Before realizing that there is natural Gas west of Crimea I thought: Why is a Ukrain NATO membership a risk for Russia, there is no change that in Europe NATO would attack Russia, as European NATO members would not allow it. That is except if Russia expects to be in a war against NATO in the not to long future. (Not necessary start the war though). This behaviour could also fit into this argument, i.e. losing a lot b…
What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
361–370 of 791 posts
Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#362I guess everyone's weighing in with their view, so why not? Firstly, we should be mindful that the fog of war is now in play, and a good amount of what we think we know is unverifiable. With that caveat out of the way... It seems that the Russian soldiers are making efforts to avoid attacking civilians directly. Counterexamples exist and could be explained by rogue units, incompetence, or hot-blooded revenge on local…
Let's face it, Russian airforce, russian army and russian equipment suck, but are good enough in this situation.
The Emperor Putler has no clothes.
Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#363I guess everyone's weighing in with their view, so why not? Firstly, we should be mindful that the fog of war is now in play, and a good amount of what we think we know is unverifiable. With that caveat out of the way... It seems that the Russian soldiers are making efforts to avoid attacking civilians directly. Counterexamples exist and could be explained by rogue units, incompetence, or hot-blooded revenge on local…
I don't even see how (b) is going to work at this point--with the massive flow of weapons and money that is coming from the West, and NATO safe havens on the borders, Russia will be playing whack-a-mole against insurgency forever no matter how much force they use. Imagine if the Iraq or Afghanistan insurgencies had had access to an endless supply of top-of-the-line weapons, orders of magnitude more funding, and 'safe…
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Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
A combination of 1 & 3 seems highly likely in my uninformed opinion. Economically, losing aircraft will make a war very expensive very quickly. Losing large numbers of top of the line aircraft will severely harm Russian military aircraft exports. With Europe closing its airspace there aren't many valid approach paths into Ukraine, or ways to get out of Ukraine should things go south. Russia has few stealth aircraft.…
I've often suspected that the F-35 was so expensive only a handful could be built, and would not be risked in combat because it was too expensive to replace.
Curiously I wonder if a similar problem is occurring with SA-400 missiles and other Russian air defenses. They may be too expensive to shoot at low cost drones such as the bayaktar.
Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#365I guess everyone's weighing in with their view, so why not? Firstly, we should be mindful that the fog of war is now in play, and a good amount of what we think we know is unverifiable. With that caveat out of the way... It seems that the Russian soldiers are making efforts to avoid attacking civilians directly. Counterexamples exist and could be explained by rogue units, incompetence, or hot-blooded revenge on local…
>> and the order to avoid targeting civilians implies restraint on use of indiscriminate bombing
they do not. Their policy is not pro-civilian at all. These are facts that you can see on the streets, no fog of war here. They are are bombing residential areas for DAYS without stopping. And I know, my best friends are in Kyiv and Kharkiv how.
Also there was a missile strike on the railway in Kyiv where people are evacuated. Civilian people.
Not sure why you think they are pro-civilian even on some level.
Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have footage of cluster bombs striking civilian apartment buildings in Kharkiv: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZuKEwuZznw
There are counter claims that that building was being used for recruitment for the Azov battalion.
That’s what they said about a different building that got bombed in Kharkiv, a University Economics building, that the intended target was “Azov Battalion” across the street. They can’t seriously be bombing many different buildings and claiming they’re all “Azov Battalion.” Azov mainly operated around Mariupol too, not Kharkiv.
Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#367I guess everyone's weighing in with their view, so why not? Firstly, we should be mindful that the fog of war is now in play, and a good amount of what we think we know is unverifiable. With that caveat out of the way... It seems that the Russian soldiers are making efforts to avoid attacking civilians directly. Counterexamples exist and could be explained by rogue units, incompetence, or hot-blooded revenge on local…
I don't even see how (b) is going to work at this point--with the massive flow of weapons and money that is coming from the West, and NATO safe havens on the borders, Russia will be playing whack-a-mole against insurgency forever no matter how much force they use. Imagine if the Iraq or Afghanistan insurgencies had had access to an endless supply of top-of-the-line weapons, orders of magnitude more funding, and 'safe…
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Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#368Almost everyone underestimating Putin. Probably there’s more than meets the eye. For sure a lot of wishful thinking in western views. Putin never lost a war. Not defending him, just noting that the “good guys” don’t always win.
Putin's never really fought a war though, so he would be hard pressed to have won any. The conflicts Russia has engaged in during his reign have been small affairs where there was basically never any real military resistance against Russia. Each of those conflicts was fait accompli as soon as it started.
Ukraine is a different beast. Its a country with a regular army that has spent the last 8 years undergoing a rapid modernization process for said army. They have 44 million people, and lots of western support.
Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see why an official would publicly broadcast active wartime capabilities and tactics that might not be known. And, there's a strong possibility that we're experiencing some psyops here, to make the Russians appear incompetent. There's an active war. If history has taught us anything, psyops is as sure as death, in war.
> I don't see why an official would publicly broadcast active wartime capabilities and tactics that might not be known. That explains the anonymous officials not agreeing with this stance. That doesn't explain the non-government experts not agreeing that this is the reason though. They don't have any special knowledge and wouldn't be telling the Russians anything they didn't already know. > And, there's a strong poss…
Re: psyops, Russia has many of the same weaknesses as China, in that their practitioners cannot conceive of an independent, actively contradicting and adversarial infosphere.
Inside Russia or China, psyops is muting whoever says something you don't like, and deciding on and disseminating the message of the day.
Outside of Russia or China, that looks very different, with everyone opining on your message whenever they feel like it, in addition to virality being a huge component of message reach. That's a very different skillset to navigate successfully.
Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#370Earlier 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.
I'm guessing most mechanical and/or ECE programs still teach "control systems", and that might be where one begins, along with some "signals and systems" and RF classes. I suspect that the engineers you know are more computer science "engineers" than people who went through a traditional engineering core.
And there's a fair cohort of us (note, US-based perspective here) that _did_ go through the traditional electrical engineering education, learned the hard math and analog/mixed-signal engineering needed to put together something like this, dipped our toes in the industry, and then realized all our CS buddies had double our base salaries for objectively easier work.
We've strongly disincentivized gaining mid-level expertise on hard engineering.