Timeline for Why has Russia made surprisingly little use of its Air Force in the Russo-Ukrainian war?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
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| Apr 17 at 3:54 | comment | added | wrod | @ohwilleke re: "but if they learn to file a jet and fly it 100 hours a year, that isn't nothing" You recon being dead is enough to prevent them from flying? | |
| Apr 15 at 7:41 | comment | added | ohwilleke♦ | @wrod Do you have any evidence, other than Russia refraining from the use of fixed wing fighter aircraft in large numbers itself, that Russia has so few pilots? They might not be the best pilots, but if they learn to file a jet and fly it 100 hours a year, that isn't nothing. | |
| Apr 15 at 5:13 | comment | added | wrod | @ohwilleke what about down 300 pilots? and its capacity to produce new planes is around 30 a year. The gist of my post it is "lots of old planes, no one to fly them". That's the gist, so there is no need to argue exceptions. But Russia most certainly would not be able to put 100 planes in the air at the same time despite presumably having over 1,000 of them. | |
| Apr 14 at 22:51 | comment | added | ohwilleke♦ | @wrod Even down 300 planes, Russia has the second or third largest air force in the world including some quite modern jet fighters and vastly outmatches Ukraine's warplane fleet. Ukraine has lots aircraft as well. Russia could, presumably, have chosen to incur the casualties to wipe out the limited air defenses of Ukraine that were effective against its jets and to wipe out its remaining warplanes. Yet it didn't, despite the fact that Russia's military as a whole doesn't to seem to care much about force protection. | |
| Apr 14 at 11:09 | history | edited | F1Krazy | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Tone down headers
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| Apr 14 at 3:21 | comment | added | wrod | @ItalianPhilosophers4Monica moreover, the only accurate frame challenge to this question would be to challenge the suggestion that Russia hasn't tried to use its air force. It tried. It failed. The pre-war estimate was that Ukraine had ~150 planes and Russia had ~1,500. Russia has lost >300 planes so far (that's twice what Ukraine was estimated to have). And new pilots take years to train. For all intents and purposes, the Russian air force has lost the air battle in Ukraine. | |
| Apr 14 at 2:52 | comment | added | wrod | @ItalianPhilosophers4Monica I don't think it's informative at all. They mentioned ability to fly by the front lines. I mentioned that, too, btw. But that's hardly what an effective air force does. Effective air force can fly deep into enemy territory. And Iraq, while not a peer, had the 4th strongest army in the world before Desert Storm. Taliban, while also not a peer, had ~30 fighter jets before the US invasion. It's not a question of who would win in the end. It's a question of having a chance to learn something (gain experience from a live adversary). | |
| Apr 14 at 2:18 | comment | added | Italian Philosopher | The US spent 15-25 years flying in low-lethality contexts. That is very different. The one big advantage they do have is that they intimately know how to fly close air support effectively and it doesn't seem like the Russians do. For the rest, make no mistake, flying against the Taliban or even Iraq is nothing like flying on this battlefield. I am not "upset", but you criticized Alamar's answer, and though IMHO they're "backing the wrong side" it's shorter, less strident and more informative. | |
| Apr 14 at 1:48 | comment | added | wrod | @ItalianPhilosophers4Monica I don't know why you are so upset here. We are not trying to predict the future here. This isn't saber rattling. We are trying to ascertain the causes of outcomes which have already happened. Are you suggesting that the points I made have not been true or that they cannot be contributing causes to the observed outcomes? | |
| Apr 14 at 1:39 | comment | added | Radically Reasonable | @ItalianPhilosophers4Monica it's not that Russia didn't see combat against peers in the air. It hasn't seen combat against any country with an air force at all. Why are you harping on this point? Obviously this matters. | |
| Apr 14 at 1:36 | comment | added | Radically Reasonable | @ItalianPhilosophers4Monica the answer says Russia hasn't fought any country with an air force. This isn't about relative strength. It's about pilots having to fly sorties in actual combat. It's a question of readiness. The US spent 15-25 years doing that in the MidEast. BTW, Iran-Iraq war saw a number of sorties among peers. | |
| Apr 13 at 17:17 | comment | added | Italian Philosopher |
Ah, the joys of #. Why not put this in all-caps? It would be even more convincing... This answer manages to not talk about ... Soviet/Russian air support doctrine, new technological challenges, actual uses of Russian airpower in early war... About the only thing of interest is noting they don't fly their pilots enough. How is a big command aircraft supposed to be "unassailable"? Did you miss how close the RAF's came to being shot down over the Black Sea? They are sitting ducks. News to you: no one, not just Russia, has fought a peer enemy in the air since 1967/1973.
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| Apr 13 at 15:45 | history | answered | wrod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |