Thread by @TrentTelenko

21st century artillery tech🧵, it gonna be a real ride.

So far OSINT points to the LMM Martlet MANPADS to be the most consistent killer of Russian Orlan-10 drones.

Every Ukrainian M777 towed gun battery needs a team armed with one of these to cover them👇
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https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1528052273196240896

There is a good reason for my statement, which you can see in this video.

Not long after the Ukrainian M777 opened fire, a Russian Orlan-10 showed up and vectored in a loitering munition faster than Russian centralized...
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https://twitter.com/zloneversleep/status/1526844042155278337

...fire direction could clear a MLRS volley.

Ukrainian SIGINT of in the clear Russian voice calls indicates it takes 40 minutes for the Russians to process a call for fire.

This compares with 1 hour for the US Army Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS) plus
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...JAG officer laws of war deconfliction system.

Yes, the centralized Russian artillery is 20 minutes faster than the US Army artillery because the latter is lawyer ridden.

Any serious peer-to-peer combat will see JAG officers removed from US artillery fires chain of command
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Both US/Russ systems are slow compared to about three minutes plus time of flight for Ukraine's Kropyva artillery control system.

Which is a distributed processing control system that populates the GNSS target coordinates across a common digital map space. This reduces
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...signals density of Ukrainian artillery versus Russian radio direction finding.

The importance of the Orlan-10 in the Russian centralized artillery fire control can be seen in this infographic.
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There is a nice dashed line between Russian counter battery radars and drones in that infographic.

Which means any of the eight Russian drones you see depicted below can be moved from a nearby parking orbit onto the coordinates given by the radar.👇
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Exact coordinates are important as drone sensors at altitude can only see a very small patch at high resolution.

This is why battery shoots are more vulnerable than single guns to drone surveillance because a formation of vehicles & guns are easier for low res/wide scans
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...to find.

That Russian drone was flying directly over the the M777 155mm gun for a reason.

It was generating a GPS/GNSS coordinate for that loitering munition drone and a Russian MLRS battery.

See upper right in the infographic.
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There are a few general observations which can be drawn from that video.

First, any artillery battery that shoots together has to be a combined arms unit with early warning, soft & hard kill anti-drone systems. Firing shells is a bigger tell than radio signals in terms of
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...where an artillery battery is.

Second, shoot and shoot is survival. And the time from firing to displacing 400 meters is five minutes versus a modern 21st century distributed processing artillery fire direction system.

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Third, even if you 'shoot and scoot,' drones will come hunting your artillery from your last firing position.

This makes wheeled vehicles superior to tracked because there are more wheeled vehicle tracks in rear areas than tracked AFV's.
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Plus wheeled self-propelled guns can merge into tactical truck convoys such that stand-off radars like JSTARS cannot pick them out like a Pzh2000 or M109A7 tracked SP gun can be.
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Fourth & finally, distributed processing artillery fire direction built around a common geospatial digital map and GPS/GNSS targeting is showing the huge centralized command and control systems built since WW2 to be obsolete.
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Centralized artillery command and control along with its battlefield 'deconfliction negotiations' with seperate centralized command & control fixed and rotary wing airpower simply is not competitive on the 21s century battlefield.

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Ukraine, without lots of fixed & rotary wing airpower, nor multi-million dollar 'gold plated' drones is simply in a much better position to take the risk using distributed processing fire direction for the combat advantage of time.

Existential threats do that.
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The utter combat advantage of time that distributed processing fire direction brings in the 21st century will require the abandonment of 80 years of multiple - & now redundant - centralized command 'stove pipes' for a common multi domain fires system with no centralized
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...review and approval of fires.

This sort of change is revolutionary, not evolutionary.

Only Ukraine's unique lack of resources in terms of competing centralized air/artillery C2 systems in the face of the existential threat of Russia allowed it to make that leap of faith.
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The nature of centralized institutions is they always fight to stay in existence, even if their role is no longer relevant.

I fear that nothing short of defeat in peer-to-peer combat followed by a military roles and missions change as radical as the post-WW2 merging of the
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...US Departments of War & Navy will allow the American military to adopt something as fundamentally revolutionary as the distributed fires processing & non-centralized fires approval that Ukraine's Kropyva artillery control system grants.

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