CAS over Ukraine

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So far the most effective* close air support (CAS) over Ukraine appears to be toss bombing of guided bombs.

It's similar to the graphic below, save for greater range with glide kits and greater accuracy if the guidance does its job.

The aircraft arrives very low (maybe 100 ft), pulls up, releases flares and chaff, releases the bomb, escapes at very low altitude (again maybe 100 ft).

 

U 

The advantage over artillery is mostly that the munitions are much heavier. Huge craters by delay-fuzed heavy bombs can destroy underground field fortifications or sewers, a single bomb can destroy a large building.  

The speed of the vehicle should be high subsonic in order for the munition to have much kinetic energy (and thus range) upon release.

 

This doesn't look like the "Americans bomb brown people" guided bomb attacks from above ManPADS ceiling (at about 15k ft) or dive-bombing from such safe altitude and it doesn't look like the A-10 concept of CAS, either.

 

Post-WW2 versions of toss bombing were initially developed for free-fall nuclear bombs, as the pilot wanted to get away from the blast in time. Later on, the skills were used by Israelis in 1973 and the British in 1982 when they faced effective air defences and didn't dare to fly in range and in line of sight to said air defences for more than a few seconds.

 

We could dismiss the Ukraine CAS experience as irrelevant to NATO because NATO would go after the air defences, but

1. anti-radar missiles aren't terribly plentiful (we had shortages in 1999 already)
2. even radar-based air defences survive anti-air defence campaigns for long if the air defence officers are smart (see 1999 Kosovo Air War and 2022-2025 Ukraine air warfare)
3. not all air defences require radar (examples IRIS-T SLM and VL MICA IR missiles) and radar-independent air defences are very difficult to suppress.** In fact, medium range air defences based on thermal cameras may be more useful than ones based on x-band radars because of RF stealth aircraft. 

So what should we do based on the observations from Ukraine?

 

I stick to my opinion that we need eyes in the sky, but fires can come from the ground. Air/Ground bombing does not seem to promise a good overall package (cost, uncertainty, rapidity of effects) in peer wars in my opinion. That being said, Russia is no peer to NATO. We can deal with Russian air defences well-enough to rip open gaps in the SAM belt or we would find enough gaps between dispersed air defence umbrellas to bomb enough  (even with unguided 'iron' bombs) for decisive effect.

So we should look at Chinese air defences, really. They haven't been exposed to war and are thus of unknown quality, but a couple of their air-to-air missiles proved to be effective over Pakistan.

 

related:

/2008/11/wurfgert.html

/2010/07/first-week-of-peer-vs-peer-air-war.html 

/2018/03/luftwaffe-f-35-or-typhoon-for-airground.html

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: There were also super-inaccurate unguided missile attacks and unguided bomb attacks with approx. toss bombing profile and at least some guided glide bombs appear to have been released at high altitude where no area air defences made that intolerably dangerous. 

**: Radars are active emitters. These emissions can be detected, direction finding to the emissions' origin can be used to find the emitter. Triangulation by aircraft (or detector on the surface), detection by satellites and anti-radar missile simply flying towards the emitter are frequently used options. To search for a thermal camera (imaging infrared sensor) in a large area is futile by comparison.

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My critique of Israel

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I did a search in the blog archive to see how much I criticised Israel after all.

 

January 2009 Called Israel a source of alienation between NATO members and Arab countries

April 2009 Claimed that Israel alienated Western nations with its behaviour for decades

December 2008 Expressed doubts that Israel's self-defence against Hamas/Gaza was proportionate / implying it was excessive.

July 2009 Called Israel's behaviour unacceptable, singling out the bombing of other countries 

July 2010 'tail wags the dog' graphic symbolising Israel-U.S. relationship 

May 2011 Called Israel a "regional troublemaker" 

September 2011 Claimed that Israel has a "usual" disrespect against Muslim nations 

November 2011 "Expect a revolt if you run the largest prison on earth." [Gaza] 

December 2012 Insisted that Israel is no ally to the U.S., using the concept of an "ally" that's dependent on a signed & ratified two-way alliance, not mere good relations. I repeated this briefly in April 2018.

July 2014 A blog post mentioning the lopsided casualty figures in a Israel-Gaza/Hamas conflict at the time. I also supposed that Israel&Egypt could be pressured into peace with Gaza becoming Egyptian. 

July 2014 Criticism of Israel's grand strategy as stupid, drawing parallel to the Crusader states that were dependent on outside support, too. 

May 2015 Israel as #5 threat future threat to Germany, but rated "utterly unrealistic"  

July 2015 "Israel has earned a reputation for not necessarily letting refugees return" 

April 2017 "Israel's attempt to hold on to occupied territories since 1967 in spite of repeated UN resolutions demanding its withdrawal"

August 2018 Claimed that Israel deviated from Western norms and "Apartheid light, routine disregard of international norms" 

May 2019 Indirectly called Netanyahu corrupt

October 2020 Called Israel an illegal occupier of the West Bank

June 2021 Linked without comment to an article of HRW and another from The Intercept that were criticising Israel

October 2021 Mentioned Israel hacking, assassination and subversive actions without elaborating

January 2022 Mentioned without elaboration habitual Israeli occupation and bombing of foreign lands 

February 2022 Linked to an article about allegations that Israeli police illegally wiretapped Israeli citizens

February 2022 Called Israel an aggressor and occupier since 1967

February 2022 One post that is all about Israel's offences and I called it "unacceptable behaviour"

July 2022 Called Israel 5th most important threat to Germany due to the range of its nuclear-tipped missiles (later quoted this part in July 2024)

October 2023 I wrote that peace in Near East should be pursued by forcing a solution on the regional countries, not by negotiating with them.

November 2023 I wrote "Israel has to leave the occupied territories and go back to its pre-1967 borders. The state of Israel is only legitimate within the pre-1967 borders." and that the naval (longtime) blockade of Gaza by Israel was illegitimate

April 2023 Mentioned that Israel habitually commits wars of aggression

January 2024 Mentioned that Israel demolitions buildings in Gaza outside of combat.Also claimed that Israel "played the victim card too brazenly" (overplayed it).

I did NOT count my comments in the comment sections for economy of effort reason.

Now put these 28 instances in perspective; about 2,500 blog posts were written in total!

 

Looking back, I think not one of those statements is indefensible.

The "habitual", the #5 threat ranking, the opinion that Near East parties should be dictated/forced into peace rather than negotiation partners are unusual opinions, for sure. Definitely outside of mainstream. Still, in hindsight I still think of them as reasonable.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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Ethnic cleansing complicity by accepting refugees?

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Here's a difficult thing about ethnic cleansing. Suppose the evil party wants a people gone, ded or alive. Just gone from a specific area. They inflict harm on them. Now there's a third party and it has to decide whether to accept refugees.

To accept refugees means to assist the evil party in its plan. Such acceptance of refugees may even be a necessary part of the evil plan. To not accept them means they will suffer harm.

The right thing to do would be to intervene and force the evil party to stop its evil actions, but suppose that would not be practical for whatever reason: 

Should the refugees be accepted or not?* 

Would help in evacuation / resettling equal complicity in ethnic cleansing?

 

The international law scholars certainly have opinions on this and possibly they even have a consensus. I didn't bother to check this, for this time I'm rather thinking about the ethical dimension than the legal one.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

 

*: Pretend it's only about the quesiton of agreeing with another country taking them in, suhc as permitting evacuation flights over territory if an aversion to let certain brown people into your country gets in the way of thinking clealry and within the limits of this case / model.

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The finiteness of self-defence

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I wrote about extremist warfare in 2009. The idea was that maximalist war objectives such as total annexation or unconditional surrender raise the bar to victory because they provoke maximalist hostile efforts. The effect is that wars are unnecessarily long and destructive compared to the case of more moderate objectives.

Now I'd like to point out something similar:

Some countries becomes extremist in response to being under attack. They have the legitimate and legal right to self-defence, but then they just keep going, inflate and exceed this right, up to "forever conflicts" where supposedly all military action for all eternity isjustified by the original offence.

I strongly suppose that the right to self-defence ends when the hostilities have ceased (including blockades and occupations by the aggressor being lifted) and only renews when a new aggression occurs. Any remaining entitlements to compensation of damages is then a legal affair that does not justify violence.

Examples for such 'forever' conflicts:

• American derangement about the Iranian embassy crisis 
• Israeli conflicts with Syrians, Palestinians, Hezbollah
• The Frozen Korean War (some people pretend the lack of a peace treaty means an attack on North Korea would still be legal) 
• The American sustainment of their conflict with Iraq from 1991-2003

I wanted to raise awareness about the problem and shed some light on it, but the latter intent is difficult to realise. I simply don't see any justification for such an open-endedness of a right to commit violence.

Proportionality is for all I know a universally accepted principle in law. An aggression from decades ago that was already punished ten times over cannot possibly be considered to justify further violence. It would simply not be proportional. And I'm not even discussing the "ten times over" part, right now I just take offense at the abuse of the "self defence" or ' UN authorised military action' authorisations of violence by pretending that they are endless.

 

We should go beyond accepting that self-defence is a right and pay A LOT more attention to the limits of self-defence. Civilised countries did this in criminal law, it's about time the public does it in regard to military actions (and subversive, sabotage and assassination activities).

S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de
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Guilty or not?

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Suppose a man gets killed in his home. He had a long and violent dispute with his neighbour.

 

Should the police investigate said neighbour as suspect even though his grandma was murdered 80 years ago?

 

Or does this mean the neighbour cannot be guilty?

 

 

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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A track record that needs no hiding

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I searched for an old blog post to quote and instead found a blog post-sized comment of mine (colouration added):

I covered Russia previously
http://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2007/08/no-major-war-in-europe-in-next-ten.html
and as much as I like low military spending, it's a bit more complex than what you suggest.
I don't expect them to turn on us militarily in a few years (rather on Ukraine), but don't exclude it as a possibility.


First problem: Lags (a.k.a. initiative)
The reacting powers would react with a lag of about three years due to imperfect information collection, processing and distribution.

Second problem: Aggressor's timing advantage
An aggressor can plan ahead to be ready for war in year x (Hitler planned 1940 for basic readiness, 1944 for full readiness against Russia and 1947 for naval readiness against the UK).
He can ensure that his forces are fit at that time. A reacting power - no matter whether low or high expenditures in peacetime - is at a disadvantage.
High peacetime expenditures can even be a disadvantage, as the equipment will be older on average than the aggressor's (example France 1940 - it still had many WWI guns).

My conclusion (I wrote several blog posts around it) is that we need to be aware that conventional warfare is the only truly threatening one (besides genocidal nuclear warfare). Militias at the end of our world will never touch us much, they cannot invade us or cut our sea lanes. Conventional warfare deserves our attention.

Our policy as well as our armed services need to be fit to react quickly.
We need good education for the relevant politicians, a good cultivation of military competence (including a reserve of trained soldiers; basic infantry training suffices to save 6+ months of lag) and we need always competitive hardware designs.
That's more easily done by many incremental steps instead of 35-year- development and replacement cycles as usual for much of our hardware.

Finally, we need to prevent that these precautions take effect - we should prevent WW3. Reduce reasons for war, don't create new ones - and avoid wasteful arms races and wars.

Published in February of 2009. The typical contents of military blogs and military news were still dominated by the occupation war in Iraq at that time.

 

I can proudly state that I'm still 100% behind those statements and feel pretty good compared to most people who actually got paid in the 2009...2021 period for commentary or studies on military affairs.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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The direct/indirect/antiair fires tank concept

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I wrote in the past about tanks that have a unusually high maximum elevation of their main gun and can be used for indirect fires and for short range air defence.

/2010/04/medium-calibre-allround-option.html 

/2017/01/42-elevation-tank-turrets.html

/2023/04/a-compact-and-agile-exploitation-brigade.html

/2023/09/the-directindirect-fires-armour.html

 

I have never elaborated on the technical side of the shot, but the technical details matter for understanding the concept.

A tank gun has a very high muzzle velocity even with a high explosive shell (it won't be less than 700 m/s). A variable propellant strength may be used and special shells or fuses may increase drag to brake the shell, but a basic tank gun HE cartridge is going to produce a cannon-like, very flat trajectory.

This makes it difficult to hit a flat target with a point detonating (impact) fuse. A slight error in elevation or a slight deviation of muzzle velocity leads to a much greater range error of the shot than the shot's lethal radius. 

Historically, the best use for cannons in indirect fire at short and medium distances was to use a bouncing shot (cannon shells bounce off flat ground when fired at no more than 10° elevation as a rule of thumb). A delay fuse would then cause the explosion  when the shell is airborne after bouncing off the ground. The fragmentation effect of this would be greater than with point detonation, but the dispersion would be bad.

How about proximity fuses? Again, quite the same as with point detonating, just worse. The fuse may trigger much too early, especially when it overflies a building. Even a time-gated proximity fuse wouldn't be satisfactory. 

Normal time fuses use 0.1 second intervals. A shell travelling at 600 m/s would thus fuse somewhere within 60 metres - unsatisfactory, as the lethal radius even of a 120 mm HE shell in much smaller. 

The technical solution is to use more modern fuses that deliver accuracy of about ten metres. The elevation may still be off a little, but an explosion 3 m lower than intended or 3 m higher than intended isn't a too terrible variation.

Here's an example of such a very accurately fusing fuse.

 

This can be used to explode the shell inside a building (setting the timing accordingly and disabling a point detonation feature if present).

This can be used to shoot at aerial targets in the way heavy anti-air artillery did in WW2, just much more accurately.* 

Ideally, the fuse would have selectable point detonation (quickest direct fire shot mode that's somewhat useful on everything, including messing up a T-14 tank turret) and delay (for exploding BMPs, BTRs and rooms in a building)

 

The technology for proper fuses for very flat trajectory shots hasn't been available for very long. Most main battle tanks of today are from a 1970's conceptual design and prototyping generation, when such fusing wasn't on the horizon yet. The Chinese have newer designs, but they were catching up. The South Koreans have a newer MBT design, but they have mostly hilly to mountainous terrain. Same with the Japanese. The current equipment is thus no argument against the validity of the direct/indirect firepower tank concept. It makes sense that the in-service tanks lack it and at the same time the concept  may be entirely valid with our current technology.

Back to bending that flat trajectory a bit: The muzzle velocity depends on the propellant temperature. One might have a cool/cooled and a warm/heated cartridge compartment to enable a choice between two muzzle velocities. The difference wouldn't be great, though. This would not enable shooting over most hills in the line of sight.

Another possibility is to use a fuse or shell feature that deploys a braking element, such as in trajectory-correcting munitions. Another analogy is the nose or drag ring that can be added to rockets of manually loaded multiple rocket launchers to slow them down and thus reduce the often terribly long minimum shot distance. 

High tech approaches include variable injection of liquid propellant, use of electro-chemical-thermal gun principle and so on, but such already researched and tested technologies appear to find no users for good reasons.

In the end, a fixed cartridge with combustible case is realistic, a semi-fixed cartridge for varying the propellant strength by adding or removing modules would only be reasonable if the tank is used mostly in indirect fires. Another option is to simply have two different kinds of HE cartridges with combustible case; one for high muzzle velocity and one for low muzzle velocity. The latter could be used to shoot over hills, but it would have a reduced maximum range and longer time of flight. The shell orientation at explosion would also differ, leading to a different optimisation for fragmentation pattern and thus a different shell design.

 

The great potential of the concept of a direct/indirect/antiair firepower tank is in the versatility. This may go so far as to enable a much smaller and thus much more agile tank brigade without a dedicated artillery component. I described that concept in the 3rd and 4th link above. The same brigade would have dozens of assets capable of sniping away observation drones without need for any dedicated air defence vehicle.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: Proximity fusing may be preferable for this, but ordinary artillery proximity fuses meant to fuze a couple metres above ground don't work on air targets. Their safety feature keeps them from exploding before the zenith of the trajectory was passed.

Due to recent events...

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I'd like to remind you that any NATO member attack on another country without permission by the United Nations is a violation of the North Atlantic Treaty. 

Article 1

The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_17120.htm

The U.S. has ONCE AGAIN intentionally, habitually and grossly violated its obligations to the NATO other members.

The high risk of this happening again was obvious for days, but the terrible NATO general secretary didn't put it on the agenda during the NATO meeting. Instead, the "5%" brain fart of a lying moron was to be discussed.

/2008/09/overly-aggressive-allies.html

/2010/09/anglophone-disrespect-for-international.html

/2014/03/hypocrisy-in-effect.html 

/2017/04/the-us-blatantly-violated-north.html 

/2018/04/comment-on-recent-cruise-missile.html

 

It was completely unnecessary, actually. 

And it's not sure at all whether the supposed goal will be achieved. It's not a nature's law that a nuclear weapons program needs to be confined to a few locations. A dispersed enrichment program could lead to a simple gunshot uranium fission device. Iran is likely holding back from expending some of its better rockets.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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Hostility caused by fundamental misunderstanding

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I ask you to read this (shockingly, already 15 years old!) blog post first:

/2010/09/do-opponents-misunderstand-each-other.html

So, Iran is sponsoring terrorism abroad, right?

graphic taken from U.S. Congress

 

Well, look at the following map and search for "coincidences":

regarding copyright: see lower bound of image

The so-called proxies turn out to be Shia / Shi'ite groups outside of Iran.

 

This opens the possibility that the Western public (not terribly literate on such issues) misunderstands Iran's policy regarding support for outside groups. It might actually be about

• support for religious fellows who are (or feel) oppressed by sunni-dominated governments
• an effort to overcome the solitude as only Shia country by having at least some friends abroad 

Again (I wrote so previously), maybe the best approach to overcome the war in Yemen including the Red Sea crisis and missile launches on Israel is to split Yemen into a Shia state and a Sunni state. The unification of both Yemens was an obvious mistake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemen_Arab_Republic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Yemen

We should have a peace conference with incentives to both Houthis and their main opponents to agree to a partition (preferably with better-drawn borders, but a decent seaport for the Houthis) rather than focusing on shooting down Houthi munitions and bombing them targets in Houthi-controlled territory.

 

Lebanon's issues could be addressed by replacing the Shia sponsor Iran with a more secular, more international order-focused sponsorship.

 

 

Last but not least another thought; even a democratic Iran would still be majority Shia and might still behave very similarly, feeling solidarity with Shias abroad, supporting their cause in some way, including arming them!

 

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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Issues with "self defence"

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Countries are entitled to defend themselves against aggression, that's universally accepted international law and almost everyone (exceptions include some particularly dumb Germans who apparently like to give BJs to Putin) gets and respects that.

The application in practice isn't without issues, though. Those issues go beyond 'false flag' actions and lying about who started the shooting.

Suppose there's a country A and a country B. They've been at each others' throats for decades. Maybe four decades, maybe eight. Maybe it's possible to tell who did start it originally, maybe not. Maybe the conflict escalated through non-warfare hostilities such as sponsoring terrorism and sabotage/assassination campaigns, maybe not.

Is there still a right to self-defence in such a permaconflict? And if yes - who has it if the origin is unclear?

Even more troublesome: What if the originator of the conflict is known, but the origin has been many decades ago and both sides were actively hostile to each other (albeit not waging open warfare) for a long time? Suppose we agree that if country A was the original culprit then country B has the right to self-defence. When does this right end? Does it ever end? Can A be blamed for not quitting the permaconflict even if it gets harrassed by below-warfare level hostilities of B? It's human nature to NOT show the other cheek for decades. Suppose we say B loses the right to self-defence in response to below warfare level hostilities if A shows the other cheek. For how long does A have to show the other cheek, or how much punishment does it have to endure while showing the other cheek until B loses the right to kill citizens of country A and destroy things in it (or possibly maintain a naval blockade)?

 

Personally, I believe there are seemingly perpetual conflicts in which I stop caring about who started it. I transition to looking who does much more damage and then am convinced it's appropriate to demand an end to lopsided killing and damage as a step towards getting out of the vicious circle of violence. That demand is easier to meet than a demand for showing the other cheek for a long time.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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