20945

What’s missing from the situation on the ground in Ukraine though is a serious air threat. Neither side seems to have air superiority and conventional air attacks seem to be a relatively small part of the war at this point. It is something of an open question then how things would play out in a situation where one side had total control of the air and could deploy traditional air assets in numbers as well as drones and missiles.

20946

Yes, they amount to the same nutcase in the end. There are certainly a number of dedicated Spanish Tankies active on Twitter.

20947

I just admit I still don’t know wtf a “tankie” is in real life vs some kind of Reddit thing that everyone on Reddit thinks is huge and nobody else even cares or knows exist unless said people start shooting or blowing things up to get attention.

20948

Link to the original study on learnings from the war here:

Some further derail in the thread.

Further high level Twitter summary here:

Thread reader view here:

Fascinating.

20949

More drone killers coming:

20950

So, this effectively mutes the milbloggers, doesn’t it? Wonder how that is going to go over.

20951

From the thread roll.

36/x “#Russian satellite reconnaissance proved very limited, (…) A probable reason for this may be the insufficient number of satellites in the orbital grouping of the VKS and the overestimation of their technical capabilities.” April, #Russia started buying commercial sat pics

Russian military are just like us guys.

20952

Three important points from the report:

20953

Yup.

Gonna be a long hard fight from here on out.

20954

Most Ukrainian General Staff press releases seem to include a count of air to ground sorties. On really busy days it might be 30, or in the high 20s. On most days it seems to be between 10 and 15.

It’s one reason why I’m not really bought into the calls for supplying F-16s. It doesn’t seem like the Ukrainian airforce has the personnel to operate anything in the volumes that might make a difference.

20955

Yeah, ATACMS and other long range artillery seem like they would do the job better for them. And I wonder how many launchers and ATACMS can be provided for the cost of a single F-16 when training, maintenance, and support is taken into account.

20956

Pretty sure the training, maintenance and support is expensive for those too.

Difference is that an F-16 can do A2A denial too.

the F-16 would certainly be nice, as they have trouble using western supplied munitions on most of their fleet, though they have been able to jury-rig some munitions onto their Russian purchased planes.

20957

74/x “Of all #UAVs used by the #Ukraine in the first three phases of the war covered by this study, around 90% were destroyed. The average life expectancy of a quadcopter remained around three flights. The average life expectancy of a fixed-wing UAV was around six flights.”

Interesting observation on the vulnerability of drones.

20958

I’m sure, but I would guess that training a crew to fire a different missile from their existing HIMARS systems is a lot faster/cheaper than training up pilots. Similarly, I would be very surprised if maintenance on HIMARS is anywhere close to a jet fighter but I admit that’s just a guess, I don’t have any numbers to compare.

Ukraine can fire missiles from HIMARS without losing them in numbers, I don’t think the same is the case for operating F-16s in ground strike roles.

20959

This is pretty much what @janster has been trying to say.

20960

My understanding is that don’t have planes for the pilots to operate. They’ve lost more than 1/2 of their airforce, and since they were operating in friendly territory I think most pilots survived.

20961

The tweet is kind of cherry picked. The report then goes on to say:

They remain highly lethal, determined to achieve the mission set by their president, and employing highly capable weapons systems. In future assessments of Russian capabilities, careful attention should be paid to the extent that they have corrected some of the systemic weaknesses in their force, which they are unlikely to be able to resolve during the current period of aggression.

(Emphasis added.)

Which is exactly the thing that most of the pushback has been on. It makes no sense to assume that Russia will be able to fix their various dysfunctions just because they want to, until we see some evidence that they’re doing so.

20962

Uhm… not really. There is a significant difference between saying “Russian AF are not as bad as some people think, and they’re learning from their defeats” to saying “1 mil conscripts are going to arrive soon, and then Ukraine will be in trouble”. Few will disagree that the former is possible; the latter is what the majority here say is nonsense.

20963

Yup. Thanks for taking this one for the team. ;)

20964

The problem Spain has is they set the precedent a ways back that if you threaten Spain with terrorism, they’ll back down.

Many in Spain and around the world saw the attacks as retaliation for Spain’s participation in the war in Iraq, where about 1,400 Spanish soldiers were stationed at the time. The attacks took place two days before a major Spanish election, in which anti-war Socialists swept to power. The new government, led by Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, removed Spanish troops from Iraq, with the last leaving the country in May 2004.

I’m not saying that is what is happening here, but if it is, Spain is probably a good target for it. Perception is they buckle to threats, even if the reality is probably more complex (ie. they elected an anti-war party, so odds are they were pulling out of Iraq anyway).