Still fighting 1913 war in the information epoch

Military summary channel gives daily reports on the war in the Ukraine. His account is one of continual struggles for high ground and observation points, with Russians advancing over low ground at high cost to grab a high point.

Wagner’s movie of the war depicting one small but horrific battle for one small observation point. (hat tip Kunning Druegger) This account is fictionalized but was produced by people who waded through blood, and is consistent in detail with the real life tactics, weapons systems, and terrible costs summarized in the military summary channel. We may conclude that though fictionalized, it accurately depicts war as it is being fought today.

It depicts a battle for a nine story building, which they need so that they can put spotters on top. A whole lot of good men die, and a whole lot of very expensive military equipment gets blown up. Enormous amounts of expensive ammunition are expended.

What the &@%&? My drone can fly nine stories up. For the cost of one of the heavy weapons that gets blown up in the movie, you could give every grunt in the movie a pile of drones and computers like mine.

The Russians are continually fighting for the high ground, for observation. This should not be happening in the information epoch. Every grunt should have his own small drone, and teams should have larger drones. The sky above the battlefield should be thick with drones, and an AI should weave their data into a big google style map using Postgis rather than messages going up and down the chain of command. Getting the top of a nine story building should not matter. Every grunt should be able to look at google style map with live images from his drone and his platoon’s drones showing up the map.

What happens in the movie is that a drone spots a target, the spotter calls the commander, the commander calls the artillery. The first shots go wild, so the spotter calls the commander again, the commander calls the artillery crew again The artillery crew should be able to see their target on a google earth style map, and see their shots land on a live window into that map. Why are we involving chain of command in the information epoch? Targeting information is not well suited for being conveyed in words.

Do it in postgis. In the movie, the Ukrainians lose a building because humans are piss poor at doing what postgis does much better.

The drone video should be passed directly from the drone to the artillery team, as well as to a central postgis database, and the artillery team’s computers, knowing their position and the drones position from their respective integrations into the central postgis database, should overlay artillery coordinates on the image. This is not a job appropriate for chain of command to do. It is not even a job appropriate for the central database to do. The artillery team should have their own local computers that have low level access to all the information needed to do their job. And their own drones that answer directly to their own computers. The man who is physically aiming the gun should look at the screen to see the target on a google earth style map with drone’s eye view, and his computer’s artillery coordinates overlayed on the map, before firing it, then look again after firing to see his shots land on the screen, and then adjust his aim. Humans should not be transmitting this data to each other by talking about it. Words are not a good medium for this kind of data. It needs to be seen, and the gunner needs to see it.

Because of wind and weather, and because artillery is apt to get banged up, the coordinates will not be exactly right, and the team will still have to walk their shots in every time the wind changes, but the commander back in the rear should not be involved. No words should need to be spoken about this kind of information, which should be presented in images organized and marked up by postgis.

In the movie, the wind changes, and the Wagnerites have enough time to get a foothold in the next building before the Ukrainian artillery team realizes. It is stupid that the Wagnerites are fighting for a nine story observation point, and it is stupid that the Ukes are quarreling over who is at fault when their fire goes wild. In the movie the fire goes wild, the Wagnerites wait a bit, see it is not being corrected in a timely manner, then rush their objective. The scriptwriter depicts the delay as Ukrainians quarreling through the chain of command over what is happening, which is presumably a guess, but a highly plausible guess. Discussing in words what is happening when the participants each have an incomplete and imperfect view takes time, and if chain of command is in the middle, takes a great deal more time.

Data should pass from a grunt’s drone to the grunt’s tablet, integrated with local postgris data previously downloaded from the central database, and then, later, from the platoon commander’s tablet to the central database. Chain of command and words just get in the way. And big centralized databases also have a tendency to get in the way. The grunts need direct immediate access to the drone data, while the central database only needs to get eventual and delayed access. The grunt needs live video. The central database does not, and is unlikely to be able to provide it in a timely fashion to those who need it even if it had it. Postgris databases tend to less than fast, and when you try to make them go fast, you hit data consistency and coherence problems. Queries against data subject to a high massively parallel update rate is going cause trouble in a postgris database. It needs to stick to passing out position and scale data on live images and stale google earth style data on the larger geographical context in which those live images are displayed. The live data needs to go direct to the people with their fingers on the trigger, and the postgris database can get around to digesting it later, and the commander can look at it after postgris has digested it. We don’t want the central database in the way, and even less do we want the commander in the way. The commander ordering big gun fire in detail is a waste of his time and even bigger waste of time for the big guns and the men with their fingers on the trigger. He should order fire in general terms and not very often, and the men with their fingers on the trigger should take care of the details.

The delay depicted in the movie, which lost a building and a whole lot of lives, would not have happened if the men actually aiming and firing the big guns could see their shells landing in a live window inside a stale map marked up by the commander when he ordered big gun fire support.

105 Responses to “Still fighting 1913 war in the information epoch”

  1. Epimetheus says:

    The regular Russian forces have had integrated drone networks for artillery fires direction since at least 2014. There’s a glowie called Phillip Karber with a couple good talks on YouTube. He and a Ukrainian general got shelled 4 mins after being buzzed by a Rus drone during an excursion back when the civil war started. And the Ukrainians had a centralized network when the war began. Maybe Wagner is behind the curve?

    • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

      In a certain way the Russian military of 2014 was more advanced than the Russian military of 2023. The replacement of Serdyukov with Shoigu was a big factor.

      • Epimetheus says:

        That’s the furniture guy. I heard he was a disaster for the military, McNamara-level idiocy, but I don’t know enough to argue the point.

        https://youtu.be/_CMby_WPjk4?t=1862

        That’s the link to 2018 talk by the Karber fellow, starting at the section where he talks about Russian military UAVs. He says among other things that Russians have organic UAV control at the company level and they’re going (or already gone) down to platoon, and that their spot-targeting-strike cycle is 10 mins

        • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

          I’ve heard many different things, but the results speak for themselves.

          Serdyukov was bad at making friends, or didn’t make the right friends, so he got the boot for Shoigu, who is much more agreeable to get along with in person.

          • Epimetheus says:

            I’m not sure what the results are. The received wisdom is that the Russians are incompetent, stupid, and incapable – they didn’t steamroll Ukraine the same way the US did Iraq etc, but until we have reliable Ukrainian casualty numbers it’s impossible to say if the Russian military sucks or not. Suppose the rumors are true that the Russians kill 7-10 Ukrainians for every loss of their own & that the AFU has lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers, which would make sense if Russia indeed fires magnitudes more artillery rounds than Ukraine. But who knows — I guess we’ll find out the truth after the war is over.

            Certainly, the Pentagon doesn’t seem eager to get directly involved.

            A more detailed document on the Russian drone-artillery kill chain:

            https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55faab67e4b0914105347194/t/5b17fd67562fa70b3ae0dd24/1528298869210/The+Russian+Reconnaissance+Fire+Complex+Comes+of+Age.pdf

  2. Kunning Drueger says:

    https://twitter.com/RWApodcast/status/1639047223248920577

    We will see IEW espoused when we make it known, or make it happen. Otherwise, we’ll have to wait for incremental iteration by pure necessity and happenstance.

  3. Karl says:

    What 1913 war do you mean?

    World War I was 1914 to 1918. The First Balkan War 1912 -1913 was a war of movement with little trench warfare.

  4. Anonymous Fake says:

    [*deleted for massive overdose of the blue pill on women*]

    • jim says:

      Nothing is sexier than deadly violence or the potential for it. Which is why women bang criminals rather than billionaires.

      • Anonymous Fake says:

        [*deleted for fake consensus*]

        • jim says:

          1950s America was unimaginably red pilled by today’s standards (Lucy of “I love Lucy” got well deserved spankings with great regularity), and even 1980 America was still unspeakably red pilled by today’s standards. The current year is a radical deviation from last year, and the last year a radical deviation from the year before that.

          • ray says:

            I was around in Fifties America.

            The local, working men — not women collectivized into Goddess Columbia’s District — ran the small and midsize towns, and they ran their own families, schools, churches, cop shops, and family-owned businesses.

            I grew up working-class. Every day of our lives was a Hate Crime by modern, Woke-Fem standards.

          • Anonymous Fake says:

            [*deleted*]
            Most of my “blue pill” economic posting is simply based on trying to get the right to get into all of the urban administrative careers that offer power,
            [*deleted*]

            • jim says:

              And all of your posting is deleted because it presupposes the right is allowed into administrative careers that offer power.

              We always have a state religion, and only the faithful are ever allowed into state and quasi statal office. We are always ruled by priests or warriors or a bit of both. A faith is a synthetic tribe, and there is always a ruling synthetic tribe.

              Should you ever attempt argue that the right is allowed into administrative careers that offer power, I will allow it through to debate it, but none of your pretended arguments are arguments but are instead a rather small donkey pulling a very big cartload of presuppositions that are presupposed to be universally accepted consensus. Obviously that consensus is not accepted here, and I doubt your supposed consensus on the blue pill (supposedly we were blue pilled in the time of our greatness) is accepted anywhere – the Christshills keep pushing it, but they get scarcely more traction than the flat earthers. The Joo Joo Joo shills also push it, but they do not try very hard.

              • Anonymous Fake says:

                [*deleted*]
                If you’re saying [*deleted*]
                [*deleted*]

                • jim says:

                  Try responding to what I did say.

                • Anonymous Fake says:

                  All you say is [*not what I have said, and repeated to you far too many times already*]

                • jim says:

                  You just ignore what I say and just repeat yourself. This becomes tedious and repetitious. I encouraged you because you seemed to be allowed some flexibility, but it is evident that you have come to limits of what little flexibility is permitted to you. I have explained why the left has power and the right does not far too many times. You may not agree, but I am just not going to allow you to continue as if no one, not even me, could ever say or think such a thing. Just going to silent deletion if you continue to just ignore what we say and assume no could ever say it.

                  If you continue to just endlessly repeat yourself with slightly different words, you are going on the killfile list with viagra and nigerian princes.

                  Posts that presuppose that your audience does not think what we do think, that no one has ever suggested what we assert to be true, will be silently deleted. After several such posts, killfiled with viagra and nigerian princes.

  5. Red says:

    What’s likely to be more dangerous with the upcoming leftist violence? Nearby white leftists or nearby large populations of blacks?

    • jim says:

      If you are Havel’s greengrocer, black violence. If you are detected posting questions like this, white leftist violence.

      • Kunning Druegger says:

        Maybe. I’d worry more about White Thrall violence for being an internet racist. I know there are some of us that live in urban areas, so I could see them being at risk, but it would be quite the tactical blunder to send Antifa out innawoods.

        • The Cominator says:

          The violence will be directed by the increasingly schizophrenic security state, which means basically white leftist violence.

          Blacks will be allowed and encouraged to riot in leftists areas which means black violence is mostly a threat to white leftists and perhaps some responsible and more likely to be right wing black guys. In Florida there are lots of blacks and I have prettymuch zero fear of them unless they are feral nigger age (15 to early twenties, niggers are overwhelmingly dangerous only when young) and otherwise strike me as threatening…

          • Kunning Druegger says:

            While the leadership & admin is leftist whites, I think we need a new category of White Thrall to describe the vaguely rightist or apolitical technicians, agents, detectives, officers, operators, etc. that just do their job because they live to serve.

            This category is not universal, you see it agglomerated around shared social management infrastructure (like a place where private sector, state gov, and fed gov coordinate), military support infrastructure, and statal sprawl. It’s the white side of DMV, the ones (the very few lol) that actually work.

            • The Cominator says:

              “While the leadership & admin is leftist whites, I think we need a new category of White Thrall to describe the vaguely rightist or apolitical technicians, agents, detectives, officers, operators, etc. that just do their job because they live to serve.”

              Nah they are leftists or true NPCs now, too much positive affirmations of demon worship required for them to be rightists anymore.

              • Kunning Druegger says:

                That’s just not how it works bro. The performative stuff and demon worship is kept in the high status zones. To put it another way, there are still plenty of janitors that don’t have to do the DEI song and dance, don’t have to deal with faggot managers, and get to be quietly divergent from the diversity parade. This is no good thing, nor is it an argument for the holiness spiral slowing, or some kind of Reconquista. I am saying that we’ve gotten to a point where the managerial elite has expanded as far as it can, with the skeleton crew as small as possible, while maintaining the façade that everything is just fine. Pretty soon, they will go after the “janitors” and then they will need someone to “clean up the vomit,” which is to say do the actual work at the power plant or the sewage processing center or facilities management, and there will be no longsuffering whites who are “just happy to help,” so the new shift left will begin anew.

                • The Cominator says:

                  I’m not talking about the janitors I’m talking security state functionaries, all must demonstrate demon worship.

                  Maybe DIA is different but there are no white hats in the FBI etc.

                • Kunning Druegger says:

                  I think i was being to obscure. Pick a random industry, then imagine you are attending the biggest yearly conference for that industry. Pretend that there are 100 people attending. 20 of those people will be representative of 80% of the business in general, revenue or representation or notoriety. Pareto Principle in action. This distribution tendency cuts every which way, and all the strivers and reachers will only concern themselves with getting into the Golden 20%, or getting their ear, or what have you. That 20% is a candle to the DEI moths. With good reason, they feel that if they can convert them, the rest will follow by hook or crook. But in any complex operation, of the “100” things that need to get done, 20 of them *must* be done, and they aren’t always the most glamorous or fun.

                  So yes, janitors are in a unique place at the moment, because the school board gets all the attention and the administrators make all the decisions and the most expensively educated teachers get all the support, the cafeteria hags control food supply access and the janitors have the keys to every lock in the building. “Janitor & Cafeteria Lady” are positions in every job, firm, industry, though they often go by different names like “field engineer” or “assistant section chief” or whatever. These positions are inhabited by people that just want to work and don’t need much in the way of recognition, because if they did they would have quit already or moved into “management.” These are just regular white people (most times, though plenty “based black males” as well) enthralled to a system or company or industry for a multitude of potential reasons. When these people get thrown out or replaced by diversity hires, then we will be well and truly South Africa’d. If the managerial elite manage to halt the spiral and we enter into a long period of slow decline, it will be born on the backs of Thrall Whites. If we get thrust into WW03, they can quietly withdraw support for the Shaniquas and go back to supporting the Thrall Whites, which was what was happening in the 90s and 00s as I recall before the institutional long march went past a certain saturation threshold. If no war or balkanization, we can look at the Thrall Whites as an indicator species [1] for the countdown to South Africa.

                  [1] https://archive.ph/2JyCJ

                • Karl says:

                  Sure, they need someone to do the actual work, but when there is nobody “happy to help”, I expect them to simply force someone to do the work.

                • jim says:

                  No they don’t. They are entirely comfortable letting everything go to hell in handbasket. They want everything to go to hell in a handbasket. They want permanent covid Global Warming lockdown.

                • Kunning Druegger says:

                  I think that’s the heart of this issue: there’s a fundamental disconnect between the Brain, the Voice, the Hands, and the Body. I think we can confidently assume that the Brain is wholly owned by daemon worshiping skinjobs, any exceptions are irrelevant. The Voice is so subservient to the Brain, that they are indistinguishable in presentation, though I would hazard a guess that many of them truly believe the “right side of history” meme and think they are helping. The Hands have no clue what’s going on, they live to act and nothing else, you could lobotomize the whole system and, so long as they kept getting orders and pay, they’d not notice a single thing. Ditto the Body, but obviously big chunks would be excised without the particular Brain in control.

                • Western Taliban says:

                  Jim is right, they just want to kill everyone if they can. But even if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to force people to do the work those middle whites do.

                  You can’t point a gun at an engineer and expect the bridge to be built magically, it will not. You are a lot more likely to find out you’re getting buried under a collapsing bridge while the engineer gets the last laugh the day you try to cross it. Violence doesn’t produce intelligence or competence, at most it produces more stupidity.

  6. […] Still fighting 1913 war in the information epoch […]

  7. longarch says:

    https://www.wired.com/story/drones-russia-ukraine-war/

    I have seen many puff pieces praising Ukraine for using small cheap drones as battlefield recon and the like. I don’t know to what degree those puff pieces are grounded in reality.

    Even if the Ukrainians are using drones for recon, Russia’s official troops and privately contracted troops might have economic or logistical reasons to avoid doing so.

    A highly expert but highly biased source of analysis is online at:

    https://turcopolier.com/

    • jim says:

      This depicts Russians failing to apply the lessons of 1913 in 2023, which is probably true enough, but neglects to notice the disastrous “no retreat” policy of the Ukrainian authorities in response to operational encirclement. And, on the same page, there is an article about drinking the Koolaide in the Iraq war. What was the Koolaide in Iraq? It was selective blindness. And we see in his web pages selective blindness.

      In Iraq, they could see clear American military supremacy, but greatly over estimated American soft power. And now America does not have clear military supremacy, and he is still greatly overestimating American soft power.

      He gloats over China not being totally in bed with Russia, but since Russia is at this point struggling to survive as an independent power, rather than reign as world hegemon, it does not need other powers totally in bed with it, it only needs them to be not totally in bed with Global American Empire. And in this it is having considerable and growing success.

      • TheDividualist says:

        Your last para confuses me. You mean China will let them keep enough independence?

        • jim says:

          China is not a threat to Russia’s independence. (Or anyone’s except Taiwan’s and the traditional Chinese territories) It is extending empire in Africa out o economic necessity – the African chaos prevents anyone from making use of African resources.

          • Mayflower Sperg says:

            Check out the documentary film Empire of Dust. The Chinese are trying to bring civilization to the Congo, and by their own admission, not making much headway. “It’s all so tiresome.” They marvel at the ruins of things built by the Belgians and wonder how King Leopold did it.

            Whips, chains, and Maxim guns would be my guess. Which system ended when a rival faction of white imperialists gave the monkeys Kalashnikovs. Trust me, there will always be a rival faction of enemy lords giving your peasants Kalashnikovs and anti-Jimian propaganda just to fuck your shit up.

            • jim says:

              Nah. The belgians, the Rhodesians, and the South Africans were not defeated by blacks, nor by the communists, but by the west using soft power and economic sanctions. The Congo was lost in Belgium, and Rhodesia and South Africa lost in London.

              • Mayflower Sperg says:

                As their fertility plummeted, white elites lost the will to rule Africa, though all those Soviet-backed insurgencies surely didn’t help. Why fight London when you could just move to London?

                Nor do the Chinese want to rule Africa today. They want to cut deals with the present rulers and have cheap labor to build railroads and work the mines. Which strategy totally fails in Empire of Dust because Africans are lazy fucks who won’t work unless a less-African person stands over them with a whip and makes them work.

  8. C4ssidy says:

    They are supposedly more vulnerable to being shot out the sky than expected, and detected with radar. If they use missiles for the expensive ones, presumably anti aircraft guns for the cheap ones? trading a bit of flak for what must be decent optics and electronics even in a cheap drone. The film had a brief clip of some kind of anti-drone gun. Perhaps the Ukrainians had similar tech around their buildings. . But if you need a vantage point so badly, why not make one which sticks to the side of a building, or quietly crawls up the side? Or if artillery spotting does not take long they should make them shoot straight up like a firework/flare/model rocket and you’d just launch one each time you do an adjustment

    • Reziac says:

      Per what I’ve seen reported from the Russian side of the front: they are indeed using drones to paint and confirm some artillery targets (tho there was more of that early on, when they were still trying to not damage civilian stuff. I’ve seen video of a Rus drone locating a target, immediately followed by a precision impact.) However, they need to be cautious and limit the two-way, because the signal back to a tablet can be triangulated and then all of a sudden YOU are the target. (This happened with cellphones early on, got some Russians killed. Presume it also got Ukes killed.)

      • jim says:

        The signal back to the tablet cannot be triangulated. The signal from the tablet can be triangulated. Thus the correct way to use a drone is to send it on a preprogrammed tour with short range, or better, nfc, signal, and then give it a new preprogrammed course when it returns.

        • The Cominator says:

          Why don’t you have intermediary drones

          Tablet transmits to mobile intermediaries that flyout (from relatively short distances when they get their initial transmissions) to the actual spotter drones?

          • jim says:

            For jam proof systems, you need strict line of sight, such as laser signaling. For strict line of sight, going to need a high intermediary drone, because you will be as low you can get, and your observation drone is going to be low also.

            You probably want your observation drone to be low and fast, so you really need a presentation engine that can stitch together a rapidly changing two dee image stream into static three dee, and then give you a God’s eye view on what it has stitched together. Such a UI does not yet exist.

  9. Aidan says:

    The likely reason this isn’t happening is lack of smarts on the part of grunts. We shouldn’t overestimate what the average IQ- and grunts are lower than that- is capable of. Your average office worker is barely able to use a computer; companies have entire IT support positions because their employees are not smart enough to do more than the very basics of sending an email or entering data in a spreadsheet. Military equipment has to be grunt-proofed. “Point this end toward the enemy” on the side of a bazooka.

    Future warfare as you describe requires high IQ men who are manly enough to not shit their programmer socks under counter battery fire. Where are high IQ manly men like this? I know a few, but that’s because I hang out with anonymous internet racists. In the general populace? Non fucking existent.

    The lack of high IQ warriors means that a small army of them using technology to its highest potential could conquer the whole world. Give us the resources of Wagner and we could do this.

    • Kunning Druegger says:

      This. Going even further, give ME the low IQ grunts and I could work wonders with them. A lot of times they put too-smart people in charge of too-dumb minions, which just breeds resentment and inefficiencies. So long as the hierarchy is ironclad, I am perfectly comfortable working with the “simple apple” types. KD’s Battalion of Ditch Diggers & Bullet Stoppers would win pendants and acclaim to rival even the Tech Knights of St. John or Aidan’s Untouchables.

      • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

        Midwit grunts are still very valuable, even if they cannot operate a drone swarm or drone spotter. We still need them, and they need us. The solution to lower-IQ grunts being led by high-IQ leaders is sergeants and corporals. The guys who are midway between the officers and enlisted men make NCO, then communicate between the two.

        • Aidan says:

          Perfectly drone integrated artillery or not, infantry is still going to be necessary, and infantry doesn’t have to be all that smart. The crayon-eating Marines being the best infantry around; at least they used to be.

          But an asymmetry in smart warriors behind the controls of networked warfare is still going to be the crucial deciding factor in warfare. To get smart men to sign up, of course you have to promise them high status and war brides.

          • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

            All jokes aside, infantrymen in both Army and Marine Corps have a pretty high average ASVAB. They get in trouble because they are high-T, aggressive savages that have been told that they are basically immortal and then constantly kept near the breaking point by their commands.

            • Pax Imperialis says:

              There are some dumb fuckers in there with 90 ASVAB scores. Some of those borderline ASVAB scores also really make you think some shady shit happened. I know MEPS made one of my not-otherwise-waivable physical conditions magically within waivable limits. I’m sure the same happens with ASVAB. When smart people start talking about putting targeting drones with direct line of communications to fire support in their hands, I get uneasy. I’ve met combat experienced grunts who have a hard time with google maps. This is the folly of smart people who don’t understand average and below average.

              Midwit grunts are still very valuable, and I would go as far as say mildly dumb grunts are still valuable. Someone has to pull security while the drone operator is potentially getting tunneled vision. They would be pretty good at forcing the locals at gun point to clear up suspected IEDs, but unfortunately certain people didn’t seem to like my idea. They would be great for civilizing places as well. Give them several million dollars apiece, lots of gun, ownership of their Afghanistan FOB, and complete operational freedom and you’ve got a completely loyal puppet government. Strangely, certain people didn’t like that idea either. Lots of other jobs as well I won’t get into.

              >The guys who are midway between the officers and enlisted men make NCO

              A problem, as I’ve pointed out before, is that many of the Officers are midwits and many of the NCOs very slightly above average. 40% of Officers are under 120, the WW2 bare minimum.

              • jim says:

                > This is the folly of smart people who don’t understand average and below average.

                I do understand average and below average. I talk to women, dogs, and dumb men just fine. And to operate modern expensive weapons systems effectively, need smart men.

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  It’s a very poor anthropologist or researcher that would categorize you as exemplary, Jim. This much is obvious. Apologies for the effusive pseudo flattery, but they don’t really make many of your model, bro.

                • Adam says:

                  Males always take after the highest status male so you really only need the top guy to have it all together.

                • TheDividualist says:

                  You don’t get frustrated and then angry?

                  This happens to me at work all the time. Software users who cannot parse an error message like “in the field ‘price’ enter a number”

                • jim says:

                  It has been a while since I had to man a help desk, but long ago I did, and when I did I rarely got frustrated and angry. Rather I came to appreciate the importance of UI design. Part of being able to talk to dumb people is designing UI for dumb people. And, what do you know. It is relaxing and comfortable for a smart person to use a UI design that also works for dumb people. A good UI is good for everyone.

                  A big problem is that people, quite smart people, will click their way through mysterious error messages without really reading them, and then wonder why things do not work, so your software needs have an architecture that cannot have issues that would require such error messages. The panic signals that software generates on arcane certificate issues are a really obnoxious example.

                  If your software can have user hostile error conditions, people just are not going to read the manual nor pay attention to the error messages.

                  the help desk is apt to be a bandaid over bad software design, and it must be very frustrating to be in that position, but I have never been in that position.

                • Pax Imperialis says:

                  @jim
                  Talking under normal circumstances is one thing, expecting them to perform autonomously under sleep deprivation, hunger, cold/heat, and general stress is another. I might be failing in explaining my reasoning. I might be assuming underlying a priori to yours.

                  As the force structure is now, every grunt having a drone with direct comms to fire support is a recipe for disaster. There are diversity hires in there, on both sides of the comms, even as much as I, and many others, detest it. The same type of people who would crash a train because they can’t pull the breaks. Among the commissioned ranks, the type of people who would muck up implementation of such systems that it would likely be a net negative. As I have previously pointed out, GUI design has gotten increasingly retarded over the last several decades. Diversity hires in software would contribute to fucking up implementation.

                  If you argue that a force without such diversity hires could do well with such tech, no argument from me… but even that is an unbalanced force. Still need specialization and diversification in roles. Someone has to pull security and man the guns/comms/radar/etc. The closest to that (still far away) is in American special operations… which coincidentally just so happens to have the least number of diversity hires, but even that is changing. Capabilities are deteriorating rather than building.

                  I do not understand your apparent surprise that the new paradigm hasn’t been adopted (Russian forces in particular). You’ve written much about the decline of societies without a king, tech or otherwise. Others have pointed out that men ape those in charge. Putin is no king. Russia is no monarchy. Putin is a blind man stumbling around having to rediscover lost social tech. He has no long term vision either. To his credit, he has set the stage for the return of functional monarchy, functional family, and functional church. A major step in the right direction from the ruins of Communist failure. A king will arrive eventually, but eventually is likely after the war.

                  Implementation of information epoch warfare requires radical long term vision being driven by a single man. That can only be done by an absolute authority, a king. Where is DoD’s king? There is none. There will be no implementation. It’s all committees and State Department fuckery. Where is Russia’s king. If not Putin, Shoigu a man who has demonstrated repeated failure in the Chechen wars? General Surovikin, another Chechen war failure of the Motor Rifle Regiment type? Or perhaps Prigozhin, the only man with any vision yet resented by Minoboron and thus not in charge…

                  There is no one in authority, Russia or America or anyone else, for men to ape a vision of information epoch warfare from. It should therefore not be surprising that everyone has decided to just bleed instead.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  The most forewards looking Russian defense minister in recent history was Serdyukov; he wasn’t much of a ‘people person’ though, and so lost power.

                  Much of the credit for the spectacular successes on the battlefield in the 2014 operations can go to him.

                • Pax Imperialis says:

                  Serdyukov was an absolute Chad that forced the entire Russian military bureaucracy to cleave to his vision. But like all Chads, he had massive ball that were readily drained by a hot secretary who was not his wife. Unfortunately, his none to happy father in law had sway over Putin who then had Serdyukov fired. Most of his reforms unraveled soon after and it was business as usual in the Kremlin.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  While it is shame to not repeatedly impregnate and fuck one’s wife, such cavils also show the paucity of lingering pater-familial influence over daughters after they have been handed off to their grooms; they tend to be overly interested in their princesses, to the detriment of the interests of their fellow men.

        • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

          Militaries in more civilized times had the concept of ‘garrison troops’, men who stood the posts, like heavily armed militia or constabulary, freeing up higher end units for higher concentration in other duties.

          • Pax Imperialis says:

            In even more civilized times such men would form colonies and become loyal puppet governments in otherwise hostile lands.

    • jim says:

      > Where are high IQ manly men like this?

      In world war II, no shortage of high IQ manly men. High IQ people tend to adjust more completely to the current environment (unless, as with internet racists, they are resistant to social pressure). The current environment is extremely hostile to manliness. Change that environment, as it was changed in the lead up to World War II, and there will be no shortage of smart manly men.

      • Aidan says:

        It is likely such wars will decide the fate of the world before the environment can be changed

        • jim says:

          In 1933 the American government abruptly set about changing the environment in favor of manly men. And by 1939, an adequate supply of manly men was ready. The lads who hit puberty after 1933 were plenty manly by 1939.

          • Mayflower Sperg says:

            In 1933 people still got the joke, and the halls of power were full of men who knew what manliness was and what it was good for. Now those halls are full of affirmative-action hires who think gay parades win wars.

          • Aidan says:

            What I mean is not that it takes a long time to change the environment, but that changing the environment is coup-complete. The great satan of Cambridge has to fall first. And I think that for the great satan to fall, war as we discuss it will need to be fought, and the GAE will need to lose coercive power.

            • Pax Imperialis says:

              Russia has been stuck in Soviet hangover for how long now? 30+ years… that’s more than a generation. Putin only started restoring family and religion in the last couple years. To get a manly generation will require 20 more years. They are looking at 50+ years to recover.

              America is even worse off than Russia. I’m not so optimistic as jim to think “change that environment” will be anything but a painful, drawn out, bloody process that takes longer than Russia’s experience. That is in no ways comparable to the swift change as seen in WW2 America.

              • jim says:

                > To get a manly generation will require 20 more years

                America reversed course in 1933. Took us only six years. Would have done better if taken more time, but did well enough.

                • Kunning Druegger says:

                  Look at the bigger timescale though. How long had the crypto-Whigs been running their schemes when it was all halted in ’33? Less than 20 years, as the Spinster takeover really kicked off in 1917. No we look at today: the Cathedral has been de-whiting and de-masculinizing since *1973*. I think expecting it to take a single generation (20yrs) is wildly optimistic.

                • Pax Imperialis says:

                  In 1933 a young feminized man would still have a manly father, a manly grandfather. All examples for him to follow when regime changed course.

                  Today we have feminized young men, some with hormone blockers and estrogen, that have feminized fathers, and partly feminized boomer grandfathers. That’s if they are “lucky.” Many young men don’t even have fathers having been completely subsumed by their mother’s ego.

                  The unmanly generation of 1933 had just above 800 ng/dl of T. Today the average is just above 400 ng/dl of T. I think we’re working on a slightly different time scale than just 6 years.

                  T declines have been fairly linear in decline. Can we really expect anything but a linear increase in restoration?

              • Adam says:

                Trump is a good example of how things can turn around. By the end of Obama the Lightbringer’s terms the white male population was defeated, demoralized and in despair. Trump didn’t even have to take office to start turning that around, MAGA started on the campaign trail. Men are real quick to get moving when they have a chance to win.

                • Kunning Druegger says:

                  Fair enough, but by that same measure, look at how trivial it was for them to eject Trump with daylight robbery, and look at how “we” did nothing about it. The change Obama brought was permanent, being built off of decades of preparation, planning, and propaganda. The change Trump brought was temporary, being a ferocious but impulsive response to a one-time exploit, a 0 day in the vote manufacturing apparatus.

                • Pax Imperialis says:

                  Easter European T levels have decline at a faster pace than Western. While in the 1980s they were higher than Western by 100 ng/dl, today they are lower by about 40 ng/dl.

                  Putin is much more manly than Obama, yet he presided over a much stepper decline.

                • Adam says:

                  Sure, but had Trump not failed to hang Hillary and secure his lifetime position as God Emperor, we would hardly remember Black Jesus.

                  Our game is different from the lefts in that we cannot afford to slip up. The left is always going to try and drag us down. It will never stop. Our success is always going to be measured in stretches of victory and successful defense.

    • yup says:

      [*deleted*]

      • jim says:

        This looks like obvious information free low effort shill spam. Your other messages have not yet been deleted.

        Take the shill test.

        Pass the shill test and I will let them through, fail the shill test or fail to take it, and your email address goes to the long and growing list of silently and automatically deleted spammers, along with viagra and Nigerian princes.

  10. Karl says:

    Why is no side in this war using drones in the way Jim explains above?

    Everybody on both sides of the war knows that these drones exist. The advantages of visual targeting information are apparent. So why is it not done?

    Maybe large militaries are slow to aquire new methods, but Wagner isn’t that large. Moreover, civilian drones are so cheap that a squad, perhaps even an individual soldier, can buy them.

    • TheDividualist says:

      Eh the brass is always fighting the last war. In 1914 they thought cavalry charges win. In 1940 the Frogs thought it is gonna be static trenches.

      • Kunning Druegger says:

        It’s not that simple. No one except maybe Jim predicted the effects of devolution of society would have such dramatic effects on warfighting. I think cavalry charges will come back, as they will be effective against masses of foot mobile bandits and mobs who will have guns but no skill, no discipline, no coordination, and poor leadership.

  11. simplyconnected says:

    Off-topic: just a blog recommendation. Some recent interesting posts:
    Potemkin Prosperity — We only think we’re rich.
    Tonic masculinity
    It’s nice to see humanities types on our side (their writing is sometimes very good).

    • Adam says:

      I’ve been pointing this out to people for some time now. What is a Clif bar? It is dog food for people. Soon they will no longer bother with the marketing.

      • Pax Imperialis says:

        Sergeant Instructors would gives those out the night before big humps after half starving us. Had several seconds to stuff faces. Would occasionally find men on firewatch digging through the trash looking for unfinished ones. Pretty sure we were less than dogs at that point. Ahh, the good memories.

  12. bane says:

    https://twitter.com/restoreorderusa/status/1638003414637461508

    offtopic, but there’s talk of trump being indicted on RW twitter – reminds me of the predictions made on this blog after the 2020 election

    i havent been keeping up to date with current events, but is this a legitimate possibility and if so, what are the projected consequences?

  13. Kunning Druegger says:

    Two things: technical and art.

    Art: this is precisely why I stand by my opinion that this is actually a very good movie. Cinema is a weird thing. Most movies live in a ~5 year window (much variance, many exceptions, just go with it): 3 years to write the script, 1 year to make it, 1 year to edit and release it. Apply that calculus to films and it should be clear why movies can’t really be “cutting edge.” Newspapers hit the same wall; by the time it’s in your hands and your reading it, everything has changed, reversed, moved on, and now you’re just reading a poorly crafted and poorly written book full of a bunch of irrelevant opinions. News is just history happening in the moment(Yarvin, c. 2021). So, cinema cannot, by design, be informationally revelatory unless it’s being foisted upon hidebound, captive populations. To make a relevant movie, you must present what is already known in such a way that it illuminates, informs, corrects, mutilates, alters irrevocably the subconsciously held perceptions of the viewer. So, same as newspapers in a weird way.

    Why read the Times? Because John T. Everiman needs to know how to feel about a thing he already “knows.” Sure, Johnny T. already *heard* about Trump saying a thing, but how should he *feel* about it? What are the experts feeling about this thing? Have we consulted with [notTrump character #47] in regards to the said thing? Let’s get this sorted! Profound insight, I know. Derivative observation registered, let us consider why cinema matters. This movie tells us, in the character of Jim, nothing at all that we did not already know. I’ve made it plain that I feel the IEW memeplex is quite possibly the most important contribution to The Dialogue that Jim has made yet. I don’t say that lightly. The work on the WQ, answering, definitively, the JQ, facilitating the answer to the Hitler Question, contributing massively to the Puritan Question, ZK Snarks, cryptocurrency proper, Throne Alter Freehold (this one is my life’s purpose), so many stunningly profound insights for one man, but all of it (well, except the WQ, but no one seems ready for that, for it’s an old and deep magic) is secondary to Information Epoch Warfare.

    What new insights does this movie bring to our (his) analysis on IEW? Nothing whatsoever. What did Jim miss in his exploration? Not a single thing. But now, Jim, and by extension We, have a cinematic prybar, a gravity assist, a fulcrum to move the Discourse, in a neat little package. I have put a fair amount of time into summarizing IEW and I did a good job (for fucking once lmao), and it has been discussed by the canny coalition of competent contributors here at length, but has anyone besides myself tried to port these informations “off site?” People just stare at me like I’m crazy (happens often, they don’t kno bout my dick) or dismiss it because I’m not an Expert. Maybe others could go further, indeed almost certainly could. Or, they could watch this movies and just *get it in one go*. This is the awesome power of cinema. This is why fiction matters. This is why we need to be story tellers first and all things after. I’m not saying this movie will change anything, but now we have a tool for demonstrating what’s wrong with The Method, The Means, the Way It’s Done. Instead of burning words in the desperate hope you break through, just have them watch this movie, then do precisely what Jim did in this post. For some reason, cinema puts us in a place to receive instruction while believing we are thinking for ourselves. That’s some impressive magic, niggers.

    Technical:
    I really liked the way the technology was portrayed. Yes, it is clunky and full of seemingly pointless bottlenecks. But Wagner Social (or whatever they call their propaganda arm) really appears to have thought this movies through. The didn’t make a movie about “wouldn’t it be cool if…” (scifi), or “it should be like…” (editorial), or “this is how we are telling you It Is (political/propagandistic), they made a movie that is a window into how they are dealing with It. That’s a level of honesty very uncommon in modern cinema. Most movies refuse to portray women as women, men as men, or reality realistically. They make excuses, we all make excuses, but the current artistic regime is “we all agree that this horse documentary starring a deer is accurate, RIGHT?” And this movie bucks that trend.

    There’s a very brief moment wherein Wagner HQ makes a call to “some guy” who then runs up to a device on a tripod, very gently adjusts its configuration, then scurries off like he just breached the Holy of Holies to relight a votive candle. I think that was a subtle reference to a very large part of this war: counter/ECM. Notice that they never really return to it (the movie is a study in dichotomies; the Whites do a thing, the Yellows do a thing, and they don’t fall out of lockstep), there’s a throwaway couplet in the Yellow HQ about their drone being “foiled” and that’s it. For me, I was like “PUT THE POISON IN THE TEA!” (IYKTYK) and I couldn’t figure out why the ECM device played a larger narrative roll. I think that’s because that is a chapter of this whole saga that has barely even begun being written. Reviewing documentary evidence, I’ve seen more than a few “anti-drone” weapons and tools, but I almost never see them in use. To my mind, that should be something we see in every single clip. The modern infantry squad should have an ECM guy right there with them, just like the Heavy Weapons guy or the grenadier (St. John, imagine this movie if they had the loadout you pine for… much shorter, infinitely cooler). But this is not the case, or if it is, all sides are working assiduously to suppress it.

    I bet there are more technical things I missed, but the counter/ECM part stuck out to me, and I believe this just further reifies what Jim is saying about the larger situation: we are at 1913 + 110, and there’s no good reason why that’s the case.

    • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

      A great deal of Wagner’s success derives largely from elimination of bureaucracy – which is of course a common element to the success of everything at everything.

      In particular though, is a short line between spotters seeing a target and calling down firesupport on it, with a minimum of procedure or middlemen beyond the relevant information.

      So however hidebound this example looks, other line units are probably worse. On both sides at that.

      In the second war of internationalist aggression, the time on target in the US army between calling in a fire mission and shells arriving was five minutes. In the GAE’s sandbox masturbation sessions, this time had ballooned up to an hour or more. Limitations of voice comms notwithstanding, ability to shrink that time to under a minute is still an impressive achievement, and having the local lord (squad leader) be the one to make the call is a reasonable precis, though arguably he should also be the one operating the spotter drone in the first place.

      • Kunning Druegger says:

        Good point. I forgot to mention (twice) that the whole movie, we never see a politician, and they never phone home to Moscow or Kiev for permission to fight.

  14. Fucking horrible reminder in title… 1913 fucked us,
    they started Federal Reserve and Income Taxes that year.

    Seems there’s a new guy, an outsider, running for US President in 2024, republican.

    https://www.vivek2024.com/

    Something says he’s going to be a fighter maybe
    with enough outside tenacity and impunity to win it.
    He’s been doing a lot of visits on podcasts.
    Wants to shut down a lot of Fed Departments like FBI.
    Apparently is pro cryptocurrency.
    Anti-woke… wrote a book on this.

    Should we get a post and thread going on 2024 elections.

    • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

      Vivek is cool for someone the cathedral allows to speak on their platforms.

      You know, relatively speaking.

    • jim says:

      He promises to end affirmative action by executive authority.

      He defines America believing in actual merit. He secondly promises to restore executive authority.

      Starting by shutting down the core of enemy power: The US department of education, and secondly shut down the fbi.

      Thirdly shut down illegal immigration.

      That order implies a correct perception of the way power works in America.

      But Trump talked a good fight also – which failed when he failed to arrest Hillary.

      To do what he proposes would require giving a lot of people helicopter trips to the Pacific for free long distance swimming lessons. He is not up for that. Like Trump, he has the soul of a merchant. Should he become the republican candidate, they will just go on stealing elections, and the big thing he failed to talk about was the big steal. A real Republican is only going to win the presidency by the methods used by Caesar and the NSDAP. Which methods lead to one honest election once.

    • pinochet's ghost says:

      Ramaswamy graduated in 2003 from St. Xavier High School, a Jesuit high school in Cincinnati.[13][14] He was his class valedictorian and a nationally ranked junior tennis player.[2]

      Oh no !!!

      • jim says:

        I smelled something slightly off in his presentation. This markedly increases the smell.

        • Kunning Druegger says:

          When he first magically appeared, someone pointed out that in an interview he did, he was given the question “As president, what would you do…” and his first answer was “import more Indians.” He hid this under praising his parent’s work ethic and devotion, but the message is clear. Before Jews, Blacks, or Latinos, I would expel all Indians from CONUS. Not permanently, they can come back as guest workers and visitors (unlike the others which are getting one way trips to where they belong), but they should not vote or hold office or own property here. This should be the way they treat Americans in India too, and I bet that’s basically how it is.

          I respect the Dharmabros and wish them well, but we don’t need based swarths in the West. They have to go back.

          • Oog en Hand says:

            A: Hinduism is peaceful and tolerant.
            B: No, it isn’t. The Vedas say…
            A: You are using a bad translation. You do not know Sanskrit.

  15. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    Discussion of blockchain technology usually centers on the concern of routing civilization around hostile factions of treasonous elites, but there’s obvious wartime applications as well, like sending data packets of targeting information from a troop or mobile platform to nearby ordinance assets.

    Applications requiring higher bandwidth and lower latency – like live video – where the calculative burden of heavier encryption is not shoulderable by the platforms involved, can be secured via stochastically generated encoding formats, using one-time keys in local battle groups with physical proximity, while handshaking between platforms on different battlenets can be accomplished via packets on more secure sidechain layers.

    (This technique can also be used on active sensors, to retrieve information at longer ranges with lower power and against most common forms of ECM.)

    Sensor fusion, where multiple platforms distributed across space can network together to act as singular systems, is another area where the possibilities have yet to be exploited in a systematic way by any existing major power. A small scale example of this would be your cellphone camera, in which multiple cameras take multiple images, which then use different algorithms to interpolate it into a single image, achieving higher resolutions than the physical sensor is nominally capable of.

    A large scale example would be interferometry arrays used for astronomical observation. EG, those giant fields full of antennas gazing at the sky. Because each element in the array is stationary and in a set position relative to each other, the calculations for signal processing are greatly simplified. Advancements in information technology however have largely trivialised the problem of mobile platforms in arbitrary positions relative to each other calculating solutions, even while on the move. The primary limiting factors at present are not limitations in instrumental techne, but limitations in social techne.

    Up to date equipment used by high speed low drag guys already includes things like protective headphones that use microphones to mediate sound; it is not a far leap from there to using short range v-band LANs to act as mobile arrays for picking up and direction-finding sounds of interest – like gunshots, drones, or mortar rounds – which can be plotted on their phablet, smart scope, or eyepiece.

    A small platform by itself has limited ability to extract useful kinds of information from the environment; but lots of small platforms altogether can act like a very large platform.

    Apps for using the radio antenna on a smartphone to make 3d radar images already exist; it is not a far leap from there to having RF equipment across all platforms be capable of acting as passive radar arrays, sighting objects via ambient RF energy much like other sensors use higher frequency ambient radiance. This can also overlap synergistically with active jamming as well. Russia’s Murmansk-BN system is a limited scale example of this; the concept is there, but the ‘economy scale’ exploitation isn’t.

  16. skippy says:

    Both sides seem.to have been acquiring/trying to acquire drones from the atart. Are they getting shot down quickly?

  17. Rando says:

    A potential problem with this type of data link driven drone spotting for artillery is what happens if you start getting jammed? You could have the drones, have the postgis database and the computers to tie it all together, but that drone relies on an RF data stream that can be jammed. Granted, jamming opens up its own can of worms, but I am surprised at the lack of reports of drones having their frequencies jammed. I would think one side or the other would be furiously trying to figure out how to neutralize enemy drones in this way. The only thing I can think of that would explain this is a lack of man-portable EW equipment.

    One thing that using drones can open you up to is being spotted yourself. For one thing, many of the small drones have limited endurance so they cannot fly for very long. When that happens an opposing drone hunter could let fly his own drone to follow the returning drone to see where it lands for recovery. Then use the postgis system to coordinate a quick arty barrage on the exposed drone troops. Of course, this would require that grunts be alert and perceptive enough to spot these drones, which would be very difficult given how small they are.

    A way to solve that could be to deploy specialized foxhunter drones that carry directional antenna arrays to get a bearing on any transmissions to and from these drones. You could have a swarm of them all linked to the postgis system, have them all overlay their bearing lines and then mark up where they all intersect for bombardment. Then, if the enemy tries to compensate by blasting the swarms with RF to jam them, have conventional aircraft launch anti-radiation missiles to blow up the jammers. Incidentally, the grunts should be marking things up on these postgis maps and beaming it up to the air force too.

    Lots of possibilities with information age warfare. Given how clueless most militaries are, you will probably see insurgent forces lead the way in developing these new tactics, depending on how gifted their demographic is.

    • jim says:

      Spread spectrum communication channels in the gigahertz range, directional communication channels, and laser communication channels.

      If using directional devices, still not hard to interfere with messages sent to the drone, but considerably harder to interfere with data being sent back by the drone. But even consumer grade drones these days will cheerfully fly a preprogrammed course and take preprogrammed videos if communication from the ground drops. Line of sight laser is unjammable, but laser communication devices, though in use, are not widely and routinely available, due to tech stagnation. We know in principle how to build them cheaply and in large numbers and have known for a long time, but they are not being built cheaply and in large numbers.

      This is also partly the lack of a large market. Military drones are amply large enough potential market.

    • jim says:

      All the obstacles you suggest are likely, the enemy always gets a say, but compare with wading in blood to the top of a nine story building.

  18. DavyCrockett says:

    Great post from Jim, it really is amazing a war is being fought in Europe with most of the tactics being based on technology from 100, 100+ years ago.

    • Calvin says:

      Not surprising. Happens all the time that the generals are ready to fight the last war. See the Armenia-Azerbaijan scuffle not so long ago. Change comes slowly and generally only when forced by circumstances or a visionary leader.

      • DavyCrockett says:

        No, I think it is surprising, and Jim has also said that is surprising in many posts. It would not be surprising if they were fighting this based on tactics from World War 2, or from a war 50 years ago. That they’re mostly using tactics from 100+, 110+ years ago is fairly surprising.

        • ten says:

          In ww1, on the other hand, retrofitted line infantry tactics were still attempted repeatedly (move rapidly forward right through heavy fire, concentrated salvo, melee) to zerg trenches.

          • jim says:

            They have not forgotten what was learned in World War I (that zerging machine guns does not work). But the primary thing learned in Word War II was tanks as cavalry, which does not work any more, so, back to World War I, rather than forward to information epoch.

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