How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[dan/california]

 

2 minutes ago, cyrano01 said:

Back from cycling to the dentist, and not entirely convinced that self-driving cars are likely to be any worse than the current man-in-the-loop variety, at least the self driving sensors are likely to be switched on rather than devoted to texting or social media...need an RPG.

If we move the discussion to bicycle safe street design, Steve will have us shot! 

[Battlefront.com]

6 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Until those little micro-drones with DPICM can fly directly into those trenches and bunkers to clean house...no I think JasonC is correct.  One could try to cut off logistics, but these are deliberate defence positions with stockpiles along really long frontages, so that plan would take more time than the Russians likely have.  Tunneling?

I think the Switchblade type drone is just about what is needed, but not quite.  What is needed is rotor based suicide drone with both impact and remote detonation options.  For situations that have no doors, fly right in and detonate.  Once people learn to put up a barricade in front of the entrance, ram it and blow through it and follow up with a second drone to detonate inside.

That's the future, of course.  Is there an option to use right now?  Yes, there is.

They homemade drone "bombers" should be able to do the trick quite nicely.  Hover directly over the entrance to a covered position and drop a grenade at the mouth.  If the fragmentation effect doesn't get them, the "oh crap they know exactly where we are" effect probably will encourage them to leave.

Steve

[billbindc]

13 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

That and aerial drones (as opposed to UGVs) don't have to worry about running into things, therefore you don't need the sensor and processing power that self driving cars do.

Steve

A simple proximity sensor would be good enough and take almost no processing power at all. 

[dan/california]

I wonder how many of them lived long enough to realize they were bleeped?

[Battlefront.com]

11 minutes ago, cyrano01 said:

Back from cycling to the dentist, and not entirely convinced that self-driving cars are likely to be any worse than the current man-in-the-loop variety, at least the self driving sensors are likely to be switched on rather than devoted to texting or social media...need an RPG.

In my state there has been a huge spike in pedestrians hit by vehicles.  It seems to be a national trend in the US at least.  This is a snipit I easily found from last year:

Quote

Nationally, more than 20,000 people died on U.S. roads in the first six months of 2021 showing the largest six-month increase ever recorded in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System’s history. This puts the country on track to have one of the highest years for losses from motor vehicle crashes in recent years, the bureau of highway safety said.  

This itself is totally off topic for this thread, by a WIDE margin, but I think it illustrates a point that might be missed by critics of drones.  It would be nice if unmanned vehicles could do everything perfectly all the time, but news flash... that's not the standard we apply to the manned equivalents when we judge their effectiveness on the battlefield.  Instead, we apply far more reasonable standards of cost:benefit.  I can not conceive of a situation where autonomous drones couldn't be competitive with, if not superior to, manned equivalents.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

5 minutes ago, billbindc said:

A simple proximity sensor would be good enough and take almost no processing power at all. 

Might be difficult to use proximity sensors when approaching a complex structural environment.  For example, dropping into a trench might put the drone within inches of an earthen wall before getting close to the opening.  I think such an operation needs more control.  In fact, until autonomy is in play the operator would simply opt when to detonate, be it externally to breach a barrier or internally.  Simple manual detonation is all that's needed.

Steve

[dan/california]

2 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

In my state there has been a huge spike in pedestrians hit by vehicles.  It seems to be a national trend in the US at lest:

This itself is totally off topic for this thread, by a WIDE margin, but I think it illustrates a point that might be missed by critics of drones.  It would be nice if unmanned vehicles could do everything perfectly all the time, but news flash... that's not the standard we apply to the manned equivalents when we judge their effectiveness on the battlefield.  Instead, we apply far more reasonable standards of cost:benefit.  I can not conceive of a situation where autonomous drones couldn't be competitive with, if not superior to, manned equivalents.

Steve

There are at least ten or twenty Russian tanks that just drove off a bridge or something like aren't there? I mean verified, photographed and posted on Oryx?

[The_Capt]

18 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

They homemade drone "bombers" should be able to do the trick quite nicely.  Hover directly over the entrance to a covered position and drop a grenade at the mouth.  If the fragmentation effect doesn't get them, the "oh crap they know exactly where we are" effect probably will encourage them to leave.

This is true, we have seen this.  There was that one were they dropped a grenade right through a sunroof.  However, this would have to be done en masse along a frontage right before attempting breakthrough.  Oh man, that is a video I want to see.

[dan/california]

3 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

This is true, we have seen this.  There was that one were they dropped a grenade right through a sunroof.  However, this would have to be done en masse along a frontage right before attempting breakthrough.  Oh man, that is a video I want to see.

We haven't seen Switchblades, or the equivalent employed by the five ton truckload yet. If we don't see it before the end of this war. We will surely see it on day one of the next one.

Edited May 11, 2022 by dan/california
dropped a word

[Battlefront.com]

And so it begins.  Ukraine is starting up its first warcrimes trial against a 21 year old soldier who killed an unarmed civilian.  It is yet another indication of how totally Putin's plan failed to achieve its stated aims.  Not only is the Ukrainian government still functional, but it is holding Russians accountable for their behavior while the war is still being fought.

https://thehill.com/policy/international/3484475-russian-prisoner-to-be-tried-in-first-war-crimes-case-in-ukraine/

Steve

[DesertFox]

19 minutes ago, dan/california said:

I wonder how many of them lived long enough to realize they were bleeped?

LOL, looks like my pixeltruppen, when the AI decided for the enemy BMP coy to cross that river at the single available bridge all at the same time ...

[Battlefront.com]

5 minutes ago, dan/california said:

We haven't seen Switchblades, or the equivalent employed by the five ton truckload yet. If we don't see it before the end of this war. We will surely see it on day one of the next one.

Switchblade's main drawback is that it isn't a drone, it is a flying munition.  If you know where your target is, and it is in a relatively exposed position, then Switchblade works fine.  But if the target requires subtle guidance it isn't.

Steve

[billbindc]

19 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

In my state there has been a huge spike in pedestrians hit by vehicles.  It seems to be a national trend in the US at least.  This is a snipit I easily found from last year:

This itself is totally off topic for this thread, by a WIDE margin, but I think it illustrates a point that might be missed by critics of drones.  It would be nice if unmanned vehicles could do everything perfectly all the time, but news flash... that's not the standard we apply to the manned equivalents when we judge their effectiveness on the battlefield.  Instead, we apply far more reasonable standards of cost:benefit.  I can not conceive of a situation where autonomous drones couldn't be competitive with, if not superior to, manned equivalents.

Steve

Staying OT but perhaps useful to illustrate the complexity of circumstance on behavior and both of them on systems: the thinking is that covid drove down car times which did several things: 1 it put more pedestrians on the streets, 2 it reduced congestion which *sped* up the cars that were there and 3 all of that driving down time blunted the skills associated. That was not at all where expectations thought we would be.

[Battlefront.com]

10 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

This is true, we have seen this.  There was that one were they dropped a grenade right through a sunroof.  However, this would have to be done en masse along a frontage right before attempting breakthrough.  Oh man, that is a video I want to see.

This gets back to the larger discussion about mass and the thinking that you can do a slow grind that produces rapid results.

Picture a typical battalion scale offensive action with the sort of preconditions I covered above (i.e. defender is not in great shape).  How many points in front of the battalion are likely to be contested to the extent that they have to be singled out for extra special attention?  A handful.  Of those, how many of them are extensive?  Likely none.  If you have 2-3 bombers available you could probably render those defensive points ineffective rather quickly when you add other effects into the mix.

Picture the defender of roughly platoon sized strength spread out in 3-4 reinforced defensive points.  The morning starts out quiet, then there is a light sprinkling of artillery that causes the defenders to go to ground.  While this is going on the bombers advance onto the position, but not close enough to accidentally get tossed by friendly artillery fire.  Artillery pauses for a few minutes, bombers move into position, drop their bombs, and hopefully casualties occur.  If not, then panicked guys race out into the open just as another volley of artillery comes down onto them.  The drones are fast so they can get out of the area before the rounds come in.

If all goes well, a defensive position could be eliminated within an hour at the start of the day, leaving the rest of the day for exploitation.

Don't need masses of drones or artillery to make this happen.

Steve

[dan/california]

9 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Switchblade's main drawback is that it isn't a drone, it is a flying munition.  If you know where your target is, and it is in a relatively exposed position, then Switchblade works fine.  But if the target requires subtle guidance it isn't.

Steve

Yes it is, but it is a VERY small technical leap program 100 of them simultaneously detonate in every single zig zag of a major trench system, at the same time in perfect coordination with the assault. I mean the Russians can't get this done, they are proven military incompetents, but the Ukrainians could, with a few months to work on it, and a budget. I suspect it is WELL within Chinese capability if they applied themselves.

[The_Capt]

3 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Don't need masses of drones or artillery to make this happen.

And this would be the precision argument.  To do this you need very high precision.  Also, at this point you are not slow and grinding anymore.  A reinforce platoon in the defence gone in an hour is pretty near the metrics we had for manoeuvre warfare before all this, particularly if you can upscale it.

[The_Capt]

15 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Switchblade's main drawback is that it isn't a drone, it is a flying munition.  If you know where your target is, and it is in a relatively exposed position, then Switchblade works fine.  But if the target requires subtle guidance it isn't.

Steve

As I understand it, the Switchblade acts like a drone right up until you lock it in and send it on its terminal attack.  So it can loiter directed by an operator above a target until you get a clear fix and then hit.  There is a time constraint though.

[Battlefront.com]

9 minutes ago, billbindc said:

Staying OT but perhaps useful to illustrate the complexity of circumstance on behavior and both of them on systems: the thinking is that covid drove down car times which did several things: 1 it put more pedestrians on the streets, 2 it reduced congestion which *sped* up the cars that were there and 3 all of that driving down time blunted the skills associated. That was not at all where expectations thought we would be.

Added to existing failure point of an increase in texting while driving behavior.  Agreed.

Back to why this is relevant to this discussion, drones and their applications should be judged against what it might be replacing on the battlefield.  The arguments that existing capabilities are not going to be significantly altered by drones that can't achieve their full advertised capabilities is inherently flawed.  "Good enough" when you're talking about systems that cost millions of USD isn't the same as "good enough" for system that cost as little as hundreds of USD.

The mass issue is, still, a problem that drones haven't yet addressed.  And it's not just mass of systems, though that is certainly part of it, but mass of fire.  An Apache swooping in over a column of 50 vehicles has the capacity to destroy (not just freak out) all 50.  No single drone can do that and probably never will.

What I envision is a single, fairly expensive, drone getting over that column that can rapidly switch targets.  Designate Target 1, send in a Switchblade type munition.  BOOM.  Switch to Target 2, send in another Switchblade.  BOOM, swich to Target 3... so on and so forth.  This requires a bunch of things that currently don't exist but ALMOST exist.  As in it could exist within this war without too much difficulty.

Steve

[Suleyman]

In just 3 pics I see 20+ AFVs destroyed together with a picture not from the pontoon crossing. Those are crazy losses, RU command has to be snorting something illegal to only have one pontoon bridge for crossing. One thing I don't like about this conflict is putting music into videos where people are getting obliterated. Both sides do it I end up muting every video. 

Edited May 11, 2022 by Suleyman

[Battlefront.com]

3 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

As I understand it, the Switchblade acts like a drone right up until you lock it in and send it on its terminal attack.  So it can loiter directed by an operator above a target until you get a clear fix and then hit.  There is a time constraint though.

Yes, but it has very limited loiter time and you can't guide it into a target directly.  You basically have to know exactly where the target, get it into position, lock on, and then it's just like any other precision munition.  You can't delicately get it into a trench and fly it right into the laps of the defenders sheltering under cover.

The other shortcoming of the Switchblade is that (as I understand it) once it's deployed it's not recoverable if the target becomes un-engable.  A drone can return to base.

Steve

[cyrano01]

7 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

What I envision is a single, fairly expensive, drone getting over that column that can rapidly switch targets.  Designate Target 1, send in a Switchblade type munition.  BOOM.  Switch to Target 2, send in another Switchblade.  BOOM, swich to Target 3... so on and so forth.  This requires a bunch of things that currently don't exist but ALMOST exist.  As in it could exist within this war without too much difficulty.

 

Back in pre-history (well the mid 80s) I can recall being involved in modelling target selection and allocation algorithms for an potential, autonomous, unmanned air weapon that would cruise down roads detecting columns of enemy vehicles and dispensing the good news in the form of guided sub-munitions. I am beginning to think the technology has caught up with the idea forty odd years on...

[Battlefront.com]

26 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

And this would be the precision argument.  To do this you need very high precision.  Also, at this point you are not slow and grinding anymore.  A reinforce platoon in the defence gone in an hour is pretty near the metrics we had for manoeuvre warfare before all this, particularly if you can upscale it.

Not quite

In the scenario I've outlined the majority of the enemy's front is rolled up by conventional means, which would include all kinds of non-precision effects.  Even the strong point attack I've outlined is largely non-precision.  It's just that precision attacks are used to facilitate larger outcomes than what the individual strike does.

Think about it this way...

If you want to wipe out 50 vehicles in a column behind the lines you can either drop a ton of conventional pain on it (artillery/bombs) or you have to use a ton of precision munitions that you likely don't have access to.  Both are what we are describing as "massed fire".

However, what if you used a single precision munition to ensure the first vehicle in the column is blocking the road just ahead of laying down a non-precision artillery strike on the rest of the column?  This achieves the same end result as the massed precision fire, but far more inline with current (and likely future) capabilities.  The key to making this happen is realtime eyes on the column and artillery that can get into action faster than the vehicles can withdraw.

So you say this is still massed fire.  Yes, it is.  However, it's not a requirement for the type of operation I've outlined.  You could get the desired effect by simply breaking that 50 vehicle column up and not destroying every single one of them right there.  The primary concept is to disrupt their effectiveness and if they are driving into trees, off bridges, into bogging in a field, driving to the rear, crashing into each other... well, that's good

As for the grind issue, this can either be a part of the slow grind (as Ukraine has been doing) or part of a faster tempo operation.  It works equally as well from where I sit.  However, the overall operation I described above is coming after the slow grind as it is the way to achieve the prerequisite conditions to make a light infantry centric exploitation attack viable (including low friendly casualties).

Put another way, you do the slow grind for a couple of weeks and then you do the fast attack with light forces for a couple of days.  Neither phase requires large scale employment of mass, which is (I think) the issue we're trying to get our finger on... how to achieve traditional breakthrough exploitation without requiring traditional mass.  Right?

Steve

[dan/california]

4 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Yes, but it has very limited loiter time and you can't guide it into a target directly.  You basically have to know exactly where the target, get it into position, lock on, and then it's just like any other precision munition.  You can't delicately get it into a trench and fly it right into the laps of the defenders sheltering under cover.

The other shortcoming of the Switchblade is that (as I understand it) once it's deployed it's not recoverable if the target becomes un-engable.  A drone can return to base.

Steve

Yes, but for a major set piece attack it is a SMALL technical leap to have every drone preprogrammed with both the GPS coordinates, and an hour old image of the section of trench it is supposed to hit. Preprogram everything, flight path, the attack angle aligned with the trench angle, the whole bit. And then just have them either hit the whole system at once when your troops are close enough to make them man the actual fighting positions, or key on movement in their tiny little assigned trench zone. 

[Battlefront.com]

Just now, cyrano01 said:

Back in pre-history (well the mid 80s) I can recall being involved in modelling target selection and allocation algorithms for an potential, autonomous, unmanned air weapon that would cruise down roads detecting columns of enemy vehicles and dispensing the good news in the form of guided sub-munitions. I am beginning to think the technology has caught up with the idea forty odd years on...

Yes, the technology is there right now.  The question is if sub munitions is going to be something that Western countries put back in play.  A very high level decision would need to be made that a) the weapons are legal and b) they would be used if made available.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

Just now, dan/california said:

Yes, but for a major set piece attack it is a SMALL technical leap to have every drone preprogrammed with both the GPS coordinates, and an hour old image of the section of trench it is supposed to hit. Preprogram everything, flight path, the attack angle aligned with the trench angle, the whole bit. And then just have them either hit the whole system at once when your troops are close enough to make them man the actual fighting positions, or key on movement in their tiny little assigned trench zone. 

This would work for zapping something like an entire trenchline, but it won't work for anything that is mobile.  Putting all that work into targeting a grouping of vehicles only to get the word they have moved would quickly discourage such concepts.

The main issue now is that something has to keep a target in its cross hairs.  Be that a laser designator or an optical system.  A single drone being able to designate/track multiple targets concurrently is a capability that isn't likely to exist any time soon.  Therefore, rapid re-targeting is what I think should be aimed for.  It works equally well for fixed or mobile targets and can be done without pre-planning.

Steve