How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Battlefront.com]

34 minutes ago, JonS said:

Ok, well, using that logic I will now simply demonstrate how you can pack a lot of artillery ammunition into a single truck

https://images.app.goo.gl/hPN4JLEuvudZ8aTo7

Checkmate, as I believe the kids say.

 

Small arms ammo?  That's checkers, not chess! And no, I will not king you.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

28 minutes ago, JonS said:

Yeah, weird, right? Now, why would I do that? Oh, right, because Steve seems to think that micro drones are a useful proxy for large drones that can carry a reasonable HE payload.

Small things pack small. Micro drones and small arms ammo are examples of this.

Heavy things pack heavy. Artillery ammunition is the canonical example of this.

Bulky things pack bulky. Load carrying drones are an example of this.

Load carrying drones are a lot lighter than artillery ammunition, but they are also bulkier. Ignoring that doesnt make the arguments in favour of drones more compelling.

Wow.  So you've not noticed that those micro drones have been knocking out T-90s and plenty of other things?  Or thought about how cost effective it is to take out 2 men in a bunker with a drone vs. how many rounds of 155 it would take to do more than rattle their fillings?  Because from what I've gathered, those micro drones are more effective at it than artillery.

I don't know where you went off the rails on the track we were on, but I think you've slid down an embankment.  The discussion (which has meandered) was about equivalency.  The argument was made that there's no substituting a big shell blowing up something, but the counter argument is you don't need big 'splody stuff to get the job done.  Then the discussion about costs and logistics got into the mix.

So, to recap.  Artillery is good at delivering large boom-booms in one place at one time, but it is an extremely expensive and massive logistics system to field and maintain.  For the same money and effort you can have vastly more drones.  So many more that it's hard to argue that they are less effective and very easy to argue it is more effective.

Steve

[The_Capt]

17 minutes ago, JonS said:

Yeah, weird, right? Now, why would I do that? Oh, right, because Steve seems to think that micro drones are a useful proxy for large drones that can carry a reasonable HE payload.

Small things pack small. Micro drones and small arms ammo are examples of this.

Heavy things pack heavy. Artillery ammunition is the canonical example of this.

Bulky things pack bulky. Load carrying drones are an example of this.

Load carrying drones are a lot lighter than artillery ammunition, but they are also bulkier. Ignoring that doesnt make the arguments in favour of drones more compelling.

Ok...weird roundabout way of proving a point...sure, whatever.

But doesn't this totally ignore the quality of precision? A micro drone with a single DPICM munition hitting at the right location can do as much or more than a bunch of heavy boob-boom.  Have we not seen enough evidence of this already.  I mean I watched an FPV pull U turn and hit a tank in the @ss at speed.  

Small things do pack small but a single DPICM round can penetrate up to 100mm of armor.  The NEQ is around 33 grams.  The trick is hitting the right spot.  Back deck, tracks, gun, sights...

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/dpicm.htm

"But they will miss!!"  Ok, send a few dozen.

The argument in favour of drones is cost, precision, dispersion and extremely low logistical weight. 

Checkmate?  Add up all the support and infra tonnage to get that single 155mm shell on target, from factory to X.  Now add up the same chain for a small FPV with a DPICM attached to the front.  I will bet a pension cheque on which system is going to win that one.

That is the compelling argument in favour of drones.  What we do not know is if a million autonomous drones can replace artillery on the battlefield...at a fraction of the cost.

[squatter]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

I don't see the frontline moving in any major way in either side's favor.  Whatever modest hopes I had for that were dashed last summer.

You are right and the penny needs to drop - this war has reached a brutal stalemate. Neither side can advance short of Western support either massively increasing/decreasing (neither of which scenarios likely). 

So the only humanitarian response is stop the violence now and use other means to reach a resolution that favours Ukraine. 

[kimbosbread]

47 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

The argument in favour of drones is cost, precision, dispersion and extremely low logistical weight.

Don’t discount vastly reduced medical bills due to ear damage, concussions, TBI etc. from being exposed to boom boom. These are accumulated in peacetime too!

[kimbosbread]

7 minutes ago, squatter said:

So the only humanitarian response is stop the violence now and use other means to reach a resolution that favours Ukraine. 

Please explain what means that is.

[Letter from Prague]

6 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

Please explain what means that is.

Nuking Russia?/s

[Sgt Joch]

Since the topic of countering drones came up, the U.S.Navy is confronting the problem head on dealing with Houthi drones and coming up quickly with stopgap solutions.

 

[Battlefront.com]

27 minutes ago, squatter said:

You are right and the penny needs to drop - this war has reached a brutal stalemate. Neither side can advance short of Western support either massively increasing/decreasing (neither of which scenarios likely).

Except that territorial gains are not the measure of if this war is won/lost by either side, so while there might not be any shifting of the frontlines the war is far from stalemate.  Ukraine is still finding new and interesting ways to punish Russia for continuing the war.

27 minutes ago, squatter said:

So the only humanitarian response is stop the violence now and use other means to reach a resolution that favours Ukraine. 

Right.  The problem is that only Putin can decide if this war ends and Putin is anything but a Humanitarian.  He's also in no position to give Ukraine what it wants (a fair and just peace) because he would find himself thrown out a window or suffering from a acute case of poisoncidous.

Therefore, absent a massive shift in the alignment of the stars, the war must go on.

Steve

[JonS]

On 4/10/2024 at 6:03 PM, chrisl said:

So instead of 50 kg of shell and propellant, you've got 17 kg of R18 drone+5 kg explosive,

@The_Capt take it up with chrisl. I already halved the size of his 22kg drone and you're quibbling with *me*?

Also, those cute little whirrwhirrs you keep referring to are *extremely* handy at the tactical edge as mobile mines and for battlefield assassination, but I believe (because physics) they lack the payload, range, and endurance to be much use as part of a fire plan supporting go-forward combined arms maneauvre.

[poesel]

2 hours ago, Sojourner said:

Echolocation? Bats use it to track small, fast moving objects.

Granted, not something we're likely to see soon, but possibly something worth looking into.

Not enough precision at range. Also, comparatively slow (speed of sound vs speed of light) against anything electromagnetic.

I put my money on radar for counter drone. IIRC the Serbs managed to detect F-117s by analyzing bounced mobile signals in the 90s. Now, drone are slightly smaller than F-117s, but then this is 30 years ago and signal processing has made huge leaps.

I wouldn't be surprised if we would see automatic counter drones this year. The pressure to have them is high as never, and the technology is there (in principle).

[JonS]

5 minutes ago, poesel said:

Not enough precision at range. Also, comparatively slow (speed of sound vs speed of light) against anything electromagnetic.

Could be useful for the last 10-20 metres, to cope with rapid final jinxing?

[chris talpas]

Guidance will certainly be the challenge. Not only detection and target discrimination but how do you prevent fratricide?  Does that then require some IFF since you aren’t going to launch singletons against a swarm.  The aforementioned bats have solved the target discrimination problem in a swarm setting.

Do different models of drones have significantly different acoustic signatures?  If so, could they home on that?

Then again a bunch of dpicm armed drones sent into a swarm to explode could do substantial damage.  All depends on how dispersed the swarm is.  Widely dispersed until final targets probably makes sense.

Edited April 12 by chris talpas
Additional dpicm discussion

[The_Capt]

2 hours ago, JonS said:

@The_Capt take it up with chrisl. I already halved the size of his 22kg drone and you're quibbling with *me*?

Also, those cute little whirrwhirrs you keep referring to are *extremely* handy at the tactical edge as mobile mines and for battlefield assassination, but I believe (because physics) they lack the payload, range, and endurance to be much use as part of a fire plan supporting go-forward combined arms maneauvre.

Right now FPVs have anywhere from 5-10km range.  How much father they can push is a function of energy density and payload.  A 5kg warhead is on the heavy end - the tandem warhead maybe.  A standard RPG 7 is about half that…and this is overkill as the warhead does not need to carry propellant.  Small loitering munitions with 40-100 kms already exist, we have just not seen them at scale because the UA has a limited supply.

Once FPVs start using purpose made warheads those loads are going to get lighter, not heavier.  Once those tac UAS can reach out to 20km…and some already can…they are overlapping artillery ranges to support forward edge fire planning.

They do not need a heavy payload if they can hit with the accuracy we have seen.  The fact that Russia is now building turtle-tanks is a clear sign that those FPVs can hit all aspect to effect.

Keep in mind the UA is currently using commercial drones they are buying online.  None of them have been optimized for military application.  After this war so you honestly think that military R&D is not going to go nuts on pushing ranges and payloads to max out military effect?  These “cute whir whirs” have killed more T90s than anything else right now.  We have watched them stop company sized armor attacks cold.  They are hunting artillery and C2 nodes.  They are hunting individual infantry.  It would be a mistake to put UAS into the “nice hat for combined arms”.  They are proving themselves to be a lot more than an “nice additive”.

What we do not know is how deep this rabbit hole will go.

[chrisl]

3 hours ago, JonS said:

@The_Capt take it up with chrisl. I already halved the size of his 22kg drone and you're quibbling with *me*?

Also, those cute little whirrwhirrs you keep referring to are *extremely* handy at the tactical edge as mobile mines and for battlefield assassination, but I believe (because physics) they lack the payload, range, and endurance to be much use as part of a fire plan supporting go-forward combined arms maneauvre.

Each of those little drones in the living room full of drones looks about like the one we saw in the IEEE article carrying an rpg warhead that can penetrate 300+ mm of armor.  I was being conservative in picking big ones.  The little ones lack range for now, but wait til you see a bunch burst out of an ATACMS and go all murderbot.

[JonS]

35 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

After this war so you honestly think that military R&D is not going to go nuts on pushing ranges and payloads to max out military effect?  

This feels like one of those "pick two" triangles.

Range, size, payload.

Pick the two you want to optimise carefully, because the other one is going to suck.

[chrisl]

48 minutes ago, JonS said:

This feels like one of those "pick two" triangles.

Range, size, payload.

Pick the two you want to optimise carefully, because the other one is going to suck.

You left out precision.

With high precision & high accuracy you need less payload.

 

[JonS]

Yeah, nah. I'm assuming accuracy as a given

(I'm not sure precision is relevant here)

[Battlefront.com]

46 minutes ago, JonS said:

This feels like one of those "pick two" triangles.

Range, size, payload.

Pick the two you want to optimise carefully, because the other one is going to suck.

The flaw in the standard "rule of three... pick two and lose the third" is that it's not context sensitive.

Let's say you want to be able to hit logistics capabilities 20km in the rear.  We're talking trucks, not tanks.  So you optimize for range (long) and size (small), while accepting compromise on payload (reduced).  Well, if that reduced payload is two VOG-15s with fins on them, where's the problem?  They will shred an unarmed vehicle quite nicely. 

So now this drone can blow up a fuel or ammo truck, big deal you might say.  That's nothing to write home about.  Unless you consider that they'd also do just fine against an artillery piece, something like a Caesar, an AA radar component, an EW vehicle, a command node, and any number of other critical parts of the fight that aren't uparmored to deal with even a VOG sized grenade.

So in context of what the mission is, sacrificing payload isn't an issue.

Now, if you want to have the same drone blow up an oil refinery or sink a ship, NOW you have a situation where this particular drone doesn't work.  But those are big targets and there aren't many of them, so no problem making drones that compromise on something else and get to have a big payload.  And so far range and size aren't the things that matter, but cost and time to produce.

I don't get why you're arguing against any of this because it's already here and already doing much of what artillery and manned aircraft have previously been nearly exclusively tasked with doing.  The revolution is over... it's settled science.  Now we're just seeing where evolution takes us.

Steve

[JonS]

1 minute ago, Battlefront.com said:

Well, if that reduced payload is two VOG-15s with fins on them, where's the problem? 

It's not four VOG-15s?

[chrisl]

1 minute ago, JonS said:

Yeah, nah. I'm assuming accuracy as a given

(I'm not sure precision is relevant here)

Accuracy and precision together are important if you want to reduce the payload requirement.  

[JonS]

3 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

I don't get why you're arguing against any of this

Because I'm not a fan of magic thinking.

Look, I have repeatedly said drones are great. But I *also* know they have drawbacks, limitations, and vulnerabilities. Pretending they don't, pretending they can do everything, isn't especially helpful.

[JonS]

5 minutes ago, chrisl said:

Accuracy and precision together are important if you want to reduce the payload requirement.  

Yes, but it's not like you can back that drone up and try again if the first hit wasn't where you wanted it.

Edited April 12 by JonS

[The_Capt]

3 minutes ago, JonS said:

Yes, but it's not like you can back that drone and try again if the first hit wasnt where you wanted it.

No but the second one can…that would be precision.  Accuracy is how close to true target one was.

https://www.ssusa.org/content/accuracy-vs-precision-sharpen-your-shooting-skills/

The question is not one of “magic drone wand” it is “how large is the impact on warfare?”  When this thing started I was impressed by the fact we could see Russian columns from kms away via UAS.  That alone plugged into a decent C4ISR complex would be enough to go “wow”.  It would be enough to make anyone in the business take notice.  A small cheap tac whir-whir just gave cheap multi-spectral ISR that can see out kms down to the Company/Platoon level.  Those feeds can all be linked to unit/formation creating an incredibly fast and hi res targeting complex.  If that was all UAS did we would still be looking at major “so what’s?” As battlefield near-total illumination became reality.

And then some teenager went “Hey sir, what would happen if we tied a grenade onto one of those things?”  We watched simple drop targeting evolve as operators got better and better at this, but we’re still largely regulated to killing already abandoned vehicles.  Their biggest contribution was ISR but one could not argue the potential.

Then another teenager went, “Hey they have these first person thingys…what if we strapped an RPG round onto one of those and flew straight at the target?”  Now we are watching f#cking drones chase soldiers around trees and bag multi-million dollar tanks by hitting the back deck.  And the UA significantly upscaled them to offset artillery shortages…and it appears to have worked, at least for now.  

So this is not a discussion on whether or not this emerging capability has or has not had en effect; we are really past that point.  It really should be about “what the hell is going to happen next?!”  We have maritime surface drones taking out ships. Very long range drones hitting airfields, dry docks and oil industry in Russia…and electricity infra in Ukraine.

Next up on my list is scope and scale where drones can make offensives happen.  I am not even sure what that will look like but if it happens then unmanned systems not only created Defensive Primacy, they broke it…in months.  At this pace no one can really say where this thing ends.  If we stop right now and don’t see anything new these systems have changed warfare forever.  No military can go out without UAS cover…at least for ISR. Western militaries will spend billions on trying to stop drones. China and other will spend billions to make them even more potent.  These are game changers already,

Now just how much, how far and how deep?  All remain to be seen.

[JonS]

9 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

No but the second one can…that would be precision.  Accuracy is how close to true target one was.

Yes, but there is no feedback loop between one autonomous drone and the next, in the way that there is between subsequent rounds from a rifle.