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

reuters.com

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

#461

Post by smallerfish »

dymk wrote: post #300
smallerfish wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a lack of imagination, honestly. Per your sibling comment Ukraine needs all the resources it can get

For some reason, I feel like assistance in the effort from nazis would actually be a net harm to the cause.

If you have a limited headcount, a country invading you, and a violent bunch of nationalists who want to fight the invaders, you're going to turn them down?

Also, consider: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-stops-short-bannin...

And: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/capitol-riot-january-6-military...

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

#462

Post by [deleted] »

google234123 wrote: post #381
danenania wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yo be fair, those insurgencies did kind of have access to safe zones (Pakistan is next to Afghanistan) and a good supply of weapons which definitely helped them.

[deleted]

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

#463

Post by JumpCrisscross »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #449
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russia has ~half of the world's nuclear arsenal If this is the state of their conventional military, it raises questions about the state of their nuclear deterrent. In any case, if China wanted Siberian resources, fomenting a breakaway region would be cleaner than invading.

>If this is the state of their conventional military, it raises questions about the state of their nuclear deterrent. A scary fucking thought. i.e. some of them will stay in silos, but others will be partially airworthy. >In any case, if China wanted Siberian resources, fomenting a breakaway region would be cleaner than invading. This would result in a nuclear exchange.

> This would result in a nuclear exchange

Possibly. But the exchange would occur on Russian soil. China is more than capable of covertly supporting separatists. Hell, it might not even have to. Just prime the pump and then let the West take over.

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

#464

Post by glogla »

yks wrote: post #270
jl6 wrote: post #261

I 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…

This is a war of hatred towards Ukrainians from Putin. Therefore he's both 1) not expecting resistance because enemies are dehumanized and weak according to his worldview, 2) probably ready to start genocide if enemies resist too much, after all, Holodomor happened less than a century ago.

Reading his speech, both the one before the invasion and the leaked one that was supposed to go up after victory confirms this. Putins objective is genocide.

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

#465

Post by sbmthakur »

Cd00d wrote: post #353
jl6 wrote: post #261

I 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…

suzerainty You can't just lob a hundred dollar word out like that! I spent several moments trying to figure out what your typo was before allowing the possibility that you didn't have one. a relationship in which one state or other polity controls the foreign policy and relations of a tributary state, while allowing the tributary state to have internal autonomy

I would have done the same had I not played Civ 6.

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

#466

Post by redisman »

csee wrote: post #456
bryananderson wrote: post #424

From what I can gather from a week of obsessively following military experts’ explanations of the conflict, there seem to be two main factors at play. One is the Russian choice of overall military tactics, which is derived from their political goals. While we can’t know exactly what it is, we can assume that Russia plans to impose some sort of political settlement on Ukraine (could be anything from puppet government…

Do you think Putin wants to find a negotiated solution right now, or he's still all-in on the outcome?

I guess he could ask the admin to resign and bring back the old president but I’m not sure what the chances of short term success there would be

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

#467

Post by simonh »

littlestymaar wrote: post #453
danenania wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Russia doesn't have a big track military track record in recent years, but there's one thing that they have proven to do really well: leveling a city to the ground while slaughtering the civilians who didn't flee. Having the Ukrainian legitimate government agree to surrender to save Kiev (or “just” Khariv) from such a fate isn't completely impossible to imagine. And giving infantry weapons isn't going to be enough to…

That thing is only really useful against static, or near static high value targets. Against insurgents dispersed across the countryside with Javelins the weapon itself is effectively useless while the aircraft delivering it is still vulnerable.

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

#468

Post by caycep »

Cd00d wrote: post #353
jl6 wrote: post #261

I 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…

suzerainty You can't just lob a hundred dollar word out like that! I spent several moments trying to figure out what your typo was before allowing the possibility that you didn't have one. a relationship in which one state or other polity controls the foreign policy and relations of a tributary state, while allowing the tributary state to have internal autonomy

Play more Civ 6! ;)

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

#469

Post by tablespoon »

jihadjihad wrote: post #394
tablespoon wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I speculate that Russian airforce weaponry is not generally high-precision, and the order to avoid targeting civilians implies restraint on use of indiscriminate bombing. Again, we've seen counterexamples which could be explained by all of the above reasons, plus the possibility of friendly fire from failed Ukrainian air defences. That doesn't explain this, though: > Vastly outmatched by Russia's military, in terms…

I agree, and it might be the case that since they lost any element of surprise due to their moves being telegraphed by Western intelligence, it greatly undermined any speed they were hoping to make use of.

> I agree, and it might be the case that since they lost any element of surprise due to their moves being telegraphed by Western intelligence, it greatly undermined any speed they were hoping to make use of.

It's unclear to me how much of that time Ukraine used to prepare. If they did, they didn't telegraph it.

What I read was the Russian amphibious landing in the south was done 30-40 miles away from the target city (or kilometers, can't remember the unit). Apparently they wanted the space to get organized. However that meant the city had extra time to prepare after the actual invasion started.

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

#470

Post by vintermann »

spacemark wrote: post #434
vintermann wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its easy - imagine massive, gargantuan corruption. Well, it's not as if the US military industrial complex has nothing of that? I think the problem isn't corruption alone, but the combination of corruption and all the corrupt trying hard to put their own eggs elsewhere than Russia's basket. Working with a corrupt authoritarian leader can be profitable, but you really want to have a plan B for when SHtF. US corrupt…

I think you underestimate the extent of corruption in Russia. The US doesn't even come remotely close. You can look up corruption indexes, Russia is near most corrupt, US somewhere in the bottom quartile iirc. A quick example from my industry - roughly 1/3 of the ~USD $3 billion spent on the new Russian spaceport is unaccounted for (stolen). I assure you that's many orders of magnitude worse than the contracts in pla…

First, I was mostly thinking about historical corruption in the US, i.e. in the age of Robber Barons, which was really incredibly bad.

I agree there's probably less of the "money just unaccounted for" type of corruption in the US (though it does happen, especially in connection with wars and intelligence agencies), and certainly less petty bribes. But that may just be a symptom of more organized corruption, so that it isn't necessary to let to many lower instances have a cut. In short, there may be more legal ways to divert public trust to private gain, so that the petty sort is just pointlessly risky.

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