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CommieGIR posted:They are importing artillery shells from North Korea and Ukraine has been actively denying them ammo by blowing their dumps up with HIMARS. I'm not disagreeing with you overall, but isn't the reason trench warfare became a thing of the past the rise of air power?
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Sep 10, 2022 01:08
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Stultus Maximus posted:I'm not disagreeing with you overall, but isn't the reason trench warfare became a thing of the past the rise of air power? And guided weapons, and mobile/mechanized warfare.
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Sep 10, 2022 01:10
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Trench warfare died when mechanized infantry and armored cavalry became a thing. As soon as advancing units could pursue troops who were retreating with a reasonable expectation that the retreating troops would not be able to about-face and lay into the advancing (unprotected) army with machine guns, trench warfare died and maneuver warfare was born in its place. Air power was already a thing in WWI, but it didn't do much to break the stalemate, as without a protected way to advance, ground troops could not quickly seize positions which were weakened by aerial or artillery bombardment.
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Sep 10, 2022 01:22
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“Dug in” != literal 19-teens trench warfare. Prepared defenses are still in the most bleeding edge modern military manuals.
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Sep 10, 2022 01:23
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orange juche posted:Trench warfare died when mechanized infantry and armored cavalry became a thing. As soon as advancing units could pursue troops who were retreating with a reasonable expectation that the retreating troops would not be able to about-face and lay into the advancing (unprotected) army with machine guns, trench warfare died and maneuver warfare was born in its place. I disagree. A number of assaults in WW1 achieved their initial expectations after even short barrages. Creeping barrages had great effect in protecting advancing troops, and they would often seize the German front trenches. The problem lay with the NEXT line of trenches a ways back from the first set of trenches, which were out of range of the British/French artillery, and also the trenches the attacker had just taken were sited by the undamaged artillery of the Germans. The tank was designed to be a form of mobile, non horse drawn artillery that could keep up with the advancing ground troops and provide support for the next set of trenches. Except the tanks were very unreliable and soon countered by AP rounds fired from anti tank rifles. Germany didn't lose the war because of combined arms or tanks or even maneuver, they lost simply because the Allies were able to do what Germany tried and failed at Verdun, they ran them out of men and broke the German morale. Even in WW2 and (and to a lesser extent, Korea) fixed fortifications were really good at stopping mobile forces. Just ask the Germans attacking the Maginot Line, Patton attacking Metz or the NK's attacking Pusan. Today, fixed fortifications still work as long as the enemy does not have air superiority, because while a prepared trench will still stop infantry and armor, that trench and fortification system don't work very well against bunker buster bombs and napalm. Cimber fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Sep 10, 2022 |
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Sep 10, 2022 01:38
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mlmp08 posted:“Dug in” != literal 19-teens trench warfare. Prepared defenses are still in the most bleeding edge modern military manuals. I'm sure that'll start working for Russia any day now
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Sep 10, 2022 01:39
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One of the more recent examples of the value of prepared fortifications and defenses was in a very recent and ongoing conflict where Ukraine used prepared defenses to great effect against a foe with superior firepower. Another example would be Russia and Russian-backed separatists from 2014 to present in the Donbas.
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Sep 10, 2022 01:46
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mlmp08 posted:One of the more recent examples of the value of prepared fortifications and defenses was in a very recent and ongoing conflict where Ukraine used prepared defenses to great effect against a foe with superior firepower. Another example would be Russia and Russian-backed separatists from 2014 to present in the Donbas. Or Russia's superior firepower just sucks, which actually seems to be the case. And 2014 to present in Donbas is completely different and had more to do with Ukrainian military maturity than the capabilities of the defenses. The same quality forces that are being rolled over right now are defending the Donbas.
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Sep 10, 2022 02:02
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We’ll see how it goes.
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Sep 10, 2022 02:10
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not caring here posted:Slap an M2 in a CROWS and it is frighteningly repeatable at very long ranges. ive heard of them using rocks to reach water but this is ridiculous
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Sep 10, 2022 02:40
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this is a gbs post but I think it's a good summary of the last few daysshadow puppet of a posted:Russia is brilliant to choke the Ukraine forces on all fronts not just pows and general lookalikes but also usable heavy equipment, heartening press reports and jaw dropping combat footage.
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Sep 10, 2022 03:10
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anyways shitpost aside, a few observations 1) ukraine internet people infiltrated a bunch of russian telegram channels in the last week and I'd be surprised if they didn't use that to amplify the chaos. in light of that I've been a bit more skeptical of some of the reports of poo poo falling apart. with that said, 2) the sheer amount of footage of destroyed russian positions and especially of captured equipment tells the real story and even as someone hesitant to believe that good things are happening, it's beyond clear at this point that some catastrophic collapse happened. a bunch of the footage is also obviously from ukrainians set up along avenues of retreat that russian forces fled into. I'm curious just how far back russia is going to collapse 3) there's precious little footage of the opposite from any front and while I don't doubt that whatever push happened around kherson was bloody, if Russia's claims to have killed thousands of Ukrainians there were true they would have, like, any photo or video evidence at all of it. If you're killing tons of people and holding ground, it's trivial to go take some pictures or videos or even fly a drone out after. anyways there's more layers to whatever information war poo poo is going on here, but lol so far it's incredibly lopsided. ukrainians got a bunch of the russian 'report uaf movements/footage' bots shut down/inundated with spam before this and lol man it seems to have worked. Also most of the non-russian osint world has not touched ukrainian sourced info for at least the last couple weeks, it's been almost entirely people putting together the pieces of what Russia is putting out.
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Sep 10, 2022 03:25
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To follow up with the above, I'm wondering how much of this retreat is due to the absolute beating Russian logistics have been taking the past few months.
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Sep 10, 2022 03:27
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My understanding is that a lot of trench warfare was down to logistics and communications, not armored cavalry - basically, with good artillery barrages and force concentration it's perfectly possible to overrun the first line of trenches and even for the attacker to take fewer casualties than the defender at first because you're the one deciding where to hit them (their weakest point) and when to hit them (with all your artillery). The trouble is that your troops are now marching by foot across an artillery-shelled moonscape and the only way you, the guy at HQ, know that they were successful is if they either unroll a telegraph wire far back enough from where the frontlines are that they can link up with you or if they send a literal runner to delivery a message to someone who DOES have a telegraph (radio existed but not on the mobile tactical level, I think). In other words, you at HQ don't know if your men are successful, or how successful they are, and who can and should be reinforced and how far further you should be pushing your troops. Furthermore, any reserves and supplies you assemble to reinforce success needs to march out on foot over the top and over the artillery moonscape anyways to back up your disorganized and scattered assault forces (who, incidentally, only really know what THEY'RE doing and how successful THEY were and don't necessarily know how well the second battalion to their left was doing, so even if this or that battalion achieved stunning local success they're not necessarily able to launch a coordinated assault on the second trench line without a lot of time running around coordinating). Meanwhile your opposing number DID have a chance to telegraph back to HQ that they're under heavy attack, which means that while you're waiting to hear where you should reinforce and then waiting for your troops to actually get there, the enemy is already railing in all their reserves right to the front line in secure communications trenches to repel any further assaults you might make and to prepare for a counterattack while their own backline artillery is already targeting no man's land where all your reinforcements and supplies need to go through and giving your men a Very Bad Time. Tanks don't improve this situation at all, since WW1 tanks are just as slow as foot soldiers and don't go any faster or better over the moonscape and still need to give reports and receive orders the same way the footsloggers do. Neither does aircraft, since again WW1 aircraft don't really have enough firepower to make a difference. It is of course also worth remembering that trench warfare was more a feature of the Western Front where the acreage was small enough and armies large enough that you could fill up the entire frontline - on the larger and more open Eastern Front maneuver warfare remained a thing, though trenches were still important. In any event while trenches were one of the defining feature of trench warfare, "trench warfare" describes a whole particular system of battle unique to time and place, and while technology did obsolete trench warfare they didn't obsolete trenches. There's a reason why WW2's advice was for every infantryman to dig a foxhole as soon as they settle in to a new location, and why the Ukrainians themselves produced a slick publicity ad featuring shovels. (Note: Much of my information here drawn from this here blog post by Bret Devereaux, the military historian you might have seen blogging now and then about the war.)
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Sep 10, 2022 03:53
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Tanks today also have to deal with vastly superior anti tank weapons to ever before, e.g. javelins
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Sep 10, 2022 04:10
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Tomn posted:There's a reason why WW2's advice was for every infantryman to dig a foxhole as soon as they settle in to a new location, and why the Ukrainians themselves produced a slick publicity ad featuring shovels. That was a badass video.
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Sep 10, 2022 04:17
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orange juche posted:Air power was already a thing in WWI, but it didn't do much to break the stalemate, as without a protected way to advance, ground troops could not quickly seize positions which were weakened by aerial or artillery bombardment. My dude, airpower in WW I was some scooby doo poo poo where you dropped a grenade out of the cockpit and hoped the wind didn't blow it back in. The recon was pretty good though. (yes, they got better than that, but never particularly good)
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Sep 10, 2022 04:28
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I mean drones in this war are effectively doing the same thing
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Sep 10, 2022 04:31
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Yeah but that's something a civilian could rig together in their garage with commercial parts if they could get someone to spot them the grenade, not the cutting edge of a nation's experimental weapons program. poo poo, the hobby hackjob drones are drastically better in probably ever meaningful regard except maybe operational range?
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Sep 10, 2022 04:34
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psydude posted:I mean drones in this war are effectively doing the same thing Rather more effectively thanks to the whole basically-silently hovering over the target to drop the bomb thing, rather than hucking it from your cockpit as you fly over and hoping it hits anything.
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Sep 10, 2022 04:35
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psydude posted:I mean drones in this war are effectively doing the same thing 100 years from now this era of drone warfare will be talked about the same way probably. hell, 20 years really
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Sep 10, 2022 04:42
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Arrath posted:Rather more effectively thanks to the whole basically-silently hovering over the target to drop the bomb thing, rather than hucking it from your cockpit as you fly over and hoping it hits anything. Sure. It's just just funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same. Basic concepts like deception and the Fabian strategy are still effective. Just like dropping grenades out of an aircraft onto your confused enemy below.
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Sep 10, 2022 04:51
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The Predator drone and the Fairey Battle light bomber from the 1930s are almost the exact same size and payload.
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Sep 10, 2022 04:55
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Looks like the Ukrainians have turned south and are about to encircle Izyum. Forces to the south are attacking north, probably to fix the Russians in place. A few outlets are stating that there could be as many as 20k Russian troops cut off if they don't pull out soon. https://mobile.twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1568364450708701184
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Sep 10, 2022 05:15
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shame on an IGA posted:oof yeah the whole thing is cyrillic and the parser mangled it So I ran that page through Google Translate and sent it to my buddy... 
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Sep 10, 2022 05:21
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Kesper North posted:So I ran that page through Google Translate and sent it to my buddy... ....Lando????
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Sep 10, 2022 05:22
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Herstory Begins Now posted:100 years from now this era of drone warfare will be talked about the same way probably. hell, 20 years really <wiseass student in 2045> Lol that's so silly, why didn't they just build an autodeployed swarm? Sure, proper multilayer intercommunicating swarms of MALE surveillance drones, SEAD drones, and your workhorse payload-droppers was years away still but they had all the prereq technology, why did they sit back and let China do it first? Did they not see drones were the future? <Watches vintage low res 2d footage of soldiers shooting handheld weapons at and running from weaponized commercial drones, interspersed with inventors strapping themselves into obviously unsound flying contraptions while a nasal announcer talks about the Bold New Frontier> I guess people were just dumber in the past
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Sep 10, 2022 05:35
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:....Lando????  Task Force Squirrel Murder will neither confirm nor deny that its operators are executing missions in Ukraine.
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Sep 10, 2022 05:39
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Uncle Enzo posted:<wiseass student in 2045> Real question, how long till we see some poo poo out of Ace Combat like the Arsenal Bird flying wing carrier drones deploying swarms of advanced UCAS and using powerful directed energy weapons to deny airspace to an adversary? A decade? 2? Less? (Seriously though a real life platform equivalent to something like the fictional Arsenal Bird would wipe out entire countries air forces, since it's armed with an entire air wing of agile, dogfighting capable AI powered drones, and it also has entire banks of directed energy weapons to completely dominate the airspace around it, anything that got detected as a hostile contact could potentially be evaporated out of the sky if you could put a powerful enough laser on it. I'm sure some nerds at Skunkworks are already dreaming about it.) E: Love that Namco created a faux MIC advert for the Arsenal Bird https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obP-ztpRBeI orange juche fucked around with this message at 06:23 on Sep 10, 2022 |
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Sep 10, 2022 06:04
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:....Lando???? idgi
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Sep 10, 2022 06:07
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orange juche posted:Real question, how long till we see some poo poo out of Ace Combat like the Arsenal Bird flying wing carrier drones deploying swarms of advanced UCAS and using powerful directed energy weapons to deny airspace to an adversary? A decade? 2? Less? I read "directed energy weapons" to mean MASER or LASER: wouldn't either being effective and legal (Why hello, prohibition on blinding weapons) basically be the death of military aviation? And, for that matter, space based force multipliers and a version of the moon that doesn't have a future equivalent of the helicockter burned into it? Over/under on the speed of Ukrainian advance starting to match the marching speed of a Russian conscript carrying a washing machine?
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Sep 10, 2022 06:30
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IPCRESS posted:I read "directed energy weapons" to mean MASER or LASER: wouldn't either being effective and legal (Why hello, prohibition on blinding weapons) basically be the death of military aviation? And, for that matter, space based force multipliers and a version of the moon that doesn't have a future equivalent of the helicockter burned into it? The use of directed energy weapons to destroy a hostile target is already a thing that has been done. The way around the 1995 Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons is the fact that the weapons are not designed to blind, they're designed to ablate the outer skin of an incoming aircraft/missile until it is destroyed. At current energy levels that are used in these weapons, they're pretty loving effective already, and one of the capabilities pitched by Lockheed for the F-35 Lightning II is a solid-state laser weapon for destruction of aerial targets within line of sight. As far as determining the average land speed of a Russian trooper hauling a washing machine on his back, and advancing slightly quicker than that... I don't really know, I think the Ukrainians would advance faster than that speed since they probably want their washing machines back. orange juche fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Sep 10, 2022 |
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Sep 10, 2022 06:46
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I very much doubt that laser weapons will be the end of military aviation simply because the beam attenuates pretty quickly in atmosphere. You don't have the range of a kinetic weapon.
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Sep 10, 2022 06:51
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orange juche posted:The use of directed energy weapons to destroy a hostile target is already a thing that has been done. The way around the 1995 Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons is the fact that the weapons are not designed to blind, they're designed to ablate the outer skin of an incoming aircraft/missile until it is destroyed. At current energy levels that are used in these weapons, they're pretty loving effective already, and one of the capabilities pitched by Lockheed for the F-35 Lightning II is a solid-state laser weapon for destruction of aerial targets within line of sight. It's not a blinding weapon if being hit in the eyes with it means your head turns into ablating flesh-plasma!
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Sep 10, 2022 07:05
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Kazinsal posted:It's not a blinding weapon if being hit in the eyes with it means your head turns into ablating flesh-plasma! Currently they're not allowed to knowingly fire the weapons at manned things i.e. fighter jets, due to restrictions on using deadly laser weapons directly against humans, though somehow helicopters are fair game. I guess they don't think helicopter pilots are human. Also, eventually someone who is not a signatory to the treaty restricting the use of those sorts of laser weapons will use them against humans, and then what do you do? Abide by the treaty by restricting your own forces against an ostensibly hostile power using them against you? Or do you even the playing field and rework the RoE to allow your side to turn the enemy into crispy critters? orange juche fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Sep 10, 2022 |
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Sep 10, 2022 07:08
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orange juche posted:Currently they're not allowed to knowingly fire the weapons at manned things i.e. fighter jets, due to restrictions on using deadly laser weapons directly against humans, though somehow helicopters are fair game. I guess they don't think helicopter pilots are human. It's a pretty good gamble that any given helicopter is going to kill its occupants so they just assume anyone in them is already fated to meet St. Peter.
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Sep 10, 2022 07:10
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Kazinsal posted:It's a pretty good gamble that any given helicopter is going to kill its occupants so they just assume anyone in them is already fated to meet St. Peter. Judging by the amount of rotary aircraft Russia has lost in the war, that's a pretty safe bet.
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Sep 10, 2022 07:13
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orange juche posted:Currently they're not allowed to knowingly fire the weapons at manned things i.e. fighter jets, due to restrictions on using deadly laser weapons directly against humans, though somehow helicopters are fair game. I guess they don't think helicopter pilots are human. Just giving the pilot a sporting chance to be killed by something other than the helicopter.
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Sep 10, 2022 07:14
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orange juche posted:Real question, how long till we see some poo poo out of Ace Combat like the Arsenal Bird flying wing carrier drones deploying swarms of advanced UCAS and using powerful directed energy weapons to deny airspace to an adversary? A decade? 2? Less? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjUdVxJH6yI (The sound at 2:17 is pretty good) Kesper North posted:I very much doubt that laser weapons will be the end of military aviation simply because the beam attenuates pretty quickly in atmosphere. You don't have the range of a kinetic weapon. No but if those same kinetic weapons get easily shot down by lasers things get interesting.
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Sep 10, 2022 07:54
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Seeing reports that Kupyansk has been taken by Ukraine. They're also attacking a major Russian logistics hub just north of it, and are about to take major choke points near Lyman. This would cut off Russian forces in Izyum from reinforcements coming from Luhansk. e: Per ISW, it's likely that this will precipitate the complete collapse of Russian forces in Izyum. Forget the blow to troop numbers - the sheer amount of equipment that will end up in Ukrainian hands is mind-boggling. psydude fucked around with this message at 08:44 on Sep 10, 2022 |
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Sep 10, 2022 08:35
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