How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[The_Capt]

45 minutes ago, dan/california said:

Two secondary turrets, four different ammo calibers, very few rounds for the main gun. Are they just trying to prove

The_Capt right?

That ridiculous monstrosity is exactly what I expect from the combined imaginations of conventional military thinking and industry.  Visible from space, blasting away at every bird for kms, weighing a freakish amount, burning more gas than some entire nations…and costing more than those nations GDPs…there is a winning solution! Even if we can build a fence around the thing that will stop every missile, artillery shell, UAS, ATGM and UGV (including mines), we can’t do the same around the platoon of fuel trucks it will take to keep each one of these on the road.

I have zero doubts we are going to see a lot more of this insanity….

[Battlefront.com]

Looks like Ukraine's renting of a satellite paid off handsomely:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ukraine-s-defence-intelligence-says-people-s-satellite-helped-to-destroy-thousands-of-russian-targets-photos/ar-BB1oV4N8?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=c99c1afaac724fce85a54402763f9461&ei=29

Steve

[Vanir Ausf B]

7 hours ago, A Canadian Cat said:

Anything that rides along with IFVs or APCs might as well be build on the same platform. No need for tank - again.

Ah I see what you did there - just rename something useful a "tank" bingo tanks aren't dead.  

Just pointing out that the line between tank and IFV is getting blurrier over time. The Puma IFV weights up to 43 tons, more than a T-64. The Merkava tank can carry up to 6 dismounts, ect.

I'm kind of agnostic on the whole "is the tank dead" debate. I'm not even sure what it means to say the tank is dead. Poland just ordered something like a thousand of them. Germany can't keep up with demand for the Leopard 2. The US is designing a new tank rather than scraping tanks. It seems to me tanks are going to be around for a long time to come, like it or not.

[Seedorf81]

10 hours ago, dan/california said:

He hasn't won yet...

One thing I miss in the news about the upcoming US elections, is the mentioning of the possibility (a likely one, as I see it) that neither of the current candidates will be able to participate. Either because one of 'm suddenly drops dead or gets seriously ill, with Biden looking a bit more prone to do that first, and/or, since emotions are running exceptionally high between the two parties and fanatical loonies are everywhere, one of 'm gets assassinated.

I would be very surprised if both make it to november.

But, except for Kamala Harris, who does not look presidential material (Wow, to me she seems even worse than a sometimes senile looking Biden AND the crazy SOB Donald! That is really something), I haven't seen or heard anything about DECENT "back-up" presidential candidates from either party.

What are Ukraine's perspectives if neither Biden or Trump becomes the new US president?

[omae2]

Uhm i cant really ask anybody about this so this is why i put it here. Why drone hunters don't use sub 22 ammo with small loads? Not like they want to shoot from long distance they usually fly next to it. It would be of small weight little recoil and if the ammunition is the right shape it would be very accurate. They could bring a mag with them so they could hunt down a lot of drones with just one hunter.

So what is the reason that we don't see that?

[Carolus]

46 minutes ago, omae2 said:

Uhm i cant really ask anybody about this so this is why i put it here. Why drone hunters don't use sub 22 ammo with small loads? Not like they want to shoot from long distance they usually fly next to it. It would be of small weight little recoil and if the ammunition is the right shape it would be very accurate. They could bring a mag with them so they could hunt down a lot of drones with just one hunter.

So what is the reason that we don't see that?

There have been some prototype videos of armed drones but nothing in frontline use yet.

Beside the recoil problem it seems to be hard to zero the gun with regard to the camera. They scribbled an aim point with a marker onto the middle of their tablet depending on where bullets would hit during tests, but the gun and the camera tend to jerk into different directions and after the first shot, the screen start to jitter so much that you lose track of where you were aiming.

It's trying to brace a gun against air, basically.

Edited Thursday at 09:19 AM by Carolus

[hcrof]

35 minutes ago, Carolus said:

There have been some prototype videos of armed drones but nothing in frontline use yet.

Beside the recoil problem it seems to be hard to zero the gun with regard to the camera. They scribbled an aim point with a marker onto the middle of their tablet depending on where bullets would hit during tests, but the gun and the camera tend to jerk into different directions and after the first shot, the screen start to jitter so much that you lose track of where you were aiming.

It's trying to brace a gun against air, basically.

I wonder if you could adapt the drone with a stick idea and have the bullet fire when a long probe touches the target. The barrel would always be aligned with the probe so you get a guaranteed hit but you are not risking your drone with a direct collision. The probe could even be a laser to avoid the poor aerodynamics of a long object strapped to your drone. 

[omae2]

57 minutes ago, Carolus said:

There have been some prototype videos of armed drones but nothing in frontline use yet.

Beside the recoil problem it seems to be hard to zero the gun with regard to the camera. They scribbled an aim point with a marker onto the middle of their tablet depending on where bullets would hit during tests, but the gun and the camera tend to jerk into different directions and after the first shot, the screen start to jitter so much that you lose track of where you were aiming.

It's trying to brace a gun against air, basically.

What caliber? How much load? Was it an attached barrel or it was part of the body of the drone? Most drone could be penetrated with harsh language and tearing any electronic will make the drone ineffective so you don't even need a 22, you could use air pellets.

[Maciej Zwolinski]

8 hours ago, dan/california said:

Two secondary turrets, four different ammo calibers, very few rounds for the main gun. Are they just trying to prove

The_Capt right?

There is all this talk of "frog DNA"...surely German tank designers have Maus DNA

[Maciej Zwolinski]

37 minutes ago, hcrof said:

I wonder if you could adapt the drone with a stick idea and have the bullet fire when a long probe touches the target. The barrel would always be aligned with the probe so you get a guaranteed hit but you are not risking your drone with a direct collision. The probe could even be a laser to avoid the poor aerodynamics of a long object strapped to your drone. 

In that case don't bother with any bullet and any recoil, just have a small HEAT charge at the tip of the probe. Like the earliest torpedoes, which were essentially bombs on a stick

Edited Thursday at 10:34 AM by Maciej Zwolinski

[hcrof]

3 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

There is all this talk of "frog DNA"...surely German tank designers have Maus DNA

Truly we are back to the interwar period where noone could figure out what to do with these machines...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_A1E1_Independent

[hcrof]

1 minute ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

In that case don't bother with any bullet and any recoil, just have a small HEAT charge at the tip of the probe. Like the earliest torpedoes, which were essentially bombs on a stick

I like it, but it would destroy the centre of gravity of the drone and make it unflyable!

[Maciej Zwolinski]

8 hours ago, The_Capt said:

That ridiculous monstrosity is exactly what I expect from the combined imaginations of conventional military thinking and industry.  Visible from space, blasting away at every bird for kms, weighing a freakish amount, burning more gas than some entire nations…and costing more than those nations GDPs…there is a winning solution! Even if we can build a fence around the thing that will stop every missile, artillery shell, UAS, ATGM and UGV (including mines), we can’t do the same around the platoon of fuel trucks it will take to keep each one of these on the road.

I have zero doubts we are going to see a lot more of this insanity….

By now I am getting pretty heavily sick of repeating myself, but I feel honour bound to do this. Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas. In Stanislaw Lem's novel "the Invincible" the evolution of machines of war pushes them in two directions, lumbering mobile cities vs nano-drone swarms. Given that in the early 1960's that guy seems to have predicted everything, I am also fairly certain that we will see some very heavy metal around.

[Maciej Zwolinski]

8 minutes ago, hcrof said:

I like it, but it would destroy the centre of gravity of the drone and make it unflyable!

Unflyable is nothing

 

[The_Capt]

11 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

By now I am getting pretty heavily sick of repeating myself, but I feel honour bound to do this. Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas. In Stanislaw Lem's novel "the Invincible" the evolution of machines of war pushes them in two directions, lumbering mobile cities vs nano-drone swarms. Given that in the early 1960's that guy seems to have predicted everything, I am also fairly certain that we will see some very heavy metal around.

So there is what should happen and what will happen.  After WW1, by a rough count, around 46 Battleships were built:

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

Many of these were the largest in terms of tonnage and weight of guns.  All built in the 20s, 30s, up to the end of WW2.  Hard to say when the end of the battleship was definitive, but by the early 20s most historians agree that the cheap airplane mated with the torpedo was the deal breaker (sound familiar?)  The end of the battleship as the core platform of naval power - and had been for at least two centuries - was vehemently opposed by the naval cultures of the day.  Adjusting for inflation, trillions were spent on these ships in research, design and construction.  By 1945 they were universally recognized as a niche shore bombardment platform and even that did not last.

Of course tanks are just as sacrosanct in land warfare, and we will very likely do the exact same thing with them as we did with battleships.  And weirdly, the tank will fail for the exact same reason as the battleship: range.  The tank and battleship exist because they are built around a powerful gun that can be moved around and protected doing so.  Problem is that the range of that gun is great so long as it defines the horizon of engagement.  Artillery has in reality defined that horizon, but artillery was notoriously in efficient - requiring many shots per kill.  Tank guns had very high comparative Pks per shot, once they got within LOS ranges.

Right up until the modern era.  Now, not only is artillery becoming far more efficient with PGM, ISR and computers but it is paired with other NLOS systems that can see and engage land formations well beyond the ranges of the tank. This list includes: missiles, glide bombs, ATGM/loitering, and drones. We have seen this trend for at least a decade - effective land engagements are happening well out of direct fire ranges. To the point that the tank has been noted as largely being used as an indirect fire platform in this war.

But the brutal reality is that the tank gun has been out ranged…and not by a little bit, but by kms.  And these systems are accurate, demonstrating very high Pk rates.  They are also ubiquitous, being everywhere on the battlefield.  So effectively the thing the tank used to do has been replaced by a disaggregated set of systems able to do the job better.  It can also see and hit the entire mechanized system at longer ranges - so tanks, IFVs/APCs, logistics, C2 nodes etc. We are seeing tactical units able to hit at 10s of kms.

So what?  Well evident on this forum and in these discussions are the seeds of what modern militaries are going to do, because they have always done it. 1) denial - call into question “what is happening” and cry “moment in history” and “tank has been dead before”. 2) shore up - come up with all sorts of scenarios where the tank still matters. 3) advocate and negotiate - lean into technologies and solutions that are designed to preserve the tank itself and not the missions, roles and tasks the tank used to do but are now being done better by other systems.

There are generations of army officers who will be defending the tank for at least a decade after this war.  And there are very large industries that are heavily invested in its continuation.  We will continue to see large, expensive solutions to protect a system that has been outranged.  Or try and find a role for the tank at those greater ranges, but at that point we have a really expensive platform launching those cheap systems I mentioned before.  It will take 10-20 years, but meanwhile quietly in the background modern militaries will know the real score and investments in those long range systems, along with C4iSR will go into overdrive.  We will see heavy competition, skewed exercises and experimentations. The argument will continue and be very expensive.

In the end, cheap long range high precision many will win out. They always do.  Industry will layer more and more capability on those cheap systems, until they are no longer cheap. We will have $10m FPVs with laser beams and “light” infantry vehicles that hover.  Because industry will always find a way to make government spending more expensive.  And then mid-century nano will come along and break reality once again…and the cycle will continue.

 

[omae2]

To be honest there is another thing that bugs me. We are at the beginning of an evolution cycle of a new type of warfare. But in reality that is another strategic factor. Like in every arms race there is an action and a reaction and those consume resources and time. Which is obvious this what you guys are talking here week after week. (I mean no offense with the term guys.) So the point is we have a factor that can be exploited like if you know what is needed for the situation at the moment (like cheap anti drone measures) and you know how you can achieve it than you know what your opponent will do. They going likely develop something against it. If one side have a technical superiority over the other on an evolving warfare than that side can force the other side to waste resources on developing and employing measures that will be outdated by the time they arrive. But there is a limit to this. Like infantry warfare or tank warfare there is ceiling when all tactical depth is figured out and you have books on all of them. When the ceiling is reached development might be so expensive that its not worth it, in the same time deployment is already in place. So you gonna be stuck with what you have.
So the point is, that if we know that drones gonna be a future, and drone warfare gonna peak some time in the future, than there is a limited amount of variation of tools that can be used. These limits are technical and simply physic.

The russians are constantly walking behind the curve, they look like have the initiative but in technical dimension they are behind. This is a trend that can be exploited, cause if you know what they gonna copy you can prepare in advance for that, and turn this advantage into territory or casualty on their side. But there is a window where you can do that, after that its back to attrition.

So i probably didn't wrote anything new just really curios what other thinks about this cause in my circles this does not fly.

[The_Capt]

31 minutes ago, omae2 said:

To be honest there is another thing that bugs me. We are at the beginning of an evolution cycle of a new type of warfare. But in reality that is another strategic factor. Like in every arms race there is an action and a reaction and those consume resources and time. Which is obvious this what you guys are talking here week after week. (I mean no offense with the term guys.) So the point is we have a factor that can be exploited like if you know what is needed for the situation at the moment (like cheap anti drone measures) and you know how you can achieve it than you know what your opponent will do. They going likely develop something against it. If one side have a technical superiority over the other on an evolving warfare than that side can force the other side to waste resources on developing and employing measures that will be outdated by the time they arrive. But there is a limit to this. Like infantry warfare or tank warfare there is ceiling when all tactical depth is figured out and you have books on all of them. When the ceiling is reached development might be so expensive that its not worth it, in the same time deployment is already in place. So you gonna be stuck with what you have.
So the point is, that if we know that drones gonna be a future, and drone warfare gonna peak some time in the future, than there is a limited amount of variation of tools that can be used. These limits are technical and simply physic.

The russians are constantly walking behind the curve, they look like have the initiative but in technical dimension they are behind. This is a trend that can be exploited, cause if you know what they gonna copy you can prepare in advance for that, and turn this advantage into territory or casualty on their side. But there is a window where you can do that, after that its back to attrition.

So i probably didn't wrote anything new just really curios what other thinks about this cause in my circles this does not fly.

My thinking is that the future does not “happen” it is constructed.  So looking back, I wonder what would have happened if nations took those billions and billions they spent on battleships and invested it into aircraft.  Would we have seen jet aircraft as mainstream by WW2?  Missile systems?  Computers? In the end we do not know, and all we can do is speculate.

So right now we face another fork in the road.  There is risk, but there is also opportunity.  A side that can master this new environment faster will have definitive advantage.  We have seen examples of this throughout history. One could argue that the digitized high tech US military crushed Iraq back in 91’ because it had invested forwards, not backwards.

But militaries are not independent entities.  We do not own ourselves.  We can chart capability course, but employment is largely out of our control.  So we can create a capability advantage but the decision to employ it to strategic gain is up to the political levels.  All we can do is create and sustain options, the decision to exercise them is not up to us.

[ArmouredTopHat]

 

[omae2]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

My thinking is that the future does not “happen” it is constructed.  So looking back, I wonder what would have happened if nations took those billions and billions they spent on battleships and invested it into aircraft.  Would we have seen jet aircraft as mainstream by WW2?  Missile systems?  Computers? In the end we do not know, and all we can do is speculate.

So right now we face another fork in the road.  There is risk, but there is also opportunity.  A side that can master this new environment faster will have definitive advantage.  We have seen examples of this throughout history. One could argue that the digitized high tech US military crushed Iraq back in 91’ because it had invested forwards, not backwards.

But militaries are not independent entities.  We do not own ourselves.  We can chart capability course, but employment is largely out of our control.  So we can create a capability advantage but the decision to employ it to strategic gain is up to the political levels.  All we can do is create and sustain options, the decision to exercise them is not up to us.

Seems like the wheel is on the hand of peoples who don't know where they are heading. Windows open windows closes. China pushing in Africa hard while we loosing ground, its possible that in fifteen years they gonna have a window and will not shy away from exploiting it.

[dan/california]

 

37 minutes ago, ArmouredTopHat said:

 

Two observations, the relentless Ukrainian campaign to degrade Russia's IAD system is having an effect. Also, that mans equipment is solid brass and so heavy I can't figure out how the plane took off.

 

Edited Thursday at 03:04 PM by dan/california

[ArmouredTopHat]

16 minutes ago, dan/california said:

Two observations, the relentless Ukrainian campaign to degrade Russia's IAD system is having an effect. Also, that mans equipment is solidi brass and so heavy I can't figure out how the plane took off.

Certainly a good sign that they are able to sneak in Migs to perform such attacks that literally cross the border. 

[dan/california]

12 hours ago, The_Capt said:

That ridiculous monstrosity is exactly what I expect from the combined imaginations of conventional military thinking and industry.  Visible from space, blasting away at every bird for kms, weighing a freakish amount, burning more gas than some entire nations…and costing more than those nations GDPs…there is a winning solution! Even if we can build a fence around the thing that will stop every missile, artillery shell, UAS, ATGM and UGV (including mines), we can’t do the same around the platoon of fuel trucks it will take to keep each one of these on the road.

I have zero doubts we are going to see a lot more of this insanity….

I think a notable amount of the problem is that certain science fiction authors have influenced the debate excessively because they are GOOD authors, and they did a good job with their hand wavium while they got on with telling a story. 

Let me go through "Hammer's Slammers" hand wavium in some detail, just to make the point. 

The Slammers author(David Drake) posits a regiment wide integrated air defense system controlled by a central computer. Every vehicle has a secondary turret controlled by the air defense system unless the crew actively takes/is given control. We see something like this with the new German tank that started this discussion, and it sounds almost possible, right? The thing is that this is the least radical technology in the book. 

The second pillar of the Slammers ability to utterly dominate the battlefield are energy weapons whose effectiveness is off the charts, I mean effective all the way to orbit off the charts. Drake barely bothers to explain how this works, but it relies on ammo with an energy density that is somewhere between nuclear fission and anti matter, depending on a zillion assumptions that you have to make to figure it out.

The third pillar of of the Slammers dominance is that their tanks don't need fuel trucks. They are FUSION POWERED, They not only can run for months on a single fuel load, they actually provide the electrical power that charges the high tech batteries that run everything else. 

So yes, if an armored force actually had all three of these it would be more or less unstoppable, except by a similarly equipped force. I think it is a at least a few hundred years out though

Edited Thursday at 03:06 PM by dan/california

[The_Capt]

8 minutes ago, dan/california said:

I think a notable amount of the problem is that certain science fiction authors have influenced the debate excessively because they are GOOD authors, and they did a good job with their hand wavium while they got on with telling a story. 

Let me go through "Hammer's Slammers" hand wavium in some detail, just to make the point. 

The Slammers author(David Drake) posits a regiment wide integrated air defense system controlled by a central computer. Every vehicle has a secondary turret controlled by the air defense system unless the crew actively takes/is given control. We see something like this with the new German tank that started this discussion, and it sounds almost possible, right? The thing is that this is the least radical technology in the book. 

The second pillar of the Slammers ability to utterly dominate the battlefield are energy weapons whose effectiveness is off the charts, I mean effective all the way to orbit off the charts. Drake barely bothers to explain how this works, but it relies on ammo with an energy density that is somewhere between nuclear fission and anti matter, depending on a zillion assumptions that you have to make to figure it out.

The third pillar of of the Slammers dominance is that their tanks don't need fuel trucks. They are FUSION POWERED, They not only can run for months on a single fuel load, they actually provide the electrical power that charges the high tech batteries that run everything else. 

So yes, if an armored force actually had all three of these it would be more or less unstoppable, except by a similarly equipped force. I think it is a at least a few hundred years out though

That is old school (and quaint) sci-fi.  The future will be about vigorous AI negotiations and simulations, while the primates sit back awash in TMS and synthetic drugs...as we slowly bleed out, evolutionarily speaking.  We will drift right past Children of  Men, into oblivion, and our synthetic offspring will try hard to pretend that there is no real relation.

[dan/california]

1 minute ago, The_Capt said:

That is old school (and quaint) sci-fi.  The future will be about vigorous AI negotiations and simulations, while the primates sit back awash in TMS and synthetic drugs...as we slowly bleed out, evolutionarily speaking.  We will drift right past Children of  Men, into oblivion, and our synthetic offspring will try hard to pretend that there is no real relation.

Oh I think we will get to nano goo first, or some similarly effective way to off ourselves. But every time the tank is dead debate revs up I feel like David Drake is laughing his head off. I hope General Dynamics Land Systems paid the man...

[LongLeftFlank]

55 minutes ago, omae2 said:

Seems like the wheel is on the hand of peoples who don't know where they are heading. Windows open windows closes. China pushing in Africa hard while we loosing ground, its possible that in fifteen years they gonna have a window and will not shy away from exploiting it.

Yeah, as my Nigerian accountant would say, goo luck wit dat.

...Not gonna post them, but there's plenty of photos out there of Chinese engineers lined up and executed by local bandits when the protection money didn't come in, or the 'wrong' people got the money.

And unlike Victoria, Leopold, et al., the PLA can't 'send a gunboat' to enforce any of their so-called concessions. All they can do is send more engineers to replace the dead guys, (who honestly deserved better from their country).