How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[dan/california]

 

[JonS]

3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

This is why I think some of the doom saying about artillery systems is misplaced.  I think tanks and other heavy IFVs are out, but I think artillery is here to stay for a long time.

It's the same thing with air power - at it's best air power can do things (particularly in terms of range, firepower, precision, ISR) that artillery cannot, but artillery has a whole suite of it's own capabilities (intimacy, endurance, affordability, availability) that air power cannot emulate. That's why artillery is still a thing, despite the best efforts of first Goering and later the USAF.

Quote

Plus, it gives JonS something to occupy his time and that's in all of our best interests

That, obviously and correctly, is priority 1.

Edited October 31, 2023 by JonS

[Battlefront.com]

55 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

People are getting all excited about Unmanned and AI but Nanotech is around the corner.  And I am not talking Grey Goo.  I am talking manufacturing nano-additives to fuel and explosives.  Not to mention energy storage. 

 

A few pages ago I mentioned that whatever we're talking about now will likely fail once nano becomes a thing.  But let's not talk about that, shall we?  Because if we do, it won't take long before you'll never hear from me again.  I'll be busy building my zero heat signature off-grid bunker to live in.

AI scares me enough, but AI combined with nano... no thanks.

Steve

[acrashb]

28 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

An exo-suit with armor will have a lot of weight

Weight appears to be more of an issue than power.  Ground pressure goes up and soldiers sink into soft terrain; stairs built to code are designed for (in the US) 510 lbs, which assuming that the soldier weighs 225 leaves less than one would like for exoskeleton, power source, full-coverage armour, weapons, ammunition, and a 3-day pack.

There could be breakthroughs in armour weight.

40 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

EFP is not HEAT per se, it is a slug of hot metal fired at the vehicle at great speeds.  Sort of if HEAT and AP had an angry murderous baby.

How about an angry, murderous sumo wrestler?  Nuclear EFPs could be built today, and will be when someone thinks it is necessary, although more likely in the space domain than ground, sea or air.

"a 1 kiloton yield warhead could propel more than 21.7 tons of metal at the target at 9 km/s."

https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/05/nuclear-efp-and-heat.html

We talk a lot about near-real-time ISR from satellites.  In the next peer-to-peer war, space will be a warfighting domain.  Which will likely cause a Kessler syndrome, and we'll go back to communicating with tin cans and string.

 

 

[Hapless]

54 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

An exo-suit with armor will have a lot of weight

Armour would be nice, but I think the potential for assisted movement is more important.

Giving a platoon of infantrymen the ability to run several km at speed without fatigue... that's a gamechanger at the pointy end.

[The_Capt]

40 minutes ago, JonS said:

artillery has a whole suite of it's own capabilities (intimacy, endurance, affordability, availability) that air power cannot emulate.

Jon...are you coming onto me?

[sburke]

14 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Jon...are you coming onto me?

whew glad you didn't spell that "on to".  This is a family forum after all. 

[Battlefront.com]

14 minutes ago, Hapless said:

Armour would be nice, but I think the potential for assisted movement is more important.

Giving a platoon of infantrymen the ability to run several km at speed without fatigue... that's a gamechanger at the pointy end.

Regardless of if it's for mobility or protection or both, it's a truly distributed system.  One of the keys to surviving on tomorrow's battlefield is having redundancy at the lowest level.  Going the Nazi German route of "if it isn't big and heavy enough, then build it bigger and heavier" concept is as dumb as it is expensive.

Steve

[Nastypastie]

1 hour ago, Hapless said:

If we're looking at a battlespace where high signature vehicles are prohibitively vulnerable and low signature infantry is simultaenously survivable and lethal (via calling for precision fires), maybe the way forward is less to try and proof AFVs and more to boost infantry mobility and load carrying ability.

Or, in short: Heinlein probably nailed it.

Its not viable to up armour to upper surfaces of a tank. Modern tanks are already extremely heavy on the top armour by historical measures with around 40mm or so and it makes them crazy heavy as it is. You'd need about 50% more than that to even stop shell fragments from a close burst from a 155, let alone an EFP or a shaped charge. It's long been the case that its only viable to stop HEAT from the frontal arc and even then that has been since the advent of composite armour. When you think about the surface area you are talking about compared to actually quite small armoured front section of a tank you can imagine how having in any way comparable armour on the roof would simply not be possible. Pretty much at any scale.

[chrisl]

9 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Regardless of if it's for mobility or protection or both, it's a truly distributed system.  One of the keys to surviving on tomorrow's battlefield is having redundancy at the lowest level.  Going the Nazi German route of "if it isn't big and heavy enough, then build it bigger and heavier" concept is as dumb as it is expensive.

Steve

So basically the Borg.

[Battlefront.com]

Just now, chrisl said:

So basically the Borg.

Agent Smith from the Matrix would be even better, but the Borg could work as well.

Steve

[chrisl]

5 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Agent Smith from the Matrix would be even better, but the Borg could work as well.

Steve

Borg vs Matrix, like the old monster movies.

[Vet 0369]

20 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

The first video shows a very large assembly area getting hammered.  Ukraine has hit stuff in this area before, so WTF were these morons thinking about forming up for an attack right there?  Apologies to the morons out there, I don't mean to insult you.

The second video contains yet another view of the infamous slaughter of the BTRs.  I don't know about the rest of it.

Steve

Hey! I resemble that, at least according to my wife!

Edited October 31, 2023 by Vet 0369

[JonS]

39 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Jon...are you coming onto me?

Constantly. Your fanfic ... moves me.

[Fenris]

Long thread with many still shots of RU losses from the Avdiivka attacks over the past few weeks.

https://twitter.com/OSINTua/status/1719405791428440462

 

And another example of an AFV column being picked apart.  Can't be 100% sure it's all the one action but it's put together that way.

 

Edited October 31, 2023 by Fenris

[Battlefront.com]

13 minutes ago, Fenris said:

Long thread with many still shots of RU losses from the Avdiivka attacks over the past few weeks.

https://twitter.com/OSINTua/status/1719405791428440462

 

And another example of an AFV column being picked apart.  Can't be 100% sure it's all the one action but it's put together that way.

 

For the first half it's pretty clearly the same force being hounded over a pretty long distance.  From there it looks like documenting the column being picked off one at a time.

Whatever the case may be, this once again shows that the threat to an armored column is not limited to one specific point of their advance.  There is no running the gauntlet, so to speak, with PGMs because you're vulnerable the entire time regardless of how fast or often you change direction.

Steve

[poesel]

Ukrainian drone pilot destroys a Russian tank from 22 km distance (18 from frontline).
The tweet also states, that Russia has imposed a 10 km no-tank zone from the front.

 

[LongLeftFlank]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Jon...are you coming onto me?

 

2 hours ago, JonS said:

Constantly. Your fanfic ... moves me.

Get an inner board, you two.

[Kinophile]

On 10/30/2023 at 8:35 AM, chuckdyke said:

Then we had Northern Ireland. 

That was a colonial war. 

While Religion was a demographic identifier, to clearly separate Them from Us, the war wasn't over religious definitions,  protocols,  iconography or anything else. It was fundamentally about a foreign invader oppressing a native population.

The imposed existence of a regime-friendly settler population using a different religion was a sociopolitical characterization, not a religious one. 

In many respects,  Northern Ireland shared strong similarities with the Algerian war against France. The settler population there was less embedded and had been there for less time but that was very clearly a war against a colonial power. 

Where NI differs (as I currently understand it) is that many Protestant /Unionist self identify as both Irish and British. Republicans consider the two as oil and water. I don't think any French Settlers referred to themselves as Algerian and French. 

There are corollaries with Ukraine, but there the classic identifier is language. A Ukrainian can speak Russian fluently and only passablr Ukrainian,  yet identify as Ukrainian. The opposite is(was?) true in the Donbass,  I believe? 

It's easy to look at a conflict,  hear the base identifiers of either community and think,  oh that's what it is. But the real truth is often a bit deeper,  much older and more basic, essential to human nature. With Northern Ireland and any other colonial war it's fundamentally about freedom from someone else in another culture deciding the status,  state and fate of your culture. 

Which, exactly,  is the nature of Ukrainian resistance against Russia. 

Edited November 1, 2023 by Kinophile

[dan/california]

 

Quote

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/opinion/ukraine-military-spending.html

So, do we have a hugely bloated military budget? No doubt the Pentagon, like any large organization, wastes a lot of money. But recent events have made the case for spending at least as much as we currently do, and perhaps more.

First, one of the revelations from the war in Ukraine has been that those expensive NATO weapons systems, from Javelin anti-tank missiles to HIMARS, actually do work.

More important, it turns out that the era of large-scale conventional warfare isn’t over after all, and there are real concerns about whether our weapons production capacity is large enough to deal with the potential threats.

 

Krugman had a good day.

[Kraft]

PoWs with tied hands shot by the Russians

[Vanir Ausf B]

 

[sburke]

1 hour ago, Kinophile said:

Where NI differs (as I currently understand it) is that many Protestant /Unionist self identify as both Irish and British. Republicans consider the two as oil and water. I don't think any French Settlers referred to themselves as Algerian and French. 

Not sure that is entirely accurate.  The French in Algeria had a somewhat different perspective.  In their view Algeria, particularly Algiers was French.  You've probably watched it but if you haven't you should - I visited there for work a few years back and the cab driver was taking me around to some of the sights like the milk bar.  He seemed excited to find someone who knew some of the specific history.  The company warned us however that we were not to go into the Casbah.

 

[chrisl]

4 hours ago, acrashb said:

Weight appears to be more of an issue than power.  Ground pressure goes up and soldiers sink into soft terrain; stairs built to code are designed for (in the US) 510 lbs, which assuming that the soldier weighs 225 leaves less than one would like for exoskeleton, power source, full-coverage armour, weapons, ammunition, and a 3-day pack.

There could be breakthroughs in armour weight.

How about an angry, murderous sumo wrestler?  Nuclear EFPs could be built today, and will be when someone thinks it is necessary, although more likely in the space domain than ground, sea or air.

"a 1 kiloton yield warhead could propel more than 21.7 tons of metal at the target at 9 km/s."

https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/05/nuclear-efp-and-heat.html

We talk a lot about near-real-time ISR from satellites.  In the next peer-to-peer war, space will be a warfighting domain.  Which will likely cause a Kessler syndrome, and we'll go back to communicating with tin cans and string.

That results in denying yourself space-based ISR, too.  Anti-satellite without making a big mess is possible, and for most satellites (i.e. those not designed to avoid a predatory satellite) probably not really much more difficult than doing it the messy way.  Possibly easier, because you can do it with higher certainty.  

The problem with the pre-war Russian attempt is that they wanted deniability with respect to taking out US/NATO allied satellites and so they had to make a big mess out of one of their own so they could say "oh, noes!  we didn't mean to make that big mess that took out all your fancy electro-optical systems.  We were just trying to remove our sad, useless satellite from the sky so it wouldn't bother anybody else, but Igor grabbed the wrong jar, and now here we are..."

[JonS]

An easy-ish way for the US and NATO to deal with drones would be to simply accept that its isn't practically solvable and therefore anything and everything under ~2,000' is to be shot down/destroyed.

Yes; that would mean denying themselves the use of drones. But given their dominance in all other domains of conventional warfare, denying drones to both sides would be a net benefit.