【Article/ Observer Network Columnist Xi Asia】
This week, the conflict in Ukraine entered a "normal" rhythm, and under the orders of President Putin, the Russian military did not take a resolute surprise attack on the Azov steel plant, but adopted a strategy of long-term siege waiting for its own collapse. At the same time, the Russian army's campaign in the direction of Ikumu continued at an unhurried and step-by-step pace, although Ukraine received a small amount of military assistance from NATO, but these assistance could not help Ukraine to turn defeat into victory, it can be said that the prospect of the Ukrainian armed forces will be divided and encircled by the Russian army and eventually eliminated by the Russian army remains unchanged.
In this context, our observations of the war in Ukraine can also lead to more summative conclusions. Among them, what I want to say today is a timeless conclusion that seems to be difficult to change, "air defense and air defense, ten defenses and nine air", the Russian army, as one of the most complete armies in the world's army air defense system, still seems to have failed to solve the problem in Ukraine, and it can even be said that it is a bit anxious. This week's military review will talk about this issue.
In addition, this week's military parade in North Korea and the selection of new guns in the US military are actually very interesting, but the conductor has done two video sessions to discuss related topics, and the copy content has also been published in the Observer Network News Community, if you are interested, you can read or watch the relevant content.
First of all, we still have to talk about the recent russian army fighting in the direction of Ikumu. Judging from the information available on the Internet about the Russian offensive, the Russian army is making steady progress and may complete the blockade of the main objective of the previous campaign that we speculated about: Slavyansk within a few days. After that, it may enter the attack on the important cities of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, thus completing the division of the fortified areas in eastern Ukraine and eventually annihilating the Ukrainian Northern Donetsk Heavy Army Group.
The goal of the Russian operation may be to hit Slavyansk and encircle the heavy army group that annihilated the northern part of the Ukrainian defense line
It should be said that this direction of attack can be basically inferred by looking at the Map of the Ukrainian Road Network.
Ukraine has established fortified zones in this region for many years, and its army's will to resist is quite tenacious, but due to the shortcomings in its overall strength, there is no hope of turning defeat into victory in the face of the Russian army's mode of action of taking the battalion step by step, hardening the village, and fighting a stupid battle.
The Ukrainian army lacks the ability to carry out large-scale field battles with the Russian army and win, so it can only choose to use towns and residents to hold on, but this strategy can only delay time, forcing the Russian army to adopt the "road roller" tactic, before each attack, a large number of drones are invested in aerial reconnaissance, while preparing to cover all the found Ukrainian defense points with heavy artillery fire, and then cautiously put tanks and mechanized infantry to strip the Ukrainian defense system layer by layer.
This style of play is safe, but it will inevitably take a considerable amount of time.
For the Russian army, the main battle equipment that was easily lost in the first phase of the war was quite painful
After all, in this season's Ukrainian operations, it is basically swimming in the mud pit, after the Russian army missed the last window of time before the thaw in the first few days of the war, it is impossible to make a right hook punch in the field like the US military did in Iraq in 1991, and it is impossible to advance linearly along a few high-level paved roads.
Judging from the current progress of the Russian army, they should not be in a hurry to finish the battle and declare victory before the victory day on May 9, although the military should be subordinated to politics, but for political purposes, regardless of military reality, risking and rushing forward, from a historical point of view, it is often a sign of failure, there have been many military operations that claim to "go home before Christmas" have failed, and the Russian army naturally will not set a deadline for itself to "go home before victory day" to find obscurity.
As for whether the Russian army annihilated a large number of Ukrainian troops in Donbass and whether it will become an opportunity to end the war, it is not clear at present, but it is certain that if Ukraine's attitude does not change significantly, the Russian army is likely to continue to attack the remaining parts of the entire Ukrainian "eastern anti-terrorist zone", or turn to the Kharkov defense, which has been softened to a certain extent by heavy artillery fire, or even turn its attention back to the southern front and seize Odessa. Under the premise that the Ukrainian army will not be able to regain its strength for a while and a half, as long as the Russian army is determined to concentrate on capturing any part of Ukraine, they are powerless to stop it in the end.
It can be said that the war actually has no suspense from the beginning, the Russian army can win, the question is only what the course of the war looks like, it can be said that the process of the war itself will affect how to deal with the Ukrainian problem after the war.
In the Ukrainian mud pit in this season, it is impossible to open and close, it can only be a hard village, a dull battle, and a flat push for the battalion step by step, but the advantage of this is that in the case of the lack of field combat capabilities of the Ukrainian army, the Russian army will not face large-scale concentrated losses
For people in addition to Russia and Ukraine, the observation of this war is more to combine their own problems to see what kind of inspiration this war can bring us, which is also some of the things that have recently been discussed online with some relevant professional friends, hoping to provide you with some new perspectives.
This time, we will talk about one of the aspects, that is, some problems exposed by the air defense system of the Russian air and space forces and the army in this Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
The intensity and density of this Ukrainian military conflict has reached a new historical height, and the density, intensity and reaction speed of long-range strike firepower on the modern battlefield are far more than any other period in history, so the density of troops can no longer return to the degree of surprise attack on hundreds of tanks of an armored division on several kilometers in front of World War II, which makes every tank on the battlefield a valuable asset in the hands of commanders and cannot be easily lost, especially for Russia and Ukraine. Although the technical equipment is more or less in the warehouse, it still takes time and money to drag the equipment out for repair and renovation, so in fact, it is still quite valuable, and it can be said that it cannot be replenished in a short period of time.
Therefore, the Russian army's surge beyond the limits of its own logistical support capabilities in the early stages of the war was actually an overdraft of the combat energy of the most elite combat units in its hands. Of course, this is also related to the fact that the Russian army has been reduced to a sufficient number of positions, has not made its own main assault organization, and the "battalion battle group" has sufficient accompanying logistical support forces.
However, about this, we have to talk about the "treasure book" that almost all researchers had at the time of our military reform, "The Manual of Equipment and Preparation Targets of the US Brigade Combat Team"... Although later we found out that in fact, many of the three brigade-level combat teams of the US military itself failed to reach the level described in this book, our military's military reform really referred to their ideal organization and conscientiously implemented it... Therefore, for the weakness of the Russian army's rear-loading support capability, in fact, everyone is quite surprised. After all, even if you have seen the Russian army pulling the crotch during the exercise, everyone always feels that it is not the Russian army, in fact, those old Soviet logistics equipment are in the library, but they have not been used, and the result is now that it is not the case.
So to some extent, the performance of the Russian army has become a good grasp of the full set of equipment that we will sell our complete armored and mechanized troops to the outside world in the future, including those special logistics support equipment that the military and politicians in many countries think are "unnecessary".
Of course, this is only secondary, in fact, the preciousness of equipment brings a problem is in the face of air strikes, ground equipment is very fragile, in this Russian-Ukrainian conflict, both sides have a large number of UAV, although both sides do not have such a large long-haul such as "Pterodactyl", "Rainbow" such a large high-altitude detection and attack integrated UAV (the number of Russian "Oran" UAV is very limited), in terms of firepower output capabilities are still weak, and the Turkish TB-2 UAV due to the lack of defense against out-of-zone strike weapons, To use missiles and bombs to attack targets, it is necessary to fly very close to the target, so it is easy to be shot down by various anti-aircraft weapons.
At the beginning of the war, Ukraine often used TB-2s to carry out near-suicide attacks on Russian troops, and although they could achieve some results, they did not have many drones on hand, and they were soon forced to change tactics
But as the conflict progressed, both sides found that using this small drone to observe at a distance of about 5 kilometers from the enemy was a difficult way for both Russian and Ukrainian air defense systems to cope.
At this distance, the photovoltaic equipment on the UAV can effectively search and identify the enemy's troop deployment and movement, while the enemy can only get the UAV if it uses a "relatively large short-range air defense system" such as the Doyle-M1. At the same time, small UAVs at this distance are also difficult to be detected by the older generation of air defense radar, and the same is true for infrared and optoelectronic systems.
Even if the use of Doyle missiles for interception, there are problems, although the price of the Doyle missile itself is relatively low, but after all, a launch vehicle has 8 rounds of spare ammunition, and because of the design of the vertical launch system of the Doyle launcher, it is not easy to load and replenish, so it is likely that the rapid exhaustion of the ammunition in the face of multiple UAVs, resulting in the loss of combat capability of the system in a short period of time.
In fact, this problem is only a problem in the environment of Russia and Ukraine, but if it is a future confrontation battlefield between major powers, it is likely that tens of thousands of drones will appear on a battlefield.
Because the modern battlefield UAV is really a "panacea" to solve many problems, it can be said that every soldier hopes to get his own UAV, whether it is from the sky to see the battlefield, communication relay, or can launch some weapons, UAVs are the ideal solution to solve tactical problems.
Of course, when chatting with relevant professional friends, they also mentioned that the current information-based operations have actually encountered a problem, that is, with the explosive growth of the number of UAVs and information systems on the frontier battlefield, the amount of computing has become a bottleneck, and the current battlefield system, whether it is China or the United States, is still only a luxury to achieve the ideal goal of letting frontline commanders have an almost "God's perspective". This is also one of the reasons why the "reverse training of informationization" routine developed by NATO in this conflict also makes us very interested.
At present, both sides have invested a large number of small drones on the battlefield, making the battlefield air defense situation increasingly complicated
Returning to the problem of air defense systems, the main consideration of the Russian air defense system was tactical aircraft and helicopters against low-altitude penetration during the Cold War, so the density of the air defense system and the specific system configuration of its design are aimed at a small number of enemy aircraft carrying a large number of attack weapons in the defense zone, but if the enemy uses a large number of defense zone strike weapons, or faces a large number of unmanned aerial vehicle threats, then there will be such similar adaptation difficulties mentioned above.
In fact, when the mainland recently exported the FK-3 air defense missile system to Serbia, we can also find that in fact, Serbia is more interested in a set of air defense command and control systems that can be compatible with the Russian-made old air defense missiles provided with the missiles, but this system itself is still mainly to consider the traditional air threats such as enemy fighters and helicopters, so whether it is the target tracking and monitoring capabilities or the ability to calculate and process air intelligence, There is still a long way to go before dealing with tens of thousands of drones and smart ammunition targets.
So although the Russian military has invested all its modern air defense systems in service in Ukraine, including the S-400 system, it still has a situation that is difficult to deal with even if it is a few dozen or even a few drones. Therefore, friends in related fields sighed that when learning the theory of air defense systems, everyone felt that "air defense air defense, ten defenses and nine air", it was difficult to improve the effectiveness of the new generation of air defense systems against the air threats of that era to a certain extent, and the rise of unmanned aerial vehicles made the situation "return to the pre-liberation overnight".
In fact, this is not the first time that Armenia, which has received Russian military assistance, has not played a particularly good role in the conflict with Azerbaijan, and the number of Soviet field air defense systems they have purchased have not played a particularly good role.
It can be seen that the future air defense operation will indeed be a difficult problem, the existing air defense system, in many aspects has not adapted to the needs of the new era, such as the number of simultaneous response to the number of targets, the number of air information receiving and receiving terminals in the system are explosively increased, as for the means of killing, the existing anti-aircraft artillery and missiles are also insufficient, so it is necessary to carry out a comprehensive redesign, it is possible to deal with the rapid development of the future air threat.
Of course, both the mainland and the United States are developing laser air defense systems, including the Silent Sentinel laser air defense system we exported to the Saudi Emirates, which has also been tested in actual combat.
Laser air defense systems have great potential for the future, but are currently constrained by energy, range and continuous operation capabilities
But one of the big problems facing such directed-energy air defense systems is still the energy problem.
Due to energy limitations, it is currently difficult for laser air defense systems to be further reduced to a smaller extent than a container, and even then its continuous combat capability is still limited, and the combat distance of contemporary laser air defense systems is not ideal, in order to further improve the combat distance, it is necessary to further increase the power, which in turn increases the difficulty of energy system design. Before we also mentioned that the design of the laser air defense system of the US military encountered the bottleneck of energy system design, in fact, this problem is not only the US military, before the understanding of the "Silent Sentinel" system friends chat, they also said that in fact, the problems encountered by the Americans, we also encountered, which is indeed the most important bottleneck restricting the further development of the laser air defense system.
Of course, there are some other programs at present, such as Gaode Infrared before the air show showed a set of anti-aircraft missile systems that completely use infrared photoelectric systems to work, and its missile range performance is also good, but the price of such missiles themselves, used to deal with unmanned aerial vehicles is actually not cost-effective, and the Russian "Doyle" system is also a problem in this type of system. And infrared photoelectric systems, including the further expansion of the optoelectronic system working frequency band currently under study, such as ultraviolet systems, although it should be said that the detection capabilities are good, the price has been reduced, but the problem is that the cheap system detection distance is short, and the high-value system cannot be scattered everywhere on the battlefield.
The other problem with the optoelectronic system itself is that its detection range is relatively small, and it cannot map the battlefield air situation like radar, which in turn requires the support of the battlefield air situation, which leads to the calculation burden of the air condition system not only not lightening, but heavier.
What exactly is the solution? In fact, some user requirements on the battlefield in the Middle East, although they sound very "simple", are not necessarily without value.
For example, the use of drones against drones.
Before chatting with friends in the field of related military trade, they talked about a recent idea, that is, to develop a "unmanned fighter" specifically for air defense, using a small turbojet engine, installing cheap infrared and ultraviolet photoelectric sensors on the aircraft, if the detection distance only needs to be about 2 kilometers, then the price can actually be compressed to a very low level, plus the airframe of this type of unmanned aerial vehicle itself is the level of model aircraft, and the cost will be very low.
After launching, a bee swarm can be formed, or in fact, there is no need for a swarm, just hover in the predetermined area of the battlefield, wait for the rabbit, and find the enemy drone and impact.
At the same time, it is necessary to carry specially developed cheap anti-drone ammunition on existing large drones - of course, due to the existing UAV working mode, it is unrealistic to remotely control the ground for air combat, and they need to be equipped with autonomous air interception capabilities.
Iran may have been an active early participant in drone air warfare, but their technological backwardness is doomed to be short-lived
Of course, the target of such weapons cannot be the enemy's manned high-performance tactical aircraft, but targets with poor mobility and autonomy. And the best thing is that this kind of system itself can work without air information support, although it may bring great difficulties to the identification of friend or foe, but at least, it can solve the contradiction between cost and ability, and the problem of air situation support can be considered later.
In fact, this kind of equipment has appeared on the battlefield in the Middle East, and Iran has already put similar equipment into actual combat. However, due to the limitation of Iran's technical level, their air combat UAV function is quite simple, the seeker is basically a seeker of an R-60 air-to-air missile, and it is also necessary to install a photodetector on the aircraft to search, and it is likely that it is not a UAV independent search, but rely on the ground operator to find the target through the photoelectric system search, and then control the seeker to turn to the direction of the target to try to lock.
This mode of operation has also led to the failure of Iran's UAV to achieve a large number of results in the Middle East battlefield, and so far only one result of shooting down the "Pterodactyl" UAV can be confirmed.
But if we can add "intelligence" and advanced and cheap photovoltaic systems to such a device, it is entirely possible that it will become an important equipment to completely suppress low-end drones such as the enemy's TB-2 on a battlefield like Russia and Ukraine.
Of course, correspondingly, the future of large-scale drones operating on the battlefield is bound to need to deal with this new threat, which is the future cycle of "one foot high, one foot high".
As more and more countries begin to try to build drones according to fighter standards, it is only a matter of time before high-intensity air combat between drones in the future
However, this kind of air-to-air routine makes us feel whether we should also re-understand the US air defense thinking, in fact, the US air defense thinking also has its rationality.
The idea of air defense in the United States is to retain only the minimum field air defense capability, and the Army only retains the "Patriot" air defense missiles and the "Stinger" short-range missiles, and gives the main air superiority tasks to the fighters of the Air Force, especially to the Air Force to strike and suppress the enemy Air Force in an all-round way. At present, such a line of thinking is reasonable for a party that has the advantage of air and long-range strikes.
Of course, with the development of the current situation, the US Air Force is no longer invincible in the world, and it is impossible to achieve the effect of complete control over air supremacy, and the US Army must re-focus on the issue of combat air defense.
Their line of thinking is that the task of attacking enemy high-value air targets is still entrusted to the Air Force, and the Army only considers short-range air defense, and mainly targets unmanned aerial vehicles and smart munitions.
To this end, they developed the IM-SHORAD air defense system, which mainly uses improved "Stinger" missiles, which are equipped with a close-blow fuze to better adapt to the needs of small drone targets, and previously intended to use the Hellfire anti-tank missile as a means of dealing with long-range drones, which can reach a range of up to 8 kilometers and can strike at the long-range drone targets mentioned above. In addition, in order to deal with the enemy's suicide drones and smart ammunition, it is equipped with 30 mm machine guns and intelligent fixed-distance fuzes to improve interception capabilities.
As for the detection system, it uses a small four-sided active phased array radar at any cost, like a miniature "land Aegis" system.
The U.S. military has canceled the HELLFIRE missile of the IM-SHORAD system, and perhaps this position will be an anti-aircraft patrol missile in the future
This thing seems a bit unreliable compared to the various air defense systems in service, but if you only consider the needs of the US military itself, this seems to have its own rationality.
The problem for Russia is that it costs a lot of money to update its air defense system, and it is not possible to succeed by making slight changes to the existing system, and it is difficult to completely update its air defense system. But for our army, this matter is not so difficult.
The question is whether the air defense system should be further decentralized in the future, and the existing army accompanying air defense system is usually an air defense battalion under the brigade, and an air defense company is set up in the composite battalion, equipped with various professional air defense weapons. However, in the future battlefield environment, it seems imperative to let each combat unit have a certain air defense capability, but this air defense capability can certainly not be a simple one-man air defense missile, but it needs to have the ability to deal with the incoming enemy drones and intelligent ammunition, which means that it is necessary to have the ability to collect and distribute air conditions.
This adds more computing and more difficulties to the entire information system, so perhaps in the future, it will become an imperative to bring small air defense drones to every forward combat vehicle, because small drones can mainly rely on automatic search and combat, and it does not need air information support very much.
Perhaps just as in the 1960s, when individual anti-aircraft missiles and individual anti-tank missiles appeared at the same time, the future patrol missiles will also appear anti-aircraft patrol missiles and cha-ta integrated missiles.
However, the design of such an air defense system will undoubtedly bring difficulties in identifying the enemy and us, which is the same reason why the US military does not like the Army's field air defense. According to the Soviet army's operational regulations, the field troops will not appear on the head of their own fighters, because the army's field air defense system will not distinguish between the enemy and the enemy, as long as it appears within its strike range, it will open fire, and in turn, the air force will not be able to provide air cover for the army unit that carries out the field air defense system. The U.S. military, on the contrary, weakened the army's anti-aircraft fire to only "stingers", and the air defense task was completely left to the air force. But if we now have a strong air force and a strong ground air defense, if we add air defense drones that are impossible to identify friend or foe in the future, things will become more complicated, which may be a new topic that needs to be studied urgently.
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