Russia and Ukraine

[Thumpalumpacus]

You're too kind, thanks.

I get your point about SEAD, though I think that would be very difficult anyway given that most Ukrainian AD is in the form of MANPADs. For this reason, I was thinking more along the lines of attacking Ukrainian airfields harboring combat planes or repair facilities with stand-off missiles in the opening minutes of the war.

They may well be husbanding their more advanced aircraft in order to address any potential NATO intervention, too.

I'd have to go digging through the toobs, but one of the people I watch semi-regularly from before the war when he was doing his analysis pointed out the fact that the Russian airforce are doing all their sorties at low altitude, indicating that quite a lot of Ukrainian long range and high altitude air defence is still active.  They picked off the fixed point radar installations early on, but that's no real achievement, any airforce with superiority in numbers should be able to do that.  But Russia look to be absolutely cack at taking out mobile air defence and at taking out airfields.

I hadn't really considered your point about high-alt AD, and I knew the Ukrainians did field some S-300s. Mobile AD, especially MANPADs, are very hard to target with air, that's a ground job there if ever we see one.

I'm really surprised the Russians didn't go after military airfields and repair facilities, though. The best place to kill an enemy air force is on the ground.

PS I'm sceptical about the idea that Russia are holding back their more advanced aircraft because, a) they know NATO won't involve themselves directly without nukes falling, and b) they've put in their best units and equipment in every other department (which got absolutely spankered as a result) so why keep their planes back (unless they've nobody to fly them)?

I've seen very little reportage regarding Su-35s and -57s, and very little about their heavy bombers being involved, as well, which is the basis for my point. I could certainly be wrong, obvs.

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The incompetence we've seen on display this last month is stunning, to me.

Even if Russia had more-than-competent field commanders, their invasion force would still be in the weeds because their equipment and logistics are shit. They attempted a half-arsed blitzkrieg with four different lines of assault using armour and artillery that hadn’t been properly maintained and couldn’t be reliably supported.

Boru

It's worse than that, Boru. Combat capability starts at the level of the soldier, and these Russian troops are clearly deficient in simple tactics. Their morale also seems lacking. I've read that many of them were told they were on maneuvers and were not expecting live fire at all. Young conscripts with less than a year in service being confronted with a surprise offensive ... yeah, no.

Good troops can rarely, but sometimes, overcome bad plans or poor equipment, but they still need food, fuel, and ammo to do so. Overcoming poor planning is just as hard, but still sometimes doable; we see instances of that in the Pacific in WWII, for instance, except when as in this case the poor planning happens in logistics as well as operations.

But when you throw undertrained troops in with poor leadership and shitty planning, expecting anything other than a clusterfuck is rainbows-and-unicorns territory.

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And I'd even forgotten about rasputitsa when I made the "can't fight 50 miles outside its borders" predicition.

Add to this last comment the fact that the winter has been very mild there this year, and you're looking at four months of mud. Rasputitsa doesn't typically start until late March/early april there, and last until the end of May, though there've been instances of it going into late June -- just ask the Germans why they had to delay Barbarossa a month.