How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Teufel]

Think this one is self-explanatory, as the post suggests. Reminder to those that think Russians understanding anything but force.

[kevinkin]

https://jamestown.org/program/ukraines-slow-moving-counteroffensive-problems-and-solutions-part-one/

I think the writer is a Ukrainian military analyst. Looks like some recommended solutions are on the way in part two. For now the writer thinks training has been deficient. More equipment with standardization is also recommended. 

In response, the West began to supply Ukraine with non-standardized military equipment, not only from different military schools but also from different eras, thus overloading the Ukrainian military logistics and administrative system. Moreover, it is futile to talk about the multiple increases in military capabilities for Ukraine based on the increased supply of Western aid, as, overall, this equipment was provided in small quantities and has thus been “diluted” along the front.

Some analysis of numbers:

https://unherd.com/2023/08/why-ukraines-offensive-has-stalled/

There is, then, only one route forward: to fight the war in earnest, as befits a struggle of national liberation. Ukraine’s population has declined but still exceeds 30 million, so that the total number in uniform could be as much as 3 million (Israel’s 10% ratio in 1948) or at least 2 million (Finland’s reservists as a percentage of the population). With those troops, Ukraine could win its battles and liberate its territory in the same way as most of Europe’s wars of independence — by grueling, attritional warfare.

Yuck. 

But once again the transparent battlefield has changed everything. Watching the Ukrainians advance in real time, the Russians could send their forces to intercept them in equal if not greater numbers. And even if the numbers were equal, the combat would be unequal because the Russians would be shielded by their minefields and by their trenches.

Minefields and trenches yes. Not so sure about RA ISR and ability to react. I guess the point might must be the two are capable enough. You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometime you find. You get what you need.

A lot of hindsight and rationalization going on. Some helpful and healthy; some a nothing burger. 

[Kinophile]

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2023/08/uk-royal-marines-train-ukrainians-in-complex-amphibious-operations/

Not in any scale that suggests an amphibious assault on Crimea,  (cough air/sea supremacy cough) so likely riverine focussed. 

Edited August 11, 2023 by Kinophile

[kevinkin]

Some neighbors:

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/20445

Wagner effect?:

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/20451

Serhii Nayev, the commander of the Joint Forces said: “Over 15 new strongholds have been established, tens of thousands of mines have been laid, with at least 20 percent being guided anti-personnel mines.”

Nayev cautioned that while there is no immediate threat, future risks remain possible. He elaborated, “The enemy would require at least one and a half months to amass the necessary forces to initiate offensive operations in this area.”

[cesmonkey]

36 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2023/08/uk-royal-marines-train-ukrainians-in-complex-amphibious-operations/

Not in any scale that suggests an amphibious assault on Crimea,  (cough air/sea supremacy cough) so likely riverine focussed. 

Video version of the same:

 

[Battlefront.com]

6 hours ago, Joe982 said:

Your posts don't allow links to Twitter

Ah!  Sorry, I forgot to post a summary.

North Korean GRAD ammo was recently captured in Ukraine.  Russia did make some attempts to obscure where they came from, which of course instantly indicates it isn't Russian   The likely source was Iran who is already documented to use NK GRAD rockets.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

5 hours ago, Butschi said:

Back to drones: I guess the difficulty here is in actually reaching the target not identifying it. Without relying on GPS you have to either navigate using landmarks or have inertial sensors. Both doable but the former is non trivial and the letter expensive, I think?

Anything other than a dumb munition adds cost, of course.  This means the drone itself is already more expensive per KG of explosives than a dumb munition.  The costs only go up from there.  Guidance systems that do not rely upon GPS have existed since the 1950s, but they have inherent limitations.  However, those limitations are likely mostly overcome by now.  Or at least could be very soon.

5 hours ago, Butschi said:

That said, the main difference is probably in the fact that this is a war. You don't have to guarantee that your drone crashes only once in a billion kilometers. If nine out of ten reach their target that's fine.

It depends.  Since the drones are more expensive and take longer to assemble per KG of explosives than other systems, including (at times) smart munitions for ground systems, the cost of missing the target factors into target selection, frequency of targeting, and of course number of targets that can be engaged in X time period.  It's just simple laws of economics involved.

Now, it is true if you have a strategic goal of destroying something specific, like a power plant or a port facility, then throwing waves of drones at it can produce results.  This is what Russia has been doing for most of the war.  But in doing so they are taking away resources from other things.  For example, the costs of acquiring and producing Shahed drones is massive in terms of money and resources.  Theoretically Russia could do something more useful with the same expense.

Steve

[Haiduk]

Official information about today's Kinzhal strike. It was directed not against Kyiv, but to strike Kolomyya airfield in Ivano-Frankivsk oblast, western Ukraine. Since 2004 this airfield was inactive and only during 2014-2016 it was restored as reserve airfield. It has tough conrete bunkers for aircraft. 

Four Kinzhals were launched, probably at least two of them entered in Ukrainain airspace from north of Kyiv oblast and turned out in range of Patriot. Real laucnhes were accompanied with active EW imitations of false launches. One missile was shot down, I heard four explosions (2 missile at each Kinzhal), so likely we couldn't hit the second missile and it could broke through. 

Press-secreter of Air Forces Command made a statement, three missiles hit the area of Kolomyya airfield, according to his words "enemy targeted our young pilots, who prepare themselves for tarining on F-16". One of theese missiles impacted near the private house and killed 8 y.o. boy. Nearest yards are in 1 km from airfield (it's about "precision").    

Here on the photo a Volodymyr Balabanyk, the boy, killed in this strike

 

Edited August 11, 2023 by Haiduk

[poesel]

That's the spirit.

[cesmonkey]

Includes subtitles:

 

[Der Zeitgeist]

18 minutes ago, Haiduk said:

Official information about today's Kinzhal strike. It was directed not against Kyiv, but to strike Kolomyya airfield in Ivano-Frankivsk oblast, western Ukraine. Since 2004 this airfield was inactive and only during 2014-2016 it was restored as reserve airfield. It has tough conrete bunkers for aircraft. 

Four Kinzhals were launched, probably at least two of them entered in Ukrainain airspace from north of Kyiv oblast and turned out in range of Patriot. Real laucnhes were accompanied with active EW imitations of false launches. One missile was shot down, I heard four explosions (2 missile at each Kinzhal), so likely we couldn't hit the second missile and it could broke through. 

Fascinating. This may have been one of the first (maybe even the first) real midcourse ballistic missile shootdown in the history of warfare.

[kimbosbread]

7 hours ago, Butschi said:

Back to drones: I guess the difficulty here is in actually reaching the target not identifying it. Without relying on GPS you have to either navigate using landmarks or have inertial sensors. Both doable but the former is non trivial and the letter expensive, I think?

Yeah, I think navigation is the harder problem. There are cheapo inertial measurement sensors: https://www.mouser.com/c/sensors/motion-position-sensors/imus-inertial-measurement-units/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_fr2sfrUgAMVI3tvBB2eJwG3EAAYASAAEgLRkvD_BwE. The problem is fusing them together with unreliable GPS and image-based navigation and your airspeed/wind/etc.

If you have detailed satellite maps, I think the landmark navigation might not be that bad, especially if you can tag landmarks on a route like “radio tower” or “settlement” or “river”. Training an image recognition model to recognize very specific categories or even individual types of things is straightforward- be it a helicopter or a radio tower, and requires relatively little processing power to do the image recognition.

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Anything other than a dumb munition adds cost, of course.  This means the drone itself is already more expensive per KG of explosives than a dumb munition.  The costs only go up from there.

I disagree, strongly, if you consider the delivery system. Getting the dumb munition to where it’s supposed to go, and actually getting enough of them to hit the target is quite expensive. Consider all the logistics, tubes, field kitchens, treatments for STDs etc.

A small autonomous drone is relatively cheap as far as hardware goes. Most of the cost is navigation and targeting software, which can be amortized to nothing over the fleet. This isn’t some sort of ultra high tech stealth cruise missile with a fancy engine- it’s a crappy cf or plastic fuselage with a little gas or electric motor, some servos, a warhead and computer ****. In terms of delivery system, maybe you need a little catapult with garage springs and a dude with a tablet to select a target, describe it and add known landmarks (if not already in software). This can all fit in the back or on top of a hastily comandeered Lada Niva (cheap, or free).

This is not my area of expertise (especially the Lada), but I have worked on embedded systems in the past and my main focus is big distributed systems and data pipelines, formerly major social networks and now cybersecurity. I do dabble in computer driven image recognition on occaison, though!

 

[Haiduk]

18 minutes ago, Der Zeitgeist said:

Fascinating. This may have been one of the first (maybe even the first) real midcourse ballistic missile shootdown in the history of warfare.

Strictly speaking, Kinzhal is not a classical ballistic missile, though this is really air-launch version of Iskander-M. MiG-31K accelerates itself on altitude 12-15 km and launches the missile, and all way further Kinzhal flies on gradually descending trajectory. Russian Wiki writes, UKR Petriot operators claimed, the velocity of Kinzhal on final stage of trajectory before interception was 1240 m/s (about 3M) - this is in three times less, than claimed by RU MoD. But in today's attack, when missiles entered in our airspace, Kyiv wasn't their target, so their velocity had to be much higher.   

Edited August 11, 2023 by Haiduk

[dan/california]

35 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

Yeah, I think navigation is the harder problem. There are cheapo inertial measurement sensors: https://www.mouser.com/c/sensors/motion-position-sensors/imus-inertial-measurement-units/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_fr2sfrUgAMVI3tvBB2eJwG3EAAYASAAEgLRkvD_BwE. The problem is fusing them together with unreliable GPS and image-based navigation and your airspeed/wind/etc.

If you have detailed satellite maps, I think the landmark navigation might not be that bad, especially if you can tag landmarks on a route like “radio tower” or “settlement” or “river”. Training an image recognition model to recognize very specific categories or even individual types of things is straightforward- be it a helicopter or a radio tower, and requires relatively little processing power to do the image recognition.

I disagree, strongly, if you consider the delivery system. Getting the dumb munition to where it’s supposed to go, and actually getting enough of them to hit the target is quite expensive. Consider all the logistics, tubes, field kitchens, treatments for STDs etc.

A small autonomous drone is relatively cheap as far as hardware goes. Most of the cost is navigation and targeting software, which can be amortized to nothing over the fleet. This isn’t some sort of ultra high tech stealth cruise missile with a fancy engine- it’s a crappy cf or plastic fuselage with a little gas or electric motor, some servos, a warhead and computer ****. In terms of delivery system, maybe you need a little catapult with garage springs and a dude with a tablet to select a target, describe it and add known landmarks (if not already in software). This can all fit in the back or on top of a hastily comandeered Lada Niva (cheap, or free).

This is not my area of expertise (especially the Lada), but I have worked on embedded systems in the past and my main focus is big distributed systems and data pipelines, formerly major social networks and now cybersecurity. I do dabble in computer driven image recognition on occaison, though!

 

There are a LOT of sensors, a lot of processing power, and a three very good cameras in an iphone 15. Servos, and the other bits and bobs that aren't included in a phone, seem to be so cheap and ubiquitous that we can't keep the Russians from buying them. As kimosbread has just eloquently detailed , the rest of it is just software. GPS jamming was the inevitable counter to GPS guided weapons wrecking everything in sight, but it will only be a small interruption in the progression of small robots that want to kill whatever their makers are unhappy with.

Edited August 11, 2023 by dan/california

[Kinophile]

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/20451

Quote

Serhii Nayev, the commander of the Joint Forces said: “Over 15 new strongholds have been established, tens of thousands of mines have been laid, with at least 20 percent being guided anti-personnel mines.”

Guided? What model is that? Are @The_Capt's nightmare human-homing spider mines finally on the march?

Edited August 11, 2023 by Kinophile

[Maciej Zwolinski]

11 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/20451

Quote

Serhii Nayev, the commander of the Joint Forces said: “Over 15 new strongholds have been established, tens of thousands of mines have been laid, with at least 20 percent being guided anti-personnel mines.”

Who-hoo! And f.u. sideways Ottawa Treaty.  I was sure the UKR have been using anti-personnel mines in quantities, it is good they have come clean. I hate sanctimonious, knee-jerk, pseudo-moralistic pseudo-solutions to real life problems, which the land mine ban applied to a full-scale conventional war certainly is.

[dan/california]

7 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

Who-hoo! And f.u. sideways Ottawa Treaty.  I was sure the UKR have been using anti-personnel mines in quantities, it is good they have come clean. I hate sanctimonious, knee-jerk, pseudo-moralistic pseudo-solutions to real life problems, which the land mine ban applied to a full-scale conventional war certainly is.

I suspect this is an overwrought term for command detonated claymores.

[Maciej Zwolinski]

15 minutes ago, dan/california said:

I suspect this is an overwrought term for command detonated claymores.

Possibly, my enthusiasm might be premature. I would not use the phrase "to lay a mine" in respect of setting up a Claymore, but things can happen during translation that are not dreamt up in my philosophy.

[kevinkin]

45 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

Guided? What model is that?

I thought the same. Maybe like a wireless detonated IED. Or denoted based on something other than ground pressure. Maybe a UAV could do so by patrolling between strong points. 

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, kimbosbread said:

I disagree, strongly, if you consider the delivery system. Getting the dumb munition to where it’s supposed to go, and actually getting enough of them to hit the target is quite expensive. Consider all the logistics, tubes, field kitchens, treatments for STDs etc.

Heh.  Well, that is certainly true about total costs as well as the flexibility that comes with not being tied to a cumbersome logistics chain. This is the crux of the argument in favor of getting rid of traditional air forces and going with all drones.  Not quite there yet, but there is no question that is the way we are headed in large part due to costs.

The point I was trying to make is that nothing is free.  The more accurate you want a weapon to be, the longer you want it to fly, the more resistant to EW, the less likely AD can hit it, etc. adds costs.  Some of those costs remain fairly constant, others scale with the size of the platform.  Which means the more capable and heavy a drone is, the more it costs, which likely means fewer made compared to smaller/cheaper systems.

We're approaching the point of warfare where a country can afford to "drone swarm" an enemy position with large, long distance drones... but we're not there yet.

Steve

[dan/california]

6 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Heh.  Well, that is certainly true about total costs as well as the flexibility that comes with not being tied to a cumbersome logistics chain. This is the crux of the argument in favor of getting rid of traditional air forces and going with all drones.  Not quite there yet, but there is no question that is the way we are headed in large part due to costs.

The point I was trying to make is that nothing is free.  The more accurate you want a weapon to be, the longer you want it to fly, the more resistant to EW, the less likely AD can hit it, etc. adds costs.  Some of those costs remain fairly constant, others scale with the size of the platform.  Which means the more capable and heavy a drone is, the more it costs, which likely means fewer made compared to smaller/cheaper systems.

We're approaching the point of warfare where a country can afford to "drone swarm" an enemy position with large, long distance drones... but we're not there yet.

Steve

But what we are seeing right now is enough drones with a 1000km range and an at least minimally meaningful warhead to impose massive air defense costs on the other side, and real damage when that air defense fails. This is one of the relatively few times that Russias sheer size is actually working against it. They have spread significant military production facilities, and oil infrastructure out as widely as possible, but now they have to try and provide air defense for all of it.

[Haiduk]

2 hours ago, Kinophile said:

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/20451

Guided? What model is that? Are @The_Capt's nightmare human-homing spider mines finally on the march?

Maybe incorrect translation. Means MON "claymors" or OZM and some other AP-mines, which have option of remote controlled activation by operator or activation via sensors. Most of pressure-type AP-mines Ukraine already utilized after signing of Ottawa convention. Already during ATO we used mostly MON-50 and booby-traps.

Edited August 11, 2023 by Haiduk

[Kinophile]

Urozhaine. 

The advance moves onwards

 

[hcrof]

51 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

Urozhaine. 

The advance moves onwards

 

Stupid question, but which Urozhaine are we talking about? Near tokmak?

[MSBoxer]

27 minutes ago, hcrof said:

Stupid question, but which Urozhaine are we talking about? Near tokmak?

It looks like it, east/southeast of Tokmak.  Of course, I could be wrong.

Edited August 11, 2023 by MSBoxer