Yes, USA has a lot of high tech, very complex gadgets. Russia has countered and nuetralized most of them to date, one way or the other. There are now near 300,000 Ukraine killed and missing, and another 300,000 wounded. Russia has about 20,000 dead, and perhaps 50,000 wounded. Ukraine has burned through many thousands of pieces of armor and artillary and 90% of its Air Force. Russia has prepared actively for this war since 2007. At the end of the day, results matter. Russia is rapidly destroying Ukraine military, and likely 2 months away from fully decapitating it, at the current pace.
Funny how life imitates art sometimes. Real war is turning into an RTS game, complete with map hacks and unit-micro
To me this explains a bit why Ru has been moving as slowly as it has. They are probably limiting movement to ranges where they have peer ISR capability.
Incidentally I would have thought that buttoning up in urban fortresses (as Ukr is) would negate this advantage, but what do I know
Ahh my thinking was that if you seal your army in a small city like Bakhmut or Ugledar your adversary more or less knows where you are, and the sophistication of ISR required is a lot lower since combat ranges are measured in hundreds of meters instead of km. But I have no military background so I accept I may be totally wrong!
RTS is so new... Why not decorate with some ancient nobility and say the war started imitating chess/checkers other encient board games, having no "fog of war" and absolute and symmetric knowledge. So the only thing one could do is keep one's movement ambiguos as long as possible and only commit when the enemy, after finally understanding the plan, would not have time to stop it.
Remember the saying "chess is a tregedy of [lacking] one turn".
Also remember the chess strategy of "creating N+1 threat" and then givin the opponnent the 'initiative' to freely choose their failure point.
Lol. It's hard to tell cus he says everything so straightfaced. But I haven't heard any possible way that Wagner can have dozens of satellites of their own, unless he's just referring to Russian satellites which Wagner is allowed to have access to.
And even the Russians are lacking in satellites. In particular they don't have enough radar satellites. So I think it's Uncle Zhenya doing Zhenya things.
Remembewr that those "Delta" leaks came from some captured Ukrainianofficers, whose laptop was not banned from the C4ISR network timely. so for a while Allied enjoyed access to all the NATO informatin this offecer was authorised for.
That is the fundamental problem with "ready to consume" big libraries, they are equally handy fror intended and unintended purposes.
Also, remember repoorts that ISIS and Iran and whoever used USAF Raptors TV feeds. They could not hijack or attack them, but at least they could tune in and see everything the operators saw.
And this American merc, who tuirned his coat.
Both Russian and American headquarters are surely salivating about tapping into their opponent digital treasuries. And probably to some extend they did. Could Prigozhin refer to this? You know, donkey loaded with gold, etc.
I did hear of China exporting a lot of high-end digital optics to Russia some time last year, and the theory was that these would be used in a new range of intel satellites. There was a flurry of military launchings by Russia toward the end of last year, not in the kind of numbers to counter Starlink, but presumably fulfilling something of the same function. Musk has also admitted that Russia has made attempts to hack Starlink and I can't help wondering if some of these were more than just 'attempts'. The stalled UKR advance down through Kherson, along the Dnieper, was curious in this regard, as was any advance past Kupiansk in Lugansk. Something certainly stemmed the work flow there quite apart from troop losses.
This only show how misjudge everybody regarding the technological advancement of the Russian Federation. Even here in Vietnam, a sitting on the fence country, many people, highly educated people, believes that Russia is just a backward country with primitive tech from the 50s and everything HighTech is provided by the West and China. All wrong. Russia, in and by themselves, a superpower with tier 1 technologies. Gives Russia 5 years and they will even be able to produce 5nM chips.
The challenge pose by the US/NATO on Russia is something, in term of magnitude and scale, nobody would even comprehend how can Russia overcome this challenge. I concur that the US, if put into the same situation face the Russian today, would be able to fare that well as the Russian without resorting to nuclear threat.
For China, on the surface they cannot outright support Russia, due to China economy still pretty much intertwined with the West, unlike Russia. So best they can do is behind the scenes intel supply to Russian's forces through front enterprises for plausible deniability. But honestly, I believe the Chinese Armed Forces is actively helping Russia in one way or another, because they know, after Russia, China will be next.
Anyway, I have been missing you from the Saker blog, your NightVision era post is one of the reasons why i follow the Saker.
thanks buddy. I'm saddened to hear some in Vietnam feel that way. I would have thought they had more solidarity with Russia. But it's typical for any country who starts to become a 1st world country, they begin aligning philosophically with the West and Western culture it seems
No dont be sad, luckily the Vietnamese youth netizen are increasingly supporting Russia and rebuking the Pro-Western hypocrisy. I believe they have see through the lie spewing by the Western MSM and see things as it is and deduce their own conclusion.
Actually, right now in the Vietnamese CPV, the Pro-East faction is in predominance against the Pro-US faction. Most of the highly educated i refers too are those who received Western Education or those who come from family that served the southern regime and those who had to live through the 1975-1994 period. They all admired the US because blow-job Bill removed all the sanction against Vietnam. The olive branch in the most desperate of time when your greatest friend, the Russian, collapse and is being rape by the West, and China playing in tune with the USA made those highly educated people believed that the USA is truly the greatest country in the world. Indeed it was, but not anymore.
I concur that the reason Bill lifted the sanctions is not because of pity for the Vietnamese people but rather for their own interest of doing regime change through open market policy and Us style democratization of the mass population. One other reason is to surround China with it arch enemy from the south. Vietnam and Chinese ruling elite, and in general for the Vietnamese people, throughout our shared 4000 years history, doesn't exactly liked each other and usually went to war for every 100 200 years. The US want to exploit our mistrust (for a lack of a better word) for the Chinese CPC to pitch us against war with China.
I can say that Vietnam right now is a hot battleground of East -West clashing ideologies and culture war.
(sorry for my rambling and my English is not that high level either)
Thanks for the info. I have great respect for Vietnam and have said back in the Saker days I believe Võ Nguyên Giáp is probably the greatest general of the 20th century.
Considering the technical and military help the USSR gave Viet Nam in the past one would think that most would know what Russia is capable of. But then again that generation are dead and the new generations are disinterested, ignorant iphone twits just like everywhere else.
Now, most of the highly educated i refers too are those who received Western Education or those who come from family who served the southern regime. Actually, during the 1975 to 1994 period, the CPV have done everything they could to salvage the war-torn economy, isolation from pretty much everybody including China (because the CPC still think of Vietnam as the little brother and require us to submit to them, even by now), except for the USSR. But even then the USSR was also on the decline so they could not provide much help and then the collapse and the horrible 90s befell on the Russian. Truth to be told after 1990, nobody here in Vietnam regarding Russia as a superpower with advanced tech anymore. They all believe that the US is the paragon of virtually everything and the advancement in tech from China and Russia is just them stealing US tech, even more outrageous is they refuse to look at the big picture and just swallow every things the MSM throw at them. At least i can say is a portion of Vietnamese youth are not so easily convinced to such blatant lie and i have able to detect a growing trend of many Pro-Russian sentiments from Vietnamese young netizen, which is nice to see.
Now to be perfectly clear, Vietnam, due to it geo-political position, have to sit on the fence, we have to problem with the Russian, but we have problem with China. Not with the Chinese people per se, but with the CPC. The way they have been probing us in the East Sea (South China Sea) have raised anti-China sentiment in Vietnamese population. And many often neglect history when to comes to small insignificant country but Vietnam and China always have bloody feud, directly or indirectly through proxies, occurring between us for every 100 -200 years or so. So when the time come (which i hope it will never come), I hope everybody here will have a fair and impartial judgment.
When you are small, better play smart so not to get involved into the fight of the elephants, for when such thing occurs, the ants will be trample to dead.
I'm not a war historian, but I do remember reading that radar gave the RAF a huge advantage against the Luftwaffe in WW2 over England. The RAF "seemed" to always have just the right amount and mix of fighters to counter German raids. This tech definitely would give the Ukrainian's a strong ability to do something similar. A sustained and distributed push against large sections of the line by Russia probably reduces the effectiveness of this as the Ukrainian's can't line up counters across the entire line constantly.
There is a very good book on the Battle of Britain by Stephen Bungay. He argues that the network capability was the crucial element. Other countries apparently had radar. The British radar stations though were linked to a very well organised communications command and control infrastructure. This enabled the prime operational commander Keith Park to make real time decisions and keep control of the battle. In some ways it was the pioneer for the networking models that are being deployed in Ukraine.
My father was an RAF radar operator in the later stages of WW2 and used to tell about many of the imperfections too! For example, that it was not always so easy to identify everything correctly. Suspect that there is a lot of such chafe in the current intelligence world too. No doubt the Russians carry out electronic counter measures and I would not be surprised if more physical deceptions are carried out to fox the satellites. Do dummy tanks look so different to real ones? Can thermal images be doctored? I wonder how much of that is going on too. The Russian General Staff is for sure not going to tell us!
Seems Germans should have first and foremost bombed all the UK radar stations in the south/canal, then swept the skies and only then started bombing airfields. Instead they probably did something like escorted raids directly to airfields which made it possible to prepare the interceptors and resulted lot of bombers shot down.
I think even with that advantage they would have fallen if a mounted effort was taken, but Hitler was like a child, the shiny key of Russia was right there, so he just left England for later. Its well known that he considered England done, and after he dealt with the only enemy that could threaten his 1000 year plan, Russia, then he would just sail over the canal and walk right to London or maybe even get the English to welcome him with a tea party.
Britain, America and France paid for the rebuilding of the German war machine. Weimar was bankrupt - which are the only countries that had finance capital to spare? And were interested in supporting Fascism (Corporatism & racism) and a destruction of the "Communist Threat"?
In Olly Stone's 'Untold History' series, he makes the clear point that the UK & US simply 'pootled round' UNTIL the Russians had defeated the German Nazis, at which point the Invasion of France was quickly undertaken to 'protect' western Europe(an markets for American goods and capital/domination).
Chamberlain handed the Sudetenland defences over for free. Quite WHY that didn't alarm Stalin is anyone's guess.
So, in summary, Germany/Hitler expected the 'war' to be over once he had defeated the Soviets, and was busy exterminating Russians - as the Ukrainian Nazi battalions also expected to be called on to do NOW.
Fortunately, once again the American-backed Nazis are failing.
And once again, the propaganda will attempt to hide their hand behind it all.
Given America’s awesome technology I wonder how she has managed lose all her recent wars. The Taliban probably had very limited satellite and network capability. But they still won.
Maybe the intended “innovation” in Ukraine is to marry US technology with more local cannon fodder. Although all of America’s wars seem to involve large proxy armies too. Afghan National Army deaths exceeded NATO ones by a factor of ten. Similar story in Vietnam.
So hard to see what is different here from the normal US model which ultimately will end in failure. It always does.
Washington likes to destabilize and turn countries against each other. Letting their people kill each other while they participate cowardly hiding in America. One day hopefully Washington gets a taste of their own medicine
All very complex, very expensive systems, which is why they fight a proxy war and will never directly fight Russia or China or even North Korea. A direct war would mean all that expensive equipment gets scrapped in the first strike, and then no more video games for Uncle Sam.
In the event of actual NATO and US intervention in Ukraine? And if Russia actually starts fighting a "war". What would the best way be to be interdict these capabilities? I am guessing the AWACS would be the primary target? The drones and Starlink are too dispersed and numerous. Even the satellites are too numerous. And of course, the analysis sites could be anywhere and difficult to find. What assets would Russia use against the AWACS? Or is there another way for Russia disrupt these capabilities? Short of a EMP of course.
In any event, I find your analysis incredible and informative. I have forwarded your posts to everyone I know. But my fellow 'Muricans aren't too interested in reading. Which of course is why we are where we are at.
Well GPS and all the other major spysats can be taken out but yes starlink with its 4000 current and 8000 planned small satellites are way too numerous. Also the big danger is, if GPS is taken out, Starlink can likely be rerouted to basically be a GPS proxy and function as GPS transceiver as I understand it. The only other option is total 'space kesslerization' which is destroying enough satellites such that it creates massive snowball effect of debris/particles that it creates a completely impenetrable layer in low orbit that destroys ALL satellites for everyone, and likely makes space 'uninhabitable' for hundreds/thousands of years.
Excellent points. Of course, if the Russians "actually" targeted the infrastructure and shut down the utilities for real? Might be hard to run all those computer sites, and Starlinks off generators. I know Putin is all about the "rules" and herding international support. But at some point, the gas and electricity and railroads have to be shut down. Then if you have Star Wars info or not, hard to move those artillery assets around.
if its LEO (like Starlink and most spysats) it wouldn't be hundred of years, even with control and thrusters systems on most LEO sats they still have short life spans and need constant replacement. (they just fall back down to earth and burn up)
GPS satellites have atomic clocks on board. The whole system relies on very precise timing, so precise actually that relativistic effects have to be taken into account, which stem from time dilation due to the relative speeds of the satellites to each other and to the earth's surface. That makes it somewhat dubious that GPS could be rerouted via Starlink without loosing much of its precision. Even if that were not the case, if enough GPS satellites get disabled, then eventually the point arrives where nothing is left to reroute.
More generally, though, it will be necessary to develop anti-satellite lasers to the point where they will be able not only to dazzle the sensors of low earth orbit optical reconnaissance satellites. They will have to be able to burn up the solar panels of all types of satellites at least as far out as to the orbits of GPS satellites.
Great article. Now I understand why UKR badly needs more artillery ammo. This NATO operated C4ISR is useless without UKR artillery which is useless without ammo. My guess is that the new Penicilin medicine is making life of UKR artillery and NATO planners very difficult as recent UKR artillery losses seem to be quite high. When UKR and NATO run out of artillery pieces then C4ISR will become quite expensive Playstation 6. Is this the ultimate RUS strategy?
Now go deeper. What does it mean to have this level of surveillance and targeting capability? It simply means that if you can be identified, located, and targeted; you very likely can be destroyed by a stand-off weapon. And small, fast, stealthy, and cheap drones are the perfect stand-off weapon of the modern battlefield. They are difficult to detect and interdict, have a huge cost-benefit ratio, and do not put military personnel at serious risk.
OK, now let's assume that "intelligent" military staff personnel foresee these advantages and begin to move toward better ISR and drone technologies. What good is an expensive tank battalion if a drone swarm can take it out far behind enemy lines at trivial cost? In classic military countermeasure warfare, anti-drone technology becomes an existential necessity. Jamming can suppress communications (and potentially disable drone functionality), but what if the drones are AI-driven, self-contained, hunter-seekers?
At some point in the future evolution of modern warfare, death to electronics becomes a critical necessity if you want to stay alive on the battlefield. And then what happens? Has anyone modeled this wargame scenario? And for those who still adhere to the belief that EMP hardening will save the day, you might want to look at the trackrecord of these efforts against a high-altitude, high-energy pulse; which is also relatively cheap to implement and repeat.
Gordon R Dickson in the excellent Dorsai! series, argued that every technological advance is and will be countered - meaning that eventually, it all comes down to humans with blades, or simple projectile weapons that cannot be electronically jammed.
Which is bad news for America, ultimately, as the US MIC don't find investing in troops very profitable.
Still, when you're just printing money, meaning your vassals are picking up your inflation, I guess actually "winning wars" isn't that vital. Especially when you can convince swastica-upped imbeciles to die for you WITHOUT EVEN BEING PAID.
Or terribly poor Ukrainian conscripts who have absolutely no choice in the matter. They should just shoot their CIA handlers and surrender.
Despite China offering a peace plan- essentially providing its services as a mediator- the USA still rejected it outright.
Notably, Russia said okay and I believe Zelensky did not reject it outright.
With the loud silence over the Nord Stream bombings from EU and USA, I think this really shows the international audience as to who wants peace and who wants war. Hopefully, this adds up to more pressure across the international audience to press for peace and influence the US to start making more sensible choices.
Of course, the global economic plates begin to shift... de-dollarization, regionalization etc...
In fact, better that they start shifting- at least it means we see what the USA is doing and countries are taking steps to avoid war.
Otherwise, we're really getting dragged to some nonsensical conflicts.
The C4ISR and the strike capability is amazing. The question I pose to my friends, for 800 billion a year, where the heck is the ammunition?
Yes, USA has a lot of high tech, very complex gadgets. Russia has countered and nuetralized most of them to date, one way or the other. There are now near 300,000 Ukraine killed and missing, and another 300,000 wounded. Russia has about 20,000 dead, and perhaps 50,000 wounded. Ukraine has burned through many thousands of pieces of armor and artillary and 90% of its Air Force. Russia has prepared actively for this war since 2007. At the end of the day, results matter. Russia is rapidly destroying Ukraine military, and likely 2 months away from fully decapitating it, at the current pace.
Low and behold, here is the destruction tally highlights from the 4 March 2023 MOD report:
-880 KIA's
-12 heavy artillery/howitzers, including 2 M-777
-3 MI 8 helicopters
-1 S-300 system
-3 tanks
-7 armored fighting vehicles
This is WINNING.
So essentially it's a war of live online video games
Funny how life imitates art sometimes. Real war is turning into an RTS game, complete with map hacks and unit-micro
To me this explains a bit why Ru has been moving as slowly as it has. They are probably limiting movement to ranges where they have peer ISR capability.
Incidentally I would have thought that buttoning up in urban fortresses (as Ukr is) would negate this advantage, but what do I know
haa that's funny maphacks and unit-micro...it's true though. Also the famous RTS rule never to 'blob up' unless you're playing Starcraft.
But how would buttoning up in a fortress negate this? I'm trying to understand the reasoning, it's eluding me at the moment?
Ahh my thinking was that if you seal your army in a small city like Bakhmut or Ugledar your adversary more or less knows where you are, and the sophistication of ISR required is a lot lower since combat ranges are measured in hundreds of meters instead of km. But I have no military background so I accept I may be totally wrong!
RTS is so new... Why not decorate with some ancient nobility and say the war started imitating chess/checkers other encient board games, having no "fog of war" and absolute and symmetric knowledge. So the only thing one could do is keep one's movement ambiguos as long as possible and only commit when the enemy, after finally understanding the plan, would not have time to stop it.
Remember the saying "chess is a tregedy of [lacking] one turn".
Also remember the chess strategy of "creating N+1 threat" and then givin the opponnent the 'initiative' to freely choose their failure point.
"He claims that his own system of satellites allows Wagner to observe all points of the world.
Now what could that mean?"
More proof that Prigozhin is a Grandmaster troll.
Lol. It's hard to tell cus he says everything so straightfaced. But I haven't heard any possible way that Wagner can have dozens of satellites of their own, unless he's just referring to Russian satellites which Wagner is allowed to have access to.
And even the Russians are lacking in satellites. In particular they don't have enough radar satellites. So I think it's Uncle Zhenya doing Zhenya things.
maybe he payed for some western ones with proxy accounts, that would be pretty clever use of enemy logistics
Remembewr that those "Delta" leaks came from some captured Ukrainianofficers, whose laptop was not banned from the C4ISR network timely. so for a while Allied enjoyed access to all the NATO informatin this offecer was authorised for.
That is the fundamental problem with "ready to consume" big libraries, they are equally handy fror intended and unintended purposes.
Also, remember repoorts that ISIS and Iran and whoever used USAF Raptors TV feeds. They could not hijack or attack them, but at least they could tune in and see everything the operators saw.
And this American merc, who tuirned his coat.
Both Russian and American headquarters are surely salivating about tapping into their opponent digital treasuries. And probably to some extend they did. Could Prigozhin refer to this? You know, donkey loaded with gold, etc.
I did hear of China exporting a lot of high-end digital optics to Russia some time last year, and the theory was that these would be used in a new range of intel satellites. There was a flurry of military launchings by Russia toward the end of last year, not in the kind of numbers to counter Starlink, but presumably fulfilling something of the same function. Musk has also admitted that Russia has made attempts to hack Starlink and I can't help wondering if some of these were more than just 'attempts'. The stalled UKR advance down through Kherson, along the Dnieper, was curious in this regard, as was any advance past Kupiansk in Lugansk. Something certainly stemmed the work flow there quite apart from troop losses.
This only show how misjudge everybody regarding the technological advancement of the Russian Federation. Even here in Vietnam, a sitting on the fence country, many people, highly educated people, believes that Russia is just a backward country with primitive tech from the 50s and everything HighTech is provided by the West and China. All wrong. Russia, in and by themselves, a superpower with tier 1 technologies. Gives Russia 5 years and they will even be able to produce 5nM chips.
The challenge pose by the US/NATO on Russia is something, in term of magnitude and scale, nobody would even comprehend how can Russia overcome this challenge. I concur that the US, if put into the same situation face the Russian today, would be able to fare that well as the Russian without resorting to nuclear threat.
For China, on the surface they cannot outright support Russia, due to China economy still pretty much intertwined with the West, unlike Russia. So best they can do is behind the scenes intel supply to Russian's forces through front enterprises for plausible deniability. But honestly, I believe the Chinese Armed Forces is actively helping Russia in one way or another, because they know, after Russia, China will be next.
Anyway, I have been missing you from the Saker blog, your NightVision era post is one of the reasons why i follow the Saker.
thanks buddy. I'm saddened to hear some in Vietnam feel that way. I would have thought they had more solidarity with Russia. But it's typical for any country who starts to become a 1st world country, they begin aligning philosophically with the West and Western culture it seems
The greatest tragedy of the fall of the USSR, was leaving Capitalism as the sole world philosophy. No other ideas allowed.
The Islamic concept was there for while in the wake of the fall, but the US quickly crushed that.
I think maybe North Korea is the only one left with a different outlook on civilization.
No dont be sad, luckily the Vietnamese youth netizen are increasingly supporting Russia and rebuking the Pro-Western hypocrisy. I believe they have see through the lie spewing by the Western MSM and see things as it is and deduce their own conclusion.
Actually, right now in the Vietnamese CPV, the Pro-East faction is in predominance against the Pro-US faction. Most of the highly educated i refers too are those who received Western Education or those who come from family that served the southern regime and those who had to live through the 1975-1994 period. They all admired the US because blow-job Bill removed all the sanction against Vietnam. The olive branch in the most desperate of time when your greatest friend, the Russian, collapse and is being rape by the West, and China playing in tune with the USA made those highly educated people believed that the USA is truly the greatest country in the world. Indeed it was, but not anymore.
I concur that the reason Bill lifted the sanctions is not because of pity for the Vietnamese people but rather for their own interest of doing regime change through open market policy and Us style democratization of the mass population. One other reason is to surround China with it arch enemy from the south. Vietnam and Chinese ruling elite, and in general for the Vietnamese people, throughout our shared 4000 years history, doesn't exactly liked each other and usually went to war for every 100 200 years. The US want to exploit our mistrust (for a lack of a better word) for the Chinese CPC to pitch us against war with China.
I can say that Vietnam right now is a hot battleground of East -West clashing ideologies and culture war.
(sorry for my rambling and my English is not that high level either)
Thanks for the info. I have great respect for Vietnam and have said back in the Saker days I believe Võ Nguyên Giáp is probably the greatest general of the 20th century.
Considering the technical and military help the USSR gave Viet Nam in the past one would think that most would know what Russia is capable of. But then again that generation are dead and the new generations are disinterested, ignorant iphone twits just like everywhere else.
Now, most of the highly educated i refers too are those who received Western Education or those who come from family who served the southern regime. Actually, during the 1975 to 1994 period, the CPV have done everything they could to salvage the war-torn economy, isolation from pretty much everybody including China (because the CPC still think of Vietnam as the little brother and require us to submit to them, even by now), except for the USSR. But even then the USSR was also on the decline so they could not provide much help and then the collapse and the horrible 90s befell on the Russian. Truth to be told after 1990, nobody here in Vietnam regarding Russia as a superpower with advanced tech anymore. They all believe that the US is the paragon of virtually everything and the advancement in tech from China and Russia is just them stealing US tech, even more outrageous is they refuse to look at the big picture and just swallow every things the MSM throw at them. At least i can say is a portion of Vietnamese youth are not so easily convinced to such blatant lie and i have able to detect a growing trend of many Pro-Russian sentiments from Vietnamese young netizen, which is nice to see.
Now to be perfectly clear, Vietnam, due to it geo-political position, have to sit on the fence, we have to problem with the Russian, but we have problem with China. Not with the Chinese people per se, but with the CPC. The way they have been probing us in the East Sea (South China Sea) have raised anti-China sentiment in Vietnamese population. And many often neglect history when to comes to small insignificant country but Vietnam and China always have bloody feud, directly or indirectly through proxies, occurring between us for every 100 -200 years or so. So when the time come (which i hope it will never come), I hope everybody here will have a fair and impartial judgment.
Lets he who want to enjoy peace, prepare for war.
Life ain't easy anywhere it seems.
When you are small, better play smart so not to get involved into the fight of the elephants, for when such thing occurs, the ants will be trample to dead.
Ah.......Mystery solved as to where my favorite Sit Rep author from the Saker ended up. :-))
Thank you for your work and dedication regardless of your nom de plume ;-)
I'm not a war historian, but I do remember reading that radar gave the RAF a huge advantage against the Luftwaffe in WW2 over England. The RAF "seemed" to always have just the right amount and mix of fighters to counter German raids. This tech definitely would give the Ukrainian's a strong ability to do something similar. A sustained and distributed push against large sections of the line by Russia probably reduces the effectiveness of this as the Ukrainian's can't line up counters across the entire line constantly.
There is a very good book on the Battle of Britain by Stephen Bungay. He argues that the network capability was the crucial element. Other countries apparently had radar. The British radar stations though were linked to a very well organised communications command and control infrastructure. This enabled the prime operational commander Keith Park to make real time decisions and keep control of the battle. In some ways it was the pioneer for the networking models that are being deployed in Ukraine.
My father was an RAF radar operator in the later stages of WW2 and used to tell about many of the imperfections too! For example, that it was not always so easy to identify everything correctly. Suspect that there is a lot of such chafe in the current intelligence world too. No doubt the Russians carry out electronic counter measures and I would not be surprised if more physical deceptions are carried out to fox the satellites. Do dummy tanks look so different to real ones? Can thermal images be doctored? I wonder how much of that is going on too. The Russian General Staff is for sure not going to tell us!
Seems Germans should have first and foremost bombed all the UK radar stations in the south/canal, then swept the skies and only then started bombing airfields. Instead they probably did something like escorted raids directly to airfields which made it possible to prepare the interceptors and resulted lot of bombers shot down.
I think even with that advantage they would have fallen if a mounted effort was taken, but Hitler was like a child, the shiny key of Russia was right there, so he just left England for later. Its well known that he considered England done, and after he dealt with the only enemy that could threaten his 1000 year plan, Russia, then he would just sail over the canal and walk right to London or maybe even get the English to welcome him with a tea party.
Britain, America and France paid for the rebuilding of the German war machine. Weimar was bankrupt - which are the only countries that had finance capital to spare? And were interested in supporting Fascism (Corporatism & racism) and a destruction of the "Communist Threat"?
In Olly Stone's 'Untold History' series, he makes the clear point that the UK & US simply 'pootled round' UNTIL the Russians had defeated the German Nazis, at which point the Invasion of France was quickly undertaken to 'protect' western Europe(an markets for American goods and capital/domination).
Chamberlain handed the Sudetenland defences over for free. Quite WHY that didn't alarm Stalin is anyone's guess.
So, in summary, Germany/Hitler expected the 'war' to be over once he had defeated the Soviets, and was busy exterminating Russians - as the Ukrainian Nazi battalions also expected to be called on to do NOW.
Fortunately, once again the American-backed Nazis are failing.
And once again, the propaganda will attempt to hide their hand behind it all.
Great article and an eyeopener for me.
It goes a long way toward making sense of the apparent incongruities between Russia's successes and failures on the battlefield.
Very interesting article.
Given America’s awesome technology I wonder how she has managed lose all her recent wars. The Taliban probably had very limited satellite and network capability. But they still won.
Maybe the intended “innovation” in Ukraine is to marry US technology with more local cannon fodder. Although all of America’s wars seem to involve large proxy armies too. Afghan National Army deaths exceeded NATO ones by a factor of ten. Similar story in Vietnam.
So hard to see what is different here from the normal US model which ultimately will end in failure. It always does.
Washington likes to destabilize and turn countries against each other. Letting their people kill each other while they participate cowardly hiding in America. One day hopefully Washington gets a taste of their own medicine
As the Taliban themselves said: "They may have the watches, but we have the time"
All very complex, very expensive systems, which is why they fight a proxy war and will never directly fight Russia or China or even North Korea. A direct war would mean all that expensive equipment gets scrapped in the first strike, and then no more video games for Uncle Sam.
To me, this is just as well boots on the ground. Probably worse
In the event of actual NATO and US intervention in Ukraine? And if Russia actually starts fighting a "war". What would the best way be to be interdict these capabilities? I am guessing the AWACS would be the primary target? The drones and Starlink are too dispersed and numerous. Even the satellites are too numerous. And of course, the analysis sites could be anywhere and difficult to find. What assets would Russia use against the AWACS? Or is there another way for Russia disrupt these capabilities? Short of a EMP of course.
In any event, I find your analysis incredible and informative. I have forwarded your posts to everyone I know. But my fellow 'Muricans aren't too interested in reading. Which of course is why we are where we are at.
Well GPS and all the other major spysats can be taken out but yes starlink with its 4000 current and 8000 planned small satellites are way too numerous. Also the big danger is, if GPS is taken out, Starlink can likely be rerouted to basically be a GPS proxy and function as GPS transceiver as I understand it. The only other option is total 'space kesslerization' which is destroying enough satellites such that it creates massive snowball effect of debris/particles that it creates a completely impenetrable layer in low orbit that destroys ALL satellites for everyone, and likely makes space 'uninhabitable' for hundreds/thousands of years.
Excellent points. Of course, if the Russians "actually" targeted the infrastructure and shut down the utilities for real? Might be hard to run all those computer sites, and Starlinks off generators. I know Putin is all about the "rules" and herding international support. But at some point, the gas and electricity and railroads have to be shut down. Then if you have Star Wars info or not, hard to move those artillery assets around.
if its LEO (like Starlink and most spysats) it wouldn't be hundred of years, even with control and thrusters systems on most LEO sats they still have short life spans and need constant replacement. (they just fall back down to earth and burn up)
GPS satellites have atomic clocks on board. The whole system relies on very precise timing, so precise actually that relativistic effects have to be taken into account, which stem from time dilation due to the relative speeds of the satellites to each other and to the earth's surface. That makes it somewhat dubious that GPS could be rerouted via Starlink without loosing much of its precision. Even if that were not the case, if enough GPS satellites get disabled, then eventually the point arrives where nothing is left to reroute.
More generally, though, it will be necessary to develop anti-satellite lasers to the point where they will be able not only to dazzle the sensors of low earth orbit optical reconnaissance satellites. They will have to be able to burn up the solar panels of all types of satellites at least as far out as to the orbits of GPS satellites.
Great article. Now I understand why UKR badly needs more artillery ammo. This NATO operated C4ISR is useless without UKR artillery which is useless without ammo. My guess is that the new Penicilin medicine is making life of UKR artillery and NATO planners very difficult as recent UKR artillery losses seem to be quite high. When UKR and NATO run out of artillery pieces then C4ISR will become quite expensive Playstation 6. Is this the ultimate RUS strategy?
Now go deeper. What does it mean to have this level of surveillance and targeting capability? It simply means that if you can be identified, located, and targeted; you very likely can be destroyed by a stand-off weapon. And small, fast, stealthy, and cheap drones are the perfect stand-off weapon of the modern battlefield. They are difficult to detect and interdict, have a huge cost-benefit ratio, and do not put military personnel at serious risk.
OK, now let's assume that "intelligent" military staff personnel foresee these advantages and begin to move toward better ISR and drone technologies. What good is an expensive tank battalion if a drone swarm can take it out far behind enemy lines at trivial cost? In classic military countermeasure warfare, anti-drone technology becomes an existential necessity. Jamming can suppress communications (and potentially disable drone functionality), but what if the drones are AI-driven, self-contained, hunter-seekers?
At some point in the future evolution of modern warfare, death to electronics becomes a critical necessity if you want to stay alive on the battlefield. And then what happens? Has anyone modeled this wargame scenario? And for those who still adhere to the belief that EMP hardening will save the day, you might want to look at the trackrecord of these efforts against a high-altitude, high-energy pulse; which is also relatively cheap to implement and repeat.
Gordon R Dickson in the excellent Dorsai! series, argued that every technological advance is and will be countered - meaning that eventually, it all comes down to humans with blades, or simple projectile weapons that cannot be electronically jammed.
Which is bad news for America, ultimately, as the US MIC don't find investing in troops very profitable.
Still, when you're just printing money, meaning your vassals are picking up your inflation, I guess actually "winning wars" isn't that vital. Especially when you can convince swastica-upped imbeciles to die for you WITHOUT EVEN BEING PAID.
Or terribly poor Ukrainian conscripts who have absolutely no choice in the matter. They should just shoot their CIA handlers and surrender.
"I don't know which weapon would be the backbone of WW3 , but for WW4 those would be sticks and stones." - attributed to Einstein
Despite China offering a peace plan- essentially providing its services as a mediator- the USA still rejected it outright.
Notably, Russia said okay and I believe Zelensky did not reject it outright.
With the loud silence over the Nord Stream bombings from EU and USA, I think this really shows the international audience as to who wants peace and who wants war. Hopefully, this adds up to more pressure across the international audience to press for peace and influence the US to start making more sensible choices.
Of course, the global economic plates begin to shift... de-dollarization, regionalization etc...
In fact, better that they start shifting- at least it means we see what the USA is doing and countries are taking steps to avoid war.
Otherwise, we're really getting dragged to some nonsensical conflicts.
Keep the faith, my friend.