Feb 24 - Day 731 - Thanks to Readers, Gibbon and The Decline and Fall, Enter the Air War

Hi All!

Two years. Two friggin’ years.

OK, first and foremost, now that we’ve hit 24 months of war, this post must start with a huge “thank you” to you guys, the readers. If I’m honest it’s not always fun and games and and upbeat conversations and pleasant people to hang out with, in an actual conventional war.

When you’re reporting it, no matter how well you do that job, there is a giant mass of comment and emotion (sometimes humor, but usually anger) that can’t be news but you feel like somehow others need to hear it. From my side, having an outlet to write down what I’m thinking, and sometimes to point out hints and trivia that might just turn into a trend or just generic news at some point down the line, isn’t just a way to blow off steam. So thanks to you guys for being there so I’m not just bouncing my theories off of (padded?) walls.

Second thing, and also there is no way I can possibly emphasize it enough, the conversations I have with you guys aren’t just helpful, they’re directly motivating me, who is not exactly a young guy with a lot to prove, and who by nature tends towards laziness (ask Mrs. K., she’ll tell you) to keep at it. Thank you for the feedback and the comment. It helps.

Big picture two year observations.

The image is a Javelin gunner from 36th Marines and his buddy. If they look kind of worn down, well, consider that that pic is from an official Ukrainian military information channel that has the job of keeping up the civilian population’s morale…

36th Marine AT gunner, with battle buddy, in southern Ukraine. Publicity photo from Ukrainian military.

On to two years’ wisdom!:

1.Ukraine will win. It is inevitable. The Ukrainian people will never surrender, they will keep resisting under all circumstances. This specifically includes absence of Western assistance to whatever degree you want to select. This is not hope or rhetoric. This is observable to anyone willing to look.

2. The Russian Federation has no way it can force its will on the Ukrainian people. That is a fact that I wasn’t positive about at the start of the war, and was sort of on the fence at the one-year mark. But now, I see no way, whatsoever, under any imaginable circumstances, that Russia can achieve its goals in Ukraine militarily.

3. There never was an army, in history, that could take casualties infinitely. The Russian army has a history of falling apart when the losses get too high and the leadership too uncaring. This war is about attrition. The length of the war will be determined by the location of the breaking point in Russia. The cracks are already appearing.

4. I can’t say whether this will play out as a collapse of morale in the Russian army ranks, civilian discontent with repression and falling living standards, a palace coup, or those things mixed. To me the process and its direction are obvious.

5. Equally obviously, potentially, the degradation of Russian willingness to prosecute a war against Ukraine it cannot win could take years, like Afghanistan or Vietnam. I expect that one year from now I will either be retired or writing another one of these prognostications, and I would put my money on reading coffee grounds. I don’t expect peace a year from now.

6. European will to commit resources to counter Russian aggression is real, it is corporate, and there is too much money and political capital involved now for it to be reversed. A year ago I wasn’t sure. My view at this point is that the European elite has decided first that Russia is a real threat to continental stability and economic well-being, and second that containing that threat requires commitment of resources to military force.

From a news point of view a report of Denmark advancing a half billion in aid or a couple of hundred of British Brimstone missiles or Germany and Rheinmettal (ja, ja, we have all heard the joke that Germany really is conglomerate corporation masquerading as a nation state) having a plan for five 155mm howitzer shell factories these days is hardly a huge news story. More European stuff that will go towards destroying the Russian military in Ukraine isn’t even extraordinary, it’s just something interesting for today and tomorrow it will be something else. Think about a year ago.

Sorry, maybe it’s time to bench this guy. He’s really acting like he wants to get benched.

It saddens me to write it, but American weakness and inability to lead in the western confrontation with Russia is now obvious and it doesn’t look to me like it will be repaired this year at least.

America is willingly, as a matter of choice, marginalizing itself internationally. They can say whatever they want, point fingers at each other to their heart’s content, in fact the Americans are edging away from alliance and tight relations with Europe, a policy dating back to 1945 and that by many measures worked pretty well.

Were a historian were to wish to point to a moment in time when the American nation abandoned a 200+ year national tradition of exceptionalism and active promotion of US interests internationally, 2023–2024 could well become an excellent tipping point to single out.

I am well aware the US is a democracy and today’s policy is not necessarily tomorrow’s. I can see many, if not most, of the sneaky ways the present administration and the Pentagon are helping out Ukraine in spite of Congressional inability even to make a decision about the same thing.

But the observation that I would make is that the US national leadership — and let me be clear, this is all the government, both political parties, the corporations that fund them, the whole nine yards that make up the American ruling class that calls the shots between elections — has from where I sit chosen CYA and personal career advancement, and trying to win the internal domestic battles, over geopolitical realities. Any idiot can see this will continue at minimum until the end of 2024.

There are consequences when you make choices like that. What America is doing, they aren’t doing in a vacuum.

One consequence we are seeing right now: where the US led the Atlantic Alliance in the past, in Feb. 2024 anyway, the US is now a follower, literally being dragged along. The Europeans are too polite to say it out loud but I’m not European.

If that process continues, then a modern version of the Concert of Europe would be logical to expect, with decision-making power shared out among the most economically-powerful. Meaning if you want to predict the future of Europe (you know, the wealthiest most advanced place on Earth, pretty much), then identify issues that Britain, Scandinavia, Poland/Czechia, the Dutch and Germany are likely to agree on, and that’s what the continent is likely to do. If France and Italy sign up, then it becomes probable.

Several of those countries would prefer strong US engagement in Europe, but none of them appear willing to accept throwing European security into the trash because the Americans can’t get their act together. The next time the Americans decide they need their European allies to help them stop tech transfer to China or deal with the latest war-of-the-week in the Middle East, or not regulate Elon Musk or Amazon the way the Americans don’t regulate at home, or trading with the Iranians or the Chinese more then the Americans like, there will be Europeans saying “Na und? And we should agree to do what you ask, when you ask, all the time, exactly why?”

In this sense, if that process continues for more than a year or two — and of course US foreign policy zig-zags all over the place — then ironically Putin will have won. Russia may become a second- or third-tier state even before he dies, but, Putin wants a multi-lateral world where the US isn’t the sole superpower, and the US leading the developed West doesn’t dictate economic terms to the rest of the World, for its benefit.

Thanks to US politicians and voters, America is on track to giving Putin exactly what he wants.

Considering the US found itself dragged into two world wars (so far) precisely because isolationism as a national policy failed, and that the US became the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth, exactly when the US was closely engaged with Europe, that direction of US public will to me seems stupid. But then as I understand in US schools these days history is one of those subjects educators don’t think is particularly relevant.

Attached is a cartoon of Uncle Sam getting benched. I hope I made myself clear.

There is another way to look at the US Congressional — meaning US voter — failure to support Ukraine over the last two months: A superpower that doesn’t want to be one stops being a superpower, but there is life without superpowers.

Narrowly, the air war, and A-50s and SAM-200…and yes Vipers:

Spiffy image of an A-50 posted. Most of you will be aware that over the last week and a bit the Ukrainians appear to have shot down at least seven and, unconfirmed, possibly as many as ten top-end Russian aircraft.

Cool stock photo of A-50. Now Russia has a reported eight of these AWACS planes. They need probably twice that and even their rah rah hate Ukraine telegram channels saw there’s basically no way to make more.

Most recently, last night the Ukrainians, according to them, used a 1960s-era S-200 missile — this is exactly the same weapon the Vietnamese shot at US B-52s hitting Hanoi — to knock down another A-50 air traffic/reconnaissance jet, in other words a Russian AWACS. For the record the Russians are also blaming their own air defenses, maybe technical, maybe human error. Some of them are griping the evil Americans have figured out a way to trick Russian air defenses to fire on their own aircraft. So clearly they don’t know how the Ukrainians did it.

I think it’s worth spending a few moments detailing how painful a loss that is. First, Russia started the war with a maximum ten of these things. Now there are eight. This is the plane the Russian air force uses to monitor air space, including deploying interceptors and running air strikes, on a strategic level. This is well beyond just the Ukraine war scale, these things need to be wherever the Russian Federation needs to watch sky that might contain a hostile aircraft or missile. One plane might be responsible for the Petersburg/East Baltic region, one would cover Crimea/east Black Sea, one the Caucasus, one Alaska, one vs. Japan, one vs. Korea and NE China, etc.

Once you factor in crew rest, maintenance, and places like Manchuria, trans-Baikal, the Caspian region, and Central Asia (never mind Lapland and the entire Arctic coast) you can see how already the world’s biggest country doesn’t have near the number of A-50s it would like to have. Now make a note about the reality that unlike in western air forces, in the Russian air force air defense is highly centralized, so in simple terms even if an A-50 sees incoming bad guys the job isn’t done, there are people inside the A-50 trained to direct fighter jets to intercept, to issue and update rules of engagement, and to decide which aircraft are bad guys and target priorities. Bear that note in mind.

It’s not clear to me how the Ukrainians, if they are telling the truth, managed to fly an ancient S-200 missile into air space containing an A-50, and through the same air space that was, based on news reports, covered by at least two top-of-the-line S-400 air defense systems, specifically around the Kerch Bridge and in the west Kuban. Nor do I understand how the museum-era radar seeker in the S-200 chose to ignore the jammers and spoofers aboard the A-50 AWACS.

As has been the cast repeatedly the case with past high-profile Ukrainian shoot-downs of high-value Russian jets, NATO reconnaissance plane activity in the west Black Sea and around Crimea, and as far as I am concerned it’s been happening too often to ignore the possibility of cause and effect. Russian mil-bloggers are claiming NATO runs real-time data feeds from its plane to Ukrainain air controllers, which I very much doubt, but I think we can take NATO handover of relatively fresh targeting information, say 12–24 hours after the recon flight, as a given.

Point being, we are seeing a spike in shootdowns of Russian airplanes, by various Ukrainian means, at the same time as we are seeing spikes of NATO recon plane activity close enough to where the shootdowns are taking place. It’s a very safe bet that among the targets the NATO sniffer planes are identifying, are the locations of Russian ground-based air defense radars.

A similar safe bet is that, as long as Russia decides not to shoot down a NATO sniffer plane and start World War III, the data collection flights are going to continue and the picture the Ukrainian have of the Russian air defense network is only going to improve.

OK, still remember the note you weren’t supposed to forget about what A-50 AWACS planes do?

With the Ukrainians and their NATO buddies busily registering the location of every ground-based radar, air defense vehicle, and interceptor aircraft within probably 300–400 km. of Crimea, the future to me does not look like more clever Ukrainian air ambushes that embarrass the Kremlin.

The number of A-50s is finite and the locations of the Russian air defenses are becoming known and targeted. If we were to replace “Russian” with, I don’t know, words like “Iraqi”, “Syrian”, “Serbian” or “Egyptian”, then what is going on right now starts to look very, very much like a systematic campaign to degrade Russian air defense capacity, right down to the US Air Force and its and its NATO buddies helping out big time with intelligence collection.

This is not “it would nice if they were doing it”. This is “you can see them doing it, right now, and big questions is why and what are the objectives?”

To me, first conclusion it looks to me that this campaign is real and will go on for several months at least. This is not a huge guess because several top Ukrainian officials, Zelensky and Syrsky among them, have told reporters that in the near future “more unpleasant surprises for Russia” are planned on the air war front. I doubt it’s getting into western mainstream reporting but it’s all over the Ukrainian news.

Second conclusion, if you look at how the Ukrainians approach a big military problem and how they absolutely prefer incremental steps while stacking the odds of each step heavily in their favor, and then look at the way they’re picking off AWACS, strike jets, and high-end fighter jets, this to me is really starting to look like the the initial stages of a Ukrainian campaign to gain at least partial air superiority over the Russian military. Not resist, not hold out, not keep fighting. Not demonstrate they’re not dead yet, not make a gesture to score some more foreign aid. It looks to me like the Ukrainians have a systematic plan.

I would say the specific objectives of that campaign probably include (1) eliminating the Russian air force’s present capacity to throw inertia-guided glider bombs, albeit inaccurately, with impunity at Ukrainian positions (2) strengthening the Ukrainian air defense network’s capacity to intercept and shoot down cruise missiles (3) build up Ukrainian air force capacity over time, so that the first few F-16s and pilots arriving in May/June operate successfully (4) as F-16 numbers build over the second half of 2024, get to a point where in some places at some times, the Ukrainian air force, including ground systems, takes over the sky from the Russian air force.

That these processes are in motion is already visible. I won’t go so far as to predict the outcome, but if you want a guess for year three of this war here it is: The Ukrainian overall Ukrainian objective over the next twelve months is to challenge Russia for control of the air, and push the Russian air force out of airspace near or over Ukraine.

As an aside, if you want an indicator of the skill and mindset at the top of the Ukrainian military, the direction and objectives of this campaign (which, admittedly, I am guessing at) are textbook NATO. The tactics won’t be NATO-standard, we can already see that. But the ultimate goal is command of the air, same as Bloecke said was imortant, same as Billy Mitchell, same as General Horner. Take control of the sky so you can see the ground and the other guy can’t, and then blast the other guy with impunity.

The qualification is that that campaign, even more than the sea war defeat Ukraine inflicted on Russia in 2023 (and that a very few observers *ahem* were guessing at even in mid-2022) will be even more heavily dependent on western supplies to keep it running, meaning missiles, spare parts, new pilot and ground crew training.

The fact that most of that can be managed without having to depend on the US as a sole supplier of something so loaded with domestic political baggage that it’s useless as a supply item, is encouraging.

But as we have seen with 155mm artillery ammo, professional armies used to peacetime conditions, even if you pay a lot for them, almost always miscalculate how much stuff one needs to shoot, if there actually is a real war.

So the caution would be that although the Ukrainians appear to have a viable plan for the air war, it’s going to need material sustainment, and the cost I guarantee you is going to be higher than what European politicians are hinting to European taxpayers it will be. Therefore, a key issue to watch over the next twelve months will be the willingness of European politicians to push through more financing for air war material for Ukraine.

And yes, a Viper pic. You know you wanted it.

No real reason for this picture except that everyone likes pictures of F-16s.