How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[dan/california]

49 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

Software defined radios aren’t cheap or easy across wider frequency bands, and especially not in higher frequencies.

 

They will be absolutely critical for recon drones going forward though. The stuff that is basically a smart RPG round needs to leave its launcher/mothership with a fully autonomous AI . It will still be very useful if the mothership can send an immediate BDA and any other useful information it acquired in real time. Or maybe it is the relay station for the mothership that gets the full communications package, or, or, but there is a point in the drone TO&E where being able to phone home will always be important.

[MikeyD]

I'm reminded of the old film 'Poltergeist'. The dad is trying to watch the football game but his neighbor's TV remote is on the same frequency so his TV channel keeps switching to 'Mr Rogers'. I would imagine frequency saturation would be a limiting factor in drone warfare, especially for long range drones. A dozen drone in the air all trying to broadcast pictures back to their operators and the operators all trying to broadcast steering commands to their drones. How are these frequencies being coordinated?

[JonS]

1 hour ago, MikeyD said:

How are these frequencies being coordinated?

On the friendly side, that's one of the roles of the unit signals officer.

At the national level, there is an office which allocates broad frequency bands for things, generally in ranges in which the physics of the frequency band suit the application. So, there's a large chunk for commercial radio, a chuck for TV, a chunk for high capacity comms links, a chunk for airspace management, some for 3G, 4G, and 5G, some for consumer stuff like TV remotes and garage doors (yes they're low powered and not likely to interfere with anything else, but if they shared a freq with the local 100MW FM station ... well ... everyone's garage door will be opening every time Lady Gaga comes on rotation), a large chunk set aside for military use (although that's always under pressure from commercial operators), more chunks for the emergency services, wifi, satellite comms, etc etc. Then within each chunk, specific operators are allocated specific frequencies.

For mil use, in the olden days the sigs officer of an AO will be given a band to work within, then he'd have to come up with a plan so that each battalion and company and squadron and battery operating in that AO had its own freq to work with, and a plan to move those freqs around every 24 hours or so to mess with enemy signals interception efforts. That's not so much of an issue with frequency hopping and digital  comms - the new radios just sort of listen to everything that's within their band of interest, and know from the data packet headers which ones are 'theirs'.

For EW, you can just dump noise at high power across multiple freqs, but obviously that messes with your own comms. So the EW wonks and the sigs guys will work together to leave gaps in the blanket through which friendly forces can communicate with each other. Generally those gaps will be in places the bad guys aren't likely to be using. So, for example, in Iraq and Afghanistan the gaps would NOT be at or near the freqs that 3G or 4G cellular networks use ... Meanwhile, in Ukraine, presumably the gaps aren't at the common COTS UAS Freqs, except when FF want to send one up.

Generally, I would think that freq management along the front line in eastern Ukraine would be relatively simple. Since there's essentially no civilian activity there, then the entire EM spectrum is up for units to use. Further back the AD dudes would have to manage their freqs a bit more carefully given that there is still a full civilian economy in places like Kyiv and Odessa. But on the other hand they wouldn't generally have to worry too much about Russian jamming that far from the front.

Edit: oh, and don't forget to leave some gaps for the zoomies.

Edited March 8 by JonS

[cesmonkey]

Mashovets offers a long analysis of how  Avdiivkafail to the Russians:

https://t.me/zvizdecmanhustu/1688

He concludes with:

Quote

final conclusion...

It’s obvious that the Russian command has completely mastered the basics of the methodology for conducting operations at various levels and scale "to the environment". In fact, they consider it the main tool for the “decisive and rapid defeat of enemy troops.”

Moreover, the Russian command obviously understands that this methodology is quite understandable to us. But, despite this, all the same, every now and then we observe approximately the same algorithm...

- a gradual and slow “squeezing out the flanks”, even at a very high cost... but, well, very persistent

- then - or " closing of the flanks,” as was the case in Bakhmut, or one “splitting breakthrough” to a key point, as was the case in Avdievka...

The main question is how to prevent all this with the set of forces and means that the Armed Forces of Ukraine now have. ..?

Obviously, the answer lies, no matter how tautological it may sound, on the same “flanks”...

 

 

[Pete Wenman]

Don't think this has been posted earlier but the Army trying some new tech here.

Airborne soldiers do some smart shooting with new sight that helps smash drones. 

https://www.forces.net/services/army/airborne-soldiers-do-some-smart-shooting-new-sight-helps-smash-drones?fbclid=IwAR0TWthFemVVlX_5RRp79SZg4GiWN8JOPy84i4znNrwF7E1cRtwvIsFwyi4

 

 

[Pete Wenman]

double post ignore

 

 

Edited March 8 by Pete Wenman

[Tux]

22 hours ago, Butschi said:

They can't seize and hold terrain, yet.

And how well will holding that terrain work out for the infantry in the future? Hell, how well does it work right now?

If we accept a combination of points raised by Butschi, JonS, Capt and others I think we probably agree that unmanned and autonomous weaponry will likely dominate the future battlefield to the extent that whoever wins the "drone war" may gain an unassailable military advantage over the side who are left without a functional drone force.  That does mean that whatever passes as "infantry" will have little combat utility beyond supporting operation of the drone force.  I would therefore agree that it probably doesn't then follow that infantry will be needed to "hold ground" in the traditional sense of holding it against enemy military action, since they will be incapable of doing so if the enemy still has a functional drone force capable of launching an attack.

However if we consider the non-military dimension to "holding ground", perhaps the primary role for human infantry in the future will be closer to a police force than traditional soldiery.  They may have to be police officers, diplomats, counsellors, managers, teachers, engineers, artists, partners and merchants; everything needed to help, energise and build trust within a population recently scoured by warfare.  I suppose you could call it COIN but really the "infantry" may have to be optimised entirely for winning the hearts and minds of any occupied or liberated population and barely at all for combat.

I know there are multiple people on this board who have experience in Afghanistan and Iraq - perhaps they can opine as to what the ideal "infantry" would have been in those theatres, if they could have taken for granted that basically all substantial combat functions were accomplished by autonomous drones.

[The_Capt]

13 hours ago, JonS said:

Frankly, I'm as shocked about this development as anybody.

And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.  Acts 9:18

Let your sins of woeful ignorance be washed away!

[The_Capt]

13 hours ago, Kinophile said:

Is this quite accurate? Microwave emitters are a form of EW. Broader than lasers,  more of a zone/volume effect weapon, correct? Depending on the power, modulation and sustainment of the effect you can sweep the skies in a certain arc to fry all UAV, or focus on individual units to scramble and drop them. 

Would Autonomy not be just as vulnerable to fried electronics as it is "invulnerable" to classic radio attack?

Eg

From The Crows Nest, podcast ep Feb 14th

From The Crows Best, ep. Feb 28

No shielding is perfect or invulnerable. Everything has a finite quality and bell curve of effectiveness., no? 

As I always say, and my wife hates to hear:

There's more than one way to skin a cat. 

Of course, there's also this:

 

 

The largest drawback (and risk) in employing EM for c-UAS is signature.  One has to pump a lot of energy into the sky with a large very expensive system to take down cheap drones.  These EM systems are very vulnerable to detection because they are pumping out so much energy into space - you can literally see them from space.  They immediately become targets for other fires.  In many ways this is the major dilemma of UAS right now.  Whether a bunch of soldiers open up with small arms, EM or even EW, missiles…they all have high signatures that give away position.  So if you are firing away at 20 small, cheap UAS, you can get 90% of them but your position is given away and artillery can go to work on you.  If you don’t fire and try to hide, the UAS will likely find you anyway and then FPV you to death.

This is why I am a big fan of low energy dispersed systems (like other UAS) doing the c-UAS job.  Fight flies with flies, not a hammer.

Edited March 8 by The_Capt

[Tux]

On 3/7/2024 at 1:51 AM, The_Capt said:

I am thinking that these unmanned surface vessels are probably going to evolve into platforms as opposed to suicide drones.  They are fast (relatively), low profile and have incredibly long range.  I suspect they are already working on using them for UAS or missile launching platforms.  And I would not rule out small fast torpedoes.  In the end they don’t even have sink the ship, only damage it enough and the effect is the same.  That way these small sea drones can stand off kms and simply launch other systems until enough get through.  At these ranges this will effectively deny sea space within the littorals and possibly further out.

Quoting this note only because it's the most recent one to touch on the naval warfare discussion and I wanted to add some thoughts to that.

On ideas for near-term development of Ukraine's naval drones:

1. The aim is to destroy the enemy's ability to wage war on the sea.  That will almost always mean that your target is the enemy ship, not the crew.  At the moment exposed enemy crew members are not effective at preventing USV attacks.  If you can get close to a ship you are therefore much better off pressing home a direct attack on said ship than you are trying to blow grapeshot into the face of some rube balancing an MG on the railings.  This will remain the case until exposed crewmembers become a significant threat to your attempts to approach the ship (unlikely to ever happen imo) or until you are able to kill so many crew, so efficiently as to make it a better way of neutralising the ship than sinking it (ditto).
2. Modern warships are already pretty focussed on mitigating the dangers presented by enemy warships, ASMs and torpedoes - those are obviously well-established as primary threats.  To my mind then there is not much to be gained in terms of lethality by having USVs try to replicate those types of attack.  The Ukrainians' current success is being achieved by threading the eye of the needle between their drones not being torpedoes, ASMs or warships but having features of all three:  They are operator-guided and can see their targets from long distances like a warship or a missile and they cause damage on the waterline like various torpedoes or missiles can.  The fact they attack on the surface also means they are too low down for conventional anti-ASM defences to effectively target but they are too small and agile for anti-ship weaponry to hit reliably, either.
3. Given the above, I think it's only a matter of time before this capacility gap slams shut and effective countermeasures to the current generation of Sea Baby-type drones are popularised (although whether the Russians will be the ones to do so seems bafflingly uncertain).  I've mentioned previously that I do think deployable netting/fencing could be an interim solution which could completely neutralise the current threat or at least significantly increase the number of successful attacks required to damage or sink a vessel.

Longer term, I agree that naval drones will become platforms for torpedo-type weapons (correctly noted already as basically the best way to sink something otherwise designed to float).  Do we think future navies may start by looking to populate the oceans perhaps even exclusively with torpedo-toting, submersible drones?  Presumably they may spend time at the surface to charge batteries, cruise more efficiently and/or to communicate but what combat advantages, if any, would a drone have on the surface if there is no part of it that needs to breathe?

Even further hence, I wonder whether the ideal future naval drone might be capable of both flight and submersible operations?  Flight could be used for faster travel and to escape from enemy torpedoes; submersion would grant concealment, energy-efficient loitering, etc.  You then of course need to start on a 'torpedo' design that can follow a target into the air and potentially back underwater again.  Get a few of these machines fighting each other close to shore and you've got yourself a hell of a show, if nothing else!

[Tux]

59 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

The largest drawback (and risk) in employing EM for c-UAS is signature.  One has to pump a lot of energy into the sky with a large very expensive system to take down cheap drones.  These EM systems are very vulnerable to detection because they are pumping out so much energy into space - you can literally see them from space.  They immediately become targets for other fires.  In many ways this is the major dilemma of UAS right now.  Whether a bunch of soldiers open up with small arms, EM or even EW, missiles…they all have high signatures that give away position.  So if you are firing away at 20 small, cheap UAS, you can get 90% of them but your position is given away and artillery can go to work on you.  If you don’t fire and try to hide, the UAS will likely find you anyway and then FPV you to death.

This is why I am a big fan of low energy dispersed systems (like other UAS) doing the c-UAS job.  Fight flies with flies, not a hammer.

Following on from this thread, do we have any ideas why we're not seeing more evidence of HARM-type UAVs, yet?  LARDs ("Light Anti Radiation Drones"), if you will?  From what I can tell it shouldn't be particularly complicated to make a drone which takes off and flies towards (and then into) the strongest local source of radiation at a frequency of your choosing?

Wouldn't such a design be equally capable of attacking enemy EW or other enemy emitters (soliders with radios, FPVs, etc.)?

[Kinophile]

3 hours ago, Pete Wenman said:

Don't think this has been posted earlier but the Army trying some new tech here.

Airborne soldiers do some smart shooting with new sight that helps smash drones. 

https://www.forces.net/services/army/airborne-soldiers-do-some-smart-shooting-new-sight-helps-smash-drones?fbclid=IwAR0TWthFemVVlX_5RRp79SZg4GiWN8JOPy84i4znNrwF7E1cRtwvIsFwyi4

 

 

Another soldier training with the new sight is Lance Corporal Harry Howes, a driver with 13 Air Assault Support Regiment Royal Logistic Corps, who was full of praise for the Smash sight.

LCpl Howes said: "The Smash sight is a simple piece of kit to use. It just takes a few goes to get used to how it works.

"You still pull the trigger, but the system fires the rifle when it is most confident of a hit – which it gets!"

Interesting kit. Bet it will turn up in Ukraine pretty quickly. In that second photo he's using a tripod, I assume for parameter control during range testing. 

And of course,  they must first solve for

Edited March 8 by Kinophile

[Tux]

41 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

Another soldier training with the new sight is Lance Corporal Harry Howes, a driver with 13 Air Assault Support Regiment Royal Logistic Corps, who was full of praise for the Smash sight.

LCpl Howes said: "The Smash sight is a simple piece of kit to use. It just takes a few goes to get used to how it works.

"You still pull the trigger, but the system fires the rifle when it is most confident of a hit – which it gets!"

Interesting kit. Bet it will turn up in Ukraine pretty quickly. In that second photo he's using a tripod, I assume for parameter control during range testing. 

And of course,  they must first solve for

If this works as advertised and production is quickly scalable I think we might be looking at the first real anti-drone game-changer.

[The_Capt]

56 minutes ago, Tux said:

Following on from this thread, do we have any ideas why we're not seeing more evidence of HARM-type UAVs, yet?  LARDs ("Light Anti Radiation Drones"), if you will?  From what I can tell it shouldn't be particularly complicated to make a drone which takes off and flies towards (and then into) the strongest local source of radiation at a frequency of your choosing?

Wouldn't such a design be equally capable of attacking enemy EW or other enemy emitters (soliders with radios, FPVs, etc.)?

Probably a matter of time.  It would require full autonomy but I think that capability is already on the table.  My sense is that in order to survive one will need to get quieter on the battlefield, not louder.  I think decoys, deception and obscuration are also going to see a major renaissance.

[Kinophile]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

The largest drawback (and risk) in employing EM for c-UAS is signature.  One has to pump a lot of energy into the sky with a large very expensive system to take down cheap drones.  These EM systems are very vulnerable to detection because they are pumping out so much energy into space - you can literally see them from space.  They immediately become targets for other fires.  In many ways this is the major dilemma of UAS right now.  Whether a bunch of soldiers open up with small arms, EM or even EW, missiles…they all have high signatures that give away position.  So if you are firing away at 20 small, cheap UAS, you can get 90% of them but your position is given away and artillery can go to work on you.  If you don’t fire and try to hide, the UAS will likely find you anyway and then FPV you to death.

This is why I am a big fan of low energy dispersed systems (like other UAS) doing the c-UAS job.  Fight flies with flies, not a hammer.

For sure, a MW Emitter presents a target, but anything doing anything on a battlefield presents a potential target, no? That can't be a priority criteria for platform selection, can it? If we follow that logic, well...

Are you assuming a single platform approach, where the loss is quickly felt and is significant? But I think we're on the same page that any c-uas system must be as equivalently redundant and easy to scale up in numbers as the UAS its countering. Not equivalent in actual numbers but proportional (eg Pacific war, where the eventual AA Cruisers were vastly outnumbered by planes, but their own numbers were sufficient.). 

Skynex systems etc are nice but are thinking from a decade ago. Future skynex need to be mounted on golf cart/minivan sized UGVs, and as plentiful. The same would go for any Microwave Emitters.

Is it also not a factor of exposure time? The length of time the emitter needs to sweep a particular patch of sky vs hostile response time. It doesn't need to be a Big Fat & & Hot - it can be small, light and hot. Then it's hot for a while but can then displace. While it's doing so another one of it's kind lights up.

Running a Christmas lights style op of these networked UGV-MW could keep a sky volume clear, sustain losses, and open/close holes for friendly UAS to pass through, help identify counter measures by their own losses,  etc. 

This is just spitballing, sure. But everything has a signature vs effect tradeoff. The fact of a temporary hot signature does not negate the platform if it's effect is useful, esp at scale and can be maintained.

Edited March 8 by Kinophile

[Tux]

12 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Probably a matter of time.  It would require full autonomy but I think that capability is already on the table.  My sense is that in order to survive one will need to get quieter on the battlefield, not louder.  I think decoys, deception and obscuration are also going to see a major renaissance.

Absolutely.  I honestly can't wait for this bit.  The instant autonomy properly arrives the race will be on to work out where the gaps lie in the enemy drones' target recognition algorithms and exploit them.  Yellow/pink dazzle camouflage for infantry?  Every solider wearing a pair of prosthetic arms to avoid being identified as human?  Furry SPGs that grunt and let off an occasional puff of methane in an attempt to "look like" livestock to a particular type of 'walking land mine'?

Entire fleets of dirt-cheap drone decoys chirping and hopping around the place, attempting to deceive and absorb the enemy's dirt-cheap attackers faster than they can be produced:  the ultimate expression of a war of economies?

As an aside, this is not the first time the discussion on this thread has made me consider the massive ****tonne of plastic waste that even near-future wars are going to leave lying about the place.  Hopefully materials tech can get ahead of the game soon and provide viable bio-degradable solutions.

[The_Capt]

12 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

This is just spitballing, sure. But everything has a signature vs effect tradeoff. The fact of a temporary hot signature does not negate the platform if it's effect is useful, esp at scale and can be maintained.

I don't think it is a question of effectiveness as much as it is one of sustainability.  A large, hot and expensive platform needs to be able to sustain its effect over the long term.  UAS have accomplished this through mass production, we are not going to be able to mas produce our current suite of EM weapons.  If we could, great, we have a viable counter. But the large centralized system I am seeing will eventually be overwhelmed unless we can make them a lot cheaper and easier to build.

[The_Capt]

16 minutes ago, Tux said:

As an aside, this is not the first time the discussion on this thread has made me consider the massive ****tonne of plastic waste that even near-future wars are going to leave lying about the place.  Hopefully materials tech can get ahead of the game soon and provide viable bio-degradable solutions.

Don't worry we will have nano Grey Goo to clean all that up...and eat humanity while they are at it.

[Kinophile]

5 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

I don't think it is a question of effectiveness as much as it is one of sustainability.  A large, hot and expensive platform needs to be able to sustain its effect over the long term.  UAS have accomplished this through mass production, we are not going to be able to mas produce our current suite of EM weapons.  If we could, great, we have a viable counter. But the large centralized system I am seeing will eventually be overwhelmed unless we can make them a lot cheaper and easier to build.

Absolutely, this also where I'm coming from.

I should have clarified in original post that I was thinking of future smaller, minivan sized platforms, not the truck/stryker size were seeing right now, the BFH Platforms that will have effect but die soon and are expensive (in material, and crew and time) to replace. 

[Tux]

5 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Don't worry we will have nano Grey Goo to clean all that up...and eat humanity while they are at it.

Probably for the best.

[Butschi]

58 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

It would require full autonomy

Depends. The obvious advantage a missile has over a drone is speed. So I'd guess if you expect a target to emit shorter than the drone needs to arrive at the target and then change position, the drone needs to be able to search the area autonomously.

If we are talking about a stationary and/or constantly emitting target the drone just needs to home in on the source, avoid obstacles and if the target stops emitting in between keep going in the last known direction and possibly identify the target at the target location. That wouldn't require full autonomy, at least not that much more than current fire and forget weapons already have, right?

[kimbosbread]

3 hours ago, Tux said:

Even further hence, I wonder whether the ideal future naval drone might be capable of both flight and submersible operations?  Flight could be used for faster travel and to escape from enemy torpedoes; submersion would grant concealment, energy-efficient loitering, etc.  You then of course need to start on a 'torpedo' design that can follow a target into the air and potentially back underwater again.  Get a few of these machines fighting each other close to shore and you've got yourself a hell of a show, if nothing else!

I image this capability will be bifurcated; ie the drone will consist of sub units, perhaps the main one capable of diving, the others for flying, for that nice one too punch. As always, range and payload don’t favor flying unless it’s on a suborbital trajectory!

2 hours ago, Tux said:

Following on from this thread, do we have any ideas why we're not seeing more evidence of HARM-type UAVs, yet?

Expense/lack of off the shelf components. All of the sudden it’s not just hobbyist parts, but fancy antennas/SDRs/EE degrees etc. Radios is not a simple domain.

1 hour ago, Tux said:

The instant autonomy properly arrives the race will be on to work out where the gaps lie in the enemy drones' target recognition algorithms and exploit them.

This is where cyberwarfare will really come into it’s own. We need to basically figure out whatever Bloodhound + etc are, but for autonomous warfare. Maybe once I finish my current gig in 3 years, I’ll start a company doing drone network risk analysis.

[The_Capt]

1 hour ago, Butschi said:

Depends. The obvious advantage a missile has over a drone is speed. So I'd guess if you expect a target to emit shorter than the drone needs to arrive at the target and then change position, the drone needs to be able to search the area autonomously.

If we are talking about a stationary and/or constantly emitting target the drone just needs to home in on the source, avoid obstacles and if the target stops emitting in between keep going in the last known direction and possibly identify the target at the target location. That wouldn't require full autonomy, at least not that much more than current fire and forget weapons already have, right?

I think one could get away with a hybrid system - semi-autonomous until a certain range and then fully upon release.  I think the difference is attack profile.  So an anti-radiation FPV is going to want to come in at very low altitude, skulking in the treetops until the last few hundred meters (oddly tree cover could become more dangerous with unmanned systems, and conversely open fields remain dangerous for artillery strikes).

A HARM missile is fired from high altitude and comes in at high speed.  A HARM FPV will come in at low altitude and slower speed.  My thinking is that the FPV will likely need a higher level of autonomy than the missile based on approach.  If the target does short burst radar painting then either system is going to have to "remember" the target location and then be able to sweep/search - that might be better with human eyes on board, so in that case the FPV will need less autonomy.

So maybe hybrid?

[Carolus]

Nothing too special about this drone video, except when one flew into the BMP driver hatch.

 

 

[cesmonkey]

Most of the first half of this podcast is a discussion on the chances of Ukraine being ultimately successful against Russia between H.R. McMaster and Victor Davis Hanson - and/or what it will take in Western support to make this possible - in the context of Biden vs. Trump this November.