How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[sburke]

Headline is a bit more than what has been said.  Seems more that they want direct information if Russia conducts an attack on civilian shipping.  Helpful but not exactly "protecting".

UK planes protecting Ukraine ships from Russian attack after grain deal collapse (yahoo.com)

Downing Street said: “We will use our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance to monitor Russian activity in the Black Sea … As part of these surveillance operations, RAF aircraft are conducting flights over the area to deter Russia from carrying out illegal strikes against civilian vessels transporting grain.”

Edited September 8, 2023 by sburke

[Maciej Zwolinski]

13 hours ago, The_Capt said:

I honestly think that air superiority/supremacy is the Achilles tendon of the entire western way of warfare.

Amen. 

And there are hundreds of ways in which they can be taken out of the fight. For example - with the manned systems approaching USD 100 mil. per unit, I can easily see them becoming something like battleships, so costly that they cannot be risked on many missions, including those which would be feasible for cheaper platforms. For missiles there is a similar problem, already experienced by the Ukraine - once the Russians divided up the large ammo&POL depots into a multitude of smaller ones, they ceased to be economic targets e.g. for Storm Shadows because that would be exchanging "2000 pounds of education" for a "ten-rupee jezzail", to quote Kipling's "Arithmetic on the frontier".

Ultimately, the ground forces should be designed to be able to stand on their own, which includes developing a functional battlefield ADA.   

[cyrano01]

2 hours ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

 e.g. for Storm Shadows because that would be exchanging "2000 pounds of education" for a "ten-rupee jezzail", to quote Kipling's "Arithmetic on the frontier".

 

Strike hard who cares — shoot straight who can —
The odds are on the cheaper man unmanned system.

There, fixed it for Kipling, although it doesn't quite scan.

 

Edited September 8, 2023 by cyrano01

[Teufel]

 

Edited September 8, 2023 by Teufel

[Carolus]

34 minutes ago, Teufel said:

 

It seems surreal that Ukraine has been sitting right outside the capital of Russia's phony republic for 8 years, and the frontline has been going at best a few hundred meters this way or that way.

If anyone ever wonders again what Russian offensive capabilities are, they need to remember that Russia has not managed to push the Ukrainain forces out of artillery range of the city for years despite publicly citing that as their main casus belli (the Bimbambombas story).

Edited September 8, 2023 by Carolus

[Taranis]

34 minutes ago, Teufel said:

 

What a symbolic take that would be! 

[Teufel]

 

Edited September 8, 2023 by Teufel

[Teufel]

 

[Butschi]

16 hours ago, kevinkin said:

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.

You know, the other side might just try to do the same. So, what will the US do if the others are not compliant enough to just let them play to their strengths and target the enemy's weaknesses?

It's not like that hasn't happened in a couple of wars in the past...

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Carolus said:

It seems surreal that Ukraine has been sitting right outside the capital of Russia's phony republic for 8 years, and the frontline has been going at best a few hundred meters this way or that way.

If anyone ever wonders again what Russian offensive capabilities are, they need to remember that Russia has not managed to push the Ukrainain forces out of artillery range of the city for years despite publicly citing that as their main casus belli (the Bimbambombas story).

It is also a hopeful sign that Russia's inability to replace losses and repeated stripping of "inactive fronts" to shore up the south is having some tangible impact on the front.

Not to sound like a broken record, but months of Russia not replacing losses then diverting resources to Kherson is what made the Kharkiv counter offensive possible.  None of us are expecting (though we are hoping!) that there's another "Kharkiv" kind of collapse waiting to be had, however it is possible and it could even be bigger than the Kharkiv collapse.

Steve

[Beleg85]

59 minutes ago, Teufel said:

 

Worth to remember this short clip- Mordvichev is trying to position himself as hardliner and distance from putchists. But sole fact that this new narration of "collecting Russian lands" as historical mission is gradually being accepted by top muscovite militaries and wider society (and not just state propagandists) is telling by itself. Year after year it will become less fake and more genuine, even if they lose this war.

So it was just about time to start arming ourselves on Eastern NATO Flank.

 

 

Edited September 8, 2023 by Beleg85

[Monty's Mighty Moustache]

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-admits-thwarting-ukraine-attack-not-activating-starlink-satellites-2023-9

He didn't think Starlink would be used for military purposes? Man is either deluded or a liar. Or a deluded liar.

Edited September 8, 2023 by Monty's Mighty Moustache

[kimbosbread]

55 minutes ago, Butschi said:

You know, the other side might just try to do the same. So, what will the US do if the others are not compliant enough to just let them play to their strengths and target the enemy's weaknesses?

It's not like that hasn't happened in a couple of wars in the past...

I think the unmanned systems and cyber are gonna change combat significantly more in the next decade. Learning is going to have to accelerate dramatically to keep up.

Just as cheap, powerful chips made cheapo quadcopters possible in the 2000s, cheap, more powerful chips + machine learning advances will make cheapo autonomous systems possible in the 2020s and beyond. We need to skate ahead of the puck here, and understand what the next set of computing advances unlocks. Same for el cheapo access to space ($10-199 per kg)… that unlocks a whole new set of capabilities for us.

[kimbosbread]

5 minutes ago, Monty's Mighty Moustache said:

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-admits-thwarting-ukraine-attack-not-activating-starlink-satellites-2023-9

He didn't think Starlink would be used for military purposes? Man is either deluded or a liar. Or a deluded liar.

Mmmm I wouldn’t underestimate him. He is extremely smart, but also a bit crazy and speaks with zero filter or forethought sometimes.

He’s also terrified of Kessler syndrome and nuclear war, and rightfully thinks Russia can make that happen to the degree it makes LEO a more dangerous place, thus jeapordizing humanity going off to Mars.

[Maciej Zwolinski]

12 minutes ago, Monty's Mighty Moustache said:

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-admits-thwarting-ukraine-attack-not-activating-starlink-satellites-2023-9

He didn't think Starlink would be used for military purposes? Man is either deluded or a liar. Or a deluded liar.

He got scared that the Ukrainian drones will be too succesful and  turn Sevastopol into the second Pearl Harbour. Following which Elon would be invited by the vengeful Russians for a polonium tea and strychnine cakes party.

[kevinkin]

9 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

more powerful chips + machine learning advances will make cheapo autonomous systems possible in the 2020s and beyond.

Don't forget about innovations that increase lift/lower weight and extend battery life. I would love to just getting out of college with degree to work on these things. Alas, time flies almost as fast and a cheapo quadcopter.

[sross112]

13 hours ago, The_Capt said:

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”.

As it stands, counter-battery will be the deciding factor then. If both sides are able to put drones up for a good picture of where the other is and what he is doing and don't have effective counter-drone abilities, then the next best thing is to take away the other side's ability to act on their information. It appears that the UA has been doing this with their increased killing of artillery systems for the past few months. It also explains the small operational areas as the UA doesn't have enough resources to isolate large swaths of the front.

Of course this doesn't solve for the FPV drones. So if we are looking at the future we really need to field a robust counter UAV system of whatever sort (lasers, guns, uavs, etc) that cleanses the sky under 2000 feet. I don't think EW is the answer as it is expensive and the trend towards autonomous will invalidate it or make it super-duper-stupid-expensive. If you can remove the drone threat then it is back to business as usual, if you can't, well, good luck.

Is corrosive warfare a thing of the future or is it just what works for the UA considering all the factors that are present? Would they be using corrosive warfare if they had a USAF? Probably not. The SEAD and DEAD leads to air supremacy and the air supremacy leads to hammering of the towed/SP guns that are the big killers as well as everything else. This in turn enables the ability to maneuver and takes out the enemy's. Would they be using it if they has 100 HIMARS and 90,000 rockets? Probably not, as they would be able to neutralize large sections of the front and keep that neutralization going with the maneuvering elements. If they had hundreds of SP guns (Ceasars, Paladins, Archers, etc) and millions of rounds? Again, probably not. The control envelope is smaller, but the ability to dominate would still be there. So corrosive warfare really isn't the wave of the future for the US or NATO, but it probably is for those that don't have the enablers that they do. 

Other than an insurgency, how do you fight the guys with all those enablers? A ridiculously large pile of FPV drones. Those western powers need to solve for counter uav. If they can do that then like I said earlier, it is back to business as usual. If they can't, well, they should probably start teaching everyone Mandarin to make the transition smoother.

[kimbosbread]

7 minutes ago, sross112 said:

Other than an insurgency, how do you fight the guys with all those enablers? A ridiculously large pile of FPV drones. Those western powers need to solve for counter uav.

FPV drones are “easy” to solve for in that we have a good near term answer: Anti-radiation loitering munitions. Sense that microwave signal and take out the drone or the control team. Anything that has a signature can be detected and targeted.

The challenge we’ll face very soon is autonomous drones that won’t emit any signals and dont need a control link. You already have cheap, fast powerful image recognition on devices like phones without an internet connection needed. Small drones already have minimal radar signature and are quiet because they are all electric. How do you detect these? Other than a Diamond Age-esque flying fence that is a km deep (which is feasible to build in next decade), I can’t think of a good solution.

[Bearstronaut]

46 minutes ago, Monty's Mighty Moustache said:

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-admits-thwarting-ukraine-attack-not-activating-starlink-satellites-2023-9

He didn't think Starlink would be used for military purposes? Man is either deluded or a liar. Or a deluded liar.

Too much ketamine.

[billbindc]

44 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

He got scared that the Ukrainian drones will be too succesful and  turn Sevastopol into the second Pearl Harbour. Following which Elon would be invited by the vengeful Russians for a polonium tea and strychnine cakes party.

The one simple trick to understanding Musk is that he will do whatever he perceives to be in his self interest. Obviously, letting Ukraine use Starlink endeared him to the US government...upon whose contracts several of his companies depend. But he also has large Tesla manufacturing interests in China and that government was expressing strong concerns about Western aid to Ukraine at that time. Much of his wealth is tied to Tesla and it wouldn't take more than a Russian interlocutor mentioning Putin's conversations with Xi to put a deep chill into him. 

The situation now, as I understand it, is that the USG locked him in contractually to avoid this sort of thing reoccurring but I would imagine the scrutiny of who at Starlink knows what about Ukrainian operations and who they may then be talking to will be going into overdrive. Musk's wealth is a pretty big vessel but in the end, the USA is the world's biggest glacier. He avoids running against it or he sinks.

[Letter from Prague]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/09/08/chinese-opera-singer-sings-mariupol-theatre-ukraine/

A shame they couldn't spare a GMLRS or Storm Shadow for this lady.

[dan/california]

54 minutes ago, Letter from Prague said:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/09/08/chinese-opera-singer-sings-mariupol-theatre-ukraine/

A shame they couldn't spare a GMLRS or Storm Shadow for this lady.

Not worth the hassle or the missile. It would just give the Chinese an excuse to send the Russians more ammo. What SHOULD happen is that she is utterly blacklisted in all countries supporting Ukraine. And if some suitable legal interpretation can be found the next time she transits a Western airport, perhaps should could be inited to stay a while at government expense.

[The_Capt]

2 hours ago, sross112 said:

The SEAD and DEAD leads to air supremacy and the air supremacy leads to hammering of the towed/SP guns that are the big killers as well as everything else. This in turn enables the ability to maneuver and takes out the enemy's. Would they be using it if they has 100 HIMARS and 90,000 rockets? Probably not, as they would be able to neutralize large sections of the front and keep that neutralization going with the maneuvering elements. If they had hundreds of SP guns (Ceasars, Paladins, Archers, etc) and millions of rounds? Again, probably not. The control envelope is smaller, but the ability to dominate would still be there. So corrosive warfare really isn't the wave of the future for the US or NATO, but it probably is for those that don't have the enablers that they do. 

There is one massive flaw in this logic..well maybe two.  First is that SEAD and DEAD will work in modern context.  Western SEAD is designed specifically to take out IADS, big complex systems built in layers.  What we are seeing in Ukraine are highly distributed systems with more weight being carried by what we considered “point AD”.  Problem with “point” is that it becomes “area” if you have enough of them and can link them together.  We already see MANPADs capable of reaching up to 20000 plus feet, what happens when someone sticks a bunch of those on a UAS?

Let me be very clear…western “superiority” as we we know it may be dead as of this war.  The things we are seeing are on a very long trend going back to The Gulf War so this is not some flash in the pan phenomena, it is a building pressure wave.

Second flaw…guns will keep doing all the killing.  Guns are highly effective but they are big and have a very large logistical footprint.  The trend appears to be more and more loitering munitions and very long range systems be they rockets and/or unmanned.  Cheap, low footprint is the trend.

Finally the primary driver for corrosive warfare and Denial primacy does not appear to be weapon systems or capacity, it is C4ISR.  Our western forces have enormous logistical footprints that can be seen from space.  An opponent that can find them first and then hit them via any number of methods is going to be able stop us cold.  

So what?  The entry cost to fight a peer opponent has gone up dramatically.  Stand-off and denial technology has gone into overdrive because (surprise, surprise) adversaries want to blunt western advantage.  I am not convinced we have solved for any of this.  I know we are working on it but old faiths die the hardest.

2 hours ago, sross112 said:

Those western powers need to solve for counter uav. If they can do that then like I said earlier, it is back to business as usual. If they can't, well, they should probably start teaching everyone Mandarin to make the transition smoother.

UAS have nothing on UGV and that shoe will likely drop very soon.  Western powers need to solve for Unmanned, C4ISR and Precision Defence very quickly.  We won’t be learning Mandarin, we will be looking very long high intensity wars that our societies are incredibly poorly prepared for.

[cesmonkey]

https://warontherocks.com/2023/09/ukrainian-progress-a-breach-or-a-breakthrough-of-russian-lines/

Ukrainian Progress: A Breach or a Breakthrough of Russian Lines?

Nick Danforth sat down with Mike Kofman to discuss the state of the Ukrainain offensive three months in, as well as the challenges of assessing it.

[Maciej Zwolinski]

5 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

UAS have nothing on UGV and that shoe will likely drop very soon.  Western powers need to solve for Unmanned, C4ISR and Precision Defence very quickly.  We won’t be learning Mandarin, we will be looking very long high intensity wars that our societies are incredibly poorly prepared for.

I hate to repeat myself but I again encourage everyone interested in this to look up "the Invincible" by Stanislaw Lem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible