Almost 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.
What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
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Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#72Just because the US is in love with 'Shock and Awe' doesn't mean everyone else sees it as the appropriate methodology in all circumstances.
Modern militaries that don't like taking tons of unnecessary losses on the ground are in love with controlling the air. It's not like there's a wide variety of proven strategies and countries just pick one that they're "in love" with—there's a fairly narrow set, in these circumstances, which all look pretty similar. It's definitely curious that Russia hasn't committed to establishing and leveraging air superiority, d…
> it suggests severe problems with their command structure
This is what my money is on.
Sending ground forces in without establishing air superiority is ludicrous, for reasons that we are seeing now. I guess we have a good idea where the military coup will originate.
Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#73I think part of why Russia looks so inept is because everyone is comparing against the US.
However, the US military has the finest logistic operations in the world.
Also, there is no substitute for fighting an actual enemy. Part of the reason the US (especial Air Force and Naval Aviation) is so good is that they have actually been fighting. From Libya(Reagan), Gulf War I, Serbia, Gulf War II, Afghanistan, Libya (Obama), the US has been fighting quite a bit.
Whenever you are actually fighting an enemy, there is a learning curve. The big question is whether the sanctions and international isolation combined with the Ukrainian resistance will force Russia to back down, before they navigate that.
Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#74Just because the US is in love with 'Shock and Awe' doesn't mean everyone else sees it as the appropriate methodology in all circumstances.
Modern militaries that don't like taking tons of unnecessary losses on the ground are in love with controlling the air. It's not like there's a wide variety of proven strategies and countries just pick one that they're "in love" with—there's a fairly narrow set, in these circumstances, which all look pretty similar. It's definitely curious that Russia hasn't committed to establishing and leveraging air superiority, d…
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. In the 1991 gulf war, 60's era Soviet SA-2 missiles were able to defend Baghdad against non-stealth aircraft despite weeks of Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses(SEAD) strikes.
A MIG-29 costs ~20 million dollars new.
Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US is "in love with Shock and Awe" because it worked extremely well. Russia doesn't have the air power to pull it off, which is why they are running a version of Deep War, but without a second echelon to prevent their supply lines from getting picked off. In reality it appears that Russia had a big problem with "ghost units" and rapidly tried to fill their invasion force with conscripts in the weeks before the in…
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…
It seems like you're trying to shoe-horn in an entirely different point? How does maintaining air supremacy as a military tactic relate to mass casualties?
Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#76One thing I don't understand is Russia's opening missile salvos, they barely even struck at the heart of the Ukrainian Air Force. I guess you could theorize they didn't want to destroy that infrastructure in the event that the Ukrainian government rolled over, but that seems to have been a risky bet that is currently playing out.
I don't think RU has that many precision guided (cruise) missiles. The tech for those, small GPS/GLONASS/TERCOM, is post Soviet. My impression is that RU military capability kinda froze after the Soviet Union collapsed, and what "modern" stuff they do have is in very limited quantity.
Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#77I can only assume they are keeping their powder dry, or working to limit casualties. I saw a video of a lady riding in a car beside a convoy, and then she threw a molotov and the driver sped off. If that were Iraq in 2003, she car probably would have been lit up.
They have been bombing cities. I don't think they are trying to limit casualties.
Without minimizing the awfulness of this invasion and the fact that it must be condemned, it is not nearly as brutal as Russian operations in Chechnya and Syria or the US-led coalition invasion of Iraq, likely because Ukranians are not nearly as much of a racial or cultural other to Russians as Chechens or Syrians. The greater ability of Ukrainians to gain coverage in both traditional and social media may also be a factor.
Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#78They 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…
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.
Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#79The West should be offering ~$5 million per Russian jet that defects, along with EU citizenship. The US should put up a billion dollars for the program to get it started. Land the jets in NATO territory. Let's put troop loyalty to the test and see if we can't drain some of their best hardware. We're not allowed to attack Russia directly so let's plunder them. Our leaders are not being nearly creative enough in this s…
Why not sell Ukraine some of these nice B52 planes to seek and destroy convoys on the ground ?
Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's around 40 million people that might have a problem with that.
Yeah I can't help but wonder if Putin is trying to run a playbook that worked in parts of Georgia and "worked" in Chechnya (eventually remaining Russian territory, at great cost), but doesn't scale to major Ukranian cities.
Russia's only possible 'winning' outcome at this point is to subjugate and murder huge numbers of Ukrainians under a brutal police state, if Putin wants to hold most of the population centers. It'll take a very long time before they'll stop fighting back, Russia will have to debase the culture (they might try it China style, bring in a lot Russian citizens to live in those cities and begin a full, forced transformation, while you violently try to strip away Ukrainian culture).
It sure seems like Putin expected them to capitulate quickly and become largely docile before the occupying Russian soldiers while a new government is installed. Not much else explains their approach thus far other than that (their supply provisioning was clearly built for a very short conflict).
If Russia doesn't go for the full brutal police state approach, they'll hemorrhage with any typical occupation and will have to leave, and any new system they attempt to install and leave behind will be toppled rapidly (the Russians will have to keep sending forces in).