How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[sburke]

1 hour ago, dan/california said:

Whatever they moved to Russia to do, it wasn't to die in Ukraine. It does make you wonder how awful most of Central Asia is, that moving to Russia seems like a good idea?

Just money.  Seems like a lot of places in the world you can make some money to send home to family.  Like the slavery conditions workers face in the Middle East.

[sburke]

On 10/25/2023 at 6:23 PM, JonS said:

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 ...

JD Vance calls Speaker Johnson’s Ukraine remarks ‘concerning’ (yahoo.com)

[Harmon Rabb]

Just recently started following this Twitter account. Like it so far, good info on both Ukraine and Israel.

Relatively new account, was only created in 2023.

[dan/california]

29 minutes ago, sburke said:

JD Vance calls Speaker Johnson’s Ukraine remarks ‘concerning’ (yahoo.com)

 

10 minutes ago, Harmon Rabb said:

Just recently started following this Twitter account. Like it so far, good info on both Ukraine and Israel.

Relatively new account, was only created in 2023.

If He wants to go down in history as the hero, all he has to do is put the Ukraine/Israel supplemental, and the full year budget up for a vote. I the Putin Caucus boots him I will by the mans book, so help me. I don't think he would be hurting for job offers in D.C. either.

 

[Harmon Rabb]

Some photos and a video of AFU snipers in action that Jack Ryan posted recently.

Lets be honest, ghillie suites always look cool.

[Battlefront.com]

Another Russian recruitment pool is Ukrainian POWs. 

Quote

Russian authorities have likely coerced Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) into joining a “volunteer” formation that will fight in Ukraine, which would constitute an apparent violation of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War. Russian state media reported on October 27 that the “Bogdan Khmelnitsky” volunteer battalion “recruited” roughly 70 Ukrainian POWs from various Russian penal colonies, has begun training, and will deploy to an unspecified area of the front line upon completion of training.[17] Coercing POWs into combat would be a violation of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, which stipulates that “no prisoner of war may at any time be sent to or detained in areas where he may be exposed to the fire of the combat zone” and shall not “be employed on labor which is of an unhealthy or dangerous nature,” as ISW has previously reported.[18]

Small number that is unlikely to grow, but hey... it's at least 10 minutes of combat power to throw into the mix.

Steve

[JonS]

11 hours ago, Endyamon said:

I was wondering one thing: Everywhere they talk about how many artillery shells Russia can produce or already have, but I wonder if they can also buy/obtain/build enough artillery systems to fire all these shells. I'm not an expert about military stuff, but I think artillery tubes can deteriorate quite quickly if used a lot. Has anyone any idea of how many of these new hardwares can Russia field each month?

Modern artillery generally seems to be rated for around 2,000 EFC, where 1EFC is one round fired at full charge (ie, firing out to maximum range). EFC stands for Equivalent Full Charge. Most rounds are fired at less than maximum range, or a fraction of an EFC. The exact mix of ranges fired obviously depends on circumstances, but figure 10,000 total rounds fired is as good an estimate as any for the life of a barrel.

That means that for every 1,000,000 rounds fired you're going to need another 100 new barrels, quite apart from any damage the enemy manages to inflict.

Edited October 28, 2023 by JonS

[Aragorn2002]

'Russian trenches are apparently dealing with a slight infestation by rodents of unusual size in Donetsk Oblast.'

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, JonS said:

Modern artillery generally seems to be rated for around 2,000 EFC, where 1EFC is one round fired at full charge (ie, firing out to maximum range). EFC stands for Equivalent Full Charge. Most rounds are fired at less than maximum range, or a fraction of an EFC. The exact mix of ranges fired obviously depends on circumstances, but figure 10,000 total rounds fired is as good an estimate as any for the life of a barrel.

That means that for every 1,000,000 rounds fired you're going to need another 100 new barrels, quite apart from any damage the enemy manages to inflict.

As some OSINT guys have noticed, barrels on mothballed SPGs have been disappearing.  Not surprisingly, this indicates that Russia is going through barrels faster than it can produce them.

Steve

[JonS]

Indeed. Of course, western barrels also wear out. 500,000 donated rounds = 50 replacement barrels too, please.

Edited October 28, 2023 by JonS

[Grossman]

Oleg Tsaryov once said to be the potential leader of a Kremlin controlled puppet government in Ukraine shot twice by unknown assailant.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/27/pro-moscow-ukrainian-politician-oleg-tsaryov-in-critical-condition-after-apparent-assassination-attempt

[The_Capt]

3 hours ago, JonS said:

Indeed. Of course, western barrels wear out too. 500,000 donated rounds = 50 extra barrels also, please.

Gawd. Guns. Neediest bad-girlfriend on the battlefield.

[cesmonkey]

Nice little compilation video:

 

[kimbosbread]

Given that we have a satellite passes every 90m (for LEO), both optical and SAR and firms, how hard is that to use to identify artillery hides + firing positions? I feel like it would be fairly straightforward to train an image recognition model on this sort of data. Are we not doing this, or is it way harder than I think?

[kimbosbread]

Also, I’ve wanted to give everybody some insight into one of the big problems of how you train image recognition models: Good quality data!

I mentioned a while ago that I wanted to set up my drone to fly through my house autonomously, exploring it depth-first-search style and building a map, basically, and driven by an ML model running on my rather beefy desktop. I realized pretty quickly I’d need a way for the drone to recognize rooms, doorways, walls, etc and be able to estimate distances from just one camera alone, maybe using ghetto stereo, ie comparing image if you move 1s forward towards whatever you are moving towards. And to do this, I’d need a virtual dojo/training environment where my drone could learn everything. And I was building that in Unity, and then got this new cool job where I’m working 12 hours a day so that’s on the shelf.

Where are we at? Obviously the military is interested in these virtual training environments and I understand they’ve invested a lot of effort. So has Nvidia with their Omniverse product: https://www.youtube.com/@NVIDIAOmniverse/playlists. Microsoft also built a tool called Airsim in 2017: https://microsoft.github.io/AirSim/

[JonS]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Gawd. Guns. Neediest bad-girlfriend on the battlefield.

You know it, babe

 

Edited October 28, 2023 by JonS

[chrisl]

46 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

Given that we have a satellite passes every 90m (for LEO), both optical and SAR and firms, how hard is that to use to identify artillery hides + firing positions? I feel like it would be fairly straightforward to train an image recognition model on this sort of data. Are we not doing this, or is it way harder than I think?

What makes you think that isn't how Bayraktar found a lot of high value stuff early on, or that that's not how we got all the  river bridging massacres?  You can be sure that anybody who owns satellites and computers is spending a lot of effort on that.

Whether it works for artillery hides will depend on a lot of things - the satellite resolution and wavelengths: optical are generally higher res, but easier to camoflage against;  SAR doesn't really care what color you are, but does care about your shape and what you're made of.  That's also why artillery units train to be able to hang out behind CB range, or just drive around, and then just like a panda: park, shoot, and leave in 5 to 10 minutes.

 

 

[chrisl]

44 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

Also, I’ve wanted to give everybody some insight into one of the big problems of how you train image recognition models: Good quality data!

Not just good quality data. Good quality data that has been accurately labeled, and often in massive volumes and of high diversity.  Depending on your system, that can be very difficult to get - I do some optical systems where we're almost guaranteed to have low signal to noise (always working at the limit of our resolution) and are likely to run into things that are outside the training set, and we spend huge amounts of effort on both improving the repeatability of the acquisition (relatively easy), and automating the development of training data, which sometimes involves a lot of bootstrapping.  You think watching the scanners at TSA checkpoints is painful? Have I got a job for you...

[kimbosbread]

12 minutes ago, chrisl said:

Not just good quality data. Good quality data that has been accurately labeled, and often in massive volumes and of high diversity.  Depending on your system, that can be very difficult to get…

Yeah, the accurate labeling is a real issue. For my drone problem, the nice thing about a virtual environment is you absolutely know where the virtual drone is, so you have labelled data without extra effort and can very easily build the model to estimate distances for a single camera- once you have the environment.

Edited October 28, 2023 by kimbosbread

[kimbosbread]

21 minutes ago, chrisl said:

Whether it works for artillery hides will depend on a lot of things - the satellite resolution and wavelengths: optical are generally higher res, but easier to camoflage against;  SAR doesn't really care what color you are, but does care about your shape and what you're made of.  That's also why artillery units train to be able to hang out behind CB range, or just drive around, and then just like a panda: park, shoot, and leave in 5 to 10 minutes.

I was thinking of it more as an anomaly detection problem. If you could label your data using what Ukraine does (given either SAR or optical, or combined), and train the model on that, would that work on the other side as a rough cut? And then once you have located them, loitering munitions. I guess that’s the missing link: An autonomous drone that can recognize desired targets and look for them in a rough search zone for a few hours.

Edited October 28, 2023 by kimbosbread

[chrisl]

5 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

I was thinking of it more as an anomaly detection problem. If you could label your data using what Ukraine does (given either SAR or optical, or combined), and train the model on that, would that work on the other side as a rough cut? And then once you have located them, loitering munitions. I guess that’s the missing link: An autonomous drone that can recognize desired targets and look for them in a rough search zone for a few hours.

Yes, it's a "difference detection" problem, but if you're looking for something that's near your limit of resolution it gets harder.  And all measurement systems have noise. For most human optical applications you're used to signal levels that are *way* above the noise, but someone trying to hide from a satellite is going to work hard to keep the changes that you see down close to the observer's noise level. That makes life much harder for the automated system and its trainer.  And aside from the changes they're looking for, there are lots of other changes going on above threshold because stuff just moves around on earth.  That's noise, too, but of a different sort, and part of the developer's goal is to be able to discriminate benign activity from targetable activity when they both show up in the signal.

[kluge]

1 hour ago, kimbosbread said:

Given that we have a satellite passes every 90m (for LEO), both optical and SAR and firms, how hard is that to use to identify artillery hides + firing positions? I feel like it would be fairly straightforward to train an image recognition model on this sort of data. Are we not doing this, or is it way harder than I think?

In theory, this should be pretty easy as image classification is well known and widely studied.

Acquiring the data is a different story. Free data sources like FIRMS don't provide enough resolution to identify individual positions in any meaningful way. Commercial data sources have enough spatial resolution to identify vehicles, but generally don't have the temporal resolution to continually scan locations and doing so every hour is sure to rack up an eye popping bill. Government satellites definitely have the resolution, but that information is classified and its unclear if the US offers a direct data pipeline to Ukraine.

[chrisl]

1 hour ago, kluge said:

In theory, this should be pretty easy as image classification is well known and widely studied.

Acquiring the data is a different story. Free data sources like FIRMS don't provide enough resolution to identify individual positions in any meaningful way. Commercial data sources have enough spatial resolution to identify vehicles, but generally don't have the temporal resolution to continually scan locations and doing so every hour is sure to rack up an eye popping bill. Government satellites definitely have the resolution, but that information is classified and its unclear if the US offers a direct data pipeline to Ukraine.

US/NATO almost certainly aren't giving a direct data pipeline, but Ukraine probably wouldn't be able to process it as well or as quickly as they're likely getting pre-processed from US/NATO.  The US has had electro-optical/digital (non-film based) satellites since the mid 1970s and has a lot of infrastructure built up for the processing/evaluation/distribution that would take a long time and a lot of trial and error for Ukraine to replicate.

Commercial sources actually have very rapid revisit times these days - that's the big selling point for Planet Labs - moderate (0.5 to 3 m) resolution at very high revisit rates.  If you look at the whole Maxar fleet, they can revisit anyplace every few hours, and it looks like you can probably get commercial SAR at similar return rates.

[Yet]

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-drone-struck-russian-nuclear-waste-facility-ministry-says-2023-10-28/

 

false flag to scout the possibility to use tacticals in the near future?

[Sojourner]

Oh, this is rich...

Russian foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova: "According to preliminary data, the drones used in the attack on the nuclear power plant used components supplied by Western countries."

The same holds true for Russian drones.