Drones are crowding Ukraine's skies, largely paralyzing battlefield | Hacker News Reader

Drones are crowding Ukraine's skies, largely paralyzing battlefield

washingtonpost.com

7 pointsAnimats15 comments

It sounds as if the Ukrainians could really use a bit of long-range precision munitions to blow up bridges, railway stations and depots.

If I were the Russians (especially as I think their strategic goal is control of a certain radius from their Black Sea port) I'd have used this stalemate to preposition food and ammunition at the front.

I think that's routine, to the extend that it's possible. But one also wants to avoid having too much stored within shooting range.

BTW. One of my history books stated that in WW2(?) the necessary supplies were more than a ton per day and front-line soldier. 16kg of food and drinks, and a little of this and a little of that.

I remember reading that during the Russian Civil War, although they still used horses (their equivalent of todays "technical" being a machine gun in a horsedrawn carriage), the cavalry pretty much had to operate within a day's distance of rail lines, because they relied on rail transport for grain and hay, only being able to source water locally.

(cursory Wiki'ing says standard independent operation for sub-army units is somewhere between days and 1-2 weeks of resupply, so it sounds like being able to destroy rail faster than construction battalions can rebuild it ought to be a thing)

It is a thing. Particularly for crucial points like bridges and hubs.

With questionable assumptions, I'm getting:

(10% of 500'000 men) tonnes/day * 1 wagon/60 tonnes = 800+ wagons/day

which sounds like a lot of (theoretically interruptible) traffic.

Using the model of the US Civil War, which also had an environment where defence easily beat offence, the side that mustered the most industrial output won. That suggests the centre of mass of UA's fight to be less logistical and more political.

So high technology causes reversion to the tactical status of WWI trench warfare over a century ago. It reminds me of the personal force fields in Dune that only allow slow penetration and so revive the use of the sword in combat.

Cavalry disappeared from the battlefield in part because horses don't hide well in foxholes; are we at the point where humans don't either?

(how are sappers doing? they had some use in Syria, but I imagine radar modalities would make them easy to spot)

Uhm, don't be so quick to assume that.

The first world war wasn't quite as you've heard. The front line was very dynamic in some parts (n the summer of 1915, Russia lost an area an area around half as big as today's Ukraine).

It was static in some areas, notably the small areas of the western front where the troop and supply density was enormously high. The German attack at Verdun was just 40km wide, the Russian invalsion now is a >1000km front. During that battle, the Germans committed more soldiers to attacking a single village than the total size of the Russian army now. Maybe you could say that those sections were kept static by extreme resource use, rather than by lack of anything.

This is more like the Viet Cong using tunnel networks because the US had air superiority.

The view from the Army War College on Ukraine: [1] Key points:

- This kind of warfare kills a lot more soldiers than the US has been used to since WWII. The US military lost only 2.7% of the force that went to Vietnam. Later wars were lower. Russia/Ukraine is far higher. Nobody publishes reliable casualty numbers, but they're huge. The US-style all-volunteer all-pro military model won't work. Those guys get used up fast. It may be necessary to go back to a draft to get enough fresh meat for the grinder. Both Russia and Ukraine are doing that.

- Command posts, firebases, or strongpoints anywhere near the front will be found and destroyed. Command posts further back have trouble communicating with front units maintaining radio silence. If it talks, it dies.

- Helicopters are not too useful. Too easy to hit. This also implies the end of fast Medevac.

[1] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/10/

> If it talks, it dies.

On the bright side, reliance on both broad conscription and mission command really ought to result in improvements to public education...

(a mission command anecdote: when speaking with a FSU friend, he related that while Zhukov was on his way to Berlin, the germans had broken russian codes — but it did them little good, because "our boys" were always "disobeying" orders in order to do what was necessary to advance on the ground)

> Those guys get used up fast.

  Stormed at with drone and shell,
  Boldly they strode and well,
  Into the jaws of Death,
  Into the mouth of hell,
    Those 3,600.

> On the bright side, reliance on both broad conscription and mission command really ought to result in improvements to public education...

That's the romantic version. The reality is sending large numbers of barely-trained conscripts into battle. Many will die. A few will survive as good soldiers.

"So many drones patrol the skies over Ukraine’s front lines — hunting for any signs of movement — that Ukrainian and Russian troops have little ability to move on the battlefield without being spotted, and blown up."

If UA and RU lines are a drone-flight away from each other, is next obvious step drone carriers for extended range? (there's a rocket equation here, and both sides would quickly deploy the same tech, so it'd probably just enlarge the effective grey zone without any strategic effect)

Would anti-drone drones do anything? (I think not: should inf'y attempt to advance under their cover, being spotted at all probably invites incoming att'y)

>is the next obvious step drone carriers for extended range?

Yep. https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/drone_carrier_quad...

The drone carrier also acts as a radio relay, the other big thing limiting FPV range, since they both have to use low gain omnidirectional antenna and also operate very low to the ground, which is terrible for reception range.

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