Army vehicle size limits

.

It's often said that the CVR/T tank family of the British was required to be narrow enough to fit between the rubber trees on Malaysian plantations due to the British experiences in the late 40's conflict there.

(c)Irish Defence Forces

I don't care whether it's an myth or true - it inspired me to think of what we should require regarding vehicle maximum sizes in Europe. I do explicitly exclude heavy logistics and support vehicles as well as tanks here; just thinking of common battlefield used by forces in or close to a battle such as cars and APCs.

The war in Ukraine has shown the importance of being able to hide troops, vehicles and supplies once again. It also had and has a substantial share of combat inside woodland, even including tank actions.

 

Garage doors aren't standardised even in Germany, but they are very commonly sized to fit at most a medium-sized SUV.

Doors aren't fully standardised either, but there's a certain common size that could inform requirements regarding UGVs and all kinds of manually-moved containers on wheels belonging to headquarters, field kitchens and the like.

One thing is for sure: We should NOT permit battlefield vehicles to be needlessly too tall for concealment. Vehicles so tall that to disguise them as a building is the only promising approach should not exist. 

"Boxer" - some geniuses want to add a turret on top

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

.

How many generals do we need? Or: The case against generals

.

This blog post will be close to maximum disrespectful towards general ranks. The two reasons for my disrespect are the reasoning I will lay out and military history.

Today's armies (and air forces) have great many officers at general rank on active duty. A ratio of personnel strength to quantity of generals close to 1,000:1 is not unusual nowadays (edit: German military as a whole in 2019: 935:1 for troops to generals+admirals, assuming no vacancies among generals and admirals). The U.S. armed forces had a ratio of about 8,000:1 between overall personnel and generals plus admirals by late WW2, for comparison.

 

So, how many generals do you need?

I'll begin with the field army. One might think a brigade is commanded by a brigade general, but in many armies it's commanded by a colonel. So for a high scenario you need one general per brigade (none per independent regiment), but none for a low scenario.

The commonly most-respected ratio of brigades to divisions is three brigades in a division. The division commander has a general rank, but his executive officer and second in command doesn't need to have one. Moreover, we could use four brigades per division, but I won't choose that for the high scenario. So the high scenario is at five general ranks per division, low one is at one.

Next, the corps level. A corps usually also follows the rule of three, a corps with only two division makes really only sense if the mobilised strength of an army is either two or five divisions. We can safely assume that the second in command of a corps is at general rank like the commander himself. Let's add one reserve general. So we're at 17 generals for an army corps in the high scenario and six for the low scenario.

The entire German field army as of now and into 2030 is not going to need more than 17 generals and could very well make do with six.

 

So why are there so many more generals? They're not needed for the field army. Instead, they're in management jobs, comparable to management board members in a public company.

And here's the thing; we could hire civilian managers for most of those jobs. (Junior) officers of the reserve often advance in business leadership positions, so there's enough of a reserves pool and they can be called up even at high age (not just 45 years of age as is the limit for ordinary conscripts in some countries).

Imagine a mobilised army strength of two army corps. The 2nd (reserve) corps would need 6...17 general rank officers, but it would be inactive in peacetime. These general rank officers could be in exactly the kind of management positions where a civilian manager (even if he/she/it is a captain in the reserves) would be insufficient: Leading the military schools, doctrine development, future force planning.

Many Western countries are in NATO, and the "O" stands for organisation, but by now it should be a "B" for "bureaucracy". Great many career officers have jobs in said bureaucracy and in NATO HQs of often questionable usefulness beyond logistics management purposes. You cannot have a lean army with few general ranks and still play the games at this bureaucracy, for you would have to send generals to fit general rank positions in this bureaucracy. My advice is to largely stop wasting money on the NATO bureaucracy. The degree of influence on the largely pointless work there is small even for a country such as Germany. Command structures above Corps are the only really interesting HQ structures anyway. A country such as Spain would suffer practically no real negative effects if it ceased to participate in the NATO bureaucracy and command structure, for example.

 

So in the end, a bloated, top-heavy army of today could be crashed from around 200 general ranks to less than 40 (at two corps mobilised strength) without loss of deterrence or defence strength. You just need a couple years for the conversion and you need to make sure they never meet in the same room.

 

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de 

P.S.: I could make a case that a European air force only needs two general ranks because so much operational decisionmaking happens at below general rank level. And don't get me started on admirals!

 

edit: The Bundeswehr had 211 generals (not just army generals) and admirals in 2019. I cannot find any more recent figure, it doesn't seem to have been disclosed any more. So we had about 100 generals in an army that could be described as having a corps-sized field army and hardly any ability to mobilise reserve combat formations.

And don't get me started about the quality of the generals. We promoted the wrong people and turned the right people into wrong people. The problems already begin at lieutenant level - many of those are simply not suitable to become officers. Some of them aren't even suitable to be volunteer soldiers.

.

Drone cloud support to battlefield drones

.

Here's one thing that drones can do that manned aviation did not do in either world war nor in the Vietnam War:

A huge quantity of cheap yet EM-hardened drones with about 30 km flying range can saturate any counter-drone defence and thus protect much fewer actual scout and attack drones in the air.

S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de
.

Artillery fires types

.

The literature (including field manuals) usually discerns three kinds of artillery fires for lethal munitions*:

Destructive fires, neutralising fires, suppressive fires

The required munitions are the greatest for destructive fires, somewhat less** for neutralising fires (though the fire mission for this has to last quite long) and smallest for suppressive fires.

The usual literature approach is to pretend the target is infantry that has dug in or has some other cover.

Suppressive fires shall scare enough to make them combat ineffective during the suppressive fires, while neutralising fires are meant to shell-shock them into combat ineffectiveness that lasts long enough to complete an assault on the position after the artillery fires ceased.

This thinking about infantry targets with cover fits WWI thinking, but it's not very realistic even in modern trench war IMO.

The use of artillery differs greatly between high force density and low force density battle. High force density battles (such as WW2 Eastern Front) put a premium on the shelling of marshalling areas in which troops prepare for an assault. To shell such areas was reported to have caused more harm than the artillery actions during the by comparison very brief assault. Furthermore, it was reported from WW2 experience that most failed infantry attacks failed before they got into small arms range; so most successful positional defences were entirely carried by artillery and mortars (air power played a negligible role).

 

So for low force density conflicts, I'd say

• destructive fires on point targets of justifying value 
• ad hoc firing missions on moving or briefly halting forces, trying to achieve whatever best effect can be achieved in the brief time available to hit them
• obscuration for force protection
• (IR) illumination to enhance friendly forces' vision at night and possibly to damage the enemy's night vision tech

 Whereas for high force density, I'd additionally say

• destructive fires of heavy munitions (100+ kg or FAE rather than 155 mm shells) on known enemy point positions
• destructive fires on area targets if the enemy is expected to largely lack cover and hardening
• neutralising fires on known but somewhat dispersed positions (such as a platoon spread out on 1+ km of trenches or scattered 3-men positions)
• suppressive fires on suspected enemy positions while friendly are in field or view or about to enter it

I suppose this is roughly similar to the actual opinions in the Western artillery communities.

You can see that low force density battle such as fighting Taleban in Afghanistan emphasises accuracy and small dispersion - essentially precision guided munitions.

A high density conventional warfare on the other hand has good use for very destructive munitions (up to very heavy bombs) and a large quantity of dumb lethal munitions such as 155 mm HE shells.

155 mm DPICM shells are vastly more lethal on paper, but not so when fired into forests with a high tree canopy. This happens to be the most typical kind of marshalling ground for massing forces for and before an assault, though. The second most-typical one is for all I know villages - and DPICM isn't known for great lethality through roofs, while 155 mm HE has quite a reputation for ruining homes.

S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: Other artillery purposes include propaganda (leaflet) munition delivery, illumination, obscuration (smoke) and some shots to measure the weather (multiple rocket launcher batteries used to shoot one rocket, sense its wind drift by radar until the rocket's self-destruction in the air, then compensate the aim for the real salvo). Lethal (high explosive) munitions can also be used for demolition, mostly demolition of buildings including bridges and intentional cratering of routes.

**:Whether the used amount was enough will only be known once line of sight combat troops are in contact. 
 .

Mysteries of the Russo-Ukrainian War

.

Where are the machineguns? I saw a few photos of heavy (and ancient) machineguns in field fortifications, but other than that - crickets. Machineguns shooting down quadcopters? Haven't seen that.

Are mortars proving themselves or not? I have read a bit about Russian mortar teams, but those may have been the weird Russian long-barrelled mortar-guns rather than normal mortars. I've also seen footage of mortar bombs being delivered by motorcycle, that's all. I suspect the short range makes resupply too troublesome by now, but what did mortars do in 2022-2024? 

What about artillery radars? I understand they wouldn't last this long far enough forward to be of use now, but what about 2022/23? NATO expected WW3 to include lots of artillery duels based on artillery locating radars. Sure, modern navigation did lead to individual gun placement rather than battery placement, but I saw some photos of Russian batteries, so they did exist. Were they hit with help of radars or not? What about the battlefield surveillance radars?

What altitude do Russian cruise missiles cruise at? I saw video that seemed to suggest rather 60...100 m than 30 m (Russians don't use ft. Terrain-following radars of the 70's were capable of ~60 m autopiloted flight, ~30 m is reasonable for less than 45 minutes with manual flight with good visibility). 

Did the Iskander cruise missiles turn out to exceed the INF treaty limit of 500 km or not?

Did the Iskander quasiballistic missiles turn out to exceed the INF treaty limit of 500 km or not?

Why are the Russians unable to procure heavy payload multicopters in quantity when they're supposed to be backed by China? 

Did Nozh ERA work well or not?

I have seen almost no footage of MBT vs. MBT actions. Were they common in the first weeks? 

What's better to destroy the Crimea Bridge; Mephisto warhead of Taurus into the foundations or continuous rod warheads against the suspension part's cable bundles?

Why are TM-62 anti-tank mines used so widely for demolition work? It should be easily possible to provide demolition charges for demolition jobs, even civilian companies have those for demolition work.

Are anti-tank mines still important or is the stopping power now vested in battlefield interdiction based on drones?

Does Russia use satellites for GPS jamming or not? (Satellites could not be countered by phased directional antennas.)

Was the WW2 data about infantrymen getting near-useless after a certain quantity (IIRC 130) of combat days confirmed?

Did any Russian tanks with Arena or Drozd hard kill defences show up in combat?

Did the trade show-grade BMP-3s with lots of heavy ERA show up in combat? 

Are tethered drones in use?

Why aren't the Russians able to regularly find & hit Ukrainian air defence radars or combat aircraft on the ground?

Related to the previous question: How useful is Russian satellite reconnaissance for battlefield uses?

How quickly can Russian artillery and mortars react to calls (I understand this is going to be a huge range of response times, so a distribution would be interesting)? 

Why can't the Russian navy reliably kill off simple motorboats? Even WW2 radars were already able to detect a periscope!

Why can't the Russians stop Ukrainian very low level air attacks despite having missiles such as R-37M and 9M96E2?

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

.

CAS over Ukraine

.
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.

.

My critique of Israel

.
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

.

Ethnic cleansing complicity by accepting refugees?

.

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.

.

The finiteness of self-defence

.

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
.

Guilty or not?

.

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

.