Thread by @thewizard765

@ArmchairW Good thread, and you keep touching on a topic of importance but not quite focusing on it. Modern PGM fights are reconnaissance based engagements first, communications second, actual explosives third. No wonderwaffe is ever going to change the outcome of this style of fighting.

@ArmchairW This is going to be a long thread but it needs to be posted due to the sheer number of wunderwaffe weapons claims throughout militaries and twitter right now. Precision weapons are NOT game changing weapons. In fact in most cases precision weapons are inferior to dumb munitions.

@ArmchairW What? How can this be? I have seen hundreds of videos of precision weapons wrecking Iraqi tanks, military bunkers, didnt you see the precision strike on that syrian airfield? etc. etc. None of that shows the power of precision weapons. Because when viewed from above we see a

@ArmchairW bunch of buildings, cars, vehicles, and bunkers. nothing inherently sticks out as particularly strike worthy. See when undertaking all of those strikes youve seen on video, there are important steps neglected from your viewing experience. How did they figure out that car had

@ArmchairW ISIS fighters in it? How’d they figure out that building was a Taliban bunker? How’d they know that group of people in the back yard were a terrorist gathering, not a wedding party? For the Syrian airbase strike closer analysis allowed us to determine which bunkers are occupied

@ArmchairW which ones were used purely for parts. Which buildings stored fuel, and which stored mission critical supplies for the airbases operation. Thus this strike shows the power of our Reconnaissance and intelligence gathering capabilities and the strength of our kill chains.

@ArmchairW Huh? whats a kill chain? See to use a precision weapon or even a dumb weapon effectively you must first find the enemy. Once found, you have to pass that information to both the person ordering and directing troop fire missions as well as the unit that will actually fire.

@ArmchairW Then that officer must order the strike and the troops must undertake the strike. If performed seamlessly such fire missions can reliably take out the target; however, the time scale of opportunity depends upon how far away from your strike assets the identified target is.

@ArmchairW The further away the target is, the more shorter the time in which it can be reliably struck, whereas point blank targets can be struck within much longer time periods. So the kill chain consists of several parts 1) finding a possible target. 2)sorting the targets to find the

@ArmchairW militarily important ones (vs civilian ones) 3)communicating said information to command 4) command processing the data, determining what if any strike assets are in range of said target. 5)command assigning an asset(if available) to engage said target. 6) Command relaying the

@ArmchairW order to the specific fire asset 7) the fire support unit engaging the target. 8) munitions deployed on target. In many militaries such chaining of data takes hours, sometimes even days. With delays of this timescale it is impossible to engage transitory targets even if your

@ArmchairW precision munitions are capable of engaging the target. Thus sending precision munitions to a military with a mostly soviet era kill chain as described above which takes hours to actually complete the full circuit is less than meaningless, as dumb area effect munitions would be

@ArmchairW far more effective as instead of sending a missile precisely to a spot valid an hour ago, wiping a whole grid square is much more likely yield some result. This is why no matter what country the west has given precision munitions too, exactly none of them operate as effectively

@ArmchairW as the US military itself. Not because the munition is any different, but rather the kill chains are radically different. The US military with the worlds 1st, 2nd, and 3rd largest airforces has a capability no other country comes close to. By having such large airforce elements

@ArmchairW the US can run 24/7 overwatch of entire countries, with strike assets never more than a few minutes out. Then with all the aerial SIGNIT data collection we can mass our artillery and other ground based long range fire systems to most effectively massacre an enemies that group up.

@ArmchairW Further, almost all USA grunts have radioes and this allows individual fire teams to call on CAS literally at the moment of contact and the supporting fire can be there inside of a single minute in some cases, which is frankly unheard of in most militaries. Thus the kill chain

@ArmchairW can be as short as a grunt on the ground comes under-fire from a building then he radios to an F-15E overhead the building the fire is coming from. The F-15E then at supersonic speeds races to the scene and levels the whole building with a JDAM, long before the occupants of the

@ArmchairW building had time to get out. This is ludicrously advantageous for US war fighters and is why the US places such extreme emphasis on SEAD and DEAD operations BEFORE beginning ground operations. For once the US controls the skies, their long range reconnaissance and continual

@ArmchairW overwatch with your fire support delivered in 5 minutes or its free doctrine can truly dominate the battlefield. But here is the thing: No European country has this capacity. In Afghanistan it was a regular occurrence that even in AOs run by the Europeans that the Americans

@ArmchairW would still know more about the situation on the ground than the European militaries actually engaged in operations there. This was because of the raw number of reconnaissance and intelligence gathering assets that go far beyond any one else in the world. Not even Russia has

@ArmchairW this capacity. China doesnt even have the capacity for such a doctrine. Ukraine absolutely positively does NOT have the capacity to use such a doctrine. They dont have the aerial dominance. They dont have the long range reconnaissance systems. They dont have the seamless kill

@ArmchairW chain that operates in time scales of second or at worst minutes. Thus precision weapons will NOT serve them well. In fact having fewer precision weapons than more dumb munitions is a massive handicap for the Ukrainians, and will lead to them being unable to effectively blunt

@ArmchairW Russian operations with raw fire. What ukraine needs is a metric shitload of dumb munitions, not any fancy western recon and precision weapons as the kill chain simply put isnt reliable enough for such operations. To better understand this look up the term RUK and reconnaissance

@ArmchairW strike complexes such as from: jstor.org/stable/pdf/res… Effectively the soviets devoted a large amount of time and energy to studying the effect of PGMs and how to employ them properly, because they knew NATO had a significant advantage in them (as demonstrated during Vietnam)

@ArmchairW In short, long range reconnaissance strike makes the war a game of hiding from your opponents recon assets while finding them with yours. If you dont have a massively well developed recon arm, you are doomed to be found first and promptly blown to bits.

@ArmchairW ex?-NATO military men are finding out the hard way that the ukranian military does not have the recon capabilities they are used to, does not have the short kill chains they are used to, does not have the fire support capabilities they are used to, and without this very

@ArmchairW complicate behind the scenes capability the vaunted PGMs of the west are largely useless. Frankly, NATO should be embarrassed by this whole clusterfuck, as they spent 8 years training the ukranians and knew better than anyone else in the world their flaws, and they still didnt

@ArmchairW notice the most obvious gapping flaws in the kill chains and thus didnt understand that PGMs and NATO weapons are not the best suited for the AFU.European countries should have a wake up call if they are paying attention, as ukraine is showing how utterly useless PGMs are without

@ArmchairW such aerial dominance that the US and the US alone can bring to the table. If Poland was asked to defend itself, it would find itself unable to bring the bulk of their PGMs to bear in an effective manner unless the US rides to the rescue. Even if all of Europe stood united (and

@ArmchairW spoke the same language) and pooled their capabilities flawlessly, they would still be a far cry from what is necessary to actually enact a proper long range reconnaissance strike doctrine. They need to invest heavily in recon assets at all levels from satellites, to planes, to

@ArmchairW helos, to ground force recon assets (this war has shown the value in squad level cheapo quad copter recon assets). The US military needs to take to heart that numbers of recon and strike assets is absolutely critical. downsizing their airforces in the quest of making every thing

@ArmchairW stealth is a liability as it compromises the overwatch capabilities and reduces the area that can be effectively controlled. Yes non stealth will take more losses but letting a company on the group get slaughtered rather than sacrificing ten airmen is a BAD cost benefit trade,

@ArmchairW and in war we are forced to make such trades. Reducing overall force count in the quest of stealth and lower aerial loss rates will naturally result in higher ground loss rates. We MUST not compromise our reconnaissance capabilities! To anyone actually familiar with how this

@ArmchairW works everything in this thread is bog standard basics, yet everyone clamoring that one weapon, or one PGM will change this war is missing the fundamentals of how such modern wars are fought. Sadly MANY high ranking officers are missing this basic understanding.

@ArmchairW Sorry again for the verbose reply, but people need to understand PGMs are one small part of a massively complex delicate kill chain, which if disrupted at any stage, prevents the effective deployment of the PGM. And Russia has capabilities to disrupt kill-chains at many stages.