packed with ads for positions in Chinese universities where they'd set you up with startup packages that were essentially unimaginable in the US.

[chrisl]

3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

There is also a third category, which is something like "precision assisted".  The combo of depth charges and sonar is a great example of this.  The munition itself has no guidance, therefore it is not a PGM.  However, a separate system provided targeting information which then allowed for the otherwise dumb weaponry to be aimed "precisely".  Other examples of this are early acoustic counter battery fire, radar directed flak, Norden bombsight, and others.

Plain old torpedos are also precision assisted.  A WWII US sub only carried 24 torpedos, and only fired a few very carefully aimed ones at any target.  There were even homing torpedos in WWII that chased down the sound of their targets' screws.

[chrisl]

3 hours ago, Astrophel said:

It can be done but it is non-trivial.  Key technology is manufactured in Netherlands but that should not be a problem.  Some key knowledge and IP and people are in Taiwan.  The costs are enormous.  A European CEO of a semiconductor company told me Europe is looking at $500 billion minimum and the US bill will not be less.  Huge amounts of money for no actual benefit if only we could make a lasting peace with China - it is just added cost on our societies.  Timeframe I would estimate is 7 years give or take when we start now.

An open question for me at least is how much of this chip manufacturing is really strategic in a military sense?  The state-of-the-art chips are going into high volume-low power-massive processing-miniature applications like a mobile phone.  Much of the military equipment making a decisive impact in Ukraine is 20 years old technology or older.

The key technology is manufactured in the Netherlands, but also depends on US imported technology for some key parts.  It's a very internationally intertwined tech.

And the shift of a lot of semiconductor mfg to the US is already in progress, funded largely by the companies themselves.

[Grigb]

Some observations on recent Prig videos/audio recordings

1. Prig claims RU has been able to increase shell production, but I didn't see any confirmation. Certainly not on the front lines.
2. Prig says some unnamed authorities (heavily implied RU MOD) are planning to disband Wagnerites after Bakhmut. The plan is to order Wagnerites to R&R, disarm them, and offer them an early retirement option.
3. Prig announced that Wagnerites would not retire under any circumstances. Instead, they are preparing to recruit men from all over RU and will become a real/large army of their own.
4. It was less of a military announcement and more of a political one.
5. Politically RU has already been negatively affected by the Bakhmut siege. And most likely it is one of the reasons UKR command prefers to continue to defend it.

 

[danfrodo]

5 minutes ago, Grigb said:

Some observations on recent Prig videos/audio recordings

1. Prig claims RU has been able to increase shell production, but I didn't see any confirmation. Certainly not on the front lines.
2. Prig says some unnamed authorities (heavily implied RU MOD) are planning to disband Wagnerites after Bakhmut. The plan is to order Wagnerites to R&R, disarm them, and offer them an early retirement option.
3. Prig announced that Wagnerites would not retire under any circumstances. Instead, they are preparing to recruit men from all over RU and will become a real/large army of their own.
4. It was less of a military announcement and more of a political one.
5. Politically RU has already been negatively affected by the Bakhmut siege. And most likely it is one of the reasons UKR command prefers to continue to defend it.

 

So this idiot Prig thinks he has some power base of his own?  He exists at the discretion of Putin.  And the military has to supply him w everything and can, if not refuse,  drag their feet & give the worst supplies.  And who pays Prig & friends -- Putin does.  So he thinks all he needs to do is recruit?  -- only if someone else is paying can he do this.  Fascinating political foolishness in middle of a war.

Edited March 10, 2023 by danfrodo