2022/09/09

It's the four big levers and the basics, stupid!

.

The recent wars (Azerbaijan-Armenian and Russo-Ukrainian) confirm and -to those who pay attention- remind us of what really matters in defence, and it's not what you normally read about.

Only a few key levers absolutely need to be covered with good-enough hardware, even against a 1st rate opposition:

  1. You need to be able to destroy many main battle tanks.
  2. You need to be able to very largely mitigate the effects of hostile air power.*
  3. You need to have effective support fires.**
  4. You need to be able to usually maintain quick (message) communications***

Then everything else is about will (morale), good-enough doctrine (what is being taught & trained), good-enough training (quantitatively & qualitatively)**** and getting basics right.

The latter includes avoiding building a hollow force.*****

Your doctrine doesn't need major updates over what was state of the art (of war) up to the 1960's. Most things haven't changed much anyway, and (almost?) all armies are incapable of matching that level or tactical, operational and strategic proficiency anyway.

To get the basics right is laborious, inglorious, largely the job of non-commissioned officers and it's hardly profitable for the arms industry. Politicians know much about allocating more funds to the military, and next to nothing about what basics their army and air force don't get right, and how to fix that.

S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: "very largely" ~ 80+% / This does not require big, expensive hardware. All that it takes could be distributed on civilian pickup SUVs.

**: Artillery shooting 105 mm HE shells of WW2-ish quality and range would suffice, as long as the gun and its crew are survivable enough to pull it off.

***: "usually" ~ 80% connectivity even in face of a main effort attack / "quick" = quicker than motorcycle couriers, so by cable or by light or by radio frequency comms. Such quickness is important to achieve responsive (and thus effective) support fires. High bandwidth is no requirement. One 100 bytes message per minute is plenty bandwidth on a company leader to battalion HQ line.

****: Well-trained troops have better morale and are incredibly more effective. A well-trained reservists crew could be reassembled after two years of civilian life and be 10x as useful with a Soviet-era (1983) Buk M1 air defence system than the average Russian crew could be with the newest (2006) Buk M3 air defence system, for example.

*****: If you raise an army of a thousand howitzers, you better also buy millions of shells, fuzes and proportional quantities of propellant charges for it and store those properly. So for a thousand howitzers better have at least two million shells, and if that's too much in your opinion then a thousand howitzers are too many. If you think you can make do with 200,000 shells, then don't buy and train for more than a hundred howitzers. One might disagree on how many shells per gun exactly are appropriate and the correct figure may be different for Singapore than for Vietnam, for example. Yet the figure surely is between 1,000 shots and about 10,000 shots. At certain high round per gun counts you'd additionally need to be have certain spare parts and the corresponding maintenance & repair capacity, for that will be needed long before 10,000 rounds can be spent. .

5 comments:

  1. 5. Build and use simple and durable equipment suitable for prolonged usage wherever possible.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Even these basics are debatable.
    1) Do we? 'we' being 'Europe', for now.
    China isn't shipping tanks to Russia, or Europe any time soon it seems.
    The Russian tanks: how many Armata-14's are they producing a year?
    The rest: see the Ukranians: ravage the supply lines, and tanks become broken bunkers without replacement or fuel.
    The drivable Russian tanks are increasingly part of Ukraine's inventory, or had their turret exploded.
    Besides big US of A, how many Nato countries can keep tanks well supplied for high mobility warfare?

    You wrote of having a cheap, 'good enough' anti-tank weapon; well: IFV's and 'not tank level protection' type of vehicles are by far more common.
    And I think 'need to destroy many tanks' leads to the thinking of 'we need 120mm Sabot tank rounds'.
    Or indeed, Javelins.

    Even the Armata: is it still a tank in the version without the big main gun?

    Admittedly, with add-on armor etc, 'not-quite-tanks' can become a lot tougher.

    Anyhow, all those vehicles: if they get mobility-killed, the advance is already scrapped.
    Minefields have been effective vs Russia.

    > Your doctrine doesn't need major updates over what was state of the art (of war) up to the 1960's.

    drones, and precision guided munitions plus far better surveillance.

    I've also been thinking: we have been pushing drones forward to the battlefield as scouts and weapon platforms.
    Perhaps we should have been automating transport aircraft, including transport helicopters (Search & Rescue: a drone attempts to pick up wounded; no further loss of life if unsuccesfull).
    During any major war, transport aircraft will become prime targets, and pilots are in limited supply.
    So we have a few big transport aircraft.
    (officially, Luxembourg has a single A400 Atlas transport aircraft...*why*?)
    With automated transport flying (you'll still need loading & unloading), the pilot costs would be less of a factor, and perhaps more smaller transport aircraft could be an option.
    With even some survivability upgrades perhaps; some stealth optimalization (expensive to go 'full stealth' obviously), jammers/... for all transports etc.
    Should become a lot more difficult to eliminate (including a first strike, or sabotage) than say, 8 big transport aircraft (Belgian airforce).
    Downside: no transporting full size tanks on smaller transports.
    But how many tanks would you want to put onto an A400 during war-time anyhow. Answer is none, as they're too heavy already. But even IFV's: 30 tons: means you're transporting 1 vehicle.. with a giant transport aircraft. Nope.


    I don't see how you'd vastly reduce the effects of hostile airpower with a few pick-up trucks.

    3) I'm very much in favor of 105mm artillery; can be fitted onto lighter platforms, and/or can bring more shells (with modern accuracy, nr of shells is a very limiting factor imo); and HE frag effectiveness as you wrote in some earlier post iirc, (sorry, no link) can be increased with things like a parachute to slow the shell down to improve the fragmentation spread (more expensive rounds tho).


    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The issue with MBTs is that they cause too much harm if tgeir commanders don't fear your anti MBT defence.

      The Russo-Ukrainian War has highlighted the AT qualities of old school HE (not PFF) rounds of 152...155 mm calibre. 105 mm is not much of an AT calibre for arty. I blogged about 155 mm HE vs tanks long ago, but only recently accepted it as important enough to prefer 155 over 105.

      Delete
  3. Interesting how much importance gets given to the anti "obsolete" tanks.
    For future conflicts, I do come around on it: with increasing active protection systems (at least, I expect so), dumb sheer power, has attraction in being harder to defend. Anti-artillery is great, but there's a volume issue there too.

    For armies like Belgium, perhaps we should increase the 155's and in parallel look into things like self-propelled 120mm mortars and rocket artillery.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. MBTs have become obsolete because good ones have become unaffordable. The purchase costs are very high, and the operating costs are so high that they discourage ongoing thorough training.

      Different design philosophies and mass-produced RCWS for all-vehicles-drone defences are needed.

      Delete