The War in the Ukraine

sheogorath

Major
Registered Member
Sad to see such an esteemed infrastructure destroyer comment on Russia destroying infrastructure as a method of terrorism.
Do as I say, not as I do.


Ukranian soldiers in a trench get ambushed by a Russian patrol

Effects of a drone on a D20 howitzer, soldiers claim it had extra shrapnel attached to each and show some large pieces of rebar, which shows its most likely bullshit

An Ukranian van transporting equipment got hammered by a tank

Ukranian mortar team try to shoot-n-scoot and fail, leaving half the mortar behind


EDIT: New wave of missiles might be on the way


Russians are attempting to encircle Bakhmut by heading to Chasov Yar after capturing Artemovsk. There is also talk of an offensive going on in the Kupyansk area.
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One of the expected side-effects of the missile strikes on electric infrastructure, causing a breakdown of fuel logistics at multiple levels as now you have to also power generators, diesel trains and become more reliant on trucks on top of the fuel requirements for the ground forces.
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plawolf

Lieutenant General
It's pretty surreal these folks are oblivious to a DJI Mavic 3 hovering overhead. I guess they can't hear it.

Many if not most of the soldiers on the frontlines are probably half deaf from all the artillery use.

The lucky ones with ear-pro wouldn’t hear any better unless they have electronic ones that actually boost hearing. But those electronic ones need batteries to boost hearing, which are probably in short supply at the front and probably prioritised for use in NODs/thermals and radios.
 

tankphobia

Senior Member
Registered Member
It's pretty surreal these folks are oblivious to a DJI Mavic 3 hovering overhead. I guess they can't hear it.

If you're experienced with quad copters, you'd be surprised how quiet and hard to spot they are when they're like 50m+ off the ground. On a windy day a Mavic would be close to inaudible and a faint dot in the sky.

That's why you see oblivious infantry in those videos all the time, the drones are actually fairly high up and you need to place close attention to the sky to spot them. Which also plays to how pointless a tactic it is to hand infantry a shotgun and expect them to shoot drones down as some had suggested in this thread.
 

Tam

Brigadier
Registered Member
They can pick up your jammer, which should not be placed in the middle of your troop concentrations.

The more powerful the jammer, the bigger the effective bubble and the further away you can place it from friendly forces and assets.

If you want to move up a gear, you can have a mobile jammer that moves around randomly and avoid easy targeting. You can use long cables to route the jammer emitter far from the rest of the jammer so enemy artillery will only hit a cheap and expendable emitter.

Moreover, your jammer should be working in conjunction with your own recon forces, counter battery radars, friendly artillery and aviation such that if the enemy tries to hit your jammers with artillery, they would expose their artillery positions to rapid counter battery fires as well as rapid UAV ISR recon to do damage assessment, fine tune friendly artillery and/or seek out fleeing enemy artillery units for aviation to follow up and mop up.

But this is the Russia forces, so a lot of that is probably not something they can do consistently across their forces. Which is probably another reason China is withholding direct military supplies. There is no silver bullet solution to the poor shape the Russian forces are presently in. You will need a full spectrum modernisation for them to fight like they should be able to, and that is going to require arms supplies on par with what NATO has been sending Ukraine.

Ukraine is just not remotely important enough for China to be worth that kind of investment, not even counting the diplomatic and economic costs of taking sides so decisively for China.

So if sending individual systems isn’t really going to make much difference, but incur full costs for China, it makes most sense for China to not get involved overtly.

I think this is the kind of calculations the EU has collectively just not even thought of to do before getting involved in supporting Ukraine.

As soon as you take a side, you incur full economic costs in the form of sanctions and/or loss of access to markets and key supplies.

Drip feeding arms into the conflict will only serve to prolong it, and the economic pain to yourself. Thus the logical play is to either not get involved, or to intervene decisively and with overwhelming force to utterly and irrecoverably tip the balance in the favour of your supported side.

Unless of course, you are a special case like Iran that both benefits from the current global economic earthquakes, and are also so sanctioned there isn’t much additional cost to getting involved since there isn’t anything left to sanction anyways. So it makes perfect sense for them to get involved to make a quick buck both from direct arms sales and also from prolonging the current favourable economic conditions and opportunities. This, funnily enough, also applies to the USA.


Jammers will draw HARMs towards them, exactly the US sent Ukraine some. If it were not for Tors, Buks and Pantsyrs, the Russians would have lost more these jammers.

Jammers are supposed to work with your own ESM systems. They are not set on 24/7 daily to create a static bubble. Instead the ESM picks up the enemy signal, then processes it for two results. The jammer stays quiet and invisible until it is called into action.

The first is to identify the signal, to determine friend or foe, then what classification of signal is it. Is it a radar? What type of radar will it be? Is it communication? What type of communication will it be?

The second is that the ESM then determines the location of the signal. There are a few means how this is determined but we won't go through these techniques (AoA, ToA and FoA).

Both data is sent to the jammer, with the signal waveform being replicated by the jammer. Then via a phase array, a beam is formed towards the offending source with a duplicate of the signal that has been either manipulated to give errors, or rotated to cancel it out. Incidentally this is also how shipborne EW systems work.

The ESM is a passive system and it would be working somewhere near the jammer. Because it is passive, detection is impossible except through optical means, and these systems can get away being small and not easy to spot.

The media almost never talks about it but I believe Russia has embedded into their brigades, sophisticated EW systems both ECM and ESM, which along with ground based SAMs, are able to neutralize Ukraine's drone forces to some degree. The ESM and SIGINT also tap to the Ukrainian communication chatter, overhearing conversations, and directionally locate them for targeting. That's likely how they were able to destroy some of the Ukrainian air defense systems. Picking up their radar signals, analyze them to identify the target, then directionally locate the source, and then send drones after them. The drones I suspect might have a HARM capability, this being the enhanced Lancet drone. Using a sample signal obtained by the ESM, the drone sniffed and followed the signal to its source. This may also be used against counter battery radars, and the Russian MoD occasionally reports the destruction of such radars in their public briefings.
 
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Atomicfrog

Captain
Registered Member
Well, Russian is clearly stuck to get all of Ukraine or losing any face value...Nato just cut all the chances for a ceasefire bigtime.

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Civilians will be the one getting the worse of the situation and it's sure that if any of Ukraine survive, it will be a pile of rubbles. Maybe we will see T-14 in battle in Ukraine after all in a couple of years.
 
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plawolf

Lieutenant General
Jammers will draw HARMs towards them, exactly the US sent Ukraine some. If it were not for Tors, Buks and Pantsyrs, the Russians would have lost more these jammers.

Jammers are supposed to work with your own ESM systems. They are not set on 24/7 daily to create a static bubble. Instead the ESM picks up the enemy signal, then processes it for two results. The jammer stays quiet and invisible until it is called into action.

The first is to identify the signal, to determine friend or foe, then what classification of signal is it. Is it a radar? What type of radar will it be? Is it communication? What type of communication will it be?

The second is that the ESM then determines the location of the signal. There are a few means how this is determined but we won't go through these techniques (AoA, ToA and FoA).

Both data is sent to the jammer, with the signal waveform being replicated by the jammer. Then via a phase array, a beam is formed towards the offending source with a duplicate of the signal that has been either manipulated to give errors, or rotated to cancel it out. Incidentally this is also how shipborne EW systems work.

The ESM is a passive system and it would be working somewhere near the jammer. Because it is passive, detection is impossible except through optical means, and these systems can get away being small and not easy to spot.

The media almost never talks about it but I believe Russia has embedded into their brigades, sophisticated EW systems both ECM and ESM, which along with ground based SAMs, are able to neutralize Ukraine's drone forces to some degree. The ESM and SIGINT also tap to the Ukrainian communication chatter, overhearing conversations, and directionally locate them for targeting. That's likely how they were able to destroy some of the Ukrainian air defense systems. Picking up their radar signals, analyze them to identify the target, then directionally locate the source, and then send drones after them. The drones I suspect might have a HARM capability, this being the enhanced Lancet drone. Using a sample signal obtained by the ESM, the drone sniffed and followed the signal to its source. This may also be used against counter battery radars, and the Russian MoD occasionally reports the destruction of such radars in their public briefings.

Yes, I am aware of the basic principles of EW, and the Russians have been deploying a lot of tactical jammers and EW systems, some of which were even captured by the Ukrainians.

The point is you don’t need military grade jammers to effectively and efficiently deal with commercial grade drones.

The overriding imperative for jammers to counter civilian drones is numbers. It’s no good having a all bells and whistles jammer for only 1 out of 100 of your positions. You need a lot of these jammers and they need to be cheap and essentially expendable so you don’t need to be precious about where you deploy them or need to worry about them falling into enemy hands. With those features, you can easily deploy such jammers on such a scale it moves from point defence to area defence. So instead of pockets of jamming out in the middle of nowhere to aim your artillery at, it’s the entire front that’s blocked off to commercial
Drones. You can shoot at all the individual jammers all you want, but the enemy will not care when each of their jammers cost less than one of your artillery shells.

You are also falling for the most ridiculous western MIC hype if you think HARMs can magically detect and engage any jammer, especially ones operating on civilian Wi-Fi bands. If HARMs or HARM like missiles can work like you think, no one would be using DJIs in Ukraine because they will all get hit with blindfired HARMs tracing their drone feeds back to the operators. You would also see internet traffic drop to nothing as rogue HARMs would have taken out all the Wi-Fi and cellular masts, not to mention a lot of civilians on their cellphones or computers.

The fact that civilian drones operate on civilian bands is both their biggest strength and weakness. You cannot easily distinguish drone signals from normal background civilian comms traffic, and developing missiles or drones to home on civilian Wi-Fi and cellular signals is so obvious a bad idea i shouldn’t need it spell out why. But jamming commercial drones is also far easier than military signals because commercial drones don’t have anti-jamming features beyond basic anti-interference. Jammers targeted at commercial drones will also be operating on commercial frequencies, make it just as difficult for opfor to distinguish your jammers from regular civilian comms infrastructure.
 

Abominable

Major
Registered Member
To make a drone structurally suited to a mounted machine gun, you will need a lot of weight for the body of the drone. A burst of machine gun fire of say, 100 rounds can weight quite a bit. The missile does not have to be very sophisticated if the killer drone can fly at the same speed and hover over the drone it tries to kill. The missile just need to attach to the drone. Maybe a sticky substance and a certain shape which allow it to attach. Maybe a few small pallets the size of a large bullet with sticky surfaces. A small explosive device will certainly be lighter than a machine gun and a 100 rounds. For the cost of one of the drones with a machine gun, you might be able to have 2-3 drones with explosives.
Most drones are flimsy, even something like 22 calibre would shoot them down. Not much recoil there at all. A gun with plenty of ammunition wouldn't take up much more weight than the typical payload a drone has.

Missiles would be more expensive and if they are guided you'll need sensors and guidance onboard the drone. Missiles are also slower over shorter ranges than gun projectiles.

Using a drone to take out another drone using physical means is plausible and does have some precedent in WW1 & WW2. I do think it'll be quicker and easier to shoot them down than to ram them.
 
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