With Vivaldi, Ukraine Has Undermined Assumptions About Offensive War In Drone Age

Innovation has spurred Ukraine's momentum, undermining assumptions about the impracticality of offensive warfare in the drone age.  

This is one of the reasons why Operation Vivaldi may be yet another turning point, as Russian forces struggle to catch up and offset the growing Ukrainian gains. JL

David Kirichenko reports in The Atlantic Council:

The effectiveness of the tactical and technological innovations employed during Operation Vivaldi have undermined assumptions regarding the impracticality of large-scale offensive operations amid the rise of drone warfare. If the lessons learned on the Lyman front can be scaled and implemented across the Ukrainian army, this could provide Ukraine with a model for restoring maneuver across drone-dominated battlefields. Vivaldi also sends a powerful message to Moscow and to Kyiv’s partners that the highly innovative Ukrainian military remains capable of defeating Russia on the battlefield.

Why Russia Purposely Leaves Its Dead On the Battlefield

If the family every Russian soldier killed in Ukraine were to get their promised death benefit, the total would amount to $68 billion - and that's just to date. So, it is, to put it politely, unlikely that the Kremlin has any intention of paying poor peasants in the hinterlands or the urban poor in big cities that kind of money. 

B Kean reports in Medium:

In 2023, Putin signed a decree stating that families of fallen soldiers would receive $68,000. Today, roughly 1 million Russian soldiers have been killed in Putin’s war against Ukraine. If Russia were to pay the families of each fallen soldier, the total would be $68 billion. There is no way in hell the Russian government plans to pay for each fallen soldier. Throughout Russia, loved ones of the fallen are finding they cannot get confirmation that their family members were killed. Officers tell their soldiers not to collect the dead. In some units, quotas limit how many fallen soldiers can be sent back to families. Regional governors are warned that if too many families request payments, the governors will pay. 

First Ukraine-Made Ballistic Missile Fired At Russia. More To Come

Russia is about to get a taste of its own deeply unpleasant medicine. JL

Andrew Kramer reports in the New York Times:

On Thursday, Ukraine fired a domestically made ballistic missile in combat for the first time. It is a breakthrough in Kyiv’s push to field a powerful (missile). The FP-7, produced by the Ukrainian company Fire Point, has a short-range of 155 miles. But Fire Point is developing a larger ballistic missile that would be able to reach Moscow and strategic defense industry targets. That missile has a greater potential to change the dynamics of the war, and is expected to be ready later this year. Ballistic missiles are hard to intercept, fly quickly to targets and can carry a heavier payload than most of drones. The missile could help tip the economics of the missile and drone war more in Ukraine’s favor. 

Kharkiv Oblast Tank Assault Followed By Infantry Is First Step In Fall Counteroffensive

A few days ago, when news of Ukraine's tank attack in northern Kharkiv oblast was first released, the primary reaction was basically, "OMG, the Ukrainians attacked somewhere with tanks - and the tanks actually survived?!"

That understandable surprise was driven by the past three years of increasingly lethal drone warfare, which had largely rendered tank attacks to the history books along with images of the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War in 1854. But contemporary Ukraine's new combined arms maneuver warfare which pairs up-armored tanks with recon, kamikaze and bomber drones has created a new reality. And the even larger surprise may be that this was the first thrust in an autumn counteroffensive which was followed up Ukrainian infantry clearing units dispatching and then securing the now empty - if messy - Russian positions struck in the initial attack. This portends even greater advances further to the southeast as Operation Vivaldi begins its own fourth phase. JL

RFU News reports:

Ukrainian forces unleashed a massive armored assault into Russian lines as a devastating close-quarters opener for the Ukrainian autumn counteroffensive. The Ukrainian armored assault took place on the eastern flank of the Russian pincer effort in the northern Kharkiv region. The assault column was escorted by a series of Ukrainian drones; reconnaissance drones with high-resolution cameras were able to guide the tanks accurately around possible dangers. The tank assault allowed Ukrainian infantry clearing groups to move in and clear several parts of the grey zone

To Justify Current AI Capital Expenditures, $6 Trillion AI Market Needed By 2031

To put this in perspective, about half of that $6 trillion is going to have to come from the purchase of products and services that not only do not yet exist, but haven't even been conceptually imagined yet. 

Not impossible, necessarily, in this can-do, if you have doubts you just don't get it hype machine of an AI world in which we live, but not exactly a slam-dunk, either. And that's just to justify current spending on data centers, 'compute,' etc. It's speculative and it's a big number with massive assumptions, as well as risk. So when you read about investors expressing caution, it's not because they are 'fraidy cats. JL

Josh Marshall reports in Talking Points Memo:

A new Bain Capital study says that to keep up with the current levels of capital expenditures AI will need to become a $6 trillion dollar market by 2031. (To give some perspective, global IT spending will be just under $6.4 trillion this year. Devices, hardware, software, services... everything.) It then posits the beginnings of a $1.5 trillion market — which would be a consumer market of between $200 and $400 billion and then an enterprise market of between $1 and $1.4 trillion. Leaving $4.5 trillion to go. For about half the $6 trillion is what might be termed "stuff we haven't even been able to think up yet." So, almost none of the $6 trillion is current revenue. A quarter is massive growth of existing things. Another quarter and more is highly speculative, but things that we can point to. And half is the 'we have no idea and better start innovating quickly' category. This all has to happen by five years from now. It's a lot. 

Russian Bridgehead North of Kupiansk Is Shrinking Due To Ukrainian Pressure

This is a smaller version of what is happening around Lyman due to Operation Vivaldi. The Kupiansk salient is different in many ways, but the Ukrainian tactics - drone recon guiding infantry to eliminate individual Russian positions, quietly, over time - are adding up to a similar result. JL

Ryder Blackthorn reports in Frontline Signal:

Something is changing north of Kupiansk. Wooded areas are being cleared, individual Russian positions are disappearing, and terrain around the Dvorichna bridgehead have been shifting back toward Ukrainian control. The Russian bridgehead has been shrinking for  for more than a month. Drone teams locate Russian positions. Small assault groups move in underneath that surveillance, clear the position, and establish control. Then they move on to the next. Against a bridgehead held partly through scattered positions and narrow supply routes, those little pieces start adding up. Russian attack intensity in the Kupiansk area was roughly half what it had been in August. Signs of exhaustion are becoming visible among Russian formations. If enough of those little pieces disappear, the bridgehead starts disappearing with them.

Amphibious Drone Is Ukraine's Newest Threat To Russian On Land And Sea

First were the aerial drones which evened the battlefield in the face of Russia's manpower advantage. Then came the sea drones, which helped 

eliminate the storied Black Sea Fleet and forced its remaining ships to flee to ports hundreds of kilometers away. They were followed by ground drones which have taken on an increasingly important role in front line fighting. 

But now, Ukraine is combining elements of all three to make their unmanned systems forces even more lethal. In addition to using aerial drones to drop ground drones behind Russian lines, Kyiv's forces have created an amphibious ground-sea drone that can operate effectively in both environments, making them harder to stop and even more deadly by increasing the number of directions from which they can attack. JL

Brendan Cole reports in Newsweek:

Ukraine  deployed an unmanned vehicle that traveled across land and water and delivered ammunition and supplies to its troops in a technological breakthrough. The robotic amphibious platform was used for the first time, moving provisions across 25 miles of mixed land and water. This solves the logistics problem on parts of the Ukrainian front where rivers, canals and marshes prove to be obstacles to supplying troops. This month, the number of missions of Ukraine's ground-based robotic systems more than tripled since the start of this year. Unmanned ground vehicles are playing a larger role in Ukraine's assault tactics against Russia as they carry out tasks once assigned to infantry.