How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Holien]

For those interested in listening in on two world leaders talk about Ukraine before the war. More to follow....

 

 

[Holien]

 

 

[Holien]

 

Edited March 14 by Holien
Messed up link

[Butschi]

4 hours ago, dan/california said:

 

The part about Russia being better coordinated seems to contradict most of the other information we get. The NYT seems to consistently be talking to the most unhappy Ukrainian it can find.

I don't know, I seem to remember quite a few reports saying that Ukraine generally struggles with coordination above a certain level. Doesn't mean Russia is any good at this, either. Not sure what is meant here but EW assets are usually higher level assets, right?

Edited March 14 by Butschi

[Offshoot]

It seems Ukraine still struggles under legacy Soviet systems in some areas. This article on the failures of their military medical system is a hard dose of reality - 'Abandon all hope:' Ukraine’s wounded warriors compare military medical system to the Inferno

Quote

Reformist NGOs and military staff who know this system blame outdated Soviet orders, the lack of clarity or transparency in the system, the overwhelming scale of the war, and the fact that most records are on paper. They also point out the incompetence, callousness, or corruption among medical commissions or unit command staff.

 

[The_Capt]

1 hour ago, Butschi said:

I don't know, I seem to remember quite a few reports saying that Ukraine generally struggles with coordination above a certain level. Doesn't mean Russia is any good at this, either. Not sure what is meant here but EW assets are usually higher level assets, right?

I have never fully bought this reason for the UA or RA difficulties in this war.  It got rolled out after last summer to try and explain why the UA failed while trying to employ western doctrine and equipment: “well you see it would have worked but the Ukrainians struggle to coordinate above company level.”

Problem with this theory for both the UA and RA is that the first year of the war had plenty of examples of larger operational level coordination for both sides.  Russia pushed in a 5-6 axis attack that saw successful penetration up to 250kms.  It wasn’t a lack of coordination that stalled and killed these attacks it was the levels of friction modern C4ISR and weapons can project on conventional forces.

The UA coordinated two nearly simultaneous offensives roughly 450 kms apart at Kharkiv and Kherson successfully.  Kharkiv demonstrated Brigade level manoeuvre and Kherson started that way be devolved to Coy level actions the forced the Russia withdrawal more slowly.

Finally, there is nothing in the infamous “Soviet system” that precludes higher level coordination.  In fact it is quite the opposite.  Soviet doctrine was all about mass and scale.  Mission Command does not magically create upscaling.

We watched western doctrine and equipment fail very visibly back in summer ‘23 and our immediate reaction was “well it is clear they are doing it wrong”.  Based on the evidence we see, nearly daily, do we think perhaps there might be other reasons that are forcing both sides of this war to adopt multiple small unit actions as the primary mode of offensives?  After 2 years of this war, perhaps they understand and are employing what works as best as it can due to battlefield realities better than we do?
 

[Kinophile]

39 minutes ago, Offshoot said:

It seems Ukraine still struggles under legacy Soviet systems in some areas. This article on the failures of their military medical system is a hard dose of reality - 'Abandon all hope:' Ukraine’s wounded warriors compare military medical system to the Inferno

 

From a certain level up. 

I wonder if Zaluzhny was pushing for mobilization but Zelensky was feeling that the current system of training, and command and support was too Legacy Soviet? It would only waste the extra people, while also putting enormous strain on civilian support.

Not just in the actual mobilization but once casualties piled up would the current system be able to handle it? Ukraine is an actual democracy and could fail under the strain of a military medical system designed by an autocracy. 

If 'all'  Syrsky does this year is drastically reform his military, root & branch, then hecwill have set Ukraine up for true victory - the final destruction of its Soviet military legacy. 

[The_Capt]

10 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

If 'all'  Syrsky does this year is drastically reform his military, root & branch, then hecwill have set Ukraine up for true victory - the final destruction of its Soviet military legacy. 

Huh?  The same legacy system that has kept Russia in this war far longer than they should have.  There is nothing militarily wrong with the Soviet system for the time it was in.  In fact a modernized Soviet system might just be better at modern warfare than the western one - massed precision, for example.

The Soviet military system demonstrated its full potential at the end of WW2 and frankly was highly effective until about the mid-80s.  If modernized there is no proof it could not be highly effective again.  We have a tendency to blame every failure on this “Soviet legacy” without really understanding what that military was, or was not.  The Soviet system had very high resilience, which the RA is demonstrating pretty much on a daily basis.  It also could marshal and project mass like no one’s business.  Problem is that the mass was “dumb” - and frankly I am not sure it was as dumb as we believed.

Problems in a medical system could be from many causes.  The “Soviet legacy” has become an easy-button for western analysts to explain pretty much everything.  

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP82-00039R000100110060-3.pdf

https://www.milbank.org/wp-content/uploads/mq/volume-40/issue-04/40-4-Highlights-of-Soviet-Health-Services.pdf

The Soviet medical system, for example, had its strengths and weaknesses but there was nothing inherently “wrong” with it (for example the Soviet Union had lower doctor to patient ratios than the US).  It was designed for a different baseline, much like pretty much everything else in the Soviet system.  The Soviet system was by-design aimed at supporting mass.  So failures in the current UA system buckling under the weight of casualties cannot all be thrown at the feet of Soviet legacy, when that legacy was designed specifically not to buckle under massive casualties.

 

 

[cesmonkey]

 

[cesmonkey]

 

[cesmonkey]

 

[cesmonkey]

Konstantin Mashovets today:
https://t.me/zvizdecmanhustu/1704
 

He begins with:

Quote

Review...

First, about the “fashionable thesis”, supposedly the enemy’s offensive has “almost stopped”, and the battle line (front) is stabilizing...

I do not entirely share this point of view. More precisely, I think its publication is still quite premature. And, obviously, the enemy command also does not agree with her. At least, over the past 24 hours it has taken a number of measures to prevent this from happening. In particular:

And concludes with:

Quote

Therefore, the central message of the 2024 campaign will be determined by the answers to a couple of key questions.

- Who will have time first - the Armed Forces of Ukraine to equip the appropriate defense system and prepare for a strategic defense operation,

- Will the Ukrainian Defense Forces, in turn, be capable of conducting offensive actions at least at the operational level in 2024 (and this presupposes, by the way, the process of forming our OWN strategic reserves, within the framework of which, obviously, the current military- the political leadership of our state, one way or another, will have to make a number of “unpopular decisions”)?
 

 

[cesmonkey]

Oleksandr Syrskyi today:
https://t.me/osirskiy/624

Quote

In these conditions, reliable protection of our servicemen can only be provided by modern and powerful EW devices, the role and importance of which is constantly growing.

The confrontation between drones and EW has come to the fore, and only the one who will be the first to break away from the enemy in this competition will have a chance to win.

The positive thing is that, despite the rather difficult situation on the entire front line, we managed to start the process of rotations and replacement of units and units that have been performing combat tasks at the front for a long time. This will stabilize the situation and have a positive effect on the moral and psychological state of our soldiers. During the work, he made all the necessary decisions to increase the combat capabilities of our brigades.
I continue my work. Glory to Ukraine!

 

[Butschi]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

Finally, there is nothing in the infamous “Soviet system” that precludes higher level coordination.  In fact it is quite the opposite.  Soviet doctrine was all about mass and scale.

I thought so but was unsure about whether a) the RA it's actually still applying Soviet doctrine b) does it properly and c) if those EW assets are indeed higher level.

[The_Capt]

20 minutes ago, Butschi said:

I thought so but was unsure about whether a) the RA it's actually still applying Soviet doctrine b) does it properly and c) if those EW assets are indeed higher level.

From what we can tell..."not really".  The modern Russian military system employed at the beginning of the war looked a lot more western in composition.  Since then, it does look like Russia is rolling back to the Soviet Divisional construct at least for force generation.  As to EW employment specifically...who knows, but I suspect the Russians are falling back on volume.  They definitely appear to have upped their ISR game somewhat.

In the field both sides are down to multiple small unit actions to go anywhere - this is why Adiivka likely took months instead of days.

Why that is happening has nothing to do with the strengths or weaknesses of the Soviet era systems.  It has to do with profile and time.  We have seen plenty examples of detection of forces well back from the front line.  So if one tries to marshal anything bigger than a company your ISR signature is going to get picked up very early.  Hell the troop positioning movements alone will likely get picked up.

Second element is time.  It takes maybe 30 minutes to get a company group or combat team lined up and into action.  Less if you have drilled it.  A Battalion can be an hour or more.  A Brigade can take hours to days to get into position and lined up for an operation.  An entire day sitting with a lot of highly detectable assets in range (now being +50kms) of strikes is suicidal on this battlefield...so neither side is doing that.  This has little to do with upscaling ability, or Soviet era C2, and everything to do with battlefield illumination and long range strike at a tactical level.  If you want to lose a Brigade, sure deploy it within 50kms of the front in concentration and try and get it shook out for a major operation.

So both sides appear to be de-aggregating in order to have some chance of actually getting forces to the front.  This has resulted in corrosive tactical scatter in a lot of cases.  In the few areas where we see concentration (e.g. Russian assaults at Adiivka and Bakhmut) we still saw small scale actions, just a lot of them repeated.  We also saw horrendous losses.

There is a very real possibility that behavior on the battlefield is a result of the environment and not legacy shortfalls in C2.  This scares the bejezzus out of the west as we have bet the farm on the superiority of our own system.  The real lesson for the west is: "do not fight in a war like this one".  Which is a great idea, unless all war is headed towards versions of this one, at least for the next while.

I strongly suspect we are headed for something even worse for the western system to be honest.  The trends pulled out of this war speak to a completely different battlefield dynamics, much of which we have not figured out.  We could have entire volumes of doctrine that have been overtaken by events, and nothing scares a modern military more than that.  

Edited March 14 by The_Capt

[kimbosbread]

For everybody’s fun and entertainment, the third launch of SpaceX’s Starship just made it to orbit and will re-enter in a half hour or so. < $100kg to LEO, here we come.

Obviously being able rapidly re-use a rocket that can put 150 tons into LEO will make it easy to rebuild satellite constellations in a war, but the logistics possibilities are really cool.

Edited March 14 by kimbosbread

[dan/california]

 

Quote

 

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/03/14/science/starship-spacex-launch

Live Updates: SpaceX’s Starship Journeys Into Space but Is Lost on Re-Entry

The powerful rocket, a version of which will carry astronauts to the moon for NASA, launched for the third time on Thursday morning. It achieved a number of milestones before losing contact with the ground.

 

Almost.... They are clearly making progress.

[kimbosbread]

18 minutes ago, dan/california said:

Almost.... They are clearly making progress.

$666 per kg to LEO (assuming $100M launch cost, 150T payload) is around a quarter of Falcon 9’s cost. So right now, even if you expend the rocket, it’s a massive advance.

[Tenses]

Don't want to go farther into OT but at least for cargo we should have long ago switched to non-rocket systems. Rockets are good for humans, who are not feeling very well with 100G accelerations on their heads, but for any cargo like satellites, space station components, etc. we should instead fire them into space using electromagnetic catapults. Much cheaper, environmentally friendly and you can do launches all day long.

There are some startups for that at the moment but when matured it could instantly replace anything what was lost in space due to warfare or natural reasons.

[sburke]

50 minutes ago, dan/california said:

 

Almost.... They are clearly making progress.

This actually made me chuckle.

Quote

It achieved a number of milestones before losing contact with the ground.

I expect it had no problem making contact with the ground.

 

[mosuri]

18 hours ago, Kinophile said:

This guy (RB&PG) has been continuously maddened by the lack of a Ukrainian campaign against RUS electrical and gas infrastructure. He has a good point. 

 

Well, I can't tell whether those are part of infrastructure that's wholly internal to russia, or whether they are part of international pipelines, but in this strange war russian natural gas still flows through pipelines over Ukraine to countries like Hungary and Austria, even today.

Agreement continues until end of this year, at least: https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/91649

It probably isn't in the best interests of Ukraine to rock that particular boat and cause worsening relations with EU members, even if they are led by characters like the toad orban (although to be fair, toads have a spine, and a heart) or Slovakia's fu.., I mean, fico. 

[LuckyDog]

3 hours ago, The_Capt said:

The real lesson for the west is: "do not fight in a war like this one".

I'm unsure if we will have a chance to get to war. In retrospect, if Russia were to invade Ukraine again, it would probably start with hundreds of thousands of drone strikes to cripple infrastructure, command and control. Take out government offices, cell towers, TV masts, power stations, command HQs, water utilities, fire stations, docks, oil/gas storage, and cause major traffic accidents on the arterial roads the army will use to deploy. Never mind the military targets.  What kind of response could be coordinated and executed if they did that? 

If this is a realistic possibility, how can any country guard against it? Sanctions have reduced border traffic, but there are too many avaricious useful idiots that will enable this to happen (again, in any country). Have we arrived at mutually assured destruction version 2?

[Edit - after thought] And that is why we can't stop helping Ukraine now. It will be worse next time.

Edited March 14 by LuckyDog

[Astrophel]

3 hours ago, The_Capt said:

From what we can tell..."not really".  The modern Russian military system employed at the beginning of the war looked a lot more western in composition.  Since then, it does look like Russia is rolling back to the Soviet Divisional construct at least for force generation.  As to EW employment specifically...who knows, but I suspect the Russians are falling back on volume.  They definitely appear to have upped their ISR game somewhat.

In the field both sides are down to multiple small unit actions to go anywhere - this is why Adiivka likely took months instead of days.

Why that is happening has nothing to do with the strengths or weaknesses of the Soviet era systems.  It has to do with profile and time.  We have seen plenty examples of detection of forces well back from the front line.  So if one tries to marshal anything bigger than a company your ISR signature is going to get picked up very early.  Hell the troop positioning movements alone will likely get picked up.

Second element is time.  It takes maybe 30 minutes to get a company group or combat team lined up and into action.  Less if you have drilled it.  A Battalion can be an hour or more.  A Brigade can take hours to days to get into position and lined up for an operation.  An entire day sitting with a lot of highly detectable assets in range (now being +50kms) of strikes is suicidal on this battlefield...so neither side is doing that.  This has little to do with upscaling ability, or Soviet era C2, and everything to do with battlefield illumination and long range strike at a tactical level.  If you want to lose a Brigade, sure deploy it within 50kms of the front in concentration and try and get it shook out for a major operation.

So both sides appear to be de-aggregating in order to have some chance of actually getting forces to the front.  This has resulted in corrosive tactical scatter in a lot of cases.  In the few areas where we see concentration (e.g. Russian assaults at Adiivka and Bakhmut) we still saw small scale actions, just a lot of them repeated.  We also saw horrendous losses.

There is a very real possibility that behavior on the battlefield is a result of the environment and not legacy shortfalls in C2.  This scares the bejezzus out of the west as we have bet the farm on the superiority of our own system.  The real lesson for the west is: "do not fight in a war like this one".  Which is a great idea, unless all war is headed towards versions of this one, at least for the next while.

I strongly suspect we are headed for something even worse for the western system to be honest.  The trends pulled out of this war speak to a completely different battlefield dynamics, much of which we have not figured out.  We could have entire volumes of doctrine that have been overtaken by events, and nothing scares a modern military more than that.  

I wonder how many lessons of this war are applicable to a potential conflict with the west.  What we have surely learned is that drone warfare is the future, on land and at sea.

I doubt we are learning anything useful from the soviet style artillery duels that are turning the battle lines into a killing field made static by obscene numbers of mines.  We are never going to fight this kind of war.

Were the West to be fighting this war we would be relying on air superiority and our long range accurate missile systems.  We do value our soldiers highly these days because they are highly trained - imho conscripts would be more a danger to our own side than useful.

Macron's proposal to add western bodies into this antique warfare was ill-conceived to say the least.  I hope the more fanatic among the Nato allies do not succumb to temptation.  If we are going to fight this war - and I think we must - we need to return to the idea of compelling air dominance.  The political narrative is clear cut - a peace based on recognition of the already accepted international borders.

 

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, kimbosbread said:

$666 per kg to LEO (assuming $100M launch cost, 150T payload) is around a quarter of Falcon 9’s cost. So right now, even if you expend the rocket, it’s a massive advance.

It is real progress, and I expect them to get the rest of the way there Elon doesn't flame out in some spectacular fashion. At a 100kg to orbit a LOT of things become economic that just are not now.

1 hour ago, Tenses said:

Don't want to go farther into OT but at least for cargo we should have long ago switched to non-rocket systems. Rockets are good for humans, who are not feeling very well with 100G accelerations on their heads, but for any cargo like satellites, space station components, etc. we should instead fire them into space using electromagnetic catapults. Much cheaper, environmentally friendly and you can do launches all day long.

There are some startups for that at the moment but when matured it could instantly replace anything what was lost in space due to warfare or natural reasons.

I agree with this in theory, but rail guns, and that is essentially what this is, have been a little bit like laser weapons and fusion power. They are a decade or two out, and always will be. 

That said you never know when some materials science guy will crack the critical part of the problem, and AI is moving materials science right along.

[dan/california]

4 minutes ago, Astrophel said:

Were the West to be fighting this war we would be relying on air superiority

The several trillion dollar question is whether changes in technology have made Iraq War levels of air dominance unachievable. Especially since small drones have pretty much punctured the concept of perfect air defenses that are at least as important to the modern version of blitzkrieg as offensive side. We have built an enormous tower of military assumptions on the basis of air dominance, without it it is well and truly back to the drawing board. And even if we could utterly cleanse the sky of Russian anything now? Can we do it to the Chinese in five or ten years?