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The War in Ukraine

Ukrainian drone crashes 1,000km inside Russia.


Not exactly a small or stealthy design. There must obviously be some serious gaps in the Russian AD network for it to get 1,000 km inside Russia. Makes you wonder what a low flying F-16 might be able to do.
 
Ukrainian drone crashes 1,000km inside Russia.


Not exactly a small or stealthy design. There must obviously be some serious gaps in the Russian AD network for it to get 1,000 km inside Russia. Makes you wonder what a low flying F-16 might be able to do.
Mathias Rust - 'Hold my beer'.....
 
From the ISW website, the "transparent" battlefield is forcing the Ukrainians to pull their Abrams tanks back from the front in order to protect them.

The Ukrainian military has reportedly pulled US-provided M1A1 Abrams tanks from the frontline in part because of the widespread threat of Russian drones and other strikes. The Associated Press (AP) reported on April 26, citing two unspecified US military officials, that Ukraine has removed Abrams tanks from the frontline partly because Russia’s widespread drone usage has made it too difficult for Ukrainian forces to operate Abrams without Russian forces detecting and striking Abrams with drones.[30] Ukrainian drone operators recently told the Washington Post that the number of drones that both Russian and Ukrainian forces use has made the battlefield “almost transparent” given that up to 100 Russian and Ukrainian reconnaissance and attack drones can operate simultaneously within a 10-kilometer radius.[31] Any armored vehicles that Russian or Ukrainian forces may field on the frontline are visible to each other’s reconnaissance drones, so Ukrainian forces are likely prioritizing efforts to protect the limited number of Abrams tanks they currently possess. Any armored vehicles on the battlefield without active protection and counter-drone systems are highly vulnerable to enemy drone, artillery, and anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) strikes. The Russian government has hyper-fixated on Russia’s ability to destroy Western-made weapon systems to posture Russian military equipment as superior to Western designs. Russia will soon open an exhibition of captured Western equipment in Moscow and has given military and monetary awards to Russian soldiers who destroyed Western armored vehicles.
I'm sure that more effective counters to UAVs will in the near future improve the situation, but I suspect that concentration of forces will always be much more challenging than in the past. Does that mean that pushing combined arms further down in the TOE will be required?
 
Sounds like it’s getting easier and easier to hold ground; harder and harder to take.
 
But is it effective?
It's sheet metal that probably won't stop anything. All it really does is create massive blind spots and limit the main gun's arc, leaving them open to this:
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From the ISW website, the "transparent" battlefield is forcing the Ukrainians to pull their Abrams tanks back from the front in order to protect them.


I'm sure that more effective counters to UAVs will in the near future improve the situation, but I suspect that concentration of forces will always be much more challenging than in the past. Does that mean that pushing combined arms further down in the TOE will be required?

Russia put a slew of effort into trying to clobber those Abram’s. I would expect that C-RAM will be expanded to Maneuver sub units and C-UAS will need to be a Coy/Platoon attachment.



Sounds like it’s getting easier and easier to hold ground; harder and harder to take.
I’m not sure that’s a take away. Russia has been effective at taking ground by simply flattening what is in front of it.

With enough Artillery you can take ground, it just may be a ruined crater.

Ukraine has had some serious setbacks in the last 6 months as their Artillery (rocket and tube) ammunition dwindled and Russia was propped up by NK ammo.

Rapid Scatterable minefields cannot be taken lightly and it’s a capability that the West needs to relook at. There used to be a lot of stock in that during the Cold War — and it going to need to be a bigger part of the defensive arsenal again.
 
From the ISW website, the "transparent" battlefield is forcing the Ukrainians to pull their Abrams tanks back from the front in order to protect them.


I'm sure that more effective counters to UAVs will in the near future improve the situation, but I suspect that concentration of forces will always be much more challenging than in the past. Does that mean that pushing combined arms further down in the TOE will be required?
The inability to concentrate forces was a major concern during the early Cold War. At that time, the fear was that nuclear weapons would make it prohibitively difficult to mass forces without them being wiped off the map.

In the 1950s, the US Army developed the Pentomic division as a response to the threat of nuclear weapons. The division had five battlegroups of five companies each, as well as a large recce battalion and nuclear capable surface-to-surface missiles. Each battlegroup was intended to operate independently and had its own artillery and CSS support. So, basically the US took the approach you have suggested - pushing capabilities down much lower in the TOE than previously. The theory was that the battlegroups could fight dispersed and the company teams were small enough that they wouldn't attract nuclear strikes, and the collective nuclear capabilities of the division would allow it to defeat much larger Soviet formations.

The Pentomic division might serve as a cautionary tale, as it was ultimately abandoned in 1963. Exercises and wargaming had demonstrated several problems. First, on a (simulated) nuclear battlefield it proved to be better in theory than in practice due to deficiencies with equipment and training. Second, on a more traditional conventional battlefield, it lacked firepower and mass. It's probably a good thing that Vietnam was not fought with Pentomic-style divisions.

For their part, the Soviets (and their Russian successors) came to see precision guided weapons as having effectiveness on par with tactical nuclear weapons. They both made it easy to cripple a tactical formation with a relatively small number of munitions, provided that they could be delivered accurately enough.

UAVs seem to be reaching a similar level of effectiveness, in that a given UAV strike will have a high probability of killing a vehicle if it can get close enough. Drone operators can only control so many UAVs at a time, so I'm not entirely convinced that they can't be countered with sufficient mass, even if a massed formation might increase vulnerability to other threats.
 
UAVs seem to be reaching a similar level of effectiveness, in that a given UAV strike will have a high probability of killing a vehicle if it can get close enough. Drone operators can only control so many UAVs at a time, so I'm not entirely convinced that they can't be countered with sufficient mass, even if a massed formation might increase vulnerability to other threats.
I think UAV's as precision weapons are getting a little too much attention in Ukraine. FPV strike footage certainly is sexy to watch, but honestly I think the bigger impact on a future peer battlefield is the wide area surveillance that UAV's are able to provide.

Most drone strike you see are against small groupings of vehicles which frankly in the grand scheme of things have limited military impact beyond the immediate tactical area. I'm sure that the local infantry that was going to have to face that attack is very happy to see the enemy tank taken out, but Section/Platoon/Company-sized attacks are taking ground measured in meters, not kilometers.

What you're not seeing is drones attacking Battalion and larger sized enemy forces because neither side is able to concentrate forces at that scale without being spotted by UAVs and attacked by artillery/rockets/missiles. That I think is a much bigger impact on modern warfare than quadcopters or switchblades that can take out an individual tank.
 
More info from The War Zone on the Abrams tanks being pulled off the front line in Ukraine:


Two U.S. military officials confirmed the move to the Associated Press, stating that Russian drone operations, in particular, mean that the Abrams cannot operate effectively without detection or coming under attack.
The proliferation of drones on the battlefield means “there isn’t open ground that you can just drive across without fear of detection,” a senior defense official told reporters yesterday.“

When you think about the way the fight has evolved, massed armor in an environment where unmanned aerial systems are ubiquitous can be at risk,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Adm. Christopher Grady told AP this week.

However, with five of the 31 Abrams provided to Ukraine already having been lost to Russian attacks, it makes sense to preserve the dwindling force for when it is needed most, for example during particular breakthrough operations, or when more examples of the M1 become available.
 
I think UAV's as precision weapons are getting a little too much attention in Ukraine. FPV strike footage certainly is sexy to watch, but honestly I think the bigger impact on a future peer battlefield is the wide area surveillance that UAV's are able to provide.

Most drone strike you see are against small groupings of vehicles which frankly in the grand scheme of things have limited military impact beyond the immediate tactical area. I'm sure that the local infantry that was going to have to face that attack is very happy to see the enemy tank taken out, but Section/Platoon/Company-sized attacks are taking ground measured in meters, not kilometers.

What you're not seeing is drones attacking Battalion and larger sized enemy forces because neither side is able to concentrate forces at that scale without being spotted by UAVs and attacked by artillery/rockets/missiles. That I think is a much bigger impact on modern warfare than quadcopters or switchblades that can take out an individual tank.

More true than ever....

"All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill’."

- Duke of Wellington
 
I think UAV's as precision weapons are getting a little too much attention in Ukraine. FPV strike footage certainly is sexy to watch, but honestly I think the bigger impact on a future peer battlefield is the wide area surveillance that UAV's are able to provide.

Most drone strike you see are against small groupings of vehicles which frankly in the grand scheme of things have limited military impact beyond the immediate tactical area. I'm sure that the local infantry that was going to have to face that attack is very happy to see the enemy tank taken out, but Section/Platoon/Company-sized attacks are taking ground measured in meters, not kilometers.

What you're not seeing is drones attacking Battalion and larger sized enemy forces because neither side is able to concentrate forces at that scale without being spotted by UAVs and attacked by artillery/rockets/missiles. That I think is a much bigger impact on modern warfare than quadcopters or switchblades that can take out an individual tank.
I tend to agree, probably the most important role for UAVs is to provide observation from altitude. I think a caveat is in order, though, because the ability to counter UAVs depends on where they operate. The types of UAVs that deliver (or actually are) precision weapons are dangerous mainly because there are very few ways to counter them other than EW and concealment. There just aren't many AD weapons that can take down small and fast moving UAVs at low level.

Seeing further into the distance (30km or more) is a little more challenging. UAVs certainly can do this, but the further you want to see, the higher they need to go, and eventually this will make them visible to major AD systems. It's hard to tell what is happening in Ukraine but it appears that both sides have reasonably capable medium and high altitude AD capabilities. Fighters seem to operate primarily at low altitude and almost exclusively on the friendly side of the lines, and it's been a while since I've seen any footage from a UAV operating at altitude. In particular, the Bayraktars seem to have disappeared: Are the once-vaunted Bayraktar drones losing their shine in Ukraine?.

Going back to the nuclear battlefield, it's worth noting that while the Pentomic division focused on dispersion across a large geographic area, the Soviets instead chose to rely on depth and speed for protection against nuclear attack. Formations would gather in an assembly area that could be 50km or more from their objectives. Once they started moving, they would advance at speed in a march formation that had quite a bit of depth. They would stay in march formation until they came into close contact with the enemy. The idea was that NATO wouldn't be able to detect their forces and fix them in place until it was already too late to organize an effective nuclear strike.

I suspect that a big reason we don't see many attacks at the Coy-level or higher is that neither side has enough troops to hold their entire front line and conduct a major (ie multiple brigade) attack at the same time. The total frontage is over 1000km, and based on what I've read it seems that they both have about 80 brigades to cover that distance. Pre-war Russian TTPs suggested that a motorized brigade could defend a frontage of 10-15km but they couldn't attack on that frontage. I think this force density issue goes a long way to explaining why we see lots of local tactical actions but nothing larger than perhaps Bn attacks. If they were being attempted but failing due to UAV-observed fire strikes, the Ukrainians would probably be happy to have published them - we have seen some company attacks that failed, but nothing bigger. But that's just my speculation and I have no hard evidence to back that up.
 
Surely we can’t be far off from drone swarming brigades where thousands of drones of all types, at all altitudes, “advance” right through enemy positions on a narrow front, achieving the elusive breakthrough.
 
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Surely we can’t be far off from drone swarming brigades where thousands of drones of all types, at all altitudes, “advance” right through enemy positions on a narrow front, achieving the elusive breakthrough.

This has been part of the plan since at least the 80s, and there's alot of OS stuff out there about this subject if you're interested in going down that rabbit hole, viz:

Countering Swarms: Strategic Considerations and Opportunities in Drone Warfare​


States should plan to employ drone swarms after careful consideration of their risks and implications. Some literature acknowledges the conceptual application of drone swarms in certain strategic military contexts. For example, one strategy expert theorizes that armed fully autonomous drone swarms (AFADS), a subset of drone swarms, could be considered a weapon of mass destruction (WMD).18 A U.S. Army wargame applied methodology to demonstrate how drone swarm weapons might provide operational advantages in parallel attack.19 One of the originators of the DOD directives on the employment of autonomous systems states:

Deploying fully autonomous weapons would be a weighty risk, but it might be one that militaries decide is worth taking. Doing so would be entering uncharted waters. . . . Hostile actors are actively trying to undermine safe operations [in wartime]. And no humans would be present at the time of operation to intervene or correct problems.20

 
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