The only reason you'd use tanks or infantry in a modern war is that you don't have enough drones and missiles.
Maybe you're willing to climb into a tank after what we've seen in Ukraine recently, but that's all you, pal.
Maybe you're willing to climb into a tank after what we've seen in Ukraine recently, but that's all you, pal.
Infantry and AFVs that support them will never go away. They may change but war isn't just about destruction.
There are some experiments using turret style drones to maintain like DMZs. They still need a human operator. That is a case where you are mostly just waiting though.
Seizing a town means dealing with a ton of civilians - negotiating, handling mixed reports, etc. Drones may become part of that but cameras are imperfect and you will need people unless Drone tech has a giant leap in human interfacing.
How would you occupy a city with only drones? What would it look like? Would they issue orders to civilians to stay in their homes? What sort of objectives that humans do now in war [0] do you think drones can fully replace?
[0] establishing forward bases for further logistical support, "securing" areas, including searching through rubble for humans and making sure they're not a threat, etc. I've never been in the military so I don't know from experience but I'm pretty sure there's tons of other examples here.
Half-life 2 confirmed.
"Since 2011, the system has achieved 100% success in all low and high-intensity combat events, in diversified terrain (urban, open and foliage). The system has intercepted a variety of threats, including the 9M133 Kornet ATGM, RPG-29, etc. the U.S Army has reported similar success in tests. “I tried to kill the Abrams tank with ATGM 48 times and failed, despite the fact that some of them were supersonic,” said US Army Col. Glenn Dean."
Is a remote-controlled dune buggy with a low-recoil rifle a tank?
- you can airlift 25 2-ton dune-buggies instead of 1 50-ton tank
- you can buy 25 $2 million dune-buggies for the cost of 2 $25 million tanks
- if you sent 2 tanks, losing one is half of your force projection. If you sent 25 dune-buggies, losing one is 4% of your force.
- maintenance on an unmanned 2-ton dune-buggy has to be easier, faster and cheaper than maintenance on a tank. Tanks need dedicated recovery vehicles (or Ukrainian tractors) that cost nearly as much as another tank. Maintenance is going to be much, much easier without armor and the concomitant suspension for the armor getting in the way.
A hybrid powerplant is probably best -- a diesel motor-generator to charge batteries and run for distance, with an electric motor system and nice quiet relatively cool batteries for an hour or two of sneaking around at a time. Tanks don't sneak up on you, but a hybrid dune-buggy in battery mode can.
This also has knock-on effects for the civilian economy, because if the cool support weapon for the infantry is a quiet hybrid dune-buggy, the same thing with a crew cabin instead of a gun and ammo will be a smash hit.
Also, lol at "Ukrainian tractors". Their biggest (only?) tractor plant was destroyed in Kharkiv. Most of their tractors are... John Deere. Probably why they got so good at modifying them that Americans are buying their software :D
But it will be vulnerable to smaller weapons on smaller cheaper vehicles.
Also consider that tanks are dispatched in small groups; they need to be able to defend themselves. But a swarm of buggies could have weapons optimized to defend each other -- a shotgun is pretty effective against small suicide drones, and nothing defends against a laser-guided bomb anyway.
Which is the reason why great-powers don't go to war with each other these days. Forget nukes, the first thing that will be destroyed is each other's satellite communication systems. That alone would devastate the world's economy.
Anti-satellite warfare is a huge reason why the Space Force (stupid name) came into existence.
No idea how far between concept and reality that is and obviously this is a whole different class of vehicle than a tank.
Not everybody likes wars of attrition. Russia is an outlier in that regard. Copying their doctrine and tactics is a bad idea, as is citing them as a successful example of how to accomplish anything. They are great at beating up on unarmed civilians, but against a modern armed force they wouldn't stand a chance... and no amount of tanks and soldiers will change that.
...modern armed force and which is willing and allowed to fight. It's an increasingly important factor of modern day engagements.
Let's not forget the political aspects of the battlefield, as we are continuing to witness.
They seem to be doing quite well against the modern army of Ukraine, NATO-trained for 7-8 years now.
Where do people get the impression that Russian army is strong and capable is beyond me, they just throw people into the meat grinder and sit on top of the infinite Soviet arsenal of old equipment.
"Quantity has a quality all its own". They aren't considered "strong" because individual Russian battalions are expert warfighters per se. They're considered "strong" because the Russian military-industrial complex in its totality is not something that can be idly ignored by anyone except maybe the US or China.
Basically Russia scores high on 3 particular Principles of War: Mass, Offensive, and Simplicity. Not so well on the other 6 though.
https://www.trngcmd.marines.mil/Portals/207/Docs/TBS/B2B2269...
Frustrating to watch.
There are also larger issues to consider beyond just "we want the help the Ukrainians". The best stuff we can send has a bunch of sensitive NATO/US technical information (radio comms, etc.). Do we want to risk that gear falling into Russian hands (and by extension probably getting shared with China)? If the answer is "no", we either have to send alternatives or send the equipment to depot maintenance areas to have the sensitive tech removed. That takes time.
Do we want to risk escalating the war outside of Ukraine, if the Russians respond kinetically to armaments shipments? The answer is again an emphatic "no" from almost every nation except maybe Poland.
Hence the popular snarky refrain: "NATO will fight Russia to the last drop of Ukrainian blood". Western governments and people will "stand with Ukraine" as long as it doesn't involve them really risking anything (such as themselves being on the receiving end of Russian missiles or artillery).
More concerning (imo) is gear, particularly man portable anti-air weapons, sold to terrorist groups either via corruption in the Ukrainian forces, or a Russian op to supply NATO arms to such groups.
Makes sense - if all combatants in the Russian army are dead, there’s no further need to defend territory for Ukraine. A boom with a border guard stamping passports would suffice.
Thus the priority from the very beginning was to disrupt the supply lines and ability to generate resources, meanwhile securing own supply and resources.
Ukraine needs more supply of long range artillery and lot more ammo for it ... yesterday and right now!
Political goals are always the first priority. Fighting may be exciting, but it may also be irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Defeating the enemy is neither necessary nor sufficient for winning the war.
Also, the degree to which the world economies are now interconnected make it next to impossible to believe that a major war in Europe would not impact other parts of the world, which is super naive. Time will tell but I fear that we're in for a very rough ride if this current war doesn't get stopped in its tracks before it can engulf more territories, which ultimately will happen.
The only good thing is that now that the Russians have shown their true goals that the bulk of the 'NATA did this' or 'The Ukrainians only have themselves to blame' people have something to chew on.
This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe, and literally about post WW2 order that you seem to be enjoying the fruits of, if only by hanging out on Hacker News.
>This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe, and literally about post WW2 order that you seem to be enjoying the fruits of, if only by hanging out on Hacker News.
I'm not sure what purpose you think this sentence serves. If your argument is, again, the United States is the Global Imperial Power and, because I post on HN, I am balking in my responsibility to sufficiently support this Empire, then got it. I'll make sure to "do better".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...
> there's at least a dozen other conflicts around the world right now where you can make the same argument
Which other conflict is waged with the goal of eliminating the country completely and destroy its culture?
There were no major conflicts of this kind since WW2. Changing the government, plenty of times, but not erasing borders with the cultural genocide and some forced children "relocation" on top of that.
I didn't say anything about the US as a global empire or whatever, it's the collective World's responsibility to maintain peace and it's failing. But I say that there are clear "good guys" and "bad guys" here, regardless of the history of the US.
From your link:
>>Another key point was that U.S. State Department lawyers made a distinction between "guarantee" and "assurance", referring to the security guarantees that were desired by Ukraine in exchange for non-proliferation. In the end a statement was read into the negotiation record that the (according to the U.S. lawyers) lesser sense of the English word "assurance" would be the sole implied translation for all appearances of both terms in all three language versions of the statement.
>Which other conflict is waged with the goal of eliminating the country completely and destroy its culture?
There's a lot going on in Africa and the Horn. More or less all feature some degree of genocide or mass killings, objectives of replacing the current government, or redrawing the lines on the map.
>There were no major conflicts of this kind since WW2.
This is absolutely not true. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan (the first one), Myanmar and a couple others I'm forgetting all were an order of magnitude larger than this one in terms of casualties. Maybe you mean this is the first major conflict of this kind in Europe since WWII, in which case... maybe, because you'd have to omit Yugoslavia. There's room to argue about that one. Not sure why that's relevant, unless we're going back to the insistence about the United States' role in security on the European continent.
It is much cheaper and safer to fight this war in Ukraine rather then trying to liberate Lithuania
>It is much cheaper and safer to fight this war in Ukraine rather then trying to liberate Lithuania
This is what I do not understand, the "safer" part. How exactly is it "safer" to intentionally antagonize the old Cold War adversary over a country that even President Obama admitted is not a strategic interest to the United States? To attempt to steelman this, we should support/arm/fund the Ukrainians as a means to degrade and destroy (by proxy) Russian combat power just in case they invade Lithuania next - or maybe to try and prevent them from being of use to the Chinese in a new Pacific War - knowing full well that they know invading a NATO country means WWIII in Europe (and probably the Pacific, who knows). This sounds awfully similar to the "we have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" refrain that I heard all the time in the lead up to GWII and thereafter as we extended our stays in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it's the most compelling argument in favor of support I can come up with. I still think it's wrong, though.
Practically how does NATO actually liberate them. Does it have the stomach for the full scale high intensity war as we see in now in the East Ukraine? Not just Putin, I am also not sure of that. Who is going to lead the American armoured division drive to capture Kaliningrad..
Yes detoothing Russia in Ukraine is MUCH safer.
I don’t know that I’m as confident as you are in the Russian VDV’s ability to competently conduct an airborne invasion given their, shall we say, clumsy implementation of combined arms war in Ukraine thus war. I’d also love to see a citation that 20% (really?) of the population in the Baltics wouldn’t freakout and instead either actively support or be indifferent to a Russian invasion.
I was incorrect about the 5th column number. Lithuania is actually the best in this category with very few non-citizens. Seems like many left and some naturalized, current total is more like 8% not 33% like it was in the 90s. Latvia has the most but it is still much less than 20%.
And yet we've been arming the Saudis while they starve and bomb the Yemenis into oblivion for the past 10 years.
>>>This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Wars-are-only-evil-when-West...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/civili...
I find the degree to which HN has taken umbrage with this particular war.....unsurprising, yet extremely telling.
So yes, even if you do give up on Ukraine, it won't stop there. In that, again, this is very much like 1938.
BTW, I should probably add at this point that I'm ethnically Russian as well as Russian citizen, although I've been living mostly out of the country for the past decade. But I still remember very well what our nationalists are, I'm familiar with the kind of political musings Putin gets his inspiration from, and my firm belief is that this is going to be a much bigger war than most everybody in the West currently anticipates.
>In that, again, this is very much like 1938.
I'm looking for some actual evidence that the global geopolitical situation is comparable to 1938. Merely pointing out that a country in Europe has been invaded is not sufficient.
At this point, I think I should probably note that I consider Putin's invasion of Ukraine to be an enormous blunder. The humanitarian cost is already well documented, but from a strategic perspective, which is the theme of this thread, he's going to deplete his forces to such a degree that any follow-on invasion of other countries is going to be even more of a disaster. I don't know why or how he was convinced this was a good idea. He was always going to pay a significant cost, even if he, eventually, gets a land bridge to Crimea.
Comparison to Germany in 1930s is fairly straightforward. Both Germany and Russia believed that they have suffered considerable humiliation in the last major conflict (cold war for Russia), lost "their" lands in the process, and were plunged into an economic black hole. In both, this triggered an embrace of irredentism and the overall ideology that can be summed up as "we'll be back, and then you'll be sorry". Both produced increasingly authoritarian regimes that, as they solidified their rule, started to look more and more at "their" lands among their neighbors. Both accused one of their neighbors of persecution of "their" ethnic minority, and justified the invasion and occupation of said neighbor on those grounds.
As for WW3 - no, I don't think it'll start over Kazakhstan. But if you wait long enough, it might start over, say, Latvia. The problem is that, with every country that the collective West allows Russia to overrun, NATO Article 5 is perceived as less of a real deal and more of a bluff. Basically, if US is unwilling to fight for Ukraine for the fear of escalating into nuclear, why would it fight for e.g. Latvia when the likelihood of that escalation would be even higher? Because Latvia is a NATO member? American isolationists will say that NATO isn't worth getting nuked over anymore so than Ukraine. So if you "draw the red line" there, you might find that line rather faded by the time Russia comes close to crossing it. They might cross it simply because they don't believe you have the guts to do anything about it by then.
Adding to the problem is the overly rosy picture of Ukraine successes in this war so far. Don't get me wrong - they are doing very well, exceeding all expectations by a large margin, and have plenty to show for it. But, at the end of the day, this is still a country of 50 million people with a $6 billion defense budget (2021) fighting against a country of 150 million with a $66 billion defense budget. Ukraine has had several mobilization waves since the beginning of the war, while Russia is still relying mostly on contractors and PMC. Ukrainian industry - which is largely in the east - is already devastated, while Russian manufacturing capacity is still fully intact, limited only by sanctions. If Russia were to truly switch to war footing to the same degree that Ukraine already did, Ukrainians won't be able to hold the line - not because they're bad at it, but because Russia can afford to overwhelm them with bodies and munitions. So you can't just assume that if we sit and wait long enough, the Russian advance will stall indefinitely, and that'll solve the problem long-term because all forces will remain tied in Ukraine.
>Putin did not expect it to be a fight at all.
I genuinely don't get this, though I agree with you. Still, how could Putin possibly expect Ukraine to roll over after the Maidan Revolution, which had clear and obvious western support? Perhaps he was nervous and figured that event was an actual threat to him? Especially given the United States', shall we say, cavalier attitude in selling arms abroad it seems really really obvious that Ukraine would of course happen to find themselves in possession of the latest in battlefield tech. Surely a lesson has been learned here, especially given that Russia's most advanced combat power has been significantly depleted in this endeavor - and without those modern weapons NATO can mop the floor with them using F-18s built in the 1990s. Same with tanks, not to mention drones.
Third,
>Because Latvia is a NATO member? American isolationists will say that NATO isn't worth getting nuked over anymore so than Ukraine.
Agree. I said this in another comment but I think it's pretty obvious that, 30+ years after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union ceased to exist it's probably a good idea to assume there is some kind of priority list within the NATO members for who actually matters. I would venture to guess that certain former-Soviet countries that were added after the fall of Soviet Union are at the bottom.
Finally,
>Adding to the problem is the overly rosy picture of Ukraine successes in this war so far.
Also agree. When I discuss this with my too-well educated and too-well traveled friends, they sound like they've spent too much time on reddit. If you actually pay attention the war has somewhat stalemated, with slight favor to Russia at this point as they repair and rearm for what I assume will be a push to the western edge of the Donbas. Despite all this, these friends still believe in these now debunked myths (the Ghost of Kiev for one).
All of this just makes me want us to try to figure out a diplomatic solution. I don't know that Putin or Zalenskyy are in a position, politically, to seek one, so you may end up being correct that a compromise in one conflict leads, for Putin, to the initiation of another. I hope you're wrong.
We mustn't forget Vizzini's Aphorism: Never get involved in a land war in Asia.
The problem is that once shots are fired, things can escalate very quickly, and decision-making is often not rational.
The US no longer has a draft law because the US determined that the draft was bad both from a military manpower perspective and from a domestic politics perspective as to maintaining national will to continue a conflict.
The US will not reauthorize a draft for an overseas war while the US remains a major power. If the US collapses from major power status and the entire political and military calculus is scrambled, it might.
Nixon got rid of the draft for reasons that had to do with the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and his presidential election. The argument was that the AVF wouldn't negatively impact force readiness, not that the draft was "bad" from a military manpower perspective (I'm not sure what that means). There's some other reasons peppered in correspondence from that time, but I'm super skeptical of this argument for enough reasons to finish a PhD thesis. It's been a long time coming, but the conversation needs to be had about how even if the United States needed to institute a draft we may not actually be able to do so anymore because of the general decline in health and fitness of men in this country. More over, there are civ-mil relations considerations that aren't properly accounted for when you claim the AVF is superior - we have essentially a warrior caste now, that's in many ways sectioned off from the reset of the civilian population. Good? Bad? Exercise for the reader but you can probably guess my stance.
>The US will not reauthorize a draft for an overseas war while the US remains a major power.
I don't see how these are related. Plenty of non "major" powers have conscription (in some form or another), as do plenty of "major" powers. The US wasn't a "major" power before WWI, though it was certainly "a power", and yet my great grandfather was drafted. Maybe you mean the US won't get into an unwinnable and unpopular ground war in South East Asia and then re-institute the draft, but you may be underestimating the depth of ineptitude of the people who've been running the show the last 30ish years. Everyone I served with was a volunteer, obviously, but war necessitates a lot of things that people would otherwise consider impossible right up until they happen.
The argument for the AVF has evolved over time; the issue wasn't once and done, and the importance of longer service terms in a wide range of specialties has been increasingly cited in arguments for maintaining the AVF. But even in the original Gates Commission report, the AVF was not, contrary to your description, painted as merely non-harmful, but as a more efficient means of meeting military requirements, with extensive supporting analysis.
The Commission's charter wasn't "figure out how to never do a draft again". It was "figure out how to turn this draft that everyone hates off".
edit: bad grammar
No, it's just accurate to what's in the report.
> The entire premise of the AVF at the time was that it would work fine, if you could still do a draft if you needed to.
No, it wasn't. While the standby draft was in the report as a safeguard to slightly reduce the the from-0 spinup time of a draft, the argument presented is not “an AVF is non-harmful as long as backstopped by a standby draft”, but “the AVF is superior on both practical economic efficiency grounds and ethical respect for personal liberty grounds in essentially every conceivable situation (with extensive analysis of the former and philosophical argument for the latter), and, just in case, we can also set up a standby draft system so things aren't quite needing to be built from scratch if Congress and the President ever decide a draft is needed for some reason again.”
In fact, the section of the Gates Commission report on the Standby Draft makes, obliquely, very good argument against the standby draft ever being the right choice, pointing out that it cannot immediately produce forces in an emergency because of time to train and organize, so it is only useful for gradual expansion, but then arguing for voluntary recruitment measures like compensation boosts for gradual expansion to be used in preference to activating the standby draft.
The military doesn't even want conscripts anymore. They have discipline problems, take too long to train, and don't stay long enough. Conscription stopped being relevant when technology became more important than numbers.
I am not, necessarily, concerned about questions of if the military wants conscripts. I'm concerned about the ability of the nation-state to properly respond to a crisis that precipitates major war. If you just consider the military's wants in a static context and extrapolate forward, just giving them what they want, the entire procurement roadmap for the next 10 years would probably still look like IED defeat devices and other garbage "future" tech that didn't and doesn't work, with the actually useful stuff arriving in 2040. We've thankfully had, on rare occasions, some smart civilians and DoD contrarians who have edged things in a different direction in some cases.
>Conscription stopped being relevant when technology became more important than numbers.
Hard, hard disagree. It is not at all decided that technology is more important than "numbers" (I'm assuming you are referring to raw numbers of troops in a particular combat zone). "Technology" has a lead time, and while humans have an approximate lead time of ~18 years, whatever technology that would beat them on the battlefield isn't stockpiled like humans are.
I'm not too sure it would be motivating to people either. Usually what motivates people is the fear of being overrun by some other group but with immigration the way it is that's happening anyway.