How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Haiduk]

Ukrainian army is coming in zone of high risks of "revolutionary situation" by a classic "bottoms no more don't want to fight in old way, tops can't fight in new way"

After dismiss of general Sodol' it's an imagimation that pressure on the dam is growing more and more. In UKR social network during all war there were critical feedback about Soviet methods of troops control and resource managments. But now the voice of soldiers and authority commanders sounds threatingly. "Blood of Sodol' " has given of small hope, that it's possible to make high officers responsible for own incompetence and petty tyranny and to stop vicious practice, when high commander, who fail own task and "zeroed" whole battalions was "punished" by rising in rank and moving to highter duty or in worse case - to command of new formed units. 

Fuel to the fire added three strikes on UKR airfields, when Russian UAVs by hours hovered over them and was no reaction - as result several aircrafts were destroyed and damaged and after this Air Force Command came with "poker face"  - it's just a war, why so many negative? 

Maybe better to post google-translated today's post of Maryna Bezuhla, the member of National Defense and Securuty Committee of parliament. If recently after her sharp criticizm of Zaluzhnyi, many of serviceman considered she is "stupid girl, who is used just like a torpedo to sank Zaluzhnyi", now many of them after her articles about Sodol, Syrskiy, about idiotic resource managment in our army are changing of own point of view. 

Of course, obviously right those who say theese articles write not Bezuhla herself and many conspiracy about who is it. But maybe we on the edge of radical cleaning of army tops and Bezuhla with support of some authority officers, like "Azov" chief of the staff Krotevich, after whose FB post Sodol' was dismissed, just prepare public opinion to some radical things.  

So here is new post of Bezuhla and it not only about Sodol', but also about situation in our army in whole.

Just some issues of translation - "keep bare lanfings" = keep bare tree-plants, "cotton views" = vatnik moods

  

Edited Thursday at 07:51 PM by Haiduk

[ArmouredTopHat]

Curious vehicle spotted at a Russian training site

[The_Capt]

48 minutes ago, billbindc said:

Stealth seems like a likelier option than a powered battle suit...and really a necessary concomitant. If Watling it to be believed, as time goes on signals discipline will need to include not just IR and EM but also sound, etc. Think the movie Quiet Place but with smarms of smart drones instead of beatable-by-one-smart-trick alien attack dogs. 

A friend at work pointed out something brilliant - in the future it won’t be enough to find, engage and kill something, we will also have to do it without giving off information.  Every time we do violence in war it is communication.  A sending and receiving of information.  So shooting down an airplane will need to include creating a bubble of silence around the airplane so that an opponent does not get any information for free when we kill it.

That is where things are going.

[Haiduk]

In short about fail of UKR defense near Toretsk - there is long tweet about it, but in short - general Sodol', comamnder of OTUV "Khortytsia" (zone from Kupiansk to Vuhledar) despite objections of brigade commanders gave the order to rotate two brigades simultainously from Toretsk to Chasiv Yar. On their place he moved battered units from other directions and part of 41st mech.brigade, which he put to defend Toretsk from south - from New-York settlement. Toretsk/Horlivka area long time was calmest part of frontline, so Sodol' maybe thought nothing bad will happen. But happened as always - Russians cought rotation time and attacked with multiple small infantry groups. In New-York and Pivdenne area there are many wast lands, abandoned coal mine sites, covered by heavy trees and bushes. In New-York area Russians penetrated through these bushes in one narrow place, and captured southern part of settlement. There was a chance to cut them, but command of 41st brigade did nothing. Moreover, on this direction brigade command operated by attached units - they mixed people from different squads and companies on micro-positions. Nobody knew in these "jungles" who is their neighbour. Russians used DNR forces in UKR uniform, who can speak Ukrainian and there some accidents, when DNR troops just shoot out UKR squads, when they though this own troops came. And this sh..t also led to many friendly fire and new deaths, when other units now in any unfamiliar soldier in UKR uniform had seen potential enemy. 

West from Toretsk, Russians almost without resistance took UKR positions in Shumy and eneterd to Pivdenne - brigade, which had to settle positions just hadn't time to do this in usual chais of such big rotation. 

Now we have another problem, but generals still say "situation is hard but under full control" 

Edited Thursday at 07:54 PM by Haiduk

[The_Capt]

15 minutes ago, A Canadian Cat said:

Or look a the references on the wiki article. Honestly I know people deride Wikipedia but some of their work is top notch. At the very least look at the reference list and read some of that content too.

Back in my engineering research days (no Wikipedia man) papers and articles in journals were nice and all but their reference section - that's where the gold is man. Once you find a couple of interesting articles and then dig up their 15-20 references and read them and read 15-20 more papers that you find referenced in those then you are cooking with gas. You can learn a lot.

So, if I hit a wiki page with little or no references yeah I'm worried but if there are lots of references then I have more reading to do and that's where the real value is. It doesn't take long to realize that the vast majority of well referenced wiki articles are actually quite good summaries of the topic.

Oh and reading like that digging into the references to journals and primary sources - that *is* doing your learning. (I will not use the phrase "do your own research" because that actually should mean conducting your own experiments and surveys and that's not something that should be expected of non experts)

Exactly.  People are just using ChatGPT now, which as far as I can see basically creates a wiki page answer on the fly. I always use wiki and then dig into the refs.  That plus a search engine offers up a lot of information.  But it has become “cool” to look down on wiki for some reason.

[Vanir Ausf B]

13 minutes ago, ArmouredTopHat said:

Curious vehicle spotted at a Russian training site

More like an Israeli Namer than a Bradley.

[A Canadian Cat]

17 hours ago, The_Capt said:

History is not on the “hey let’s think about it differently” side.

Huh? Don't you mean the history is on the side of the "think differently" side?

From the point of view of being correct I mean.

I suppose you could have meant those that "think differently" loose the battle for change to the "leave it like it is but some how do it better" side. Is that it? We see through out history that side can hold on until much longer that expected. At some point though reality reaches out and kicks them in the balls.

[dan/california]

6 minutes ago, Vanir Ausf B said:

More like an Israeli Namer than a Bradley.

Interesting that it doesn't even have a turret, a that I could tell in that film. As Steve was just discussing, its only job is to get the infantry in alive, and then hopefully go back for more. I don't think they could put enough armor on a T-90 chassis to take a Javelin hit, but it is at least possible they tried. I assume a final version would have a an engineered attempt at whatever the Russians think is the best cope cage/turtle tank superstructure. Indeed, if you realize you need the full barn like thing on top it would be great reason to skip the turret.

No turret cuts cost, as well.

 

 

 

 

 

[A Canadian Cat]

7 hours ago, The_Capt said:

When we see threats in terms of their unmanned systems capacity and not numbers of tanks/AFVs we will know the world has finally turned.

That's a lagging indicator as the financial people like to say. Reality will change long before our reporting on what's threatening changes. "When we see threats in terms of their unmanned systems capacity and not numbers of tanks/AFVs we will know the world has finally agreed that things have turned."

But I think you knew that already.

[dan/california]

20 minutes ago, Haiduk said:

In short about fail of UKR defense near Toretsk - there is long tweet about it, but in short - general Sodol', comamnder of OTUV "Khortytsia" (zone from Kupiansk to Vuhledar) despite objections of brigade commanders gave the order to rotate two brigades simultainously from Toretsk to Chasiv Yar. On their place he moved battered units from other directions and part of 41st mech.brigade, which he put to defend Toretsk from south - from New-York settlement. Toretsk/Horlivka area long time was calmest part of frontline, so Sodol' maybe thought nothing bad will happen. But happened as always - Russians cought rotation time and attacked with multiple small infantry groups. In New-York and Pivdenne area there are many wast lands, abandoned coal mine sites, covered by heavy trees and bushes. In New-York area Russians penetrated through these bushes in one narrow place, and captured southern part of settlement. There was a chance to cut them, but command of 41st brigade did nothing. Moreover, on this direction brigade command operated by attached units - they mixed people from different squads and companies on micro-positions. Nobody knew in these "jungles" who is their neighbour. Russians used DNR forces in UKR uniform, who can speak Ukrainian and there some accidents, when DNR troops just shoot out UKR squads, when they though this own troops came. And this sh..t also led to many friendly fire and new deaths, when other units now in any unfamiliar soldier in UKR uniform had seen potential enemy. 

West from Toretsk, Russians almost without resistance took UKR positions in Shumy and eneterd to Pivdenne - brigade, which had to settle positions just hadn't time to do this in usual chais of such big rotation. 

Now we have another problem, but generals still say "situation is hard but under full control" 

Given that rotations have been Ukraine's weak spot for the whole war, it seem whatever is worse than just nuts to attempt two of them at once, side by side. I am I correctly understanding that the guy that did this has been relieved of command?

[billbindc]

42 minutes ago, dan/california said:

Hey JonS rained all over my parade for saying that two thousand pages ago....

 

AI isn't going to revolutionize as many things as folks imagine...but one thing that it is likely to is the ability to filter noise to isolate particular sounds and at great distance.  

[dan/california]

8 minutes ago, billbindc said:

AI isn't going to revolutionize as many things as folks imagine...but one thing that it is likely to is the ability to filter noise to isolate particular sounds and at great distance.  

It doesn't take all that many revolutions to have a heck of an impact.

[dan/california]

Quote

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/whats-that-bird-song-merlin-bird-id-can-tell-you/#

What’s That Bird Song? Merlin Bird ID Can Tell You

 

Yeah that tech is already moving right along

 

12 minutes ago, billbindc said:

AI isn't going to revolutionize as many things as folks imagine...but one thing that it is likely to is the ability to filter noise to isolate particular sounds and at great distance.  

Watling''s book says AESA radar is not currently getting the press it deserves either.

Quote

 

“AESA radar can combine these functions on a single platform. Thus, an airborne AESA radar will reliably detect moving objects on the ground, adversary radar, artillery fires and other aircraft over considerable distances. Whether it records and classifies these detections is a function of the software directing and supporting it, rather than the hardware’s capability. Furthermore, if the radar moves, then an AESA radar can create a synthetic aperture to generate an image of an area of interest at considerable resolution. Thus, if a radar is tracking a suspicious object that goes static and therefore disappears from the radar screen, it can then be captured through SAR and thereby identified”

Excerpt From
The Arms of the Future
Jack Watling
This material may be protected by copyright.

 

When someone with competence, resources, and the right clearances lets AI loose on AESA radar data at scale, You will get off the charts levels of information. Or maybe they already have, and just haven't told us yet.

It is an interesting question if large surveillance planes can be protected when people are managing to put missiles like the SM-6 on airplanes, per the post someone put up yesterday. I assume the Russian's and the Chinese are attempting similar things. Protecting these platforms might one of the areas where laser based defense systems make sense, even if they have to be put on a second 767. I am sort of assuming a modern /near future AESA based AWACS can handle its own radar jamming. They will need an awful lot of defending from other threats though.

[chrisl]

3 hours ago, ArmouredTopHat said:

I personally think that the tank is potentially replaceable, just that currently there isn't really something that can do so right now, for reasons I have explained earlier. Clearly the majority here think the tank is dead, that is fine and everyone is more than titled to their opinion of such. I dont mind playing devils advocate in that regard.
 

Wait, what?

It's already been replaced, and the parking lots of old tanks just haven't been cleared out yet.  The rest of your same post that I cut from the quote pretty much summarizes it.

It's all about C4(or 5?)ISR+precision, and how the precision is delivered doesn't really matter.  Up until the mid 1970s, ISR on the ground was practically limited to LOS with binoculars plus some broad view from an airplane. In the mid 1970s, electro-optics+microelectronics began making the world, including the ground environment, more transparent and making it faster to distribute that information.  The tank remained useful because at the "guy standing in a field" scale it still could do local ISR+precision quite well and carried enough protection to last at least a few minutes on the battlefield statistically.  

Fast-forward to "I'm sitting in a home office within arms reach of a few hundred TB of storage and more computers than I can count that would have been considered supercomputers when I was in graduate school" and that's over.  High performance, low power, extremely compact computing power is essentially free.  SDR is practically free and fits on a thumb drive.  Battery tech has created bonkers energy density at low cost and high efficiency. High school kids can build and launch satellites as part of their space club.  They get capable ISR drones under the christmas tree and could build FPV drones in their aerospace club if they could get ahold of RPG-7 warheads (fortunately those aren't *that* easy to come by in the US). We're living in the future.

And unbelievably, about 10 years ago I even started having my thanksgiving menu and recipes planned out on a laptop that was in the kitchen during meal prep.

[chrisl]

6 minutes ago, dan/california said:

Yeah that tech is already moving right along

 

Watling''s book says AESA radar is not currently getting the press it deserves either.

When someone with competence, resources, and the right clearances lets AI loose on AESA radar data at scale, You will get off the charts levels of information. Or maybe they already have, and just haven't told us yet.

It is an interesting question if large surveillance planes can be protected when people are managing to put missiles like the SM-6 on airplanes, per the post someone put up yesterday. I assume the Russian's and the Chinese are attempting similar things. Protecting these platforms might one of the areas where laser based defense systems make sense, even if they have to be put on a second 767. I am sort of assuming a modern /near future AESA based AWACS can handle its own radar jamming. They will need an awful lot of defending from other threats though.

Even scarier: with enough compute (and I suspect enough isn't very much by modern standards), you can passively use all the other RF sources in your neighborhood as the transmitters and do radar without your own active transmitter.  The math fairly well understood but kind of compute intensive.

[ArmouredTopHat]

4 minutes ago, chrisl said:

It's already been replaced, and the parking lots of old tanks just haven't been cleared out yet.  The rest of your same post that I cut from the quote pretty much summarizes it.

Does not explain active new production of tanks from a wide variety of countries, including the two currently fighting. You are mixing up the legacy of a cold war with new production.

If tanks have been replaced why are they still in most armies? Most NATO countries have them. 

[dan/california]

3 minutes ago, chrisl said:

Even scarier: with enough compute (and I suspect enough isn't very much by modern standards), you can passively use all the other RF sources in your neighborhood as the transmitters and do radar without your own active transmitter.  The math fairly well understood but kind of compute intensive.

How big of a data center could you stuff into a 767? When you think about power, and cooling, and the performance of NVIDIAS latest stuff?

Edited Thursday at 08:49 PM by dan/california

[dan/california]

15 minutes ago, chrisl said:

Even scarier: with enough compute (and I suspect enough isn't very much by modern standards), you can passively use all the other RF sources in your neighborhood as the transmitters and do radar without your own active transmitter.  The math fairly well understood but kind of compute intensive.

Is there all that much point in trying to be stealthy with what is essentially a modified airliner? Or do you think you could put the sensors for what you are talking about on a stealth bomber of some sort?

[chrisl]

11 minutes ago, ArmouredTopHat said:

Does not explain active new production of tanks from a wide variety of countries, including the two currently fighting. You are mixing up the legacy of a cold war with new production.

If tanks have been replaced why are they still in most armies? Most NATO countries have them. 

You missed the second part of the sentence: "the parking lots haven't been cleared out yet".

How many countries on that graphic have been involved in a conventional ground war recently? When was the last time an Abrams was used in combat outside Ukraine?  Against whom?  So they still have full parking lots.

Ukraine and Russia are still using (and at low levels producing) them because they both need everything they can get to fight with, and they already have the infrastructure to keep doing it.

How many videos do we see of tanks destroying things?  There were a number at the start of the Ukraine war, but fewer and fewer over time.  The tanks basically provide precision HE infantry support, as they were originally intended for in the early part of the last century.  There are more effective ways to do that that are currently in use.

The US was still building battleships throughout WWII.  As previously pointed out - no battleship whose keel was laid down after Pearl Harbor saw combat in WWII.  Meanwhile, the allies cranked out ~180 aircraft carriers and countless aircraft.

The tank is currently on the endangered species list and you're just arguing that we should implement the same protections we do for wildlife.

[photon]

23 minutes ago, ArmouredTopHat said:

If tanks have been replaced why are they still in most armies? Most NATO countries have them. 

Vehicles in inventory is a lagging indicator. The United States, Britain, Italy, France (sort of), and Japan all had battleships in inventory in 1944, at least three years after astute people realized that they were no longer useful for power projection.

[photon]

1 minute ago, chrisl said:

The US was still building battleships throughout WWII.

This, in passing, was a sign of our hilarious naval production dominance. When Japan, our primary naval adversary, was desperately trying to scrape together enough fuel to allow its existing battleships to sortie, we kept building and fueling ships we considered mostly unnecessary. http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm nicely lays out the extent to which naval warfare in WW2 was anything but a peer-on-peer conflict.

[chrisl]

24 minutes ago, dan/california said:

How big of a data center could you stuff into a 767? When you think about power, and cooling, and the performance of NVIDIAS latest stuff?

I have crap for electricity in my house, with the home office on the same circuit as the kitchen outlets (fridge, toaster, espresso machine, air fryer, microwave, whole house fan, rice cooker) and it's not a problem unless I try to run three devices intended to produce heat at the same time.  And I don't have AC.

[chrisl]

13 minutes ago, dan/california said:

Is there all that much point in trying to be stealthy with what is essentially a modified airliner? Or do you think you could put the sensors for what you are talking about on a stealth bomber of some sort?

It's sort of complicated, but to first order you'd probably make it about the same size as a phased array used for the same purpose.  

[ArmouredTopHat]

4 minutes ago, photon said:

Vehicles in inventory is a lagging indicator. The United States, Britain, Italy, France (sort of), and Japan all had battleships in inventory in 1944, at least three years after astute people realized that they were no longer useful for power projection.

 

5 minutes ago, chrisl said:

You missed the second part of the sentence: "the parking lots haven't been cleared out yet".

This entirely ignores current or planned production of new tanks. I literally pointed out Lithuania ordering new Leopard 2s These are going to be new builds. Its not just simply a case of everyone sitting on their stockpiles until they run out. 

 

6 minutes ago, chrisl said:

Ukraine and Russia are still using (and at low levels producing) them because they both need everything they can get to fight with, and they already have the infrastructure to keep doing it.

Sounds like they have a role then!

 

6 minutes ago, chrisl said:

How many videos do we see of tanks destroying things?  There were a number at the start of the Ukraine war, but fewer and fewer over time.  The tanks basically provide precision HE infantry support, as they were originally intended for in the early part of the last century.  There are more effective ways to do that that are currently in use.

We need to be very wary of confirmation bias and the fact that drone based munitions are inherently have by nature a more accessible nature. Just because we dont see as much of it doesn't mean its not doing a lot of work. 

[The_Capt]

1 hour ago, A Canadian Cat said:

Huh? Don't you mean the history is on the side of the "think differently" side?

From the point of view of being correct I mean.

I suppose you could have meant those that "think differently" loose the battle for change to the "leave it like it is but some how do it better" side. Is that it? We see through out history that side can hold on until much longer that expected. At some point though reality reaches out and kicks them in the balls.

Awkward wording on my part - yes, thinking differently usually loses the argument for a long time before things flip.  Then everyone races to claim that it was their idea all along.  We also can over correct when this happens - see the crazy ideas with nuclear weapons in the 50s.  Yet even in that there was the whole “duck and cover” and winnable nuclear wars ideas.  Humans tend to lean backwards, not forwards.  I think it has to do with us being middle of a food chain.  We can definitely adapt, it is our strong suit, but we are normally very cautious doing so.  And then sometimes we aren’t…one has to wonder how we made it this far.