How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[chris talpas]

4 hours ago, Offshoot said:

Add this to the analogy

 

Definitely shades of WW1.  Remember having learned about the extent of tunneling and touring through one when visiting the Vimy Ridge memorial in France.

 

[dan/california]

2 hours ago, LongLeftFlank said:

The vibration of a pigeon's heart over Shanghai or sumfink.

As a complement to @dan/california's $100k ghillie suits, there could also be a war profiteering future in faking human heartbeats and heat signatures.

Decoys of more or less everything is the future. Indeed it seems to be heavily utilized in Ukraine now. It is rapidly becoming the only way of obfuscating anything, and the best counter Lancets.

[dan/california]

If Dmitri wants to talk, I want to listen...

[cesmonkey]

The remnants of Klishchiyivka

 

[Haiduk]

Avdiivka slag heap. View from east/north-east. Red arrows - direction of Russian attacks. Behind it - territory of Avdiivka coke plant. 

According to UKR TGs - no one side now control this important point. Situation is dynamical.

According to Russian TGs - eastern approaches to the slagheap now under control of Russians, western area - under control of Ukriane

 

Edited October 21, 2023 by Haiduk

[The_Capt]

38 minutes ago, Haiduk said:

Avdiivka slag heap. View from east/nort-east. Red arrows - direction of Russian attacks. Behind it - territory of Avdiivka coke plant. 

According to UKR TGs - no one side now control this important point. Situation is dynamical.

According to Russian TGs - eastern approaches to the slagheap now under control of Russians, western area - under control of Ukriane

 

Hey look its Neuhof. 

[Haiduk]

"Birds of Magyar" now in Kherson oblast and hunt for Russian boats. Drones drop 82 mm mortar shells. "Magyar" says Russians use stealed or volunteer-supplied boats of different sizes - most usually carry 5-6 men, but not rare they use larger ones for 7-10 men. Multiple boat hits on this video, which gives opportunity to learn more about silent riverine war between islands

 

Edited October 21, 2023 by Haiduk

[Haiduk]

39 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Hey look its Neuhof. 

I've found about what you told - intersting, this Kaliberg has 190 m, but looks much taller than slagheap in Avdiivka, having a point "height 230". But maybe this is relative point from the sea level, not absolute height of the heap.

 

Edited October 21, 2023 by Haiduk

[Haiduk]

Somebody of Russian personnel filmed conditions of helicopter parking in Luhansk airport after ATACAMS strike. Video, alas, isn't informative - cameraman likely didn't risk to approach close to helicopters and films only pavement with cluster munitions craters. But you can see three Ka-52 without blades - probably damaged and one burned down unknown helicopter 

 

 

Edited October 21, 2023 by Haiduk

[Haiduk]

UKR riverine movement near Kherson. The boat enough big

 

[LongLeftFlank]

2 hours ago, Haiduk said:

According to Russian TGs - eastern approaches to the slagheap now under control of Russians, western area - under control of Ukraine.

 

 

I was originally gonna be boring and paste 'When the Tigers broke free', but you know what,  you, Roger Waters! This stunner will be vastly more welcome to serenade the lads arriving at the feasting hall from the hellscape.

...However, I will quote a little Fall of Rome (one of my favourites in high school):

From here on one could smell the coming battle, one of the turning points of the world. There were streams and trails beckoning to Alaric, and others that refused all passage. There would be only one battlefield possible—the environs of Aquileia—on which, all commanders on all sides knew, an army coming from the east could not win....

The Vallone, cutting like a fissure through the high Carso, is a dry gulch, murderously hot and breathless in the summer. There is no water at all in its ten mile length. It is the face of the Devil....

It was then that the message came from Stilicho. [The Goths] were to hold the end of the Vallone till there was not one man of them left. “You will find it as good a graveyard as any,” was the final cheerful word of the Master General.

A distant mirror.

[kimbosbread]

20 hours ago, The_Capt said:

This is a primer on how to defeat us.  We are going to be limited to the wars where we can establish air superiority…and that is damned hard wrt UAS.  

It wasn’t the artillery in that video that was the central problem.  It was the video itself.  That entire RA armoured attack was butt naked to the sky and detected probably a zip code away.  Dropping the sky on it from a bunch of different systems was just the finish.  

I am not sure how to build a bubble around that assault in the modern era.  Even if, especially if, it was one of ours.  

 

2 hours ago, dan/california said:

Decoys of more or less everything is the future. Indeed it seems to be heavily utilized in Ukraine now. It is rapidly becoming the only way of obfuscating anything, and the best counter Lancets.

Mmmm, I don’t think you can build a bubble around that sort of assault. So the question becomes, what kind of assault would be less susceptible to eyes in the sky?

Option 1 is stealth: Especially at night, your electrically powered robot dog will be quite stealthy if moves slowly enough not to raise it’s ambient temperature enough and uncover too much soil, especially if it also has some thermal camouflage. Or fancy ghillie suits.

Option 2 is speed: Disposable heavy lift quad copters can move your assualt units through no mans land very fast, preceeded by a swarm of drones/mini-cruise missiles/etc. If you an move a 100-200kg payload 20km at 60kmh, that might be enough to negate the enemy’s response time.

Option 3 is corrupt the enemy’s data: Hack their computers, drones, beam the wrong signal back to the base station. And/or decoys and jamming.

Option 4 is universal anti-radition counterybattery: Hunt down everything emitting an electronic signal with your swarm of drones.

18 hours ago, dan/california said:

There has to be some combination of lasers, drones that kill drones, and tunable jammers that can literally listen for the drones frequency and then swamp it. If that combination is not technically feasible we are back to my $100,000 ghillie suit, and doing everything VERY slowly.

Well, stealth ghillie suit, and more “active” measures, such as fooling the enemy computer and sensor networks. For example, if we talk about Watling’s sensor-infused battlefield, what happens if you are able to physically compromise a bunch of them?

18 hours ago, dan/california said:

“a vibrometer is substantially more sensitive, being able to listen – for example – to a pigeon’s heartbeat at 30 km.”

That’s a laser microphone, and that’s old hat. As long as you can aim the laser precisely over 30km, and you know what frequency a pidgeon heartbeat should be (vs say a rat) you can do it. I did some research in this area in undergrad 20 years ago and this was already possible then, through some feet of concrete if you traded off distance. The real magic is when you have small phased arrays with precise beam steering.

16 hours ago, chrisl said:

Why bother with the $100K ghillie suit with a person inside?  Just wrap it around an autonomous robot.

Well, until we have powered armor we we’ll just have the camouflage. But yes, once you have powered armor, the person inside may be superfluous in some situations, and you might as well go with your robot dog.

[dan/california]

28 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

The real magic is when you have small phased arrays with precise beam steering.

Watling discusses them at length, along with the AI/computer architecture to make sense of the data. I just grabbed the sentence that seemed the most like science fiction.

[Beleg85]

Short but nontheless interesting piece from propagandist Sladkov.

Russian propaganda try to convince audience that it took measures to use Tuvinians as "Russian Navajo", using their hectic language instead of code to communicate between units. I heard different opinions as to how widespread this phenomena actually is in muscovite army- it doesn't look like they took systemic effort to employ it along whole theatre, in manner of US Navy in WWII. Code talkers from various minorities (they have a wide selection to choose from, admittedly) for now seem to be ad hoc solution taken by various commanders.

Worth to note Ukrainians use Hungarians and Huculs in the same manner.

 

 

[Battlefront.com]

On 10/20/2023 at 8:37 PM, The_Capt said:

This is a primer on how to defeat us.  We are going to be limited to the wars where we can establish air superiority…and that is damned hard wrt UAS.  

It wasn’t the artillery in that video that was the central problem.  It was the video itself.  That entire RA armoured attack was butt naked to the sky and detected probably a zip code away.  Dropping the sky on it from a bunch of different systems was just the finish.  

I am not sure how to build a bubble around that assault in the modern era.  Even if, especially if, it was one of ours.  

Add to this the mundane stuff.  I just watched yet another video (this time Ukrainians on the receiving end) of a FPV smashing into soldiers doing routine non-combat soldier stuff.  Then there's the countless videos we've seen of various Russian assets deep in the rear, fixed or in motion, getting slammed by something.

The point here is that bubbles are not good enough unless you're talking about ones that are 100s of 1000s of KM2 in size.  Otherwise you get a situation where a tiny fragment of the ground forces is temporarily protected for a specific time and place, while everything that supports it is attrited a little bit each day while not engaged.

I'm not optimistic.  Even if the US and its allies pull their collective heads out of the sand and recognize that billions of Dollars worth of equipment is effectively defenseless against cheap and plentiful threats I don't see a solution for traditional mechanized forces on the horizon any time soon.

The short term solution is to knit all the current anti-drone capabilities together (as mentioned in the last page) and accept that it will be wildly imperfect.

If I were in charge of Pentagon spending I would tell the defense community no new big ticket purchases until they have first proven that they won't go boom due to a $500 drone within a minute of arriving on the battlefield.  If they can't do that, then redirect spending into relatively inexpensive unmanned systems.  Personally, I'd just skip right to unmanned stuff as the pros are massive and the cons tiny, but giving the defense industry a chance to prove they can't do it seems fair

Steve

[MikeyD]

I recall discussing lessons learned from the Iraq war and I commented that nobody's going to un-invent the roadside IED. The 'great powers' have been facing the problem of cheap-vs-expensive asymmetric warfare for quite awhile

Edited October 22, 2023 by MikeyD

[sburke]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Add to this the mundane stuff.  I just watched yet another video (this time Ukrainians on the receiving end) of a FPV smashing into soldiers doing routine non-combat soldier stuff.  Then there's the countless videos we've seen of various Russian assets deep in the rear, fixed or in motion, getting slammed by something.

The point here is that bubbles are good enough unless you're talking about ones that are 100s of 1000s of KM2 in size.  Otherwise you get a situation where a tiny fragment of the ground forces is temporarily protected for a specific time and place, while everything that supports it is attrited a little bit each day while not engaged.

I'm not optimistic.  Even if the US and its allies pull their collective heads out of the sand and recognize that billions of Dollars worth of equipment is effectively defenseless against cheap and plentiful threats I don't see a solution for traditional mechanized forces on the horizon any time soon.

The short term solution is to knit all the current anti-drone capabilities together (as mentioned in the last page) and accept that it will be wildly imperfect.

If I were in charge of Pentagon spending I would tell the defense community no new big ticket purchases until they have first proven that they won't go boom due to a $500 drone within a minute of arriving on the battlefield.  If they can't do that, then redirect spending into relatively inexpensive unmanned systems.  Personally, I'd just skip right to unmanned stuff as the pros are massive and the cons tiny, but giving the defense industry a chance to prove they can't do it seems fair

Steve

so is war becoming obsolete or just for those who don't care about their own casualties?

[dan/california]

5 hours ago, Beleg85 said:

Code talkers from various minorities (they have a wide selection to choose from, admittedly) for now seem to be ad hoc solution taken by various commanders.

It could get unpleasant if two units using different languages suddenly needed to communicate. Also how much actual education is done in languages besides Russian? I have  great many questions, but most of them are probably a distraction. 

[Battlefront.com]

3 hours ago, sburke said:

so is war becoming obsolete or just for those who don't care about their own casualties?

Oh, don't get me wrong.   Current NATO type forces used en mas against pretty much any conventional force (except China, probably) will wipe a non-prepared enemy clean off the map.  I'd say that even now a concentrated force could take out a prepared ground force, such as Russia has in the south of Ukraine, by employing massive stand off and deep strike attacks over weeks if not months.

Where NATO type forces are fooked the most is against unconventional forces.  This is a particular problem because the West is far more likely to face something more like Afghanistan than Ukraine.  I can easily picture an Afghanistan situation except with 100s of casualties and 10s of millions of Dollars worth of equipment lost every few days against an enemy that can not be PGM'd out of existence.  Afghanistan would not have lasted 20 years with that sort of attrition, that's for sure.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

Here's an Avdiivka video I don't think anybody's posted yet.  It shows a lot of BTR type vehicles going boom.

Quite a few of those BTRs don't appear to have turrets of any sort, as far as I can see.  Command variants of BTR-60 or 70?

Steve

[FancyCat]

3 days later, another 6 ships. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-18/ukraine-s-risky-bet-pays-off-with-ships-streaming-to-its-ports

Article from Bloomberg a few days ago noted a similar volume shipped this month compared with the first month of the UN brokered Black Sea grain deal, and that included at least 9 Panamax vessels, the largest size vessels that normally ship grain, indicating insurance brokers are willing to risk retaliation by Russia. 

Quote

Over 1 million tons of grain, crops, iron, and other precious cargo through the Black Sea humanitarian corridor. Russia’s cruelty will not prevent Ukraine from feeding the world and increasing exports. We’re counting 33 ships through so far!

 

 

[The_MonkeyKing]

https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1715836719071686908

Rob Lee and Michael Kofman underline not to underestimate this.

North Korea has significant production capacity and latent production potential. And they are more than happy to exchange ammo for technology transfer and food.

[The_MonkeyKing]

link to translated threadreader :https://threadreaderapp-com.translate.goog/thread/1715419274582356325.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=fi&_x_tr_pto=wapp

 

[Pete Wenman]

 

MOD with thoughts on RU casualties

 

(4/5) It is likely that Russia has suffered 150,000-190,000 permanent casualties (killed and permanently wounded) since the conflict began, with the total figure including temporarily wounded (recovered and due to return to the battlefield) in the region of 240,000-290,000.

(5/5) This does not include Wagner Group or their prisoner battalions who fought in Bakhmut.

[Haiduk]

4 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Quite a few of those BTRs don't appear to have turrets of any sort, as far as I can see.  Command variants of BTR-60 or 70?

Steve

I posted this video yesterday and made an assumption, this could be vehicles of 15th motor-rifle "peacemaking" brigade, having BTRs on armament (BTRs are very rare in separate motor-rifle brigades). Brigade was moved here recently, but stood in reserve. But this also could be some replenished DPR unit, 114th motor-rifle brigade, for example, though I don't know about their current equipment. 

Judging on back of theese BTRs, all are obviously BTR-80-based. Absence of turrets it more probably wrong imagination because of racurse. Even if that BTR, which pushes other hasn't a turret, this is usual BTR-80, but his turret just dismounted by some reason. At least Oryx team identified all BTRs from this video as common BTR-80/82A

Edited October 22, 2023 by Haiduk