My video today (it should be available for everyone in an hour or so) talks about what this blog and my YT especially are all about from the inception. Sure, visuals, explosions, drones, tanks, aircraft and red and blue arrows on maps (which are as far removed from real military maps as possible, with some exceptions you all know) that the nature of war and REAL combat has been completely drowned in this tactical minutiae by all kinds of fanboys who never served a day in uniform as a grunt, forget about officer rank with real military experience. At some point all this pseudo-military noise gets to you and I used today's lull in "political news" to deliver some doze of war reality as seen from those who plan and execute those plans in REAL war.
So, the primer to those who never heard about Markov Chains or Bayes and Bayesian Networks. This is not difficult on a conceptual level.
Here is a key and also the entrance into Operational ART. Why it is called such.
Bayesian statistics provides a probabilistic framework for reasoning under uncertainty. It is valuable in scenarios with limited data or prior knowledge. At its core is Bayes’ Theorem:
Here:
P(θ∣D) is the posterior probability: The updated probability of the parameter θ after observing the data D
P(D∣θ): is the likelihood: The probability of observing the data D given the parameter θ
P(θ) is the prior probability: The initial belief about the parameter θ before considering the data
P(D) is the marginal likelihood: The overall probability of the observed data D for all possible values of θ
Do you see what is highlighted yellow and underlined? Well I will repeat again what real military professionals are dealing with--RESOLUTION of UNCERTAINTIES. And here comes the main issue--why West loses its wars. Speaking plainly--it has fucked up beliefs both in enemy's capabilities and gross overestimation of own ones. This clusterfuck hasn't been fixed, it is impossible to fix. Not with present crop of NATO planning officer corps which is largely incompetent, arrogant and lacking military culture required for the war of the XXI century. It has been proven empirically time after time since 2022. It is institutional catastrophe. So, here is my little introduction to COGNET and how you POPULATE networks and how handling beliefs (yes, Bayesian Networks are belief networks) and uncertainties separates a true operational artist from some three-star ass-kisser. This is your frame of mind you need to understand what is in my today's video about how operational planning is done.
A little bit of military porn. And it goes well with Douglas Macgregor's recent revelations (they are revelations for those who watched too much of US military propaganda in 1990s and 2000s and missed the revolution). Here is one of the points I try to explain for the last many years: Russia has two types of Air Defense. One type is what is called objects Air and Anti-Missile Defense (aka Voiska PVO-PRO) and it is the AD which guards industrial, civilian and military objects--industrial plant, administrative infrastructure, military installations and HQs--and then there is Troops' Air Defense, which is quite different. This AD, unlike Voiska PVO-PRO which belong to Russia's VKS (Air-Space Forces), are known as PVO SV (Air Defense of Ground Troops) is a branch of the Army and their task is to defend Russian Land Forces.
This is not to say that these two Air Defense are not interconnected--they are, but Voiska PVO-PRO are not designed to deploy with the either advancing or retreating troops, PVO SV is and that is why you see not only somewhat different AD technology (PVO SV also has anti-missile capabilities) but all of it is primarily based on tracked vehicles, such as what would pass in the US for SHORAD the venerable and ever updating Tunguska.
But this is where the similarity with the US ground forces ends. No doubt, military purists may contend that, say, US Patriot and THAAD batteries ALSO could be viewed as a form of troops PVO. Well, maybe, the problem (for the US forces), however, is in the fact that what Russia's PVO SV provides in short-to-medium range protection for ground forces is simply mind-boggling. TOR-M2 alone is a formidable system, but when "plugged" into the combat network which apart from Tunguska and TOR involves a medium range BUK-M3, it provides and outstanding coverage for Brigade and division size formations against any targets (do not forget long-range AD and ABM complexes such as S-300V4).
All in all, Russian ground forces are designed to fight with very good protection against any type of enemy's targets, ranging from stealth aircraft, ballistic missiles, to stand-off and precision-guided munitions. But Russia celebrated the Day of PVO SV on the 26th and Russian MoD issued some military porn video:
In it you can see all the above-mentioned systems of PVO SV, but this is not what is important. In apparent Christmas present to PVO SV and, by default, to Russia's ground forces this news has gone unnoticed in the West but it shouldn't have.
Translation:simultaneously we develop a modification of ZRPK Pantsir-SM-SV on tracked vehicle for Ground Troops and Airborne Troops. The complex will have two types of missiles and will have an extended kill range. Both jobs are planned to be completed in 2022. For the immediate front-line AD the new missile system Ptitselov (Bird Catcher) is being developed, with two types of missiles (infra-red and laser-guided).
That is something, because Pantsir (especially with new capability of detection range of up to 70 km and missile range of 40 km) gave a lot of grief both to Israel and the US, being able to intercept a bulk of standoff and precision-guided weapons ranging from TLAMs (rumor has it JASSMs too, wink-wink) to all kinds of Israeli missiles and it goes without saying that appearance of such a system combined with already impressive TOR-M2 and BUK-M3 creates a completely new tactical and operational reality for ground forces. Not only Russian ones, for the ground forces of the enemy. There is nothing in the combined West which can even remotely challenge such air defenses, despite some attempts, such as France's Crotale. But in the end, Russia's capability to see, detect, track and develop distributed firing solution within the networks against any aerial target is simply unmatched. Single Polyana-D4M1 can tie into a single network up to 14 separate AD (systems) nodes and create a "through" channel either to a same level network or to higher ones, up to the very top of VNTZUO. I assume latest Polyanas have even greater capability and even the layout differs from those of earlier 2010s versions, not to speak of versions from 1990s.
So, why did I bring Douglas Macgregor here. Here is why. In his article in TAC, which being discussed widely, he states:
Macgregor is on record with this conclusion, especially highlighted part, but so am I, trying to explain for years now that the issue is very simple--US Armed Forces never fought the enemy which can not only defeat them, but completely shut down the skies for the US main power tool--its Air Force and standoff weaponry. Once this is removed from the equation, annihilation of the opposing force is just the matter of Russia's own standoff arsenal and then mopping up by the ground forces which will retain their combat effectiveness even against most advanced and massive attacks from the air. It is, obviously, impossible to explain to neocons infesting corridors of high power in D.C. and who made their careers both in Pentagon and State Department by writing theses on Peloponnesian Wars and deriving "lessons" from swords, shields and bow and arrows armed cohorts slaughtering each-other more than 2,000 years ago, that those do not apply for machine speed operating combat networks and weapons which can hit not just to tactical and operational depths, but can, actually, reach easily the United States proper. And that is a big, big difference.
What will be done to its AD I don't know. But, obviously, 8 launchers of P-270 Moskit (SS-N-22 Sunburn) will be removed and in their place 8 containers with X-35 will be installed, similar to Marshal Shaposhnikov's upgrade. But Chabanenko was different in many respects from classic 1155 Udaloys since it carried a strike missile complex from the outset and was a dedicated SuWa ship. So, will see where it will lead to. Meanwhile Admiral Vinogradov is also in the full refit and that will be a clone of Shaposhnikov upon completion. And that too is a big, big difference. Especially with Zircon already in serial production.
Make no mistake--I am all for automation, where it is needed. But I am also, and primarily so, for high level of professional training of personnel which provides a set of fundamental skills allowing professional pilots, mariners, surgeons, what have you, to be independent of "technology" in critical situations while deciding when and how to engage it. We just saw another example of a loss of a situational awareness and of extremely low level of fundamental professional skills here:
At least in Norway no people got killed, in case of Indonesian Boeing every one on board died. Somebody at Boeing has to answer for this major FUBAR and higher-ups there at least may try to remind people who write all kinds of software for commercial aircraft that it is not a freaking video-game they are coding--people's safety is at stake. But that opens another can of worms altogether--technophilia taken to the extreme in a firm conviction, primarily among people who do not have required complex skills such as piloting, that machines can do everything for us. They can't, and they shouldn't. In the end, the Miracle on Hudson occurred primarily for the reasons of Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger and his crew's superb professional human skills under the conditions of almost complete failure of technology. In the end, I would be extremely apprehensive while being flown in the aircraft in which pilots are merely operators of the cockpit at the service of main on-board computer, or to be driven in pilot-less cars--another wet dream of office plankton who thinks that human lives can be described in Java or C++.
Most of all, I would be very, and I am, apprehensive of exclusion of a human professional from the decision loop in Combat Informational Control Systems (aka Battle Management) responsible for the use of sensors and weapons because in this case a Skynet scenario becomes not only possible but reasonably probable. In warfare, I am all for networks and AI but only under conditions of a human having his hand at the switch. I really hope that Boeing learns its (tragic) lesson because I like Boeing's aircraft but the idea that those could become simply uncontrollable pieces of metal with no ability to get them under control is, frankly, terrifying.
