How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[JonS]

44 minutes ago, JonS said:

First off; WTF were the Russians up to having a relaxed range-day on a billiard table within reach of surface fires!?

I'm starting to wonder whether some of Murphy's Rules of Combat need to be re-written, especially

3.  Don't look conspicuous, it draws fire.

and

6.  Try to look unimportant, they may be low on ammo.

In the ordinary run of things, a dozen blokes standing around learning how to use rifles wouldn't appear to be worth a $500,000 missile.

Edited 10 hours ago by JonS

[billbindc]

4 hours ago, ArmouredTopHat said:

Girkin isn't dead?

[Kraft]

Quote

A Western diplomat told the Kyiv Independent that Pyongyang had sent 10,000 soldiers to Russia. Zelensky said that Moscow plans to "actually involve" North Korea in the war in the coming months.

https://kyivindependent.com/north-korea-preparing-10-000-soldiers/

Not sure if this number has been reported here yet.

It seems atleast one side is willing to escalate, meanwhile, there has still been no meaningful response to the hundreds of NK ballistic missiles sent, except a confusing 2ish day period where people thought the striking limit would be removed (and applauded the wise escalation managers boiling the frog at ice age level for it), which turned out to be wrong. 

 

Edited 9 hours ago by Kraft

[Kraft]

15 minutes ago, billbindc said:

Girkin isn't dead?

Not physically. He is dead inside though that might count for something.

[Bearstronaut]

4 minutes ago, Kraft said:

Not sure if this number has been reported here yet.

It seems atleast one side is willing to escalate, meanwhile, there has still been no meaningful response to the hundreds of NK ballistic missiles sent, except a confusing 2 day period where people thought the striking limit would be removed (and applauded the wise escalation managers for it), which turned out to be wrong. 

 

What would you have us do to punish North Korea? They have existed under punishing sanctions for decades. A strike on them would definitely invite a massive conventional retaliation on Seoul and a possible nuclear one on Tokyo or the US west coast. I mean, they are currently going ape***t because somebody flew an unarmed drone over Pyongyang.

[omae2]

1 minute ago, Bearstronaut said:

What would you have us do to punish North Korea? They have existed under punishing sanctions for decades. A strike on them would definitely invite a massive conventional retaliation on Seoul and a possible nuclear one on Tokyo or the US west coast. I mean, they are currently going ape***t because somebody flew an unarmed drone over Pyongyang.

Almost like showing weakness doesn't pay. Ten years ago it was news that they developing nukes the US did nothing to stop it even tho they were in a better position than they are now. If they would have gone down the way Israel takes when it comes to threats things might look different. Now with the escalation spiral we are in it seem like there is only a matter of time before someone blows a nuke to make a point. I'm still confused why the US foreign efforts are concentrated on the middle east when the real threat is on the far east. Decades of miscalculation will be payed in blood i just hope that I'm not the one who has to pay it.

[Kraft]

19 minutes ago, Bearstronaut said:

What would you have us do to punish North Korea? They have existed under punishing sanctions for decades. A strike on them would definitely invite a massive conventional retaliation on Seoul and a possible nuclear one on Tokyo or the US west coast. I mean, they are currently going ape***t because somebody flew an unarmed drone over Pyongyang.

Why do you think NK needs to be touched? Sending in more arms and lifting restrictions can be done to equalize, as has been the case before.

Escalation ladder. Except one side is now sending literally thousands of soldiers to fight, kill and die and hundreds of ballistic missiles, while the other is still pussyfooting around limits on russian military airfields and ammo storages, with so few missiles I can count on my hands the time ATACMS could be used on major targets inside Ukraine. There were a lot of opportunities to destroy dozens of russian jets parked within range, but they all dissapeared after the White House starting shaking on long range strikes, and then still got cold feet.

These people will escalation manage themselfs into every possible conflict country going for nuclear arms instead of trusted treaties and guaranntees.

Edited 9 hours ago by Kraft

[Lethaface]

On 10/14/2024 at 5:33 AM, chrisl said:

You don't even need to hack a persons phone.  If you're in a war situation like Ukraine, you can listen for the pings from the phone and track its position.  There are commercially available devices for doing that, mostly sold to police departments.

If you're a government in a war zone, you can use the cell system itself for doing that, without having any access to any particular phone. You just need to know which phone you want to find.  It doesn't even need to be transmitting GPS coordinates if you have a moderate number of tracking receivers - I get accurate realtime  locations of aircraft that are only transmitting a hex code and not full ADS-B data, just from multi-lateralization from a handful of receivers that are all running $30 SDRs feeding raspberry pis that dump to a server that calculates it on the fly.

License plate readers are practically trivial to make.

Such strikes have already been happening a lot in the past in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Obama even intensified them. IIRC they call them 'signature strikes' and there was quite some criticism about m because they were striking weddings, taxi drivers and things like that without necessarily knowing what they were striking; just because their GSMs had been in close proximity to target GSMs they were assumed targets as well (taxi driver), or a group of GSMs (of which some belonged to known targets) together seemed like a target group meeting (wedding).

Apart from the ethical pov, and laws of war, my perception is that such strikes mainly create more 'enemy combatants' than that they eliminate. 
Anyway, having autonomous killer drones to be the business end of such strikes, instead of hellfires fired from drones or plain old air strikes shouldn't be that big of a challenge if you have the killer drones on the ready. 

The thing I'm more afraid of and I have been yapping about for a few years on here, is what if you combine current distributed services software hosting/delivery architecture concepts with attrition/corrosive warfare concepts. I deliberately wont go into too much details and a bit tongue in cheek, but:

In the end warfare is mostly logistics, if a Amazon.mil/WarUntilTheEnemyDoorSAAS solution framework can bring munitions directly to your enemy faster and cheaper, what's not to like? . Of course they'd be supporting all NATO compatible ISTAR integrations for targeting, apart from their own TargetFinder service (which could basically just be their customer database as a searchable catalog lol).
You don't even have to go full machine orgy, selected tube fired munitions or missiles are supported with the BYOD premium ;-). 
Combine that with killer drones and they could be flying out the factory straight into 'business' behind the enemy front, 24/7/365.

A Continuous Destruction Pipeline.

Fortunately the (software) engineering part is quite a challenge, at least from an organizational pov. Not many countries could set something like that up and pay for its upkeep in wartime, let alone during peace. 

 

[The_Capt]

2 hours ago, kimbosbread said:

That’s because this is a white collar jobs program for project managers.

On a more serious note why doesn’t a certain forum member start a Canadian defense company? It does seem like there is a bunch of low hanging fruit that could be pursued without needing a giant MIC behind it.

I really hope a small start up can make some real waves. But I spent 36 years in defence and security, I am burned out and tired beyond description. This thread is about all I can muster in the “business”. 

[The_Capt]

2 hours ago, JonS said:

Hmm. That's exactly what someone did with the SR-71, of which there were orders of magnitude fewer built. Granted the -71 was a bit cheaper, although that was in old money.

Not sure what to do with this one. The SR-71 is an old strategic ISR asset, and F35 is an air superiority system. We were talking about the possible difference between LOS range and altitude. How many times do you want an F35 to try and slalom through the possible gaps in a denial fence? 

The answer is standoff long range fires.

[ArmouredTopHat]

1 hour ago, JonS said:

I'm starting to wonder whether some of Murphy's Rules of Combat need to be re-written, especially

3.  Don't look conspicuous, it draws fire.

and

6.  Try to look unimportant, they may be low on ammo.

In the ordinary run of things, a dozen blokes standing around learning how to use rifles wouldn't appear to be worth a $500,000 missile.

The source suggests these were snipers training specifically, hence the especially expensive sending of a GMLRs cluster in their direction. Probably worth more to kill specialised personnel and their skillsets than some measly conscripts. 

 

Edited 8 hours ago by ArmouredTopHat

[ArmouredTopHat]

A nice little thread detailing the T-80 reserve situation with Russia. In short they are burning through their stocks mind-numbingly fast. 

Edited 8 hours ago by ArmouredTopHat

[Bearstronaut]

44 minutes ago, omae2 said:

Almost like showing weakness doesn't pay. Ten years ago it was news that they developing nukes the US did nothing to stop it even tho they were in a better position than they are now. If they would have gone down the way Israel takes when it comes to threats things might look different. Now with the escalation spiral we are in it seem like there is only a matter of time before someone blows a nuke to make a point. I'm still confused why the US foreign efforts are concentrated on the middle east when the real threat is on the far east. Decades of miscalculation will be payed in blood i just hope that I'm not the one who has to pay it.

Seoul is one of the largest cities in the world. I’ve been there many times. Used to go hiking in some mountains nearby and at the top you could look out and it seemed like the city stretched on endlessly. I’ve never seen anything like it and I grew up 20 miles from NYC. There are thousands of KPA artillery pieces that can hit at least part of that city. War on the Korean Peninsula would mean hundreds of thousands of citizens of Seoul dead within the first hour. That’s not even counting North Korea’s chemical stockpile and short range missiles that can hit Busan, Gwangju, Daegu, or Japan. That is why the U.S. wasn’t proactive in taking out the North Korean nuclear program.

[JonS]

They're labelled as snipers, sure, but ... eh. Ever since there have been rifles, people being shot at have described the enemy as snipers. I'm not inclined to to take the labeling on a twitter video as definitive of ... anything, really.

[ArmouredTopHat]

Another interesting thread highlighting that in the last few months Russia has lost a greater ratio of IFVs to tanks. 

[dan/california]

52 minutes ago, Kraft said:

Why do you think NK needs to be touched? Sending in more arms and lifting restrictions can be done to equalize, as has been the case before.

Escalation ladder. Except one side is now sending literally thousands of soldiers to fight, kill and die and hundreds of ballistic missiles, while the other is still pussyfooting around limits on russian military airfields and ammo storages, with so few missiles I can count on my hands the time ATACMS could be used on major targets inside Ukraine. There were a lot of opportunities to destroy dozens of russian jets parked within range, but they all dissapeared after the White House starting shaking on long range strikes, and then still got cold feet.

These people will escalation manage themselfs into every possible conflict country going for nuclear arms instead of trusted treaties and guaranntees.

The next rung on the escalation ladder, after saying military targets in Russia are fair game for ATACMS and cruise missiles, and sending a lot more of them. Is to reverse the current policy on retired NATO /U.S. F-16 pilots signing up to fly for Ukraine. That should have been done at least a year ago actually. It has been actively discouraged, it needs to actively ENCOURAGED. Ditto for maintenance personnel.

[dan/california]

 

Quote

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-bulwark-podcast/id1447684472?i=1000673491212

interview with Bob Woodward that covers most of todays topics, actually.

 

[JonS]

45 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Not sure what to do with this one. The SR-71 is an old strategic ISR asset, and F35 is an air superiority system. We were talking about the possible difference between LOS range and altitude. How many times do you want an F35 to try and slalom through the possible gaps in a denial fence? 

The answer is standoff long range fires.

people have been 'playing trigonometry' with state-of-the-art air assets ever since there have been some people with state-of-the-art air assets and other people who wanted them gone. It doesn't really matter whether state-of-the-art is a BE-2, a B-17, a U-2, an SR-71, an F-117, a B-2 or an F-35, the game is the same: 'how do I slalom around these defences to do what I want (shoot you, land some explosives on you, take a photo of you, or whatever)?' vs. 'how do I make the slalom course so hard that you can't do what you want?' If you want me to believe that game has ended, you're going to need something a bit more convincing than your reckons.

And yes, granted, there is a variant of the game which goes "how do I punch through some of these defences while slaloming around the others etc etc..." There is also the variant which goes "how many of these defences do I have to slalom around before I can just throw my toys the rest of the way in etc etc ...." But those are both still essentially the same game of trigonometry.

Edited 8 hours ago by JonS

[omae2]

12 minutes ago, Bearstronaut said:

Seoul is one of the largest cities in the world. I’ve been there many times. Used to go hiking in some mountains nearby and at the top you could look out and it seemed like the city stretched on endlessly. I’ve never seen anything like it and I grew up 20 miles from NYC. There are thousands of KPA artillery pieces that can hit at least part of that city. War on the Korean Peninsula would mean hundreds of thousands of citizens of Seoul dead within the first hour. That’s not even counting North Korea’s chemical stockpile and short range missiles that can hit Busan, Gwangju, Daegu, or Japan. That is why the U.S. wasn’t proactive in taking out the North Korean nuclear program.

Yeah well, all the above is still true only you have to ad that they can now send nukes to all of those and a lot of other places as well. Does this look like something that is the better outcome?

[sburke]

anyone see any decent news reports on this?

Vladimir Putin has been dealt another blow after a military airfield in the Moscow oblast was the scene of a huge fire on Wednesday.

Images shared online showed black smoke billowing above the airfield in Chkalovsky, just days after he was rattled by a deadly fireball and his tanks exploded into flames.

[Lethaface]

On 10/16/2024 at 4:43 AM, Battlefront.com said:

Here's something we haven't explicitly stated in simple terms, but for sure have discussed pretty much every page.  See if you like this...

Instead of presuming something can be made survivable, and building to that goal, all new systems should be designed with the assumption that *IF* the system even manages to make to the battlefield it won't survive it's first mission.  If it does make it to the battlefield and survives its first mission, consider that a bonus and not a requirement

Think about all that flows from this concept.  Er, like everything.

Now I know what people might say about force protection systems.  I mean, who would want to design an infantry transport that is not expected to even make it to its forward deployment zone?  Nobody.  So you don't focus on a vehicle being able to remain mission capable against all threats, but instead design it to keep the Human elements safe from all threats.  Designing a "safe box" that is transported by something that is not expected to survive is vastly easier than trying to design a vehicle that can remain functional as a system.  With that design goal you can make lots and lots of cheaper vehicles to transport the "safe box" instead of having a single expensive one that isn't any more survivable.

Put another way, spend your limited resources on keeping your people safe, not keeping vehicles safe.

Steve

That sounds a lot like how I learned to play with Syrian forces in CMSF

It also sounds like a requirement for self healing ephemeral capabilities. If every part of a system can be replaced on the fly as long as there are spares in reserve, the business end of a capability doesn't necessarily needs to be survivable. 

If you have enough spare humans, like Russia seems to have, one can just populate such a system with humans in good ol WW1 fashion.
Back to the current Ukraine war, Russia's advantage is that they don't need to concern themselves with keeping their people safe. It's also it's weakness, but they have already implemented this (your italic):

"Instead of presuming something can be made survivable, and building to that goal, all new systems should be designed with the assumption that *IF* the system even manages to make to the battlefield it won't survive it's first mission.  If it does make it to the battlefield and survives its first mission, consider that a bonus and not a requirement"

[The_Capt]

35 minutes ago, JonS said:

people have been 'playing trigonometry' with state-of-the-art air assets ever since there have been some people with state-of-the-art air assets and other people who wanted them gone. It doesn't really matter whether state-of-the-art is a BE-2, a B-17, a U-2, an SR-71, an F-117, a B-2 or an F-35, the game is the same: 'how do I slalom around these defences to do what I want?' vs. 'how do I make the slalom course so hard that you can't do what you want?' If you want me to believe that game has ended, you're going to need something a bit more convincing than your reckons.

And yes, granted, there is a variant of the game which goes "how do I punch through some of these defences while slaloming around the others etc etc..." There is also the variant which goes "how many of these defences do I have to slalom around before I can just throw my toys the rest of the way in etc etc ...." But those are both still essentially the same game of trigonometry.

Well that is a helluva theory but when have we done it in a shooting war…WW2? I mean perhaps Gulf War but the coalition did not do a lot of slaloming in that one. B2s? Where? Afghanistan? I am sure Taliban AD networks were not really up to snuff.

So we were talking about VTOL systems with Starstreak onboard. Starstreak has a listed rate of 7km and 20,000 feet.  Now does that 7km range shrink if you are targeting up to 20k feet..I don’t think so but fine…let’s say it does. So you can pop a VTOL up to 5000 feet that creates a cone of denial. If you need to not have any air gaps you overlap those ranges. Keep in mind this is in combination with other layers defences.  An airborne Starstreak is pretty cheap compared to an F35, so “I reckon” one can buy a lot of denial for the price of an F35. Denial (as I am sure you know) is about risk and cost. If these system drive the cost-risk too high we are not going to risk a very expensive and hard to replace 5th generation fighter on it like it is a B17 over Germany circa ‘43. Instead the system will standoff and fire deep fires systems - very fast moving precision munitions that are much harder to counter…you know…like missiles?

My point is that if you check the calendar you will note the date…it does not say “1943” or “1965” or even “1988”. It says “2024”. Denial is incredibly cheap and effective…you may have noticed that from this war. We cannot depend on air superiority as our own freedom of action is not guaranteed and while we can deny an opponent, we also cannot deny standoff. So while you are pointing to SR71s doing camera flyovers, the reality is multi-spectral stand off ISR that no one can fully deny nor achieve full freedom of action. So we are at…wait for it…air parity in many ways. We need to learn to fight in that environment…or perhaps re-learn is a better term.

So, “I reckon” that we are in a situation of mutual denial in some ways and being unable to deny in others (long range stand off). No fancy footwork, just fires superior or not. The side that can do that will tip the balance.

[alison]

4 hours ago, The_Capt said:

We need to think like the Ukrainians right now. Cheap, easy and let the kids in the ranks come up with the solutions. A big centralized multi-billion dollar attempt to buy our way out of this mess is not going to work.

This whole argument reminds me of an excellent talk from 1982 that the NSA recently released ahead of their podcast/recruiting push.

It's a 2 hour lecture by a woman who lived through a lot of wars making the case for modernization and standardization of computer hardware and software in the military. Aside from being an entertaining watch in its own right, it's relevant because you can see that even 40+ years ago people in the system already understood the requirement to move faster, think smaller and cheaper, try to leverage COTS etc.

[alison]

double post

Edited 7 hours ago by alison

[JonS]

30 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Well that is a helluva theory but when have we done it in a shooting war…WW2? I mean perhaps Gulf War but the coalition did not do a lot of slaloming in that one. B2s? Where? Afghanistan? I am sure Taliban AD networks were not really up to snuff.

Hmm. Good question.

So, just off the top of my head; WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Cold War, mission planning for Cold War gone hot, Gulf War, mission planning for INDOPACOM shenanigans, Red Flag, ... but I may have missed some.

6 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

So your historical refs are definitely applicable back to about 1945. The rest is pretty weak tea. I would argue that pinning air planning on the hope that a peer opponent is dumb enough to leave gaps in which to slalom in 21st century warfare is not the way to go.

And yet ... slaloming around to exploit capability gaps ("playing trigonometry") is exactly what allowed the U-2 and SR-71 to overfly the USSR, the F-117 to tool around over Baghdad, the Argentinians to attack British ships of the Falklands, etc. If only they'd listened to you, they could've saved themselves a hell of a lot of effort.

 

Edited 7 hours ago by JonS