[throwup238]

It’s not being talked about much outside of military analyst circles but those small drones have significantly changed the logistics of modern warfare possibly more than anything in the 21st century. Before, with cover and conceal warfare, armies had to deliver massive firepower to even have a chance of hitting an enemy unit from a another dynamic military, with ever more expensive precision munitions to make up for that fact. Now a small drone can drop a grenade and do the same amount of damage at similar distances between combatants. It makes a huge difference when a combat engineer slash drone pilot can carry 20kg of drones and small explosives into the battlefield as part of a small team instead of manning an entire artillery unit.

[tim333]

The larger drones are having an effect too. Ukraine as of mid feb had taken out about 10% or Russia's refining capacity and it's ongoing - the Ufa oil refinery was hit a day or so ago which is one of the largest in Russia and 1300 km from Ukraine. And of course their naval drones have had quite an effect on Russia's warships.

(recent sky new footage of them being sent off https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egEwObPT8zE)

[JumpCrisscross]

> hitting an enemy unit from a another dynamic military

Would note that Russia’s failure to execute combined-arms manoeuvre-based warfare technically makes it a static fighting force.

[throwup238]

I think it’s better to look at it as a spectrum and Russia’s place on it differs based on time and place. They don’t have the air superiority to carry out the kinds of operations the US could and what seems like a suboptimal command structure but they are getting increasingly more organized, especially as the war drags on and they develop/acquire more adaptions like the Shahed drones or glide bomb conversion kits. IMO the biggest thing getting in their way is the desperate human wave tactics that hamper their ability to grow a veteran core that could actually organize the combined arms.

[JumpCrisscross]

> but they are getting increasingly more organized, especially as the war drags on and they develop/acquire more adaptions like the Shahed drones or glide bomb conversion kits

I’m not suggesting they aren’t a lethal fighting force. They’re just not a dynamic one. They still rely on static tactics, i.e. blowing up the enemy, versus dynamic ones that rely on manoeuvre.

[throwup238]

I don’t mean lethality either. It’s hard to craft an argument here without doing a blog post length comment (that I’m hardly qualified to write) but even from the last week there’s evidence of Russian FPV drone use with very mobile forces: https://armyrecognition.com/focus-analysis-conflicts/army/co...

I don’t know where you draw the line between static and dynamic/modern but IMO they’re clearly in the latter mode at least some of the time, even though it’s hard to tell which attacks are strategic and which are the result of combined arms tactics due to fog of war.

[JumpCrisscross]

> don’t know where you draw the line between static and dynamic/modern

“Biddle identifies what he calls the ‘Modern System’ of combat (though I am going to treat it a bit more broadly than he does). In short, it’s a set of tactics and operational art that emerged out of the First World War and were refined in the European theaters (East and West) of the Second, to cope with the tremendous potency of industrialized firepower which had fundamentally reshaped war. Rather than relying on fixed positions for defense and dense shock-formations (‘shock’ here – think ‘bayonets, grenades and trench-knives’), the modern system relies on cover-and-concealment for survivability and maneuver in the offense (go around, not through your opponent’s overwhelming firepower). Adroit use of terrain on the tactical level is a key component of the system, which in turn requires both extensive training of junior officers and NCOs and devolving quite a bit of command agency down to them so that they can make local decisions (compare to, for instance, linear tactics which leave virtually no decision-making to the individual rifleman).

…

Static-System armies, since – as we’ll see – in modern warfare, they tend to be a fair bit more fixed and static than the modern system armies (note: I’m going to keep calling them ‘armies’ for simplicity, but the modern system combined land and air assets), preferring to dig in for sieges and trench warfare. So again: static system (old, cheap) vs. modern system (new, expensive). And remember: this is a difference in doctrine not equipment, in how an army expects to fight their battles and how they actually do – a difference in how, not in what. It is possible to have all of the tools of the modern system, and still not have the training or will to do the modern system (indeed, Iraq did just this in 1991 and got torn apart for it). You can buy tanks and planes, but you cannot buy the modern system, you must train it.“

Russia’s human waves are a trench tactic. Command flows entirely top down. They’re going straight at the enemy. And training is virtually impossible given the expendability of their troops.

https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

[throwup238]

While Brett Devereaux is excellent, he’s sharing a surface level, black and white definition suited to a blog post aimed at laymen, the kind that want to read about the siege of Gondor. Biddle’s Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle is a much more in depth treatment of the topic that is hardly that prescriptive.

Edit: if you are so inclined, Commanding Military Power: Organizing for Victory and Defeat on the Battlefield by Ryan Grauer, The Art of Maneuver: Maneuver Warfare Theory and Airland Battle by Robert Leonhard, and Combined Arms Warfare in the Twentieth Century by Jonathan House would provide a more rounded view of the academic debate. The latter is particularly relevant because it looks at Russia’s tactics in Chechnya.

[esseph]

Their leadership and training is not pushed to the lower levels like in the US military NCO corps. Russian warfare is extremely. . bureaucratic.