How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[NamEndedAllen]

3 hours ago, dan/california said:

two sort of equally matched technically competent militaries in conflict are going to strive to project mostly unmanned ISR bubbles.

This. Plus lots of recent posts involving electronics and electronically-guided assets of every ilk reacting with extreme quickness and accuracy suggest a paradigm shift is near. The final replacement of speed and sensory-limited meat puppet biology by electronic devices, AI linked with machines unfettered by meat puppet biology physical limitations. The emergence of AI able to learn from its access to any and all databases and internet sources will be incorporated into the sensor-analysis-decision-action chain. Un-impeded by the soon-to-be fatal human-imposed delays of biological processes. Currently in development semi-autonomous projects are one small step from full autonomy kill chains. There is no worldwide veto ability.  All it will take to open the floodgates is one player, large or small, that takes the step and unmistakably prevails in a significant operation. Follow suit or perish. Think there is no one who wouldn’t flip the switch to save their unit? Their installation? Their city? The technology is simply advancing too quickly and effectively in wartime to never ever come to pass. The only remaining question will be how long it takes for each successive level of lethality, the dominoes to fall. 

We’ve read the science fiction exploring a myriad of variations on this theme. Looks as if we are going to be around to see its dawn. If we haven’t already. 
 

[Seminole]

18 minutes ago, JonS said:

Quick reminder:

"Bureaucracy" produced these:

And

And

 

Meanwhile, lack of bureaucracy produced these

And these

I don’t think it’s fair to throw Mr. Higgins in that, uh, boat.  
 

Higgins developed a reputation for being able to do the impossible. Once, the Navy asked him if he could come up with plans for a new boat design in three days. “Hell,” he replied. “I can build the boat in three days.” And that is exactly what he did.

[JonS]

14 minutes ago, Seminole said:

Mr. Higgins

The photo refers to the production of NEPTUNE, rather than the production of one boat. (Same for the CSM)

Edited March 31, 2023 by JonS

[dan/california]

3 minutes ago, JonS said:

The photo refers to the production of NEPTUNE, rather than the production of one boat.

And the tension between Mr Higgin's having the ability come up with boat that works, and the ability of the Pentagon to recruit and organize the military-industrial complex to produce 20,000 of them is kind of what I am getting at, however badly. In many ways the Ukraine war has been showpiece for the Pentagon's processes, almost everything we sent to Ukraine has worked more or less as advertised, and with some hassles we have been able to keep that equipment in the fight.

At the same we are in a moment where what we should and shouldn't be building is in real question. The Switch bBade 300 is one of my canonical examples of the process going slightly wrong. And I am not saying it doesn't work as advertised, but somewhere in the process things went subtly wrong. The board is littered with video of civilian racing drones with an anti tank grenade zip tied to them doing real damage, and they cost somewhere between a tenth and  twentieth what a switchblade 300 does. 

[kimbosbread]

3 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Another option is to stay distributed entirely and rely on corrosive warfare but speed up attrition and precision.

As a relatively uninformed software engineer, I think this is where things will go. We've been able to build small (10cm long) fixed wing drones that can fly for an hour at 100km per hour for 24+ years with a camera (at least when I was visiting the MIT aerospace labs in 1999). You can build something like this now for very cheap, and much improved performance just on the hardware side.

Let's say these are electric drones, so trade endurance for no need to truck fuel around and simpler motors, you could have thousands of these things in the air, with 25g of high explosive in the nose. Combine that with modern ML/image recognition software + GPS running on hardware that fits into a tiny package AND is cheap and easy to build, as in $100 or less cheap. Effectively this is a smart cruise missile scaled down to kill an individual soldier. Let's say Ukraine could have a ten thousand semi autonomous drones roaming 20km behind Russian lines looking for targets for several hours at a time; would you even need mass if it was cheap to dedicate a drone to kill each enemy soldier?

3 hours ago, dan/california said:

it may be that the cost curve between the drones, and various drone countermeasures is so divergent that the drones just can't BE countered.

If the defences are cheap enough to scale with the number of drones, maybe. Lasers seem reasonable, but they require a lot of power and cooling, especially for longer range. As soon as a laser is identifier, something specialized can be sent after the laser.

The more insiduous thing with drones and small computers is there is no reason the drones can't be used to execute flexible tactics. For example, we've identified a laser on a bmp-9000, and we estimate it can only fire 20 times per minute, so let's swarm it with 25 drones at once, or attack from multiple directions at once with 5 drones.

[akd]

1 hour ago, Beleg85 said:

Or Russian zeroing mortars on their own position. Doubtful, but still possible- it seems muscovites tried throwing  everything in this fight they have at hand, unsuccessfully. Also trench itself seems rather shallow now, perhaps it was mauled so much in earlier fights.

No, comes in fast and relatively low angle from the right (general direction the tanks and BMP arrived from).

Edited March 31, 2023 by akd

[Kinophile]

I was very surprised at that Tank behaviour.  I've seen UKR armor using MGs in assault. This was a very odd attack. 

No preceding supression by the BMP, or Even just the other Tank with its own MG. Why on earth did they separate and physically block themselves from each other? Where's the supporting infantry?  UKR obviously have a good read of the Wagners,  surely some mortor or AGL would have rapidly cleaned up this pocket,  with tank and MG fire. No need for PBI to get too close. 

 

[Kinophile]

2 hours ago, RandomCommenter said:

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2023/03/31/russian-ships-return-to-west-coast-despite-appearing-to-depart-for-africa/

 

Next Nordstream incident in the works?

 

Russian government vessels equipped with technology capable of interfering with subsea cables have returned to the west coast (of Ireland) after appearing to depart towards Africa earlier in the week.

The two Russian flagged ships, the Umka and the Bakhtemir, caused alarm among defence officials late last week when they were spotted engaging in unusual manoeuvrers off the Galway coast, in the vicinity of a newly opened subsea communications cable.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/im4moqltx8jsh9a/IMG-20230331-WA0000.jpg?dl=0

Definitely effing around where they've no good reason to be. 

Not that the Irish Navy can doing anything... 

Edited March 31, 2023 by Kinophile

[JonS]

Up till early 2020 I was part of the project that was removing the FOW from our army. Despite it procuring exactly zero weapons systems, it was - is - eye-wateringly expensive, and involved - involves - completely rethinking how the army works operationally. We had to consider the full range of procurement activity (what the Pentagon refers to as DOTMLPF) and that takes time.

Among other things, we had to consider how much of the army to de-FOW at any given time. "Obviously" you want to do it all, like yesterday, but that would mean taking the army offline for about two years while it was re-equipped and retrained with it's new capabilities. Politically that is obviously unacceptable - you can't just not have an army for a couple of years on the promise that it'll be better, I swear, when it comes back. Plus, of course, the capital cost of doing it all at once is intolerable, and probably worse than all of that you would be baking in future obsolescence - all that shiny new kit, a whole army's worth - is going to time out in a few years, meaning you're up for a whole army's worth of capital purchase again plus the requirement to take the whole army offline again. So we were enabling capability bricks at a time, and a lot of thought and effort and trialing went in to figuring out what that actually meant - you want whatever you deploy to be able to talk to itself, which means taking a slice across the army - some guns, some grunts, some loggies, some sappers, some armoured, etc. Which is great from a deployable capability perspective, but wildly inefficient because you're doing a bit of this, and a bit of that, and some of those. And you don't get long term efficiencies either, because the tech is moving so fast that the next time you do a chunk of the each the tech has moved on so you don't want to just buy more of what was great last year because now it's obsolescent. Which means a whole new cycle of testing and selection and integration and training. All of which means that the whole programme is going to take years longer than if you were able to just take the Army offline for a couple of years. And, in fact, the programme will never be completed because the relevant technologies will keep moving forward while the in-service kit will keep becoming obsolescent and obsolete, so we're now on an unwinnable treadmill of going around and around the army upgrading this and that and the other to keep this overall capability relevant and competitive until the heat-death of the universe.

But despite all that, despite all the rework and despite never quite being able to deliver the dream, one of the most frustrating and wasteful components of the whole programme was the extraordinary amount of time and effort we spent proving that we weren't wasting either time or effort. And that was necessary primarily because of all the people out there who think that "the bureaucracy" is the problem.

Edited March 31, 2023 by JonS

[JonS]

29 minutes ago, dan/california said:

And the tension between Mr Higgin's having the ability come up with boat that works, and the ability of the Pentagon to recruit and organize the military-industrial complex to produce 20,000 of them is kind of what I am getting at

[JonS]

35 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

Let's say these are electric drones, so trade endurance for no need to truck fuel around

Providing electric power on the modern battlefield is one of many major logistics challenges. Disposable batteries are great, but really really heavy when summed across a deployed force, and they all have to be trucked around the battlespace. Rechargeable is great, except that recharging has to come from some other power source - probably liquid fuels, which then have to be moved about the battlespace.

Also how many different batteries or recharging cables do you support? We all know of the problems the Germans created for themselves in WWII by using every piece of cptured and confiscated equipment they could lay their hands on - 3000 different vehicle models for the opening of BARBAROSSA, for example. Then there's all the different calibres of small arms and tanks and artillery to manage. How do you maintain and sustain that?

Hint: they couldn't.

Edited March 31, 2023 by JonS

[Kinophile]

Very interesting, Jon.

And dispiriting... 

[Kinophile]

ChrisO doing an interesting series of threads on Crimea. 

 

[MSBoxer]

From the New York Times (behind paywall)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/world/europe/ukraine-bakhmut-russia.html

 

Quote

Six weeks after coming to help defend Bakhmut, the men of the Adam Tactical Group, one of Ukraine’s most effective battle units, were quietly confident they had turned the tide against Russian troops trying to encircle and capture it.

“The enemy exhausted all its reserves,” the commander, Col. Yevhen Mezhevikin, 40, said on Tuesday, straddling a chair as artillery, air defense and intelligence-gathering teams worked around him…

But now, Colonel Mezhevikin said, the Russian assaults have slowed and the imminent threat of encirclement has been thwarted. “The density of assaults dropped by several times,” he said. “Before, they could assault in all directions simultaneously and in groups of not less than 20, 30 or 40 people, but gradually it is dying down.”

 

[kimbosbread]

8 minutes ago, JonS said:

Providing electric power on the modern battlefield is one of many major logistics challenges. Disposable batteries are great, but really really heavy when summed across a deployed force. Rechargeable is great, except that recharging has to come from some other power source - probably liquid fuels, which then have to be moved about the battlespace.

Rechargeable means only using half of your battery charge every flight, unless you are find junking that battery in 100-200 use cycles. If you have small drones (fixed wing, at least not power hungry quadcopters) with longer ranges they can make their way much further back to find a recharge pad (let's say no battery swap) or for a refuel. Nice thing about sealed rechargeable battery is you could just slap an induction pad on it and although charging is slower, there is no port for dirt to get into. It also means you could just drop a bunch of passive self contained recharge pads on the battlefield that would be good for 100 charges and you consider them a consumable (a nasty, toxic lion one though). Swapping batteries is much faster if you can figure out a good autonomous way to do it.

[kevinkin]

There is a lot of electric power to be deployed:

https://www.powermag.com/dod-picks-bwxt-to-manufacture-project-pele-prototype-nuclear-microreactor/

The question is how close to the front these reactors can safely do so. Certainly they would become primary targets. But when deployed well to the rear, they lose a lot of the potential (play on words) benefits to tactical formations. Not to mention the risk associated with leaks anywhere they are stationed. So, the jury is out. They could be stockpiled as a continency if the enemy goes ahead and deploys their own. No sense in fighting behind the 8 ball.

[JonS]

You see what you're doing there, right? Compromising the design to meet conflicting operational requirements, and you still haven't gotten away from the need for bulk liquid fuels moving about the battlespace to each of those recharging pads.

[Offshoot]

2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

BMP lay down suppressive fire on the trench.  Not just a few shots, but constant attention.  Tanks 1 and 2 would drive to the treeline as they did, but Tank 2 would have stayed on the near side of the treeline to engage the same trench from "behind" while Tank 1 engaged from the "front".  I'd also have moved a squad of infantry to the treeline behind the tanks.  They would move towards the trench from trees and, at some point, taken over from the tanks.

Surely tank 2's job was to protect tank 1's left flank? Although they weren't shown, I don't think the trench on the cross-point of the T was the only Russian position they were worried about (are the Ukrainians suppressing a third in the distance with artillery?). At the end, tank 1 gets close enough to the trench that it could easily have come under fire from the position tank 2 is suppressing.

[cesmonkey]

Rumored new U.S. aid package coming Monday:

https://www.reuters.com/world/munitions-anti-tank-rockets-next-26-bln-us-pledge-ukraine-sources-2023-03-31/

[JonS]

45 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

And dispiriting... 

the good news is that everyone is facing the same problem

[Vet 0369]

On 3/30/2023 at 6:11 PM, chrisl said:

I told you that a long time ago.

knock knock

”who’s there?”

”candygram”

“Candygram?”

(land shark chomp)

 

 

LOL, for all those of you who don’t understand the joke, the “Land Shark was a comedy skit in the late 1970s and early 1980s on the U.S. comedy show Saturday Night Live. The land shark would knock on a door and announce a delivery. It would cycle through a number of deliveries until the door was opened, and then “chomp.”

[chrisl]

7 minutes ago, Vet 0369 said:

LOL, for all those of you who don’t understand the joke, the “Land Shark was a comedy skit in the late 1970s and early 1980s on the U.S. comedy show Saturday Night Live. The land shark would knock on a door and announce a delivery. It would cycle through a number of deliveries until the door was opened, and then “chomp.”

They’re up on YouTube for the interested, and still funny.  Search on “SNL Land shark”

I watched one the other day - Belushi played Dreyfus better than Dreyfus.

[chrisl]

52 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

Rechargeable means only using half of your battery charge every flight, unless you are find junking that battery in 100-200 use cycles. If you have small drones (fixed wing, at least not power hungry quadcopters) with longer ranges they can make their way much further back to find a recharge pad (let's say no battery swap) or for a refuel. Nice thing about sealed rechargeable battery is you could just slap an induction pad on it and although charging is slower, there is no port for dirt to get into. It also means you could just drop a bunch of passive self contained recharge pads on the battlefield that would be good for 100 charges and you consider them a consumable (a nasty, toxic lion one though). Swapping batteries is much faster if you can figure out a good autonomous way to do it.

The UA experience is that drones only last a few missions and are essentially disposable.  Use the full battery capacity.  

[cyrano01]

3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

BMP lay down suppressive fire on the trench.  Not just a few shots, but constant attention.  Tanks 1 and 2 would drive to the treeline as they did, but Tank 2 would have stayed on the near side of the treeline to engage the same trench from "behind" while Tank 1 engaged from the "front".  I'd also have moved a squad of infantry to the treeline behind the tanks.  They would move towards the trench from trees and, at some point, taken over from the tanks.

Right. No suppressive MG fire, no supporting infantry. Tanks pushing up close to occupied enemy infantry positions. Even if they were confident that the target position was well suppressed that's a high degree of reliance on there not being any wild-card bad guys out there in unidentified positions.  That sort of thing has pretty much never ended well for me in CMBS but the Ukrainians seem to go in for it and get away with it. Haiduk makes a good point about getting inside the ATGM's min-range though.

 

Is it just my eyesight or was the commander operating with his head out of the hatch at least some of the time?

[Harmon Rabb]

Busy day at work, have not had a chance to read this information myself yet. Looks interesting.