What Many People ...

 ... still don't get about Russian Air Force. 

This is SU-34. Yes, it is a FIGHTER-bomber. And what many people still don't get is that it is a fighter in its own right. What does it mean? Yes, its g-limits are g=7, as opposed to classic fighters which is g=9+. However, look at the standard air-to-air package--it includes this: 

Missilery writes only about R-77-1 version. R-77M, however, has a range of 200 km. and it outranges anything (well, anything being the only thing of AIM-120 AMRAAM) the US has at its disposal. So, how many of those (also capable of launching hypersonic Kinzhals) does Russia have? If you go to wiki, which is "supplied" with data from 404 and those who curate it--it says 163 as of 2024. Well, something (or someone) tells me that it is long ago above 200. But what do I know--404 (that is US) AD shoots those Russians down everyday. I mean it, go watch Top Gun: Maverick--it is a documentary. 

Eli Did A Wonderful Job...

 ... on the day The Stalingrad Battle ended on February 2, 1943. By then, Soviet people knew that they will win the war. 

More than 2 million casualties, more than  a million KIAs, a complete destruction of Wehrmacht's 6th and elements of 4th Armies, annihilation of Italian, Hungarian and Romanian armies. Compare this with victory over 50,000 Germans at Alamein. Just numbers and scales.

Please, Get Them Back To The 6th Grade.

To repeat middle school course on basic math, fractions, percentages and shit like that. Come to think about it--basic calculations course from the first grade may be even a better proposition. 

WASHINGTON, Jan 20 (Reuters) - Senior U.S. officials are advising Ukraine to hold off on launching a major offensive against Russian forces until the latest supply of U.S. weaponry is in place and training has been provided, a senior Biden administration official said on Friday. The official, speaking to a small group of reporters on condition of anonymity, said the United States was holding fast to its decision not to provide Abrams tanks to Ukraine at this time, amid a controversy with Germany over tanks. U.S. talks with Ukraine about any counter-offensive have been in the context of ensuring the Ukrainians devote enough time first to training on the latest weaponry provided by the United States, the official said.

A pop-corn time))  Of course, the "official" is anonymous--a feature, not a bug. It is fascinating, really, to see how long a brigade worth of Strykers and Bradleys will last during such an "offensive". Ahh, the zugzwang time--no matter what they do, it all ends up with embarrassment, a euphemism for clusterfuck. They cannot even lie convincingly anymore. Peskov nonchalantly stated yesterday:

If the US and its allies supply Ukraine with heavy tanks, the consequences for Kiev will only be negative, while it will not seriously impact Russia’s military operation in the country, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed on Friday.   

And this was about tanks, mind you. The fate of the light armor, such as Bradleys, Strykers or what have you is unenviable on the modern battlefield. I stress it--BATTLEFIELD--like in the theater-wide clash of the regular standing armies, not calling CAS on the AK-47 and RPG armed goat-herders while on platoon-size patrols in the mountains. There is a difference, believe me. 

But this news is indicative, together with calls from the American side on Kiev regime to withdraw from Artemovsk, because "it impedes the preparation to Spring offensive" (in Russian). The Washington is delusional and desperate because everything they can do there is optics and nothing more. There are documented facts now of very young kids and old men being thrown by regime into the meat-grinder. Zelensky, who is controlled by sore losers from London, who wouldn't be able to field a full combat-ready brigade of anything and continue to wreck their aircraft carriers due to low level of general command and navigational competence, is a dead man walking, because he will be offed by either British or US side, because he knows too much. Both in terms of money laundering and sheer incompetence of NATO military "advisers".  My only question, of course, remains unanswered--where ARE the numbers for anything in the de facto corpses of both 404 and its main sugar daddy-- combined West? That is why they need to go back to school and learn basic calculations. 

In related news. California's attempts to reinvent Physics based on degrees in public relations, political science and Queer studies, and other pseudo academic and magical thinking "degrees", evidently failed. 

As California goes, so goes the nation, or so they say. If that rings true, the nation is set for a reversal of some of its strictest renewable energy plans, after the Huntington Beach City Council voted to dump its plan for 100% renewable energy. Huntington Beach, California, is changing the plan it had in place with the Orange County Power Authority (OCPA)—a nonprofit offering clean energy. But its recent history in a rather unfavorable media limelight has given the city council pause.And Huntington Beach wasn’t the first municipality to pull out—Orange County bailed on the green power authority, citing transparency concerns and a series of ugly audits, and allegations that the authority failed to inform the public that their electricity bills were increasing. Orange County was set to begin receiving green power from the authority by the end of this year. The cost of having the county pull out is estimated to be around $65 million.

Damn you Carnot, Boltzmann and others for inventing Thermodynamics. It is a totalitarian science and it hurts feelings, well... and budgets too.  

GIGO.

Ah, now, some interesting facts about Italy's pandemic begin to emerge. As Russians say--it doesn't matter how many, it matters who (pun is unintended) counts. As Ria reports (in Russian) there is a teeny-weeny "issue" with the high mortality rate (emphasis on "rate") in Italy because, as it is worded, of the "method of testing" (in Russian). Namely, the issue I am writing about non-stop and appeal to everyone to wait for the larger data set. Well, guess what: as deputy director of WHO stated today, Italy changed the method of testing, due to, get this, shortage of test kits and counts only "confirmed" cases against deaths and here is the direct quote of this WHO deputy director: if the mortality rate would have been calculated against the number of actually infected, which, and I quote, would raise the number of infected many times--the mortality rate would have been much lower. Pardon my French, no shit! 

As was predicted (well, by me) we are dealing with a classic GIGO--Garbage In, Garbage Out. It absolutely doesn't mean that serious measures against Covid-19 shouldn't be taken, they should. But as it is always the case in operational assessments in military, one thing you always need is a reliable verifiable data. One cannot base decision on unconfirmed and un-weighted, that is processed for their probability of being accurate, reports based on opinions of limited number of observers (sensors), military people invented Sensor-Data Fusion for that and have well-agreed upon mathematical apparatus which accounts for probabilistic assessment. I can report that my forces destroyed 50% of enemy's forces based on observations of the front line, but they will tell me nothing (unless I am aware by means of ISR) about the state of reserves which are moving and, once reserves are counted, by percentages describing super-pooper "victory" will drop dramatically from 50% to much lower number.  Even in the old times of steam when navigating oceans, when using Sextant to get a position line form individual celestial body, navigators would take usually five-six measurements within equal short intervals of time to average (that is partially resolve uncertainty) the measurement before applying it. Similar algorithms today are realized in optronic means of navigation and targeting--non-stop measuring, with constant averaging. Of course, today it is done by modern processors. 

This all doesn't mean that Italy is not in danger, but it does raise the issue which I raised few days ago: we are yet to learn (hopefully) how WHO arrived to a decision to declare a pandemic globally. There ARE questions about this decision and the panic which ensued. Russia, meanwhile, is operating the air bridge to Italy, the tenth military cargo landed just very recently near Rome, and efforts to contain and prevent will continue in earnest.  But after all is done and over with, we must ask ourselves a question even maroons in NYT are beginning to ask themselves--didn't we all go a "bit" too far? Meanwhile in good ol' USA Congress, as is expected, cannot do anything of value, being embroiled in.... normal political process. 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate's drive to pass a $1-trillion-plus coronavirus response bill remained stymied late on Sunday, as Democrats held out for more money to help state and local governments and hospitals, while Republicans urged quick action to give financial markets a sign of encouragement. Earlier on Sunday, the Senate failed to get the necessary 60 votes in the 100-member chamber to get the Republican plan over a procedural hurdle after days of negotiations, with 47 senators voting in favor and 47 opposed. Later on Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, announced he would hold a repeat vote early on Monday, only to be blocked by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer.

Isn't it wonderful? I guess that is how it is supposed to work. Right? It is finally raining today around Seattle, after two very dry weeks. One of the main ways Covid-19, or any other virus, spreads, apart from direct contact, is a an air-droplet way. Rain is a welcome relief from early Spring allergies and raising humidity to levels which help blocking all kind of airborne shit. I am in the mood for the melody.

150th Motor Rifle Division And Much Much More Military Power Related-III

So, the question is: do Osipov-Lanchester Equations work in real life? Not quite. This, inevitably, creates another question: why bother then with studying these equations? The answer is simple--to understand highly non-linear dynamics of a war and to get both tactical and operational (and, in the end, strategic) sense of opposing forces' ratios which become an absolute must when planning and fighting a battle. These equations give us an entrance into the world of both quantitative and qualitative considerations for opposing forces, which is later described by Salvo Model, which can sometimes get fairly complicated, not too bad, though.  

So, let's conduct some mental experiment--let's model a simplest battle from the point of view of non-military and non-mathematical average Joe, or Ivan, or Hans or what have you. Say we have two opposing forces A and B. Both forces are an exact match in terms of their weapons and skills, except for their numbers. Let's assume that force A has 1000 riflemen while force B has 750. These forces begin to shoot at each other and the intuitive, and very civilian, conclusion would be that by the time these forces A and B stop shooting at each-other, force A will have 1000-750=250 riflemen left after completely annihilating force B. After all, force A is simply larger (more numerous) than force B. Well, this is very wrong. This is not how it will happen. A way more realistic calculation will be done with the system of differential equations which you already saw in the previous post and we will simplify them even more by getting rid off those fancy Alpha and Betta which are merely numerical coefficients we will talk about later: 
                              

As you can see, we simplified these equations to merely reflect the changes in the numbers of both sides over time. Term dt merely stands for change in time: say our imaginary hostile forces started to shoot at 13:00 and stopped at 14:00, so dt=14:00-13:00=1 hour. dA and dB merely mean change (in our case this will be decrease in numbers) in respective forces. Thus, dA/dt and dB/dt are merely changes in respective forces over time or rates of losses. Now comes this tricky (not really, but still) moment--how are we going to calculate what's left of more numerical force A after it annihilates force B, and here our civilian non-mathematical intuition does not fail us--under all other conditions being equal (memorize this statement really well!!!), force A will eliminate force B, because it has numerical superiority. Here is how--all this is basic math: let us bring both equations in system to a single "floor": 
                      

As you may have already noticed, we are solving these equations in general, without plugging in our numbers yet. We also understand our initial conditions (and constrains) that once B is annihilated A stops sustaining casualties. So, let us simplify these equations even more, for people who are scared of math, by rewriting what these fancy dA and dB really are. They are nothing more than the difference between the numbers of respective forces before (start) and after (end) the battle, in our particular problem. In reality, we are the ones who choose the time period in which to see what those differences are. Thus:       

 

By now some of you may have guessed already that our dB will be 750 (or -750, depending on how you view your equations), which means only one thing--everyone in force B will be either killed or taken out of action. As you can see, I am being very deliberate and tedious in explaining these transformations and this is for only one reason--we have to integrate both sides of both equations. This is how simplest differential equations with separable variables are solved. Some of you probably will recall now what anti-derivative is. So, let me make things somewhat easier here. We already know from the bottom equation in the system that in the end B force will reduce (or, rather, will be reduced by A) itself from 750 riflemen to 0. But laws of mathematics do not allow us to simply write this number in the left side of this equation, it still has to look like this. I deliberately eliminated any mention of limits of integration to make it look simpler:                         

     

I know, I know, believe me I am trying desperately to make this as simple as possible for those who are intimidated a bit by all this math mambo-jumbo. But since we are dealing here with integrals and some abstract variables we have to remember that integration is a finding of anti-derivative and anti-derivative for a simple variable X (or A, or B or whatever letter you want to use) is always:                                       

         

So, the solution to our system of equations will look like this and we will call it Equation - I : 
                       

But, since we are back into simple math in Equation-I you may easily see that after all simplifications our equation becomes this, Equation-II:   
                        

This equation is in the foundation of what became known as Quadratic Law and we are about to demonstrate it. So, let's start plugging in our available data into this equation. We know that our B start=750, we also know that our B end=0, our A start is 1000 and A end is unknown and we will call it X. Look now at what our equation has become--yes, simplest quadratic equation:     
                      

   

From here you can easily establish that the value of X, that is the number of remaining riflemen in the force A after they annihilate whole force B will be a square root of 1,000,000-562,500=437,500 which is approximately 661 riflemen. That is 2.5 times more than linear approach would suggest. I hope those lively colors in equations helped all of you to keep focus on what matters here. So, the implications of this simple quadratic law are immense. In fact,  all those Alphas and Bettas which are, in this particular case, coefficients of combat efficiency enter the fray. You may get a somewhat expanded form of these equations which introduce combat efficiency here and here (pay attention to page 8):

Consider this simple problem: we know that combat efficiency of the machine gunner equals combat efficiency of 36 riflemen. How many machine gunners will we need to completely substitute 1000 riflemen. No, it is not 1000 divided by 36, it is 1000 divided by the square root of 36 which is 6. 1000/6 gives us about 167 machine gunners. That means that combat strength of a fighting force is calculated by multiplication of combat efficiency of a single unit (rifleman, squad, platoon etc.) by the square of numerical strength. In layman's lingo it means one very important thing: the more numbers you have (let alone when you have numbers more effective than that of your enemy), the more disproportionate will be the distribution of losses in your favor. Indeed, recalculate this same problem but now 2,000 against 750. You will lose roughly 146 of your riflemen, that is 1854 of your troops will survive the battle. These simple calculations lead us to a very fundamental conclusion which is one of the main principles of war:

         PRINCIPLE OF CONCENTRATION OF FORCE 

This principle also has a very famous application in everyday life in famous formula from physics: P=F/A. Pressure equals applied force divided by area. The larger is a force and the smaller is an area--the larger is a pressure. This is what went into the foundation of the Blitzkrieg and its famous schwerpunkt (focal point) principle, where a massive force, locally more numerous than that of the enemy, was concentrated on a small segment of the front thus applying and immense pressure on the enemy defense, eventually breaking the front and going on the exploitation which was a death knell to a broken enemy. For anyone who ever even remotely dealt with the issues of military technology, combat training or combat, let alone studied military history not from propaganda outlets, the arguments which Shlykov used in his article do not sound convincing at all. Basic operations research can give some fairly accurate answers. 

To Be Continued...... 

          

150th Motor Rifle Division And Much Much More Military Power Related-II

So, let us review some of the fundamental ideas which Vitaly Shlykov advocated for Russia's "military reform" which, in the end, resulted in a disaster that required urgent intervention of....drum roll...none other than President Vladimir Putin, that is a man, whose appointment of Anatoly Serdyukov to the Defense Minister position precipitated that disaster in the first place. But first, we need to point out positions where Vitaly Shlykov was correct. 

1. He, certainly, was correct about the necessity to reform Soviet Armed Forces, which were massive and, effectively, existed in overkill mode insofar as the numbers go. Yet, while correctly pointing out in his What Killed Soviet Union. The General Staff And Economy the fact of Soviet military and intelligence failure to correctly estimate (by inflating) NATO's military potential, Shlykov went overkill the other way--he "informed" Gorbachov that Soviet General Staff overestimated NATO's mobilization potential 50 to 100 times. 

2.  Well....that's about it. 

Yes, those were the times of Perestroika (correctly dubbed Catastroika by Alexander Zinovyev) and ascendance of highly idealistic, if not altogether naive and uncritical to the point of folly, views of the combined West and Vitaly Shlykov's ideas on war and military reflected it fully. In fact, they influenced them in the most harmful way possible. Here I need to make a confession. It was then, late 1980s when I also, together with very many of my peers, exercised the idea of possible re-formatting of the geopolitical order after the collapse of the communist ideology into some sort of a cooperative environment in which reformed USSR would take its proper place and fears and hostilities of the Cold War would be the thing of the past.  But that was me, at that time senior lieutenant of Soviet Armed Forces, who still thought that surely the Colonel of GRU must know more than me about the war. Boy, was I wrong. By 1992, two years after I left the service for health reasons and scarred by the events related to Nagorny Karabakh, there was nothing left of the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact and former Soviet Armed Forces were in the process of disintegration. It was also the time of mindless economic, military and political so called reforms (in reality, annihilation of anything perceived as Soviet) which would bring upon peoples of Russia a suffering and humiliation not seen since the first days of the Great Patriotic War. This would become the time when history would be taken away from Russian people. 

One of the major, if not the most important, premises, on which demolition of what used to be Soviet military was based was the idea that the victory over Wehrmacht in WW II was won by the enormous purely military losses and despite, not thanks, to Soviet highest military-political leadership. A popular "trupami zabrosali" (overwhelmed the enemy by throwing corpses at it) meme became extremely popular among "liberal" post-Soviet "intelligentsia" and all kinds of "fighters with bloody Soviet past". All kinds of revisionist crap, akin to incompetent propaganda BS by turncoat Victor Rezun (aka Suvorov) filled the void of military science. Indeed, the logic went, if USSR collapsed, together with ideology which supposedly held it together, then everything associated with it must be wrong. And it was then that the revision started. Vitaly Shlykov led the charge with his 1988 Mezhdunarodnaya Zhizn (International Life) famous article The Armor Is Strong (Bronya Krepka). 

"Посеянные в те годы семена «науки побеждать» числом, а не умением нашли благодатную почву в консерватизме советской военной мысли застойного Периода, наследие которого еще предстоит преодолеть. Броня крепка, стереотипы прочны, отходят от них иные с трудом".(c)

The seeds of the "science of winning" by numbers, not by the skill,  sown in those years (he means WWII period) found a fertile soil in conservatism of the Soviet military thought of the zastoi (stagnation), whose heritage we are yet to overcome. The Armor is strong, stereotypes are rigid and some people abandon them with difficulty. 

Shlykov went further in the same article and stated: 

Stalin and his immediate military surrounding always tried to hide from complex and incomprehensible for them variety of qualitative characteristics of the military might of states with different social structures behind the thick wall of numerical superiority over the enemy. (c)

I know, the hindsight is a 20/20 vision, especially considering the time when Shlykov's pieces were written, but it is impossible to ignore such absolutely sweeping generalizations from a man who inserted himself into the discussion on one of Russia's most important, existential, issues and who started to built his conclusions based on cliches which had very little to do with the realities of the Great Patriotic War. There is no denying that Red Army was sustaining abhorring losses at the start of the war. Wehrmacht losses inflicted by the Red Army at the end of the war were no less massive. Yes, the issue of large tank units is valid, the same as, to a certain degree, the issue of Red Army's prewar purges. But today, when most of the archives are opened, it becomes absolutely inconceivable to accuse Stalin, let alone Stavka in "hiding" from "qualitative" characteristics of military might when, in reality, if not for Stalin and his "military surrounding" the victory of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War would have been inconceivable. 

Admitting almost miraculous survival and recovery of what essentially can be termed Stalin's (and Beria's, Vannikov's and many others) economy doesn't make one a Stalinist. In the end, it was this economy which provided not only quantity but the quality of weapons which ensured the final outcome. In the end, Soviet tanks as a force turned out to be simply better than German ones and so were, in the end, Lavochkin or Yakovlev fighters which were at least on par with what Luftwaffe could field and they were produced in quantities which ensured, from the skies of Kursk Battle and massive air campaign over Kuban, Soviet dominance in the air. Not without Allied help with US providing P-39 Cobras which were flown by none other than Pokryshkin and Rechkalov brothers--all, together with Ivan Kozhedub who flew Lavochkin aircraft, top Allied aces by far.  But the question here is why the issue of numbers even came up at all? By what means Vitaly Shlykov was going to fight the greatest and most advanced military force in history, fresh from its....drum roll....lightning victories over French and British Armies and subjugation of Europe? Here we are going to make a small detour to elaborate on some basic operational facts and they will involve a little bit of mathematics (rather, simplest calculus). Welcome to the world of Osipov-Lanchester differential equations.   

dA/dt = -βB

dB/dt = -αA

Well, as it is usually the case, the original 1915 essays by Russian mathematician M.P. Osipov "Estimation Of Victims Of War" went unnoticed in the West, but Lanchester's work in the same field did get noticed. Today Western world knows those equations as Lanchester Model or Laws, while truly educated people call it Osipov-Lanchester equations. Before I get accused of abstract approach to a war or playing "percentage" war ( I had exchange on this issue with incomparable Colonel Lang) I want to make a disclaimer--I am no military nerd who views the world through the prism of dry numbers. Far from it, I am keenly aware of a chaotic and too often very human nature of war in which command ability, heroism, sacrifice and skill are as, if not more, important as technological and operational dimensions of a war. 

To Be Continued...........

P.S. Do not run for cover yet. I will explain how this simple math works.