How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[chrisl]

12 hours ago, holoween said:

Because its true.

Sounds paradoxical but isnt. If youre thrown into a random combat situation and have to deal with a tank and get to choose one weapon system to deal with it youll always choose a tank. Because it can do the job at any distance in any weather condition any EW and air defense situation in very short time.

But tanks cant be everywhere and in a lot of specific circumstances other weapons are more effective and importantly widespread.

What?  No.

I want a radio.

A tank is only good if it sees the other tank first and can get the first shot off and has a sufficiently good targeting system to get a 1st-shot kill, and the range is short enough that the other tank doesn't get a round in the air ensuring the near simultaneous death of both tanks.

No thanks.

With a radio I can hide in a little hole and call my friends who deliver action at a distance to make the tank go away without  the guys inside ever knowing I'm there.

But I don't even want to let things get that far.  I'm a geek, I enjoy the comforts of my home office.  I'll take space-based ISR for $1000, Alex. And the questio to the answer is "What do I have to build so nobody will bother trying to sneak up on me, lest they end up suffocating in a cubic mile of popcorn, and they know it?"

(edit: and I see @The_Capt ninja'd me on this.  I need to try to keep more caught up.)

Edited April 10 by chrisl

[Kinophile]

54 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Sorry Mr. Cannoncocker, I thought of artillery pretty much straight away and it fails all four.

1.  Massive production scale practicality (cost, size, resources, etc.)

Artillery is expensive to produce and not easy to build.  Plus, we just saw that Ukrainians are concluding that towed artillery is not survivable with the threat of drones, so SP artillery is what they're looking for.  That's even more expensive.  Something like a PzH 2000 is €1.7m each.  How many drones could you purchase with that money?  Lots.  And you'd have them faster than a single PzH 2000 I bet.

 

It's far more than that. Try 10 times more.  €14-17m /pzh. 

https://en.defence-ua.com/industries/how_much_a_modern_155_mm_spg_gun_costs_now_examples_of_the_german_pzh2000_korean_k9_and_french_caesar-6251.html

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzerhaubitze_2000

By contrast the truck mounted Caesar / Archers are €3-4m / €4.5m. That's a far more useful price, lead-in times and replacability. This would put artillery back into the argument. The current price of 155mm is more a factor of ****ty policies and economic opportunism (demand >supply) than reflective of the actual cost of materials and labour. A proper wartime economy could absolutely churn out dumb 155 at a far lower cost, and probably guided shells too (through sheer scale of production). 

The all weather factor for artillery is definitely a plus over FPV and no matter what, the kinetic and explosive effect of a 155mm plunging from a big F-off height will never be matched by an FPV, cos physics. Modern Caesar and Archers can deliver very accurate salvos from just one gun at about 40km distance, within a few minutes, EW and weather be damned. 

The twilight of the MBT is upon us, but big guns will always have a singular use - massive effect on target in a very short time frame from really far away. 

But they must be mobile, relatively light (weight & logistics) and probably need their own organic drone spotting squad. 

Edited April 10 by Kinophile

[chrisl]

12 hours ago, Tux said:

Imo you're one order away from the truth, here: the hard requirement is the effect (including the type of effect).  You'll probably need to transport an object to the target to cause the effect but that's not the start.

Again, I think you're one dimension away: you want to "delay the collapse of the weapon's time and space option space" not necessarily as long as possible but at least until the point at which the target can no longer avoid being hit and there is therefore no longer a need to re-target.  The rifle bullet is fine if fired from close range.  The FPV drone is stuffed if the target drives away from it at 100km/h.  What matters isn't the energy profile of the weapon system per se but its relationship to the intended target.

If you start from an intended effect, you can decide what the best target will be and what the best type of effect would be (chemical, kinetic, phonic, electromagnetic, etc.).  You can then work out the best way to apply that effect to that target (i.e. the type of warhead) in order to achieve the intended overall effect (I'll google synonyms for "effect" in a minute, don't worry).  The mass, volume and fragility of the selected warhead will be the main things that dictate the achievable energy-time curves for your weapon system.  Then you can start worrying about things such as launch signatures or changing trajectories post-launch and whether you can realistically do anything about those things.

I've already written about the "as long as possible" point but you mention retaining energy here and that's important.  Retaining energy is physically expensive and should always be seen as a compromising factor.  All else being equal you want to retain as little energy as necessary after launch in order to achieve your desired effect at the target.

I think you're still one dimension away, too. You're starting from "How does my thing work, what can I shoot it at".

From a battlefield perspective, the problem is more of "what am I facing and how do I keep it from getting anywhere near me".  And then you develop the ISR and precision to vaporize anything you don't like that acts like it wants to get to close based on what's out there.  In doing all of that you're constrained by conservation of energy, but there's a lot of room to work with if you start before anything gets you into its range.

[chrisl]

10 hours ago, TheVulture said:

I wonder how much the F-4 Vietnam experience plays in to this (I'm probably mis-remembering the aircraft involved - apologies if so - and possibly this is one of those 'truisms' that turns out to be an urban myth or at least not quite as simple as usually described).  The F-4 was initially designed without a gun / cannon, since it had air-to-air missiles that would supposedly render the gun obsolete - anything dangerous would be destroyed by missiles (or destroy the F-4 by missiles) before they ever got close to gun range. Turns out that the anti-air missiles didn't perform as reliably as hoped, and they did find themselves in dogfighting range without a gun to fall back on.

New versions were quickly developed that did have a gun, and all US planes since then, including the F-35 which is very much meant to not be a dogfighter, still carry a gun, because the cost of including it is relatively small, and the downside of not having one if you happen to find yourself in a situation where it's the best option is comparatively large.

And for modern naval vessels packing a single 5" gun, I imagine if things got hot they'd get used much like the guns on WWII era submarines.  For an isolated, unarmed ship (or small hostile scout vessel) they wouldn't want to use their equivalent of a missile (a torpedo), especially for small targets that might not even trigger it.  They'd sneak up and cut loose with the deck gun (or guns, sometimes they had a 20 mm and/or .50 cal too).  Sometimes you need to be able to deliver an explosion from moderate range and don't need a whole missile for it.

[dan/california]

14 minutes ago, chrisl said:

And for modern naval vessels packing a single 5" gun, I imagine if things got hot they'd get used much like the guns on WWII era submarines.  For an isolated, unarmed ship (or small hostile scout vessel) they wouldn't want to use their equivalent of a missile (a torpedo), especially for small targets that might not even trigger it.  They'd sneak up and cut loose with the deck gun (or guns, sometimes they had a 20 mm and/or .50 cal too).  Sometimes you need to be able to deliver an explosion from moderate range and don't need a whole missile for it.

In particular the gun can respond to close targets far faster than anything else. Say you are in the process of stopping and boarding a freighter of unknown provenance/registration/intentions, having a fast firing five inch gun pointed directly at the bridge of said freighter is a extremely good guarantee of the ships behavior unless the people on the bridge are suicidal. Furthermore the boom the five inch makes is unlikely to damage your own ship if it detonates a kilometer or two away.

[JonS]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Artillery is expensive to produce and not easy to build.  Plus, we just saw that Ukrainians are concluding that towed artillery is not survivable with the threat of drones, so SP artillery is what they're looking for.  That's even more expensive.  Something like a PzH 2000 is €1.7m each.  How many drones could you purchase with that money?  Lots.  And you'd have them faster than a single PzH 2000 I bet.

The gun is just the delivery system. The ammo is the weapon, and the weapon lends itself to mass production is a significant way. Artillery ammunition is practically the poster child for mass production.

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Artillery is cumbersome and has a long logistics tail.  Very delicate supply chain too.  Add to this the trend towards SP and it gets worse (transport to/from the battlefield goes way up).

Artillery ammo is pretty logistically heavy, but then mass scale UAVs are going to be INCREDIBLY logistically bulky. The supply chain isn't particularly delicate or particularly long - at least no more so than any other military log chain.

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Artillery can not inherently choose its own targets and at least doctrinally isn't given a free hand to do smash whatever it spots with them.  While artillery is now more independent than it used to be, thanks to drones and ubiquitous communications methods, it is still far away from the red leg equivalent of Magyar taking care of business.

Ah ... artillery does chose its own targets and is given a free hand to smash ****. It's a combat support function, true, which means that it works in support of the maneauvre arms (at least ... most of the time. Sometimes it's totally off doing its own thing), but that support is - doctrinally - provided in terms of desired effects. Supported arms commander will say "I want to move from here to there, what can you do for me shelldrake?" The attached FO will say "Ok, I'm going to drop a concentration of HE on that feature where I suspect there is an enemy OP just as you start to move, then drip more rounds over the next 10 minutes - is that enough time to cross the gap?" OR the FO will say "Ok I'm going to drop a smoke screen between you and that village where I suspect there are enemy forces - it'll take 2 minutes for the screen to build up, and I can sustain it for 15 minutes - is that enough time for your move?" OR the FO will say "Ok, I'm going to pop some illum rounds just in front of that treeline where I suspect there are enemy ATGM teams, that'll blind their Gen1 night vision gear so you can move freely. I have enough illum for 14 minutes - is that enough time for your move?" Three different ways of solving the same problem, FOs choice.

And, by the same token, drones aren't just the wild west off on their own gig and ignoring the larger battle. At least, they better bloody not be. They should be targeting enemy assets and applying effects in support of the wider battle. At least, they bloody well should be, otherwise they're just wasting everybodies time.

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Good score on this one, until one asks the question "how much does it cost to assure a hit?".  Just for the munition alone we're talking $100k.  How many FPVs can $100k purchase and how many things can those FPVs take out of action compared to the one Excalibur shell?  10x? 20x?  Whatever the case is, it's some number followed by an X.

Two things here. 1) about the same as a drone if you're using PGMs. 2) You're introducing additional factors ($ now, what next?) to ensure that your pre-determined conclusion remains valid.

Edited April 10 by JonS

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Kinophile said:

It's far more than that. Try 10 times more.  €14-17m /pzh.

Heh.  I thought that sounded low.  I must have misread the quick search result.

1 hour ago, Kinophile said:

By contrast the truck mounted Caesar / Archers are €3-4m / €4.5m. That's a far more useful price, lead-in times and replacability. This would put artillery back into the argument.

Er, no.  My argument was that even a weapon half that expensive (€1.7m) didn't fit the first criteria, so you'll need to challenge my point before concluding that something 2x as expensive is "back into the argument" from a procurement standpoint.

1 hour ago, Kinophile said:

The all weather factor for artillery is definitely a plus over FPV and no matter what, the kinetic and explosive effect of a 155mm plunging from a big F-off height will never be matched by an FPV, cos physics. Modern Caesar and Archers can deliver very accurate salvos from just one gun at about 40km distance, within a few minutes, EW and weather be damned.

For sure FPVs and even heavier drones have weather limitations.  However, so does artillery.  Or did you miss the fact that Ukraine has some serious mud problems around this time of the year   A drone might not be able to fly in bad weather, but it doesn't take a dozen men and large pieces of equipment to pull it out of what used to be a road.

Terrain also imposes more restrictions on big heavy weapons than it does small drone teams that can operate from a civilian vehicle or a light ATV.

So yes, UVs are not without their drawbacks, but compared to artillery they are minor in the big picture.  Especially because the biggest drawback for a UV is (at least for the short term) EW.  Artillery suffers from EW vulnerability as well because it relies on UVs and/or radio communications, which EW is also designed to degrade.  Not much use to have a gun that can fire in any and all conditions if it has no idea what to shoot at.

However, I will come back to my other point that artillery as a supporting system is way more useful for the near future than others.  However, if you gave me a choice between a single Caesar or 2000x FPV drones, 20x ATVs, and 40x operators... I'd take the latter every single time in all situations always.  Because I don't care how many rounds you say will be available to that Caesar or how many times and how widely it can relocate within a period of time, it can't hold a candle to the drone option.

Steve

[chrisl]

25 minutes ago, JonS said:

The gun is just the delivery system. The ammo is the weapon, and the weapon lends itself to mass production is a significant way. Artillery ammunition is practically the poster child for mass production.

Artillery ammo is pretty logistically heavy, but then mass scale UAVs are going to be INCREDIBLY logistically bulky. The supply chain isn't particularly delicate or particularly long - at least no more so than any other military log chain.

Drones reduce the mass of steel that you have to haul around that's only there to make the ammo survive the launch, even if you assume the same number of drones as artillery shells.  They also precision deliver the HE so that you need less of it.  So instead of 50 kg of shell and propellant, you've got 17 kg of R18 drone+5 kg explosive, so there's a factor of 2.5 per munition, and you don't need a big 4200 kg launch system.

 But if you get 1 kill for every 10 drones (reasonably consistent with how Ukraine is doing) vs 1 kill for every 200 artillery shells, the drones get another factor of 20.  You can make all the shells be PGMs, but then they need a spotter (drone), maybe a targeting laser (on a drone) and the shells are basically just  drones with longer range and limited maneuverability because they're ballistic. I'd be more inclined to stuff autonomous drones into 155 mm shells to get the extra range, then let them fly around and do their precision autonomy thing far away from any friendlies.

Edited April 10 by chrisl

[Fenris]

55 minutes ago, dan/california said:

In particular the gun can respond to close targets far faster than anything else. Say you are in the process of stopping and boarding a freighter of unknown provenance/registration/intentions, having a fast firing five inch gun pointed directly at the bridge of said freighter is a extremely good guarantee of the ships behavior unless the people on the bridge are suicidal. Furthermore the boom the five inch makes is unlikely to damage your own ship if it detonates a kilometer or two away.

FWIW - I seem to recall reading the AU frigates that went over during Desert Storm (can't remember which) were considered quite useful because they had a deck gun able to do fire missions for troops on the ground.  A ship though has a whole tool kit of weapons so I think it's quite obviously a useful capability in that context.

On land, I tend to agree with @Kinophile, on the proviso that there's ammunition this conflict has shown mobile artillery is in the ascendancy (edit compared MBTs).  I wouldn't be surprised to eventually see the traditional direct fire MBT's becoming short to medium range precision, indirect platforms with armour and jamming to help them survive being closer to the front.  More traditional tube artillery will become wheeled because it's affordable and mobility seems to be better for survival than armour at this stage.

Edited April 10 by Fenris

[JonS]

3 hours ago, chrisl said:

rones reduce the mass of steel that you have to haul around that's only there to make the ammo survive the launch, even if you assume the same number of drones as artillery shells.

Not exactly - the steel alloy used (high carbon and brittle) is chosen so as to create fragments which themselves contribute to the effectiveness of the weapon.

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 You can make all the shells be PGMs, but then they need a spotter (drone), maybe a targeting laser (on a drone)

Artillery worked quite well before drones were a thing

 

Look, drones are great. The have capabilities that emulate or exceed other similar kinds of effects delivery systems. But drones also have limitations, and capabilites that are inferior to other similar kinds of effects delivery systems. And they most definitely aren't some magical uber weapon which has suddenly made all other military capabilities obsolete.

Edited April 10 by JonS

[chrisl]

Just now, JonS said:

Not exactly - the steel alloy used (high carbon and brittle) is chosen so as to create fragments which themselves contribute to the effectiveness of the weapon.

Sure, but if I can deliver it up close and personal with a drone, I need a whole lot less frag, too.  And I can deliver it like a pizza through the door of your dugout.

[Kinophile]

Cmon, you can't gave your cake and eat it too. Or whatever that stupid phrase means. There's a narrative growing that drones are the future be-all and end-all. That feels very binary and overwhelmed by the excitement of a new weapons system coming into its own. 

Sure 155 arty relies on radio coms (degradable)  - and so do drones. Arty will always have the grid square fires advantage. 

Autonomous drones are not flying witches - and for sure there will be counters. I read articles several years ago about encoding lasers to hack the system behind optical sensors. These were simple brute force attacks, scrambling the input to DDOS the system. It required LOS to the hostile lenses but not 90*. It's not a stretch to extrapolate this idea to be effective against autonomous drones. 

Sure Trucks etc etc don't like mud - so what? Ukraine has had Caesars for at minimum 1.5 years now, and two winters later I havent seen any videos of bogged down Caesars. Or HIMARS. Or Archers. And even if someone can find such videos, again - so what? It certainly won't be at the occurrence rate to signify Crap Don't Use Caesars Coz Mud. I've seen plenty of MBTs and BMPs turning into land submarines, though... 

Sure the trucks weigh 4.5 tons, so what? It's disengenuos to say it's only there so the shell will survive launch. Its there to move the shell, aim the shell,  fire the shell,  track the shell and fire the next one in rapid succession in relation and correlation to the first shell.

With firing on the move either just around the corner or already being implemented the mobility, the utility and effectiveness increases yet further, and that's because of the 4.5 ton truck. 

Sometimes you don't need precision or can't guarantee/achieve it - you need area suppression, denial. Even a dumb western 155 is reasonably accurate (Eg front line accounts thatvcompare Soviet 152 from Msta v US 155 from M777) and can suppress/scatter any human formation very quickly. It doesn't need to be perfectly aimed to do the job. But a drone not perfectly aimed, either autonomously or directed, is pretty useless. 

There will always be a need for rapid effects at long distances, using large scale area effect munitions that can ignore weather, strip terrain cover, ruin trenches, suppress infantry and generally **** things up over a wide area for days.  

Every single destruction of RUS's armored columns has used artillery. There's some examplrs of drones alone picking apart a column, but also plenty of Artillery doing the same with nary a FPV drone in sight. 

I'm very suspicious of using a new tech's promises to blanket kill/dismiss existing capabilities because they don't share the same characteristics. We haven't seen much counter-drone systems at scale - yet. But there is already work being done and it will only accelerate. 

We have seen zero instances of successful interception of plunging 155 HE, guided or not. 

Edited April 10 by Kinophile

[chrisl]

28 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

Cmon, you can't gave your cake and eat it too. Or whatever that stupid phrase means. There's a narrative growing that drones are the future be-all and end-all. That feels very binary and overwhelmed by the excitement of a new weapons system coming into its own. 

Sure 155 arty relies on radio coms (degradable)  - and so do drones. Arty will always have the grid square fires advantage. 

Autonomous drones are not flying witches - and for sure there will be counters. I read articles several years ago about encoding lasers to hack the system behind optical sensors. These were simple brute force attacks, scrambling the input to DDOS the system. It required LOS to the hostile lenses but not 90*. It's not a stretch to extrapolate this idea to be effective against autonomous drones. 

Sure Trucks etc etc don't like mud - so what? Ukraine has had Caesars for at minimum 1.5 years now, and two winters later I havent seen any videos of bogged down Caesars. Or HIMARS. Or Archers. And even if someone can find such videos, again - so what? It certainly won't be at the occurrence rate to signify Crap Don't Use Caesars Coz Mud. I've seen plenty of MBTs and BMPs turning into land submarines, though... 

Sure the trucks weigh 4.5 tons, so what? It's disengenuos to say it's only there so the shell will survive launch. Its there to move the shell, aim the shell,  fire the shell,  track the shell and fire the next one in rapid succession in relation and correlation to the first shell.

With firing on the move either just around the corner or already being implemented the mobility, the utility and effectiveness increases yet further, and that's because of the 4.5 ton truck. 

Sometimes you don't need precision or can't guarantee/achieve it - you need area suppression, denial. Even a dumb western 155 is reasonably accurate (Eg front line accounts thatvcompare Soviet 152 from Msta v US 155 from M777) and can suppress/scatter any human formation very quickly. It doesn't need to be perfectly aimed to do the job. But a drone not perfectly aimed, either autonomously or directed, is pretty useless. 

There will always be a need for rapid effects at long distances, using large scale area effect munitions that can ignore weather, strip terrain cover, ruin trenches, suppress infantry and generally **** things up over a wide area for days.  

Every single destruction of RUS's armored columns has used artillery. There's some examplrs of drones alone picking apart a column, but also plenty of Artillery doing the same with nary a FPV drone in sight. 

I'm very suspicious of using a new tech's promises to blanket kill/dismiss existing capabilities because they don't share the same characteristics. We haven't seen much counter-drone systems at scale - yet. But there is already work being done and it will only accelerate. 

We have seen zero instances of successful interception of plunging 155 HE, guided or not. 

I wouldn't dismiss artillery, but a lot of its applications can and will be replaced by higher precision drones.  Much like a lot of what it used to do was replaced by aircraft.

At least for now, artillery has an advantage in both range and speed of delivery, even if it doesn't have the precision of drones..

But if you have drones where you need one tenth as many munitions as artillery shells to get the same effect, each munition weighs 1/3 as much, and you don't need a 4000 kg M777 to launch them, that's a big advantage in logistics while doing a lot less collateral damage.

And you can disperse the lot of them and don't have to bring them back together to a launch site (artillery battery) to launch them.  C4ISR is only going to get better for the technically advanced countries, and it will get hard to even drive a bunch of Caesars around and keep them hidden from CB.

As for area denial?  Sure, you can plaster a field with 152/155 for days, mostly shredding nothing, or you can keep some spotter drones in the air and a handful of munition drones as loitering and have them come flying in at anybody who tries to enter.  Area denial with drones will be a thing in the near future.

Trenches?  WWI was famous for the enormous volumes of artillery and enormous systems of trenches.  That was a whole different scale of artillery and it didn't ruin the trench systems.  Compare it to a drone munition that can fly into the trench and blow the door of an enclosed area with a second one right behind to go inside.

Yes, we've seen more Russian columns taken apart by artillery than by drones, but that's because there's been more artillery than drones. But they're short on artillery shells, so we're going to see less of that.  With Ukraine's current rate of production of drones, they now have enough that they're comfortable sending one drone chasing after one guy.    If you want psychological effect - that's a bullet that's chasing you around.  

[JonS]

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And you can disperse the lot of them and don't have to bring them back together to a launch site (artillery battery) to launch them. 

Artillery can can fire from dispersed positions. C2 is a lot easier (a LOT easier) when all the guns are within shouting distance of each other, but there is no technical reason they can't be dispersed from each other by 100s or 1000s of metres.

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Trenches?  WWI was famous for the enormous volumes of artillery and enormous systems of trenches.  That was a whole different scale of artillery and it didn't ruin the trench systems.

Uh, the development of artillery during WWI totally DID ruin the trenches as systems. The offence/defence arms race during WWI was run at a sprint (at least in terms of ability to break-in. Break-through and break-out remained elusive)

[JonS]

5 hours ago, chrisl said:

But I don't even want to let things get that far.  I'm a geek, I enjoy the comforts of my home office.  I'll take space-based ISR for $1000, Alex. And the questio to the answer is "What do I have to build so nobody will bother trying to sneak up on me, lest they end up suffocating in a cubic mile of popcorn, and they know it?"

and what can be relied on to deliver that cubic mile of popcorn?

Oh.

Right.

Artillery ... because drones will definitely not be getting that job done.

Edited April 10 by JonS

[Hapless]

Artillery deployed drones.

There. I can have the cake and eat it.

More seriously, there's inevitably going to be a blurry line between smart submunitions and drones at some point.

[The_Capt]

Upon waking from a decent night sleep (free from the normal terrors of age and images of JonS - I keep seeing him as a Rocky Horror Picture Show Tim Curry in a gunnery instructors hat)…this guns versus drones argument is a bit silly.

In reality they are likely the core components of a new emerging combat arms team.  Essentially they can do things the other cannot but when mutually supporting are able to dominate a land battlefield.  At least for now.  Perhaps once we get fully autonomous very smart unmanned air and ground, artillery will become hunted to extinction.  However I suspect it will simply evolve to greater ranges.  Nothing says “hello” like a plunging artillery round and no amount of Chinese lasers are able to effective stop it.

I suspect Infantry will remain on the the third leg of the stool because nobody has as much fun as people and the human brain is still the most powerful processor we can put into the field.

Now let the healing begin…

[cesmonkey]

 

[Tux]

15 hours ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

Where did you get the idea? They were very effective as tactical bombers, only vulnerable to interceptors due to low speed. Where the enemy air cover was absent or not effective, StuKas worked very well. 

Yeah, I went in a little heavy on the Stuka.  When left alone to do their job they... did their job.  They were good for hitting 100m targets relatively accurately, provided there was no modern or competent airborne opposition.  As mentioned in a previous response my point was meant to be that the Stuka's reputation far outweighed its actual effectiveness relative to any other aircraft of its type and I believe that was due to the psychological impact its sirens (and partly its attack profile) had, early war.

[Tux]

7 hours ago, chrisl said:

I think you're still one dimension away, too. You're starting from "How does my thing work, what can I shoot it at".

From a battlefield perspective, the problem is more of "what am I facing and how do I keep it from getting anywhere near me".  And then you develop the ISR and precision to vaporize anything you don't like that acts like it wants to get to close based on what's out there.  In doing all of that you're constrained by conservation of energy, but there's a lot of room to work with if you start before anything gets you into its range.

I think I did start from the right place: the "effect" I proposed starting from was intended to mean any relevant effect, including your example of preventing a threat from reaching the battlefield.  I admittedly did then leap to a projectile solution due to the nature of the discussion up to that point but I would wholly support your suggestion that the most powerful effects that a weapon designer may seek to achieve are often much further upstream than on the frontline.

[Tenses]

17 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Upon waking from a decent night sleep (free from the normal terrors of age and images of JonS - I keep seeing him as a Rocky Horror Picture Show Tim Curry in a gunnery instructors hat)…this guns versus drones argument is a bit silly.

In reality they are likely the core components of a new emerging combat arms team.  Essentially they can do things the other cannot but when mutually supporting are able to dominate a land battlefield.  At least for now.  Perhaps once we get fully autonomous very smart unmanned air and ground, artillery will become hunted to extinction.  However I suspect it will simply evolve to greater ranges.  Nothing says “hello” like a plunging artillery round and no amount of Chinese lasers are able to effective stop it.

I suspect Infantry will remain on the the third leg of the stool because nobody has as much fun as people and the human brain is still the most powerful processor we can put into the field.

Now let the healing begin…

In the long run I suspect that drone dominated battlefield will transform both tanks and artillery in a very drastic way. Drones can do job of both of these systems but are not as good as them in any of these. What drones can do:

- Deliver precision guided munition of various sizes to the same range as artillery or even greater

- Have good time to deliver(if planned upfront - loitering munitions)

- Cover the square artillery mission if needed. Can be done both by having preprogrammed drones, but even better, by equipping drones with weapons containing dumb submunitions. This mission will only be viable in situation, when for some reason you can't do precision targeting by drones. The only scenario I can think of is when enemy finds a way to disguise itself from the drones so they will have to shoot blindly.

- Drones are not limited in any way in size so the swarm can achieve even bigger barrage weight than artillery battery. We are long way from FPVs with better load than 155, but it is perfectly doable. On the other hand, enlarging artillery shell in any way is a World of Hurt.

What drones can't do:

- Have better time to deliver(if not planned upfront). When you don't have drones already in the air, artillery will always be faster. In theory one could create a FPV with jet engine enabling it to reach the same or even better time to deliver than tube artillery but this is just not economically/logistically feasible anymore. Such drone would have to go supersonic very fast to reach target before artillery shell so this kind of weapons will be rather restricted to much longer ranges(strategic fires, something like currently developed hypersonic munitions).

 

To be honest there is not much, which drones can't do in comparison to artillery, not to mention the logistics chain and artillery maintenance costs. For me the obious solution is to merge tanks and artillery into one piece of equipment. Tanks will have to move further away from the frontline and start basing on non line of sight fires to complete missions. Direct fire support will become rarity. On the other hand, tube artillery might become more capable for surviving any unexpected engagements, like...direct line of sight one. Cutting logistics to save money is an obvious added benefit and might keep heavy Armored Fire Support Vehicle afloat. 

[Ultradave]

2 hours ago, Hapless said:

Artillery deployed drones

There ya' go. It's but a small step from ICM munitions to deploying a bunch of drones instead. Just have to make them tough enough to survive the setback of firing the round.  Gets a bunch of drones 10 miles away in 30 seconds.   

Dave

 

[Sgt Joch]

As I see it, UAVs reign as a potential Uber weapon will most likely be short lived. On a macro historical level, I suspect we are in 1915 when the Germans deployed a new Uber weapon and the Allies were panicking:

Fokker Scourge - Wikipedia

UAVs are just a new type of aerial weapon and as we have seen over the past 100 years, there has been a constant back and forth between offensive and defensive weapon systems.

Most likely the same general types of defensive systems are being developed:

1. ground based AA defenses: radar/guns/missile/EW to detect and shoot down UAVs before they can reach their targets;

2. air based defenses: fighters/ hunter-killer drones to hunt UAVs in the air and shoot them down.

Most likely within the next 5-10 years, we will have reached the same equilibrium we currently see in traditional aerial warfare.

[The_Capt]

1 hour ago, Sgt Joch said:

As I see it, UAVs reign as a potential Uber weapon will most likely be short lived. On a macro historical level, I suspect we are in 1915 when the Germans deployed a new Uber weapon and the Allies were panicking:

Fokker Scourge - Wikipedia

UAVs are just a new type of aerial weapon and as we have seen over the past 100 years, there has been a constant back and forth between offensive and defensive weapon systems.

Most likely the same general types of defensive systems are being developed:

1. ground based AA defenses: radar/guns/missile/EW to detect and shoot down UAVs before they can reach their targets;

2. air based defenses: fighters/ hunter-killer drones to hunt UAVs in the air and shoot them down.

Most likely within the next 5-10 years, we will have reached the same equilibrium we currently see in traditional aerial warfare.

Fair but also at risk of undersubscribing.  This sort of military doctrinal nihilism - "Its all been done before," can risk missing just how profound an impact the introduction of air warfare had.  In fact modern surface warfare, both land and sea profoundly changed as a result of air warfare, forever.

Within the next 5-10 years we will reach an equilibrium but it will likely look nothing like the one we currently have. 1914 did not look anything like 1940 for very good reasons, even though levels of equilibrium had been achieved, it was a fundamentally new equilibrium.

And it is a major mistake to think this is all about Unmanned.  C4ISR likely has had the largest effect on the battlefield by far. Total illumination and ubiquitous connectivity has led to a lot of the phenomenon we have seen at the outset of this war - there were not thousands of FPVs back in Feb '22.  Like WW1, it is the confluence of technologies that is creating a shifting wave.

So, sure we will come up with UAS defenses.  My money is on "other UAS" as the ground based solution is simply too hard and expensive.  This, plus C4ISR, could create a battlespace with an entire unmanned front edge, colliding with another unmanned force edge.  How war is fought in that space will be deterministic for the manned systems follow on.  This is not "the same equilibrium" we had back in 2020 in the least.

Mastery of that new equilibrium will be critical in the next decades. 

Edited April 10 by The_Capt

[Battlefront.com]

6 hours ago, Kinophile said:

Cmon, you can't gave your cake and eat it too. Or whatever that stupid phrase means. There's a narrative growing that drones are the future be-all and end-all. That feels very binary and overwhelmed by the excitement of a new weapons system coming into its own.

This is why we're exploring this topic in such depth.  People keep (correctly) pushing back that drones are "all that", and yet with each passing month we see the argument that they are "all that" growing stronger instead of weaker.

I'm not excited by this, BTW.  I am petrified of it.  My sense of security is dropping by the day.  And so far nothing in our discussions is helping.  Not even your post

6 hours ago, Kinophile said:

Sure 155 arty relies on radio coms (degradable)  - and so do drones. Arty will always have the grid square fires advantage.

Wrong.  First, you seem to be forgetting about AI, which we've been discussing more and more as examples of it appear to be getting out onto the battlefield ALREADY.  AI defeats EW and a host of over things, such as operator fatigue.  Just launch a bunch of drones and then take a nap while they wipe everything off the map.  That's where this is headed.

Sure, artillery can fire on a grid square.  But how does it know to do that?  Someone has to communicate that to the artillery unit and that requires communications.  Communications can be frig'd with.  Granted, for a nation like the US there's so many redundant methods it is effectively jam-proof already.  So on this point I'll grant you that artillery isn't at a disadvantage in most practical ways.

6 hours ago, Kinophile said:

Sure Trucks etc etc don't like mud - so what? Ukraine has had Caesars for at minimum 1.5 years now, and two winters later I havent seen any videos of bogged down Caesars. Or HIMARS. Or Archers. And even if someone can find such videos, again - so what? It certainly won't be at the occurrence rate to signify Crap Don't Use Caesars Coz Mud. I've seen plenty of MBTs and BMPs turning into land submarines, though... 

 

And what is the cost of keeping them going?  Tow vehicles, tracked vehicles, crews, engineers repairing bridges, etc are not free.  How much does it cost to keep an ATV going?  How likely is it that someone on an ATV can get to any two points on the map at any time of day or night compared to a very large wheeled vehicle?

Again, I'm not saying artillery is useless, I am saying that it's got a very heavy cost for retaining functionality in certain conditions compared to UVs.

Sure, there are some conditions that CURRENT commercial UVs don't do well in.  But those conditions are narrowing and I will bet you quite a load of money that over the next few years those will shrink.

6 hours ago, Kinophile said:

Sometimes you don't need precision or can't guarantee/achieve it - you need area suppression, denial. Even a dumb western 155 is reasonably accurate (Eg front line accounts thatvcompare Soviet 152 from Msta v US 155 from M777) and can suppress/scatter any human formation very quickly. It doesn't need to be perfectly aimed to do the job. But a drone not perfectly aimed, either autonomously or directed, is pretty useless.

Right, but you need to focus on the bigger picture.  Sure, there are situations where an individual drone won't kill the individual target it is going after.  Yup.  But how many shells are fired that don't do anything but blow a big hole in the earth or building?  Most?  Yes, I'd say most.  Can you say that about drones?  No.  So you are creating a false narrative.

6 hours ago, Kinophile said:

There will always be a need for rapid effects at long distances, using large scale area effect munitions that can ignore weather, strip terrain cover, ruin trenches, suppress infantry and generally **** things up over a wide area for days.

Why do you need to blast an entire treeline (and the fields around it) for hours to suppress a fortified line, MAYBE causing some casualties, when a half dozen FPVs can have the exact same effect of suppression and probably cause more casualties?

Similarly, today if you are at the front and need to combat a large oncoming enemy force it absolutely is useful to have artillery.  Which is why I picture artillery being a useful part of the battlefield for a long time to come.  However, I see it becoming more specialized than it's traditional generalized role.

6 hours ago, Kinophile said:

We have seen zero instances of successful interception of plunging 155 HE, guided or not. 

True, which but we've seen plenty examples of artillery systems getting knocked out or their supply disrupted.  You don't need to intercept a 155mm shell if you destroy the gun that was going to use it or the truck trying to bring it to the gun.

Steve