@cstross@TidalFlats
Of course! A war of attrition can also be a war or exaspiration. Keep grinding away at Putin's army until he's had enough. Like VIetNam. Don't have to win the battles, just have to exhaust the folks who though a war was a good idea.
@DismalManorGang@TidalFlats This might be feasible if Russia was a democracy with good/free news media. It's neither of those things. Dictatorships can keep fighting long past the point at which a democracy would throw in the towel. Ukrainian sources say Russian deaths so far are close to 400,000 (so 6.7 times the US dead in Vietnam, in a much shorter period, from a smaller population: 146M Russians compared to 200M USAns in 1967):
@cstross@DismalManorGang@TidalFlats my understanding has been that the numbers in those daily reports are wounded + dead, not only dead. Probably some of the same factors that inflated US reported casualty counts of Vietnamese soldiers also apply. Not that the casualty count isn't huge either way.
@oddhack@DismalManorGang@TidalFlats Even more when you consider that the Vietnam war lasted 20 years (with 10 years between LBJ ramping it up to the final fall of Saigon), while the Ukraine invasion has been going for just under 2 years so far. So Russian casualty figures are already much higher than US casualties in Vietnam, in less a fifth the time.
@cstross Reading about why Major Kunikov was made a Hero of the Soviet Union is very interesting in that context. What message could the Ukranians be sending?
@cstross They're cheap torpedoes, sure, but like torpedoes they're range limited. And they keep showing up in "how did they get there?" sorts of places, so that you have to postulate strange things to explain it. (The internal volume for the jet-ski won't support that much extra fuel and the boom, the engines aren't rated for that many continuous hours, etc.)
It makes me wonder if there isn't something submersible delivering these attack packages. Not a modern fleet submarine, but something.
@graydon They have the huge advantage over torpedos that they don't require torpedo tubes—which imply a submarine or an MTB or destroyer (or an aircraft) as a launch platform. So ... maybe? Something like a narco-submarine, probably GPS/autopilot controlled rather than crewed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine
@cstross Jets skies are not that limited on fuel, particularly if you don't have a human operator and so can put more weight into fuel. They only need to operate for say 10 hours on a tank of fuel, and any extra fuel is just more explosive power. They can run at much more fuel efficient low speeds until close to a target as well (though they are detectable then)
I don't have a good sense of scale, but these appear more like small boats than jetskis to me. A boat would allow a lot more fuel.
You're probably both right & both wrong:
The Ukrainians recently designed and (I think) built some built-to-purpose long-range submarine attack drones, as opposed to the earlier improvised drones which Charlie mentioned.
These are designed to spend most of the time underwater (making them hard to detect) with a radio antenna that can be poked up above the waves to exchange status and receive commands.
I skimmed an interesting article on it in the last couple weeks.
@cstross@graydon I've always looked at the cost for stuff like missiles and have wondered how much of that is military contractor markup (and or cost plus shenanigans) because a missile is basically some explosive, some gyros, a rocket motor and a computer (and a hell of a lot of design work)
The most expensive part to get on the open market would be the rocket the rest is relatively cheap off the shelf stuff you'd probably have to put some work into the software though
@addressforbots@graydon You mistake the fixed costs of the weapon for the cost of the entire supply chain to build the things, warehouse them, maintain them, and ship them to the troops as/when they're needed, along with spares and repairs, operator training, and so on. The actual explodey pointy bit is much cheaper than the ecosystem that produces it. (This also goes for stuff like the F-35 which is actually not significantly pricier than a Boeing 737—it's just accounted for very differently.)
@cstross@graydon so it's like enterprise software it's expensive because you're not just buying the software you're buying the entire maintenance, support and training arrangement that comes with it even if you could technically probably do something similar from scratch for cheaper it wouldn't be a robust solution suitable for actual wide scale deployment in the kind of situations where that thing would be used
@addressforbots@graydon Yep. All the screams about how "expensive" the F-35 program is miss the point that it's costed over a 30 year design life, with all projected maintenance and upgrades included. It's a fighter so more like a Formula One race car than your daily driver in terms of maintenance and costs per hour of operation, but for what it is it's not much pricier than its predecessors (eg. the F-16, Eurofighter, etc).
@cstross@addressforbots The other thing, well, two things about the F-35 is that Ukraine is demonstrating that the USAF doctrine change to presume that anything not heavily stealthed as a matter of form and design is dead against a modern air defense network is substantially correct, for one, and for two, it's built to be part of the"volume contests you" armed sensor network.
If you're going to be doing those designed mission roles at all, it's not that much over the minimum ante.
@graydon@addressforbots The F-35 has one critical weakness: a 30 year design life. Modern battlefield radar goes through a generation a decade, and old stealth techniques become useless for defense—but continue to hamper the airframes they're baked into. Which is why the F-117 was retired so early. I suspect the F-35 will be replaced by drones for deep strike, and relegated to being a BVR missile truck for air defense after 2030-ish.
@cstross@addressforbots Which probably has something to do with the NGAD program having a much shorter design life.
And yes, that's a problem, but it's also the first stealth aircraft at scale and it does look like the institutional learning experiences are happening.
The other corner is the active deployment of directed energy weapons. It's already happening and at least the USN are now a)in a hurry and b) getting quite a lot of current data from the Red Sea, which I expect is alarming them.
@cstross@addressforbots Speed of light in an atmosphere is effectively instantaneous. I don't think we're going to be seeing anybody seriously suggesting getting manned aircraft into the contested volume in a decade.
@cstross@addressforbots In the 70s the expected thing was particle accelerators. Math got done about how you hit a high altitude target with a gigajoule worth of protons.
One answer is that you build your particle accelerator emitter so it's coaxial with a laser and precede the protons with enough laser energy to create a vacuum tunnel to the target. (The laser won't work on its own because the target is shiny.)
The tunnel doesn't need to last or be very wide; it's energetically doable.
@cstross@addressforbots This does assume the energy budget of a major ground installation or a CVN, and it did NOT assume today's solid state lasers, but in terms of plausible energetics, it's an implementation problem. (Magnets and the ability to control everything have massively improved, too.)
"Volume contests you" is going to be low altitude, low energy (except when it isn't), cryptic, and frequently immobile.
Attacking is going to look like faunal succession in a soil biome.
@graydon@cstross@addressforbots
As DEW systems work their way down the TRL scale, I wonder if we'll see a return of the nuclear cruiser? In addition to the power aspect, they also have great strategic mobility. With the world getting complicated, that's going to be worth a lot more than it was in the cold war.
@rabidchaos@graydon@addressforbots More likely, I think, would be large nuclear-powered navy support ships. A multipolar world means fewer ports open to foreign warships for resupply, and also more supply chain disruption. Also, we may see another shift in warship design towards ship as modular mobile launch pad for different weapons systems, a bit like the [failed] Independence-class LCS's huge mission bay—or the FREMM/Constellation-class frigate.
@rabidchaos@cstross@addressforbots That's more or less what the Zumwalts were meant to be without the nuclear powered part. It's apparently consensus that the highly experimental design mostly works EXCEPT for the guns intended as primary armament, and the plan now is to replace the guns with hypersonic missile silos.
SSGNs are a better way to evade the drone swarm for coastal bombardment than a large cruiser. On the other hand, for everything short of sink-them-all, the cruiser is better.
@graydon@rabidchaos@addressforbots Also, aren't SSGNs a whole lot more expensive than even a nuclear-powered [surface] cruiser? The whole "submarine" angle doesn't come cheap ...
@cstross@rabidchaos SSGNs are more expensive[1], but this gets into expected effectiveness. No amount of money spent on useless is worthwhile; the least much you can spend for useful is exactly that.
It mostly comes down to the rumoured mass interferometer applications for submarine detection being effective or not.
[1] The USN stopped building SSNs some time ago; they're ALL SSGNs. The degree and flexibility to which they're SSGNs has tended to increase with time.
@graydon@rabidchaos fn[1] is a good point: the RN has done similarly (the Astute class SSNs all carry Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles as well as other stuff: the tubes are horizontal, not vertical, that's the only difference from a converted SSBN).
Add comment