Ukraine's Infantry Is Adapting to A War Of More Menacing Drones

The key to winning and survival is adaptation based on intelligence and planning.

The result has been lower Ukrainian casualty levels despite increased success in advances against Russian held territory. JL

Tamar Jacoby reports in Washington Monthly:

The main activity is planning - a new kind of detailed forethought required by drone warfare. A trio of screens dominates a corner -16 flickering feeds from friendly UAVs in the area. This isn’t a drone command center—the feeds have become essential to planning- intel that guides the dangerous slog to and from the trenches, supply runs, and battlefield ops. Robots haven’t replaced soldiers. “Drones or no drones, infantryman is still the hardest job in the army.” Two recent innovations - heavy multicopter bomber drones and those piloted by fiber optic cables - demand the biggest adjustments on the ground. The steepest new challenge is distance - the vast, growing gray zone between the rear and the line of contact. Recruits are guaranteed 14 weeks of training or more. Every significant battlefield operation is followed by an after-action review to identify mistakes and improve planning. “We used to be afraid of Russian artillery. Now we don’t even think about it.” 

The Real Trap of Pokrovsk Is Russia's Inability To Extricate Itself and Advance

Remember Pokrovsk? The Russian military sure does. Because it has been unable to turn its bloody, eventual capture of that smoking heap of rubble into operationally significant advances.

The Russians remain mired in draining combat around Pokrovsk, as Ukrainian units force them to continue to commit substantial resources, including elite airborne troops. This means that the ultimate trap of Pokrovsk, which breathless western observers once opined would be the end of Ukraine has now become a tar-baby from which the Russian military cannot disengage, meaning that it cannot mass enough forces to generate breakthroughs elsewhere as Ukraine hits other weakened Russian sectors. JL

Owen Warner reports:

The real “trap” of Pokrovsk was never a dramatic physical encirclement. It was that Russia would spend an extraordinary amount of combat power taking the city, only to discover that the battlefield beyond it remained just as difficult.  Russian forces seized Pokrovsk but failed to turn the capture into operationally significant advances. Despite the capture of the city, Russian troops achieved modest gains around the perimeter. On August 7, there were 192 combats across the front, with the Pokrovsk sector having the most. On 12 August, 237 clashes were reported on the front, many again in Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka. Months after the city fell, Russian troops were still fighting through the surrounding sector. Collapse had not followed. Ukrainian forces continued contesting attacks, disrupting infrastructure, and forcing Moscow to commit substantial combat power. Pokrovsk had fallen. The battle for what came after Pokrovsk had not.

AI's next Big Leap Is Into Real World Robotics

The goal is not superintelligence or other cult-like musings, but training for practical applications that can actually produce and operate in real world settings in order to improve performance. 

Considered low-brow by some, many investors see this as the gateway to operating efficiencies and, ultimately, the real pay-off for AI. JL

Christopher Mims reports in the Wall Street Journal:

AI models are being trained on videogames and simulations, rather than literature, code and images. They have reached a point where they can navigate in three-dimensional space and even manipulate objects autonomously with just a set of instructions. World-model startups want to create a control system that’s as versatile when piloting robots as today’s LLMs are when crafting text, from sonnets to software. The bet is a model can pilot a robot in the real world as if it were a character in a videogame. One caveat: It has to send a live video feed to a user, and can be controlled with a videogame controller, or mouse and keyboard. This is typical criteria for mainstream robots, but it excludes most two-legged humanoid robots.

China Wouldn't Sell Ukraine A Strike Drone - So Kyiv Stole the Blueprints

Whatever it takes. JL

Wes O'Donnell reports in Medium:

On July 16, Ukrainian drones traveled 800 kilometers inside Russia and reached Engels-2 air base, one of the country’s most important strategic bomber facilities. Satellite imagery showed a Tu-95MS strategic bomber with its tail section completely torn away. n the summer of 2023, China tightened its export controls on civilian drones. The Ukrainians accepted an offer for pilot training instead and used their time on the factory floor to quietly document everything they could see. “In parallel with the training, we photographed everything that was there,”. They flew home with eight actual drones and a phone full of pictures of the Chinese production line. China wouldn’t sell them the recipe, so the Ukrainians spent their training time photographing every shelf and cabinet in the kitchen. Once home, Ukraine took the eight aircraft apart and started building its own version. It's now building and firing 6,000 a year

Ukraine's Plan To Shut Down Moscow's Airports With AI Drone Swarms

It hasn't happened yet, but appears feasible. It is presumably being refined and held in reserve for the most opportune impact. JL

Simon Shuster reports in The Atlantic:

Ukrainian officials want to launch waves of AI-enabled drones at Moscow’s airports, hoping to stop international carriers from flying in and out of the Russian capital. Ukraine would warn civilian airlines to avoid Russian airports and evacuate their planes before the swarm of Ukrainian drones arrived. “If they say to themselves, You know what, it’s getting too risky. Why even continue flying there?” the source said. “That would already have quite an impact on the Russian elites. Those are their main connections to the outside world." world.” Airports across the country were forced to close 114 times from June 28 to July 28, usually due to the threat of Ukrainian drones. Moscow was affected by the highest number of shutdowns—17 in total at its four main airports. The Russian association of travel agents reported more than 290 of these incidents nationwide in the first quarter of this year.

As Russian Losses Rise, Ukraine Is Increasing Putin's "Strategic Pain"

The Ukrainians are sensing that Putin is feeling increased strategic pain, both economically and militarily. They are determined to enhance that level of discomfort as much as they can not so much that Putin will do anything new as his survival is now tied to continuing the war but so that the intended target of the pain is the oligarch class and the mass of Russians who will go along until they sense vulnerability in the Kremlin. JL

Mick Ryan reports in the Lowy Institute:

The Russians suffered 43,000 casualties in July, the highest since January. This is a major increase on the average of 30,000 Russian casualties per month over the last year. The southern offensive appears to have had a dual focus of liberating territory and causing as much destruction to Russian ground forces as possible. The Ukrainians need to increase the strategic pain felt by Putin, and they might do this by mounting more offensive campaigns to take back significant amounts of Ukrainian territory over the next year. This might form part of a one-two punch (in combination with mid and long-range strikes) against Putin.

Russian Collapse at Dnipropetrovsk Due To Lack of Reinforcements

Relentless Ukrainian pressure has driven Russian forces from Dnipropetrovsk as the Kremlin was unable to provide reinforcements to its troops there. 

The Ukrainian strategy appears to be to undermine the Russian concentration on Donbas by attacking other sectors where Russian defenses are weaker, thereby threatening the entire front so that the Kremlin must rush troops from place to place to address each crisis. JL

RFU News reports:

Russian forces have retreated from the last section of the Dnipropetrovsk region that they had managed to take under their control. The fact that even typically pro-war Russian sources are admitting this is particularly revealing. Rather than blaming overwhelming Ukrainian superiority alone, several Russian analysts angrily point to failures within Russia’s own command structure, which failed to provide the reserves that could have stabilized the sector, leaving the Russian group of forces East without enough manpower to hold its positions. The withdrawal comes after weeks of relentless Ukrainian pressure.