How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[JonS]

On 12/15/2023 at 4:41 PM, FlemFire said:

Either you are in a war to win it or you are not.

What does this actually mean?

The UK, its Dominions, and France entered a war against Germany in September 1939 to - amongst other things - guarantee the independence of Poland. Six years later that war ended. Had Poland's independence been secured? Can the UK be said to have 'won' in those terms? What about France, or even Poland?

If they didn't win, does that mean Germany did?

Edited December 16, 2023 by JonS

[Battlefront.com]

ISW has this commentary on a BILD article (yes, a pinch of salt!) reporting on Russia's goals for 2024:

Quote

German outlet BILD stated on December 14 that unspecified intelligence findings and sources indicate that Russia plans to occupy Ukrainian territory beyond the four (illegally) annexed Ukrainian oblasts throughout 2024-2026. BILD stated that Russia plans to capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and up to the Oskil River in Kharkiv Oblast by the end of 2024.[1] These reported goals are in line with ongoing localized Russian offensive operations in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv oblasts. Russia also reportedly plans to take large parts of Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kharkiv oblasts, including Kharkiv City if possible, in 2025 and 2026. BILD reported that an insider source stated that Russia plans to occupy large parts of eastern Ukraine located east of the Dnipro River within the next 36 months. Russia is reportedly planning to hold the current front line in Kherson Oblast along the Dnipro River and is only concerned about preventing Ukrainian forces in southern Ukraine from advancing towards occupied Crimea. BILD stated that Russia’s plans are based on mobilizing Russia’s defense industrial base (DIB), suffering annual casualties of around 100,000 military personnel in attritional offensive operations, and benefiting from the possible election of a US president in 2024 who dramatically reduces or stops military support to Ukraine. BILD reported that a source familiar with the intelligence findings stated that the Kremlin plans to rely on “sham negotiations” while continuing to conduct offensive operations similar to the way in which Russia negotiated the Second Minsk agreement in 2015 while the Russian military continued to occupy additional Ukrainian settlements. BILD previously published largely accurate intelligence findings about Russia’s plans for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in December 2021 which assessed that Russia would attack Ukraine from the south from Crimea, from Russian-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine, and from the north in late January or early February 2022, although the Russian invasion as executed did not perfectly align with BILD’s reporting.[2]

ISW cannot independently authenticate BILD’s reporting, but Russia’s reported plans for the war in Ukraine through 2026 are in line with continued Russian preparations for a prolonged war effort. The Russian military command is pursuing long-term restructuring and expansion efforts to form strategic reserves, and Russia has been gradually mobilizing its DIB to sustain a long war.[3] Russia’s reported medium to long-term plans to occupy territory beyond the four (illegally) annexed territories are also plausible considering that Russian officials, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, have reverted to expansionist rhetoric recently, and Russian forces continue offensive operations to expand their positions in Kharkiv Oblast. Russian officials have issued statements about Russia’s intention to occupy and annex additional Ukrainian territory beyond the current front lines and the four (illegally) annexed territories.“[4] ISW recently assessed that the sudden collapse of Western aid would likely lead sooner or later to the collapse of Ukraine’s ability to hold off the Russian military, and Russian forces could ultimately push all the way to the western Ukrainian border in such a scenario.[5]

Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov stated in an interview published on December 14 that Russia currently has no intention of changing its plans for the war in Ukraine in 2025, however.[6] Budanov stated that Russia may develop a new plan if nothing changes on the front line by the end of 2024.

To summarize Russia's plans:

• Expand territory to include all of Luhansk and Donetsk.  Take Kharkiv.  Increase holdings between Dnepr and Donetsk
• Stay on left bank of Dnepr and keep it firmly in Russian hands
• Tool up its entire economy to support these aspirations
• Be prepared to lose 100,000 men per year
• Offer sham cease fire deals similar to shame Minsk deals
• Hope US politics continue to swing towards isolation, especially if Trump wins in 2024

To summarize the summary... nothing that isn't apparent already

Ukraine's Budanov speculates that the above plan is predicated on Russia making significant grains in 2024, otherwise it might come up with another plan (presumably narrower in scope).

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Hm, let me take a shot, but honestly we are on the edge of the map here.

1.  This is a really tough one.  In a magic land of unlimited resources one could set up several of these attacks simultaneously to overwhelm an opponents defensive ISR capabilities.  But given the current realities, I don’t think one can mass all the bits without being detected.  Feints and decoys might go some distance but one would need to rely on a lot of firepower.  The opponent might be able to see but would not be able to do much about it.

...

3.  My best bet is a combination of more unmanned and light, fast infantry.  Once they can get through the minefields they are likely going to meet RA conventional c-moves, so PGM and ISR will be key.  Along with AD.  No point breaking through if RuAF just smack them 30kms in.  Light infantry come with the benefit of the lowest logistics footprint.  One could bomb them up and do a modern flying column thing.  Big and heavy would then come last.  Once a protected corridor/bubble is in place and the enemy is starting to react.  Save the mailed fist for a coup de grace type strike.

The thing that really strikes me about the war this year is how even Team sized infantry units on the move are able to be spotted and engaged if someone knows to watch.  Day or night.  This is unprecedented even in this war.  Which means one of infantry's traditional strong suits can't be counted on.

Further, this change strongly favors the defender because he no longer needs a solid line of eyeballs manning frontline positions looking for approaching baddies.  All you need is a strong drone presence and artillery.

Of course none of this is foolproof.  Scope and scale of this war means that not every attack will get spotted and swatted before it has any impact.  Even mounted ones.  However, the chances of it getting spotted and swatted have gone up dramatically.  Even for dismounted ones.

ISW's report for December 15 reminded us that they have assessed that a sudden collapse of Western aid might lead to Russia being able to drive straight to the Polish border.  I do not agree with this because the long LOCs would never be viable.  Furthermore, I think that ironically Ukraine could actually win the war outright if Russia tried this.  I don't think Russia would fare any better in advancing those distances in 2024 than it did in 2022.

Steve

[Joe982]

49 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Stay on left bank of Dnepr and keep it firmly in Russian hands

This phrase makes no sense.

No rivers run in a straight line. There is a short stretch of the Dnepr that runs north- south. The rest of it meanders in all directions.

In a north - south direction, the left side is inherently the west side ie the Ukranian side. The right side is the east side ie the Russian side.

So, the Russians wish to keep the right bank of the Dnepr.

We see in the south that the Ukranians, have crossed in a southerly direction and have captured a portion of the right bank of the Dnepr river.

 

 

Edited December 16, 2023 by Joe982

[Zeleban]

It looks like hitting a tank with an armor-piercing sub-caliber projectile.

[Aragorn2002]

On 12/15/2023 at 8:03 AM, paxromana said:

Well, it took from 1914-1918 to strangle the Germans in WW1 and from 1939-44 to do the same in WW2. Economic warfare simply isn't an overnight thing.

Note, however, the copious evidence that Russian airlines and their stolen aircraft are in free fall, operational numbers wise. And that the Kremlin spent more on thingsa  military this year than their whole budget for everything ... and it won't get better next year.

Even Dictatorships can't do deficit spending forever ... that's one of the reasons WW2 broke out in 1939, Hitler's Germany was fast reaching the end of its ability to rob Peter to pay Paul and the next four years were the Nazis raping the economies of each of their conquests to fuel their economy. Putin hasn't got any conquests to rape.

Exactly. Patience and perseverance. And realizing victory is never certain. That's why we need to keep an open eye and also allow other opinions, as wrong as they may be.

[JonS]

48 minutes ago, Joe982 said:

This phrase makes no sense.

No, that's the standard way of referring to riverbanks BECAUSE rivers meander all over the place, and different rivers flow in different directions. The Left refers to the left side of the river if you were standing in it looking downstream. In the case of the Dnepr that's generally - but not always - to the north and east. The right refers to the right side of the river if you were standing in it looking downstream. For the Dnepr that is generally - but not always - to the south and west.

Where ever you are on the river, regardless of which way it twists and turns, the left is always the left and therefore always refers the same side of the river.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_(geography)

Edited December 16, 2023 by JonS

[Zeleban]

 

[chrisl]

4 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Hm, let me take a shot, but honestly we are on the edge of the map here.

1.  This is a really tough one.  In a magic land of unlimited resources one could set up several of these attacks simultaneously to overwhelm an opponents defensive ISR capabilities.  But given the current realities, I don’t think one can mass all the bits without being detected.  Feints and decoys might go some distance but one would need to rely on a lot of firepower.  The opponent might be able to see but would not be able to do much about it.

2.  I simply have no idea.  This might be a force density number that shifts with terrain.  Or it might be entirely contextual.  My sense is “a whole buttload” and then see if it works.  Risk will be depleting UAS along the other parts of the line.

3.  My best bet is a combination of more unmanned and light, fast infantry.  Once they can get through the minefields they are likely going to meet RA conventional c-moves, so PGM and ISR will be key.  Along with AD.  No point breaking through if RuAF just smack them 30kms in.  Light infantry come with the benefit of the lowest logistics footprint.  One could bomb them up and do a modern flying column thing.  Big and heavy would then come last.  Once a protected corridor/bubble is in place and the enemy is starting to react.  Save the mailed fist for a coup de grace type strike.

4.  Scheme of manoeuvre.  Good question.  Do they go really deep?  Go for short gains and encirclements?  I think it would be situational dependent.  Short gains would make the breaches larger.  Deep could severely dislocate a sluggish RA.  

5.  My bet is the RA would try heavy c-moves and surging artillery.  “Attack!”  That is textbook.  This is both risk and opportunity.  Opportunities include killing a lot of RA hardware as it rolls forward.  Risk is getting caught outside the bubble.  The bubble itself would have to move.

6.  EW would be critical.  Shutting theirs down and pushing UAs forward.  This is like a creeping barrage.  In fact the whole damn thing would be a creeping barrage of EW, unmanned and artillery.  And then it had better be able to run.  Cyber is likely too far back (or forward).  Anything that could hack or disrupt RA C4ISR would be priority follows by anything that flies.  AI - better be as far forward as possible on those drones.  Creeping kill boxes of autonomous systems with enough brains to kill anything that looks like RA.

Big questions are:  Can they build it?  Can they project it?  Can they sustain it?  Can they exploit it?  No one has ever done this sort of operation before so what it would take to realistically pull it off is basically a mystery.  A lot of moving parts and would take months to try and out into motion - assuming one could get enough unmanned systems in the first place.

This sounds crazy but I am pretty sure tanks also did at Cambria.  And of course Cambrai did not work, or at least not all the way.  So the UA would need to be ready for failure and not overreach.  

1. Without some level of autonomy, the C2 seems to be the main barrier to a massive drone swarm.  You can plop enough bandwidth in a small area to support tens of thousands of drones, but unless they each have some level of autonomy, you also need one person per drone (or maybe per 2-3) to drive them.  With a steady stream of drones getting fed into at the back you could maybe do queues and handoffs or tradeoffs, but you probably are still talking a battalion of drone drivers at the prickly edge.

2.  What's the current kill efficiency for drones?  Given that sometimes a drone gets multiple guys with one drop, and sometimes one drone takes a few drops of separate munitions to hit one guy, and that some are single-use, you could probably shred a defender badly enough that they'd want to leave if you have somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1 drones per defenders, as long as there's good enough ISR that the later drones to enter aren't using up battery looking for targets (this maybe argues for staged drivers - someone flies a group of them from a launch location to the prickly edge and hands them off to guys who already have a good picture of what's going on and where they want to put a drone next.  Or maybe they're all in a room with a shared overview display and don't have to do handoffs.

3. yeah, small and fast. ideally with drone dogs to haul extra equipment like MCLC cord that more drones could lay.

4.  Ideally you'd hit a large 2-D region almost simultaneously everywhere so that the back is disintegrating at the same time as the front so  there isn't any help coming to anybody.  You'd probably need to launch drone bundles with rockets, artillery, or aircraft to do this though.  Basically the goal would be for drones to try to sterilize area, or at least be dense enough that it looks like that to the defense.

5. At a tactical level , the best defense is probably to be in a hole with dirt over your head and a heavy door or labyrinth so the drones can't hit you.  But as long as they have you pinned there, the attackers can follow the drones in.  At a battlefield level?  The best move is probably to move forward so that the defenders are intermixed with the attackers and there's more confusion on the ground to make the drone pilots hesitate.  They could turn on a bunch of RF noise generators, but those should have very short term usefulness, since they're basically bright light up targets.

6. There is no AI.  At best there might be some autonomy in moving clusters of drones thorugh clear space to get them quickly to where they can be actively controlled. The main thing is having some set of drones/artillery/missiles that homes in on EW generators that might interfere with the drone control.  There does have to be some high level (literally, as in high altitude) observation looking for warm things on the ground and integrated with the tactical drone pilots.  The same or similar platforms should be sucking up RF signals for triangulation, and some more platforms should be acting as relays for the drones.  Since the primary attack is drones, it can also be done in huge volumes late at night/wee hours of the morning to increase the thermal contrast between the ground and the defenders.

[cesmonkey]

A 24-page analysis / plan from Estonia:

 

[cesmonkey]

https://static.rusi.org/heavy-armoured-forces-in-future-warfare-occasional-paper-december-23.pdf
Heavy Armoured Forces in Future Combined Arms Warfare

Edited December 16, 2023 by cesmonkey

[cesmonkey]

 

[Aragorn2002]

33 minutes ago, cesmonkey said:

A 24-page analysis / plan from Estonia:

 

Thank you.

[LongLeftFlank]

8 hours ago, The_Capt said:

2 years ago I would have been the first to call it pure science fiction but after watching this last year it may be time.

 

https://www.axios.com/2023/12/05/humanoid-robot-factory-agility-bipedal-amazon

If not slaughterbots just yet, at least a source of quick and dirty mine tramplers and ammo bearers?

...Of course, since these startups need funding all their core IC is already out during the vapourware stage, which means China Inc. can and will beat them to 'market' with crappy but functional knockoffs.

Whatever happens we have got / the Maxim gun / and they have (Not!)

Edited December 16, 2023 by LongLeftFlank

[squatter]

 

Long time lurker here with first post since the war began.

First up – kudos for some of the analysis and opinion that’s been shared here. Right from the start there was nowhere else that I was aware of in MSM or elsewhere that so quickly at the outset of the war in 2022 identified that the Russians were going to suffer such a catastrophic initial defeat. It took most of the world – me included – much longer to come to that realisation. So kudos.

But more recently, as the front lines have hardened and solidified throughout 2023, I’m surprised at the almost total absence of an argument I’m going to make now:

This war is now looking pretty much unwinnable on the battlefield by any side – short of a massive uptick in US/NATO arms supplies (or a complete stop in those supplies). So surely the time has come for this horrendous, insane war to stop.

The path to some kind of operational victory on the battlefield looks gone. First the Russian offensive at Bakhmut, then the Ukrainian summer offensive demonstrated that under the new paradigm of drone proliferation, no one is going to achieve a significant mobile breakthrough in this conflict.

This time last year pundits were drawing fantasy lines of advance on maps towards Melitopol and the Crimean isthmus cutting the land bridge, but does anyone here now seriously believe anything like that kind of breakthrough is going to be possible in the coming years? I would say it’s pretty much impossible to see a breakthrough on the battlefield now.

Then came the hope of an attritional victory, or a corrosive victory, or however you want to term it. That always seemed like the more plausible option to me, but given the production levels by the Russians of cheap counters such as FPVs, ATGMs, glide bombs, etc, together with other mitigations and adaptations to PGMs, it doesn’t look like the Russians are anywhere nearer operational or strategic collapse than the Ukrainians are currently.

The parallels with WW1 are increasingly glaring and not just a casual observation based on the digging of trenches. Defence is king. Advances are counted in the 100s of meters, not 100s of miles. Look at the images: men getting blasted to hell by high-explosives for the sake of a farmer’s field, a treeline or a shattered hamlet. It’s a lunar hellscape across 100s of km of front. Towns and villages erased and rendered probably never again inhabitable.

Like in 1916, how many more 100s and 1000s of young men on either side are going to be killed before one side has to accept it is exhausted and cannot continue? How many more will be maimed, traumatised, brutalised, displaced if we continue into 2024 or 2025? How many families grieving, how many lives ruined? How much economic damage will be mounted on what’s already done? I mean what kind of state is the Ukraine economy right now? It must be utterly shattered? Let alone what it might be in two years time.

Not to mention the ongoing impacts globally – higher energy prices and increased grain prices which feed into increased cost of living around the world. Now, I’m less worried about interruption to comfortable middle class lifestyles in the West here, as I am with the impacts on the global south and developing world, where increases in food prices can be ruinous.

As others have pointed out here recently, Russia has already suffered a catastrophic defeat. 100s of 1000s of casualties (and sorry these are mostly terrified and bewildered young men, not ‘Orcs’ (the rapists and torturers excluded)). Its military is severely weakened, its economy now with a grim, baked-in demographic nightmare ahead. Its reputation sullied. NATO strengthened and expanded. And all it has to show is a sliver of territory on the land bridge.  

And even if some kind of attritional victory against Russia was to be achieved, what might that look like? That would assumably result in some kind of operational collapse leading to a wider collapse in morale resulting in mutiny or coup or similar – which many observers believe would result in even more hardline forces taking control from Putin. Then you are into fragmentation of Russia scenarios, nuclear proliferation, desperate use of nukes to prevent fall of Crimea etc. Potentially catastrophic not only for Russia but Ukraine also.

So I say: stop the goddamn war. Continue supporting Ukraine to the extent that any resumption of hostilities by Russia would be futile. Continue sanctions. Prosecute Putin as a war criminal. Encourage liberal opposition in Russia and create a set of strict conditions under which it could be accepted again as a partner of the West (such as free and fair democratic elections, prosecution of other war criminals, reparations to Ukraine, etc). 

And while reforms in Russia may be fanciful in the short term, the alternative is facing a couple more years of horrendous, ruinous grind, only inevitably having to face the realities of stalemate and the conclusion of the paragraph above anyway.

[poesel]

5 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

ISW has this commentary on a BILD article (yes, a pinch of salt!) reporting on Russia's goals for 2024:

BILD is as reliable as a news source as Fox News. They may be right that the sky is blue, and the grass is green, but I would still double-check.

[poesel]

Isn't that a nice idea? Very helpful of the Russians.

Krynky, Kherson region. Kontakt-1 on the engine compartment of the Russian tank

[The_Capt]

26 minutes ago, squatter said:

 

Long time lurker here with first post since the war began.

First up – kudos for some of the analysis and opinion that’s been shared here. Right from the start there was nowhere else that I was aware of in MSM or elsewhere that so quickly at the outset of the war in 2022 identified that the Russians were going to suffer such a catastrophic initial defeat. It took most of the world – me included – much longer to come to that realisation. So kudos.

But more recently, as the front lines have hardened and solidified throughout 2023, I’m surprised at the almost total absence of an argument I’m going to make now:

This war is now looking pretty much unwinnable on the battlefield by any side – short of a massive uptick in US/NATO arms supplies (or a complete stop in those supplies). So surely the time has come for this horrendous, insane war to stop.

The path to some kind of operational victory on the battlefield looks gone. First the Russian offensive at Bakhmut, then the Ukrainian summer offensive demonstrated that under the new paradigm of drone proliferation, no one is going to achieve a significant mobile breakthrough in this conflict.

This time last year pundits were drawing fantasy lines of advance on maps towards Melitopol and the Crimean isthmus cutting the land bridge, but does anyone here now seriously believe anything like that kind of breakthrough is going to be possible in the coming years? I would say it’s pretty much impossible to see a breakthrough on the battlefield now.

Then came the hope of an attritional victory, or a corrosive victory, or however you want to term it. That always seemed like the more plausible option to me, but given the production levels by the Russians of cheap counters such as FPVs, ATGMs, glide bombs, etc, together with other mitigations and adaptations to PGMs, it doesn’t look like the Russians are anywhere nearer operational or strategic collapse than the Ukrainians are currently.

The parallels with WW1 are increasingly glaring and not just a casual observation based on the digging of trenches. Defence is king. Advances are counted in the 100s of meters, not 100s of miles. Look at the images: men getting blasted to hell by high-explosives for the sake of a farmer’s field, a treeline or a shattered hamlet. It’s a lunar hellscape across 100s of km of front. Towns and villages erased and rendered probably never again inhabitable.

Like in 1916, how many more 100s and 1000s of young men on either side are going to be killed before one side has to accept it is exhausted and cannot continue? How many more will be maimed, traumatised, brutalised, displaced if we continue into 2024 or 2025? How many families grieving, how many lives ruined? How much economic damage will be mounted on what’s already done? I mean what kind of state is the Ukraine economy right now? It must be utterly shattered? Let alone what it might be in two years time.

Not to mention the ongoing impacts globally – higher energy prices and increased grain prices which feed into increased cost of living around the world. Now, I’m less worried about interruption to comfortable middle class lifestyles in the West here, as I am with the impacts on the global south and developing world, where increases in food prices can be ruinous.

As others have pointed out here recently, Russia has already suffered a catastrophic defeat. 100s of 1000s of casualties (and sorry these are mostly terrified and bewildered young men, not ‘Orcs’ (the rapists and torturers excluded)). Its military is severely weakened, its economy now with a grim, baked-in demographic nightmare ahead. Its reputation sullied. NATO strengthened and expanded. And all it has to show is a sliver of territory on the land bridge.  

And even if some kind of attritional victory against Russia was to be achieved, what might that look like? That would assumably result in some kind of operational collapse leading to a wider collapse in morale resulting in mutiny or coup or similar – which many observers believe would result in even more hardline forces taking control from Putin. Then you are into fragmentation of Russia scenarios, nuclear proliferation, desperate use of nukes to prevent fall of Crimea etc. Potentially catastrophic not only for Russia but Ukraine also.

So I say: stop the goddamn war. Continue supporting Ukraine to the extent that any resumption of hostilities by Russia would be futile. Continue sanctions. Prosecute Putin as a war criminal. Encourage liberal opposition in Russia and create a set of strict conditions under which it could be accepted again as a partner of the West (such as free and fair democratic elections, prosecution of other war criminals, reparations to Ukraine, etc). 

And while reforms in Russia may be fanciful in the short term, the alternative is facing a couple more years of horrendous, ruinous grind, only inevitably having to face the realities of stalemate and the conclusion of the paragraph above anyway.

Damn good 23rd post. The frozen conflict scenario has been discussed here: think Korea.  The idea that there is simply no way to break the lines and regain offensive primacy has been brought up many times.  The picture you paint is quite accurate.

However, all war is negotiation.  In order to stop this war, both sides need to be ready to stop.  It is plausible that with enough backroom pressure Ukraine could be convinced to stop this thing pretty much where it is.  The problem, not surprisingly, is Russia.  The Putin regime is riding on this dumpster fire.  Hell, his life and those of his cronies are likely riding on this thing.  Convincing Putin to stop and draw new lines is the problem.  Technically we cannot even incentivize this as the man and most of his admin are labeled as war criminals.  We cannot renormalize while he (and they) remain in power.

Subversive wheeling and dealing has and likely is occurring in the backfield.  However, as we saw with Saddam, one thing paranoid autocrats are exceptionally good at is shoring up the store.  They have intel everywhere and make people disappear who even have a whiff of disloyalty - recall the flying oligarchs of the last two years.  

So what will it take to bring Russia to the table at this point?  A freakin military coup.  The RA would need to collapse to the point it turns on Putin.  That may force him from office and we are looking at “can we bargain with the next SOB?  “Is the next SOB clean enough?”  Of course if the RA collapses, Ukraine will want to push to take more ground.  Recall that this time last year Ukraine had retaken both Kharkiv and Kherson - those were major operational victories.  The hope was that they could repeat the same method this summer.  But apparently even on the high tech battlefield, mines still work.  In fact with UAS minefields work even better.

So here we are.  Ukraine will likely be pushed into defence until someone can figure out a Plan B.  RA will keep smashing itself onto that because Putin needs to show that he is “winning” to stay alive.  Even offering the war criminal peace talks would be nothing but a sham at this point.  Hell it would lend legitimacy to their actions.  As a min, Russia would demand international recognition that they own what they took, including Crimea and Donbas.

I guess the main reason we have not gone deeply into a peace process is because frankly an RA military collapse is more viable than trying establish one.

[The_Capt]

5 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

ISW has this commentary on a BILD article (yes, a pinch of salt!) reporting on Russia's goals for 2024:

To summarize Russia's plans:

• Expand territory to include all of Luhansk and Donetsk.  Take Kharkiv.  Increase holdings between Dnepr and Donetsk
• Stay on left bank of Dnepr and keep it firmly in Russian hands
• Tool up its entire economy to support these aspirations
• Be prepared to lose 100,000 men per year
• Offer sham cease fire deals similar to shame Minsk deals
• Hope US politics continue to swing towards isolation, especially if Trump wins in 2024

To summarize the summary... nothing that isn't apparent already

Ukraine's Budanov speculates that the above plan is predicated on Russia making significant grains in 2024, otherwise it might come up with another plan (presumably narrower in scope).

Steve

No matter how they dress it up, Putin wants half of Ukraine.  Basically everything east of the Dnipro.  Kharkiv?!  That is a major urban fight.  100k per year?  That is madness.

This kinda feels like the big sweeping red arrows from summer ‘22.  RA can lose 100k per year trying to take back single towns, let alone Kharkiv.

Whelp, not a lot of room to negotiate there.

[The_Capt]

3 hours ago, chrisl said:

1. Without some level of autonomy, the C2 seems to be the main barrier to a massive drone swarm.  You can plop enough bandwidth in a small area to support tens of thousands of drones, but unless they each have some level of autonomy, you also need one person per drone (or maybe per 2-3) to drive them.  With a steady stream of drones getting fed into at the back you could maybe do queues and handoffs or tradeoffs, but you probably are still talking a battalion of drone drivers at the prickly edge.

2.  What's the current kill efficiency for drones?  Given that sometimes a drone gets multiple guys with one drop, and sometimes one drone takes a few drops of separate munitions to hit one guy, and that some are single-use, you could probably shred a defender badly enough that they'd want to leave if you have somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1 drones per defenders, as long as there's good enough ISR that the later drones to enter aren't using up battery looking for targets (this maybe argues for staged drivers - someone flies a group of them from a launch location to the prickly edge and hands them off to guys who already have a good picture of what's going on and where they want to put a drone next.  Or maybe they're all in a room with a shared overview display and don't have to do handoffs.

3. yeah, small and fast. ideally with drone dogs to haul extra equipment like MCLC cord that more drones could lay.

4.  Ideally you'd hit a large 2-D region almost simultaneously everywhere so that the back is disintegrating at the same time as the front so  there isn't any help coming to anybody.  You'd probably need to launch drone bundles with rockets, artillery, or aircraft to do this though.  Basically the goal would be for drones to try to sterilize area, or at least be dense enough that it looks like that to the defense.

5. At a tactical level , the best defense is probably to be in a hole with dirt over your head and a heavy door or labyrinth so the drones can't hit you.  But as long as they have you pinned there, the attackers can follow the drones in.  At a battlefield level?  The best move is probably to move forward so that the defenders are intermixed with the attackers and there's more confusion on the ground to make the drone pilots hesitate.  They could turn on a bunch of RF noise generators, but those should have very short term usefulness, since they're basically bright light up targets.

6. There is no AI.  At best there might be some autonomy in moving clusters of drones thorugh clear space to get them quickly to where they can be actively controlled. The main thing is having some set of drones/artillery/missiles that homes in on EW generators that might interfere with the drone control.  There does have to be some high level (literally, as in high altitude) observation looking for warm things on the ground and integrated with the tactical drone pilots.  The same or similar platforms should be sucking up RF signals for triangulation, and some more platforms should be acting as relays for the drones.  Since the primary attack is drones, it can also be done in huge volumes late at night/wee hours of the morning to increase the thermal contrast between the ground and the defenders.

Well now we got a ballgame, or what could be one.  The AI might be in networking all these drones together.  Human operators at 1:1 or even 1:5 is likely too many people having to fly this thing.  So swarms of fully autonomous systems.  They not only would have to sanitize, they would need to keep sanitizing and then move with ground forces.  Above 2000 feet Air Denial would need to be sustained.

If some defenders have to hide in holes that is a workable risk.  What cannot happen is enough of them with UAS of their own are able to dial in ATGMs and artillery or the breaching efforts could die.

UGVs are an obvious answer but I am really not sure the tech is there yet.

[pintere]

There may’ve already been a discussion on this that I missed, but one thing I’ve been wondering for a while is why did things end up going nowhere on the Velyka Novosilka axis during the Ukraine summer counteroffensive?

From day one it seemed like this was the most promising of Ukraine’s 3 axes of advance. Ukraine needed months to capture a single solitary village on the Tokmak axis, while further east they were liberating the first villages on the Velyka Novosilka axis within days. 

My impression the whole time was that the defences in this area weren’t as extensive as around Tokmak. Unlike at Tokmak, Ukraine just needed to break through one fortified line rather than 2-3. And yes, it is farther to get to Berdyansk than Melitopol, but the whole idea behind this offensive was that the key was to get past the great minefields. From how things have played out I’d reckon it’s easier to deal with 10 km of minefield followed by 100 km to the coast rather than 30 km of minefield and then 40 km of clear to Melitopol.

So why did Ukraine seemingly break a key principle of war by reinforcing failure (the Tokmak axis) rather than the one line of advance where real progress was being made?

[The_Capt]

4 hours ago, cesmonkey said:

https://static.rusi.org/heavy-armoured-forces-in-future-warfare-occasional-paper-december-23.pdf
Heavy Armoured Forces in Future Combined Arms Warfare

Well interesting if one has an unhealthy tank lust.  This is what in the business we call a “heavily situated” estimate.  The author starts with the core conclusion that tanks are still viable on the modern battlefield and then goes about pulling anything and everything he can to try and prove it:

- reduction of combat power down to firepower, mobility and protection - which of course are also the core attributes of the tank.  When in fact modern military doctrine sees combat power in far broader terms.  Interestingly he does not apply his condensed framework (from circa 1993) to the main competitor to the tank, the modern UAS/ISR.  Unmanned systems have far higher mobility, at least equal firepower in disaggregated form, and higher protection through distributed mass.

- Oversubscription on tanks role in just about all operations other than war.  I know from first personal experience and follow on research that his deductions from both Bosnian ‘93 and Canadian Forces in Afghanistan that the employment of the tank was anything but “decisive”.  In fact their overall employments were problematic for many reasons on those sorts of operations.

- Assuming that the UAS/ISR game will be fought “how we fight it”.  EW offers the best possible defence right now; however, as we have discussed at length, full autonomy of these systems, even in the last 1000m largely negates EW counter-measures.  China is investing heavily in fully autonomous systems…this is where things are going.

- Biases analysis of ATGMs: “costly and heavy”….seriously…as compared to a tank?   He also fails to recognize the most dangerous part of modern ATGMs…range.  FFS he is making a Cold War argument that ATGMs need LOS “making operators vulnerable” - that argument 1) has not been proven in this war and 2) does not reflect where ATGM technology is going.  No mention of self-loitering munitions or NLOS systems, some with ranges nearing 100kms. [He cites a CBC interview as proof that tanks can still find and kill ATGMs - sure it can happen but as we have seen, not to the point as to reestablish conditions for offensive operations]

-Largely sidesteps the entire issue of logistics.  Reduces it down to recovery and maintenance.  The major problem with heavy logistics is that itself must be “heavy”.  Heavy formations consume obscene amounts of fuel and ammunition.  Spare parts and recovery are also issues but long LOCs of fuel and supply trucks are suicidal in this war.  Why…because the enemy can see them with operational ISR (no real mention of ISR realities either for that matter).  Once seen they can be interdicted and shot to pieces.  This is why “logistics” is a core combat function…none of the others work without it.

- I do like camo, decoy and deception discussion.  That has some solid ideas.

- UGV comparison is woefully tepid.  Appears to assume UGVs will simply be 1 for 1 tank replacements when they will likely take the cheap distributed path much like their air counterparts.  

Author really fails to see modern warfare as it is,  more for what he wants it to be.  The combination of UAS/ISR and PGM has been definitely “undeciding”.  It can translate into offensive warfare under the right conditions but it is largely about Denial.  These systems have denied heavy  of its major offensive attributes.  They have done so because they are able to see, fix and engage heavy systems well beyond the ranges that heavy can respond.  They do so through distributed mass.  Combined with Air Denial we have a condition where heavy is narrowly applicable to the modern battlefield.

He proposes a bunch of solutions pretty much as I expected - invest in the tank heavily to try and keep it viable.  What he fails to define is “what is the point of diminishing returns?”  When do we call it and go in another direction?  He makes glancing, and frankly disingenuous, attempts in a light/med analysis but never really asks the question: “Well what if heavy is dead?”  Hell I am not even sure traditional military mass is not dead, let alone heavy.

The unmanned/ISR/PGM complex are not enablers to traditional land battle, they have become deterministic.  The decisive force on the battlefield is  no longer heavy systems…it is the systems that undecided them.  I suspect our future lies in these spaces as “precision, distribution, unmanned” also become part of the combat power pantheon.  We will see counter-systems and “forward edge superiority” as concepts.  What happens to forces that can “take and hold ground” remains unclear.  Right now ATGM, UAS and PGM (artillery and self-loitering) along with dog-faced infantry appear to be the new combined arms.

But if I know the western military complex (and unfortunately I do), we will spend billions, maybe trillions trying to prove “it ain’t so”.  Finally, we need to pull our collective heads out of @sses and realize that this issue is so much larger than the freakin tank or heavy or even ground forces.  It applies across all domains.  We have billion dollar ships and air fleets that may be unable to control or create superiority.  I can see that from here.  They will be brought down by cheap and ubiquitous smart munitions of all types.  So while everyone is gawping and squawking about tanks, I am not even sure aircraft carriers will stand up in 20 years.  Cyber and nukes likely may be the only military forces that we can count on to keep doing what they were.  Start with a blank white board and go from there.

 

[The_Capt]

23 hours ago, OBJ said:

Apologies if a repeat, did not find a duplicate reference, so...2021 JFQ paper on defense again becoming dominant in warfare, all domain and inter-domain discourse to include space, cyber and EM, global economic and military implications, multi-domain warfighting, the difficulty of synchronizing cross domain attacks, acknowledgement no one really knows what new technologies are capable of until they are employed, implications for the US/west success in resisting Chinese and Russian armed aggression.

Also this, in the EM discussion, which was new to me, possibly not to others here, 'At the tactical level, the United States has demonstrated a drone that can create an EMP directed at specific targets.'

The paper reinforces the opinion expressed here the world is seeing the emergence of defense as the current dominant form of warfare.

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/jfq/jfq-103/jfq-103_10-17_Hammes.pdf?ver=OMgkzdhCeQLSxaHs_SvOdw%3D%3D

Defense becomes dominant again JFQ 103 Q4 2021.pdf 282.11 kB · 8 downloads

Holy crap this was prescient!  Just when a guy figures he is clever, some guy pulled it all together in 2021.

[OBJ]

6 hours ago, chrisl said:

1. Without some level of autonomy, the C2 seems to be the main barrier to a massive drone swarm.  You can plop enough bandwidth in a small area to support tens of thousands of drones, but unless they each have some level of autonomy, you also need one person per drone (or maybe per 2-3) to drive them.  With a steady stream of drones getting fed into at the back you could maybe do queues and handoffs or tradeoffs, but you probably are still talking a battalion of drone drivers at the prickly edge.

2.  What's the current kill efficiency for drones?  Given that sometimes a drone gets multiple guys with one drop, and sometimes one drone takes a few drops of separate munitions to hit one guy, and that some are single-use, you could probably shred a defender badly enough that they'd want to leave if you have somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1 drones per defenders, as long as there's good enough ISR that the later drones to enter aren't using up battery looking for targets (this maybe argues for staged drivers - someone flies a group of them from a launch location to the prickly edge and hands them off to guys who already have a good picture of what's going on and where they want to put a drone next.  Or maybe they're all in a room with a shared overview display and don't have to do handoffs.

3. yeah, small and fast. ideally with drone dogs to haul extra equipment like MCLC cord that more drones could lay.

4.  Ideally you'd hit a large 2-D region almost simultaneously everywhere so that the back is disintegrating at the same time as the front so  there isn't any help coming to anybody.  You'd probably need to launch drone bundles with rockets, artillery, or aircraft to do this though.  Basically the goal would be for drones to try to sterilize area, or at least be dense enough that it looks like that to the defense.

5. At a tactical level , the best defense is probably to be in a hole with dirt over your head and a heavy door or labyrinth so the drones can't hit you.  But as long as they have you pinned there, the attackers can follow the drones in.  At a battlefield level?  The best move is probably to move forward so that the defenders are intermixed with the attackers and there's more confusion on the ground to make the drone pilots hesitate.  They could turn on a bunch of RF noise generators, but those should have very short term usefulness, since they're basically bright light up targets.

6. There is no AI.  At best there might be some autonomy in moving clusters of drones through clear space to get them quickly to where they can be actively controlled. The main thing is having some set of drones/artillery/missiles that homes in on EW generators that might interfere with the drone control.  There does have to be some high level (literally, as in high altitude) observation looking for warm things on the ground and integrated with the tactical drone pilots.  The same or similar platforms should be sucking up RF signals for triangulation, and some more platforms should be acting as relays for the drones.  Since the primary attack is drones, it can also be done in huge volumes late at night/wee hours of the morning to increase the thermal contrast between the ground and the defenders.

Really appreciate the thoughts on this by @chrisl and all others after.

I just started looking but haven't found anything that looks like force structure or doctrine for massed use of drones. Maybe not surprisingly there does not yet seem to be a 'FM 7-7X, the Drone Platoon in the Attack.'

The impression you get is field practice in Ukraine is way ahead of published military thought. Maybe someone here knows the Ukrainian or Russian drone equivalent of JFC Fuller or Immelmann/Boelcke.

I might differ with others on AI. I think the integration of autonomous AI into conventional war kill chains in recon/strike complexes is inevitable given the advantages in response/decision cycle time.

I did find this interesting, thoughts on drone 'swarm tactics.' Author is an Italian Air Force Lieutenant attending USMC U.

https://www.usmcu.edu/Outreach/Marine-Corps-University-Press/Expeditions-with-MCUP-digital-journal/A-New-Way-of-War/

 

[danfrodo]

5 hours ago, LongLeftFlank said:

https://www.axios.com/2023/12/05/humanoid-robot-factory-agility-bipedal-amazon

If not slaughterbots just yet, at least a source of quick and dirty mine tramplers and ammo bearers?

...Of course, since these startups need funding all their core IC is already out during the vapourware stage, which means China Inc. can and will beat them to 'market' with crappy but functional knockoffs.

Whatever happens we have got / the Maxim gun / and they have (Not!)

Without saying too much, let's just say I have rather good info on this robot and the company.  This particular company has zero interest in anything military.  Others will and hopefully will be used as LLF said above.  

And to the folks that think the end is nigh.  No, they are not about to take over the world.  It's a heckuva lot of work & effort & smart coding  just to get them to move boxes properly.  This is the current prototype, shown above & called Digit, and it's being used in warehouses for jobs that people don't like.