How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Battlefront.com]

20 minutes ago, sross112 said:

Isn't the number one thing that the UA troops were saying was the game changer for recent battles the glide bombing?

Yes, definitely (I mentioned that in the post prior to the one you quoted).  However, it could be that was used as an "excuse" for not holding any longer.  Personally, I believe it sped up the inevitable rather than causing something to happen that otherwise would not.  The endless meat waves that gradually isolated Avdiivka were the primary reason Ukraine had to withdraw.

Towards the end of the battle I saw exactly the same first and reports from Avdiivka that I read at the end of Bakhmut.  UA Soldier X saying that pretty much everybody in his unit had been wounded at least once.  New arrivals weren't making up for losses.  Russian forces were coming in small groups so frequently that the defenders weren't able to rest up, resupply, incorporate replacements, etc.

20 minutes ago, sross112 said:

This correlates to the drone discussion as that is what drones can't deliver yet: LARGE amounts of HE. They also can't support long range C4ISR like a HIMARS can. They don't have the kill radius that those tungsten balls do either.

For sure, but how many drones does it take to have the same military impact on a column of trucks as a HIMARS?  Not that many.  So I'm going to stick with my argument that given the choice between a ton of drones or one big bang system, the logical choice is a ton of drones.  However, the best choice would be to have both.  Clearly.

20 minutes ago, sross112 said:

For those reasons I don't believe that the UAV's will usurp the other systems, but they will become complementary. I do believe they will be very significantly expanded and should be prolific on the fire team to company level, but I don't see how in their current form they can replace 50lbs of explosive and fragmentation 50 or more kms away in a matter of minutes.

I agree about the complimentary bit, but not with a major shift in usage.  I also think we're going to see the end of towed artillery systems in the near future.  An article from a Ukrainian commander posted a dozen pages or more ago said that's the reality they are seeing.  They just aren't nimble enough in an environment where there's little to defend against drones that have them as primary targets.

Steve

[kimbosbread]

56 minutes ago, sross112 said:

If you had a choice between that many UAV's or the same number of ATACMS, Tomahawks, or Storm Shadows which would you take? Which would give you the most damage and loss to the enemy?

By “same”, do you mean total $$$ value or total warhead weight, or total weapons system weight?

I suspect those comparisons are not nearly as favorable to legacy weapons systems (especially the delivery system). The drones ukraine has cobbled together for long range are nothing more than poverty cruise missiles, same as hobbyists have been building for 2 decades minus the boom.

Where drones are very quickly going is autonomous targeting and prioritization at scale for relatively little money. More autonomy means less boom is needed for same terminal effect. I guarantee we’ll see full autonomy entering the area this year for certain target types; we’ve already seen last mile.

Edited April 11 by kimbosbread

[kimbosbread]

22 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

For sure, but how many drones does it take to have the same military impact on a column of trucks as a HIMARS?  Not that many.  So I'm going to stick with my argument that given the choice between a ton of drones or one big bang system, the logical choice is a ton of drones.  However, the best choice would be to have both.

Well, how about if you can have two trucks full of drones (say 2 tons of the suckers), or a truck of drones and one HIMARS?

I suspect that right now the answer is the latter, but very soon it’ll be the former because autonomy. We’ve gone over the math before, but we’ll do it again. Our little folding fixed wing ghetto GLSSSDB has 2kg HE, and 2h range electric at 140kmh (say 10kg weight) and is completely autonomous. Tell it to go somewhere, give it a target priority list, that’s it. That means you have better range than GLMRS (albeit slower), and you have 100 of these per ton => 200 per truck. You are now looking at 400 ultra-precise 2kg explosives with 250+km range (and they can loiter).

And remember, the other guys have these two, and they are hunting for all of your assets within 100km of the front line, so Mr HIMARs may not last that long!

[JonS]

I take it that the truck in this example is basically the tardis? Ie, despite external appearances it has the internal volume to hold 200 drones plus the crews and equipment required to assemble, target, and launch them, as well as being invulnerable to all types of attack.

[kimbosbread]

I’m assuming each drone fits in a 50cm x 50cm x 150cm box. Even a pickup truck bed is 1500cm wide, so we can just fit the raw drones in our favorite truck of any size no problem. Lots of room for everything else, clearly.

It’s a fair point on launch systems, and I’m implicitly assuming one of two real world examples:

• The simplest launch system is a catapult, which takes 2 guys to set up in less than 5 minutes. Pop the drone of the box, throw it on the catapult and tell it where to go. Targetting step could literally be that simple if this thing has the heart of a modern cellphone. I’m assuming they can launch one drone per minute, and targetting is automatic for all drones in hearing range (or they can be told on the ride)
• Slightly fancier is the mortar (ie what Switchblade comes in). Again 2 guys in truck take box off truck, fold down tripod legs, tell drone where to go, and that’s it. Let’s say it takes 30 seconds to launch per drone.

If we go further with the mortar version, and we pack our boxes vertically, and stick a bit more boom in the mortar, we have VLS-but-on-a-truck, for very very cheap. The only telling the drones what to hit in their boxes, so each box can just plug into port, and that port puts all the boxes on the same network (revolutionary tech, we have this in every home). And then it’s a puff of data and all the drones know where to go. Don’t even need your two schmucks in the back.

The more I think about this, the 16 tons of Himars with 3 crew is competing against one ton of drones stuffed in the back of the smallest truck you can find, or say towed in a sawed out camper by a Lada Niva with a crew of 2.

EDIT: 50cm is probably really generous even with sytrafoam padding. Your ****ty box truck can fit a hundred, but it’ll be a tight fit. If you go down to a 30cm container, it’ll be a lot easier and a large pickup could hold a 40 pack of these things vertically (5 x 8).

Edited April 11 by kimbosbread

[dan/california]

 

Quote

 

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-10-2024

Key Takeaways:

• The Ukrainian military’s effective use of drones on the battlefield cannot fully mitigate Ukraine’s theater-wide shortage of critical munitions.
• Zelensky stated that there are no mitigations for insufficient air defense systems and indicated that Russian strikes are forcing Ukraine to reallocate already scarce air defense assets to defend Kharkiv City.
• Zelensky warned about the threat of a potential future Russian ground offensive operation targeting Kharkiv City, which would force Ukraine to reallocate some of its already-strained manpower and materiel capabilities away from other currently active and critical sectors of the front.
• The Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada considered and adopted provisions from Ukraine’s draft mobilization law on April 10 as part of an ongoing effort to increase the sustainability of Ukrainian mobilization over the long term.
• Russian officials continue to indicate that they are not interested in any meaningful negotiations on the war in Ukraine amid Switzerland’s announcement that it will host a global peace summit on the war on June 15 and 16.
• Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov attempted to downplay tension in Armenian-Russian relations amid Armenia’s continued efforts to distance itself from political and security relations with Russia.
• Russian Investigative Committee Head Alexander Bastrykin claimed that Russia has no economic reason to import foreign labor, a direct contradiction of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent efforts to justify Russia’s current migration laws to his xenophobic ultra-nationalist constituency.
• Russian forces recently captured Ivanivske, a settlement east of Chasiv Yar, and advanced near Avdiivka.
• Eight Russian senators and 16 State Duma deputies submitted a bill to the Russian State Duma that would likely allow Russian authorities to deploy Russian Federal Penitentiaries Service (FSIN) employees to Ukraine, amid reports that Russia is intensifying its crypto-mobilization efforts.

 

 

ISW has a lengthy discussion on the subject of the day, including quotes from Zelensky on the subject. He would REALLY like some some artillery ammunition and more SAMs soonest. At the same time drones are killing a LOT of Russian armored vehicles.

The other great item is the last bullet point. Russian prisons have been emptied out to such a degree that the prison guards are the next people on the list for being "volunteered", they are currently standing around with nothing to do and the powers that be have noticed. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch.

•  

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, JonS said:

I take it that the truck in this example is basically the tardis? Ie, despite external appearances it has the internal volume to hold 200 drones plus the crews and equipment required to assemble, target, and launch them, as well as being invulnerable to all types of attack.

Don't need a Tardis for this...

[sburke]

34 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Don't need a Tardis for this...

I hope you aren't thinking they'd get packed into the truck like that.  Even Santa Claus has his gifts wrapped.  

[chrisl]

1 hour ago, kimbosbread said:

I’m assuming each drone fits in a 50cm x 50cm x 150cm box. Even a pickup truck bed is 1500cm wide, so we can just fit the raw drones in our favorite truck of any size no problem. Lots of room for everything else, clearly.

It’s a fair point on launch systems, and I’m implicitly assuming one of two real world examples:

• The simplest launch system is a catapult, which takes 2 guys to set up in less than 5 minutes. Pop the drone of the box, throw it on the catapult and tell it where to go. Targetting step could literally be that simple if this thing has the heart of a modern cellphone. I’m assuming they can launch one drone per minute, and targetting is automatic for all drones in hearing range (or they can be told on the ride)
• Slightly fancier is the mortar (ie what Switchblade comes in). Again 2 guys in truck take box off truck, fold down tripod legs, tell drone where to go, and that’s it. Let’s say it takes 30 seconds to launch per drone.

If we go further with the mortar version, and we pack our boxes vertically, and stick a bit more boom in the mortar, we have VLS-but-on-a-truck, for very very cheap. The only telling the drones what to hit in their boxes, so each box can just plug into port, and that port puts all the boxes on the same network (revolutionary tech, we have this in every home). And then it’s a puff of data and all the drones know where to go. Don’t even need your two schmucks in the back.

The more I think about this, the 16 tons of Himars with 3 crew is competing against one ton of drones stuffed in the back of the smallest truck you can find, or say towed in a sawed out camper by a Lada Niva with a crew of 2.

EDIT: 50cm is probably really generous even with sytrafoam padding. Your ****ty box truck can fit a hundred, but it’ll be a tight fit. If you go down to a 30cm container, it’ll be a lot easier and a large pickup could hold a 40 pack of these things vertically (5 x 8).

That's a mighty big pickup truck with a 1500 cm bed.  You need a little over 120 cm for a 4x8' sheet of plywood, which is one of the drivers of bed size in US pickups.

But many drones can travel folded and might go from being 15 cm x15 cm x 100 cm to 150x150x15 cm for a fairly large quadcopter.  Or something comparable but a little different layout if it's fixed wing.  Probably no tools for assembling either one - maybe some hex keys, but most of that should be done back at the factory and any field operations are just unfolding and clicking past latches.

And the simplest launch system if it's rotary wing is to just turn on the motors and start flying.  You don't need any catapult at all.  Maybe hold it off the ground to avoid ground effect. 

Edited April 11 by chrisl

[JonS]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Don't need a Tardis for this...

Those arent 10kg drones with 2kg payloads, though, are they?

[Maciej Zwolinski]

13 hours ago, JonS said:

Quite a bit. I havent yet seen a lot of evidence of drones being used offensively as part of go-forward combined arms maneauvre.

Instead we see they're being used as mobile mines or battlefield assassination tools. Which is genuinely really problematic, but also kind of a dead end street.

Kofman in his latest podcast which is focused on drones proposed a reason, why it is significantly more difficult to use drones in support of a go forward maneouvre. He says that Russian ECM is effective and droning Russian defensive positions requires operating within the umbrella of ECM emitters emplaced in the RUS  trenches, where drones will work significantly worse. He says that the drones really can shine when engaging units which are on the offensive and have left the ECM cover.

Kofman in general praises Russian ECM and for example, he says that GPS guided munitions have been generally degraded. Excaliburs are left unused in some units, and Ukrainians are asking for GMLRS with DPICM warheads which may still do damage despite the missile being spoofed by ECM and going off course.

[JonS]

13 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Dead end street?!  It is keeping Ukraine in this war right now.

Defensively; yes it is. Absolutely.

Offensively; it seems to be a dead end street

Edited April 11 by JonS

[Letter from Prague]

I think the drone vs HIMARS discussion depends on what countermeasures arrive, eventually. GMLRS arrives at almost a kilometer a second, while drone is much slower, so in theory GMRLS should be almost impossible to stop. But something moving kilometer a second is also going to be much more visible on radar while the drone might look like a bird, so who knows.

I'm more curious about the GPS spoofing and other ECM. If Russians can make GPS guided munitions useless, the whole Western strategy of pounding things to dust with PGMs is kind of falling apart.

[The_Capt]

1 hour ago, JonS said:

Defensively; yes it is. Absolutely.

Offensively; it seems to be a dead end street

I think two things need to occur with UAS before we may see an end to offensive deadlock:

-  Scale.  Despite a massive growth in FPV usage, the numbers are still nowhere near the levels we saw for artillery in this war.  This makes sense from both an operator and production standpoint.  We discussed how one would need offensive drone waves at higher scales in order to suppress and corrode at rates needed to set conditions for viable operational offensives.

- Autonomy.  The greatest weakness drones have right now is that each one needs a link back to a human operator in order for maximum effect.  We know the clock is ticking on this one.  Once drones become fully autonomous (or even “more” semi), EW protections start to fail because there are no links back to an operator to cut. This is why EW does nothing against a Javelin missile.

Add these two together and one has a capability that can effective suppress and support offensive operations.  Combine it with sufficient artillery and AD and one has a potential war winner.  The only question really left is, can Ukraine or Russia make this happen in this war?  And for this I do not know.

[The_Capt]

7 hours ago, sross112 said:

Isn't the number one thing that the UA troops were saying was the game changer for recent battles the glide bombing? 

This correlates to the drone discussion as that is what drones can't deliver yet: LARGE amounts of HE. They also can't support long range C4ISR like a HIMARS can. They don't have the kill radius that those tungsten balls do either. 

I'll give FPVs their due as they are the only indirect option that has proven effective on moving targets close to the front. That is where they are very useful is right on the front and close behind it. Anything deeper than that is a toss up. Look at the last airfield strike where quite a few long range UAV's went in. If you had a choice between that many UAV's or the same number of ATACMS, Tomahawks, or Storm Shadows which would you take? Which would give you the most damage and loss to the enemy?

Now that will lead into the what is available question, and that is where this war is a disconnect between the ground in Ukraine and if the US was prosecuting the same conflict: resources. The UA has had to develop the UAVs and FPVs in order to fill a gap that is not present for the US. A thousand pages ago a lot of us agreed that C4ISR and ammo to hit the targets equals success. The UA has been starving for ammo. If we really want to test the theory of where these weapon systems fit into the future, give the UA the platforms and the ammo and see where the drones get meshed in. My bet is company level and below integral fire support and recon. 

For those reasons I don't believe that the UAV's will usurp the other systems, but they will become complementary. I do believe they will be very significantly expanded and should be prolific on the fire team to company level, but I don't see how in their current form they can replace 50lbs of explosive and fragmentation 50 or more kms away in a matter of minutes. 

The defensive primacy will only last until there are effective drone countermeasures, whatever they may be. Once that is done, those layered indirect fire platforms and the other members of the traditional combined arms will be back on deck to make things happen. 

This sort of narrative reminds me of WW1 generals who also thought the airplane was a fad.  First off Russian glide bombs need to carry so much HE because they are inefficient and imprecise.  A whole lot of HE is not necessarily a good thing.  For example, if I have 10 enemy in a build I can use a large 500lb HE munition to drop the building.  The energy it takes to get that heavy munition to that building is significant, costly and has a high ISR signature.  If I have 10 micro-drones with a .45 cal round that will not miss, that simply fly into the building and kill all 10 enemy, I am using far less energy and cost to deliver the same effect.  I am using precision and processing as an offset.

So the Russian AF lobbing large glide bombs is not a sign that “big booms are back baby!”  It is a sign that 1) Russian ISR is still fairly low res, 2) Russia does not have a lot of higher tech precise munitions and 3) we should really be worrying about air denial for Ukraine because if that fails then a whole lot of this is largely academic.

As to “someday soon C-UAS will make this all go away and we can go back to Grandpa’s war” - there is a lot of hand waving on “someday C-UAS”.  Yes, counters will be developed but they will likely reshape the battle space in doing so.  For example, let’s say we invent a nifty micro-smart missile or laser that can blast those pesky UAS out of the sky, even when they are in swarms.  “Huzzah!  Now that is over with, let’s roll out the tanks and do this Persian Gulf style…USA.USA!”

Well except for the part where we have operationalized a technology that can find and hit a flying target the size of a bird with a very small munition at crazy scales.  What do we suppose the impact of that technology is going to have on conventional ground units?  That level of ISR alone means nothing can move without being picked up for kms.  Individual infantry are screwed, vehicles may as well be battleships.  The changes such technology would bring would be f#cking profound.

So there is no going back after this with or without UAS.  Unmanned, plus ISR, plus processing power, plus miniaturization, plus cheap production are all conspiring against our entire current theories of warfare. They have been for decades while we tried to ignore them.  So we can do “hope and denial” or we can can see the shift for what it is and adapt.

 

 

[Tux]

Just riffing a little off what @sross112 was saying, in all these scenarios there has to be some thought given to where we think the UAV-war will find a balancing point.  That means that c-UAS is the key.

If we allow ourselves into the world of autonomy making EW all-but ineffective, there are a couple of options with regards to what form c-UAV ends up taking:

1. Autonomous c-UAV drones ('fighter' drones) are effective against enemy UAS which fly above the treeline (or any other appreciable ground clutter) but everyone struggles to make them effective against those which are small and/or agile enough to travel amongst trees, hop over people's garden fences, etc.  This world means that the compromising effect which UAVs are currently having on efforts to employ legacy systems (towed arty, MBTs, etc) will persist as long as the enemy have low-flying attack UAVs.  This, I think, is the world most people on this thread are talking about and is the most likely to result in the most UAV-heavy future force compositions.
2. Autonomous c-UAVs quickly gain sufficient sensor/AI levels to be effective against basically all enemy UAVs.  You now have a world similar to the WW2 air war where the main battle is for air superiority and then your land forces can engage however they see best.  At this point, once you have won air superiority, you ask yourself how best to attack the enemy: other drone designs?  HIMARS? any old towed arty lying around?  All those will have their pros/cons but you don't need to worry about the enemy UAS threat, at least, so some of them might remain on top tier TOEs.

If ground-based anti-drone sniper units work, then see @The_Capt's thoughts, above - it will compromise UAVs but might do as much or more to compromise other legacy ground units, as well.  If innovative forms of camo and concealment prove widely effective against future attack drone AI, that will also change the game.

I think what all of the above probably hinges around most is the size, sensitivity and reliability of passive sensors of all relevant parts of the EM spectrum.  If your autonomous UAVs can reliably see your chosen EM frequency at sufficient resolution, then I don't see what will stop AI getting us all to #2, above, pretty damned quickly (as well as probably enabling The_Capt's, nifty ground systems).  Perhaps some of our resident subject-matter experts can opine as to whether there are any serious blockers to sensor design in certain parts of the spectrum which could then be exploited as UAV 'blind-spots' by both sides and result in a situation closer to #1?

[alison]

Loving the drone party on the thread the past day, thanks for contributing everyone!

I noticed the IEEE blog also got in on the action. Don't think anyone posted it yet, so here we go: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ukraine-hackers-war

It takes a bit of patience to wade through the usual tech blog PR hype-fest, and there isn't a whole lot of new information for people who have been following this thread, but it does go into some more depth on the technologies being used in drone communications and EW, including mention of encrypted video and other topics we were discussing last week.

The "meta" of this war spilling out into tech blogs is interesting to me. It feels a bit different from previous wars I've lived through. Not because this is really the first "hackers war" (cyberwar has been a reality at least since Stuxnet), but because this time it's out in the open. Instead of shadowy figures employed by three letter agencies, it's soldiers in trenches who are hunching over laptops, which I think makes the conflict feel more personal to white collar folks who normally wouldn't see anything they identify with in pictures from the front lines.

[Maciej Zwolinski]

1 hour ago, Letter from Prague said:

I'm more curious about the GPS spoofing and other ECM. If Russians can make GPS guided munitions useless, the whole Western strategy of pounding things to dust with PGMs is kind of falling apart.

Targeting method must be different. Guidance based on GPS has always looked like a temporary solution - this is the universal navigation system used by literally everyone and for which millions of engineers worldwide produce all kinds of devices also in enemy countries. The knowledge how to jam it must be widespread.

[chrisl]

1 hour ago, alison said:

Loving the drone party on the thread the past day, thanks for contributing everyone!

I noticed the IEEE blog also got in on the action. Don't think anyone posted it yet, so here we go: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ukraine-hackers-war

It takes a bit of patience to wade through the usual tech blog PR hype-fest, and there isn't a whole lot of new information for people who have been following this thread, but it does go into some more depth on the technologies being used in drone communications and EW, including mention of encrypted video and other topics we were discussing last week.

The "meta" of this war spilling out into tech blogs is interesting to me. It feels a bit different from previous wars I've lived through. Not because this is really the first "hackers war" (cyberwar has been a reality at least since Stuxnet), but because this time it's out in the open. Instead of shadowy figures employed by three letter agencies, it's soldiers in trenches who are hunching over laptops, which I think makes the conflict feel more personal to white collar folks who normally wouldn't see anything they identify with in pictures from the front lines.

Note that the "launch system" in one of the pictures is a couple of bricks on the ground to keep it off the snow.  The launcher can also be used as a CIWS against infantry in a pinch.  The drone also looks like a pretty light weight model carrying a round that can probably penetrate ~300+ mm.

[cesmonkey]

2 hours ago, alison said:

Loving the drone party on the thread the past day, thanks for contributing everyone!

I noticed the IEEE blog also got in on the action. Don't think anyone posted it yet, so here we go: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ukraine-hackers-war

It takes a bit of patience to wade through the usual tech blog PR hype-fest, and there isn't a whole lot of new information for people who have been following this thread, but it does go into some more depth on the technologies being used in drone communications and EW, including mention of encrypted video and other topics we were discussing last week.

The "meta" of this war spilling out into tech blogs is interesting to me. It feels a bit different from previous wars I've lived through. Not because this is really the first "hackers war" (cyberwar has been a reality at least since Stuxnet), but because this time it's out in the open. Instead of shadowy figures employed by three letter agencies, it's soldiers in trenches who are hunching over laptops, which I think makes the conflict feel more personal to white collar folks who normally wouldn't see anything they identify with in pictures from the front lines.

This part was interesting:
 

Quote

Hackers and an emerging cottage industry of war startups are raising the stakes. Their primary goal is to erode the effectiveness of jammers by attacking them autonomously. In this countermeasure, offensive drones are equipped with home-on-jam systems. Over the next several months, increasingly sophisticated versions of these systems will be fielded. These home-on-jam capabilities will autonomously target any jamming emission within range; this range, which is classified, depends on emission power at a rate that is believed to be 0.3 kilometers per watt. In other words, if a jammer has 100 W of signal power, it can be detected up to 30 km away, and then attacked. After these advances allow the drone “mice” to hunt the EW cat, what will happen to the cat?

 

[Carolus]

 

EU parliament pulled a "Republican" and refused to pass the budget by the EU council until funding for 7 Patriot batteries is found.

512 to 62 votes.

[dan/california]

7 minutes ago, cesmonkey said:

This part was interesting:
 

 

Then the jammer will have to go to remote antennas, so the expensive bits, and the operator are in a hole a hundred yards away. And then the "wild weasel drones" (TM) will have to operate in small packs where where most of them autonomously attack everything around the antenna with a relevant infra red signature. Then the people doing the jamming.... and on the game goes. This war is in the process of creating an entire group of new military specialties, and I don't see it doing anything but multiplying.

[dan/california]

7 minutes ago, Carolus said:

 

EU parliament pulled a "Republican" and refused to pass the budget by the EU council until funding for 7 Patriot batteries is found.

512 to 62 votes.

Outstanding!

[Battlefront.com]

7 hours ago, JonS said:

Those arent 10kg drones with 2kg payloads, though, are they?

Of course not.  I was simply illustrating that you can indeed pack a lot into a single truck.  The argument about how many angles can fit on the head of a pin is distracting and rather silly.  The point that was made is that the logistics of moving around a massive quantity of drones vs. an equivalent capability for artillery is beyond arguing about.  Drones win that argument by a massive margin.

Steve

[Holien]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68788110

Well the uckers were eventually going to get through...

I hope our friends in Ukraine are OK and at least summer is on the way...

Wind Turbines and Solar with extra Grid connections to Europe are I hope on the cards for you.