The key paragraph tucked second-to-last at the bottom.
tl;dr appears to be "no, unless they are holding something back".
Russia has every incentive to establish air superiority, and on paper should be more than capable of doing so if it commits to combat operations in large, mixed formations to suppress and hunt down Ukrainian fighters and SAM systems. Instead, the VKS continues to only operate in very small numbers and at low level to minimise the threat from the Ukrainian SAMs. Down low, their situational awareness and combat effectiveness is limited, and they are well within range of the MANPADS such as Igla and Stinger which Ukrainian forces already possess. The numbers of MANPADS are also increasing, as numerous Western countries send supplies to beleaguered Ukrainian forces. To avoid additional losses to MANPADS, sorties continue to be primarily flown at night, which further limits the effectiveness of their mostly unguided air-to-ground weapons.
Also (in bold) "The Only Currently Viable Explanation:
"While the early VKS failure to establish air superiority could be explained by lack of early warning, coordination capacity and sufficient planning time, the continued pattern of activity suggests a more significant conclusion: that the VKS lacks the institutional capacity to plan, brief and fly complex air operations at scale. There is significant circumstantial evidence to support this, admittedly tentative, explanation."
I also think NATO AWACS are likely not integrated with Ukrainian Air Defense. They likely operate on simply different frequencies than old soviet missiles.
NATO E-3A Sentries operating out of Krakow are orbiting just short of the Poland/Ukraine border monitoring Ukrainian and Belarusian air space. They can see everything flying over about the Western third of Ukraine at all altitudes and about half of Ukraine, including Kyiv, for medium and high altitude targets.
Even so that cover north and west. But only recently russia take over southern and eastern side. Seems more paratroopers and land forces so far.
We will they run out on Sunday as said. But it cannot be lost ended without the head of putin. The blood will flow sadly by both sides, until that head roll.
I would give one more potential explanation: In-fighting and a lack of unity.
If I were in charge of the air force, and Putin ordered large-scale air superiority attacks against Ukrainians, I wouldn't want to do that. Putin might not have the power to order his air force to launch strikes of aggression.
Dictatorships give the impression of being all-powerful, but dictators need to keep constituents appeased, but that's kind of an illusion. Key constituencies -- quite often the generals -- need to remain appeased.
I expect if this were the case, Russia wouldn't advertise this externally. There is every incentive to maintain a united external front.
I doubt the majority of Russian military planned this attack. It seems more like Putin and his inner circle made all the decisions and failed to listen (or were not even told out of fear) what could/should be done. Hitler had the same fatal idea that he was a military genius right until the end and his generals were often sacked if they disagreed.
> selling fuel and supplies ... a sign of an appalling failure of discipline in a military force.
The thing is, selling arms under the table (embezzling arms) is a sign of corruption from the highest levels. The grunts aren't stupid - they're looking out for their own interest, because they aren't paid well nor treated well i imagine.
My dad told me that when he was in the Soviet army that this was fairly common. All the equipment had bits and pieces (especially fuel) that mysteriously went missing and appeared among the local populace.
Plausible. We know a lot of front line conscripts are self sabotaging or slow walking their orders. and I think the air command showed some independence in 91 and was above the fray.
what incentives even exist in the Russian army? this is such a weird situation to extrapolate from
When the Soviet Union was breaking apart the air force general stationed in Tartu, Estonia refused the order to blockade the television and parliament buildings. That decision by Dzhokhar Dudayev probably saved many lives.
He then went on to fight for the independence of the Chechen Republic. On that note, I wonder if Russia doing poorly in Ukraine might not ignite the fight in Chechnya again.
No air force commander refuses such an order and makes his infantry die because he disagrees with the politics. Even if he did, he would likely be relieved of command the moment after and face court martial. And that's ignoring it is Russia we're talking about.
I think you're confusing how systems of government work. For a good description of dynamics in dictatorships, I'd recommend Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a political scientist at NYU.
To oversimplify, in a dictatorship, the dictator serves at the pleasure of the branches of the army, secret service, and police. If a majority believe he's unfit, he's out. Commanders have a lot of autonomy to refuse orders. That kind of infighting is common in China too. It's nearly impossible in a democracy.
I just had a thought--who are the VKS pilots? This is a pretty kick-ass and prestigious job. Have these positions been handed out to the favored sons of well-connected families, as is typical of many things in Russia? If so, could this be contributing to a reluctance to commit them to a conflict that is not going well against relatively well-equipped adversary?
Sounds plausible. Also in a kleptocracy there likely are opportunities to siphon loads of cash away from military programs and short-change equipment and training needs. An oligarch might think, "Russia will not need to wage a sophisticated air campaign any time in the next fifty years! The slop trough buffet is open!"
There was already evidence of that. Apparently Russian troops were selling diesel fuel to the locals while they were waiting at the border before the war had started.
> "Russia will not need to wage a sophisticated air campaign any time in the next fifty years! The slop trough buffet is open!"
Most people at this level don't have a soul or patriotic feelings, so the internal dialog is probably: "I don't give a shit what happens to Russia, I'll find another country to feed onto".
Pretty underwhelming to see a spitball theory on Russia regarding nepotism/corruption based on it being “typical of many things in Russia”—nothing specific to the military or the air force, just a blank cheque that can be used to interrogate anything.
Russia has a long history of corruption going back to the time when the princes under the Mongol Empire beginning in 1219 were forced to collect taxes on their behalf. Unlike in the rest of Europe and China, the princes during this time ended up controlling large regions relatively uncontested, responsible only for extracting maximum output from their vassal and putting little pressure on their power structures to be efficient to outside threats. This structure has been recreated in each successive iteration of Russia government, up to the oligarchs today. Or so goes the general historical consensus.
Russia ranked 136th out of 180 in Transparency International's corruption index.
You just used the open European Plains/Steppes to explain a supposedly incompetent Russian air force, specifically your spitball theory about incompetent VKS pilots. A more humble person might just go back about thirty years and use the post-Soviet oligarch looting in order to explain the corruption and in turn the VKS pilots... only relatively more humble, but still.
Are you sure that you don’t want to rein in the grand narration just a little bit?
On second thought, this theory of complacency on the European Plains makes even less sense when one considers the invasions that Russia/Soviet Union had to fight back in the 20th century. The border with the rest of Europe is hell to defend—it’s basically anti-Switzerland.
And in that light the historical line that is being drawn makes even less sense.
> Why are you so hung up on defending Russia?
It’s revealing that you frame or interpret this discussion as being about either attacking or defending Russia. Why is it/ought it to be about that?
It's the typical "you're either with us or against us" mentality that is very common nowadays. It's very difficult to be listened to when you have a reasonable position (on any subject really).
I believe this mentality is created by the massive propaganda we have been subjected to since a couple decades.
So, join the polarization in defeat because everyone is doing it? This is exactly when we need to be more cognizant of jingoism and the likely encroachment upon freedom and positing of dubious facts that the government and institutions will manufacture while the population is distracted not paying close attention.
No, not "with us or against us" just genuinely surprised at the level of anger being expressed by avgcorrection to what to me seemed pretty innocuous speculation: I think it's possible that the status of the VKS pilots is contributing to a reluctance to fly them into danger for political reasons.
Russia is famous for corruption, seems a weird thing to defend. Even in the US there are at least some well-connected sons getting seats in fighter jets, and "paid drivers" have existed in Formula 1 since forever. Doesn't seem too far fetched, but right or wrong hardly worth any kind of attack. Additionally I never said the pilots would be incompetent--in my experience when people start responding to accusations that were never made, something else is going on in their head.
For what it's worth, I like Russia. I'm ethnically from a former Soviet state and although I have very little cultural connection to it, whenever I meet Russians anywhere in the world they've been instantly friendly towards me just based on my name. Even with this happening I hope that someday within my lifetime EU/Russian relation can be fully normalized.
You are right to zoom in. But the basic culture abd repeat pattern of Russia and chinese empire is astonishing as well. It might not be used to explain Air Force but the general picture is still there.
For this round, expanding an empire just be force is odd, except for Mongolian empire. Usually you start with soft bit. Seems this round is very Mongolian.
Corruption is how Putin obtained and maintains order. It is regarded as a feature of Russian governance, but is likely to fail it in the case of actually providing the services a government is expected to. Why not the military as well?
Why not the military as well? Because an autocrat is directly served by having a strong military? This should not need to be explained. An autocrat doesn’t have to care about corruption in the school system or the Department of Motor Vehicles, but he has good reason to care about corruption and incompetence in his military, just from a purely self-serving perspective.
Only if the military aren't likely to pull a coup - look at Turkey, seems like a dictator getting too big for their boots and then knocked back by the military happens every decade or so there?
The political elites of the military come from the same ranks as those for corrupt other areas of life.
Soldiers in the armed forces, in any interaction outside of it, face corruption every day: semi-official bribe lists with local police forces, bribes for administrative procedures, medical and so on.
In corrupt societies, it is hard to opt out of bribery since “market” forces balance out on the assumption that bribe giver can finance them partially through bribe taking. Cutting one leg off the trade makes it fail.
I think it’s naive to believe you can build an island of meritocracy surrounded from all sides by a corrupt system.
Thanks but it's a one hour video in Finish! Subtitles are available but I don't know if they're good quality. I probably could read the thing in 20 minutes if I could extract the subtitles.
Do you have a link on an article that I could put though deepl?
I was not born in Russia, but in some Eastern European country. In my country, during the Communism, and the decade after (and maybe even to this day, but I haven't lived there since 2000), the competition to become a jet fighter pilot was absolutely insane. But that was because the kids just liked jet fighters, (some probably from watching Top Gun). However, it was known that lots of the pilots died in crashes (e.g. [1]). It was also rumored that the pilots ended up having reproductive problems because of radiation from its radar, or something. It's possible that this was an unsubstantiated urban legend, but the rumor existed, and that's what mattered. Given this, I doubt the sons of the well-connected big shots were really flocking to become pilots. Nowadays, those sons most likely prefer to go and study in Switzerland, or the UK or the US.
"As evidence of the State Armament Programme’s implementation until 2015 showed, the Russian defence industry still had not made the leap from ‘dumb-iron’ equipment to twenty-first-century sophistication.
"Russia’s intervention in Syria is a case in point. As [Russian defense analyst and director of the Moscow-based Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies] Ruslan Pukhov argued, the performance of the Russian Air Force in Syria was impressive if compared to the 2008 war with Georgia, where it lost seven aircraft in blue-on-blue incidents within a matter of four days. From an international perspective, however, it’s technological level now matches at best that of the US air force during the 1991 Gulf War a quarter of a century ago. Weaknesses have been visible in Syria, particularly in terms of the sophistication of precision-guided munitions, a shortage of targeting systems, deficiencies in aerial reconnaissance capabilities, and a lack of long-range UAVs and attack drones."
--Bettina Renz, Russia's Military Revival 2018, page 80
Tbh, now that we expect uavs everywhere, why would a competitive military in the 21st century even lead with troops. Shouldn't they do clean up to strategic attacks on various critical infrastructure.
They were just out shelling the nuclear facility when they could make some strategic strikes.
They haven't been able to modernize due to budget.
This document from 2017 was written by the US military and analyzes and points out weaknesses in the Russian BTG (Battalion Tactical Group) doctrine and has some excellent points that make a lot of what is currently occurring fall into place.
https://www.benning.army.mil/armor/earmor/content/issues/201...
>Current Russian state net revenues from energy cannot fund the same modernization period as before.
Basically they can't modernize.
It then goes into the current Russian BTG doctrine and how it leaves armored groups exposed due to a lack of supporting infantry and air.
>The BTG’s may be vulnerable to raids, counterattacks and other surprise movements because reliance on analog C2 limits subordinate units’ ability to understand and react to changes of circumstance.
>A BTG had the entire brigade’s support and enabling resources, but it had only one mechanized-infantry
battalion
>According to Russian Army manuals, in the field as many as 50 percent
of infantry soldiers can be required for local security and routine administrative tasks. This leaves relatively few infantrymen available for mounted squads. Squads are usually organized ad hoc and are less than fully manned,which makes them less effective and less independent. For opponents, it also means that it requires fewer casualties to neutralize the Russian squads.
>The lack of infantry causes BTG commanders to prefer to isolate urban infantry strongpoints for prolonged sieges instead of assaulting
The document also goes into supply issues that BTGs will likely face.
Basically the current Russian doctrine is ridiculously ineffective. It involves lots of independent battalions of almost pure armor. Which get destroyed consistently due to a lack of supporting infantry. To the point where it's quite possible they'll lose this war. The Russians thought it was effective in Chechnya and Syria and the 2014 war with Ukraine since they simply didn't face significant resistance. All of the above weaknesses are now very apparent however.
One last thing
>The current military and political leaders are the same leaders who introduced the BTG structure; their reputations
and careers are closely tied to its success. Instead of moderating BTG rollout and keeping a portion of the Russian
Army in a divisional structure to train for high-intensity CAM, Russia’s leaders are accelerating the rate that units
convert into BTGs.
> To the point where it's quite possible they'll lose this war.
Not fast enough. My understanding is the current Western military analyses still predict the Russians will eventually win, it'll just cost them more.
IMHO, if we want to Ukrainians to win, it'll require either some kind of direct military intervention, or giving them control of much more advanced equipment (e.g. cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles, etc.)
What happens when Finland becomes the "red line" or Poland etc. Both parts of the Russian "empire" at one time or another. It has to stop somewhere. Now is as good a time as any, especially as Russia has proven they are militarily weak.
The longer this war is allowed to continue, the weaker Russia will become. A weak Russia both increases the risk of nuclear weapons being used as well as that of other states - China in particular - using this weakness to try to grab some of that enormous, resource-rich area called Siberia.
So, let this war be finished soon in the same way that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or the US intervention in Vietnam were finished: in defeat without obliteration. Let Putin loose face and be deposed so that a new generation can take over in Russia, preferably one which is not controlled by some globalist loon nor one which has dreams of reinstating some former Russian empire. Let Ukraine become the European nation it claims to be which means they need to rid themselves of corruption. Let the mistakes which were made in the de-sovietification of the former USSR be corrected, get rid of the oligarchs and their cronies. Smoke out Lukashenko from White Russia so that that nation can also learn to stand on its own feet once the Putinistas have been purged.
And for the love of ${$deity} stop with the stupid, braindead anti-everything-that-is-Russian attitude that I see growing around me. I see a Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky concerts being cancelled in the Netherlands, Russian-language children's reading hours in the library in Sweden are cancelled, a university in Italy wanted to ban Dostoyevsky from its curriculum and more of such stupidity. Just stop it already, realise that Russia is part of Europe and will remain so after this war is over. Realise, also, that Dostoyevsky was imprisoned by the then-version of Putin, that Ukrainians are just as enamoured of Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky as Russians and others are, that those Russian-language reading hours in a Swedish city would most likely get the children to dislike Putinism more than that it would encourage them to follow him. If Clancy is to believed one of the bigger insults you could make to a Russian was that he was uncultured - некультурный. Let's show that we are not while making clear that it is Putin and his ilk who represent the barbarians at the gate.
> Let Putin loose face and be deposed so that a new generation can take over in Russia, preferably one which is not controlled by some globalist loon nor one which has dreams of reinstating some former Russian empire.
After being potentially devastated by the sanctions and embarassed by the world, there are no guarantees that anyone taking over from Putin would be more reasonable, less nationalistic, or less likely to utilize nuclear strikes. More chaos and instability in Russia after a Putin exit could backfire with a random cast of characters gaining power. A risky roll of your favorite multi-sided dice.
> After being potentially devastated by the sanctions and embarassed by the world, there are no guarantees that anyone taking over from Putin would be more reasonable, less nationalistic, or less likely to utilize nuclear strikes. More chaos and instability in Russia after a Putin exit could backfire with a random cast of characters gaining power. A risky roll of your favorite multi-sided dice.
It's also worth noting a Putin victory won't necessarily lead to some kind of stability. For a brief time Ukraine had nukes, but gave them up. The lesson of this invasion to every medium-size power next to a giant will be: if you value your independence, get nukes, and don't give them up.
The cancelling of Russian-language reading hours in Sweden was not due to the war. That was fake news. Please be more careful about spreading misinformation in the future.
Please be more critical in accepting excuses for misdirected attempts at supporting a cause. I read that "excuse" as well and was not convinced - it is not hard to find someone to volunteer to read stories to children.
So you think it is reasonable to spread what is essentially a conspiracy theory? Why should I not trust a public library that it is difficult to find a replacement for a Russian-speaker willing to read stories for children?
> Have you thought about what happens if Russia looses? Ukraine is a red line for them.
Honestly? The Russians go home. Putin makes threats, but they're to scare his adversaries into pulling their punches out of fear, while he does what he was always going to do.
If his goal is to rebuild the Soviet empire, it's an automatic failure if he escalates until Moscow is a smoking pit.
There was a firefight last night close to those reactors. The battle was over a museum nearby. Here's a twitter thread with the original live stream CCTV footage, clips, and just-in-time analysis in the thread and comments [0] [1]
I read the article you linked. It says yes they attacked using small arms, but did not attack the reactors themselves. The OP indicated shelling, so you are correct that OP is not accurate. The video I saw showed a flare, which seems to be how the fire started. Firefighters were unable to get to it because of the battle.
Either way, why on earth are invaders within the fence line of a nuclear facility. Completely absurd
>why on earth are invaders within the fence line of a nuclear facility
Maybe Russia is worried that Ukraine might have been covertly developing nuclear weapons, and they don't want to give the Ukrainians any more time to hide the evidence.
> Either way, why on earth are invaders within the fence line of a nuclear facility.
In WW2, on Okinawa and various other islands, the Japanese had set up nursing stations and other logistics inside natural cave structures, staffed largely by civilians, and of those, largely by women, some with children in tow.
When the Allied forces pushed onto these islands, the Japanese reasoned that if they retreated into these caves and placed the civilians in front of the forces, the Allies wouldn't have the heart to firebomb and/or shoot innocents in order to get to the fighting forces. This reasoning was faulty, as MacArthur and others below him in the CoC ordered the massacre of countless civilians to finish the job.
Facts on the ground are sketchy, but my understanding is that the Ukrainian forces made a similar gamble, that "if we retreat into a nuclear power plant, nobody would be dumb enough to fire on our position here", and that they were as wrong as the Japanese.
This is a common gamble that tacticians make, betting on the better angels of our nature to not do horrible things. But we're barely-evolved monkeys, and this gamble is almost always wrong.
However, despite the apparent lack of technical capability, ‘dumb-iron’ has inflicted an horrendous amount of damage and the potential to wreak significantly more carnage in Ukraine.
Well, also if the goal is the carnage itself and nothing else. The Kremlin is very clearly still operating under the idea that violent repression will lead to a compliant, productive population - which wasn't true at any point in USSR history even.
There has never been any doubt that 20th century weapons are sufficient to do horrendous damage to civilian targets. WWII shows plenty of examples, many of them in Russia. Saying that the modern Russian army is at least as capable as the WWII Russian army... I mean, it's not wrong, it's just not interesting.
The day the invasion started, it was like early India morning it was the scariest morning I've had in a while.
The sheer rate at which they fired missiles(Cruise? Iskandr?) and the rate at which they were able to cripple anything in sight was scary.
If this is what a reduced capability armed forces can do. I shudder to imagine what a real power can do, and sheer loss of human life and value that humans built would be(is already) heart wrenching.
Their missile strikes seemed very effective, it's the rest of their army that seem inefficient. More efficiency would mean they would be further in the control of the country and would have sustained less losses. It doesn't mean there would be more civilian deaths, on the contrary I think.
> particularly in terms of the sophistication of precision-guided munitions, a shortage of targeting systems
I think they have weakness in engines as well. It is rumoured that the Chinese stealth fighter J20's biggest weakness is its engine
Another one of their customer country India apparently used American engines in their own fighter jet instead of Russian ones despite higher cost and having operational and maintenance experience with Russian engines.
Interestingly, the Indian variants of Russian fighter jets do integrate a lot of tech from West.
I think this author makes some good points, though it seems like he is downplaying the lack of effective SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses) equipment and tactics. The USAF and Israelis dedicate a lot of attention to this area, and it seems like the Russians (and their Soviet predecessors) never have.
I wonder to what extent advice and training of Ukrainian forces, not to mention real-time intelligence, has aided the Ukrainians in denying Russia air superiority.
> I wonder to what extent advice and training of Ukrainian forces, not to mention real-time intelligence, has aided the Ukrainians in denying Russia air superiority.
I read somewhere that Soviet-style air defense turn out to be most effective against Soviet-style air forces. Basically Western militaries have never invested heavily in SAMs, but invested heavily in anti-SAM weapons an tactics; while Soviet-style militaries did the opposite. That leaves Soviet-style forces with with very good SAM capabilities and weak air forces without the ability to counter it.
> Basically Western militaries have never invested heavily in SAMs, but invested heavily in anti-SAM weapons an tactics; while Soviet-style militaries did the opposite
Hm, I will cynically say that it looks like the Russians were actually more interested in defense, while the Americans were more interested in offense.
I certainly wish that, at least in the American case, they are different. There is however evidence to the contrary.
My country was invaded by Russians in 1968. While it wasn't particularly pleasant, I think it was better than being bombed, or perhaps even, economically starved.
OK, fair enough. There might be several reasons why is air offensive more important for Americans than Russians and vice versa:
1. Russians won the WW2 using tanks on land, Americans won the WW2 using aircrafts over sea.
2. (If we assume Russians care less about the loss of their troops than Americans.) Attacking another country from the air is more expensive, but safer, than attacking it from the ground.
3. (If we assume Americans are more interested in projecting their force globally than Russians are.) It is easier to move airplanes/missiles/drones around the world on ships than to move heavy mechanized ground troops.
On the other hand, Russians have sometimes led the development of heavy ICBMs and nuclear weapons, but that also seems to be more valuable as a global deterrent rather than something you would randomly use during an invasion.
Western militaries have never heavily invested in SAMs?!
Have you heard of the stinger, that the Ukrainians are using to great effect? The US also has the patriot and aegis systems which are really good air defense missiles. That’s not including THAAD, etc.
But the OPs comment was that the west ended invested in SAMs, a laughably incorrect statement if you study the order of battle of any western military, US or otherwise.
It's kind of like saying that we ended investment in 8-bit hardware because we've replaced it with 64-bit hardware. It's not that we stopped, it's that the funding has been repurposed for newer/better things.
> But the OPs comment was that the west ended invested in SAMs
That's not at all what I said. I suppose it would have been a little clearer if I had said "never invested as heavily" in SAMs compared to the Soviets, but I wasn't focusing on the West. I was making a point about Soviet-style forces fighting one another.
Nothing about that implies the West never invested in SAMs or has stopped doing so. It just means they're not as central to its air defense strategy.
> Western militaries have never heavily invested in SAMs?!
> Have you heard of the stinger, that the Ukrainians are using to great effect? The US also has the patriot and aegis systems which are really good air defense missiles. That’s not including THAAD, etc.
Not like the Soviet Union did. The article I'm trying to paraphrase said that SAMs were far more integral to Soviet air defense strategy than they were to Western air defense, which put more emphasis on using fighter aircraft for air defense than having the Army deploy different SAM systems for every need. Because the Soviets relied more on SAMs, then the West had to put more emphasis on counter-SAM weapons (which the Soviets has far less need to do).
Also the article noted that the exception is Western navies, which the article said were in a more similar situation to the Soviet Army. That's why the more capable US SAM systems have naval lineage.
i listened to interview with leading Ukrainian journalist/analyst a couple of days ago. Apparently Ukraine got intel about time of attack and possible targets so when cruise missiles were flying to take out targets, most of functioning planes were in the air and everything that wasn't stationary (like mobile air defense systems) were moved to different locations
The author barely mentions SEAD in the post, and makes an offhand comment that the Russians should be able to take care of SAMs with large formations. I think that qualifies as down-playing, but I can see how you might disagree.
"If the VKS had the large-scale organizational capabilities we'd previously assumed, then they'd have a straightforward SEAD approach (involving strength in numbers and some moderate SEAD sophistication), though it might lose aircraft (perhaps due to comparably low SEAD sophistication, I don't know). Then, having eliminated the SAMs, they could fly higher, in larger numbers. So it's weird that they don't do that. This is circumstantial evidence that they aren't capable of this type of SEAD, and this in turn is more evidence for my tentative conclusion that they might be incapable of air operations of more than a few planes."
That's what I got out of the SEAD comments in TFA.
It's also more cost-effective to roll troops in cheap tanks from the edge of your border than to engage costly fighters and bombers with anti aerial defenses. They don't need to fly if their targets are adjacent, and Ukraine has not dared bomb Russian territory, so Russia can easily resupply its invasion for weeks if it wants.
Tanks cost less than fighter jets, but you can hardly call the "cheap", they're typically the Army's most expensive piece of kit. The M1 Abrams costs around $10 million a pop.
I'm not very informed on tanks, but IIRC the Armata series are their next-generation tanks, and they cost like 3-4 million each. Invading Ukraine would be the opportunity to throw old stockpile nevertheless, much like the bombing of Afghanistan helped replace old USA bomb stockpile.
The common opinion seems to be that the T-14 Armata is vaporware, and their newest tank is the T-90 which they are using - and having stolen by farmers.
The MiG 21 cost less to procure than a BMP-1 armoured personnel carrier if Wikipedia [1] is to be believed [2]. A BMP is not a tank and can be assumed to be less expensive than one.
FAR FAR FAR easier and cheaper to replace armored vehicles, especially for Russia in particular. The biggest problem will be the modern electronics and sensor systems. I think a lot of infrared sensor systems, ballistic computers, etc. are sold globally by Thales (France), Rafael, or Elbit (Israel). IF Russia imports those, and I think it has in the past, the global sanctions will disrupt those parts supplies, and they are pretty important to effective situational awareness and accuracy in a modern MBT. The rest of a tank is mostly steel and composites that can be churned out fairly quickly at Uralvagonzavod: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralvagonzavod
But if they can't import the latest and greatest parts to make T-90Ms or T-72B3Ms....they have such a huge stockpile of "good enough" older T-72s in storage, they can just use those with a minor refurbishment period. With what we've seen of their tactics and (lack of) skills, it won't seriously impact their battlefield results to field early 1980s-era tank technology.
Good enough against whom? Russian tanks are getting absolutely shredded by antitank personnel if reports are true.
Against M1 Abrams it isn’t even going to be a battle and they don’t have enough Armatas to make a difference.
I question the use of tanks for anything beyond a support / artillery role at this point. All tanks seem highly vulnerable to both air and Javelin-like AT.
I think there was a US report a few years back about how modern tanks are no longer really the centerpiece of the battlefield anymore. Similar to how the battleship was thought to be the centerpiece at the beginning of WW2 and then it quickly became apparent it was the aircraft carrier.
Tanks have gone through evolutions of survivability before. Through 60s and 70s they basically gave up on surviving a hit and armor actually got thinner while speed and armament improved. Then composites, ceramics, and reactives made it possible to survive an enemy tank or rpg hit again.
Now armor is less useful again , but active protection is on the rise.
>>>Good enough against whom? Russian tanks are getting absolutely shredded by antitank personnel if reports are true.
That's due more to shit tactics (exacerbated by the early spring thaw that has limited off-road movement) than to any specific limitations of their hardware. There is VERY little footage of dismounted infantry screening Russian tanks, or competent employment of other recon assets. Look up some ANNA News footage embedded with the Syrian Arab Army in Jhobar, a Damascus suburb. It took the Syrians years of errors/casualties, but they eventually learned to storm dug-in fanatical enemies in urban environments, and they did it with crappier T-72s than the Russians are fielding now. There is a plethora of modern ATGMs dumped into Syrian insurgent hands too.
>>>Against M1 Abrams it isn’t even going to be a battle
That's a crew quality issue as well. A T-90 or T-72B3 is absolutely a threat to an Abrams.
>>>I question the use of tanks for anything beyond a support / artillery role at this point.
Increasing urbanization/population densities worldwide make sweeping wars of maneuver across open terrain less viable. Tanks are useful in urban environments, but require well-trained soldiers experienced in combined arms (German Kampfgruppe in Stalingrad, US Army-Marine teams in Fallujah).
>>>All tanks seem highly vulnerable to both air and Javelin-like AT.
As my sister comment touches on, this is changing as tank protection moves away from thick slabs of passive armor, to every tank fielding active protection systems such as the Israeli Trophy ( https://youtu.be/6aA9HsmLHBQ ). <-- also some of the coolest footage of shaped charge warheads detonating.
The Russians have traditionally been very good at radio direction finding. They could then send in land forces or one of three model "Wild Weasel" aircraft they had - the Yak28N, the Mig-25BM in small numbers, then the Su-24M.
The role of a Wild Weasel aircraft is to tempt enemy radar operators into turning on their units and start transmitting. Whereupon the aircraft would launch an anti-radiation (radio-homing, not "nuclear") missile at the transmitter. The USAF has the AGM-88 and the Russians have the Kh-58 and the Kh-31 to do this. Note that all this happens while the Wild Weasel is being attacked by surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft fire.
As to why the Russians are being so ineffective at SEAD in Ukraine - no idea but I'm not going to give them any improvement suggestions.
The reason they aren't as good at SEAD in Ukraine - in no way that ineffective - is simple. NATO is flying AWACS and warning Ukrainian air defences of possible threats.
In a serious peer-to-peer total conflict the AWACS would be shot down and the Ukrainians wouldn't be able to get away with much of anything.
No-fly zone is a highly disingenuous and misleading term meaning "we will fly our planes only and shoot down yours", so no, this isn't why they don't want a no fly zone. The reason they don't is because that would be an act of war and difficult to enforce.
You can only establish a no-fly zone once you have control of the airspace. Which would require using NATO aircraft to shoot down all Russian aircraft over what is a non-NATO member. It goes without saying that that would seriously escalate the conflict.
Physically, yes. There are plenty of radar satellites.
Power is a problem. AWACS radars draw dozens of kilowatts. You very much want lots of power in military radar, since you're often illuminating something that can be engineered to have a small RCS or is actively spoofing the return signal. This forces you to have big solar panels, big radiator panels for electronics waste heat, big batteries so you can actually run the radar in the 50% of the orbit when you're in Earthshade, big antenna for high gain, big fuel tanks because you have so much atmospheric drag that you're reboosting all the time. An AWACS satellite would be bus-sized, if not bigger.
This hypothetical AWACS satellite would also have the problem that it would have a perfectly predictable orbital track, so you could target it with a very high gain antenna for jamming. And, of course, antisatellite missiles exist, and AWACS birds would badly tempt future adversaries to make yet more orbital debris.
Some of these problems could be mitigated with a larger constellation, which you would want anyway so you can run lower altitudes and (as you note) better coverage. Unfortunately, running a Starlink-style megaconstellation with hardware purchased from military aerospace contractors would cost hundreds of trillions of dollars.
Several NRO birds are known to use synthetic aperture radar, (LACROSSE/ONYX) but almost certainly not for detecting aircraft in flight. Others are for detecting radiated signals. (NOSS) For civilian (-ish) attempts to launch surveillance megaconstellations, see PlanetScope: https://www.planet.com/products/planet-imagery/
It's semi-reported, the US has been flying AWACS around the clock and reported to be giving intel to Ukraine. Beyond that, this is kind of what you'd want an AWACS to do.
No, it hasn't been denied. They said they didn't give "real time targeting". This means that they are indeed giving real-time info. What I described isn't targeting.
It's pretty obvious. "SEAD group incoming into your position from 220, turn off your radars" simply cannot be used to target. So it's not targeting information.
It's only targeting information if it can be used to attack, which is not what we're talking about here.
The AWACS flights by NATO aircraft over southern Poland are real. What is not known is if that intel is being given to Ukrainian forces. And anyone who does know won't be talking because of operational security and need-to-know.
The AWACS normally monitor Russian aircraft during peace in any case, in order to gather info about how they operate. These flights today are a goldmine of intel, as it shows how the Russian Aviation forces operate in a real conflict.
Don’t underestimate the value of any suggestions in warfare. Some guy (or woman) once threw out “let’s use condoms to protect rifle muzzles from seawater and sand incursion”. Did it work, maybe?
Sort of a monkeys writing Shakespeare thing. It may not be of value, but why take the chance of your conscience or nationality dictates neutrality.
One thing I have always wondered about WW2 - why did the Allies never attempt to perform SEAD? Send in a light striking force of Mosquitoes and such to attack flak emplacements, radar, and so on ahead of the main force that would zap the main target?
There were attacks on radar sites and such, but both sides lacked effective SEAD equipment and tactics. In addition, the flak emplacements were hard to find, and many of them were extremely sturdy.
The Germans and the Japanese developed radar systems during the war, though they were 'behind' the Brits and Americans. Radar countermeasures were actually a critical part of Silicon Valley's origins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
The Germans had an extremely sophisticated radar air defence system, both ground and air based, as the RAF found out to their great cost. Their Navy (which was small) also had very good radar.
There was actually a major SEAD campaign in the lead up to D-day, with strikes on German RADAR stations, but the primary objective prior to that point was to gain air superiority over the Luftwaffe fighter force (considered significantly more dangerous than AAA [anti-aircraft artillery, flak]).
While electronic warfare was still in relative infancy, radio and RADAR jamming and chaff (known then to the Allies as "Window") were widely used. However, prior to the widespread development and use of guided weapons (e.g. homing anti-radiation missiles) it was very difficult to precisely strike small SEAD targets (semi-mobile RADAR units, AAA batteries) without needing to first close within range of low-level AAA defenses.
All you say is true, but the radar and flak installations were not particularly mobile. THe Allies _did_ hit nightfighter bases which are definitely not mobile, but didn't seem to prioritise such strikes that much.
RADAR and Flak installations took a lot of forms - many of which were fixed or semi-fixed (these often being protected installations), but also a range that were trailer-mobile or self-propelled.
The Allies did use bombing raids on Luftwaffe airfields as a way to draw out fighters, as well as wide-ranging fighter sweeps that would attempt to catch fighters on the ground. But these had serious limitations: the Germans had very effective short-range AAA deployed around their airfields which inflicted serious losses on ground-attack missions, and airfields at the time were very difficult to damage. Especially prior to the widespread use of jet aircraft with higher takeoff and landing speeds and weights, an airfield could basically be just that - a field - and filling in bomb craters to return a runway to active use was straightforward. That means the only effective target was the planes on the ground themselves, and without guided munitions the only way to effectively target airplanes on the ground was to strike at low altitude and thus come within range of the strong AAA defenses. This would begin to change later in the war with the growing use of (unguided) rockets that allowed for something of a standoff distance (compared to dive bombing), but nothing like the reach of a modern PGM.
I think there's a necessary combination of factors that came together in the Vietnam and Arab-Israeli wars to give birth to SEAD in its modern form:
- Strong enemy air defenses in the form of SAM batteries
- Unacceptable attrition due to said defenses
- Increased weapon accuracy to allow effective targeting of specific threats (e.g. a specific enemy RADAR or SAM site) either via homing (Shrike/Standard ARM) or TV/laser guidance (Bullpup/Walleye/Paveway)
- Early integrated circuits allowing for more complicated and effective electronic warfare equipment (warning receivers, jammers, homing seekers, etc)
I'm regurgitating what I've read and heard, including from HN commenters so I don't deserve credit for this: Historically, the USSR's answer to Western air superiority isn't more fighters but air defense that can move with the army. Basically the USSR army has really good air defense. Consequently, the Western allies got really good at SEAD. The Western allies rely on their fighters to gain air superiority. It's assumed that before the army even starts moving in, the fighter would have swept the skies so the US ground forces (the US Navy does because they can't rely on ground based fighters and carriers are precious) don't have great air defense in the form of missiles, etc. when compared to the USSR. As a consequence, the USSR/Russia air force did not need to have as much SEAD capabilities. But now they're fighting Ukraine who inherited the same strong USSR air defense capabilities and its been difficult for the Russians because it wasn't a capability they had needed to develop.
The hypothesis seems plausible to me. Feel free to let me know where this information may be incorrect so I can update my knowledge.
He can call it what he likes, but I think the author rightly points out that it doesn't make sense for Russia to NOT establish air superiority -- quickly -- if it is indeed capable of doing so. Their lack of proven ability to secure the skies demonstrates to NATO that they are not necessarily the adversary one might have thought they are.
No one believes the two powers compare, starting from Russia.
In case of nato, if it was a defensive one, it would play very differently because russians counter air superiority with their AD, they give up on controlling the skies and are happy with shooting the enemy.
> But what if Putin isn't lying about his intentions. What if his intention is to have a special operation, it's just that his definition of a special operation doesn't preclude him indiscriminately killing civilians. (but it DOES preclude him launching the full might of the russian air force)
That kind of thinking seems implausible (i.e. he feels tightly bound by some contrived definition to hold back his air force, but not his army).
It's far more plausible that the "special operation" language is a propaganda smokescreen. More specifically a domestic propaganda smokescreen, since they've very suddenly made it very illegal to call it anything else.
But then you wouldn't use it at all. And let's be honest, his special operation, includes Army, Navy and Air Force, he isn't pulling his punches. My guess is that he didn't want to spend too much on this invasion. Planes are expensive, guided munitions are expensive and so are pilots. Grunts are cheap and so are vehicles (comparatively). He knows that he can't be weak after this war if only due to internal threats from breakaway regions, let alone NATO.
I don't know what the difference between a "special operation" and "war" is, but I do strongly think that if you already have committed 100k+ troops, thousands of tanks, hundreds of helicopters, lots of artillery, and are lobbing cruise missiles into cities, then adding on an air component doesn't materially change it's classification.
I think this was addressed sufficiently in the article, but the point bears repeating: if they're really thinking in terms of money, ehy are they continuing the war at all? it's a disaster economically.
The only way that works is if the air force itself is thinking in terms of money irrespective of the larger picture, but I'd find that surprising.
Does anyone have a good source on what is going on in Ukraine skies? Given that long column of equipment sitting outside from Kiev Russia must own the skies around there. But the rest of the country I'm really not sure. I'm guessing the West is UA owned still.
There’s a fair bit of talk (see Gen. Mark Hertling) that the column northwest of Kyiv is pretty FUBAR just with traffic jams and logistics, and so it doesn’t need a lot of attention at the moment. Ukrainian special forces have done a lot of damage at the head of the column, and I believe a bridge in the middle of/behind the column has been taken out, at least partially.
It seems like a big juicy opportunity tho, would be great to take out all of that armor, it might not be stuck forever. I think the problem is that there are a huge amount of sams guarding that column and it would be risky to make a run against it with the few aircraft they have left.
The optimistic takes are stronger than „temporarily stuck“. It’s basically „in a position where nothing can move forward or backward“. The road is blocked, the vehicles are out of fuel, with many wrecks in between. Food is running out and, soon, the crews will have to abandon their vehicles. It becomes a 40-mile long mass of scrap metal.
If an author like Tom Clancy wrote this as a plot line in a fictional novel, nobody would believe it as possible. What modern military would be this incompetent. The stories would surely be a false flag to pull an attack. But nope, here we are in real life.
In other words, the state of Russian security is literally nothing but threat of nuclear war. What are the odds those would be as poorly functioning as the rest of the forces?
This might be a dumb question but… where are all of those soldiers expected to sleep? In the vehicles and/or outside in the freezing cold? How does that work? The logistics of feeding, housing, and bathroom needs, etc. for 40 miles of people.
Ahh yes, the mythical Ghost of Kyiv that hasn't been confirmed by literally anything. It's basically twitter hearsay that people want to believe because it's a cool story.
Get outta here with that. OP asked for a good source. Not fairytales.
I believe someone form UKR gov 'validated' it, that said, it's probably mostly a myth though possibly maybe someone did do a few kills.
It's an ideal bit of propaganda to have though.
If the Ukranians pull through this, the 'Ghost of Kyiv' will be utterly mythologized. There will be movies, video games, statues, restaurants, brands of beer etc..
Ghost of Kyiv fights a war in the Russian minds. Consider the legend of Juba, the Iraqi sniper who killed many US soldiers swiftly and suddenly. Hard to do anything out there without wondering if Juba has you in his sights. Similarly, you could be flying along on a routine Russian recon mission and without warning get blown away by the Ghost of Kyiv.
The Ukrainian air capabilities are attacking the supply line, like the fuel trains on the south. The long column of Russian vehicles outside of Kiev is stuck for several days because logistics. Without fuel it's not going to be anywhere. There're assessments that Russia will run out of supplies to run the war further by this Sunday. At the end the vehicles will likely be just captured.
they are running not out of supplies but also out of equipment. somebody filmed a train full of whatever was state of art 40 years ago at Khabarovsk yesterday. it's 9000km away. https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1499383504265785353
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Russians are self sabotaging it. “Oh darn, the front fell off. Well, let’s turn ourselves in and get some hot food at least”
From some accounts I listened too their morale is quite low.
There's a huge advantage in Ukraine just having enough fighters to contest the skies, even if they don't actively use their planes; it keeps Russia from performing unprotected bombing runs.
One theory is that Ukraine may be running out of armed drones and its small, outnumbered air force may be wary of being shot down by Russian air defence batteries.
Ben Barry from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) suggests the Ukrainians may well be safeguarding what resources they do have in readiness to counter-attack when the Russians get closer to Kyiv
People keep wanting to chalk this up to Russian incompetence. But I feel like a far more likely explanation is electronic sabotage. Planes are complex electronic, connected instruments. They rely heavily on computers and electronic sensors.
As fun as it is to dunk on the Russians for their incompetence here, it seems far more likely to me that it's a sign of the profound competence of the US/NATO at electronic warfare. IMO this explanation accounts for at least half of what's being chalked up to "logistics" failures on the Russian's part.
>As fun as it is to dunk on the Russians for their incompetence here, it seems far more likely to me that it's a sign of the profound competence of the US/NATO at electronic warfare.
As much as I'd like to believe that US Wild Weasel aircraft orbiting outside Ukraine are capable of zapping Russian aircraft inside Ukraine and Russia itself, this does not seem likely.
You could be right, but if you acknowledge that it's possible in principle to do this, why wouldn't we be investing heavily in it? Being able to ground an enemy's air force without appearing to fight them would be an incredibly powerful capability. I think there are a lot of reasons to believe it should be possible, and if it's possible, every reason to believe it would be invested in.
I certainly don't have any evidence to prove it though, so its certainly reasonable to disagree.
No, but some firsthand experience in the cyber-security industry, and enough knowledge of how planes work to know its possible in principle. At least, assuming there are bugs in the onboard software, which i've no doubt there are.
EDIT: Planes are absorbing a tremendous amount of input from their environment at all times, both digital and analog. That input is, in many cases, being processed by software. Just to articulate the model a little further.
Australia has had over the horizon radar for decades. Maybe there is a 2020+ version that is sufficiently fine grained to use for training to the target.
You very well could be right. It just seems to me that the surface area is large, and the value of exploitation is high. Anything from targeting sensors on the plane with lasers, to exploiting ground stations / satellites / IFF systems, to interdicting component supply chains and inserting remotely triggerable flaws. These are just the things that hit my particular mind immediately, but i'm sure there are many other possibilities.
Keep in mind that military aircraft have tons of specialized systems on them that civillian aircraft do not. And further, that countries would be willing to spend, literally, billions of dollars to build systems that could exploit flaws like this. So even for quite exotic ideas like say, designing ground objects with exotic shapes that have radar signatures that trigger flaws in onboard processing software, or whatever.
I'm just making things up here, but there are undoubtedly teams of physicists, avionics experts and cybersecurity experts tasked with studying this, even if just to ensure our systems are not vulnerable to it. It's possible that all that has come to nothing, but it would not surprise me if it hasn't.
More like lasers manipulating sensors on the plane, or MITMing/jamming comms with ground/satellites/IFF systems, or interdicting component supply chains and inserting flaws into chips/sensors/controllers that can be triggered remotely. I don't claim to know exactly what anyone is doing, just that the surface area is large, the value of exploitation is high, and therefore countries would be willing to spend large amounts of money to obtain those capabilities.
Getting tangential but I believe there many armchair people's perception of this war is that is is going slowly, taking longer than 'expected', fully because of this epoch's speed of news cycle. 'Things' now usually take one day, and are forgotten by the mid week. People who follow 'things' are bewildered that a 'thing' is still going that started last week. Something must be broken with it
Both sanction-wise and publicity-wise an ongoing war is a catastrophe for Russia. Also, they invaded from three (!) sides and Kyiv is just about 100km from the border.
There's obviously some propaganda and a thick fog of war going on, but I think we can quite reasonably conclude that this is going far worse for Russia than anyone expected, including Russia.
I don't think that's the case, we have just come out of a pandemic that lasted 2 years. But we also saw Kabul and Afghanistan fall to the Taliban in a day and the Crimea annexation was so quick. There is also the fact that we all thought the Russian Army was a well oiled machine of war. That's why most people are shocked it wasn't an overnight victory, the disparity in power was obvious from the start, that this is day 9 and whilst they are closer to the capital they have suffered heavy, heavy losses. And their tactics and equipment have been shown to be poor, that's even without including their logistics which have been terrible.
I see it differently. From the outset the only realistic solution was vaccination. We have that now, I can't live my life in quarantine, so I get vaccinated and get on with my life.
>There is also the fact that we all thought the Russian Army was a well oiled machine of war.
that's what you've been told at the time when it was required for you to think so, in particular during Trump's presidency due to his stance on NATO.
today you are required to think that Russia is getting its ass kicked, and tomorrow you'll be required to think that Russia must be nuked or else Europe will fall, and the expert opinion will once again change to reflect that.
You must think I am 18/20 years old or something. It may surprise you to know that I remember times before Trump was president. And there wasn't social media to 'guide' my thinking.
There was a leaked pre-written article for some Russian rag that details the "new world" with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine spearheading it together, united.
My pet theory: the thousands of surface to air missiles that we sent Ukraine work extremely well and Russia can’t afford to lose 50-100 fighter jets and more when their objective is to take Kyiv and scalp the Nazi or some other weird fantasy. I think once the Russians have installed a new government/had rigged elections they will leave someone like Lukashenko in charge expecting it will behave like Belarus…
> I think once the Russians have installed a new government/had rigged elections they will leave someone like Lukashenko in charge expecting it will behave like Belarus…
Probably someone more exactly like Viktor Yanukovych.
Third time’s the charm, right? Yanukovych has been kicked out of Ukraine by a revolution twice. Madness to think the result would be different this time.
The Stinger anti-air missiles that the West has been sending to Ukraine have an operational ceiling of around 12,000 feet. This means they can't strike military jets (or commercial aircraft) flying at medium or high altitude.
Flying below 12,000 ft is atypical for a fighter, since it also opens you up to potential AA ground fire and flak. Not to mention gravitational potential energy is something you generally want to have on your side as a fighter. Helicopters are another story of course.
Who are they going to shoot down? There's practically no aircraft in the sky.
The Russian method of war is not to rubbleise like NATO does. Time and again in WW2 the lesson was do not bomb and destroy cities, it turns the destroyed buildings into an urban warfare playground.
So no aircraft to shoot down and no cities to bomb means very little need for an air force.
Of course, NATO could test my theory by sending over a few squadrons of F35s and see if the Russian Air Force makes any moves against them.
Except of course that rubbleising is precisely the Russian strategy, now that collapse/regime change due to lightning strikes has failed. They have no other strategy at this point.
Probably they aren't too bothered by ground equipment and manpower losses, they have plenty to spare.
Ukraine (and indeed NATO if it comes to that) needs be ready to industrialise the destruction of Russian armour and more pertinently artillery. One drone strike is great, but this must be happening at scale.
Precisely. There's no resistance in the air, and Ukrainian air defense is almost non-existent, having suffered lots of damage on day 1. So, there's barely any need for fighters. Note also that Russia tends to bring in lots of mobile air defense units to support the air from the ground (unlike US which usually relies more on fighter jets for the same purpose).
Then, if the point was to carpet-bomb and annihilate the entire territory, NATO-style, it would have been done already. Destroying singled out targets like munition depots or teletowers doesn't require engaging more than a few jets here and there.
It seems like helicopters seem to be heavily relied upon (in providing mobility, recon, convoy support, etc) - but that's a different story.
How can you say this is not their method of war after Chechnya and Aleppo? You simply haven't been paying attention at all.
It is their only method of war if it starts to drag out and they need to break will.
They have been doing it already all throughout Ukraine at a confined scale (many well documented cases) using artillery, just not air. The question is whether they're going to ramp up to full-on Grozny/Aleppo in the coming weeks as they get more desperate. My guess is yes given that they have no other playbook.
My 2 Yen: I wonder if Putin is holding back his fixed-wing aviation as a strategic reserve, so he has some conventional combat power he can commit in case of NATO intervention, before escalating to tactical nukes. He may have assessed that Ukraine could be taken without risking his expensive modern birds (Su-34, Su-35) or any of his big nuke-capable bombers.
This isn't to say the Russian Air Force doesn't have the problems mentioned. Those are all legit issues. I just think there might be some deliberate decision-making (even if we assess that those decisions were erroneous) on top of that.
Part 3 (@33:00) of Oliver Stone's interview has him taking Stone to his situation room ("my functions as Commander-in-Chief") in case you're curious at the level of interaction with MoD.
This sounds very plausible. And not just against NATO I would guess. They've deployed almost their entire active land force to Ukraine leaving their enormously long borders unprotected.
My generally uninformed take on it is that I'm as surprised as anybody. I always thought it was a rule of modern warfare that if you're capable of establishing air superiority, you establish air superiority.
Now modern nations will have an example case to understand what happens if you don’t. I’m going to guess based on what we’re able to see at this point, that no country is going to change their military doctrine based on these new data points, because they aren’t going to be willing to pay the price that seems to have be paid as a result. I could be wrong. It’s not totally clear at this point that Russia is going to be able to pay the price either, so I guess we’ll all find out together.
If you aren’t establishing air superiority and are “missing infantry” (I’m not sure what you mean by this) then… are you describing an air skirmish? Peacetime operations?
The missing infantry part refers to the fact that it seems way too much of the Russian army is tanks, and not enough of it infantry, to protect the tanks from being destroyed.
The current battlefield is entirely based on air superiority. You control the skies, you control the battle.
If air supremacy is established tanks and static artillery become useless. They are sitting ducks.
I am pretty perplexed with what is happening with the Russian armed forces. They seem to be suffering from poor planning, indecision, and poorly maintained equipment.
Poor maintenance and low morale is what it looks like to me. The grunts who are turning themselves in say they thought it was “training” until the last minute. Not sure how much I believe that…
It as if Putin drafted rough plans to attack, but never finalized them. Then, after all that public grandstanding he couldn’t back down without looking like a coward. So he said “fuck it”, and gambled hoping it would be Crimea 2.0.
We didn’t stand up enough to him then, so the bully got emboldened.
> The grunts who are turning themselves in say they thought it was “training” until the last minute.
Take that with a grain of salt. If you research the history of Russian conflicts, stating that they were told it was just training is a common trope of captured Russians (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30549427). It's basically a survival technique. Don't underestimate the indoctrination apparatus of the Russian army. They were sent there to kill, and they know it. Imagine being in 'training' and seeing medical tents + doctors + blood supplies. Give me a break. That doesn't rule out poor planning and/or poor logistics..
Yes, is probably the short answer. Not just due to training, experience, or any particular technology problem, but in fact due to all these things and more. Everything is harder in the sky - the logistics trains are longer, societal and technological depth is more necessary. This is where any rot will first present itself.
> One potential argument is that the VKS fighter fleets are being held in reserve, potentially as a deterrent against direct intervention by NATO forces. This is unlikely to be the case. If the VKS is capable of large-scale combat operations to rapidly establish air superiority over Ukraine, by not doing so, it is, in fact, weakening its potential deterrent value against NATO forces rather than preserving it.
Makes sense if you assume they're being held as a deterrent I guess. I assumed that they were being held in case they were needed for actual combat. I see nothing here that refutes this. I don't think the west really appreciates how realistic (if undesirable) this scenario is in Putin's eyes, to our great peril.
One theory I came across recently was that the Russian IFF system ("Identify Friend or Foe") has been subverted by Ukraine, possibly due to captured vehicles, and that Russia doesn't trust their own IFF system. So, any attack involving air and ground units involves a lot more coordination than it would otherwise, to prevent Russian forces from attacking each other.
Iff is not easy to hack. It is communication between radios/radars on two airborne aircraft. It is very hard to get in the middle of that conversation.
It's not just Russia. Planning air operations is far harder than it looks.
In the initial phases of the UK/French air attacks on Libya in 2011, the French Air Force plus a French carrier ended up only able to combined together sustain a rate of one to two supported ground attack missions per day.
If I recall correctly, the primary bottleneck was planning. Once the US joined in and provided planning support, the rate of French sorties per day went considerably up.
Anyone surprised. Russia may look like a big scary country on the map, but keep in mind they have roughly the same GDP as the state of FLORIDA. Its why they were once described as a gas station with nukes. The nukes are the only thing really scary about Russia, otherwise they are a turning out to be a paper Tiger. In fact if they didnt have nukes I would think other border countries in the east coughChinacough wouldn't hesitate to take their land. If the reports that they tricked their own troops into thinking it was just going to be an exercise (cant tell if thats just propaganda) then ordered them into Ukraine, and the fact that their convoy outside Kiev is totally FUBAR as far as resupply, we are looking at a major blunder here. Why wouldn't you show strong airpower competence to scare the west. I think others are right, this whole thing was likely planned at the top, didnt involve all the competent people it should, and now Putin is looking visibly pissed in his state broadcasts. Authoritarianism doesn't breed competence, its breeds yes men and ass kissers and kelptos and thugs right up until the poopees hit the fan. I think behind the scenes Russia is having a huge crisis of competence.
I've been postulating that last week, when biden was briefed on his "cyber options", that a devastating cyber attack similar to NotPetya took the Russian Air force offline.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadtl;dr appears to be "no, unless they are holding something back".
Russia has every incentive to establish air superiority, and on paper should be more than capable of doing so if it commits to combat operations in large, mixed formations to suppress and hunt down Ukrainian fighters and SAM systems. Instead, the VKS continues to only operate in very small numbers and at low level to minimise the threat from the Ukrainian SAMs. Down low, their situational awareness and combat effectiveness is limited, and they are well within range of the MANPADS such as Igla and Stinger which Ukrainian forces already possess. The numbers of MANPADS are also increasing, as numerous Western countries send supplies to beleaguered Ukrainian forces. To avoid additional losses to MANPADS, sorties continue to be primarily flown at night, which further limits the effectiveness of their mostly unguided air-to-ground weapons.
"While the early VKS failure to establish air superiority could be explained by lack of early warning, coordination capacity and sufficient planning time, the continued pattern of activity suggests a more significant conclusion: that the VKS lacks the institutional capacity to plan, brief and fly complex air operations at scale. There is significant circumstantial evidence to support this, admittedly tentative, explanation."
NATO provides eyes, and Ukrainian air defence provides the missile launch without revealing its position.
By the time the Russian pilot hears the first beep, an Ukrainian SAM would already been travking know of his flight path few minutes prior.
But of course capabilities might be more sophisticate than what's publicly known.
We will they run out on Sunday as said. But it cannot be lost ended without the head of putin. The blood will flow sadly by both sides, until that head roll.
If I were in charge of the air force, and Putin ordered large-scale air superiority attacks against Ukrainians, I wouldn't want to do that. Putin might not have the power to order his air force to launch strikes of aggression.
Dictatorships give the impression of being all-powerful, but dictators need to keep constituents appeased, but that's kind of an illusion. Key constituencies -- quite often the generals -- need to remain appeased.
I expect if this were the case, Russia wouldn't advertise this externally. There is every incentive to maintain a united external front.
This is a war they have been planning for months if not years
While preparing for the invasion, Russians were selling their fuel to locals at the borders in Russia and Belarus. Way to go!
To be fair, the troops apparently didn't know they were preparing for an invasion.
Of course, selling fuel and supplies when deployed for a training mission is still a sign of an appalling failure of discipline in a military force.
The thing is, selling arms under the table (embezzling arms) is a sign of corruption from the highest levels. The grunts aren't stupid - they're looking out for their own interest, because they aren't paid well nor treated well i imagine.
what incentives even exist in the Russian army? this is such a weird situation to extrapolate from
He then went on to fight for the independence of the Chechen Republic. On that note, I wonder if Russia doing poorly in Ukraine might not ignite the fight in Chechnya again.
No air force commander refuses such an order and makes his infantry die because he disagrees with the politics. Even if he did, he would likely be relieved of command the moment after and face court martial. And that's ignoring it is Russia we're talking about.
To oversimplify, in a dictatorship, the dictator serves at the pleasure of the branches of the army, secret service, and police. If a majority believe he's unfit, he's out. Commanders have a lot of autonomy to refuse orders. That kind of infighting is common in China too. It's nearly impossible in a democracy.
Most people at this level don't have a soul or patriotic feelings, so the internal dialog is probably: "I don't give a shit what happens to Russia, I'll find another country to feed onto".
Genuine question: have you spent anytime living there? If so where/how long?
Russia ranked 136th out of 180 in Transparency International's corruption index.
Are you sure that you don’t want to rein in the grand narration just a little bit?
Why are you so hung up on defending Russia?
And in that light the historical line that is being drawn makes even less sense.
> Why are you so hung up on defending Russia?
It’s revealing that you frame or interpret this discussion as being about either attacking or defending Russia. Why is it/ought it to be about that?
I believe this mentality is created by the massive propaganda we have been subjected to since a couple decades.
Russia is famous for corruption, seems a weird thing to defend. Even in the US there are at least some well-connected sons getting seats in fighter jets, and "paid drivers" have existed in Formula 1 since forever. Doesn't seem too far fetched, but right or wrong hardly worth any kind of attack. Additionally I never said the pilots would be incompetent--in my experience when people start responding to accusations that were never made, something else is going on in their head.
For what it's worth, I like Russia. I'm ethnically from a former Soviet state and although I have very little cultural connection to it, whenever I meet Russians anywhere in the world they've been instantly friendly towards me just based on my name. Even with this happening I hope that someday within my lifetime EU/Russian relation can be fully normalized.
You really seem like you'd just be tons of fun at parties.
For this round, expanding an empire just be force is odd, except for Mongolian empire. Usually you start with soft bit. Seems this round is very Mongolian.
Soldiers in the armed forces, in any interaction outside of it, face corruption every day: semi-official bribe lists with local police forces, bribes for administrative procedures, medical and so on.
In corrupt societies, it is hard to opt out of bribery since “market” forces balance out on the assumption that bribe giver can finance them partially through bribe taking. Cutting one leg off the trade makes it fail.
I think it’s naive to believe you can build an island of meritocracy surrounded from all sides by a corrupt system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF9KretXqJw
Do you have a link on an article that I could put though deepl?
1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ycs-youtube-commen...
youtube-dl --write-sub --sub-lang en --skip-download
I translated the subtitles with deepl, it made for a fascinating read!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doru_Davidovici
"As evidence of the State Armament Programme’s implementation until 2015 showed, the Russian defence industry still had not made the leap from ‘dumb-iron’ equipment to twenty-first-century sophistication.
"Russia’s intervention in Syria is a case in point. As [Russian defense analyst and director of the Moscow-based Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies] Ruslan Pukhov argued, the performance of the Russian Air Force in Syria was impressive if compared to the 2008 war with Georgia, where it lost seven aircraft in blue-on-blue incidents within a matter of four days. From an international perspective, however, it’s technological level now matches at best that of the US air force during the 1991 Gulf War a quarter of a century ago. Weaknesses have been visible in Syria, particularly in terms of the sophistication of precision-guided munitions, a shortage of targeting systems, deficiencies in aerial reconnaissance capabilities, and a lack of long-range UAVs and attack drones." --Bettina Renz, Russia's Military Revival 2018, page 80
They were just out shelling the nuclear facility when they could make some strategic strikes.
This seems on point.
This document from 2017 was written by the US military and analyzes and points out weaknesses in the Russian BTG (Battalion Tactical Group) doctrine and has some excellent points that make a lot of what is currently occurring fall into place. https://www.benning.army.mil/armor/earmor/content/issues/201...
>Current Russian state net revenues from energy cannot fund the same modernization period as before.
Basically they can't modernize.
It then goes into the current Russian BTG doctrine and how it leaves armored groups exposed due to a lack of supporting infantry and air.
>The BTG’s may be vulnerable to raids, counterattacks and other surprise movements because reliance on analog C2 limits subordinate units’ ability to understand and react to changes of circumstance.
>A BTG had the entire brigade’s support and enabling resources, but it had only one mechanized-infantry battalion
>According to Russian Army manuals, in the field as many as 50 percent of infantry soldiers can be required for local security and routine administrative tasks. This leaves relatively few infantrymen available for mounted squads. Squads are usually organized ad hoc and are less than fully manned,which makes them less effective and less independent. For opponents, it also means that it requires fewer casualties to neutralize the Russian squads.
>The lack of infantry causes BTG commanders to prefer to isolate urban infantry strongpoints for prolonged sieges instead of assaulting
The document also goes into supply issues that BTGs will likely face.
Basically the current Russian doctrine is ridiculously ineffective. It involves lots of independent battalions of almost pure armor. Which get destroyed consistently due to a lack of supporting infantry. To the point where it's quite possible they'll lose this war. The Russians thought it was effective in Chechnya and Syria and the 2014 war with Ukraine since they simply didn't face significant resistance. All of the above weaknesses are now very apparent however.
One last thing
>The current military and political leaders are the same leaders who introduced the BTG structure; their reputations and careers are closely tied to its success. Instead of moderating BTG rollout and keeping a portion of the Russian Army in a divisional structure to train for high-intensity CAM, Russia’s leaders are accelerating the rate that units convert into BTGs.
Not fast enough. My understanding is the current Western military analyses still predict the Russians will eventually win, it'll just cost them more.
IMHO, if we want to Ukrainians to win, it'll require either some kind of direct military intervention, or giving them control of much more advanced equipment (e.g. cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles, etc.)
So, let this war be finished soon in the same way that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or the US intervention in Vietnam were finished: in defeat without obliteration. Let Putin loose face and be deposed so that a new generation can take over in Russia, preferably one which is not controlled by some globalist loon nor one which has dreams of reinstating some former Russian empire. Let Ukraine become the European nation it claims to be which means they need to rid themselves of corruption. Let the mistakes which were made in the de-sovietification of the former USSR be corrected, get rid of the oligarchs and their cronies. Smoke out Lukashenko from White Russia so that that nation can also learn to stand on its own feet once the Putinistas have been purged.
And for the love of ${$deity} stop with the stupid, braindead anti-everything-that-is-Russian attitude that I see growing around me. I see a Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky concerts being cancelled in the Netherlands, Russian-language children's reading hours in the library in Sweden are cancelled, a university in Italy wanted to ban Dostoyevsky from its curriculum and more of such stupidity. Just stop it already, realise that Russia is part of Europe and will remain so after this war is over. Realise, also, that Dostoyevsky was imprisoned by the then-version of Putin, that Ukrainians are just as enamoured of Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky as Russians and others are, that those Russian-language reading hours in a Swedish city would most likely get the children to dislike Putinism more than that it would encourage them to follow him. If Clancy is to believed one of the bigger insults you could make to a Russian was that he was uncultured - некультурный. Let's show that we are not while making clear that it is Putin and his ilk who represent the barbarians at the gate.
After being potentially devastated by the sanctions and embarassed by the world, there are no guarantees that anyone taking over from Putin would be more reasonable, less nationalistic, or less likely to utilize nuclear strikes. More chaos and instability in Russia after a Putin exit could backfire with a random cast of characters gaining power. A risky roll of your favorite multi-sided dice.
It's also worth noting a Putin victory won't necessarily lead to some kind of stability. For a brief time Ukraine had nukes, but gave them up. The lesson of this invasion to every medium-size power next to a giant will be: if you value your independence, get nukes, and don't give them up.
Honestly? The Russians go home. Putin makes threats, but they're to scare his adversaries into pulling their punches out of fear, while he does what he was always going to do.
If his goal is to rebuild the Soviet empire, it's an automatic failure if he escalates until Moscow is a smoking pit.
Were they? https://www.reuters.com/article/ukraine-crisis-usa-nuclear-e...
Sorta like saying, the burglar didn’t steal from mysecretaccount2’s house, just the garage.
[0]: https://twitter.com/NotWoofers/status/1499527941377732609
[1]: https://twitter.com/NotWoofers/status/1499545373744017424
Either way, why on earth are invaders within the fence line of a nuclear facility. Completely absurd
Anyway if the Russians want to control all the country they can't let a nuclear power plant left alone, it's a strategic asset.
Maybe Russia is worried that Ukraine might have been covertly developing nuclear weapons, and they don't want to give the Ukrainians any more time to hide the evidence.
In WW2, on Okinawa and various other islands, the Japanese had set up nursing stations and other logistics inside natural cave structures, staffed largely by civilians, and of those, largely by women, some with children in tow.
When the Allied forces pushed onto these islands, the Japanese reasoned that if they retreated into these caves and placed the civilians in front of the forces, the Allies wouldn't have the heart to firebomb and/or shoot innocents in order to get to the fighting forces. This reasoning was faulty, as MacArthur and others below him in the CoC ordered the massacre of countless civilians to finish the job.
Facts on the ground are sketchy, but my understanding is that the Ukrainian forces made a similar gamble, that "if we retreat into a nuclear power plant, nobody would be dumb enough to fire on our position here", and that they were as wrong as the Japanese.
This is a common gamble that tacticians make, betting on the better angels of our nature to not do horrible things. But we're barely-evolved monkeys, and this gamble is almost always wrong.
It may "get the job done", but only if the job doesn't require a conscience.
Same goes for Beijing and North Korea.
Honestly, the Russians would be better off with 1950 Chinese style mass conscripted infantry formations with modern weapons, atgm, and manpads.
The sheer rate at which they fired missiles(Cruise? Iskandr?) and the rate at which they were able to cripple anything in sight was scary.
If this is what a reduced capability armed forces can do. I shudder to imagine what a real power can do, and sheer loss of human life and value that humans built would be(is already) heart wrenching.
I think they have weakness in engines as well. It is rumoured that the Chinese stealth fighter J20's biggest weakness is its engine
Another one of their customer country India apparently used American engines in their own fighter jet instead of Russian ones despite higher cost and having operational and maintenance experience with Russian engines.
Interestingly, the Indian variants of Russian fighter jets do integrate a lot of tech from West.
I read somewhere that Soviet-style air defense turn out to be most effective against Soviet-style air forces. Basically Western militaries have never invested heavily in SAMs, but invested heavily in anti-SAM weapons an tactics; while Soviet-style militaries did the opposite. That leaves Soviet-style forces with with very good SAM capabilities and weak air forces without the ability to counter it.
Hm, I will cynically say that it looks like the Russians were actually more interested in defense, while the Americans were more interested in offense.
My country was invaded by Russians in 1968. While it wasn't particularly pleasant, I think it was better than being bombed, or perhaps even, economically starved.
1. Russians won the WW2 using tanks on land, Americans won the WW2 using aircrafts over sea.
2. (If we assume Russians care less about the loss of their troops than Americans.) Attacking another country from the air is more expensive, but safer, than attacking it from the ground.
3. (If we assume Americans are more interested in projecting their force globally than Russians are.) It is easier to move airplanes/missiles/drones around the world on ships than to move heavy mechanized ground troops.
On the other hand, Russians have sometimes led the development of heavy ICBMs and nuclear weapons, but that also seems to be more valuable as a global deterrent rather than something you would randomly use during an invasion.
Have you heard of the stinger, that the Ukrainians are using to great effect? The US also has the patriot and aegis systems which are really good air defense missiles. That’s not including THAAD, etc.
That's not at all what I said. I suppose it would have been a little clearer if I had said "never invested as heavily" in SAMs compared to the Soviets, but I wasn't focusing on the West. I was making a point about Soviet-style forces fighting one another.
Nothing about that implies the West never invested in SAMs or has stopped doing so. It just means they're not as central to its air defense strategy.
> Have you heard of the stinger, that the Ukrainians are using to great effect? The US also has the patriot and aegis systems which are really good air defense missiles. That’s not including THAAD, etc.
Not like the Soviet Union did. The article I'm trying to paraphrase said that SAMs were far more integral to Soviet air defense strategy than they were to Western air defense, which put more emphasis on using fighter aircraft for air defense than having the Army deploy different SAM systems for every need. Because the Soviets relied more on SAMs, then the West had to put more emphasis on counter-SAM weapons (which the Soviets has far less need to do).
Also the article noted that the exception is Western navies, which the article said were in a more similar situation to the Soviet Army. That's why the more capable US SAM systems have naval lineage.
The same author in this video (he was being interviewed, towards the end of the video) mentioned the lack of SEAD compared to the west:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WGcfkqzUI4
"If the VKS had the large-scale organizational capabilities we'd previously assumed, then they'd have a straightforward SEAD approach (involving strength in numbers and some moderate SEAD sophistication), though it might lose aircraft (perhaps due to comparably low SEAD sophistication, I don't know). Then, having eliminated the SAMs, they could fly higher, in larger numbers. So it's weird that they don't do that. This is circumstantial evidence that they aren't capable of this type of SEAD, and this in turn is more evidence for my tentative conclusion that they might be incapable of air operations of more than a few planes."
That's what I got out of the SEAD comments in TFA.
I guess we should look at the cost of the bom for a tank, not what government pays for it.
Not that tanks are cheap but I think manifacturing cost is substantially lower than 10m.
The MiG 21 cost less to procure than a BMP-1 armoured personnel carrier if Wikipedia [1] is to be believed [2]. A BMP is not a tank and can be assumed to be less expensive than one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-21#Cost
[2] which is in this case probably is seeing as how this is not a politically sensitive subject
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millerovo_air_base_attack
But if they can't import the latest and greatest parts to make T-90Ms or T-72B3Ms....they have such a huge stockpile of "good enough" older T-72s in storage, they can just use those with a minor refurbishment period. With what we've seen of their tactics and (lack of) skills, it won't seriously impact their battlefield results to field early 1980s-era tank technology.
Against M1 Abrams it isn’t even going to be a battle and they don’t have enough Armatas to make a difference.
I question the use of tanks for anything beyond a support / artillery role at this point. All tanks seem highly vulnerable to both air and Javelin-like AT.
I think there was a US report a few years back about how modern tanks are no longer really the centerpiece of the battlefield anymore. Similar to how the battleship was thought to be the centerpiece at the beginning of WW2 and then it quickly became apparent it was the aircraft carrier.
That's due more to shit tactics (exacerbated by the early spring thaw that has limited off-road movement) than to any specific limitations of their hardware. There is VERY little footage of dismounted infantry screening Russian tanks, or competent employment of other recon assets. Look up some ANNA News footage embedded with the Syrian Arab Army in Jhobar, a Damascus suburb. It took the Syrians years of errors/casualties, but they eventually learned to storm dug-in fanatical enemies in urban environments, and they did it with crappier T-72s than the Russians are fielding now. There is a plethora of modern ATGMs dumped into Syrian insurgent hands too.
>>>Against M1 Abrams it isn’t even going to be a battle
That's a crew quality issue as well. A T-90 or T-72B3 is absolutely a threat to an Abrams.
>>>I question the use of tanks for anything beyond a support / artillery role at this point.
Increasing urbanization/population densities worldwide make sweeping wars of maneuver across open terrain less viable. Tanks are useful in urban environments, but require well-trained soldiers experienced in combined arms (German Kampfgruppe in Stalingrad, US Army-Marine teams in Fallujah).
>>>All tanks seem highly vulnerable to both air and Javelin-like AT.
As my sister comment touches on, this is changing as tank protection moves away from thick slabs of passive armor, to every tank fielding active protection systems such as the Israeli Trophy ( https://youtu.be/6aA9HsmLHBQ ). <-- also some of the coolest footage of shaped charge warheads detonating.
Combine an APS with a laser air-defense system either on another vehicle (current tech: https://www.armyrecognition.com/weapons_defence_industry_mil... ) or on the tank's turret (future tech), and these threats are moderately neutralized.
Then the advantages of the main battle tank will be retained: mobility, protection, and firepower.
The role of a Wild Weasel aircraft is to tempt enemy radar operators into turning on their units and start transmitting. Whereupon the aircraft would launch an anti-radiation (radio-homing, not "nuclear") missile at the transmitter. The USAF has the AGM-88 and the Russians have the Kh-58 and the Kh-31 to do this. Note that all this happens while the Wild Weasel is being attacked by surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft fire.
As to why the Russians are being so ineffective at SEAD in Ukraine - no idea but I'm not going to give them any improvement suggestions.
In a serious peer-to-peer total conflict the AWACS would be shot down and the Ukrainians wouldn't be able to get away with much of anything.
I would wonder more about space-based observation, either ELINT or active radar.
If so, why does the US still rely on AWACS?
Physically, yes. There are plenty of radar satellites.
Power is a problem. AWACS radars draw dozens of kilowatts. You very much want lots of power in military radar, since you're often illuminating something that can be engineered to have a small RCS or is actively spoofing the return signal. This forces you to have big solar panels, big radiator panels for electronics waste heat, big batteries so you can actually run the radar in the 50% of the orbit when you're in Earthshade, big antenna for high gain, big fuel tanks because you have so much atmospheric drag that you're reboosting all the time. An AWACS satellite would be bus-sized, if not bigger.
This hypothetical AWACS satellite would also have the problem that it would have a perfectly predictable orbital track, so you could target it with a very high gain antenna for jamming. And, of course, antisatellite missiles exist, and AWACS birds would badly tempt future adversaries to make yet more orbital debris.
Some of these problems could be mitigated with a larger constellation, which you would want anyway so you can run lower altitudes and (as you note) better coverage. Unfortunately, running a Starlink-style megaconstellation with hardware purchased from military aerospace contractors would cost hundreds of trillions of dollars.
Several NRO birds are known to use synthetic aperture radar, (LACROSSE/ONYX) but almost certainly not for detecting aircraft in flight. Others are for detecting radiated signals. (NOSS) For civilian (-ish) attempts to launch surveillance megaconstellations, see PlanetScope: https://www.planet.com/products/planet-imagery/
It's only targeting information if it can be used to attack, which is not what we're talking about here.
edit: not awacs but gives and idea of the monitoring they willing to have public
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae01d1,ae01d5,ae01d0,ae...
It’s clear there is a lot of other kit flying there too, judging by the number of aerial refuelling planes (which show up on civilian trackers).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt5j2mrXLks
The AWACS normally monitor Russian aircraft during peace in any case, in order to gather info about how they operate. These flights today are a goldmine of intel, as it shows how the Russian Aviation forces operate in a real conflict.
They were desperate to read those. /s
Sort of a monkeys writing Shakespeare thing. It may not be of value, but why take the chance of your conscience or nationality dictates neutrality.
It's probably why they're not as effective as we thought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flak_tower
[thank you for the clarification --they had R.A.D.A.R. but apparently it was behind Allies' tech]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kammhuber_Line
While electronic warfare was still in relative infancy, radio and RADAR jamming and chaff (known then to the Allies as "Window") were widely used. However, prior to the widespread development and use of guided weapons (e.g. homing anti-radiation missiles) it was very difficult to precisely strike small SEAD targets (semi-mobile RADAR units, AAA batteries) without needing to first close within range of low-level AAA defenses.
The Allies did use bombing raids on Luftwaffe airfields as a way to draw out fighters, as well as wide-ranging fighter sweeps that would attempt to catch fighters on the ground. But these had serious limitations: the Germans had very effective short-range AAA deployed around their airfields which inflicted serious losses on ground-attack missions, and airfields at the time were very difficult to damage. Especially prior to the widespread use of jet aircraft with higher takeoff and landing speeds and weights, an airfield could basically be just that - a field - and filling in bomb craters to return a runway to active use was straightforward. That means the only effective target was the planes on the ground themselves, and without guided munitions the only way to effectively target airplanes on the ground was to strike at low altitude and thus come within range of the strong AAA defenses. This would begin to change later in the war with the growing use of (unguided) rockets that allowed for something of a standoff distance (compared to dive bombing), but nothing like the reach of a modern PGM.
I think there's a necessary combination of factors that came together in the Vietnam and Arab-Israeli wars to give birth to SEAD in its modern form:
- Strong enemy air defenses in the form of SAM batteries
- Unacceptable attrition due to said defenses
- Increased weapon accuracy to allow effective targeting of specific threats (e.g. a specific enemy RADAR or SAM site) either via homing (Shrike/Standard ARM) or TV/laser guidance (Bullpup/Walleye/Paveway)
- Early integrated circuits allowing for more complicated and effective electronic warfare equipment (warning receivers, jammers, homing seekers, etc)
So the risk of an expensive bomber was greater than the risk of distributed Anti Aircraft guns, which are cheap in comparison to bombers.
The hypothesis seems plausible to me. Feel free to let me know where this information may be incorrect so I can update my knowledge.
In case of nato, if it was a defensive one, it would play very differently because russians counter air superiority with their AD, they give up on controlling the skies and are happy with shooting the enemy.
That kind of thinking seems implausible (i.e. he feels tightly bound by some contrived definition to hold back his air force, but not his army).
It's far more plausible that the "special operation" language is a propaganda smokescreen. More specifically a domestic propaganda smokescreen, since they've very suddenly made it very illegal to call it anything else.
Let's call a spade a spade.
What rational reason would the Russians have for being able to establish air superiority, but preferring not to do so?
They might think of causalities in terms of money, and not lives.
The only way that works is if the air force itself is thinking in terms of money irrespective of the larger picture, but I'd find that surprising.
If you are positioned to do a good job continuing to interfere with the resupply, that might be a favor to Russia, even though it might feel good.
In other words, the state of Russian security is literally nothing but threat of nuclear war. What are the odds those would be as poorly functioning as the rest of the forces?
Get outta here with that. OP asked for a good source. Not fairytales.
It's an ideal bit of propaganda to have though.
If the Ukranians pull through this, the 'Ghost of Kyiv' will be utterly mythologized. There will be movies, video games, statues, restaurants, brands of beer etc..
They are straight up heroes.
I hope they bring the surviving winners to national capitols so they can have parade. They deserve 'Ending of Star Wars' kind of hero status.
Sources:
(1) https://www.gamingbible.co.uk/news/viral-footage-of-ghost-of...
(2) Google/YouTube etc
Any links to read?
https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1499872184382234636
https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1499822066098655234
And with regards to supplies, yesterday, accidentally, due to electrical short in car (official version) blew up russian ammo depot in kursk region...https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1499761900959289347
From some accounts I listened too their morale is quite low.
https://www.aerosociety.com/news/air-war-over-ukraine-the-fi...
But then you risk getting hit by sams. And you're back at the article we're commenting.
Ben Barry from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) suggests the Ukrainians may well be safeguarding what resources they do have in readiness to counter-attack when the Russians get closer to Kyiv
Unlikely to be the problem. Ukraine just received more Bayraktar drones from Turkey. And they'll receive more after that.
As fun as it is to dunk on the Russians for their incompetence here, it seems far more likely to me that it's a sign of the profound competence of the US/NATO at electronic warfare. IMO this explanation accounts for at least half of what's being chalked up to "logistics" failures on the Russian's part.
As much as I'd like to believe that US Wild Weasel aircraft orbiting outside Ukraine are capable of zapping Russian aircraft inside Ukraine and Russia itself, this does not seem likely.
I certainly don't have any evidence to prove it though, so its certainly reasonable to disagree.
EDIT: Planes are absorbing a tremendous amount of input from their environment at all times, both digital and analog. That input is, in many cases, being processed by software. Just to articulate the model a little further.
Keep in mind that military aircraft have tons of specialized systems on them that civillian aircraft do not. And further, that countries would be willing to spend, literally, billions of dollars to build systems that could exploit flaws like this. So even for quite exotic ideas like say, designing ground objects with exotic shapes that have radar signatures that trigger flaws in onboard processing software, or whatever.
I'm just making things up here, but there are undoubtedly teams of physicists, avionics experts and cybersecurity experts tasked with studying this, even if just to ensure our systems are not vulnerable to it. It's possible that all that has come to nothing, but it would not surprise me if it hasn't.
If logistics of the ground forces is a challenge (https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/03/04/why-a-huge-russi...), logistics of the airforce would be a disaster.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30038951-the-modern-russ...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40653204-armies-of-russi...
There's obviously some propaganda and a thick fog of war going on, but I think we can quite reasonably conclude that this is going far worse for Russia than anyone expected, including Russia.
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9939/kyiv-to-fall-to-rus...
It doesn't seem to be going that bad as some would make you believe.
In comparison, took poland a month to fall from germany and ussr combined with much larger armies on both sides.
Not really; the most recent wave is subsiding and we’ve (as a nation, not all of us as individuals) just decided we don't care anymore.
that's what you've been told at the time when it was required for you to think so, in particular during Trump's presidency due to his stance on NATO.
today you are required to think that Russia is getting its ass kicked, and tomorrow you'll be required to think that Russia must be nuked or else Europe will fall, and the expert opinion will once again change to reflect that.
Kabul might have fallen in a day but the process of the Taliban gaining control over Afghanistan took significantly longer than a day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan_conflict_(1978%E2%...
This map shows dates on which various cities fell under the control of the Taliban and there are dates going back into June and July ...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/2021_Tal...
Safe to say things did not go according to plan.
Probably someone more exactly like Viktor Yanukovych.
Flying below 12,000 ft is atypical for a fighter, since it also opens you up to potential AA ground fire and flak. Not to mention gravitational potential energy is something you generally want to have on your side as a fighter. Helicopters are another story of course.
The Russian method of war is not to rubbleise like NATO does. Time and again in WW2 the lesson was do not bomb and destroy cities, it turns the destroyed buildings into an urban warfare playground.
So no aircraft to shoot down and no cities to bomb means very little need for an air force.
Of course, NATO could test my theory by sending over a few squadrons of F35s and see if the Russian Air Force makes any moves against them.
Why would you not do that first.
Probably they aren't too bothered by ground equipment and manpower losses, they have plenty to spare.
Ukraine (and indeed NATO if it comes to that) needs be ready to industrialise the destruction of Russian armour and more pertinently artillery. One drone strike is great, but this must be happening at scale.
Then, if the point was to carpet-bomb and annihilate the entire territory, NATO-style, it would have been done already. Destroying singled out targets like munition depots or teletowers doesn't require engaging more than a few jets here and there.
It seems like helicopters seem to be heavily relied upon (in providing mobility, recon, convoy support, etc) - but that's a different story.
It is their only method of war if it starts to drag out and they need to break will.
They have been doing it already all throughout Ukraine at a confined scale (many well documented cases) using artillery, just not air. The question is whether they're going to ramp up to full-on Grozny/Aleppo in the coming weeks as they get more desperate. My guess is yes given that they have no other playbook.
Here is one of the many examples:
https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1498940319211130881
Or are you just repeating whatever history has been written?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grozny_(1999–2000)
Plenty of photo and video evidence is available.
Bombing everything is the Russian way. That's why they're carpet bombing kindergartens, apartment blocks, hospitals, &c.
They're just not doing it from the sky because they don't have the ability to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpet_bombing
This isn't to say the Russian Air Force doesn't have the problems mentioned. Those are all legit issues. I just think there might be some deliberate decision-making (even if we assess that those decisions were erroneous) on top of that.
Part 3 (@33:00) of Oliver Stone's interview has him taking Stone to his situation room ("my functions as Commander-in-Chief") in case you're curious at the level of interaction with MoD.
It's not that simple when you're also missing infantry.
If air supremacy is established tanks and static artillery become useless. They are sitting ducks.
I am pretty perplexed with what is happening with the Russian armed forces. They seem to be suffering from poor planning, indecision, and poorly maintained equipment.
It as if Putin drafted rough plans to attack, but never finalized them. Then, after all that public grandstanding he couldn’t back down without looking like a coward. So he said “fuck it”, and gambled hoping it would be Crimea 2.0.
We didn’t stand up enough to him then, so the bully got emboldened.
Take that with a grain of salt. If you research the history of Russian conflicts, stating that they were told it was just training is a common trope of captured Russians (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30549427). It's basically a survival technique. Don't underestimate the indoctrination apparatus of the Russian army. They were sent there to kill, and they know it. Imagine being in 'training' and seeing medical tents + doctors + blood supplies. Give me a break. That doesn't rule out poor planning and/or poor logistics..
Makes sense if you assume they're being held as a deterrent I guess. I assumed that they were being held in case they were needed for actual combat. I see nothing here that refutes this. I don't think the west really appreciates how realistic (if undesirable) this scenario is in Putin's eyes, to our great peril.
Apparently Russian forces are having some difficulty with IFF, if this is accurate: https://twitter.com/andersostlund/status/1499823866893512708
In the initial phases of the UK/French air attacks on Libya in 2011, the French Air Force plus a French carrier ended up only able to combined together sustain a rate of one to two supported ground attack missions per day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opération_Harmattan
If I recall correctly, the primary bottleneck was planning. Once the US joined in and provided planning support, the rate of French sorties per day went considerably up.
What if we just didn’t need these soldiers or nukes anymore?