How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[chuckdyke]

The tank is dead topic. The AFV has changed and is now a completely different system, it will develop further.

[chrisl]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

This is fundamentally the modern warfare problem.  We have a lot of our military capabilities on things that have evolved too slowly in comparison to the technology able to find them and hit them.

We have ISR systems that can see far better than we can hide, and shooters that hit much farther away with greater precision.  Worse, the things that can still hide the best are also the things that can do the seeing and hitting.  This puts us into a massive Denial dilemma with current capability.

Now I think the RA has been so eroded (or will be) that traditional conventional mass may work, but we cannot count on this for the next war.  The tank being dead or not is irrelevant - concentration of mass has become toxic which shifts some pretty fundamental concepts of warfare.

Concentration of mass will have to happen more like flash mobs on targets than traditional massing and then moving together.  Bunches of uncrewed vehicles will converge from multiple directions to coordinate attacks on focus points and then disperse just as rapidly.

It will depend on extremely good communication and coordination, with a lot of switching between mission command and detailed command on the fly - something like CM with borg spotting, but with hopefully better AI from units that have broken comms, and keeping your units staying farther apart until they converge.

[cesmonkey]

A fairly long and personal interview with Zelenskyy by an AP reporter during a train ride in Ukraine:

https://apnews.com/article/ap-zelenskyy-interview-ukraine-war-11de771129fb822f2cd58b443736e72f

[womble]

3 hours ago, The_Capt said:

This is fundamentally the modern warfare problem.  We have a lot of our military capabilities on things that have evolved too slowly in comparison to the technology able to find them and hit them.

Fixing this issue is going to require a rethink of the western military procurement process every bit as fundamental as the changes that Russia would need to make to create a military that functions as well as it was meant to. The levels of drag on military tech development are stupefying.

I was very peripherally involved in a development for something military, over the course of about a couple of years. When I came aboard, I was dealing with "current" (not SoTA, not bleeding edge) gear. A couple of years later, that was falling further behind the curve, and the last contact I had with the project, the general in charge had been rotated out, and the new general was basically wanting to start the whole assessment process all over again.

[The_MonkeyKing]

Shouldn't we soon see more Stryker/Bradley/Marder/Leopard/ commitments to UKR? The previous equipment has or is soon finishing training.

 

[Kinophile]

8 hours ago, dan/california said:

It is the base line quality of even upper end consumer stuff that is the curve you can't beat.

This is the ~specs for the iphone 15. a decade ago this would have been a stretch for DARPA to fit on helicopter, much less a drone. 48 megapixels in the actual sensor, mind you this comes with a bonus phone....

People and AFVs still haven't changed much.

However the range and power of say, that Lidar is extremely limited. Problems don't scale up linearly as you increase demands for power and results.

[Kinophile]

6 hours ago, chrisl said:

Concentration of mass will have to happen more like flash mobs on targets than traditional massing and then moving together.  Bunches of uncrewed vehicles will converge from multiple directions to coordinate attacks on focus points and then disperse just as rapidly.

It will depend on extremely good communication and coordination, with a lot of switching between mission command and detailed command on the fly - something like CM with borg spotting, but with hopefully better AI from units that have broken comms, and keeping your units staying farther apart until they converge.

This I buy.

Smart Mass should, locally, beat Smart Dispersed through simple localised quantity of fires effects, temporarily, until the Defense likewise concentrates its Smart Mass - so long as it can.

If the initial attack is strong enough and can reach deep & wide enough (with fires, not physical units) then the Defense will remain dispersed.

In many ways this is just "regular" warfare but at an extremely high tempo of fluctuation and lethality.

The classing swinging backwards and forwards over domains will happen faster until one side loses something critical and their system rapidly cascades down into collapse, possibly in Hours.

 

Edited March 31, 2023 by Kinophile

[Kinophile]

So nice work Putrid Putin. You've given NATO a clear line (if needed),into your 2nd largest city and probably most economically important one.

Your Baltic sea fleet is even more bottled up and will need run a literal gauntlet of sensors and fires to do more than just patrol their harbours.

Edited March 31, 2023 by Kinophile

[chrisl]

42 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

However the range and power of say, that Lidar is extremely limited. Problems don't scale up linearly as you increase demands for power and results.

The important thing about the iphone example is that it's only possible economically because of enormous production of very small scale microelectronic processes. The development and fab setup costs are huge, and they get amortized across huge numbers of civil and defense production units to become very inexpensive if you're allowed access.

[Battlefront.com]

6 hours ago, chrisl said:

Concentration of mass will have to happen more like flash mobs on targets than traditional massing and then moving together.  

Yeah, flash mob battle is a very good way to think of what is needed.  I've been saying this for sometime now, but maybe not as directly as is needed for this huge change in warfare:

Concentrated mass in close proximity to the intended battlefield is no longer practical when the opponent has good ISR and ranged PGMs.  Even if various counters are available to the side wishing to mass, they are unlikely to be consistent or persistent enough to overcome ISR+PGM to the degree necessary to support traditional use of mass.

From the NATO perspective this seems to hint at a Desert Shield type operation being mandatory before any land based engagement with an ISR+PGM adversary.  This complicates operations greatly because timing of the engagement needs to be based on the results of how quickly and thoroughly the battlefield is made safe for massed ground based operations.

In a way we are getting back to a siege type method of warfare where the attacker or defender must first clear all enemy forces from around the castle before either seeking to take the castle or attempting to remove the threat to it.  Directly assaulting into or out of the castle without this preparatory work is most likely going to fail spectacularly.

6 hours ago, chrisl said:

Bunches of uncrewed vehicles will converge from multiple directions to coordinate attacks on focus points and then disperse just as rapidly.

For quite a while I it will be crewed vehicles doing this behavior, however eventually it will transition to almost purely uncrewed.

6 hours ago, chrisl said:

It will depend on extremely good communication and coordination, with a lot of switching between mission command and detailed command on the fly - something like CM with borg spotting, but with hopefully better AI from units that have broken comms, and keeping your units staying farther apart until they converge.

As a long time game/sim designer it feels very odd to me that one of the biggest, most consequential realism limitations of my chosen profession is headed towards being one of the most realistic.  Very odd.

Steve

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, Kinophile said:

However the range and power of say, that Lidar is extremely limited. Problems don't scale up linearly as you increase demands for power and results.

 

19 minutes ago, chrisl said:

The important thing about the iphone example is that it's only possible economically because of enormous production of very small scale microelectronic processes. The development and fab setup costs are huge, and they get amortized across huge numbers of civil and defense production units to become very inexpensive if you're allowed access.

Yes, that particular LIDAR, which is optimized for measuring things in your living room is rather limited. But the fact that it exists means production lines for high volume consumer electronics can do lidar systems.

Now look at what high end, and until now very tightly restricted systems can do.

Edit: cross posted with Steve

 

Quote

https://mymodernmet.com/lidar-radar-discovers-mayan-civilization/

I would not be surprised if the Ukrainians are fitting an 80% percent capability for two percent of the cost system on a done as I type this. Bureaucracy is surely the only reason the Pentagon hasn't already done it. and by literally next week week, or maybe last week, big tech is selling an AI package that will actually make the mass of data a squadron of LIDAR drones can put out comprehensible. And all of this is just one of a dozen more examples/probabilities.

 

Quote

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/19/palantir-algorithm-data-ukraine-war/

The Chinese are taking notes on what works and what doesn't. I suspect Xi is making it very clear to his military that the consequences of being as feckless as the Russians are SEVERE. The IRGC are awful human beings, but also seem at least three tiers brighter than the Russians. The next war will not look like this one, even if it happens within a year or two, much less five or more.

Edited March 31, 2023 by dan/california

[chrisl]

1 minute ago, Battlefront.com said:

As a long time game/sim designer it feels very odd to me that one of the biggest, most consequential realism limitations of my chosen profession is headed towards being one of the most realistic.  Very odd.

It's the nature of Science Fiction/Fantasy, which gaming is kind of on the edge of.  While you're spending your days trying to figure out how to simulate the fog of war that real armies experience, the guys who have to live the reality are looking at your game and saying "Dude, how do we make the real battlefield like *that*?".  And the time scale is about right.  CM:BO came out 20 years ago and there's been a whole generation of people playing CM and its ilk and having it influence what they wanted to develop in reality.

[The_Capt]

11 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

As a long time game/sim designer it feels very odd to me that one of the biggest, most consequential realism limitations of my chosen profession is headed towards being one of the most realistic.  Very odd.

Game difficulty settings become the battlefield:  I want mine to be Recruit while forcing my opponent to play Veteran.

Edited March 31, 2023 by The_Capt

[chrisl]

1 minute ago, dan/california said:

 

Yes, that particular LIDAR, which is optimized for measuring things in your living room is rather limited. But the fact that it exists means production lines for high volume consumer electronics can do lidar systems.

Now look at what high end, and until now very tightly restricted systems can do.

 

I would not be surprised if the Ukrainians are fitting an 80% percent capability for two percent of the cost system on a done as I type this. Bureaucracy is surely the only reason the Pentagon hasn't already done it. and by literally next week week, or maybe last week, big tech is selling an AI package that will actually make the mass of data a squadron of LIDAR drones can put out comprehensible. And all of this is just one of a dozen more examples/probabilities.

 

The Chinese are taking notes on what works and what doesn't. I suspect Xi is making it very clear to his military that the consequences of being as feckless as the Russians are SEVERE. The IRGC are awful human beings, but also seem at least three tiers brighter than the Russians. The next war will not look like this one, even if it happens within a year or two, much less five or more.

Yeah - you can already buy a lidar to hang on a drone for a few $K (or less) that's suitable for patrolling & mapping an area the size of platoon or company battle area.  The difficult part ends up being how to deal with all the data - either process on board or transmit large volumes back to base to look for things out of place.  Get a bucket of drones and a bunch of different sensor systems that are all co-registered, send their data back to home base and make a near-realtime multispectral map of what's going on in a region and nobody's hiding anything from you.

[chrisl]

2 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Game difficulty settings become the battlefield:  I want mine to be Recruit while forcing my opponent to play Veteran.

If your EW is good enough you can make your opponent play Iron with multiple players who aren't allowed to talk to each other.

[chrisl]

In a decade or so when this is over and details start leaking out of the UA we're going to find out that someone in a key position in Ukraine was a CM player and it influenced all their post 2014 development.

[cyrano01]

9 hours ago, The_Capt said:

This is fundamentally the modern warfare problem.  We have a lot of our military capabilities on things that have evolved too slowly in comparison to the technology able to find them and hit them.

We have ISR systems that can see far better than we can hide, and shooters that hit much farther away with greater precision.  Worse, the things that can still hide the best are also the things that can do the seeing and hitting.  This puts us into a massive Denial dilemma with current capability.

Now I think the RA has been so eroded (or will be) that traditional conventional mass may work, but we cannot count on this for the next war.  The tank being dead or not is irrelevant - concentration of mass has become toxic which shifts some pretty fundamental concepts of warfare.

This mismatch between ISR/Hitting capability and ability to develop and conceal effective mass does seem to be fundamental.

It also seems to be a continuation of a long term trend. The latter part of the C19th and early C20th up to and including WW1 saw continuous attempts to square the circle of effective mass attacks against increasingly accurate, long ranged weapons. Breech loading, rifled artillery and magazine rifles may not be precision weapons by our standards but compared to a smoothbore musket they are and, when mass looks like lines of infantry in close formations, they present a real challenge.  Taking this through to WW1 the question for any general was 'how do I deliver an effective massed attack when my troops are spotted by these new-fangled aeroplanes, shelled by accurate artillery miles back behind the front line and can't move forwards in enough numbers to deal with a counter attack?'

In the end the answer (at a very simplified level) was dispersion of assets, concentration of fires, more mobility all around and try to shut down the enemy ISR with your own new-fangled aeroplanes and AA guns. I've no idea how you achieve even more dispersion of assets and concentration of fires, or how to shut down the ubiquitous ISR but the direction of travel seems clear.

 

 

[kevinkin]

14 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

As a long time game/sim designer it feels very odd to me that one of the biggest, most consequential realism limitations of my chosen profession is headed towards being one of the most realistic.  Very odd.

For a long time it has been computer simulation of human behavior under fire and it stopped there. Soon, it will be computer simulations of computer behavior under fire. Software simulating a computer system that is behaving in response to other computer system(s). With those systems responding to other computer systems farther down the pecking order. Not sure, but is this analogous to the infinity mirror?

[Kinophile]

26 minutes ago, chrisl said:

In a decade or so when this is over and details start leaking out of the UA we're going to find out that someone in a key position in Ukraine was a CM player and it influenced all their post 2014 development.

LOL so true 

Steve,  there does seem to be some decent penetration of the UKR by BFC. Has there been an uptick in sales since Feb 24.?

[dan/california]

9 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

LOL so true 

Steve,  there does seem to be some decent penetration of the UKR by BFC. Has there been an uptick in sales since Feb 24.?

 

38 minutes ago, chrisl said:

In a decade or so when this is over and details start leaking out of the UA we're going to find out that someone in a key position in Ukraine was a CM player and it influenced all their post 2014 development.

I suspect it was the purchases in ~2014-16 that mattered. 

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, chrisl said:

While you're spending your days trying to figure out how to simulate the fog of war that real armies experience, the guys who have to live the reality are looking at your game and saying "Dude, how do we make the real battlefield like *that*?".

Yup.  And removing the fog of war has been one of the things the US, in particular, has invested trillions into since the end of WW2.  Be it radios, satellites, electronic interception, radar, whatever... it's all been about reducing fog of war.  In our lifetime it has accelerated because computing power.

1 hour ago, chrisl said:

The difficult part ends up being how to deal with all the data - either process on board or transmit large volumes back to base to look for things out of place.

This is where AI comes in big time.  If you know what signs to look for, it's only a matter of grunt work to get an AI system capable of determining areas of interest, patterns, and perhaps even predictions.

One of the massive new things coming into being now thanks to AI and various monitoring systems is continuous realtime pattern recognition.  Get enough sensors floating over a battlefield and you will be able to find where the enemy's mobile assets are no matter how clever they are about how, when, and where they move them.  Traditional methods for masking or avoiding detection simply by hiding in plain sight are effectively over.  The only hope one can have is the other side doesn't have the capability to do this sort of thing.

32 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

Steve,  there does seem to be some decent penetration of the UKR by BFC. Has there been an uptick in sales since Feb 24.?

Despite keeping a very low profile and, in fact, deliberately trying to stay out of the limelight... yes, sales went up quite a bit for the first few months of the war.  I'd guess a bunch of the new sales when to WW2 minded CM2 customers who finally became convinced they needed to check out the setting.

Steve

[dan/california]

25 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

One of the massive new things coming into being now thanks to AI and various monitoring systems is continuous realtime pattern recognition.  Get enough sensors floating over a battlefield and you will be able to find where the enemy's mobile assets are no matter how clever they are about how, when, and where they move them.  Traditional methods for masking or avoiding detection simply by hiding in plain sight are effectively over.  The only hope one can have is the other side doesn't have the capability to do this sort of thing.

Drone defense, drone defense, DRONE DEFENSE! If you don'y have it you simply cannot keep anything resembling a mechanized army in the field. That is a hard enough question. 

The even harder question is when either the U.S. or China puts up a fully militarized version of Starlink. There is no barrier except expense to putting up a Starlink clone with small addition of imaging, and or signals intelligence capability on every satellite. That is off the shelf technology at this point, and no army on earth more complicated than the Taliban could operate under it.

[dan/california]

 

[Battlefront.com]

7 minutes ago, dan/california said:

Drone defense, drone defense, DRONE DEFENSE! If you don'y have it you simply cannot keep anything resembling a mechanized army in the field. That is a hard enough question. 

The even harder question is when either the U.S. or China puts up a fully militarized version of Starlink. There is no barrier except expense to putting up a Starlink clone with small addition of imaging, and or signals intelligence capability on every satellite. That is off the shelf technology at this point, and no army on earth more complicated than the Taliban could operate under it.

Drones defense (in all its forms) certainly is the primary way to change the equation.  However... satellites and high altitude optical observation are not as easily defeated.  Like defeating drones is easy

Fortunately for NATO countries, nobody else has the same range of high altitude options as they.  China is absolutely gaining ground, but it is still not in the same class.  Russia?  Nursery school sitting in the corner facing the wall for a "time out".  The rest aren't even in the game, though India is certainly someone to watch.

Steve

[RandomCommenter]

36 minutes ago, dan/california said:

Drone defense, drone defense, DRONE DEFENSE!

But what do you do when drones go miniature?

A swarm of tiny drones controlling remote artillery with a very long range?