How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[kimbosbread]

9 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

How about fighting electronics and computers with raw high explosive power - putting a rocket engine & rudimentary guidance kit on a couple of CBU-55-type devices, establishing local EW superiority over a corridor say 15 km long just to protect them on the way and firing a salvo of thus-created GLHMEB (Ground Launched Huge Motherf***ing Explosive B****ard)  towards the enemy trenches?

Yeah, and then your corridor immediately fills up again with all the things from outside the corridor, and you are back to square 1.

[chrisl]

2 hours ago, poesel said:

 

That is where math meets reality.

P = W / t

Double W and you double P - easy. Unfortunately not.
The P on the left side represents a real machine (an engine, a laser, ...). It has a maximum power output which is limited by its construction (the CCs you have in a combustion engine or the heat dissipation in a laser to name some restraints). If you try to go beyond that power, you won't get it in the best case or destroy it in the worst.

So P is fixed. What happens when you add to W is this:

t = W / P

t gets bigger. Meaning you can drive or shoot longer.

Where caps help in the laser scenario is, that they can release a lot of energy in a short time. Much more than batteries or a diesel generator. If your laser can take that power - good! But just adding caps won't make the laser more powerful (in the sense of: more output power).

This ends my basic physics' lesson to not further derail this thread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(physics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy

As already alluded to - high power lasers are typically pulsed.  They might be powered by a system that’s in the kW range and hit GW in pulses that are a few ns long.    And the short pulses typically are putting all the power in a small area virtually instantly, so you get tremendous local heating and ablation with every pulse - you neglected thermal diffusivity in your bierdeckel calculation. For example, you can power a laser that can engrave rock using a 9V consumer battery.

[akd]

Russian MT-LB tries to drive through a Ukrainian roadblock:

 

[LongLeftFlank]

48 minutes ago, akd said:

Russian MT-LB tries to drive through a Ukrainian roadblock:

 

Crikey, that's another 10 Ivans KIA (or permanently maimed if they can somehow get casevac) right there. How long can they keep this up?

1. More unrest in the ranks, in spite of very real and lethal measures being applied to refuseniks. ChrisO thread here

https://nitter.net/ChrisO_wiki/status/1717140898411114938#m

Hundreds of Russian soldiers may have mutinied in recent weeks as the Russian army accumulates huge losses in offensives in several regions of Ukraine. At least 173 men are reported to have been detained for refusing orders, and this may be just the tip of the iceberg.

(Yet) another thread on dire troop conditions here:

https://nitter.net/ChrisO_wiki/status/1716556974572114210#m

14/ "Literally three days later, we were left with nine people out of 20, the rest were all 300s [wounded]. Despite the fact that we have been mobilised for more than a year, this does not mean that we have adequate combat training for assaults

33/ "If we fight like this, a lot of people will die ... There were dead anti-aircraft gunners in my anti-tank platoon. Commanders don't want to waste time on training – they just take them and throw them into the breach without any consideration

****

2. Tatarigami's latest, commenting on the (futile) Russian offensive that he admits he did not predict, simply because it made no sense....

From thread comments (by Tatarigami): 

It seems like they moved more troops from other areas, and are quite determined to continue despite losses, which reeks of political decision. I am not ready to say yet, but it seems like it might roll all the way to this winter, just in a different way.

Useful map, showing scale.

 

Edited October 25, 2023 by LongLeftFlank

[The_Capt]

1 hour ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

How about fighting electronics and computers with raw high explosive power - putting a rocket engine & rudimentary guidance kit on a couple of CBU-55-type devices, establishing local EW superiority over a corridor say 15 km long just to protect them on the way and firing a salvo of thus-created GLHMEB (Ground Launched Huge Motherf***ing Explosive B****ard)  towards the enemy trenches?

According to Wikipedia, a CBU 55 was dropped only once in Viet Nam, it managed to create a 4-acre fireball and kill 250 Charlie (or Charlies? Was it ever pluralised)? It would clear mines, fill in trenches, throw dragonteeh around and suffocate Russians left, right and center. A can of instant desert. Somewhat similar shock and awe effect to the one achieved in WWI by mining under the enemy trenches and blowing up whole corridors filled with TNT. Just without waiting for weeks. 

The problem is modern ranges and defending forces distribution.  So you pick a grid square for annihilation but mines are buried and very tough to over pressure (unless they are Russian and buried 2 inches from each other).  Mines with legs can, as had been noted, simply fill back in.  And ATGMs/UAS have ranges of kms so you might get those in the grid square but the rest can still reach out and get you while trying to breakthrough.

And then there is the next grid square and the one after that in depth as you advance.  So you would basically would need to carpet bomb a 10s of kms deep stretch of ground with Daisy-cutters/FABs just to get penetration…and still be dealing with stuff hitting on the sides kms out while trying to transit.  And none of that stops the enemy using FASCAM to plug the holes - which is really what they were designed for.

It might work if you could pick the right spot and exploit it…and got very lucky.  Cratering in WW1 had limited success but breaking out was the problem then, as it would be now.

Edit: forgot surprise.  Another problem is that to exploit one would need a large breakout force.  In the modern ISR environment it would get picked up from space so an opponent would know something was going on well ahead of the op.  EW might give a Local Bubble but stand-off ISR is extremely high res and could even direct C-fires.  Of course if you are going to go this way one is coming up on tac nuke solutions.

Edited October 25, 2023 by The_Capt

[poesel]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Kinda feels like you are fixating on a single factor here to try and prove a point.  And missed the OPs point, which was that one can field more powerful systems that can destroy UAS faster by adding more energy and/or releasing what you have faster.  Quick output capacitors enable the fielding of more powerful systems.  True, but then one is dragging more capacitors around which adds to weight and profile...and cost.

Adding capacitors will enhance other military factors such as endurance, but also come at a cost.  In summary, having a big giant laser running around the battlefield to shoot down bird sized UAS that can each kill a tank is not workable for a lot of reasons.

I guess the confusion comes from the use of the term 'more powerful'.

In a technical sense, it means 'more output power'.

In a more common sense, it means 'more useful'.

In the former, caps do not help, in the latter they do.

[cesmonkey]

Since all the Republican members of the House of Representatives (minus one absentee) voted today for the election of Mike Johnson as the new Speaker of the House, I assume those that are very strongly in support of more funding for Ukraine must have felt there is a reasonable chance he will allow more such votes in the future.

Edited October 25, 2023 by cesmonkey

[Sojourner]

“Different waiter, same menu. Except more conservative,” offered Representative Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts)

[akd]

A few moments earlier…

 

[dan/california]

 

Quote

 

https://www.politico.com/sponsor-content/2023/10/06/the-armys-new-piloted-scout-helicopter-is-critical-for-tomorrows-missions?cid=hp

No Substitute for a Pilot’s Instincts in the Lower Tier Air Domain

 

Now if you are looking for a fifty million dollar per piece boondoggle Sikorsky has a deal for you. I am sure it can do all sorts of wonderful tricks, I just REALLY doubt that staying alive against competent opposition is one of them.

[Sojourner]

5 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

See the last paragraph of the post just above yours.  But I'll rephrase it...

If we can not realistically protect a $5m MBT from a $1000 drone, then question why we should have MBTs in the first place (as we have been doing here)?  Throwing good money after bad just because bad already exists isn't a great strategy for using limited resources.

The same goes for civilian infrastructure.  The US has billions of points of failure for its infrastructure, ranging from huge ones (Hoover Dam) to power sub stations outside a water treatment plant in Genericville USA.  No one thing will protect them, but I can sure as Hell state that $50m laser defense systems will have zero impact on drone threats.  So we should already be looking at more practical solutions for drone threats.

Whatever solutions might be developed for protecting civilian infrastructure will likely be applicable to military capabilities.  Pour billions of R&D into solving for civilian instead of squandering that same amount of money producing inadequate solutions for even a fraction of the military's needs.

Steve

OK, I get that, I misread that part  the first time through. More of what I had in mind when I posted was an earlier comment - something to the effect  that one shouldn’t waste a missile that cost x-times more than the target (threat). In that regard, what I was trying to get across is that one needs to consider the cost of not destroying the threat.

Without diving too deep into risk analysis, in basic terms risk is the product of consequence (hazard) and probability (frequency). So an event with high consequence but a low probability can be less risky than one of medium consequence and medium probability. When today’s MBTs were designed, getting taken out by a cheap commercial drone was probably considered extremely low risk (probability), if it was considered at all. One has to admit that MBTs are pretty good at coping with the known risks at the time. Rather than “why have them”, a better question might be why use them now. The answer probably being because we do have them.  And definitely, decision makers should consider “should we make more?”.

Civilian infrastructure in the US, well… , let’s just say it’s highly neglected. Since 2002 ~25% of power outages nationwide were caused by sabotage, cyber attack, and vandalism; they can’t even prevent Billy Bob from taking potshots at substation transformers ‘cuz it’s cool when they go boom.  So I fully agree with the laser solution, or rather non-solution. Electromagnetic theory may have been my Achilles’ heel at back at uni, but I still don’t think laser defense is practical today (power requirements, size, yada yada we’ve been over that already). However, in Ukraine, a Shahed strike on a marketplace/school/hospital - high consequence + high probability, definitely worth more than x-times the cost of the drone.

[Fenris]

Appears to be an example of effective use of cluster rounds

 

[cesmonkey]

 

[Battlefront.com]

6 hours ago, zinz said:

Option 4 would be that Putin and therefore all the lower levels need good news from the front. In Russia just defending in an offensive war doesn't cut it. 

Thanks for adding that.  For some reason I keep leaving that off lists of reasons when I try to figure out why Russia does something.  Yet I know full well that it should always be on the list since that's SOP in an authoritarian state.

Steve

[Vet 0369]

4 hours ago, akd said:

Russian MT-LB tries to drive through a Ukrainian roadblock:

 

I’m sorry, but that was f’king disgusting! There’s no reason for showing vids of soldiers burning to death! When we show those, we become desensitized to them still being human beings.

[The_Capt]

30 minutes ago, Vet 0369 said:

I’m sorry, but that was f’king disgusting! There’s no reason for showing vids of soldiers burning to death! When we show those, we become desensitized to them still being human beings.

It does show a tactical example in this war.  And the brutality is not something people should try and ignore.  War has a cost and everyone should see what that cost is.

That said, I would definitely not recommend to vets out there as it could be triggering.  IED strikes look pretty much identical to be honest.  Worst case was trapped in a burning vehicle and it happened far too often.  Total nightmare fuel there.

[Offshoot]

Minister: Ukraine to produce tens of thousands of drones per month by year's end - https://kyivindependent.com/minister-ukraine-to-produce-tens-of-thousands-of-drones-per-month-by-years-end/

Quote

 

Ukraine is already producing thousands of drones per month, but this will soon increase to tens of thousands per month, said Minister for Strategic Industries Oleksandr Kamyshin on Oct. 25.

Kamyshin was in Stockholm, Sweden, for the NATO Industrial Forum.

 

 

[Battlefront.com]

19 minutes ago, Offshoot said:

Minister: Ukraine to produce tens of thousands of drones per month by year's end - https://kyivindependent.com/minister-ukraine-to-produce-tens-of-thousands-of-drones-per-month-by-years-end/

 

This just underscores the threat from drones.  Already plentiful and growing exponentially.  Good thing the Pentagon is getting ready to field 4 defense systems in 2 years!

(sorry, couldn't help myself)

Steve

[Offshoot]

A recent and interesting interview with  Illia Vitiuk, the head of the cyber department at Ukraine's top counterintelligence agency. The cyber war doesn't get covered as much here but I think awhile ago there was a short discussion after someone asked about it.

Meet the man leading the front-line effort in Ukraine's cyber war with Russia - https://www.npr.org/2023/09/06/1196975759/ukraine-cyber-war-russia-sbu-illia-vitiuk
 

Quote

 

But on Feb. 24, 2022, members of that agency — Ukraine's Security Service, or the SBU — took on another role: physically hauling important servers and technical infrastructure away from Kyiv to protect it from Russian invaders.

...

Following Russia's failure to immediately overtake Ukraine, Vitiuk said SBU observed Russian hackers switch tactics, primarily toward intelligence gathering and disrupting the power grid.

 

A recent example of a claimed hack: Ukrainian hackers and intel officers partner up in apparent hack of a top Russian bank - https://www.npr.org/2023/10/25/1208352887/ukraine-russia-bank-hack

[paxromana]

6 hours ago, Billy Ringo said:

To complicate things further: technology, AI, etc. are all advancing at such an accelerating rate that we don't even know what questions to ask or threats to combat that will need to be addressed 1-3 years in the future.  Much less 3+ years away.

Rather like Aircraft in the years immediately prior to WW2 - so majorcombatants were fielding open cockpit and/or Biplane fighters as frontline aircraft (amongst other things). Tanks also, to a lesser degree.

[cesmonkey]

 

[sburke]

11 minutes ago, cesmonkey said:

 

"we all do"  Except for the 117 House members that voted against the last package.  If a bill for Ukraine aid comes to the floor, there is a high probability Johnson will be the next guy toppled out of his chair.

[JonS]

Maybe we could run a book on how long he'll last, with the profit being used to fund the next package.

I've got $5 on 8 days ...

[danfrodo]

59 minutes ago, cesmonkey said:

 

This guy is  disgusting overall, a full-on MAGA stolen-election fascist, at least in his words and actions, gawd knows what he actually believes because it's near political suicide to actually say sane things on his side of the aisle.  But let's judge him on this one item: I interpret his words as "I support UKR aid.  I just gotta go thru some motions to make it look like we are more responsible w that aid than before to placate those of my colleagues who are on Putin's payroll".  So I like what he said, I think it bodes well.  And if he delivers I'll have to swallow my pride and thank him, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, just like I did w Sen McConnell.

[Aragorn2002]

5 hours ago, Vet 0369 said:

I’m sorry, but that was f’king disgusting! There’s no reason for showing vids of soldiers burning to death! When we show those, we become desensitized to them still being human beings.

On the contrary.