That sound track (Pink Floyd's "The Wall") sounds much like what finally penetrates the brain of an audience with less than perfect hearing. Only a trained musician can fully "hear" a piece of music. The rest of us only register a beat, a few chord changes and a few lyrics.
Boston MA (SPX) Sep 04, 2023 - Cloud gaming, which involves playing a video game remotely from the cloud, witnessed unprecedented growth during the lockdowns and gaming hardware shortages that occurred during the heart of the Cov
The active use of artillery by both sides of the conflict in Ukraine has led to a significant increase in the distance between the opposing forces. In these conditions, an extended "gray zone" is formed in front of the front lines, on the territory of which fighting is conducted by small groups...
Because remote operation is generally bad and needs to be avoided wherever possible?
Normal HF-UHF isn't terribly useful for battlefield control of robotic systems beyond a few kilometers at most. Usually less, so we're quite literally still at teletank levels of autonomy for a remotely operated ground vehicle in a seriously contested EW environment, at least until autonomic control systems become sufficiently matured.
However, Starlink and other SHF/EHF SATCOMs are incredibly tough to jam, find, and intercept in general. Which means they're the only viable communication method. But that means SATCOM for at least every vehicle, but not every soldier. Naturally, America can't afford it at the moment, and FCS merely wanted enough bandwidth for every ground vehicle and NCO in a brigade, so it'll be a long time before we get enough bandwidth for every soldier, robot or human.
Weird statement, considering it was a recommended field modification taught in the Red Army, which was probably the most mechanized and most sophisticated ground force, at least in its ability to switch from high intensity mechanized combat to post-industrial, post-nuclear combat. It's not much different than the US Army teaching GI Joe to slap wooden pallets and tarps over the M1's blown out ammo hatches, but probably more sustainable, and definitely more common knowledge.
I'll apologize in advance for the topwar.ru article (lol) but it has a good picture of the O-832 rounds.
This is just what combat looks like after the PGMs get used up and the fancy planes get shot up.
At some point you have to rely on good, old fashioned grit and mettle, which means strapping O-832Ds to a PG-7V motor, with funny machined aluminum adapters you made on a lathe in a shed in between getting bombed by howitzers.
The main reason it keeps showing up in Ukraine is because there simply aren't many tanks to shoot at, and the RPG-7 is terrible at indirect fire with the HEAT rounds, while the OG-7 is barely used by anyone. On the other hand, the O-832 is just everywhere, and the modification is really simple, so it's a natural fit. It's also better than the crummy HEDP round.
OK, this might require a new thread about brain-machine interfaces or applications of AI or whatever.
Anyway remember Firefox and 'think in Russian'? Here is mind-reading brain-machine interfacing that uses AI to reconstruct perceptions from brainwaves.
A thing that Peter Watts has pointed out (remember him from another thread?) is that consciousness is Dilbert's 'pointy-haired boss' of the brain - it takes the credit for initiatives that have already been set in progress. A true human-machine fusion would require not just someone reading information off an instrument panel and pushing buttons in response - think of Ripley using the power loader to fight the Xenomorph queen at the climax of Aliens. In practise it would use an intuitive 'preconscious' reading of intentions by the computer controlling the mechanical augmentation would be greatly more efficient. There's plenty of data showing that we perform basic tasks like the brain instructing an arm to reach for a glass of water before consciously 'deciding' to do so.
Now we have machines that can to a limited degree read minds in an experimental setting. Practical applications would be exoskeletons that could synchonise with cues from their wearer's nervous systems and weapons systems that can read mental cues.
GEN P.F. Gorman had a neat idea that you could give Joes a RFID or microchip like a SIM card, held on their dogtag chain, that is read by the exoskeleton's computer and holds your personal gait profile for the battle armor to predict your movements.
Weird statement, considering it was a recommended field modification taught in the Red Army, which was probably the most mechanized and most sophisticated ground force, at least in its ability to switch from high intensity mechanized combat to post-industrial, post-nuclear combat. It's not much different than the US Army teaching GI Joe to slap wooden pallets and tarps over the M1's blown out ammo hatches, but probably more sustainable, and definitely more common knowledge.
I'll apologize in advance for the topwar.ru article (lol) but it has a good picture of the O-832 rounds.
This is just what combat looks like after the PGMs get used up and the fancy planes get shot up.
At some point you have to rely on good, old fashioned grit and mettle, which means strapping O-832Ds to a PG-7V motor, with funny machined aluminum adapters you made on a lathe in a shed in between getting bombed by howitzers.
The main reason it keeps showing up in Ukraine is because there simply aren't many tanks to shoot at, and the RPG-7 is terrible at indirect fire with the HEAT rounds, while the OG-7 is barely used by anyone. On the other hand, the O-832 is just everywhere, and the modification is really simple, so it's a natural fit. It's also better than the crummy HEDP round.
And? Tactics are the least statistical element of war. The chance of hitting someone with a machine gun is "basically zero" at 600 yards, let alone indirectly, yet people still shoot, because the point is to let your guys close to kill the other people in their trench, obviously. The machine gun keeps people in place, might kill someone (which is good), and keeps the other guys' heads down. All good things for trench sweepers with hand grenades, flamethrowers, and satchel charges.
It will hit the ground or bunker, throw some dirt and rocks around, maybe kill a guy. Good. It beats the "literally nothing" alternative, you have more rounds your mortars can shoot anyway, and it's harder to attack an RPG team firing mortar rounds at you than it is to attack the guys with a Podnos. Easier to aim, too, and being able to hit a dugout full of dudes on the inside with a O832 is really dope for an assault team.
It's not like people haven't turned disposable launchers and 66mm rockets into impromptu indirect fire units before anyway. South Africa tried to sell it to people in the '80's as this very forum has documented.
Just don't have the RPG do the Most Annoying Thing where its hammer spring fails.
Either the mortar round has no chance of hitting someone, so it's useless, or because "literally one guy" once hit a person with a machine gun at a far distance in such a way that it's entered military legends due to its rarity, it's completely valid to assume unusual events as an ordinary occurrence?
The last time major Western powers fought a war like this was Korea. The first time was WW1. Their tactics were not especially different from the Russians or Ukrainians at the face of it once the war entered its main stagnant period: nighttime raids for POWs and infiltration attacks by small units, harassing fires by highly mobile artillery teams using Bazookas, and short attacks by assault detachments of platoon to company strength, backed by recoilless rifles and mortars, to take trenches.
The United States Army, during the period of its relative industrial and economic height, was field producing similar munitions to what the CIA calls the "RPG-82" (i.e. a PG-7 grenade with a O-832 warhead attached by a fabricated adapter) by mating M49A2 60mm mortar bombs onto M6A3 rocket motor bodies during the war, to make up for the shortfall in mortars and to allow infantry platoons and squads to harass Chinese positions with their own indirect fire.
It was more common to use recoilless rifles to do this, though, and the M20 RCLR had indirect fire optics explicitly for this purpose. Good thing RPG-7 is a hybrid of both recoilless and rocket propulsion I suppose.
This would not appear to be particularly "desperate" or unusual to any veteran of that conflict. Because trench wars look like trench wars.
You said it was almost impossible to hit a guy at 600 yards with an MG, Carlos Hathcock's shot was certainly rare, but it was also at >4x that distance. The point is that you can aim an MG. Those helicopter rocket pods were made for direct fire from helos, throwing them up in the air is just a Hail Mary. They might not probably won't even land within one field of error.
No, I said it was "basically zero" in quotes, both because the primary purpose of the machine gun at something 600 yards away is not to kill people, and because it's a rather long distance to walk for an assault team. If machine guns were good at killing the enemy at that distance you wouldn't need to attack him with hand grenades, now would you?
Typical dismount distances are going to be between 0 (literally on top of) and 500 meters (in extremis, out of the effective range [50% Ph] of most grenade projectors) of an object, and assault troops will need to get close enough to close the distance to generally accurate rifle fire and the ability to sprint to throw grenades without being killed, which is usually "the final 100 meters", by defenders. Ideally, you dismount behind concealment and as close as possible, carry a lot of grenades, and set your guns on automatic. Point shooting practice is recommended simply because you'll need to be fast on the draw.
A machine gun firing from 600 meters, instead of moving with the assault detachment, is going to be a platoon or company level crew serviced weapon. It may also be the BTR. It will most likely be firing at neighboring positions to suppress the interlinking fire zones that form a defensive fighting position, rather than over the heads of its own troops. It may be a grenade machine gun or a PK, firing indirectly, and the assault lane will be delineated with smoke lines fired from light mortars.
Yeah. You can also drop a mortar bomb on someone's head lobbed from 3 kilometers fired from an RPG. It's rare, but it happens.
So, again, which is it? Carlos Hathcock (and any other legendary sniper you can think of) is the human equivalent of the mortar bomb landing in the trench at just the right angle to kill a couple guys in a dugout, which you scoffed at earlier, but now seemingly endorse? It's not very consistent.
The purpose of such harassing fires is to keep the enemy awake and prevent him from sleeping, or doing useful work, or whatever. For the most part. Sleep is one of the first things you lose in a war of any kind, and going 50 or 60 hours without it makes physical activity hard, because you start hearing voices and seeing funny wavy things and sometimes people do dumb stuff on the basis of whatever weird hallucinations or just plain tiredness.
Anything that deprives the enemy of capacity to produce earthworks, to move ammunition, to provide aid, and to consume calories is beneficial. The cost of a few mortar bombs and the joules put into the modification of the ammunition and launchers on a T&E post is genuinely trivial compared to the cost of a couple hours of sleep lost by the enemy over the next day, in the course of a combat week.
You can aim an RPG. There are several so-called "universal" sight units, all of which are common, which allow for indirect graduation sights using varying types of munition. O-832 modified rounds are not terribly accurate, but they are a medium mortar, so they are rather lethal.
Here is a Ukrainian special operations assault team doing the same thing as the DPR troops:
They don't even have T&E gear, but they're a special forces detachment, so they probably want to be mobile. Here is a Ukrainian trench mortar devised from a pair of RPG-7s and some T&E kit:
It's similar to but probably heavier than the LDPR/DPR system.
So what of this "wreaks" of desperation? These are not slap-dash modifications, obviously, even if they are field-expedient. They are very serious, prescribed fabrications of weapons that the Red Army trained all its soldiers in, and went on to train anti-capitalist guerrillas in the jungle and desert to do the same, both in their use and similar modification.
It's much lighter than a conventional 82mm mortar, with a significant range out to around 3 kilometers. Actual mortar projectors are a scarce resource, yet this is true like every resource, and conservation of resources is the name of the game. The Soviets made more O-832s than the world could handle and both Ukraine and Russia are obviously going to take advantage of this.
Tanks are a uncommon beast in Ukraine. Thus, the rocket launchers end up being distributed poorly, with too many in small units, and insufficient anti-personnel indirect fire, because the past several decades have been spent stockpiling anti-armor means. Yet the most common military forces who have fought all P5 powers have been light infantry. It's very much a "last war" (WW2) mindset but without exaggeration.
Practically the only things that can be said to be found "in abundance" in the Ukraine theater is RPGs and mortar ammunition.
By creation of multiple rocket launchers on the frames of grenade projectors, the infantry unit increases its anti-personnel fire capacities by several times, with each tube being essentially a mortar, and preserves mortars for more important tasks such as stockpiling resources for the next push to the next set of trenches. In which the process repeats itself.
It's quite literally the opposite of desperation because it shows both sides are still willing to kill the enemy, and go to relatively high levels of effort (but absolutely very low levels) to do this. Desperate troops do not preserve themselves. Defeated troops do not fight back. This is neither. These are troops who are in a bad way finding creative solutions out of the way by improvization in the manner of their grandfathers.
What. Who said anything about helicopter rocket pods?
I was pointing out that the U.S. Army, at the height of its economic power absolutely and relatively, was doing the same thing with M1A1 Bazookas using M6 motors mated to M49A2 mortar bombs.
Our latest book on machine gun employment goes into detail on a wide range of topics relating to machine gun theory and various tactics and techniques for using machine guns in combat. This article takes a selection of short paragraphs on several key concepts and useful tactics that are critical for
specialtactics.me
Indirect lobbing MG fire and other saturation fires are a different phenomenon so dont apply to this argument.
Rheinmetall is introducing at DSEI 2023 a new Squad Support Weapon (SSW) designed to fire 40mm grenade ammunition As fire jsupport weapon for infantry squads. SSW is an automatic, magazine-loaded, shoulder fired grenade launcher, with a size and weight similar to an assault rifle.
There are pictures of dead guys in dugouts and foxholes all over Telegram. Last time people posted that kind of stuff forum members got upset, so look for it yourself. That said, good luck determining if the mortar bomb was fired from a Podnos or a PG-7 motor I guess: it's the same warhead coming down on top of you.
The accuracy is adequate, but if you think it "wreaks of desperation" perhaps you should consider that Ukraine does it a lot more than the Russian levy troops? The rocket projector RPG-7 firing PG-7V has a dispersion of a little less than 10 meters at 1 kilometer, although stuff like high crosswinds will affect this, and the travel of a high angle fire will be slightly more than 1 kilometer. Regardless, it's quite accurate as a piece of recoilless rocket artillery out to around 2-3 kilometers, provided you've sited the position properly, and you're getting accurate range to target. You can attack a platoon or squad DFP with consistent casualty production radii of between 5-10 meters with the PG-7V/-VL. Double that for the 82mm HE.
All that assumes accurate positioning and gun laying, which is the only real telling issue for short range artillery in the modern age. A couple of kilometers won't meaningfully impact accuracy unless you're firing something like a, S-5.
Lateral dispersion might be a few meters higher, and the balance will be off somewhat (which will affect range dispersion), using the O-832 shell instead of the PG-7V. That might explain why the DPR troops were firing PG-7Vs instead of the field produced O-832 rounds that the Ukrainians have photos of, but the Ukrainians use this a lot more than either Russian or DPR/LDPR troops to begin with, so yeah that might explain it too.
If you find this to be questionable, that speaks more to your ignorance of what Soviet-trained troops consider fairly basic field knowledge tbh. I don't know what your experience is or whatever, so I won't really judge, but I will just say that your doubt about this technique is pretty unfounded in the real world. People do it all the time and have won wars this way against much more powerful armies than those in Ukraine or Russia.
The weird part is using the O-832, but I guess if you can lose 2-5 meters of accuracy, you technically gain another 3 or 4 meters of killing area. Except that's not really how it works, but soldiers will do weird shit all the time based on myths rather than sound facts, as tactics being the least statistical element of military art is informed more by individual biases and experience than true understanding. It's not very important to have true understanding outside of some common fundamentals.
Which is to say if it's stupid and it works, it isn't stupid. Nor does it "wreak" of desperation.
Plenty of NATO troops in Afghanistan and Iraq can attest that the "RPG-82" is a dangerous weapon in good hands.
View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gQCUX34tP-c
I’ve seen multiple videos where Afghanis were shooting at a US troop column from high up in the mountains, basically lobbing 12.7mm shells down crudely but effectively, and the soldiers had to stay behind their vehicles and call in an air strike.
Seems a weapon like this mounted on a light vehicle, not a Bradley which were not in any of these columns probably road/terrain limited, would be cheaper/quicker than an air strike.
There are pictures of dead guys in dugouts and foxholes all over Telegram. Last time people posted that kind of stuff forum members got upset, so look for it yourself. That said, good luck determining if the mortar bomb was fired from a Podnos or a PG-7 motor I guess: it's the same warhead coming down on top of you.
There are indeed, but none of them were taken out by an RPG-7 being lobbed up in the air from 3km away and striking them on their head.
I also feel compelled to ask what lobbing an unguided RPG up the air from 3km away has to do with 'Future Soldier Technology'? The answer is 'nothing' BTW.
I'm certain you have a very robust casualty analysis that shows this.
As I said, the lateral dispersion of an RPG-7 being fired from 1 kilometer is less than ten meters. From three kilometers, it is still more than accurate enough to strike within the area of a motor rifle section's 100-150 meter wide (and around 50-100 meter deep) DFP, barring extensive crosswinds, as the article jsport linked to says.
With accurate location of yourself and your target, you can produce casualties in a platoon along portions of the trench area fairly reliably, assuming people are poking their heads out of the DFP and not already covered. It is more accurate to use PG-7V/-VL warheads but the O-832 warhead produces casualties in an area roughly twice as large (~5-8 meters versus ~10-15 meters) as the ordinary anti-tank warheads. No one uses the 40mm grenade, at least if they have a choice.
Several RPG-7s firing in a braced T&E tripod are a "good enough" substitute for rocket artillery or medium mortars. They are plentiful, cheap, and easily maintained by troops, which is probably why Ukrainian fighters, both nationalists and separatists, use them a lot. It may also be more difficult to track by WLRs, as mortars often are, but the RPG-7 is substantially more mobile and lightweight.
It's a silly weapon to look at, sure, but it's very lethal in the right contexts. It's simply the modern day version of the "condensed milk can" or "jam tin" Garland-type mortars that soldiers made in the WW1 and the Great Patriotic War.
It's up to you to prove otherwise. You said that it's happened, so it's up to you to provide evidence of indirect fire headshot from 3km with RPG please. It's not up to me to prove a negative, that's a well established principle of debate.
It's up to you to prove otherwise. You said that it's happened, so it's up to you to provide evidence of indirect fire headshot from 3km with RPG please. It's not up to me to prove a negative, that's a well established principle of debate.
Do you understand the concept of "harassing fire". It doesn't need to kill to be useful, one of the main uses of indirect fire is suppression, not destruction.
Harassing indirect fire needs volume. For instance, Grads are fired from several launchers with 40 rockets each. An RPG-7 warhead is way smaller, and no real way of even aiming it over 3km, so a few guys with RPGs firing them into the air is useful for little more than an alarm clock. You could have a few hundred soldiers firing RPGs up in the air, but that sounds like a really bad and counterproductive idea.
A little drone dropping an RPG-7 head on the other hand can be aimed a lot better and is far more useful for both harassment and killing and, even without munitions, it probably still serves up a better harassment effect. Indirect RPG fire is a lash-up job cobbled together through desperation, and RPGs date back to at least WWII, so historical soldier technology not future soldier technology, i.e. wrong thread.
It's up to you to prove otherwise. You said that it's happened, so it's up to you to provide evidence of indirect fire headshot from 3km with RPG please. It's not up to me to prove a negative, that's a well established principle of debate.
If you don't know what you're talking about, I can see why you might think the purpose of most weapons most of the time is to kill people. The reality is that almost all indirect fire is typically intended to allow infantrymen armed with automatic rifles and hand grenades to get close enough to a target to kill the enemy inside 100 meters.
Trench combat involves taking trenches until either you or your enemy has exhausted himself. It is slow and deliberate. It requires vast expenditures of conventional munitions such as howitzers, rocket launchers, and automatic grenade launcher ammunition to support the infantry in their attacks.
In between these tremendous expenditures of blood and iron, troops who are still willing to fight will engage in patrols, nighttime raids to capture POWs, and periodic firing of indirect weapons away from their main defensive lines (the last one mainly to avoid breaking the crack commandments). This is not to kill people. It is so that when the time comes to kill people, the troops will still be psychologically and mentally prepared to destroy the enemy, rather than talk with him.
This is how European armies, and those culturally adjacent such as the Americans (albeit in Korea), learned to deal with the Christmas Truce and avoid having battalions of their own men engage in fraternization with the enemy. When your trenches are within earshot of each other it is fairly easy to agree to local truces and cease fires, which leads to a lack of discipline, and degradation in fighting capacity of both sides.
The DPR troops were doing a patrol in a quiet sector to keep the pressure on the Ukrainians, remind them they were there, and most importantly, to continue to hate the enemy so that he can be killed. The Ukrainians do the same with their own RPG-7 braces, but they usually have more than one rocket launcher. Separatists prefer(red?) to use AGS most of the time, at least during the times of the ATO.
and killing and, even without munitions, it probably still serves up a better harassment effect Indirect RPG fire is a lash-up job cobbled together through desperation,
Conscription lol.
It's entirely possible that future peer-to-peer combat where technological equalities neccesitate quantity. Like Ukraine and Russia has demonstrated.
Maybe in a 2027 scenario where NATO invades Russia while USN and PLAN slings missile around.
We may see mass conscriptions getting real due to attrition.
Future soldiers could possibly be rocking barebone armour kits, cheap tactical helmets, mass-produced digital nods that are outright inferior to modern PVS-14s, and polymer-casted KP15s. So pretty much terrible throughout even comparing to units stationed in ME in 2017 or so.
If soldiers evolve to be futuristic Ghost Recon style fighters then such a future would already be achievable by even the beginning of the millenium. Budgets ruin everything.
Tldr both glorified MG-34 quadmounts and micro UAVs are in the same category of "future tech" as long as its not too obsolete. Its just that they belong to 2 opposite spectrum, the "worst" and the "best" one. Given Syria and Ukraine prove that antique weaponry when put into the right hand and properly used/updated can still be deadly. Examples like S-60s fired with mechanically caliberated sights (WW1 tech really) and drone spotters or Winchester single-shotters with pic rails and 8x scopes.
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