Russia/Ukraine Crisis 2022-3

[psyanojim]

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[dubsartur]

On the subject of small drones, there are already battlefield solutions emerging which are cheap and logistically simple. Needs must and all that.

I particularly liked this one

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1589638201085657088

Isn't that just a typical 20th century AA setup with 2 or 4 machine guns or 20-40 mm autocannons mounted side by side?  I thought that the big problem was spotting the drones in the first place since their sound, visible, heat, and radar signatures are relatively small.  Isn't another problem that small-calibre AA has a short range, so even if you can stop drones hovering and dropping grenades on you all night, you may not prevent then from spotting you from a distance and directing artillery at you?

[psyanojim]

deleted

[dubsartur]

Isn't that just a typical 20th century AA setup with 2 or 4 machine guns or 20-40 mm autocannons mounted side by side?  I thought that the big problem was spotting the drones in the first place since their sound, visible, heat, and radar signatures are relatively small.  Isn't another problem that small-calibre AA has a short range, so even if you can stop drones hovering and dropping grenades on you all night, you may not prevent then from spotting you from a distance and directing artillery at you?

Actually, thats not quite true. The problem is not detecting and shooting down drones - have a read of this.

https://en.defence-ua.com/analysis/survivability_of_uavs_on_the_battlefield_in_ukraine-5007.html

It looks like that site is summarizing an Economist article which is summarizing https://static.rusi.org/359-SR-Ukraine-Preliminary-Lessons-Feb-July-2022-web-final.pdf  I notice that the Economist quotes the claim that the Russians were firing 10 times as many shells as the Ukrainians in the Donbas which seems to be a Ukrainian claim from when they were begging for HIMARS and tube artillery.  And its a good idea in general to ignore people's claims about the enemy's strength and losses.

There is a big problem that anti-aircraft missiles were priced to kill manned fighters, but isn't there also a problem that older RADAR systems were designed to detect things massing in tons not kilos and with lengths of 5 to 15 metres not 50 to 150 cm?  And the same for other sensors, its just easier to spot a giant aircraft with huge jet engines than a little quadcopter.

Edit: and if a brigade of tanks is driving along a road in artillery range of the bad guys, and a drone spots them and transmits their location, that is bad news even if the drone is shot down 5 seconds later! 

[dubsartur]

This British perspective on countering unmanned aerial vehicles in the RUSI booklet is interesting:

Countering UAS (unmanned aerial systems, British lingo for UAVs) has proven no less important across all domains. For land forces, tactical sub-units must first have a means of detecting the presence of hostile UAS. Frontages must be covered by the means of defeating enemy UAS. Defeating UAS does not mean kinetically destroying them. It simply means denying the UAS the ability to achieve its mission. This could be done through the dazzling of sensors, or denial of navigation or control. The most efficient protection against UAS is EW (electronic warfare) and ensuring that electronic attack and electronic protection is available at all echelons.

There is, nevertheless, a need for kinetic defeat of some kinds of UAS, especially those penetrating operational depth to conduct target acquisition or loitering munitions. It is highly inefficient to have dedicated CUAS batteries in addition to air-defence batteries. Nevertheless, the munitions that air and missile defence batteries employ do not make CUAS missions economical. The answer must be the provision of intermediate munitions that can draw on the common air picture and guidance available to air-defence units but without the cost associated with munitions that must catch and defeat more complex targets. Point defence for critical sites is also an enduring requirement given the ability for long-range UAS to fly below the radar horizon on complex pre-programmed routes and thereby reach static targets in operational depth.

I would have thought a few 7.62 mm machine guns were more cost-effective than a complex jammer (and things like that attract anti-radiation missiles don't they?  And you should be able to program these to fly home if they lose contact with control or whatever the Russian equivalent of GPS is - GLONASS?) but the warfare I understand is with spears and bows.

The other scary thing is that a Ukrainian company of 100-150 guys and gals often has to defend 3 km of front because if they get closer together, precision munitions start dropping on their heads.  I don't know if that is a section here, a section there or what.  The fact that eastern Ukraine is pretty flat, so one machine gun or rocket launcher can cover a lot of that front, must help.

[Jubal]

This BBC piece from different analysts said pretty much what I'd expect - some analysts think Ukraine will win on the battlefield in 2023, others think the conflict will last longer & until one side blinks on the economic & war support side.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-63987113

[dubsartur]

It does seem that the mobiks, plus the Rasputitsa, slowed the collapse of Russian positions east of the Dnieper.  And like I said, in Stellungskrieg its hard to know which side is gaining in relative strength and which side is declining, because nobody reports their own reinforcements and losses accurately and nobody knows the other guy's.  The guys and gals in the trenches can get a sense "they are shelling us more / less than last week" but sometimes that is because they are firing off their stockpiles before they withdraw, or saving ammunition and moving their artillery for the big offensive next week.

It would be interesting to know what the Ukrainians were thinking when they chose not to call up a class of recruits.  Are they struggling to train the ones they already have to the level they want?  Or do they think putting more bodies on the front lines would just give the Russians more targets when the current thinly manned lines can hold out?

Edit: the winter hard-ground season is just starting in the south, and it has two months to go.  So really nobody knows when either side will launch a new offensive.

[Jubal]

Had to edit the thread title to bring another year into the picture.

Also, besides the sad news of the deaths of the Ukrainian Interior ministers in a helicopter crash, there's also the recent news that Germany thinks it's managed to achieve energy independence from Russia according to the right-liberal leader & finance minster Lindner:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64312400

This may embolden German leaders to support Ukraine without worrying as much about domestic pressure.

[dubsartur]

Perun has a theory of how offensives work on the very low density battlefield in most parts of Ukraine with vast numbers of drones and guided munitions: secretly gather your forces, throw a few companies or a battalion's worth of troops against one of the areas where one company is holding 3 km of front, then scatter or entrench before too many explody things start falling out the sky

https://piped.mha.fi/watch?v=UGZi-F3tz-o&t=2595

Edit: I am starting to think that the Ukrainian position on recruits is "its not 1915 and we don't have a massive fertile peasant population, to win this war we want a small well-equipped force that can attack and not lose too many people doing it."  Supposedly the defenders of Bakhmut are mostly Territorial Defense militia, so the rest of the army is in the rear doing something.  And supposedly the International Legion stopped accepting volunteers without combat experience (not just military experience?)

[Jubal]

Yes, it very much looks like Ukrainian war doctrines are converging with NATO ones, in essence: smaller, mobile, flexible forces with good training and kit and officers who get a relative amount of battlefield freedom.

And it also looks like Ukraine will finally get some western tanks, as well, after long delays from Germany.

[dubsartur]

I expanded my earlier comments on why its hard to understand this phase of the war here.

I don't see any good way to judge the two sides' relative rates of gain and expenditure of vehicles or ammunition, but I think its pretty clear that the Ukrainian forces have plenty of troops (no more conscription, rejecting most foreign volunteers), that the Russians are short of them (rushing conscripts into combat, sending naval crews into ground combat, recruiting from prisons, press ganging the Donbas), and that Ukraine is getting increasingly effective equipment while the Russians are falling back on older and older equipment.  About the only area they are improving is drones and Iran and North Korea are not high-tech industrial powerhouses.  You can debate who will run out of shells or AFVs first but I think the personnel situation is clear.

Russia has done a lot of damage to the Ukrainian power grid but not shut it down and so many Ukrainian arms come from outside the country.

Some apologists for Russian failures seem to take the absence of the Russian air force for granted, when we have 30 years of wars in Iraq, former Yugoslavia, Libya, and Syria to show how a power with a capable air force uses it against a mid-sized country with Soviet air defense equipment.  If Russia had air superiority over the front lines, this would be a very different war, but instead they mostly keep their aircraft on their side of the lines and just send drones, rockets, and missiles across.  Small drones are cheap but they carry kilos not tons of munitions!

Edit: Oberst Markus Reisner of the Austrian Army has been impressed by Russian ability to disengage troops from Kyiv and Kherson and redeploy them to other fronts. https://piped.mha.fi/watch?v=EnVMJGrNqAY One reason this war is hard to follow is that the forces on each side are so varied, so you can always point to someone on your side who is doing well and has nice kit and someone on their side who is fumbling around with grandpa's rifle.

[Jubal]

News of today seems to be the Wagner group all but alleging that the army higher ups are stitching them up to scapegoat them for war failures: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64859780

I do wonder if the end of the Russian war effort could be a very dramatic implosion rather than a grinding negotiated peace.

[dubsartur]

Perun also wonders if the endless bloody attacks on Bakhmut are Wagner's attempt to win a conspicuous victory and get more support within the oligarchy.  Their current configuration is better at bite-and-hold offensives than breakthroughs: lots of infantry and artillery, fewer armoured vehicles or aircraft.

The Russian Ministry of Defense is also trying to take control of recruitment in prisons from Wagner.  And miscellaneous actors such as Gazprom are being granted the right to raise their own security forces (technically, its illegal to form a private military company in Russia: Wagner is a "management consulting firm")

Because sometimes people complain to get more resources, and sometimes they hide their difficulties, its hard to tell who is barely holding on and who is doing OK but wants more weapons.  I'm suspicious of the people who are sure that the war is stalemated too although it could happen.  Things would be a lot easier if Germany had just handed over a thousand or so Marders and 500 Leopard tanks last fall from their parks of mothballed vehicles.

[Pentagathus]

What's the reasoning behind setting up private/semi-private security forces? I get that Wagner had been useful for influencing foreign wars without officially using Russian troops, but what's the benefit of setting up private armies? Does this indicate that Putin wants political actors who can provide some kind of check to the official military, or that he's unable to prevent them forming these armies? Are they somehow useful in a way the army aren't?

[dubsartur]

Perun has a few talks about PMCs and Wagner https://piped.mha.fi/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q https://piped.mha.fi/watch?v=hx5mTslkUBs

In their early stage they seem to have been another way for Prigozhin to make money, for Putin to balance the Ministry of Defense, and for the Russian state to unofficially intervene in other countries.  But since the start of the war they ballooned from a few hundred or a few thousand men with light weapons and small vehicles to tens of thousands with tanks and sophisticated aircraft.  Much of that increase is convicts serving six-month terms, so its not sustainable.  But it still added to the Ministry of Defense's limited ability to take in, equip, and train recruits.

Previously Putin got rid of most local security forces and replaced them with Rosguardia (so a governor in Siberia can't have his own guards any more,  they come from the federal government and if Putin has a problem with someone they won't protect him).  Maybe he thinks that PMCs are safer because they are technically illegal.  It still seems like he is not living in the same world I am living in, so its hard to interpret his thinking.