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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

#641

Post by ed_balls »

stouset wrote: post #177
ed_balls wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you mean by experts. The strategist I know said this is a political decision. They don't want to inflict too much damage to avoid bloody insurrections in the future. Russian aircrafts are not that precise. What is more, UA army received manpads. It's not worth it.

MANPADs are only effective at very low altitudes (AGL), fundamentally due to the inability to put much propulsion on a rocket intended to be carried by hand. Su-27s, Su-34s, and Su-35s should fly significantly higher than this altitude during strike and interdiction missions, but doing so exposes them to radar-guided SAM systems like the aforementioned Buk (SA-11 / SA-17) or S-300 (SA-10 / SA-12 / SA-20).

You can see on some clips how low there were flying - well within the range of manpads. As I said, it could be because they don't have a good high precision munitions.

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

#642

Post by GVIrish »

ethbr0 wrote: post #412
gamblor956 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> why Russia is going with this strategy Because this isn't the intended strategy, but rather then resultant strategy. Modern Russia seems to suffer from the same weaknesses as the USSR: garbage-in, garbage-out. If you staff an entire bureaucracy (including your military command structure) with Yes-Men, you get "Yes" responses. When the question is "Are we prepared for the invasion?" When the question is "Will we be…

I think this could be a large part of it. Putin's Russia is rife with corruption and cronyism. Those two things can dramatically reduce the effectiveness of a military.

To start with, the yes-men problem means significant bad news is often buried not dealt with. It also results in the people who are the best at bs'ing and political manuevering being the ones who rise in the ranks. Your officer corps ends up being filled with people who did not optimize for military competency. Indeed General Shogyu, the Russian Minister of Defense, actually doesn't have a military background.

The corruption comes in with logisitical support. With significant levels of corruption you'll find that the amount of parts, munitions, fuel are not what you thought they were. Then you'll also probably have problems with the condition of the stuff you do have.

All of those things damage morale, competency, readiness, you name it. So when you actually have to go to war, you might find drastic shortfalls in battlefield performance.

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

#643

Post by slim »

tablespoon wrote: post #354
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…

> 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…

bombing cities in the twitter era creates an undelible trail of images of dead civilian infants that make you lose the war. russia simply decided to give Ukraine gov. the exclusivity of bombing civilians. Photos are already out there despite the massive international PR/PSYOP campain. Search for dombass

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

#644

Post by Barrin92 »

jihadjihad wrote: post #374
Cd00d wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's an exquisite word. I too was ignorant of its existence until I played Civilization VI, where you can become the suzerain of a city-state.

I might not have an IR degree, but for the first time I feel like playing Crusader Kings and Civilization has finally paid off.

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

#645

Post by empressplay »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #600
gamblor956 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If Russia did mass killings / carpet bombing / total war, it hands justification of the west for full counterattack and occupation of Ukraine. Putin assumed all of Ukraine would roll over like Crimea. He has underestimated the people of Ukraine. He attacked in winter assuming it would be over in two days. Now his already-low-morale forces face winter. I don't care if they are equipped and Russian and "used to war". T…

Modern nuclear war doesn’t work that way. Commanders are progressively passed the order to nuke the same target until someone does. That’s why there’s so many of them, it’s a numbers game. Also it’s not all or nothing, at the start it’s tit for tat and hope you aren’t either!

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

#646

Post by Arubis »

azalemeth wrote: post #594
Arubis wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exp…

> and then realized all our CS buddies had double our base salaries for objectively easier work. One thing I realised as a graduate student designing RF PCBs and digital circuits was that the debugger for reality sucks . It's really frustrating to be faced with a problem where you just can't get "more information by recompiling with debug flags" and can't easily (or reversibly!) change the system to make it easier to…

This is a huge part of it! I spent a couple years doing IC-level failure analysis, which involves cool toys like electron microscopes, ion beams, strong destructive chemistry… a lot of it was neat, but the feedback loops were hours at best, and often days. Compared with having CI just do this for you automatically, or having something like `guard` running locally, is utterly transformational by comparison.

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

#647

Post by monocasa »

cagey wrote: post #622
ashwagary wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen reports that Russia's only deployed 5-10% of their forces. This might be a slow steady escalation to allow evacuations of civilians and test the endurance of battalion forces. Any victories for Ukrainian forces may be short lived, as Russia seems to be using this opportunity to guage hot and cold zones.

Having (from a US civilian POV) sought to comprehend Soviet (and now Russian) military capability from afar since the early 1980's, it has long been my perception that (due to the political system in place there and the resultant poor economy) only 5-10% of Russian/Soviet military units nominally in existence have sufficient morale, training, and full provisioning with modern equipment to engage in successful offensi…

But their doctrine isn't to start with the with the well trained and equipped 5-10%, but instead a bunch of conscripts that that soak up some material, and then send in the competent soldiers.

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

#648

Post by cagey »

foverzar wrote: post #211
watwut wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They expected to win quickly and easily - and are shocked it did not happened. Whether they pull the punches will be seen later. Historically, there was not much holding back punches between Russia and Ukraine. You may start reading about Holodomor, which is still debated whether it counts as genocide or not. For that matter, historically, Russia holding punches was not exactly the thing. Not even toward Russians. Th…

> Historically, there was not much holding back punches between Russia and Ukraine. You may start reading about Holodomor, which is still debated whether it counts as genocide or not. This is such a demagogy and a narrow-sighted view of history. It is always brought up only for the purpose of pouring more oil on the flames and turning up nationalistic tensions. Holodomor has nothing to do with Ukrainians or Russians.…

> Hungers of 1930s were a global event, not something conjured by one particularly nasty Georgian.

Aside from Ukraine and Kazakhstan (both under the control of "one particularly nasty Georgian") which other regions of the globe suffered from mass (1+ million) deaths caused by famine in the 1930s?

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

#649

Post by monocasa »

gpm wrote: post #159
anramon wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now an "expert" is whoever says something that is aligned with media retoric.

The expert they are quoting is a pretty well known figure, who has been saying lots of things often not aligned with media retoric. To borrow his twitter bio as an introduction > PhD student @warstudies (Department of War Studies at Kings College). Senior Fellow @FPRI (Foreign Policy Research Institute). Previously @USMC (US Marine Corp), @ColumbiaSIPA (Columbia School of International and Public Affairs), @CentreAST…

You can nearly always find a qualified individual who already is saying what you want said, just needing a microphone to say it louder or at the right time. That's how expert witnesses tend to work for instance.

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

#650

Post by redisman »

nacs wrote: post #577
redisman wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China won’t invade anyone. They haven’t had any battles in a long time. They can just take over with soft power since Russia is in a extremely weak position in a few months.

> China won’t invade anyone Except Hong Kong (and the "expansion" of the South China Sea).

A policing operation in one of their “own” cities against unarmed people and dumping a bunch of land into the sea/intimidating fishermen. Like I said they don’t have any combat ready troops. It’s basically all LARPing with a big budget. Which we should all be glad about.
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