also, this from an itk (tl;dr russia done f***** up bad)

As usual, to take or leave.

"While things are going well for Ukraine pretty much everywhere, and things are going spectacularly bad for the Russians, I would like to take a moment to ponder where in my opinion Russia failed the most, and in the most unexpected way.

But first, how bad are things going? Well, if you have fallen back in a dozen places in a single day, and gained nothing, then it is going pretty rough.
On top of that as the cherry on the cake, Russia lost an entire battalion of Mobiks in under an hour in Luhansk.
Out of 580 soldiers ten wounded was captured, the rest was killed in action.

The Mobiks had been on the front for one and a half hour, half of them had no rifles. They where sent to stop an advancing heavy mechanized brigade by their commanders.

Planes, Bombs & Air Dominance

In all of history of war, only two generals have scored a perfectly executed victory.
I have waxed about Zhukov at Khalkhin Gol, where he created a 2000 kilometer logistics train through roadless country, invented combined arms attack as an art form, and did the so far only executed full double encirclement, and crushed the Japanese army so hard that it sued for peace. Japan was an equal opponent in every way by the way.

The other contender for the throne of best general in history is Norman Schwarzkopf and Desert Storm.
Once more we see the insane attention to detail in logistics.
We again see new things in warfare, and we see such a shtumping victory that the enemy lost completely.
Iraq afterwards was not a fighting force, something that made it easy for lesser generals later on.

Norman had two ideas, one was very novel, and that was to lose as few soldiers as was possible. And, he achieved that in aces and spades.
What was new in warfare was though the concept of 'Shock & Awe'. It was the first new thing in warfare since Combined Arms at Khalkhin Gol. Completely new concepts are bloody far from each other in warfare, armies are fairly conservative.
Comparatively the Static Attack that the Ukrainians invented is relatively minor.

Back to Shock & Awe. Norman had a problem that he had pondered since the Vietnam War. How do you win a battle, or a war, without losing the lives of your soldiers?
He came up with two concepts.
The first one is probably the most important, limit the scope and duration of the attack/battle/war.
He got Bush senior to sign off on only liberating Quwait, belting the **** out of Iraq, and then pull out as fast as possible.

The second concept is very American, and it played to the strength of the weapons at hand.
Shock & Awe are actually two concepts in one.
First is win the air ware and establish Air Dominance as fast and brutal as possible.
If you do not remember, the first wave of planes was electronic warfare planes interfering with the radar and radio transmissions on a massive scale, this was kept up for the duration.
Next step that followed was a massive attack with attack planes launching HAARM missiles that knocked out the blinded radars.
Third wave was a massive strike with cruise missiles from air, ground and sea towards radars, air defence installations, airports & air bases.
Fourth wave was fighter jets chasing away any Iraqis stupid enough to be out flying, they chose to go to Iran...
At this point in a single night he had achieved total dominance in the air.
That opened up for the fifth wave, the most important one.

Bombing everything with impunity.
The Iconic F-117s flew in and started the 1300 bombing sorties that destroyed 1600 targets in mere days.
The bombs was dropped from high altitude, and was precision guided.
Later B-52s was deployed to carpet bomb, but that was not until everything that could hit one at high altitude was blown up, it was the F-117s that did the legwork on that.

The second part was to attack after air dominance was achieved and the bombing campaign was done, and with everything he had without holding back any reserves, the plan was to form reserves as and if needed on the go. The planned reserve units where designated prior to the engagement. The reserve forming part was never needed.

Russia fails
This was what I, and every other military planner on the face of the planet expected to see.
Most likely not on the same scale, nor with the same insane precission, but definitely along these lines.
Instead we got ridiculous.

As with everything else Russia decided to avoid every single hard learned lesson of warfare, including Shock & Awe.
In fact, they reversed it, and corrupted every single stage of it.
They started with the last part, they sent in everything without any reserves in a very clumsy combined arms attack that completely lacked all focus, they went for all at once.
But let us leave the tank-salamis be.
We are talking about the air war failure. Perhaps disaster is a better word.

In the first 3 days no electronic warfare was used.
During the entire war not a single sortie with an electronic warfare plane have been performed.
Strike one.
No anti-radiation strikes was done, leaving every single Ukrainian Air Defence radar operable with the exceptions of those that got blown up through lucky shots from artillery or tanks.
Strike two.
The Cruise missiles was launched at civilian targets instead of air defence, air bases, etcetera...
Strike three.
Russian Fighter Jets at this point was in trouble as they tried to chase down Ukrainian fighter jets. Instead they attacked civilian targets, and a lot of them was shot down since they flew low level sorties to try to avoid air defence that had not been destroyed.
Strike four.

Now we come to number five. This is the interesting part.
Note how I wrote High Altitude up above.
High enough and the enemy air defence can't hit you, or are at least severely limited and you have time to dodge most incoming stuff. High enough and your stealth works better.
We all expected high altitude bombardment, instead we got low altitude bombing missions and extreme loss rates for a modern air war.
Even with the failed first 4 parts Russia should have been able to do high altitude bombing, obviously with higher loss rate.
It would also have pulled the fighters up on high where more would have survived.
Instead we got low altitude bombing of civilian targets.
Strike five.

Now let us reverse order things.
To perform high altitude bombardment you either need to go US in Vietnam and drop bombs everywhere. This was an option for the Russians (we at least assumed it was). Or you use precission guided bombs. This was also an option (we assumed).
To the best of our knowledge we assumed Russia had thousands of precission guided bombs, perhaps a couple of tens of thousands.
Reality was that they had a few hundred, and had used most of those in Syria. The rest of them mysteriously had transformed into a couple of really nice super-yachts and hookers.
About 200 was dropped in Ukraine from low altidutde over hospitals. After that Russia ran dry.
Where the Russian dumb bombs for carpet bombing went is anyones guess. But, it is likely that those funded a couple of more super-yachts and a few hooker-fueled kickass parties Russian style.

The fighter jets was forced down in an attempt to avoid the air defence. Another factor for the abysmal performance was that only 1 plane out of 3 was airworthy... due to super-yachts. Also, for some reason Russians really hate childrens playgrounds and public toilets, so many was squandered on those all important targets as pretty bad attack aircraft instead of in dogfights.

The cruise missiles is a mystery. Yes they where not as good as the Russian PR blurbs stated, but they never even tried using them on high value air defence targets, or against the Ukrainian air force assets. This is probably the largest mystery, because Russia really had these, so much so that some even remain today.

Anti-radiation missiles, well there are a couple of super-yachts bobbing about for the money that was never spent on them...

The Soviet Union had during the seventies and eighties kick **** (for then) electronic warfare stuff, both planes, ships and land systems.
During the entire war we have only seen a few land systems being deployed. Still pretty kickarse for being seventies and eighties tech. Most of them got stuck in the tank-salamis and was mulched, never to be seen again.
Sea version? Someone forgot to send those from the other navies prior to the war broke out and the Turks closed the sealanes for Russian warships.
There are two electronic warfare ships bobbing about in the mediterranean now, but that is not helping Russia. Oops...
Now over to electronic warfare aircraft. Not a single sortie. Intense satelite image noodling later and it seems like none of them can fly. Probable cause is as per usual Hooker-driven super-yachts.

Political
There was probably a political part to this, the Russian war machine did not get time to do the job correctly.
I do think they would at least have tried to do something if they had been given time to do it, and perhaps most importantly, been allowed to do it.
But this does not explain the targeting of civilian stuff and the disregard of military targets from the missiles.
And it does not explain the lack of carpet bombing of military targets.

Conclusion
As with everything else in the war the air part follows the same pattern of theft, corruption, incompetence, bloodlust of civilian targets, disregard of military targets, lack of understanding of the fundamental principles of warfare, lack of logistics...

Even with what they had, and counting in all the thievery done of the weapons, the Russians should have been able to do far better.
Even fairly lacklustre generals from our history like Patton et Ilk would have been able to produce more result.

Instead we have a war, where every single decission in the first 240 days was a bad one.
During that period not a single sound decission was made, not a single decission that could have brought at least limited victory on the battlefield.
And trust me, I looked. I looked a lot for one, the reason is that I tried to see any set traps etcetera.
At every point the worst possible decission was made.
They did not even fail into making a good decission.

Even counting Russias all shortcomings, it was even at the lower numbers of equipment a true regional power, an ex-superpower with proven global strike capability.
Russia was at least two rungs above Ukraine when it attacked.
Even with a lacklustre plan and a lacklustre leader of the war it should not have ended like this, it really should not.
I do not think Russia would have won totally, not against the will of Ukraine and the willingness of the West to support the war. But everything east of Dnipro should have been Russian by now, and Ukraine should have been forced to give up into some sort of negotiated peace."

Posted By: Tombs, Nov 7, 16:34:18