Comment by Hilift | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hilift | Hacker News Reader

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That quote was Russian observations on their securing valuable technical information, but lamenting on their inability to overcome their capability gap through spying due to changes in tactics of their "main adversary". In WW2, a major factor for the US Naval success in the Pacific was a change in attack doctrine. Aircraft would attack relentlessly from multiple directions, overwhelming the Japanese defenses. In the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, when Australian and US pilots mauled a Japanese supply convoy with Bristol Beaufighter aircraft. In the battle, aircraft fake a torpedo run, the ships changed course to align with the aircraft and minimize the attack surface, then they were strafed with the four 20 mm cannons. The air campaign in the Pacific was much more vicious and effective than Europe. One of the pilots quoted

"They went in and hit this troop ship. What I saw looked like little sticks, maybe a foot long or something like that, or splinters flying up off the deck of ship; they'd fly all around ... and twist crazily in the air and fall out in the water. Then I realized what I was watching were human beings. I was watching hundreds of those Japanese just blown off the deck by those machine guns. They just splintered around the air like sticks in a whirlwind and they'd fall in the water."

The Russians have difficulty adapting their tactics on the field. Reviewing the successes of the US battles must be quite different than throwing bodies at a front line.

The major factor in winning the Pacific battles was code breaking the Japanese communications. Doctrine doesn't matter when you know what the enemy is doing or planning.

That is crazy reductive to the point of ignorance. Doctrine does matter. You might know what your enemy is doing but if you fight wrong, even with foreknowledge, you will not win.

For one important example, the battle of Midway was a close thing even with the intelligence they had. Execution matters.

The problem with code breaking is that you can't benefit from it too much because your enemy will realise you're reading their messages and change their practices.

For this reason the allies had to let convoys be hit sometimes, because they couldn't always be too suspiciously at the right place at the right time. Luckily the German confidence in Enigma was so high that their top leaders ignored reports of enigma being broken, they thought it literally impossible.

I'm not sure how this played out in the Japanese war. But the point remains. You can't use signals intelligence too much unless it's literally ending the war in a couple of days.

Onboard radar (cavity magnetron, later adapted to the microwave oven) was another pivotal technology in the battle of the Atlantic.

It's probably also in contrast to their previous adversary, the Germans.

In my opinion, the Russians are quite tactically adaptive. The current war has seen tit-for-tat adaptation between both sides. The Russians don't/can't invest resources in not losing personnel. It's not a priority for them.

> In my opinion, the Russians are quite tactically adaptive.

But they aren't. They just added Iranian drones to their arsenal.

The war evolves every day... Russia has upgraded those Iranian drones themselves many times, including just this week introducing a variant with a thermobaric warhead. There is a constant tit-for-tat with electronic warfare devices and drones, with armaments, with how radar stations positions are identified, the routes the drones take to uncover additional targets etc. The tactical play is pretty endless. I'm not sure how you would reduce it to "they bought some drones from Iran."

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