Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 791 posts

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#231

Post by thereddaikon »

PaulHoule wrote: post #3

They are afraid of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buk_missile_system a very good technology that the Soviet Union developed which punches above its weight in situations like the Ukraine war because the mobile radars are hard to suppress with these methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppression_of_Enemy_Air_Defen... I have seen a huge number of Buks in various conditions in video footage from the war, one of them wa…

Buk isn't a "cheap and cheerful" alternative to S-300. Soviet air defense doctrine was a multilayered approach featuring systems at almost every organizational level from infantry squad up to theater. Buk and S-300 serve at different organizational levels. Both are competent systems and ironically are probably more effective against Soviet derived air forces than western ones.

Starting in WW2 and moving forward each side took a very different evolutionary path in terms of air power and air defense. The west relied far more on combat air craft for air defense because that's what worked on the western front. The soviets had a very different experience in the war and had to fight while being under constant attack from German airpower through most of the war. So they focused on giving their army its own air defense capability.

Fast forward 80 years and western militaries will have a few SAM systems like the larger patriot and the Stringer MANPADS but will primarily rely on fighters to clear the skies. While the Russians have a SAM for every situation and a much smaller tactical air force. The west has also since Vietnam spent a lot of effort on defeating Soviet style SAM systems with improved SEAD tactics and equipment whereas it was never a concern for the Russians because there isn't much in the way of SAMs to suppress.

For those reasons you end up with the ironic twist of Russian SAMs being especially effective against Russian aircraft because they didn't prepare to counter their own systems. They DO have anti-radiation missiles and strike aircraft but not as many as the west and their doctrine is not nearly as well practiced.

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#232

Post by helloworld11 »

gamblor956 wrote: post #151
blast wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is the case, why would officials and experts be "stumped"? This seems like the obvious explanation.

The "stumped" is not actually in the article. FTA: the issue is that Russia made a huge show of force at the start of the invasion but has apparently held back from actually using much of it (by air or ground). This war could have been over the day it started if Russia had used maximal force, and the conservative approach their actually using maximizes risks and casualties. And that's what has the experts confused: t…

>And so experts are trying to figure out what calculus went into Russia's invasion planning (assuming there was a coherent strategy going in, which is not a given in the post-Trump world).

Because there was a much greater absence of incoherent strategies by political and military leaders in the world prior to Trump being president of one specific country? No real fan of the man but the need to cram in a Trump-hate reference for nearly any context sometimes becomes absurd.

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#233

Post by Tarragon »

guynamedloren wrote: post #142
guyromm wrote: post #42

I believe they were working under the assumption it would be a walk in the park, once the central government was captured or killed. To strengthen this assumption here's a canned article which was likely meant to be published had things gone according to plan, but pulled, since they hadn't. https://web.archive.org/web/20220226224717/https://ria.ru/20... RIA is a state owned news agency. Why precisely they thought the…

Thanks for sharing. That article is disorienting! How'd you find it?

Its existence was reported widely on major news sites, even Boing Boing!.

There's a ton of reporting right now easy to miss important while trying to drink from the firehose.

I first saw it when a friend sent me a link to this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/Tom_deWaal/status/1498310064117059585

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#234

Post by stouset »

UltraViolence wrote: post #199
ceejayoz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that was the case, the mentioned 40-mile convoy heading to Kiev would have been hit by now, no? Not necessarily. That's likely to be a target-rich, but well-defended area. As long as it's not moving - especially given rumors of fuel troubles - there may be better things for the Ukranian air force to tackle, like helicopters moving troops around.

No, this convoy would be an obvious strafing target. I'm disappointed that the Ukrainians didn't even attempt it. Or we haven't heard about it.

Strafing implies—again—flying low over a potentially heavily-defended target. If even a handful of ground troops in that convoy are carrying MANPADs it would be suicide, and that's to say nothing of self-propelled anti-aircraft guns that are almost certainly accompanying the convoy.

Again, there are probably far more urgent targets for the Ukrainian Air Force than a convoy that hasn't moved in days.

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#235

Post by ProjectArcturis »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #169

Yeah, I was under the impression pre-Ukraine that Russia was an "nth generation" fighter supplier, and therefore should have air superiority almost by default. I was corrected that nobody seems to buy Russia's offerings, and those that were made are basically for show and not in mass production. I also realized that air superiority, as in expensive jets attacking from distance and altitude, might not matter if the en…

Ukraine only has about 20 drones, and they are optimized for air to surface strikes, not air-to-air combat. Drones are much cheaper than fighter jets but they're not cheap enough for Ukraine to mass-produce (or purchase) them in the thousands.

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#237

Post by mhh__ »

WalterBright wrote: post #124
mstipetic wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder how they developed things like that in the 70s. Right now I don’t know a single engineer that could even know how to begin to develop a system like that. I feel like most of them would try and throw a neural net at the problem and call it a day.

Heat seeking missiles started development in 1940s. In the US, they began as an unfunded rogue project. The infrared guidance system was simple and very successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-9_Sidewinder

One thing a lot of people forget because war movies don't show them, is that by the end of the war allied and German aircraft were absolutely loaded with electronics.

The story of Radar on the ground is well known, but the story of systems like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2S_(radar) (so named apparently because it was a smell that no one had discovered before) is not so well known.

Similarly a lot of these British efforts were more at risk to their own commanders that the Germans at the beginning, because the engineers were having to go through utterly ridiculous hoops to justify basic physics to their superiors. Sometimes their scientific superiors...

https://youtu.be/GJCF-Ufapu8 is a very very good documentary about this kind of thing. Made before the scientists were dead, so lots of gossip.

Randall and Boot should be known by more people, but magnetrons are not as awesome as the nuclear bomb.

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#238

Post by SyzygistSix »

oh_sigh wrote: post #82
whimsicalism wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia absolutely has the air power to pull it off, you clearly haven't seen Syria. My guess is that they have, correctly, anticipated that mass casualties of white civilians would play very badly internationally and domestically. e: I'm downvoted.. for what? It's obvious that the ethnicity of the victim matters for both domestic and international perception, all you need to do is look at a bit of media coverage of r…

I downvoted you because this line of logic is deployed, I believe, by race obsessed westerners who are privately fuming that a shooting war has sidelined their culture war for a few weeks. "Don't forget about me and the things I care about!" Just because a talking head or two makes those claims does not mean it is all of the sudden the truth. If Russia was worried about the looks of white civilian casualties, they wo…

Regardless of race, plenty of people have brought up that this is about as popular to many Russians as the US invading Canada would be.

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#239

Post by thriftwy »

gamblor956 wrote: post #151
blast wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is the case, why would officials and experts be "stumped"? This seems like the obvious explanation.

The "stumped" is not actually in the article. FTA: the issue is that Russia made a huge show of force at the start of the invasion but has apparently held back from actually using much of it (by air or ground). This war could have been over the day it started if Russia had used maximal force, and the conservative approach their actually using maximizes risks and casualties. And that's what has the experts confused: t…

There's a consideration that Russia wants to actually minimize civilian deaths, because unlike Syria, territories of Ukraine will never stop neighbouring Russia. Different pieces of doctrine may apply.

But I'm not sure how it maps to observable absense of air force. Prolonging the conflict will obviously cause more civilian deaths and suffering.

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#240

Post by PaulHoule »

thereddaikon wrote: post #231
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

They are afraid of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buk_missile_system a very good technology that the Soviet Union developed which punches above its weight in situations like the Ukraine war because the mobile radars are hard to suppress with these methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppression_of_Enemy_Air_Defen... I have seen a huge number of Buks in various conditions in video footage from the war, one of them wa…

Buk isn't a "cheap and cheerful" alternative to S-300. Soviet air defense doctrine was a multilayered approach featuring systems at almost every organizational level from infantry squad up to theater. Buk and S-300 serve at different organizational levels. Both are competent systems and ironically are probably more effective against Soviet derived air forces than western ones. Starting in WW2 and moving forward each…

You are right about more emphasis on fighters in the U.S. Also the U.S. put its best anti-aircraft missiles on ships.
Post reply on HN