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As the late, great Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

We'll find out soon enough, I suppose.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
As the late, great Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

We'll find out soon enough, I suppose.

Quite.

For those who'd like to confirm the destruction of Russian forces with their own eyes, the analysts over at Oryx skim OSINT and update with photographic evidence of each destroyed piece of equipment. Given they wait to verify everything before declaring it lost, their counts are somewhat less than the Ukrainian figures; but they're broadly in line with other foreign analysis.

https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html

There's an interesting article here on Russian procurement I read today (from late last year). I feel it's a little light on detail in some places, relies a little too heavily on unnamed sources, and is ultimately written by an external anti-Putin publication. At the same time, the broader analysis made matches up with other information, and the detail about the logistical aspects of component sourcing and is superb. The crippling of the Russian defence industry pre-Ukraine due to corruption is largely a matter of public record at this stage, after all.

https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2022/11/02/the-barren-barrels-en#%3A~%3Atext%3DHandmade%20tanks%2C200%E2%80%93250%20tanks%20a%20year.

Generally speaking? I do not think we would be seeing 1950's tanks being deployed by conscripts begging for body armour if Russian stockrooms were inundated with a surfeit of good quality material. I have read so many things about issues with what has been pulled out from them (eg. fuse deterioration in shells through to looted tank rangefinders) that it has become clear the Russian army has been hollowed out. We all assumed that Putin & co. would at least maintain what the Soviets bequeathed them in terms of stockpiles. But it has become increasingly apparent that they did not.

And sadly, you cannot shove your material and munitions into storerooms for forty years, barely maintain it, loot sections of it, and then still expect it to supply a major war stretching past the one year mark.

 Ketara wrote:

For those who'd like to confirm the destruction of Russian forces with their own eyes, the analysts over at Oryx skim OSINT and update with photographic evidence of each destroyed piece of equipment. Given they wait to verify everything before declaring it lost, their counts are somewhat less than the Ukrainian figures; but they're broadly in line with other foreign analysis.

This is something I do not at all find convincing. Both sides are using the same equipment, and photos have never been easier to fake. I'm not even talking digitally - a rear-area workshop could find full employment curating wrecks and tagging them with various locations. It's like Patton's inflatable army group: looks great on film, but there's no way of knowing for sure.

The last few years have really opened my eyes to groupthink and how much media rely on the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect (that's where you read an article that you have a great deal of knowledge about and find that it is riddled with errors and utterly false, but assume everything else in the paper/site is true).

Several sources I used to trust have been revealed to be propaganda mills or simply lazy. One of the worst is the Institute for the Study of War, which is really Victoria Nuland's lobbying group (her husband runs the organization). I reached out to them some years ago when I thought they were legit because I had questions regarding some of their work. It's very disconcerting when you try to engage an expert and it's clear they don't really understand what's in their own writings.

Doing research on my China book also was an eye-opener. Most Western sources assume China was founded in 1949 (heck, most Americans think history began in 1776) and have zero cultural perspective or understanding of how the Chinese Red Army (now the PLA) evolved.

At this point, the world seems to be experiencing a constantly-shifting bipolarity, perhaps a prelude to the return of a multipolar state system. What that means is that one has to be all-in on one set of assumptions or dead set against them.

I refuse to be boxed in - especially when information is so corrupted. I do think that Western analysis has been abysmal, so I find myself reflexively rejecting it, though this too is a bias I need to be aware of.

Anyway, the spring is passing and we'll see soon enough who is right about this. My fearless prediction is that whatever the result, the people that got it wrong won't change a thing.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:


I refuse to be boxed in - especially when information is so corrupted. I do think that Western analysis has been abysmal, so I find myself reflexively rejecting it, though this too is a bias I need to be aware of.

My friend, my comment before was aimed for general discussion. You made your viewpoint clear beforehand, I'm not looking to argue. Just putting some of the better sources out there for general digestion.

Speaking from a first hand perspective on that particular source, I've been following Oryx since the start and watching the equipment casualties very gently and slowly tick up. Their numbers are much much lower than those the official Ukrainian army puts out, because they refuse to tag something as destroyed until they have solid verification. Because of that, people tend to use them as a baseline, rather than an estimate, i.e. this is what we KNOW has been smashed rather than what HAS been destroyed. Most analysis tends to place the actual figures somewhere between Oryx and the UA figures that I've seen (including the recent American leaks). What's funny is when they get the registration of a tank that the Ukrainians nicked off the Russians in the early days, then lost back to the Russians, before finally destroying it! Three casualties for the price of one there.

You're not wrong in the public information being wrong at times though. Case in point - the media was obsessed with handheld anti-tank weapons being responsible for saving Ukraine in the early days. It's since turned out (if you read more contemporary RUSI analysis and the like) that it was more to do with UA artillery being dispersed beforehand due to warnings - meaning it survived the opening Russian air strikes - and allowing it to wreak havoc on poorly planned/logistically supported Russian advances down narrow roads.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Ketara wrote:
This. The Russian military strategy has devolved over the last year into 'Throw human waves and massed artillery from near railheads' because they're incapable of anything else. Their command and control sucks, their artillery targeting is from the 70's, and they burn material at one of the most wasteful rates I've ever seen.

I haven't conducted an exhaustive search of videos or anything, but I find it curious that a war that is so intensely documented on social media hasn't shown much in the way of imagery of these assaults.

When I keep hearing something is the tactical norm but never see photos of piles of Russian corpses piled on concertina wire like it was 1916, I become a bit skeptical.

They were firing tens of thousands of shells back when they were besieging Lyschansk. Now? Much, much less than that. Every day they're throwing less, because their stockpiles have been severely depleted after a war that's been running at heavy intensive for an entire -year- now. Their monthly production is nowhere near expenditure (think 5-10%). And whilst not empty, the back of the metaphorical store room is beginning to become visible. In six months, even with slashed usage, they're going to be in trouble.

Alternative take: They're stockpiling in anticipation of the much-heralded counteroffensive.

That's because it's media bs cope. Russia certainly care about their manpower way more than the western narrative says they do. That's why they withdrew from kherson. It was a good tactical decision, saving troops over pointlessly holding ground. It was a good thing they did too because then the media was able to spin it as a massive Ukrainian victory. Basically, anything our media says about Russian military doctrine can just be disregarded. It's all lies/cope.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:

That's because it's media bs cope. Russia certainly care about their manpower way more than the western narrative says they do. That's why they withdrew from kherson. It was a good tactical decision, saving troops over pointlessly holding ground. It was a good thing they did too because then the media was able to spin it as a massive Ukrainian victory. Basically, anything our media says about Russian military doctrine can just be disregarded. It's all lies/cope.

Your understanding of the Kherson campaign timeline is wildly off, along with your understanding of the logistical nuances and the Russian movements. So I don't know what you're classing as 'our media', but if that's what you got out of it, you're 100% correct.

After the UA pulled out of Severodonetsk and Lyschansk last year, and the Russian advance was ground to a halt; they began trumpeting about how they were going to make a counter-attack. They settled on Kherson, because:

a) It would be a symbolic victory (being the only regional capital taken by Russia), and
b) The Russian position was logistically extremely precarious and vulnerable to disruption - backing onto a major river/the seafront as it did.

As the Ukrainians began rolling forward it sucked in huge amounts of Russian manpower. Despite being an obvious strategical trap to everyone involved (seriously, I was reading analysis saying this before it started, during the campaign, and afterwards) - Putin demanded that the Russian Army hold it. So they transferred across large amounts of artillery, tank units, and everything they'd scraped back together after the various other earlier debacles around the country (retreat from Kiev, etc). The same political imperatives that made it a good target for Ukraine made it necessary for Putin to feel he had to demand the RA hold it with every inch of Russian blood.

And so it got nasty. Lots of little positions traded backwards and forwards in skirmishes with dozens of deaths each time. Flat rolling terrain with very little cover, making the Ukrainians suffer from Russian artillery every inch of the way. But the problem was that once the UA blew the bridges across Kherson, resupply to Russian units became almost impossible. The Russian men were trapped with no easy withdrawal route, no way of retrieving the vehicles now on the wrong side, and no way of getting sufficient ammunition across to supply what was there. As the campaign continued, Russian logistical efforts became so strangled that they ceased to be able to fight effectively and began running out of ammo. What was ultimately the entire point and why the Ukrainians picked it.

Kherson is a perfect example of a political leader insisting on a militarily idiotic priority. And the RA suffered very heavily for that. Large amounts of equipment were captured by the UA, thousands of deaths, and thousands more Russian prisoners to try and defend a position that could never have been held. So if you read somewhere that the Russians withdrew to 'save troops', you've been sorely misled. The Russian Army should never have been there in the first place. They only entered it due to Putin's willingness to spend whatever it took to hold it. And they only withdrew after it became clear that they literally had no means of gratifying those demands, no matter how many lives they spent. The bridges were blown, the barges trying to move ammunition kept getting sunk, and morale sunk to rock bottom once the Russian infantry realised they were trapped with the sea at their backs.

And then afterwards came the Ukrainian realisation that their strategy had worked better than they'd ever dreamed. That the Russian army had utterly denuded Eastern Ukraine of regulars to supply the Kherson action. A few chance scoutings revealed the gap in Russian lines, and the Ukrainians used their centralised location/deployment capability to immediately move men eastwards towards Kupiansk even as the Russian regulars were limping out of Kherson. With only Donetsk militia conscripts (many of whom didn't want to be there), and Putin's Rosvgardia (political bully boys) to hold the line around Kupiansk, that line crumpled like paper. It only solidified after Putin called up another crapton of conscripts, gave them four days training and a rifle, and shoved them into Svatove en masse as a meatshield in such great numbers that it slowed the Ukrainians down. Literally a 'lives for time' strategy (always a historical favourite in Russia).

The sheer level of strategical incompetence displayed by the Russian Army has been genuinely astonishing this last year. And absolutely no concern has been shown for the lives of their men. The most recent round of mobiks (i.e. the half of last year end's emergency callup that got given five weeks of training and equipment from the 1960's instead of a rifle and a ticket to Svatove) got thrown into Bakhmut. And they've been mauled badly there. Six odd weeks of combat and they've failed to even encircle a single city.

Again, not really their fault. Russian logistics have been horrendous. So few trucks they can't supply anything not near a railhead any longer. Vehicles and equipment scraped out the storehouses from the sixties. The Russian infantry have been betrayed at just about every level by politicking and corruption. I almost feel sorry for them.

 Ketara wrote:
The sheer level of strategical incompetence displayed by the Russian Army has been genuinely astonishing this last year.

My problem with all of this analysis is people presuming to know the inner workings of everyone involved, all down to the finest level of detail.

And yet we know that highly-documented events of the War on Terror were radically different from their real-time reportage - assuming they even happened at all.

The information environment is highly partisan and utterly unreliable. The big leak out of the US is fascinating because people can't decide if it's authentic or fake because at this point "official channels" have zero credibility.

As I said, we'll see soon enough.

The overarching point is that infantry is still very much relevant to the discussion.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
I think the power of economic warfare, in the short term anyway; can be called into question based on what we are seeing in Russia right now.

I think it has been impressive at just how effective economic warfare has been against a country thought to be largely insulated to outside economic pressure.
A neat video on the topic.
https://youtu.be/xmO1kfCr_II

I think the example of Russia demonstrates both the power and the limits of economical warfare really well. On the one hand, it has been really damaging to Russia and has severely restricted Russia's geopolitical power, the options available to its leadership and long-term economic prospects. On the other hand, while it has somewhat weakened the capabilities of the Russian military-industrial complex, it has not been effective in significantly reducing or eliminating their capabilities to pursue their war on Ukraine.

Economical warfare can weaken an opponent, especially in the long term, but if used as a sole weapon of war, it is not effective. A determined opponent will be able to persevere through economical hardships, divert resources from the civilian economy to the military and source necessary components through neutral or sympathetic third parties. Outside of complete isolation and a physical blockade, I don't think it can have a significant impact on the outcome of a war.

See also the Vietnam War and North Korea. Through US efforts, North Vietnam was largely isolated from the rest of the world except for makeshift, hazardous transport routes to China that were under near-constant attack from US and South Vietnamese forces. Most of the above-ground infrastructure of North Vietnam was levelled by US bombardments and as a result North Vietnam did not have much of an economy to speak of. But they were determined to persevere nonetheless and so they did, eventually outlasting the US and defeating South Vietnam to come out victorious in the war. North Korea meanwhile has been largely economically isolated from the rest of the world for decades now. Its economy is incredibly weak to the point that food shortages and famine are a serious problem. Yet at the same time its ability to wage war has only grown during that period of isolation. North Korea now is stronger than it has ever been before, even being able to succesfully pursue a nuclear weapons program.

Ultimately, economical warfare is a tool that can be used to strenghten your own or weaken your opponent's forces. But without actual boots on the ground and the determination to emerge victorious at all costs, the ultimate effect of economical warfare on the course of a war is fairly limited.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Ketara wrote:
This. The Russian military strategy has devolved over the last year into 'Throw human waves and massed artillery from near railheads' because they're incapable of anything else. Their command and control sucks, their artillery targeting is from the 70's, and they burn material at one of the most wasteful rates I've ever seen.

I haven't conducted an exhaustive search of videos or anything, but I find it curious that a war that is so intensely documented on social media hasn't shown much in the way of imagery of these assaults.

When I keep hearing something is the tactical norm but never see photos of piles of Russian corpses piled on concertina wire like it was 1916, I become a bit skeptical.

They were firing tens of thousands of shells back when they were besieging Lyschansk. Now? Much, much less than that. Every day they're throwing less, because their stockpiles have been severely depleted after a war that's been running at heavy intensive for an entire -year- now. Their monthly production is nowhere near expenditure (think 5-10%). And whilst not empty, the back of the metaphorical store room is beginning to become visible. In six months, even with slashed usage, they're going to be in trouble.

Alternative take: They're stockpiling in anticipation of the much-heralded counteroffensive.

That's because it's media bs cope. Russia certainly care about their manpower way more than the western narrative says they do. That's why they withdrew from kherson. It was a good tactical decision, saving troops over pointlessly holding ground. It was a good thing they did too because then the media was able to spin it as a massive Ukrainian victory. Basically, anything our media says about Russian military doctrine can just be disregarded. It's all lies/cope.

Russia isn't exactly conducting massive human wave attacks. That is because they have neither the manpower, nor the logistics, nor the required coordination between different units to be capable of conducting such large-scale offensives. Instead, what they have been doing is just throwing away lots of lives in small-scale, disjointed, uncoordinated and often ill-supported attacks in a (usually futile) attempt to seize some local village or other position. It is not so much human wave attacks as it is human ripple attacks.

I am sure that on some level, the Russian leadership care about their manpower. Russia wants nothing more than to be seen as a threatening, competent and succesful military superpower, and the Russian leadership knows that losing lots of lives is detrimental to that image. The Russian leadership in general also consists of very intelligent and shrewd people (you pretty much have to be shrewd to survive and rise to the top in Russia's political environment), so I am sure that they are also aware that preserving their limited manpower is essential to maintaining their ability to wage war and eventually emerge victorious. But somewhere in the chain of command things go horribly wrong. And that happens because of incompetence and corruption, both factors which are also promoted by Russia's political system and culture. The thing is, while you have to be smart and shrewd to be able to rise to an influential position in Russia, you don't necessarily have to be good at your job. In fact, being good at your job is often outright dangerous if you are better than your superiors. Rising to the top in Russia is all about nepotism, making clever alliances and picking who to support, whose boot to lick and who not to associate with. This is true in Russia's military as well, and has been for a long time. If you look at Russian officers, most of them come from military families. In many cases these families have been serving in the military all the way back to days of the tsars and have extensive networks and connections that enable them to secure employment in a cozy, high-ranking position within Russia's military establishment. The establishment and fall of the Soviet Union shook up things a bit, but the underlying system has always remained. Aside from leading to the promotion of officers based on loyalty and personal ties rather than on qualification and competence, it also leads to a lot of internal rivalries which makes coordinating things more difficult.
And another important thing about Russia's political culture is that while it doesn't require competence, it does heavily punish failure. While you do not need to be competent to rise to position of power, you can definitely fall from power very easily if you show incompetence. Hence, no one in Russia ever admits to failure or incompetence. Throughout the entire chain of command, people send up false reports to emphasize their success (fabricating successes if needed) and deflect blame for anything that goes wrong. This makes them look good in the eyes of their superiors and helps their chances of advancement since those superiors in turn can use those reports to look good in the eyes of their superiors and so on. This also results in Russian officers and policy makers often having a distorted view of the situation, needing to rely on reports that quite simply aren't entirely truthful. This also leads to pressure to perform well and show results, since you do need to have some basis in truth in order to fabricate a nice report for your superiors if you don't want to get caught. So even though a Russian officer may not be competent, he still needs to perform and appear competent. That combination of incompetence and pressure to perform of course does not go well together.

Incompetent officers under pressure to show results from those above them in the chain, coupled with a lack of access to accurate intelligence and information and a lack of coordination between units leads to an uneccesary waste of of manpower and materiel on small-scale attacks just so officers can have some success to report, even despite everyone knowing the importance of preserving manpower and materiel for eventual victory.

In short, while the Russian leadership and officers are fully aware of the need to preserve manpower, the Russian political and military culture encourages the sacrifice of long-term, collective successes in favor of short-term, selfish successes.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Russia isn't exactly conducting massive human wave attacks. That is because they have neither the manpower, nor the logistics, nor the required coordination between different units to be capable of conducting such large-scale offensives. Instead, what they have been doing is just throwing away lots of lives in small-scale, disjointed, uncoordinated and often ill-supported attacks in a (usually futile) attempt to seize some local village or other position. It is not so much human wave attacks as it is human ripple attacks.

I am sure that on some level, the Russian leadership care about their manpower. Russia wants nothing more than to be seen as a threatening, competent and succesful military superpower, and the Russian leadership knows that losing lots of lives is detrimental to that image.

There is much truth to what you say. Yet a more granular level of examination of Russian deployment gives additional context to those statements.

If we look to the opening stages of the war, we can see the Russian BTG's (composed of regulars and specialists) and special forces being deployed en masse as the backbone of Russian warfighting efforts. Whether it was the VDV being thrown into Hostomel airport or the average joes trudging along the highway with their dress uniforms at the ready; it was a military effort and incurred military losses. But after the retreat from Kiev, the failure to seize any regional capital, the abandonment of the Kharkiv offensive and more, it became rapidly clear that there was insufficient manpower to continue prosecuting war that way.

Why? Partially the much heavier than expected casualties. Partially the restrictions of the Russian constitution, which prevented the deployment of conscripts. But also the revelation that many of Russian units were actually paper tigers - that is to say, Russian commanders drawing pay for two thousand troopers on the books and only having half that in reality. The switch to the BTG composition model gave massive scope for corruption to bed in - as only a small number of troops from each BTG were ever deployed at any one time. Meaning that Russian senior command suddenly found large numbers of their infantry reserves were, in fact, imaginary.

We consequently saw a shift through the middle and third quarter of last year as the Russian command attempted to drum up additional manpower by whatever means they could. Advertising heavily domestically, substantial sign-up incentives, the introduction of Wagner to the field in numbers, the attempts to enlist foreign mercenaries, and more. The regular army also found themselves having their tooth to tail ratio drastically cut - with instructors from Russian military academies and technical specialists being shoved into frontline roles. Even naval units suddenly got redeployed to the field.

By the fourth quarter, when even this proved insufficient to meet the manpower crisis, we saw the tactics you're discussing. Wagner began throwing out small human waves of infantry recruited from prisons - largely using them as walking targets to allow them to identify locations of Ukrainian defences for artillery. Rosvgardia units were deployed to fill quiet gaps in the line, and Donetsk civilians were forcibly conscripted en masse to staff defensive positions. What was left of the Russian regular army was largely redeployed instead to Kherson for the ongoing defensive battle there.

This meant that when the Kherson retreat happened, the Ukrainians were on the offensive in the East, and the Russian army was demoralised, out of position, and exhausted; there was nothing left in the tank for manpower. All lateral reserves had been wrung dry - except issuing a callup. Exactly what the government had gone to great lengths to avoid. Somewhere between 100,000 and a 150,000 reservists were therefore forcibly mobilised - half of which were immediately chucked into holes outside Svatove, and the other half were given basic training in anticipation of a fresh New Year offensive (much of which came from Belarussian NCO's - the Russians had few officers left to spare for the task). Now that this fresh offensive has happened and culminated, we've seen what was quite predictable. Conscripted reservists with green officers and poor equipment showing so poorly that only basic actions in a well supported/known tactical sphere are within their capability.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So to emphasise/contextualise what you've said Iron_Captain - I think the Russian forces value quite highly what little they've got left of the regular army. They never gave a damn about throwing away the lives of prisoners, foreign mercenaries, or Donetsk conscripts - those were only ever supposed to be meatshields. And even the more recent mobiks aren't particularly highly valued - there's always more where they came from. All of them are just fodder for Ukrainian bullets and artillery targeting purposes, and they've comprised the larger part of Russian forces in Ukraine since third quarter last year. For them, we see the 'small-scale, disjointed, uncoordinated, and often ill supported attacks' of which you speak.

If you're VDV and survived the whole thing to date though? You likely won't be thrown into a meaningless action in the same way. Professional soldiers are now scarce enough that we only ever see them in Russian lines if an action is judged of considerable importance to their command.

Thank you Ketara. That is an excellent summary/analysis.

Apparently, the man in charge of Russian logistics, Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, has been removed. Good riddance to him, he's not known as the Butcher of Mariupol for nothing.

Interestingly though, he's been replaced by one Colonel General Aleksey Kuzmenkov - and don't let the title fool you. He's Rosvgardia, the Putin equivalent of the brownshirts. Curious that Putin would put a political officer in charge of logistics at this stage.

 Ketara wrote:
Apparently, the man in charge of Russian logistics, Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, has been removed. Good riddance to him, he's not known as the Butcher of Mariupol for nothing.

Interestingly though, he's been replaced by one Colonel General Aleksey Kuzmenkov - and don't let the title fool you. He's Rosvgardia, the Putin equivalent of the brownshirts. Curious that Putin would put a political officer in charge of logistics at this stage.

One thing all dictators and tyrants have in common is a profound paranoia and sense that any setback is not their fault but the fault of their enemies.

Replacing people with outright sycophants is something they all do when the going gets tough. Loyalty is the only qualification they actually care about.

 Henry wrote:

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
If infantry are so good why did the US roll over them in both Iraq wars? Was that an aberration and if those Iraqi infantry had magically been same as US. All the javelins, training etc etc. that the outcome would have been different?

Combined arms + modern training
If the Iraqi forces had the same training as the coalition forces they would have been better, but probably still would have failed due to lower value equipment and resources.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
Surely a shell or missile is cheaper than a marine?

No.

First part: it's also important to consider the morale aspect of things. The Iraqi army, even the republican guard, such as they were, were a force who's main motivation was fear. If you feth up in the army, we will feth up your wife, kids, and your family. In contrast, we US soldiers were all "you're a badass machine!! you can storm any beach" rah rah stuff. And then, when the pointy end of the stick gets rolling and we wipe out entire tank units in the blink of an eye, they think "feth it, why bother fighting them??"


To illustrate the second part. I joined in 04, and here's what we were told when I was going through my schoolhouse for my specific job. So, it took a full year to train me how to do my army job. One of our instructors claimed it took $1mil USD to train us for that whole year: food/housing, instructor wages (for the civie instructors), training materials, etc. IF that is even remotely accurate, if you can theoretically break things down so nice and neatly to determine the per soldier cost of training me for an entire year, you can then take a look at the cost of other things. . . A very quick google says that in FY2017, the US navy spent $1.87 million per missile for the tomahawk cruise missile, in FY2022, apparently its up to a cool $2mill per unit. It's still cheaper to train me, in my HIGHLY TECHNICAL role (the short of it is: I fixed electronic gubbins of a sensitive nature) than it is to fire off one tomahawk missile.

It would be cheaper, shell by shell for using "standard" field artillery, or even Paladin mobile artillery, but there are still significant reasons why, in US doctrine, those things are used to support infantry, no the other way round.

In the end, infantry is not obsolete for one simple reason.

Tanks, artillery, missiles, aircraft? They can destroy a building. They cannot take it away from the enemy intact. For that you need boots on the ground.

And there's not much point in conquering a parking lot.

 Vulcan wrote:
In the end, infantry is not obsolete for one simple reason.

Tanks, artillery, missiles, aircraft? They can destroy a building. They cannot take it away from the enemy intact. For that you need boots on the ground.

And there's not much point in conquering a parking lot.

1st, I firmly believe we'll need and use infantry as long as there is war/conflict.

But your example/reason is quickly going away at least for some countries. We are at the point today where we can clear buildings with robots if we want. AI advances will make this even easier in the next few years, making the man-in-the-loop either not necessary or at least making his/her job a lot easier to control multiple unmanned systems.

You could use robots. Which are expensive, rely on fixed programming, or a stable wifi connection and a trained human operator.

Or, you can send in trained soldiers able to adapt on the fly, because humans do that really well.

A hybrid of both will probably be the interim solution, as already shown in many films. Meatbags for decision making and leadership and disposable mechanicals for carrying the big toys and taking the brunt of the incoming. Which will probably not go down well when our Geth spark to consciousness…. BUt that is rather a different conversation

I'd argue a robot small enough to enter and clear a human building is still infantry, just robotic infantry rather than the fleshy kind. I don't think this is substantially different than how horses have been replaced by various motor vehicles in most military contexts- the role is typically still very similar on a strategic or tactical level.

Robots are nowhere close to being able to clear building or hold territory.

They are best at search and destroy when they can just overwhelm a clearly defined target with numbers, but they are bad in chaotic environments.

 Tyran wrote:
Robots are nowhere close to being able to clear building or hold territory.

They are best at search and destroy when they can just overwhelm a clearly defined target with numbers, but they are bad in chaotic environments.

Reliable self-driving cars are still years out, if not decades, and that's for a mode of movement that essentially happens in a 2D plane, follows tightly organized and spelled-out rules and laws, uses a lot of visual aids like traffic signs or lane markings, and ultimately solves relatively easy problems like 'Get from A to B'. Freeform 3D movement in an unorganized space, while following open mission parameters like 'Search and Destroy', is so many orders of magnitude more complex that it is in another class of problem entirely, at least for infantry/ground robots. Aerial drones are easier in many ways, as they practically cheat and turn the whole thing into an image recognition exercise due to the nature of their movement and their weapons, and usually not having self-preservation particularly high on their list of priorities.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:
It's still cheaper to train me, in my HIGHLY TECHNICAL role (the short of it is: I fixed electronic gubbins of a sensitive nature) than it is to fire off one tomahawk missile.

We have this issue all the time when training civ's on military courses prior to, say, a J9 role. Cost for 1 person for 1 course is for the sake of argument £150k. Civ authorities are mind boggled by this, but if they result in just one missile being better employed they have made their money back. The cost of training is ginormous, especially stuff that isn't what you see in a Russian or Chinese recruiting video but actual train as you fight stuff.

Tyran wrote:Robots are nowhere close to being able to clear building or hold territory.

They are best at search and destroy when they can just overwhelm a clearly defined target with numbers, but they are bad in chaotic environments.

I wasn't saying they were, only pointing out that any robots capable of replacing human infantry would still be infantry by role.

Tsagualsa wrote:
Reliable self-driving cars are still years out, if not decades, and that's for a mode of movement that essentially happens in a 2D plane, follows tightly organized and spelled-out rules and laws, uses a lot of visual aids like traffic signs or lane markings, and ultimately solves relatively easy problems like 'Get from A to B'. Freeform 3D movement in an unorganized space, while following open mission parameters like 'Search and Destroy', is so many orders of magnitude more complex that it is in another class of problem entirely, at least for infantry/ground robots. Aerial drones are easier in many ways, as they practically cheat and turn the whole thing into an image recognition exercise due to the nature of their movement and their weapons, and usually not having self-preservation particularly high on their list of priorities.

Eh, it is more of a political and legal issue with self-driving cars than a technical issue at present. There has been technology for decades that allows for safe self-driving vehicles with the addition of extra road infrastructure, and current self-driving vehicles compatible with existing infrastructure and road users are good enough to deploy with similar safety to frequently gakky human drivers, if that level of collisions was tolerable to society (which it isn't for self-driving vehicles). The legal liability and legislative sides also haven't been properly hashed out yet either.

Human drivers are not terribly reliable drivers to start with, so self-driving vehicles do not have that high a bar to pass to be equivalent.

But I think "don't kill anything" is generally a much easier goal than "kill the right thing" with severe consequences for hitting the wrong target.

I’m still not persuaded a robot can match a human for spatial awareness and instinct.

For instance, you’re trying to clear a building. A human present will have a better idea not just what’s a tell tale sound and what’s background noise, but where it might’ve come from.

Even just “quick peak” to take stock is something humans are instinctually good at. Not to say “split second and you know the layout of the room”, but with training enough to get some idea of where someone might be in concealment etc. Not to mention a robot or drone is dependant on cameras, which I can’t imagine can match a human for looking around and processing.

And hey, I’m sure we’ve all had, for want of a better word, tingling spider-sense that something just isn’t quite right. That somewhat sixth sense that makes us double check or look over our shoulder. And that’s without any military training, just basic human awareness which isn’t as supernatural as my wording suggests.

In terms of squad tactics, boots on the ground and living eyes are always going to be superior to robots. At least with robots in their current form.


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Mind you, I’m not up on modern military hardware so it’s entirely possible it’s a good deal more advanced that I give credit.

And I can certainly see the benefit of squaddies and robots operating together. As the cartoon said? Man and Machine, Power X-Treme.

It depends on the dataset you train the ai on. There are currently microphone arrays that can triangulate where shots are coming from. It’s not hard to imagine sticking such things on a robot infantry frame, adding sonar and they don’t even need to go into a room to know where lurking threats might be hiding. Pair an infantry frame with mini copter and Crawly drones and situational awareness jumps massively beyond a guy and his tingliness. Human senses are pretty woeful compared to all the additional frequencies of light and sound that you could stick on a robotic platform.


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Admittedly the sensory thing could be added to some kind of AR rig for human infantry, it you have to train an AI to do it well once and you can upload it to as many robot platforms as you like. Likely to end up cheaper than training individual humans with all their idiosyncrasies. And then the robots rebel and we are in real trouble

Yeah plus even if you give a human additional input there's a limit on how much they can process in a single instance and you can't really upgrade that.

But you can give a machine multiple different wavelengths of light, sound and even smell to work with; give it the ability to triangulate information; use a database of previous experiences and more and it can calculate information way faster than a person.


The issues with machines more comes down to more interpretation of the information and also having enough money invested so that it has the processing power required.



And that latter point could be an issue for some time. It's one thing to build a machine that can do amazing things, but it might be a case that its developed and then sits on a shelf for years until consumer tech and consumer markets help drive down the production cost. Otherwise its such an expensive toy for the military that its just more cost-effective to put a person into the situation than the machine.

At the moment I think it’s less to do with processing power and more with just power. When they can crack better power supplies and charging speeds on something on a human or near-human sized frame then the equation changes. And also the ethics thing, of course.

 Flinty wrote:
And also the ethics thing, of course.

Mobile Suit Gundam Wing man.

We continue to learn nothing from good sci-fi.

 Flinty wrote:
It depends on the dataset you train the ai on. There are currently microphone arrays that can triangulate where shots are coming from. It’s not hard to imagine sticking such things on a robot infantry frame, adding sonar and they don’t even need to go into a room to know where lurking threats might be hiding. Pair an infantry frame with mini copter and Crawly drones and situational awareness jumps massively beyond a guy and his tingliness. Human senses are pretty woeful compared to all the additional frequencies of light and sound that you could stick on a robotic platform.

The issue isn't necessarily the senses a robot can have, but interpreting them. Indeed, that is the issue with computer systems today. They can gather information flawlessly, but making sense of it is beyond what computers can currently do.

A human hearing an echoing sound off a wall will instinctually know that the sound has bounced off said wall and have a rough idea of the actual direction, but the computer will only know that the sound originated from the direction of the wall with a certain volume.

For example, those microphone arrays for detecting gunshots are easily fooled by echos or if there is a lot of clutter around. They only really work properly when they have unobstructed line of sight(sound) to the origin of the gunshot. They also mistake loud sounds such as a revving motercycle or someone dropping something for gunshots.

Human senses are lacking in the total detail they can detect, but we are much better at making sense of what information we do get.

A good example are all these chat and art bots suddenly flooding on the internet.

They don't actually understand what they are creating. They are almost entirely relying on human interpretations and tags and information and vast amounts of repetition.

It's why they can create art of people with 6 fingers and not notice the extra finger. It doesn't understand that its creating a person and that a person has certain properties; its simply searched for person in a billion photos and gathered all that up together in one massive jumble and then tried to sort and sift to create a collage that's unique and such.


It's the same with a lot of detection systems; interpretation of what it's seeing is a really complicated thing.
I've no doubt one day they will crack it, but right now many machines don't really comprehend what it is they are seeing in the same way we do.



Heck chances are if you had a cardboard cutout of a person you could get a current AI to shoot it to bits thinking it was a person whilst a human wouldn't be fooled.
And even then change the angle of view a bit and the AI might get fooled again even if it learned that the cutout wasn't a person moments before .