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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

They are afraid of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buk_missile_system

a very good technology that the Soviet Union developed which punches above its weight in situations like the Ukraine war because the mobile radars are hard to suppress with these methods

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppression_of_Enemy_Air_Defen...

I have seen a huge number of Buks in various conditions in video footage from the war, one of them was scurrying around the 'suburban' areas of Kiev. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the early missile hits on residential buildings were something like this that failed to lock on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-radiation_missile

Ukraine has a lot of Buks, it has a handful of these too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-300_missile_system

on paper those are better than the Buk but Ukraine doesn't have so many and I think the Buk is a "cheap and cheerful" convivial weapon like the AK-47 that does great when exported.

(Both the Buk and S-300 are a lot like the US Patriot missile system in that they are comprised of a number of mobile units such as command posts, radar, missile launchers, etc. The Buk however has a configuration where the radar and missile launcher are colocated on the same vehicle and I'd guess that configuration works really well under rough conditions with less trained crews.)

View on HN

Buk isn't a "cheap and cheerful" alternative to S-300. Soviet air defense doctrine was a multilayered approach featuring systems at almost every organizational level from infantry squad up to theater. Buk and S-300 serve at different organizational levels. Both are competent systems and ironically are probably more effective against Soviet derived air forces than western ones.

Starting in WW2 and moving forward each side took a very different evolutionary path in terms of air power and air defense. The west relied far more on combat air craft for air defense because that's what worked on the western front. The soviets had a very different experience in the war and had to fight while being under constant attack from German airpower through most of the war. So they focused on giving their army its own air defense capability.

Fast forward 80 years and western militaries will have a few SAM systems like the larger patriot and the Stringer MANPADS but will primarily rely on fighters to clear the skies. While the Russians have a SAM for every situation and a much smaller tactical air force. The west has also since Vietnam spent a lot of effort on defeating Soviet style SAM systems with improved SEAD tactics and equipment whereas it was never a concern for the Russians because there isn't much in the way of SAMs to suppress.

For those reasons you end up with the ironic twist of Russian SAMs being especially effective against Russian aircraft because they didn't prepare to counter their own systems. They DO have anti-radiation missiles and strike aircraft but not as many as the west and their doctrine is not nearly as well practiced.

You are right about more emphasis on fighters in the U.S. Also the U.S. put its best anti-aircraft missiles on ships.

True. The Navy has spent more resources on perfecting SAMs than the Army or Air Force have. Standard Missile and Aegis are a very potent combination. So much so that they adapted it to ground based setups with "Aegis Ashore" which is literally the system taken straight off an Arleigh Burke class destroyer and installed as a ground based missile defense system.

I worked on the software for the Ageis and Iron Dome systems. The program got off to a rocky start but once we got things dialed in, it's accuracy became exceptional

I think Aegis and SM are some of the biggest success stories out of the defense sector over the last few decades. Not only is it mature and effective but its also scalable and from what I understand they managed to port the codebase to modern x86 servers and make the libraries more modular as well.

The US blue-water navy has many similar problems to the Soviet Army. Specifically: operating out of range of land-based friendly fighters and interceptors.

And since there are only so many carriers, naval aviation also can't be assumed.

Consequently, SAMs are prioritized, compared to the army or air force.

That's what the KC-46 and KC-135 are for

Tankers don't solve transit time for Atlantic and Pacific-magnitude distances.

What transit time? The Airforce establishes air superiority starting at the carrier and extending out the aircraft combat range (500-700miles) + refueling range (500miles) + missile standoff range (300miles). It's a pretty big sphere of influence and the US has 14 of them.

And does that for every ship in the Navy? All the time?

Because if not, they're launching from Okinawa or Guam.

And they don't show up instantly hundreds of miles from there, at the ship's location.

It's wild how many anti-air systems they have deployed, for an almost non-existent enemy air force. At this point they must be effectively supplying the enemy their SAM systems. Very expensive, too - saw a $15M system ditched in a field because the shitty KAMAZ truck carrying it broke its axle.

It's partly doctrine, that's just what they do. Highly mobile AA traveling with the armor is their thing and why change up your process right in the middle of a big deployment (rhetorically, obviously).

The other reason is if things go south and the US/EU decides Putin is bluffing on the nukes, they'll for sure wish they had it because NATO aircraft would color the sky gray.

> convivial weapon

I had a quick chuckle at that. It reminds me of an old joke: a bullet has your name on it, a hand grenade is addressed "to whom it may concern", and a mortar shell is posted general delivery.

What does that make nuclear warfare, a comprehensive spam campaign?

Linkedin notifications maybe

Ouch. Black humor.

We're calling because your car's warranty policy is about to expire!

Yes, see USPS bulk mail.

@here

An influencer’s Twitter feed.

Sputnik: A brief alarm heard around the world, followed by an infinitude of silence.

If that is the case, why would officials and experts be "stumped"? This seems like the obvious explanation.

Right now an "expert" is whoever says something that is aligned with media retoric.

The expert they are quoting is a pretty well known figure, who has been saying lots of things often not aligned with media retoric.

To borrow his twitter bio as an introduction

> PhD student @warstudies (Department of War Studies at Kings College). Senior Fellow @FPRI (Foreign Policy Research Institute). Previously @USMC (US Marine Corp), @ColumbiaSIPA (Columbia School of International and Public Affairs), @CentreAST (Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies), and @AlfaFellowship. Focused on Russian defense policy.

To imply that they're just pulling in random people is flat out wrong. This is a person who has been studying Russia from a military standpoint for many years.

You can nearly always find a qualified individual who already is saying what you want said, just needing a microphone to say it louder or at the right time. That's how expert witnesses tend to work for instance.

I don't see why an official would publicly broadcast active wartime capabilities and tactics that might not be known.

And, there's a strong possibility that we're experiencing some psyops here, to make the Russians appear incompetent. There's an active war. If history has taught us anything, psyops is as sure as death, in war.

> I don't see why an official would publicly broadcast active wartime capabilities and tactics that might not be known.

That explains the anonymous officials not agreeing with this stance. That doesn't explain the non-government experts not agreeing that this is the reason though. They don't have any special knowledge and wouldn't be telling the Russians anything they didn't already know.

> And, there's a strong possibility that we're experiencing some psyops here, to make the Russians appear incompetent

There's probably a degree of this, but from what I've seen it also seems to be legitimately the case that they are somewhat incompetent.

Besides which, the Russian's letting that psyop succeed, would itself be direct evidence of incompetence.

Re: psyops, Russia has many of the same weaknesses as China, in that their practitioners cannot conceive of an independent, actively contradicting and adversarial infosphere.

Inside Russia or China, psyops is muting whoever says something you don't like, and deciding on and disseminating the message of the day.

Outside of Russia or China, that looks very different, with everyone opining on your message whenever they feel like it, in addition to virality being a huge component of message reach. That's a very different skillset to navigate successfully.

> And, there's a strong possibility that we're experiencing some psyops here, to make the Russians appear incompetent.

Given their unencrypted radio communication they have done a fair effort to support that idea themselves.

I don't see how that's a sign of incompetence, rather than a sign of aging military equipment. Incompetence would be relaying important, uncoded, information over an unencrypted signal, in a way that would result in some disadvantage.

For example, saying "shoot here" then having a tank round go through the wall 5 seconds later wouldn't benefit from encryption.

> For example, saying "shoot here" then having a tank round go through the wall 5 seconds later wouldn't benefit from encryption

Of course it would. Otherwise:

* the enemy could analyse your strategy and tactics and predict your approach; and worse:

* the enemy can impersonate command, say "approach through there" and have the tank go through an anti-tank ditch

There's no excuse for unencrypted military communications. One would think the Russians would have learned their lesson from freaking Tannenberg a century ago, but it seems not.

> the enemy could analyse your strategy and tactics and predict your approach; and worse

Encryption won't encrypt the shell going through the wall, which could just as easily be analyzed with the constellation of spy satellites focused on the region.

> the enemy can impersonate command, say "approach through there" and have the tank go through an anti-tank ditch

This would be uncoded communications that would put them at a disadvantage. If that did happen, then yes it would be incompetence. Is there any evidence that this is happening? I find it unlikely that they would believe any voice coming over the line, considering what you're saying is an "attack vector" that has been present and known for, literally, the last 131 years.

Do you have anything that supports this very negative view of the intelligence of the average Russian soldier/commander?

i don't believe GP was specifically impugning the intelligence of the average Russian soldier/commander, more commenting on the apparently high displayed level of incompetence shown in the field so far (of which the use of wide-open unencrypted HF radio comms with basic tone squelch/CTCSS at the company<->battalion<->brigade level is just one example).

it was not a critique of intelligence, if anything it was a critique pointing out the failure of high-level RU military planners. what kind of competent general staff lets [at least some] of their battalion-and-below radio comms go out into open frequencies that are easily listened to, transmitted on and also easily jammed by consumer-grade cheap chinese radios?

that is madness. it is incompetent.

(edit: for grammar)

> what kind of competent general staff lets [at least some] of their battalion-and-below radio comms go out into open frequencies that are easily listened to

One that is part of a military that has old radio equipment (maybe from competently allocating funding to something more important), so they have no other choice. I'm sorry, but that doesn't require incompetence. Incompetence would be if they let it unexpectedly impact their invasion. Competence for an invasion doesn't require encryption (see Crimea). An encrypted radio channel makes things easier, but it may not be required for the invasion of Ukraine, which is the context here.

The definition of competence: the ability to do something successfully or efficiently.

The purpose of this war isn't to unlock all achievements with a high score, it's to take Ukraine. They're still progressively taking Ukraine, and they've only sent in 1/3 of the forces from the border (last numbers I saw).

Yes it's madness.

> And, there's a strong possibility that we're experiencing some psyops here, to make the Russians appear incompetent.

It's not a strong possibility, it's a 100% guarantee.

Aside from big, trivially disproven announcements ("This side now controls such and such city"), you're not going to see an accurate picture of literally anything in this conflict until months, if not years after the fact, when historians will pour over, and fit together first-hand accounts and records.

In the meantime, parts of the picture may be accurate, but nobody here has any idea which parts are true, which are propaganda, or what particular purpose that propaganda serves.

> And, there's a strong possibility that we're experiencing some psyops here, to make the Russians appear incompetent.

Definitely. You're not going to hear about the encounters where the Russians smoke the Ukrainians and they have serious loss of life/equipment or don't come back at all.

Not that there's not a lot of organic sentiment around the world, but Ukraine seems to have a very good PR corps pushing news of their victories and memes about the situation. And unlike a lot of these attempts, they aren't "how do you do fellow kids" type shit where it's super obvious.

Exhibit A: the Ghost of Kiev. Regardless of whether he exists or not, he's a great case study in propaganda.

The "stumped" is not actually in the article.

FTA: the issue is that Russia made a huge show of force at the start of the invasion but has apparently held back from actually using much of it (by air or ground). This war could have been over the day it started if Russia had used maximal force, and the conservative approach their actually using maximizes risks and casualties.

And that's what has the experts confused: they can't figure out why Russia is going with this strategy, given the overwhelming technological and numerical superiority of the invasion force and their apparent willingness to accept casualties as the cost of conquering Ukraine.

It doesn't appear to be cost, because the invasion has "cost" Russia hundreds of billions.

It doesn't appear to be casualties/morale, because Russia has suffered 500+ casualties in 3 days (its worst losses since Afghanistan), and is still invading.

It doesn't appear to be doctrine, because their actions don't match what is known of Russian ground or air doctrine.

And so experts are trying to figure out what calculus went into Russia's invasion planning (assuming there was a coherent strategy going in, which is not a given in the post-Trump world).

It's not really fair to say it's not in the article - it's the title of the article.

The author of the article does not choose the title, the editor does, based on what they think will draw more views/clicks.

I don't really care if it's the editor or the author - it's part of the article. Similarly, I don't care if it's served up over HTTP1 or HTTP2, it's irrelevant to the content of the document served up.

I think it's like this.

Russia eventually wants to bombard Kiev with heavy weapons like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9A52-4_Tornado

which can use ammunition at an absolutely insane rate. It takes time to move this stuff into place and more time to take the ammunition in, set up resupply paths, etc.

So Russia attacks Kiev with a small force with light weapons, some Spetsnaz, mostly to keep the fight away from the main body of the force which will strike hard when it is ready.

The problem with this take is Kyiv is more or less Russian Jerusalem. That’s one important difference from all other… special operations performed by Putin.

I don't understand why people just don't believe Russia is being literal with their intentions. They said multiple times they don't want Ukraine, they just don't want NATO to be able to invade them by land.

I'd you assume this is true, what they are doing make complete sense.

> I don't understand why people just don't believe Russia is being literal with their intentions

They are.

You are just listening to the wrong articulation of their intentions.

> They said multiple times they don't want Ukraine,

They have said multiple times that they do want Ukraine, view it's separation from Russia as a crime against Russia and Russians committed by those in the past with control over Russia in the form of the Soviet Union, and Russian state media even released than silently deleted a premature victory announcement for the current invasion declaring the establishment of a new union state of all the Russias (Russia [Great Russia], Ukraine [Little Russia]< and Belarus.)

Now, that's not what they emphasize to the international community, but they have been saying it.

* Russian state media even released than silently deleted a premature victory announcement for the current invasion declaring the establishment of a new union state of all the Russias (Russia [Great Russia], Ukraine [Little Russia]< and Belarus.)*

Do you have more information about this?

https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-state-news-published...

> A Russian state-run news agency prematurely published an article that said Russia has taken back Ukraine.

> "Ukraine has returned to Russia," said the article, which ran on RIA Novosti and has since been taken down. "The West sees the return of Russia to its historical borders in Europe."

The full text is even better. Talks about "solving the Ukrainian question" which sounds like a direct reference to Hitler's "Final Solution to Jew Question" or whatever that was called.

https://thefrontierpost.com/the-new-world-order/

> I don't understand why people just don't believe Russia is being literal with their intentions.

That's very reasonable.

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/10/1071766987/u-s-russia-dicuss-...

> Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov emerged from the nearly eight hours of talks and declared, "There are no plans or intentions to attack Ukraine." He went on to say, "There is no reason to fear some kind of escalatory scenario."

That was, quite clearly, a lie, as they'd already massed 100,000 troops near Ukraine.

As to the "no plans" part: https://www.facebook.com/otueast/photos/pcb.668374907921586/...

Except for when they said they were going to "show them real decommunization", kill everyone in government, that it didn't deserve to be a country and they should reform the Russian Empire, sure.

It seems that whether this succeeds or fails it'll actually increase their land borders with NATO.

Russia has had a land border with NATO since 2004 when Latvia joined.

That simply doesn’t compute.

I guess you also missed Putin characterising Lenin's actions post-revolution as a mistake, and that the Russian Empire should move back to its pre-USSR borders? Or the prepared article that was mistakenly published crowing about the "final solution to the Ukrainian problem"?

Your selection of what to believe as the honest truth is pretty telling.

Because there is a plethora of reasons given that you can choose from.

Denazification of the jewish russian speaking president.

Lawrow: Ukraine wants to aquire nukes and russia must prevent this. Propably trolling.

Half hearted false flags operations: Bombed car where the suspect was arrested the day before. Bombed out building with months old trees in it....

The aforementioned NATO ambitions of ukraine. ukraine was denied membership 14 years ago and things look even more impossible now with the territorial conflict about the crimea. Paradoxically russia is making ukraines medium term NATO membership more likely by solving the crimea conflict.

Russia wants to unite all Rus and everything else is just a smokescreen. Putin has given some rather 19th century speeches to that effect and there was this article that was published and then quickly taken down in some state owned newspaper (i think) https://thefrontierpost.com/the-new-world-order/ Pretty scary stuff.

>And so experts are trying to figure out what calculus went into Russia's invasion planning (assuming there was a coherent strategy going in, which is not a given in the post-Trump world).

Because there was a much greater absence of incoherent strategies by political and military leaders in the world prior to Trump being president of one specific country? No real fan of the man but the need to cram in a Trump-hate reference for nearly any context sometimes becomes absurd.

Yeah, it's clearly the Trump Presidency that led to Operation Barbarossa.

The difference is that Putin has previously accomplished himself as a competent military leader, and Hitler had not.

Though you are right in that there are huge similarities between the two campaigns: in both cases, it appears that the executive leader ignored the advice of his military advisors to launch disastrous military campaigns that actually ended up hindering the non-military objectives behind those campaigns.

> The difference is that Putin has previously accomplished himself as a competent military leader, and Hitler had not

What? Putin managed to force his vastly overwhelming forces on small countries with small and badly equipped armies like Chechnya, Syria, Georgia. And we don't know how much does he really do.

Hitler presided over, and even helped with the planning of, one of the most brilliant campaigns against overwhelming forces ( the invasion of Benelux and France). His army had tremendous luck, the French were thoroughly incompetent and prepared for all the wrong things, but still, it was a massive military success which was at least partly due to Hitler. That's how he got it in his head he's a brilliant strategist, which really went to his head after the initial Soviet counterattack ( when his orders were successful), and the rest is history.

I have to agree with this, by what logic has Putin established himself as a brilliant military strategist in contrast to what Hitler’s government had accomplished by 1941?

Agreed with the above comments about Putin definitively not having established himself as a competent military leader so far (and especially at the present time with this fiasco of a military invasion, again, so far).

But that aside, my original comment, despite having been downvoted, doesn't seem at all off base: Why in the world even bother to mention Trump except out of pure kneejerk emotional need in the context of unsound military leadership on the world stage. Poor invasion planning certainly existed long before he became president of the U.S. and the current disaster essentially has nothing to do with him or his lack/presence of military leadership skills.

There's a consideration that Russia wants to actually minimize civilian deaths, because unlike Syria, territories of Ukraine will never stop neighbouring Russia. Different pieces of doctrine may apply.

But I'm not sure how it maps to observable absense of air force. Prolonging the conflict will obviously cause more civilian deaths and suffering.

It will be interesting to discover in the future if we find out a large number of things like planes were not available for the operation because their commanders ensured they were broken when the invasion occurred. Attacking the nation next door that speaks roughly your same language makes things like mutiny a larger risk.

>It doesn't appear to be casualties/morale, because Russia has suffered 500+ casualties in 3 days (its worst losses since Afghanistan), and is still invading.

Conservative western intelligence estimates actually have this number at over 2000 this morning (3/1) [0]. They are losing whole battalions by the day, and the real nasty urban warfare hasn't even begun. It's an absolute bloodbath that would never even conceivably be tolerated for a moment by any other modern military on earth.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/us/politics/russia-ukrain...

> why Russia is going with this strategy

Because this isn't the intended strategy, but rather then resultant strategy.

Modern Russia seems to suffer from the same weaknesses as the USSR: garbage-in, garbage-out. If you staff an entire bureaucracy (including your military command structure) with Yes-Men, you get "Yes" responses.

When the question is "Are we prepared for the invasion?"

When the question is "Will we be able to supply our ground forces?"

When the question is "Will we be able to achieve air superiority rapidly?"

And because that's how hierarchies work, you believe the "Yes" you hear. And make your strategic plans on the basis of it being true.

Consequently, Russia appears to have built an entire invasion plan on a not-insignificant number of lies about their own forces, as communicated by their own mid-level leadership.

Imho, that explains things pretty simply and fully.

Yes, that appears to be the growing consensus among experts.

But the reason for the "confusion" (the "stumped" in the title) is that Russia has not historically operated this way under Putin (though it did operate this way under his predecessor). Basically, nothing is happening the way it has happened before (under Putin), and this appears to be a "new normal" (under Putin).

One cause could be the replacement of Minister of Defence from Serdyukov (notable for his anticorruption policies) with Shoygu (alleged yes man)

I think this could be a large part of it. Putin's Russia is rife with corruption and cronyism. Those two things can dramatically reduce the effectiveness of a military.

To start with, the yes-men problem means significant bad news is often buried not dealt with. It also results in the people who are the best at bs'ing and political manuevering being the ones who rise in the ranks. Your officer corps ends up being filled with people who did not optimize for military competency. Indeed General Shogyu, the Russian Minister of Defense, actually doesn't have a military background.

The corruption comes in with logisitical support. With significant levels of corruption you'll find that the amount of parts, munitions, fuel are not what you thought they were. Then you'll also probably have problems with the condition of the stuff you do have.

All of those things damage morale, competency, readiness, you name it. So when you actually have to go to war, you might find drastic shortfalls in battlefield performance.

If Russia did mass killings / carpet bombing / total war, it hands justification of the west for full counterattack and occupation of Ukraine.

Putin assumed all of Ukraine would roll over like Crimea. He has underestimated the people of Ukraine.

He attacked in winter assuming it would be over in two days. Now his already-low-morale forces face winter. I don't care if they are equipped and Russian and "used to war". This won't be WWI where you can build bunkers and hide in there. If you occupy a house, the local populace will email someone and you'll be a target of portable missile infantry.

He doesn't seem to have a plan B.

In theory, with good arms supply from the West (which is RIGHT OVER THE BORDER, this isn't Afghanistan that is 5000 miles away), the Ukrainian populace will get progressively better armed, more experienced (this is probably resulting in the training of a million or more Ukrainians to be effective soldiers), and more motivated.

If I were the US/NATO, I would be training and equipping as many Ukrainians as want it, and there should be millions of willing soldiers. This is the opportunity to produce a very dangerous military power right across the border from Russia. You get to breathe down the neck of the Belarus puppet strongman. And it might destroy Putin's regime by weakening him.

Putin also seems to have underestimated how much Ukraine hates him personally. I know no Ukrainians, but I suspect they are sick and tired of him threatening him and are spoiling for a fight.

The danger to Putin is that the US could equip and train and season a millions-strong Ukrainian army that sees a very unmotivated Russian army, repulses them, and then counter invades Russia. Now that is unlikely given nuclear deterrent and the like, but it is within the realm of possibility, especially if elements of Russia's army hint they are amenable to regime change and will refuse to nuke.

Modern nuclear war doesn’t work that way. Commanders are progressively passed the order to nuke the same target until someone does. That’s why there’s so many of them, it’s a numbers game. Also it’s not all or nothing, at the start it’s tit for tat and hope you aren’t either!

> Putin also seems to have underestimated how much Ukraine hates him personally.

I doubt it's personal. Russia has dominated Ukraine over the centuries. Stories of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis in WWII are true enough; but at the time, Ukraine was ruled by Russia, which only a decade previously had imposed a famine on Ukraine that killed millions. Unsurprisingly, many Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis as liberators.

Depends on what you mean by experts. The strategist I know said this is a political decision. They don't want to inflict too much damage to avoid bloody insurrections in the future. Russian aircrafts are not that precise. What is more, UA army received manpads. It's not worth it.

MANPADs are only effective at very low altitudes (AGL), fundamentally due to the inability to put much propulsion on a rocket intended to be carried by hand. Su-27s, Su-34s, and Su-35s should fly significantly higher than this altitude during strike and interdiction missions, but doing so exposes them to radar-guided SAM systems like the aforementioned Buk (SA-11 / SA-17) or S-300 (SA-10 / SA-12 / SA-20).

You can see on some clips how low there were flying - well within the range of manpads. As I said, it could be because they don't have a good high precision munitions.

> They don't want to inflict too much damage

Have you seen what they have done to Mariupol and Kharkiv the last few days? Maybe this was the original plan, but with that botched there seems to be no consideration for damage to civilians.

yes, it seems they changed the strategy to Aleppo/Grozny

I don't see how that excuses their failure to achieve air superiority. The Ukrainian Air Force still manages to fly manned and unmanned missions and harass Russian equipment and logistics.

There are many possible explanations, so latching onto the first one that sounds plausible is not necessarily the correct one. Otherwise, we would all be like those pundits on TV.

Several reasons might also be simultaneously true. Some simple examples: Russia might be testing NATO. Russia might not want to escalate in certain ways. There have been many countries whose leaders want to minimize the numbers they kill, while still killing many people. Russia might not want to reveal otherwise unknown capabilities. They might be preparing their air to strike elsewhere, possibly unrelated to Ukraine. There might be a revolt inside Russia's military. And so forth. But, what's likely? Maybe they just don't want to kill everyone or create dissent.

It wouldn't be unhelpful to increase the sortie rate of Baltic air policing missions and extend them over the Finnish border (with Finnish permission).

Potentially hostile assets require matching defensive stationing, even if they aren't doing anything aggressive. Fighters in Murmansk / Severomorsk aren't in Ukraine.

"Fleet in being" works for air forces too.

The explanation which I have not seen discussed here is that this is a secret war, in Russia.

Putin called it a "special operation." Use of the term "war" in reference to this action has been banned in Russia. This secret war aspect may have had practical effects on command and control. It is possible that by not declaring this more than a limited special action, Putin's deployment options are actually limited.

I always wonder how they developed things like that in the 70s. Right now I don’t know a single engineer that could even know how to begin to develop a system like that. I feel like most of them would try and throw a neural net at the problem and call it a day.

You may be exaggerating but there is some truth in it, and it applies to many areas of science. The growing specialization means your knowledge is deeper but lest vast. For many classes of problems you just use a pre-built solution as this is the easiest and most common way. But rest assured, the people who work on defense system know very well what they are doing.

Are these engineers paid well compared to standard web stack engineers now?

No, they might make half of what a web developer does.

On average it's not that much different, but the distributions (in both cases) are not normal.

I talked to a guy a few weeks ago who worked for a company that developed a guidance system before GPS that used stars like a sextant to navigate.

Pretty crazy to think about.

Something in that vein that has always amazed me, even though its performance in the field left something to be desired, is the Norden bombsight [0].

"The Norden [used] an analog computer that continuously recalculated the bomb's impact point based on changing flight conditions, and an autopilot that reacted quickly and accurately to changes in the wind or other effects."

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bombsight

It is also common in shiprepair to use the stars for aligning equipment with a theodolite like device.

Spacecraft often use stars to orient themselves. The Voyager spacecraft have star trackers to keep the antenna pointing at Earth. They look for the Canopus star.

Don't they need more than 1 star to get an orientation? I mean other than brightness 1 star doesn't give you a lot of information?

I guess if they can confirm that it is a specific star they know where on a I finite line they are. If that line happens to be through earth and the space craft they know where to point their antenna.

Yes, I think the tracker also uses the sun as I remember reading.

GPS and celnav (and other forms of navigation, radio or otherwise) are really not so different when you get down to fundamentals. At their core they are all about locating the intersection of multiple lines, circles, or spheres of position, depending on how many dimensions you're working with. The major differences are in how you come up with the LOPs.

The odd man out, if you will, is inertial nav, which has more in common with dead reckoning.

This is still important, e.g. the Navy teaches celestial navigation in case GPS is disrupted.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/3865/this-is-likely-wh...

Star trackers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_tracker

Ironically, the last one I touched was a piece of donated Russian equipment, intended for spacecraft use, with no manual.

It wasn't necessarily single engineers designing these systems in the 70s either.

I'm guessing most mechanical and/or ECE programs still teach "control systems", and that might be where one begins, along with some "signals and systems" and RF classes.

I suspect that the engineers you know are more computer science "engineers" than people who went through a traditional engineering core.

This exactly.

The ABET mechanical and electrical engineering curricula combined would give you all the skills a team needed (perhaps with the aid of a physicist and chemist or two) to build this system.

That we have dissolved the word "engineer" to mean "ad salesman at scale" doesn't mean the traditional engineers aren't out there.

I'm teaching in an ABET accredited program using MIT textbooks and I'm not impressed. If engineers want to avoid learning how to integrate by parts or use the chain rule it seems like a great idea. Arubis' comment above seems on point.

Are you saying that the current program lets them avoid learning those things, or that they should be allowed to avoid learning them?

I'm not sure I've seen a calculus course that skipped those (granted, it's been more than a decade since I looked at calculus courses). They certainly seem to still be within the remit of the FE - ECE exam.

It's more an issue of what the students are retaining from calculus.

I don't think this is a new problem. Its largely a problem of the way its taught, particularly at the high-school level where professional teachers and politicians choose what is important in the curriculum (and yes, I know a lot of engineering programs require an "engineering calculus" taught at the college). Nothing has changed since Feynman's little rant, if anything looking at my kids schooling its worse than ~30 years ago when I was in HS. Although, i'm told I can't compare my HS education because I went to one of the best HS's for math/science in the country (one of first of what are now called "STEM magnets" long before that term was even coined) at the time.

But even so, my calc for engineering classes suffered from basically the same problems of focus. It was frequently hard to tell what was really important vs what was an interesting sidetrack I would never use again. Which is why I distinctly remember a number of my engineering classes having week long math refreshers as the first week of class for things like Laplace transforms/etc or a math refresher TA lead study groups the prof would strongly suggest people attend at the beginning if they couldn't solve some basic math problems written on the board the first day of class. Where I went, the first week or so was add/drop and many of the professors would toss in a "prereq" quiz to scare people into dropping who weren't strong enough in the prereqs as another method. And being an engineering class grades weren't "given". For some classes it was well known that there were going to be a lot of C's and D's because the prof wasn't going to dumb down his material if you couldn't keep up because they were believers in normal distributions (and I remember a physics professor who would show the distribution for tests/etc) and that A's really meant you were excelling.

Unfortunately we are told that we have to make engineering “not scary” and “fun” so we get more engineering majors and this is explicitly not to be a weedout class. I do try to work them hard in the recitations to compensate.

And on cue I get an email saying students have been complaining my class is "too technical" and "doesn't have enough examples"

And there's a fair cohort of us (note, US-based perspective here) that _did_ go through the traditional electrical engineering education, learned the hard math and analog/mixed-signal engineering needed to put together something like this, dipped our toes in the industry, and then realized all our CS buddies had double our base salaries for objectively easier work.

We've strongly disincentivized gaining mid-level expertise on hard engineering.

> and then realized all our CS buddies had double our base salaries for objectively easier work.

One thing I realised as a graduate student designing RF PCBs and digital circuits was that the debugger for reality sucks. It's really frustrating to be faced with a problem where you just can't get "more information by recompiling with debug flags" and can't easily (or reversibly!) change the system to make it easier to understand. Totally different skillset, and requires a different method of thinking (frankly, at times, with a lot more thought).

This is a huge part of it! I spent a couple years doing IC-level failure analysis, which involves cool toys like electron microscopes, ion beams, strong destructive chemistry… a lot of it was neat, but the feedback loops were hours at best, and often days. Compared with having CI just do this for you automatically, or having something like `guard` running locally, is utterly transformational by comparison.

The HN crowd is primarily software engineers and their curriculum probably doesn't cover this. But a EE can specialize in this field with courses in radar systems, signal processing, control theory, etc.

I'm guessing all the engineers you know are web software pukes. There are loads of people who could build these today.

Instead people like me make "spatial computing" led hula hoops and other harmless stuff like that... And those EEG cat ears!

The world would be much better off with more LED hula hoops and fewer guided missiles.

It's funny because we were brainstorming on the hoop the other night and it hit me that this was the killer app for a "cheap and cheerful" inertial navigation system.

The Trident 2 submarine missile has a gyroscope in it that costs almost as much as the nuclear warhead because it is so resistant to drift that it can be spun up and locked on in port and maintain its position when the submarine is at sea.

If you tried INS with a smart phone or wiimote the errors in velocity estimation will build up quickly and you'll get terrible drift.

In the case of the spatial computing hoop though you know the hoop never gets far away from the user so you can damp the D.C. component of the velocity, work in coordinates relative the user's center of gravity and never notice any drift in the x or y coordinates. (I don't like damping the vertical so much but I think I can live with it.)

Oh, I'm pretty sure the stuff we "web software pukes" have to work with would drive all those old-timer Real Engineers crazy in its own way. It's a bit like how a middle school teacher doesn't necessarily have an easier job than a prestigious professor.

Preface: I used to work in embedded control systems, now I shovel ads for a living.

nah fam, we've got it so much easier. You should kick up your feet and enjoy it, or you'll drive yourself crazy.

Yeah digging through 2000 page reference manuals and looking for 1 bit differences with nothing other than a serial port/memory debugger is a lot harder than putting up a web page. Now backend stuff at scale is similar complexity. I still do embedded, but I also help/design on the web front ends for said devices :)

That's true. (Although what's with "old-timer"? Most of the mech/aero/etc. engineers I know are under 35.) I'm sort of the bridge between the software and hardware folks where I work, and nobody understands what anyone else does. Which is fine - that's what specialization is. The difference I find is that most hardware folks are at least aware of that, while almost all programmers I've met outside of aerospace don't even know the basic engineering curriculum exists (as exemplified by the comment that started this thread).

Heat seeking missiles started development in 1940s. In the US, they began as an unfunded rogue project. The infrared guidance system was simple and very successful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-9_Sidewinder

One thing a lot of people forget because war movies don't show them, is that by the end of the war allied and German aircraft were absolutely loaded with electronics.

The story of Radar on the ground is well known, but the story of systems like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2S_(radar) (so named apparently because it was a smell that no one had discovered before) is not so well known.

Similarly a lot of these British efforts were more at risk to their own commanders that the Germans at the beginning, because the engineers were having to go through utterly ridiculous hoops to justify basic physics to their superiors. Sometimes their scientific superiors...

https://youtu.be/GJCF-Ufapu8 is a very very good documentary about this kind of thing. Made before the scientists were dead, so lots of gossip.

Randall and Boot should be known by more people, but magnetrons are not as awesome as the nuclear bomb.

The proximity fuses were a marvel - tiny radars put into an antiaircraft shell. Such would never ever have occurred to me, as how could a radar system survive being fired out of a cannon? It doubled the effectiveness of flak.

Thank you for this documentary link, it’s amazing

Surface-to-air missiles were long a priority of the Soviets. They caused our fliers no end of trouble in Vietnam: this guy got shot down by a SAM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#Prisoner_of_war

The Russian military is organized around a land defense of their homeland since they don't have the natural barriers the U.S. has (e.g. they last got invaded in 1941, we last got invaded in 1812.)

You might think they'd invest in fixed SAM systems but mobile SAM systems are so more survivable in a war because the radar for a SAM is highly visible. You really want to hide those systems in terrain and ambush planes going by.

Systems like that are most effective when they operate in a networked mode together with AWACS airplanes like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beriev_A-50

which use a "look down" pulse doppler radar which can see cruise missiles, UAVs and other low-flying threats. This is a great complement to the radar on a Patriot missile battery which is optimized to ballistic missile threats. Russia's latest S-500 system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-500_missile_system

has crazy long range, it competes with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De...

as an anti missile missile system but also it can (try to) take out a distant AWACS airplane with a direct shot.

The Russians DO NOT want an enemy to have air superiority over them anywhere.

I'm puzzled why we haven't created something that can compete with S-300 / S-400 / S-500.

At the very least the Patriot SAM should be redesigned to allow for vertical launching to allow shooting in all directions. If you point Patriot one way and you get ambushed from behind you're basically caught with your pants down.

At the very least you'd need four Patriot missile launchers pointing in all directions to prevent this scenario.

That's why it was funny that Turkey was ostracized for buying Russian/Chinese SAMs ( was it S-400 last or a Chinese version). What else could they possibly buy? The Patriot system isn't even close, and doesn't seem to be working too well for the UAE ( but then again we don't know how S-300/400/500 would deal against drones and light missiles)

Turkey bought S-300 systems and were pummeled for it.

I find this puzzling since Greece, also a NATO member, also purchased Russian S-300 systems but weren't penalized for it.

  Turkey bought S-400. Greece got S-300. Different systems.

S-400 is an upgrade of the older S-300. Very similar, although the former may require internet connectivity and that's probably what worries NATO.

There are a myriad of versions of the S-300, from the original SA-10 introduced in the late 70's to the newest MPU version.

My guess is that Russia doesn't have that many S-xxx missile systems, and further that they are much more expensive than the Turkish drones. I imagine they're keeping their powder dry, against the risk of NATO planes appearing over Ukraine.

> I'm puzzled why we haven't created something that can compete with S-300 / S-400 / S-500.

In my opinion it is because the American way of fighting a war doesn’t need it. Let say there is a troublesome country who would want to fly airplanes to shoot at American troops. The war plans against such a threat would start with two steps: 1st supress their air defences. 2nd gain full air dominance.

Supression of air defences is a polite way to say that they pulverize anything which can shoot US airplanes from the ground or even detect US airplanes using a radar.

Gaining full air dominance is a polite way to say that they aim to pulverize all enemy airplanes, runways, taxiways, fueling equipment and maintenance infrastructure.

If that is your method of operation why would you need mobile, survivable air defenses. People who routinely plan on destroying clouds (the source of rain) don’t need an umbrella.

The best US air defense missiles are launched from ships. (These are so good that, like the S-500 they can shoot down satellites!)

That's the AEGIS system. It works better when land-based, from what I've read; it's dramatically more accurate than the purely naval fleet-defence version.

AEGIS is an integrated, networked system; multiple sensors on multiple platforms (including AWACS) collaborate to detect and hit targets.

There was an AEGIS-equipped ship either in the Black Sea, or trying to get in through the Bosphorus (now closed to naval traffic). The presence of AEGIS ships in the Black Sea would be enough to explain the non-appearance of the Russian airforce.

>I don’t know a single engineer that could even know how to begin to develop a system like that

It's called "controls engineering", and there are plenty of talented people in the field. But you are correct that people who sought a career in websites and cellphones have never heard of it.

(edit: s/cellphones/cellphone apps/)

if you are designing RF and cellphones have plenty of that, learning controls systems is a must. Think PLL, VCO, etc.

I assume they meant iOS or Android app development

Considering the lack of coordination of their ground forces and their absurd OPSEC, it might simply be communication issues. Fuel and maintenance issues are also a safe bet with Russia.

The Russian Buks also seem to be having a bad time against the Bayraktars.

That UAV is a stealthy platform

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baykar_Bayraktar_TB2#/media/Fi...

look at the shape of the tail, that thing doesn't have a single right angle to send radio waves straight back at the radar.

> The Russian Buks also seem to be having a bad time against the Bayraktars.

Why? Small radar signature?

Small signature and they fly low.

Buks are ideal for taking down a big jet aircraft flying at 10000+ ft.

Yes, especially random civilian jetliners.

> I wouldn't be surprised if some of the early missile hits on residential buildings were something like this that failed to lock on

That or Russian missile attacks.

Indeed, I think GP meant that it could be a (Russian) anti-radiation missile that failed to lock onto the radar signal of a Buk.

Some of the residential hits seemed to be cruise missiles that weren't aware that a building was in their path.

A case of the height map not being updated correctly in the computer's memory? The Russians seem to be sloppy all over the place, so it wouldn't surprise me.

All this lightens my mood, since it's obvious the Russians wouldn't last two months against NATO forces.

No forces would last two months in a nuclear war though, so it's not all that rosy.

One nuclear bomb would ruin my whole day

Don't forget about

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIM-92_Stinger

Not in the same class as the Buk.

The Stinger is deadly against helicopters and fixed wing aircraft in a close air support role. It also is good for sniping at aircraft that are taking off and landing.

Against high altitude bombers and fighter aircraft though it does nothing. With modern precision weapons an aircraft like the B-52 can fly high and have individual munitions be targeted with GPS or laser so it can cause a lot of hurt to ground troops and be out of reach of the Stinger.

The top image in that article is the first time I’ve seen a traditionally camouflaged vehicle and been quite unsure of what I was looking at.

Is there something particular about the camouflage on those buks?

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