The West is Learning the Wrong Lessons about Airpower in Ukraine

July 27, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - A recent article appearing in the US-based Business Insider titled, “Russia’s showing NATO its hand in the air war over Ukraine,” would provide a showcase of the deep deficit in military expertise driving increasingly unsustainable, unachievable foreign policy objectives. The article summarizes a number of interviews conducted with Western “airpower experts,” exhibiting a profound misunderstanding of modern military aviation, air defenses, and their role on and above the battlefield. 

The article claims:

Russia botched the initial invasion by failing to establish air superiority from the start, and it has been unable to synchronize its air and ground forces.

This is based on the assumption that Russia could somehow establish air superiority over the battlefield and infers that had the United States and the rest of NATO been in Russia’s place, air superiority would have been established. But this is false.

Fundamental Misconceptions 

At the onset of the Russian Special Military Operation (SMO) Ukraine possessed a formidable Soviet-made integrated air defense network consisting of some of the most successful and effective air defense systems in the world. This included long-range air defense systems like the S-300 as well as mobile systems like Buk, Strela, and Osa, as well as a large number of Soviet-made man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS).

The United States and its allies have not operated in airspace as contested as Ukraine’s since the Vietnam War. Over the skies of Vietnam the US would lose over 10,000 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to Soviet-made air defenses employed by Vietnam’s armed forces.

In subsequent conflicts, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, US-led forces would face either no significant air defenses at all, or air defenses consisting of old equipment operated by poorly organized, poorly trained, and poorly motivated troops, as was the case in Iraq.

Amid the US proxy war against Damascus and the US occupation of eastern Syria, US military aviation has been confined by Syria’s relatively modern air defense network, forcing both US and Israeli warplanes to conduct the same types of stand-off strikes Russian military aviation is conducting in Ukraine.
The article would claim:

Russia has demonstrated that it’s unable to suppress or destroy enemy air defenses, fly effective counterair missions, or run complex composite air operations like those the US Air Force pulled off in the opening days of Desert Storm in 1991 and then in the Iraq invasion in 2003.

Beyond the factually incorrect nature of this statement, the obvious differences between Iraq and Ukraine appear entirely lost among the “airpower experts” interviewed by Business Insider.

The Business Insider, citing these same “airpower experts,” also claims:

On the battlefield, effective airpower should aid the advance of armored combat vehicles and infantry by striking an enemy’s strongpoints, as well as the reinforcements and supplies they depend on.

Because of the vast differences between previous US conflicts around the globe and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine now, the type of rapid maneuver warfare utilized by US-led forces in Iraq would not only be inappropriate in Ukraine, it would be disastrous. The 2023 Ukrainian offensive before which NATO trained, armed, and directed Ukrainian forces, ended in catastrophic failure, comprehensively defeated by Russian defenses utilizing land mines, artillery, multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS), long-range ballistic missiles, a wide variety of drones, and both infantry and attack helicopters utilizing anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) – all elements absent among the armed forces of the various nations the US has invaded and occupied since Vietnam.

Russia has instead adopted a strategy of attrition. Instead of overwhelming Ukrainian positions with rapid maneuver warfare, it is grinding them down with huge amounts of artillery, MLRS, missiles, drones, and military aviation carrying out stand-off strikes using a variety of glide bombs ranging from 250 to 3,000 kilograms. While progress is slower than NATO-style maneuver warfare, it has allowed Russia to avoid the staggering losses Ukraine suffered last year during its offensive.

Ukraine is a different kind of war; thus Russia utilizes a different approach to military aviation.

The conclusion that events unfolding in Ukraine demonstrate the capabilities of Russian military aviation have been “significantly overstated,” as one expert interviewed by Business Insider put it, is a dangerous misconception. US-NATO military aviation would (and already has in Syria) demonstrated it suffers from the same limitations in airspace as contested as Ukraine’s.

Admitted Russian Advantages  

Business Insider’s article concedes there are aspects of Russian military aviation that constitute success. It mentions Russia’s extensive use of stand-off weapons – both air-launched cruise missiles as well as glide bombs (just as the US and its allies are using in Syria to avoid Syrian air defenses). The article also acknowledges Russia’s significant air defense and electronic warfare capabilities, constructing an “umbrella” protecting Russian forces, infrastructure, bases, and civilian centers.

There is one significant difference, however, between Russian and Western stand-off capabilities. Russia’s military industrial base allows it to produce missiles and glide bombs in quantities the collective West cannot match. Russia’s air defense capabilities also exist on a scale the collective West is unable to replicate.

After first claiming Russia is, “unable to suppress or destroy enemy air defenses,” Business Insider eventually admits the depleted air defense arsenals of the collective West and the inability to replenish them in any meaningful manner precisely because Russia has been able to not only “suppress” and “destroy enemy air defenses,” but also because of Russia’s ability to saturate and deplete Ukraine’s supply of interceptor missiles.  

Claims in the article that Lockheed Martin is expanding Patriot missile production to 550 a year are made without explaining that Russia is firing 4,000+ missiles at targets across Ukraine over the same period of time, meaning that 550, 650, or even 750 interceptors manufactured a year represent an entirely inadequate quantity.

And despite this fact, the article would even claim:

In Ukraine, the world has seen that Western air defenses can shoot down incoming drones and missiles when they have sufficient coverage and enough ammo, and the performance has quelled doubts about the Patriot.

This is doubtful.

The US and its allies transferred Western air defense systems to Ukraine, in part, to protect Ukraine’s power grid. In April 2024, CNN would admit that up to 80% of Ukraine’s non-nuclear power production has been destroyed. This means that Ukraine has either run out of Patriot missile interceptors, or the interceptors they have are failing to protect Ukraine’s power grid. It should be noted that the efficacy of an air defense system lies now only in its ability to intercept incoming targets, but also to be produced in large enough quantities to continue intercepting incoming targets.

The high cost of the Patriot missile system inhibits larger-scale production to meet the requirements of a large-scale and/or protracted conflict, meaning that despite its supposed performance in combat, it is still a fundamentally ineffective means of air defense.

Even before Russia’s SMO began in February 2022, the previous month Saudi Arabia’s Patriot systems had exhausted their supply of interceptors amid its ongoing conflict with neighboring Yemen. The United States’ inability to increase production forced Saudi Arabia to “borrow” missiles from neighboring nations.

The limited number of Patriot systems and interceptors being manufactured represent a metric of the system’s overall “success” and, despite the Business Insider’s conclusion, should  continue to drive “doubts” regarding it.

NATO vs. Russia 

The Business Insider article admits that in a conflict between NATO and Russia, NATO military aviation would face serious challenges that simply did not exist in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and even Syria.

The article cites US Air Force (USAF) General David Allvin who noted, “in future fights, it may be possible for the US to achieve air superiority only in bursts — small windows in a specific time, place, and location where air defenses are missing, destroyed, or out of ammo.” 

USAF General James Hecker would tell Business Insider, “if we can’t get air superiority, we’re going to be doing the fight that’s going on in Russia and Ukraine right now, and we know how many casualties that are coming out of that fight.” 

Considering the advantages Russia also enjoys in land warfare capabilities, including the production of up to 3 times more artillery ammunition than the collective West, the outcome of that fight would likely mirror the same incremental defeat Ukraine itself is now suffering.

Western Failures in the Skies of Ukraine, a Microcosm of Wider, Irreversible Decline 

The same blind pursuit of profits and power that compelled the collective West to expand NATO up to Russia’s border in the first place, and deliberately create a national security threat forcing Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, has also created the crisis facing the collective West’s military industrial base making it impossible to achieve the geopolitical objectives this proxy war in Ukraine is a part of.

In order for the collective West to “succeed,” it should first reevaluate what it is even trying to achieve.

This blind pursuit of profits and power is not unlike a tropism in nature – like a tree, for example – reaching downward with its roots and upward with its branches and leaves to grow as large and as fast as possible. In the ideal environment, such a tropism can thrive. In times of drought, the means of sustaining the vast proportions that the tree took could jeopardize its own very survival.

Until the 21st century, the global “environment” was ideal for Western hegemony. The disparity in military and economic power between the West and the rest of the world favored the blind pursuit of profits and power, often in the form of empire. The West grew to gargantuan proportions. Today, the environment has changed – this disparity no longer exists – and now the West is collapsing under the unsustainable size of its own overreach.

While Western policymakers search for game-changing strategies and technologies to maintain generations of global primacy, the unsustainable nature of this pursuit becomes more precarious all while Russia, China, and the rest of the world continue to grow stronger relative to the collective West. Only a policy of shifting away from coercion and control over the rest of the world, toward constructive cooperation with the rest of the world, can avert the inevitable collapse all other stubborn empires have faced throughout history.

For the rest of the world, including Russia and its Chinese allies, the goal continues to be defending their individual and collective sovereignty from Western hegemony while carefully avoiding the triggering of a much larger conflict borne of Western desperation.

In the meantime, in the airspace above Ukraine, a microcosm of the wider failure of Western foreign policy continues to play out, not only lacking any possibility of reversing in Ukraine or its Western sponsors’ favor, but almost certainly to continue accelerating to their detriment.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.