How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[chrisl]

5 hours ago, JonS said:

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.

You can disperse the tubes, but they're still huge visible targets to the ISR.  With drones you can disperse the munitions and they don't need a big delivery system.

And the popcorn gets delivered in unpopped form and popped in place from the sky.

 

[chrisl]

2 hours ago, Tenses said:

 

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). 

That's what aircraft and long range missiles do already for technical countries that have generally nice neighbors but expeditionary tendencies.  Got a problem with someone halfway around the world? Send some bombers and a refueling plane from home and be there in a few hours, or a bunch of fighter/bombers from an aircraft carrier halfway between home and the target, and be there in half the time. Or a bunch of cruise missiles from subs and cruisers a thousand miles away and don't even put any trained monkeys at risk.  A drone is just the aircraft with a good enough computer that replaces the monkeys, or a cruise missile with better software.

[Battlefront.com]

3 hours 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.

I don't think it's silly at all, and the exchange between Kinophile and me is an excellent example as to why.

This isn't about saying "my X is better than your Y", but rather a continuing saga of trying to reassess where things are at.   We trash tanks all the time because people presume that since it's always been a certain way that it always will be.  Artillery has largely gotten a free pass in this thread because it has been quite effective.  But now... we're seeing Ukraine showing that artillery isn't as important as it was even as recently as last year. 

Clearly Ukraine shifted interdiction from artillery to drones this year.  That it was done out of necessity isn't the point.  The point is they were effectively able to do that.

If that doesn't cause a major reconsideration of the traditional role of artillery, I don't know what will.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

25 minutes ago, chrisl said:

You can disperse the tubes, but they're still huge visible targets to the ISR.  With drones you can disperse the munitions and they don't need a big delivery system.

And the popcorn gets delivered in unpopped form and popped in place from the sky.

Yes.  When comparing capabilities of two systems it is always, always, important to look at them side by side.  As this war goes on the things which differentiate legacy systems from UVs is getting smaller and less significant.

"Self propelled tracked artillery can go anywhere it wants, anytime, and quickly".  True statement and definitely a leg up on towed artillery.  But a drone team with an ATV and a trailer can go pretty much anywhere they want, any time, and even quicker, so in context SP artillery comes up short.

25 minutes ago, chrisl said:

And the popcorn gets delivered in unpopped form and popped in place from the sky.

 

Oh man, sometimes I feel like I'm the only one that ever saw that movie.  IIRC I saw it in the theater!

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

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.

This is definitely the big thing to talk about.  However, I've made the point several times that there is *NOTHING* in the pipeline to combat autonomous UVs at scale.  Nothing.  This is not to say someone won't come up with something at some point, but for now?  Nobody has squat.

An example of some laser that can reprogram or fry the electronics of a drone was presented on the previous page.  This is still in the experimental stage and it runs into very, very, very obvious practical problems such as:

1.  Expensive

2.  Likely very large

3.  Must have LOS to the drone

4.  Is a 1:1 weapon (i.e. it can't blanket an area)

Without looking at any of the specifics I can very, very, very safely say that this system will not work in any practical way and it shouldn't even be pursued.  It's a military industrial complex boondoggle if I've ever seen one.

Steve

[chrisl]

7 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Yes.  When comparing capabilities of two systems it is always, always, important to look at them side by side.  As this war goes on the things which differentiate legacy systems from UVs is getting smaller and less significant.

"Self propelled tracked artillery can go anywhere it wants, anytime, and quickly".  True statement and definitely a leg up on towed artillery.  But a drone team with an ATV and a trailer can go pretty much anywhere they want, any time, and even quicker, so in context SP artillery comes up short.

Oh man, sometimes I feel like I'm the only one that ever saw that movie.  IIRC I saw it in the theater!

Steve

It's still a cult classic in Pasadena.

A few decades ago I went to visit a small aerospace company that's since been bought up by one of the giants.  In the lobby they had one of those standup vinyl promo poster things that companies put at their booth at trade shows and it had what was then the standard picture of the James Webb Space Telescope on it.  Except it was pointed down at Earth. And had a big beam of light projecting out from it. And the caption said "Space Based Laser" instead of JWST.

[Battlefront.com]

4 hours ago, The_Capt said:

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.

I think 5 years is optimistic.  Related to the post I just made, the thing that really concerns me is that nobody has any ideas that are even close to figuring out how to reach equilibrium.  Not big military industry, not pithy startup companies, and not volunteers putting stuff together in their basements.  But all three are coming out with even better and more robust versions of UVs at a rapid pace.

To stick with the airplane analogy, it is if the Fokker Scourge came 2 years ago, last year Stukas, this year we're seeing F-4 Phantoms, and F-16s are already being tested in limited quantities for next year.  Meanwhile all I hear from the people working on the counters saying "we have a very expensive and limited way to tackle Fokker's sometimes".

Put more succinctly, the counter proposals we're seeing aren't even up to the task of solving last year's problems, not to mention this year's, and absolutely no clue about how to deal with what we know is coming next year.

I'm normally a glass half full guy, but when it comes to counters I view the glass as half empty.  And if it has beer in it, I'd chug it to see if that helped my disposition any.

Steve

[chrisl]

2 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

I think 5 years is optimistic.  Related to the post I just made, the thing that really concerns me is that nobody has any ideas that are even close to figuring out how to reach equilibrium.  Not big military industry, not pithy startup companies, and not volunteers putting stuff together in their basements.  But all three are coming out with even better and more robust versions at a rapid pace.

To stick with the airplane analogy, it is if the Fokker Scourge came 2 years ago, last year Stukas, this year we're seeing F-4 Phantoms, and F-16s are already being tested in limited quantities for next year.  Meanwhile all I hear from the people working on the counters saying "we have a very expensive and limited way to tackle Fokker's sometimes".

Put more succinctly, the counter proposals we're seeing aren't even up to the task of solving last year's problems, not to mention this year's, and absolutely no clue about how to deal with what we know is coming next year.

I'm normally a glass half full guy, but when it comes to counters I view the glass as half empty.  And if it has beer in it, I'd chug it to see if that helped my disposition any.

Steve

I think almost anything you're seeing now was in development pre-2022 and pretty far along even then, and they're just trying to get some early money while there's nothing visibly on the market.  I'm pretty sure there are a lot of more likely usable ideas out there but the people who have them and the wherewithal to implement them are in the shop doing exactly that and won't tell anybody about it until whoever they get their money from wants to talk about it.

[The_Capt]

10 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I guess I have heard from the military conservative school for most of my career...hell at one point I think I was inside it.  They have declared "fad" since 1991 for everything from EBO, RMA and Multi-Domain.  They have also mounted evidence to prove their "rightness".  This war is unique, not only for its time in history, but also what it is demonstrating - just how far war is evolving beyond our former doctrinal status quos.

What we are seeing in Ukraine is not a "fad".  It is fundamental on many levels.

[The_Capt]

46 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

I don't think it's silly at all, and the exchange between Kinophile and me is an excellent example as to why.

This isn't about saying "my X is better than your Y", but rather a continuing saga of trying to reassess where things are at.   We trash tanks all the time because people presume that since it's always been a certain way that it always will be.  Artillery has largely gotten a free pass in this thread because it has been quite effective.  But now... we're seeing Ukraine showing that artillery isn't as important as it was even as recently as last year. 

Clearly Ukraine shifted interdiction from artillery to drones this year.  That it was done out of necessity isn't the point.  The point is they were effectively able to do that.

If that doesn't cause a major reconsideration of the traditional role of artillery, I don't know what will.

Steve

Solid "meh" from me.  I mean, sure if we see scope and scale that overtakes artillery and begins to hunt it to extinction, like we have seen with tanks...but the evidence is not there yet.

Guns teaming with Unmanned and Light infantry has happened in this war to pretty solid effects, I suspect it will be a trend that continues. 

I will put 50$ on the bar that the eggheads in the western MIDs are scrambling to figure out how to build and employ a cheap hunter-killer c-drone, drone.  So an equilibrium wave is coming, but the needle will be moved and cannot be unmoved.

Whether it moves far enough to drop a second pillar of the combat arms teams (ie artillery) though?  I am betting "no," at least for another decade.  My guess is that they will share the battlefield and advantage will go to whichever side can combine them the best.

The biggest reason, at least in western warfare will be "control".  Unmanned AI could be let off the leash to swarm and eliminate grid squares, but we will likely get bogged down in legality.  Artillery still has high levels of direct human control, and legal frameworks that govern its employment.  That alone almost guarantees a generational shift. 

In the end we are talking about "killing at distance".  Artillery and UAS share the qualities to push that out over the horizon when linked into modern C4ISR.  Anything that can stop a drone, won't be able to stop PGM artillery and vice versa. Tanks simply do not have the range and are too big and heavy for what we get out of them.  Infantry can hold ground.  Now UGVs are a revolution for holding ground that we have not seen yet.  But there I also expect human-unmanned pairing forward. At least at the start.

Edited April 10 by The_Capt

[kimbosbread]

10 hours ago, Fenris said:

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. 

This is exactly why a few us of think 120mm breech loaded mortars are the right way forward in the short term.

8 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.  

Yeah, I don’t think that will change. However, I’m not convinced big long tubes are here for that much longer. Rocket artillery, especially in the GLSDB direction (ie more drone, more submunition) seem like the right choice in terms of cost/precision/range.

4 hours ago, The_Capt said:

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.

Exactly. We have a set of capabilities that overlap for intersect in part, but I suspect sooner rather than later the drone circle will overlap everything but sheer throw weight.

46 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

However, I've made the point several times that there is *NOTHING* in the pipeline to combat autonomous UVs at scale.  Nothing.

Checkmate!

[The_Capt]

2 hours ago, chrisl said:

You can disperse the tubes, but they're still huge visible targets to the ISR.  With drones you can disperse the munitions and they don't need a big delivery system.

And the popcorn gets delivered in unpopped form and popped in place from the sky.

 

“I drank what?”

[Letter from Prague]

So what do you need to counter drones? A weapon, radar and some computer?

We've seen Gepards but also dudes with machine guns being reasonably effective against Shaheeds and stuff, and while FPVs are much smaller targets, I wonder why has nobody built some anti-drone system which could be just machine gun connected to some servos and a computer and a radar. Like C-RAM but scaled from enormous gun to ... maybe even a rifle.

Then you could plop it somewhere and have it work. For bonus points, put it on UGV and drive it around. We've already seen UGV with a machine gun, so it's just missing a radar.

I guess that would still cost more than a drone and you could swarm it with many drones, but it's far better in cost effectiveness to using a traditional air defense system or nothing.

As for hunter / counter drones, that is tricky - I don't know if the drone cameras are good enough to see other drones at a good distance. If not, then the counter drone would also need a radar and enough intelligence to recognize other drones from radar signature, and that's probably more expensive than normal drone.

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

I guess I have heard from the military conservative school for most of my career...hell at one point I think I was inside it.  They have declared "fad" since 1991 for everything from EBO, RMA and Multi-Domain.  They have also mounted evidence to prove their "rightness".  This war is unique, not only for its time in history, but also what it is demonstrating - just how far war is evolving beyond our former doctrinal status quos.

What we are seeing in Ukraine is not a "fad".  It is fundamental on many levels.

The current doctrine is hitting two fundamental physics problems. Tanks simply can't get any heavier, they are already so heavy that they can't go more places than they can in any environment except hardpan desert, never mind crossing anything but the largest bridges. Second a well designed five or ten kg tandem shaped charge can kill any land vehicle in existence, and the actual warhead cost at most a few thousand dollars. With tanks running five million and up the math doesn't add. All the points of friction that used to make introducing the expensive tank to cheap warhead are melting before our eyes. We need a whole new plan.

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

Solid "meh" from me.  I mean, sure if we see scope and scale that overtakes artillery and begins to hunt it to extinction, like we have seen with tanks...but the evidence is not there yet.

Guns teaming with Unmanned and Light infantry has happened in this war to pretty solid effects, I suspect it will be a trend that continues. 

I will put 50$ on the bar that the eggheads in the western MIDs are scrambling to figure out how to build and employ a cheap hunter-killer c-drone, drone.  So an equilibrium wave is coming, but the needle will be moved and cannot be unmoved.

Whether it moves far enough to drop a second pillar of the combat arms teams (ie artillery) though?  I am betting "no," at least for another decade.  My guess is that they will share the battlefield and advantage will go to whichever side can combine them the best.

The biggest reason, at least in western warfare will be "control".  Unmanned AI could be let off the leash to swarm and eliminate grid squares, but we will likely get bogged down in legality.  Artillery still has high levels of direct human control, and legal frameworks that govern its employment.  That alone almost guarantees a generational shift. 

In the end we are talking about "killing at distance".  Artillery and UAS share the qualities to push that out over the horizon when linked into modern C4ISR.  Anything that can stop a drone, won't be able to stop PGM artillery and vice versa. Tanks simply do not have the range and are too big and heavy for what we get out of them.  Infantry can hold ground.  Now UGVs are a revolution for holding ground that we have not seen yet.  But there I also expect human-unmanned pairing forward. At least at the start.

Everyone is being way to rigid about categories, drones and artillery are going to merge into a single multiply cross threaded complex of explosive delivery on demand. There will be unmanned indirect fire systems from 40mm all the way up to 155mm or even larger. There will be artillery and rocket delivered drones all the way up to the payload of an ATACMs. 

 

Quote

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMArt_155

The artillery deployed sub munitions in the very effective German smart round were developed in 1989. They deploy a parachute and float over an unlucky target, or not. Electronics and and and everything else have improved in the last thirty years, just a bit. There is ZERO reason except some development time and money that a new version of this couldn't deploy the exact same submunition with pop out glider wings instead of a parachute. So now instead of sweeping a a strip a few tens of meters wide at the mercy of the wind, it systematically searches  a square kilometer for the highest value target. And communicates with the rest of the salvo to avoid double kills. and if they can get it working with new some of the rocket assisted shells it might have a range of 80 or a hundred kilometers. Something approximating GLSDB could probably deliver 10 or twenty of the little monsters, and they wouldn't have to stand as much acceleration either. The possibilities just spin on from there.

Edited April 10 by dan/california

[The_Capt]

13 minutes ago, Letter from Prague said:

So what do you need to counter drones? A weapon, radar and some computer?

We've seen Gepards but also dudes with machine guns being reasonably effective against Shaheeds and stuff, and while FPVs are much smaller targets, I wonder why has nobody built some anti-drone system which could be just machine gun connected to some servos and a computer and a radar. Like C-RAM but scaled from enormous gun to ... maybe even a rifle.

Then you could plop it somewhere and have it work. For bonus points, put it on UGV and drive it around. We've already seen UGV with a machine gun, so it's just missing a radar.

I guess that would still cost more than a drone and you could swarm it with many drones, but it's far better in cost effectiveness to using a traditional air defense system or nothing.

As for hunter / counter drones, that is tricky - I don't know if the drone cameras are good enough to see other drones at a good distance. If not, then the counter drone would also need a radar and enough intelligence to recognize other drones from radar signature, and that's probably more expensive than normal drone.

The major problem with tactical drones is not only their size but where they fly.  These little beasts cannot not only fly behind treelines, they can fly in them.  That makes radar solutions really hard without clear cutting for kms around.  So radar solutions are limited.  The there are decoys and clutter spoofing options.  Finally firing a bunch of ammo into the air might get lucky but in doing so one is doing half the drones job for it.  See our artillery discussion.  So one has vehicles firing at the sky, killing every bird in the neighborhood for good measure.  That is going to get picked up very quickly as a big “hey we are here shooting at God” and artillery hilarity is bound to follow even if one takes out the drones.

As to hunter drones, it looks like the best tech out there right now is a net:

https://fortemtech.com/products/dronehunter-f700/#:~:text=Fortem DroneHunter minimizes collateral damage,ground based electronic counter measure.

I can see a lot of money invested in this area really soon.  Hell if one has to mount a shotgun on something to take down a drone, why not another drone?  As to detection and targeting…yeesh, no idea but some bright lights had better be working on it.

[omae2]

4 minutes ago, Letter from Prague said:

So what do you need to counter drones? A weapon, radar and some computer?

We've seen Gepards but also dudes with machine guns being reasonably effective against Shaheeds and stuff, and while FPVs are much smaller targets, I wonder why has nobody built some anti-drone system which could be just machine gun connected to some servos and a computer and a radar. Like C-RAM but scaled from enormous gun to ... maybe even a rifle.

Then you could plop it somewhere and have it work. For bonus points, put it on UGV and drive it around. We've already seen UGV with a machine gun, so it's just missing a radar.

I guess that would still cost more than a drone and you could swarm it with many drones, but it's far better in cost effectiveness to using a traditional air defense system or nothing.

As for hunter / counter drones, that is tricky - I don't know if the drone cameras are good enough to see other drones at a good distance. If not, then the counter drone would also need a radar and enough intelligence to recognize other drones from radar signature, and that's probably more expensive than normal drone.

I think what we see on the net is misguiding. We cannot understand the context in which a successful hit was achieved. I fairly confident that there is many more gunners that shooting the same drone. What i think would be a counter is smaller but faster kamikaze drones that would track down and flew into the attacking drone, with the help of some platform that will make it easier to register threats. Also high priority targets should be defended by automatic guns that shot something that separate in the air like a bird shot and have target identification tools as well as automatic target acquisition. And of course all of that with as little money as possible. Drone warfare will be attrition warfare, and drone warfare is the future. To be honest i would not want to be a soldier nowadays.

There is many ways to twist this and i think technically more qualified peoples will make many new ways to defend and to attack with drone, but what is sure that twenty years from now drones will be the main tool on the battlefield. I wonder what would that do with our society. I mean we are at the 60 in terms of defense of high priority targets. With automatic leading on the last part of the fly a drone can take out any political figure that show himself under the open sky. Twenty years from now there will be no point to have a hand held weapon against a technically superior foe, or even ones own government cause it would take no risk to kill that person. The other thing is that it would be of no risk to kill anybody when range of this type of drones get to a threshold where its impossible to identify the killer. I think that a very wild part of the human history is coming towards us.

[kimbosbread]

3 minutes ago, omae2 said:

With automatic leading on the last part of the fly a drone can take out any political figure that show himself under the open sky.

They sent a Slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW - Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

I will put 50$ on the bar that the eggheads in the western MIDs are scrambling to figure out how to build and employ a cheap hunter-killer c-drone, drone.  So an equilibrium wave is coming, but the needle will be moved and cannot be unmoved.

I agree that counter drones (c-drones) are the only viable solution on the table right now.  But figuring out how to make that work effectively enough to matter... there's some pretty steep hills to climb before that happens.  Unfortunately, one of those steep hills is the established military industrial base.  They have way too much skin in the old game to switch to a new one that is inevitably less profitable.

This gets into the problem we see with health care.  There are rare diseases out there that medical science could do a much better job fixing.  But the companies that do R&D on the drugs don't have incentives.  Hell, even with Lyme Disease there's things sitting around that are gathering dust because it doesn't look profitable for them.

Anyway, my point is that I think we're going to have to suffer through quite a lot of very expensive, avoidable mistakes before we get a real handle on this problem.

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

Whether it moves far enough to drop a second pillar of the combat arms teams (ie artillery) though?  I am betting "no," at least for another decade.  My guess is that they will share the battlefield and advantage will go to whichever side can combine them the best.

I'm betting "no" as well.  However, I'm in agreement with previous comments above that we're likely going to see a shift towards HIMARS and highly mobile 120mm mortar fire for close in support.  Towed artillery like the M777 and SP like the M109 don't really seem to be good ideas at the moment.

Steve

[Letter from Prague]

22 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

They sent a Slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW - Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

My favorite sentence of that chapter is "In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him." Gibson is a damned master of English language.

Edited April 10 by Letter from Prague

[FancyCat]

is it artillery or UAVs that are pushing Russia's advance? seems misplaced to be discussing about drone swarms when Russia isn't overtaking Ukraine in drones but artillery, and Ukraine seems unable to counter with drones or limited artillery. 

[Letter from Prague]

One more thing - someone said that that Ukrainians now seem to be stopping most Russian assaults by FPVs and not by artillery. How do we know whether that's because FPVs are more effective, or they basically ran out or artillery?

Of course, that doesn't tell us much about the battlefields of the future, but still.

[sburke]

6 hours 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.

Jesus, thanks for that image!   For some reason I was recently describing that movie to my wife- who believe or not has never seen it.

[billbindc]

16 minutes ago, Letter from Prague said:

My favorite sentence of that chapter is "In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him." Gibson is a damned master of English language.

I'll be in Chiba Monday or Tuesday.

I'm very excited to find out if the sky above the port is the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. 

[FancyCat]

Reports are Ukraine is rationing artillery ammo, so the reliance on UAVs is forced. So sure, they are effective....except Russian assaults are causing a mess for Ukraine while still damaging Russia, ideally, Ukraine should be given the tools to affect Russia without resorting to UAVs and being pushed back. 

this says to me, combined with Ukraine screaming about artillery shortages, whatever the benefits of UAVs, Ukraine isn't asking for more UAVs to stop Russian offensives but more artillery ammo. Also, sure a self-propelled gun is expensive, but what about the shell it fires? how expensive are those? 

drones are "inexpensive" except where are most drones produced anyhow? the mass produced ones are civilian and from china. What about the iranian drones? how expensive is a Gepard? Part of the reason why counters for the West are so expensive, don't we rely on aircraft dominance? lets talk about the expense of drones vs anti-drone equipment when the West actually invests in their production lines. 

[Battlefront.com]

43 minutes ago, Letter from Prague said:

One more thing - someone said that that Ukrainians now seem to be stopping most Russian assaults by FPVs and not by artillery. How do we know whether that's because FPVs are more effective, or they basically ran out or artillery?

Of course, that doesn't tell us much about the battlefields of the future, but still.

This is the point I made above.  It doesn't matter WHY Ukraine is using drones instead of artillery, it is that they CAN use drones instead of artillery.

We can debate all the day long about how much of a role artillery still plays on the battlefield now or in the future, but Ukraine has clearly established that drones on their own are now capable of mimicking much of what artillery can do.  That's the take away from the last few months.  Especially because this time last year nobody was talking about that much of a shift so soon.

Steve