How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[chris talpas]

34 minutes ago, Haiduk said:

Some sources say missiles may hit other Russian ship "Tsyklon" - newest missile corvette of pr. 22800 Karakurt-class. She stood reportedly in Kurinaya Bay of Sevastopol

Would be nice to see one less Kalibr carrying ship of the BSF, if confirmed to be true.

https://w.wiki/A85M     
wikipedia article on this ship class
 

Edited May 19 by chris talpas
Explained link

[Haiduk]

This night UKR drones has struck oil base in Vyborg close to Finnish border...

... Oil refinery in Slaviansk-on-Kuban' - reportedly refinery is temporary halted.

Six UAVs have fell down on Slaviansk-on-Kuban' oil refinery territory, prliminary no victims and destructions - the head of district

Slaviansk-on-Kuban' temporary halted work after falling of UAVs - the [Slaviansk ECO] company 

... And large military airbase Kushchovskaya in Krasnodar region. On the TG screen locals report about explosions in the direction of airfield. Maybe satellite photos will appear soon

[Haiduk]

The building of Vovchansk hospital, seized by Russians was hit with several bombs, probably GLSDB. Some sources claim a company of Kadyrov troops was here and up to 30 fighters were killed or under ruins after this stike 

Alas, in mission near Vovchansk has died our Su-27 pilot, deputy of squadron commander of 831st tactical aviation brigade lt.colonel Denys Vasyliuk. He was 31 y.o.

 

Edited May 19 by Haiduk

[Haiduk]

Russian milblogger Callsign OSETIN complains about lack of artillery shells on Kherson direction and about insufficient supply of Kornet ATGM missiles. Missiles for Fagot ATGMs also in deficite and those, which are supplied from old Soviet-time stocks already reject to launch. But he says they have enough Metis ATGM missiles, though their short range don't allow to strike distant targets on some islands and right bank.

  

Edited May 19 by Haiduk

[Haiduk]

Repelling of mass Russian armored assault of Novyi microdistrict in SE part of Chasiv Yar. About 20 BMDs and MTLBs with infantrty participated in this rush. Most were destroyed

Russian TG of some VDV unit

[Haiduk]

Concerning to Ryopke's panic "Rabotino is fallen to Russians again" from UKR serviceman, who fights there (google-translated):

 

[Haiduk]

Intrigue with a ship is continue

This is not minesweeper, alas

I don't want to sit in jail for disclosure. Soon khokhols will issue photos and it will be possible to voice it, refeting on them.

The missile. 

Two missiles, but warhead of one didn't explode

 

[kimbosbread]

2 hours ago, Butschi said:

So... at the end of the day it boils down to "how smart to do you want it to be?". I guess(!) that patrolling an area at above tree top level, applying some image recognition and tracking and then going straight for that target is really not beyond what a mobile phone can do (and that is probably something that is already done).

Yeah, that’s the real question: “How smart do you need it to be?”

Recognizing useful targets, navigating using visual references, cooperating with other drones to attack a group of targets, attacking weak points of targets… that all seems within the whole budget side of things.

For example, a model that is accurate for identifying all extant armored vehicles and their weak points (including rolling garden sheds), that’s just not that big of a model. Fits on a phone easy peasy.

[Letter from Prague]

So how are the autonomous drones handling IFF?

[chrisl]

3 hours ago, Butschi said:

To be fair, that video is really on the Puma vs drone swarm video level we were discussing before. It demonstrates a swarm flying in a more or less static formation at conveniently high altitude. That doesn't really qualify as AI in my book as it should be fairly easy to do with a few sensors and conventional simple algorithms. The Wikipedia page explicitly says: "The capability of this swarm to autonomously identify, select and coordinate attacks on a target has, however, never been demonstrated by STM in reality."

Re: the discussion how expensive autonomous UAVs would be: It depends, I guess. As others have posted already, there is a lot that can be done with mobile phone hardware which isn't really expensive. In general, though, AI is such a vague concept these days that it really depends on exactly what we are talking about. For some stuff a mobile phone is sufficient. Many things require a decent GPU, though - so, a good gaming PC - and others (think ChatGPT) are more on a computing center level.

That said, once you have trained your network you can often either put it on a dedicated ASIC or use it to train a much smaller network that can run on cheaper hardware.

So... at the end of the day it boils down to "how smart to do you want it to be?". I guess(!) that patrolling an area at above tree top level, applying some image recognition and tracking and then going straight for that target is really not beyond what a mobile phone can do (and that is probably something that is already done). That Wikipedia page says something about face recognition which is certainly something my phone can do to unlock the screen. Then again, it clearly says that it is possible that others with a similar face may be able to do that, too. And on a Monday morning before I had my first coffee, it has a hard time recognizing even me.

And that is probably the gist of it. The more you invest in hardware, the better your result is going to be. If you are only interested in your drone killing something that looks like the typical tank out in the open and don't care if it hits a civilian car every now and than, then, that is certainly something a phone can do. If you want to hit one guy in crowd with absolute certainty and noone else... maybe not.

You're overthinking the autonomy and mentally turning "autonomy" into "AGI".

A few sensors and some rules is probably sufficient if you can send them to an environment where there are no friendlies.  The rules can be deterministic linearly programmed (automated) or they can be developed via some ML algorithm that gives results that may be less obviously explainable, but they work, and need to still be bounded by some deterministic rules ("don't let the autonomy run unless you're in this region").  I can make an autonomous system that will process video data and run on a 5 year old snapdragon. It's not going to have AGI or be able to write sloppy term papers, but it will identify and prioritize objects of interest, even if it hasn't seen them before.

Edited May 19 by chrisl

[Haiduk]

I said president of Russia (in rus. genetive Rossii), but not Raisi ! 

Edited May 19 by Haiduk

[Haiduk]

Russian TG first time for today directly meant name of targeted ship - missile corvette "Tsyklon" of pr. 22800 Karakurt-class

MRK (rus. acronim "small missile ship") "Tsyklon" being hit

Information from the source. Requires further confirmation

This night 19/05/24 a missile strike was conducted at MRK pr.2280o "Tsyklon" in Sevastopol port.

The stike was conducted with two ATACMS ballistic missiles.

 Because of strike 6 BSF servicemen were killed, 11 wounded

The ship had been sunk

On the photo corvette "Tsyklon" - she was a single ship of this class in BSF active service  since comissioning in July 2023 from five of this class - three are still under construction, the fourth "Askold" was badly damaged by missile strike in November 2023.  

Karakurt-class corvettes can carry 8 cruise missiles "Kalibr" or "Onix" (in perspective "Zirkon")

Edited May 19 by Haiduk

[Letter from Prague]

We had few discussions about cyber - here's an interesting article I stumbled upon today:

Cyber Security: A Pre-War Reality Check

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cyber-security-pre-war-reality-check/

[JonS]

2 hours ago, chrisl said:

You're overthinking the autonomy and mentally turning "autonomy" into "AGI".

A few sensors and some rules is probably sufficient if you can send them to an environment where there are no friendlies.  The rules can be ...

Emphasis added.

This is what I was talking about several dozen pages ago. The system you are describing could (future tense) be useful for battlefield assassination in an area devoid of civilians, but not for offensive maneauvre.

Edited May 19 by JonS

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, JonS said:

Emphasis added.

This is what I was talking about several dozen pages ago. The system you are describing could (future tense) be useful for battlefield assassination in an area devoid of civilians, but not for offensive maneauvre.

Depends.  In this war it wouldn't be a problem because all offensive maneuvers are being conducted within already established combat zones.  There are no civilians in these zones.  The zone behind the front is minimally populated by civilians, but as far as I know they aren't driving around in things which resemble tanks or other armored vehicles.  So as long as the autonomous targeting isn't going after vehicles which might be confused with civilian ones, there's no problem with that either.

As Chrisl and others have pointed out, setting up pattern and signature recognition to specifically recognize military vehicles is really quite easy to do.  Further, the sensors needed to accumulate this information and the processing power to parse it are cheap and readily available.

Building autonomous targeting UAS focused on distinct military vehicles in a zone that is also devoid of civilian "false positives" is something that can be done by hobbyists right now. 

Making a UAS that can distinguish between a civilian with a shovel over his shoulder and a soldier with a gun is definitely more challenging.  But nobody is talking about that sort of thing here.  And even if we were, I think that it would be fairly low risk to use it in the immediate frontline areas of a war like this one.  Simply because the chances of accidentally targeting a civilian goes way down when there's no civilians to accidentally target.

Steve

[JonS]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

 

Making a UAS that can distinguish between a civilian with a shovel over his shoulder and a soldier with a gun is definitely more challenging.  But nobody is talking about that sort of thing here.

What about between a muddy person with a rifle over their shoulder, and a muddy person with a rifle over their shoulder wearing a slightly different set of muddy clothes?

Edited May 19 by JonS

[The_Capt]

4 minutes ago, JonS said:

What between a muddy person with a rifle over their shoulder, and a muddy person with a rifle over their shoulder wearing a slightly different set of muddy clothes?

You want it to make you OJ in the morning too? Human beings do fratricide all the time under those conditions. In fact AI will likely do better because it’s processor is not built on a panicky teenager chassis and when told not to shoot, it will actually follow orders.  If you wanna set the bar that high we may as well outlaw all warfare.

 

[dan/california]

3 hours ago, JonS said:

Emphasis added.

This is what I was talking about several dozen pages ago. The system you are describing could (future tense) be useful for battlefield assassination in an area devoid of civilians, but not for offensive maneauvre.

First of all there are no truly reliable methods of ensuring civilian safety in an active combat zone, there never have been. There are armies and nations that try to be discriminate, and armies and nations that don't bother. But perfection in a peer to peer shooting war where both sides are jamming and obscuring everything they possibly can, in any way they can think of is unattainable. The expression that there is no such thing as friendly artillery is about as old as anything that deserves to be called artillery.

The thing we aren't talking about enough is that there are degrees of jamming, and degrees of control. A live video going one way, and second by second flight commands going the other are by far the situation with the highest requirements for consistency and fidelity. As soon as anything less than that is required all sorts of intermittent communications options become viable. A the very simplest level you send out a first wave of drones to engage the very front line of enemy positions. You simply tell that first wave to self destruct or take whatever its current best target is, or simply hit a set of coordinates that was thought to be relevant at a specified time. So now, even in a 100% jamming environment your other forces are clear to proceed to their first phase line. At the next level up you have expendable transmitters that can broadcast a short but very high power signal to tell your drones to change kill boxes, and can even have a safety that any drone that doesn't receive a signal by the time specified crashes /self destructs. And the variations go on forever, but all of them are vastly more tolerant of reduced bandwidth than needing full time video one way, and full time control signals the other.

Edited May 19 by dan/california

[Battlefront.com]

8 minutes ago, JonS said:

What between a muddy person with a rifle over their shoulder, and a muddy person with a rifle over their shoulder wearing a slightly different set of muddy clothes?

Yup, that's also a major concern and why UAS that target vehicles is the way to go, while UAS targeting Human forms should be kept in the lab oven until it is baked a lot more.  And when it is fully baked, I expect it will go into very expensive systems made by big companies, not a $3000 drone modified by boy wonder coder whizz.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

2 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

You want it to make you OJ in the morning too? Human beings do fratricide all the time under those conditions. In fact AI will likely do better because it’s processor is not built on a panicky teenager chassis and when told not to shoot, it will actually follow orders.  If you wanna set the bar that high we may as well outlaw all warfare.

 

At least from the Russian standpoint they don't care.  They shell their own troops and it's just another day in the Russian Army.

Steve

[dan/california]

 

Quote

 

https://www.army.mil/article/42658/operation_cobra_and_the_breakout_at_normandy

That decisive blow, known as COBRA, was largely planned by the U.S. First Army commander. Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley flew from France to England to plead for a massive assault by heavy and medium bombers to blow a hole in the German line for ground troops to exploit. Aca,!A"I want it to be the biggest thing in the world,Aca,!A? Bradley said, with bomb craters every sixteen feet at his chosen point of attack, a few miles west of St. LAfA'. Originally intended to follow on the heels of GOODWOOD, COBRA was delayed several days by the wretched weather that plagued Normandy in the summer of 1944. Thick clouds also led to the abrupt cancellation of sorties launched from England on July 24, but not before the first waves had dropped their payloads, including several dozen bombs that fell behind American lines, killing or wounding about 150 U.S. soldiers.

 

Above is one of the clearer examples from WW2, bad weather and bad choices had bad results, the war went on. The bombers came back the next day with a better visibility and a better plan. The breakout that resulted pretty much went all the way to Rhine.

In the current conflict at least 5%, and perhaps a multiple of that, of the Russian Air Force's casualties have been friendly fire. I am sure they aren't happy about it, but they haven't had the sense to quit and go home, yet at least. Even the Ukrainians have lost a few planes to friendly fire. Brave men get in the cockpit every day and go out again anyway.

Edited May 19 by dan/california

[JonS]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

You want it to make you OJ in the morning too?

Well, given that drones are changing warfare all by themselves, that seems like the least they could do, no?

Even if they're not going to make it, they could at minimum deliver it.

[dan/california]

55 minutes ago, JonS said:

they could at minimum deliver it.

Oh they are working on that bit, like they mean it...

Edited May 20 by dan/california

[dan/california]

3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Yup, that's also a major concern and why UAS that target vehicles is the way to go, while UAS targeting Human forms should be kept in the lab oven until it is baked a lot more.  And when it is fully baked, I expect it will go into very expensive systems made by big companies, not a $3000 drone modified by boy wonder coder whizz.

Steve

Except for the countries and organizations that just don't care. The potential for terror attacks is LARGE.

[Battlefront.com]

Some good news from Haiduk!  It's good to see you back after some days off

1. The ship "Tsyklon" was hit and sunk, which is modern ship that is responsible for launching Kalibur missiles.  Not only that, but it wasn't the useless ship "Kovrovets".  On top of that, it's another score of a Russian ship that got sunk because Russia was too stupid or desperate to keep it away from Sevastopol. 
2. Kadyrovites got a nasty surprise from GLSDB's which supposedly Ukraine hasn't been able to use effectively.  They looked pretty effective to me!  The loss of a plane and pilot, possibly connected with this attack, is sad to hear.
3. Some evidence that Russia is having to prioritize ATGM allocations and the Kherson area is (not surprisingly) being shorted.  Inside this good news is more hints that Russia is running its Cold War stocks down as older missiles are apparently being distributed to troops that aren't functional.  I'm a little surprised that Russia doesn't have the ability or willingness to "refresh" potentially defective missiles before giving them out.
4. Röpke appears to have spread some misinformation.  IIRC he is good at that, though I haven't heard anything out of him in a long time (his Twitter feed is ancient).  Sneaking into a gray zone, taking a picture, then heading out is a trick both sides use to spread a false message.
5. An attack on Russian petro infrastructure in Vyborg by very long distance drones.  This is interesting because it's near a NATO country.  I wonder if Finland was given a headsup?

That's a decent enough list for this weekend, so if I missed anything I think I can be forgiven

Steve