How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Centurian52]

4 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

would have taken casualties (men and equipment) far in excess of what it would consider acceptable under current doctrinal guidelines.

I think that is part of the package of being out of touch with high intensity, peer vs peer, conventional warfare (modern or otherwise). We have forgotten what kind of casualties can be realistically expected in this kind of warfare.

I think even if we learn all of the right lessons from Ukraine, and do everything right in the next war, our casualties will still be far in excess of what is considered acceptable under current doctrinal guidelines. Because acceptable casualties under current doctrinal guidelines are calibrated for either high intensity, asymmetric, conventional warfare (Desert Storm, Iraq 2003) or low intensity, asymmetric, unconventional warfare (Afghanistan, Iraq).

16 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

I also think it is stupid to expect the UA to perform NATO standard doctrine without a force (including air) that is up to NATO standards.

Yeah, in retrospect it was probably always unrealistic to expect Ukraine to be able to seamlessly pull off NATO doctrine without NATO enablers. I think Richard Iron put it best when he said that, without the support of the US Air Force, no army on Earth could have done much better, including the US Army.

[Vanir Ausf B]

5 hours ago, Carolus said:

The real numbers are likely somewhere in between.

There was a Ukrainian military source quoted in an interview late last year (which I now cannot find) that said the Oryx numbers for tanks under count Russian loses by 50% and Ukrainian loses by 60%.

What is more difficult to wrap my head around is the aircraft loss numbers. Ukraine claims 315 fixed wing kills and 316 helicopters. Oryx counts 89 and 105, respectively.

[The_Capt]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Totally agree with everything you said, including that the UA should be teaching us how to do breaching and not the other way around.  I also think it is stupid to expect the UA to perform NATO standard doctrine without a force (including air) that is up to NATO standards.

However, as we've previously discussed when talking about the probable gaps in NATO doctrine is that we really won't know how "off the mark" it is until it engages in a similar land war with a similar opponent.  My personal guess is that NATO forces would have done a better job breaching than the Ukrainians did because air support, better trained engineers, more support equipment (variety and quantity), etc.  However, I also think said NATO force would have taken casualties (men and equipment) far in excess of what it would consider acceptable under current doctrinal guidelines.

If my guess is correct, what this indicates is that there's a LOT that NATO can learn from UA, but that it's a process of reforming current NATO doctrine rather than chucking it out and starting fresh.

Steve

I honestly think that air superiority/supremacy is the Achilles tendon of the entire western way of warfare.  You take it away at any altitude and our whole system become vulnerable.  We need to start thinking about fighting in mutually denied environments.  A big hint was when we lost air superiority to ISIL (freakin ISIL!) below 2000 feet in around 2016.  We kind of wrote it off as an anomaly and more of an annoyance as opposed to a signal of trends and that was a major mistake.  We know our opponents are already working on fully autonomous, which makes EW against them damn hard.  We have a lot of guns but these are small birds, everywhere.  We had better start thinking about denied and parity environments, which is something we have not thought of in over 30 years.

That and simple lethality of ground systems.  Air superiority will do deep battle on formations and units.  But 2 guys in a treeline with a system that can hit and kill at 4+ kms at 80-90 percent is just nuts.  At this point I am less worried about gaps and more worried about blind spots in western military thinking.  That post highlights some of them at a ground level.  

[The_Capt]

2 hours ago, Tux said:

I have to believe that our collective militaries are smart enough to have started down this road months and months ago.  It’s surely that obvious.

As mentioned this was discussed on the thread months ago and I seem to remember The_Capt and others making it quite clear that the major benefit to Ukraine would be the simple fact of free, safe basic training for a larger number of recruits than they could train on their own (and maybe some cultural advantages in terms of low-level initiative and flexibility being encouraged).  Otherwise there was absolutely no reason to think NATO training would somehow be better suited to this war than Ukrainian training. 

Heh, well I think they are smart enough, question is, are they imaginative enough?  Free mass basic training is absolutely a key advantage compared to what Russia has but that post was concerning as it appears we have divergence on what the “basics” are in this war.  We had all sorts of reason to believe NATO training would be superior…we tell ourselves this all the time.  And don’t get me wrong is definitely has quality, it may be more a question of alignment.  Not putting troops in a heavy UAS and arty environment is a key error, and one we could solve pretty damn quick.  And some stuff like how to operate donated western vehicles are pretty much proprietary on our end.

I can only hope the feedback loop is working and we have already adapted.

[cesmonkey]

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3518903/biden-administration-announces-additional-security-assistance-for-ukraine/
 

Quote

The capabilities in this announcement, which totals up to $600 million, include:

Equipment to sustain and integrate Ukraine's air defense systems;
Additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS);
105mm artillery rounds;
Electronic warfare and counter-electronic warfare equipment;
Demolition munitions for obstacle clearing;
Mine clearing equipment; and
Support and equipment for training, maintenance, and sustainment activities.

 

[Probus]

30 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

A big hint was when we lost air superiority to ISIL (freakin ISIL!) below 2000 feet in around 2016.

Shoulder launched SAMs?

What aircraft are we using now for EW?  EF-18s?

Burning out EW antennas used to be a big problem.  It would be nice if we had a fleet of loitering EW drones that could limit/disable all the smaller drones. But the EW systems take a lot of power and cooling.

[Beleg85]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

A big hint was when we lost air superiority to ISIL (freakin ISIL!) below 2000 feet in around 2016.  

This is interesting topic, you mentioned several times already. Could you elaborate one or two sentence? I mean was it because this particlar conflict was deemed to be too non-important for risking NATO planes (and pilots- if captured, they would be fabulous leverage in hands of fanatics)? Or because of some Iranian influences upgraded jihadi arsenal?

[kimbosbread]

1 hour ago, Probus said:

It would be nice if we had a fleet of loitering EW drones that could limit/disable all the smaller drones. But the EW systems take a lot of power and cooling.

I think that’s backwards. You want anit-radiation loitering munitions that will go after anything emitting a signal in the sky. No power/cooling problems compared to an active antenna, and emits no signature of their own, and obviously way cheaper.

[Harmon Rabb]

Stoltenberg joins in the fun of using the "second strongest army in Ukraine" meme, and criticizes the experts who are criticizing the speed of Ukraine's counteroffensive.  

[kevinkin]

4 hours ago, holoween said:

to take heavy casualties in a comparable war.

Yes, I don't think the US Army can learn anything from UA as it relates to ground warfare like breaking through mine fields. There is not a chance the US would enter into combat where that would be a factor. We would play to our strengths and target the enemy's weaknesses not the other way around. Maybe at the squad level the US could learn a few tricks. But operationally even the Milley recently said the US could not do what we are asking UA to do given no air support. 

[Tux]

1 hour ago, Beleg85 said:

This is interesting topic, you mentioned several times already. Could you elaborate one or two sentence? I mean was it because this particlar conflict was deemed to be too non-important for risking NATO planes (and pilots- if captured, they would be fabulous leverage in hands of fanatics)? Or because of some Iranian influences upgraded jihadi arsenal?

I always assumed it was because it’s basically impossible to detect and stop someone from operating a drone up to approximately that height. They don’t take long to get up, carry out their mission and then land so, as we’re still finding out today, there’s really no way of denying the airspace to anyone who wants to use it.

Once above c. 2,000ft AAA and SAM systems might start to be able to detect and shoot at things and at some point hostile aircraft would become more of a threat, too.

Keen to hear what the case actually was, though.

[Battlefront.com]

4 hours ago, holoween said:

Do you have any specific documents you could point to for NATO doctrine?

Because non of the german documents ive read and nothing ive been taught leads me to believe there is anyone expeting not to take heavy casualties in a comparable war.

Sorry, I should have been more general.  No, I do not have any specific NATO doctrine (US or otherwise) that specifies expected losses from breaching a strongly fortified defensive line.  For sure more casualties are expected for that situation relative to others. 

Centurian52 said what I was implying very well, which is a US Army Brigade suffered the sorts of casualties Ukraine's 47th Mech Brigade did there would be some very interesting discussions being had from Joe Sixpack citizen all the way to the top of the political leadership and from Private Nostripes all the way to the top of the Pentagon.  The reason being that nobody in the US, at least, is prepared to lose large numbers of personnel and equipment for a couple meters of terrain, yet that is likely the situation that would happen with a NATO force if it was dropped into Ukraine even with all their equipment.

The simple fact is that a US battalion sized task force of armor and armor infantry is just as vulnerable to KA-52, Kornet, 152 rounds, Lancets, and f'n mines as the Ukrainians are.  They might do slightly better without air cover, but I don't think it would be enough to avoid a very difficult discussion about "what went wrong".

The point is, NATO uniformed personnel and their related think tanks should not be thinking Ukraine's slow progress is because they aren't doing it right.  NATO expectations are what isn't right.

Steve

[kevinkin]

25 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

NATO expectations are what isn't right.

Bingo. 

[dan/california]

 

Quote

 

https://my.rusi.org/events/book-launch-the-arms-of-the-future-technology-and-close-combat-in-the-twenty-first-century.html

The Arms of the Future book analyses how the emergence of novel weapons systems is shaping the risks and opportunities on the battlefield. Drawing on extensive practical observation and experimentation, the book details the operational challenges new weapons pose on the battlefield and how armies might be structured to overcome them.

 

 

The nice folks at RUSI are trying to help BFC get the new game out the door

 

[Fenris]

Gepard dropping a (or perhaps 2?) Shahed drone in the dark.

Shahed taken down near Odesa by search light and small arms - clip looks like something from WW2

 

Edited September 8, 2023 by Fenris

[Sojourner]

2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

NATO expectations are what isn't right

What does that even mean? How does one know what NATO "expectations" are? Who speaks for NATO?

Some unnamed source spouting off to a journalist trying to inflate his importance?

Stoltenberg sure seems to have it right. Listen to his statement linked a few posts up by Harmon Rabb

[The_Capt]

4 hours ago, Beleg85 said:

This is interesting topic, you mentioned several times already. Could you elaborate one or two sentence? I mean was it because this particlar conflict was deemed to be too non-important for risking NATO planes (and pilots- if captured, they would be fabulous leverage in hands of fanatics)? Or because of some Iranian influences upgraded jihadi arsenal?

ISIL bought civilian drones on Ali Baba and loaded them up with cluster munitions and mustard gas.  Partner forces started taking hits from that.  And then they started using them as ISR platforms for mortars.  Western and Iraqi forces (Kurds too) did not have a counter.  So while we owned the sky above 2000 feet we were buck naked to observation and taking hits from below 2000 feet.  All of it was precursor to this war.  I can recall a commander basically declaring “we just lost air superiority below 2000 feet” and it was barely a blip as the RCAF merrily kept arguing for F-35 - shoulder shrugging “drones, not our problem”.  Needless to say there was a scramble to field C-UAS tech, we never fully solved it back then - not going to discuss state now in detail but it is fair to say no western military has the problem entirely solved and fully unmanned AI is going to make it a lot worse, can’t cut the link between operator and machine if there isn’t one.

Good news was ISIL could only get their hands on so many and we basically just killed them all at Mosul.  They are still out there but all fractured into the Syrian sh#tshow.  Then there was Nagorno-Karabakh, which really start to fry some minds.  And unmanned is just getting started. Once UGVs come into play en masse warfare will be an entirely new ballgame.  As usual we got it wrong.  Cyber kinda got locked up and blunted but unmanned broke warfare…it is always the one you don’t spend billions on.

If I could list the big changes driving this:

- C4ISR.  The UA are already fielding an ersatz JADC2 (entirely networked) system without spending billions. The rest of the western architecture means we are talking an entirely illuminated battle space.

- Unmanned, see above.

- Precision at range.  Ridiculous hit-kill to ammo ratios.  This is in land and in the air.  What used to take large heavy systems (eg TOW) is now being done with man portable.  Artillery is madness in how can be swung and put on targets.  The RA sucks but even they are demonstrating they can do it…why?  Because even though their ISR is crappy and C2 is constipated they can still see and react faster than they are supposed to.

Pull these all together and you appear to have a wicked combination that is pushing Denial into battlefield primacy.  This basically means the cost to do anything goes up dramatically.  The counter appears to be Corrosive Warfare but even it may hit a limit, that is what I am looking out for.  If the UA cannot break this Denial dynamic then we could be looking at a WW1 situation where nothing will really be able to happen until one side breaks the code first….or runs out of gas - pure Attritional Warfare.  I for one, think the jury is still out.  But that training post to my eyes is just another in a long line of indicators that “something just ain’t right”.

[dan/california]

• Quote

   

  • https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-7-2023
  • Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Bakhmut and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 7 and made further gains on both sectors of the front.
  • US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Director of Analysis Trent Maul stated that there is a “realistic possibility” that Ukrainian forces will break through the entire Russian defense in southern Ukraine by the end of 2023, while a Ukrainian source suggested that upcoming Russian defensive positions are weaker than those Ukrainian forces have previously breached.
  • Ukrainian forces are making tactical gains and successfully attriting defending Russian forces and ISW continues to assess Ukraine’s counteroffensive may achieve operational successes in 2023, but subsequent series of Russian defensive positions still pose significant challenges for Ukrainian forces and may in sections be strongly held.
  • Russian forces conducted another large-scale Shahed-136/131 drone attack against Sumy and Odesa oblasts overnight on September 6-7.
  • Moscow Oblast authorities detained the commander of the 1st Special Purpose Air and Missile Defense Army on bribery and corruption charges amidst continued and escalating drone attacks on Moscow.
  • Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, in the Bakhmut direction, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, and in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area but did not make any confirmed advances on September 7.

   

  The whole thing today is worth a read.I really liked the bit about the guy in charge of air defence for Moscow being charged with "corruption". Nothing to see here, everything is fine

[poesel]

Please don‘t take this post as bait for country bashing. It is just facts.

Europe (EU & non-EU) has now twice the amount of (pledged!) support for Ukraine. Dark blue is short term, light blue long term support.

Took us a while but it is not that the US bears the brunt of the support alone anymore. Article in German.

https://www.ifw-kiel.de/de/publikationen/aktuelles/ukraine-support-tracker-europa-sagt-jetzt-doppelt-so-viel-unterstuetzung-zu-wie-die-usa/

 

[billbindc]

10 minutes ago, poesel said:

Please don‘t take this post as bait for country bashing. It is just facts.

Europe (EU & non-EU) has now twice the amount of (pledged!) support for Ukraine. Dark blue is short term, light blue long term support.

Took us a while but it is not that the US bears the brunt of the support alone anymore. Article in German.

https://www.ifw-kiel.de/de/publikationen/aktuelles/ukraine-support-tracker-europa-sagt-jetzt-doppelt-so-viel-unterstuetzung-zu-wie-die-usa/

 

It would be idiotic to bash any country on this. The US threw it's weight in early and now the EU is stepping  up. It's *great* news that Europe is leaning in this hard and will be understood to be quite bad news in Moscow. 

[kevinkin]

1 hour ago, Sojourner said:

What does that even mean? How does one know what NATO "expectations" are? Who speaks for NATO?

Good question. Perhaps it's less about the NATO organization than the security of Europe in the face of authoritarian nations like Russia. We might be using the term NATO as a short cut since Ukraine is not part of NATO but are considered the good guys.  I think NATOs expectations were for a quicker, shorter and less deadly war where by Russia is punished and humiliated without the entire thing spiraling out of control. This is a work in progress on all those points. 

[kevinkin]

This is a bit interesting:

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-voices-concern-ally-joint-military-drills-us-armenia-csto-azerbaijan-1825002

The "Eagle Partner 2023" drill, while expected to be only a small exercise, appears to be the latest step in a long-term process of Armenian moving away from Moscow's influence because of the Kremlin's inability to resolve the ongoing Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

If you think Russia is barely hanging on, this is a data point to refer to. 

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, Sojourner said:

What does that even mean? How does one know what NATO "expectations" are? Who speaks for NATO?

Some unnamed source spouting off to a journalist trying to inflate his importance?

Stoltenberg sure seems to have it right. Listen to his statement linked a few posts up by Harmon Rabb

Yes, this is a good point.  Much of the criticism of how Ukraine is handling the counter offensive is coming from unknown sources.  The think tanks also seem to be more-or-less onboard with the concept that NATO wouldn't do much better under the same circumstances.  Maybe even worse.

However, I do suspect that there is some current of doubt running through military circles that amounts to "we trained them and they didn't do it right".  It is more likely that than all of the anonymous sources having no active role in anything relevant to the war.

Steve

[Aragorn2002]

5 hours ago, Sojourner said:

What does that even mean? How does one know what NATO "expectations" are? Who speaks for NATO?

Some unnamed source spouting off to a journalist trying to inflate his importance?

Stoltenberg sure seems to have it right. Listen to his statement linked a few posts up by Harmon Rabb

That. Bloody journalists. And desinformation by the Russians. Which is often the same thing.

Edited September 8, 2023 by Aragorn2002

[kevinkin]

2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Yes, this is a good point.  Much of the criticism of how Ukraine is handling the counter offensive is coming from unknown sources.  The think tanks also seem to be more-or-less onboard with the concept that NATO wouldn't do much better under the same circumstances.  Maybe even worse.

However, I do suspect that there is some current of doubt running through military circles that amounts to "we trained them and they didn't do it right".  It is more likely that than all of the anonymous sources having no active role in anything relevant to the war.

Steve

I don't think the Chairmen of the Joint Chief of Staff is an unknown source. And what I quoted above has been a point of discussion here for 6 plus months. Now it seems like minded advocates for Ukraine are realizing how this proxy war has been mishandled. All you have to do is watch the daily White House news conference to understand how incompetent the executive branch of US government has become along with the media trying to get answers on anything. Everyone seems out to lunch.