Army of the post-Ukrainian future
Source: t.me/Ugolok_Sitha
New or well-forgotten old?
A year will soon pass since the beginning of the special military operation, and this is an occasion to take stock.
The events unfolding in Ukraine from February 24, 2022 will have an impact on the tactics and methods of building military forces around the world. In this sense, the conflict, local in scale, has clearly grown into a global event.
Ukraine 2022–2023 showed the transformation of the meaning tanks on the battlefield. Military equipment has been repeatedly buried, especially in the West. The British, as unnecessary, reduced the number of the Challenger 2 fleet by a third, but already at the beginning of 2023 they promised Zelensky tanks. Simply because there is no way without them. And do not think that tanks are needed only in the specific conditions of the NWO.
In the West, a similar opinion circulates, they say, the "backward" Russian army is at war with the no less backward Ukrainian army, and therefore tanks are the most combat-ready force here. Norway put the first point in this - on February 3, the authorities announced the purchase of 54 Leopard 2A7 at once. An option has been declared for another 18. It is interesting that around the contract (which has not yet been signed) a lot of copies have been broken.
On the one hand, the opponent of the deal, the Minister of Defense of the Kingdom, Eric Christoffersen, insisted on helicopters as effective anti-tank weapons. The official was impressed by the Ukrainian reports, according to which they have already destroyed the fleet of Russian armored vehicles several times. drones, anti-tank systems and grenade launchers.
Much closer to reality is the head of the operational headquarters of the Norwegian army, Yngve Odlo, who said that there is no alternative to tanks and is not expected in the next 15–20 years. Whether the Norwegian tank rush is a single action or in the near future we will see a real “tank rally” of NATO countries, time will tell. But one thing is clear - despite the obvious vulnerability, it is the tank that provides the most powerful and most effective support for the infantry. Especially given the lack of operational artillery support.
According to this scheme, tanks are used by the most combat-ready formations of the Russian group - PMC "Wagner". A tank assault on well-fortified nationalist positions is now possible only from distances exceeding the effective range of light anti-tank vehicles. The role of the tank as an effective means of breaking through the enemy's defenses has been lost, but it is too early to write off the armored vehicle.
The new armored vehicles of the Russian army will inevitably become heavier and get rid of the ability to swim. For now, this is how they work. Source: t.me/Ugolok_Sitha
The second feature of the conflict was the actual uselessness of active protection systems for armored vehicles. First of all, because of its absence both in the Armed Forces of Ukraine and in the Russian army. For a war with guerrilla groups, for example, Israelis with Palestinians, KAZ is suitable. But when the quantity and quality of anti-tank equipment exceeds all reasonable limits, active defense seems like an expensive toy. The funds spent on the development, testing and construction of such products should have been spent on improving passive and dynamic protection.
See how the NVO tanks bristled with DZ blocks. The concept of differentiated booking in the realities of the special operation turned out to be erroneous - an ideal armored vehicle from the sides should be protected only slightly weaker than the frontal projection. It is good that Russian tank builders are aware of this, and the new tanks are equipped with solid onboard remote sensing units. In particular, the updated T-72B1s are richly flavored with dynamic protection. Understand this and in NATO.
The Turks from Roketsan offer additional dynamic armor packages for the Leopard 2A4 and T-72. They assure that they will close the armor from Kornets, Contests, TOW-2A and other tank killers. As soon as more advanced Western vehicles appear on the front line, their turn will come. The axiom is this - now the tank is not suitable for combined arms combat, primarily due to vulnerability, so it has to be used in a new way. A long-range heavily armored sniper rifle capable of destroying entire enemy units is a relatively new role for a tank.
Myths debunked by the special operation
The fighting against the nationalist regime showed that technical superiority does not always guarantee a quick victory. In recent years, the Russian army has firmly taken second place in the world rankings, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine have been trailing at the end of the third ten. In many ways, this overwhelming superiority was determined by the presence of high-precision weapons and powerful videoconferencing.
The special operation showed that cruise missiles and Iskanders alone cannot turn the tide - this is just an additional force on the battlefield, nothing more. And, most likely, seriously overrated. Let's ask ourselves a rhetorical question. Wouldn't it be worthwhile to reduce the number of "Caliber" by two or three times at the expense of a five-six-fold increase in the fleet of "Geranes" with "Lancets"? Having such a long arm that cruise missiles provide is too costly.
With Russian aviation, the situation is perhaps the most paradoxical. One of the strongest air forces in the world is forced to perform auxiliary functions, mainly supporting assault units at the forefront. And this, for example, on the expensive Su-34, designed for completely different conditions. Objects of communication in the depths of the enemy's defenses The Russian Aerospace Forces are currently not able to hit.
Ukraine managed to press our planes to the ground relatively inexpensively. The surviving air defense focal zones, coupled with the constant information support of NATO, allow a lot. At the same time, the enemy has practically no own air force. Russian army aviation, on the contrary, has shown itself to be the main hard worker in the sky of Ukraine. It seems that the Mi-28 and Ka-52 will become the leading hunters of modern NATO tanks.
Tanks are not going to rest, as mentioned above, but it is too early to bury artillery. Some experts considered guns and MLRS to be the dying players of modern warfare. In Russia, practically no work was carried out to improve towed artillery - as a result, one has to fight with frankly overweight and metal-intensive guns. And this is just one of the moments.
With self-propelled vehicles, the situation is not much better. In many ways, the situation on the fronts of spring-summer 2022 was saved by Russian artillery and shells from the Soviet period. It has not yet been possible to reach the level of ammunition consumption of that time. A large-scale reform of domestic artillery should become the main guideline for the post-Ukrainian future.
Engineering troops are getting a second wind. More precisely - fortification art. As it turned out, the layered and well-concreted defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Donetsk direction is an extremely hard nut to crack, which Russia has not been able to crack for almost a year. But it plays in the opposite direction. At the moment, engineers in key areas have created a strong line of defense, and since last autumn we have not seen successful offensives by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Big questions arise and to the concept of lightning-fast special operations. We are talking about the use of well-armed and trained special forces and landing units. High-precision weapons and the numerical superiority of the enemy, coupled with the weak "armor" of the special forces, largely eliminates the advantages of the army elite. Infantry again becomes the queen of the fields, but here there are some nuances. HIMARS and other guided enemy weapons have made it very dangerous to use large, localized groups with a high density of forces.
Simply put, it is now almost impossible to create a shock fist to break through the defense. First, it will be tracked by NATO intelligence, and then it will come under concentrated fire from precision weapons. The dispersal of personnel and equipment seems like a way out of the situation, but this requires the coordination of troops on a completely different level. This is also true for the primary tactical units - keeping a distance of at least 15 meters between the fighters has already saved many lives.
Strike actions in dense battle formations will have to be put aside as deadly dangerous. The first to understand this, obviously, were the commanders and fighters of the Wagner PMC, which has already been reflected in the considerable tactical successes of the Russian group. That is why we do not see the enemy's cavalry coverage followed by encirclement - for this we will have to concentrate a lot of equipment and personnel. Squeezing the APU, which some commentators call senseless frontal attacks, is just an example of a new tactic.
The Russian General Staff also took care of the tactics and strategy of future wars. Obviously, taking into account the realities of the special operation in Ukraine. In one of the issues of the military-theoretical journal "Military Thought" a characteristic thought was voiced -
“while maintaining the value of the quantitative ratio of the forces of the opposing sides, its qualitative indicators are shifting from technical parameters to social ones.”
Let's look at the example of an attacking motorized infantry unit. In fact, it is not so important in which model of a combat vehicle a company or battalion goes into battle. On the BMP-2 or BMP-3, on the T-72B3 or T-90M.
By the way, this is why we will not see the latest Armata tanks and Coalition self-propelled guns in the special operation. Much more important "situational awareness, efficiency and rationality of delegating the rights to use weapons, adaptability of control, activity, efficiency, training, coherence and experience of personnel." And here civilian technologies come to the fore, which already provide considerable support to the armies on both sides of the front.
A little about the cost-effectiveness ratio of civil hi-tech. It so happened that the special operation turned into a competition, who will deliver explosives to the enemy further, more and more accurately. Not who will occupy more territories, but who will kill and maim the enemy more. This is not surprising - any static front sooner or later comes to this. Probably the first time in stories modern peaceful technologies have made it possible to reduce the cost and simplify the process as much as possible. For example, consider the American Switchblade 300 kamikaze drone, worth $6.
Relatively inexpensive, I must say. But Ukrainian FPV drones with suspended anti-tank grenades cost just over $350. It is completely pointless to compare the cost and lethal force of these samples - perhaps that is why not a single child has been named after Switchblade in Ukraine.
But the purely civilian Starlink among the nationalists has already been elevated to the category of cult phenomena. And this is also an example of the mimicry of civilian technologies for military needs. notorious "adaptability of management, activity, efficiency, training, coherence and experience of personnel", which is discussed in the publication of the General Staff of the Russian Federation, is impossible without the widespread use of civilian technologies. Often there is simply no time to develop military analogues.
The title contains the idea of an army of the post-Ukrainian future. It remains to be hoped that the Russian army will be the first to absorb all the innovations even before the collapse of the Kyiv regime.
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