RUSSIAN COMBAT AIR STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS
LESSONS FROM UKRAINE ABOUT RUSSIAN COMBAT AIR STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS
One of the defining features of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent full-scale war has been the inability of the much larger and more technologically advanced Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) to establish and exploit air superiority over its Ukrainian opponents. This came as a surprise to most Western and Ukrainian military and civilian analysts and has prompted a widespread reappraisal of the current capabilities of the VKS and, perhaps more importantly, the potential threat that it can pose in the medium term. However, these efforts have been hindered by the lack of granular information about the actual tactics and operational tempo of VKS operations over Ukraine.
For external analysts, areas of VKS weakness have generally been possible to infer from the absence of visible operations and destructive effects. Examples of visible weakness include the VKS’s inability to effectively conduct suppression and destruction of enemy air defense (SEAD/DEAD) operations, or to project fixed-wing or rotary strike sorties over most of Ukraine. However, the sorties that Russia’s combat aircraft have been flying and the effects they have been achieving are much harder for outside observers to see and. In the land domain, ubiquitous small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and handheld cameras have provided a rich, albeit fragmentary, source of information on the tactics and nature of operations being undertaken by both sides at each stage in the conflict. In contrast, footage available for air operations has been limited to cockpit footage that is carefully collated and released periodically by both sides and clips filmed from the ground of aircraft either flying past or sometimes being engaged by surface-to-air missiles (SAMs).
To help bring greater granularity to the Western picture of Russian combat air operations in Ukraine, the British think tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) produced a special report based on face-to-face interviews conducted in Ukraine in August and October 2022 with senior Ukrainian Air Force (UkrAF) aviation, ground-based air defense (GBAD), intelligence, maintenance, and capability development commanders. In compiling this report, the authors also inspected and disassembled significant numbers of Russian missiles, UAVs, and other weaponry, and conducted numerous secondary interviews with external intelligence professionals to cross-reference the material gathered. This paper builds on that work to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Russian VKS as the war in Ukraine moves towards its second year.
The paper begins with an analysis of the major successes and failures of the VKS in operational and tactical terms during 2022. Next, it provides an analysis of the likely core reasons for the significant differences between the observed combat performance of the VKS over Ukraine and pre-war assessments. The paper then concludes with a section that examines the potential medium-term threat posed by the VKS to both Ukraine and, potentially, European NATO countries.
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DETAILS
- Pages: 26
- Document Number: IOP-2023-U-035263-Final
- Publication Date: 4/17/2023
How Russia could spot Ukrainian F-16s before they even got off the ground, according to an air-warfare expert
A US Air National Guard F-16C parked at Mirgorod Air Base as a Ukrainian Su-27 takes off in July 2011. US Air National Guard/Tech. Sgt. Charles Vaughn- Calls for Western countries to send fighter jets to Ukraine have grown in recent months.
- Those calls center on the US-made F-16, which proponents say will boost Ukraine's air force.
- But Russia would notice if Ukraine began modifying its airbases to support F-16s, one expert says.
Should Ukraine ever receive F-16 fighters from the US, the jets might not last very long. The F-16 is so fragile that it requires specially prepared airbases — and those bases can be identified and targeted by Russia, one expert says.
The F-16 has a large air intake under the nose that "sucks everything from the ground directly into it," Justin Bronk, an air-warfare analyst for Britain's Royal United Service Institute (RUSI) think tank said during a recent episode of the Geopolitics Decanted podcast. "So F-16s typically require very clean, very well-maintained air bases."
The F-16 has "fairly lightweight" landing gear because it is designed to have a good thrust-to-weight ratio and "there is no more weight on the jet than there needs to be," Bronk said.
Russian fighters are built to operate on more primitive airfields, while Western carrier-based jets like the F/A-18 are designed to absorb the shock of hard landings on a floating runway. . ."You would have to do a lot of work to get those Ukrainian, old Soviet-pattern runways to a clean enough state to use an F-16 without high risk of foreign object debris going in and damaging the engines," Bronk said. In addition, a lot of Ukrainian airfields are too short to be used by a fully loaded F-16.
"So you'd be looking at resurfacing work on runways and potentially extension work, all of which is highly visible" to Russia's satellites as well as to sources Moscow has on the ground, Bronk added.
Despite being numerically and technologically outmatched by Russian aircraft and air-to-air missiles, Ukraine's air force has proven remarkably resilient and resourceful. But so far, Russia has chosen to not to use its limited stockpile of long-range missiles against Ukrainian airbases because Ukrainian airpower "doesn't pose a massive threat," Bronk said. . .
Despite struggling with accuracy in its airstrikes, "Russia has the ability to put craters in things that it wants to," Bronk said. "It can't do loads of them. But if you're having to centralize something like the F-16 around one or two bases because you can only prepare one or two to the required standard within the resource constraints, that's quite a vulnerable posture."
Since Russia invaded in February 2022, Ukraine has been pleading for Western jets to replace its dwindling fleet of Soviet-era MiG-29 and Su-27 fighters, which are badly outnumbered and outgunned by Russia's air force.
Western bloc nations have already sent large quantities of weapons and ammunition — including tanks, artillery, and guided missiles — to Ukraine, but they have yet to send jets because of concerns about Ukrainian unfamiliarity with Western aircraft and for fear of provoking Russia."
. . .Bronk has argued that Sweden's JAS-39 Gripen fighter would be the best choice because it is designed to be easy to maintain and to operate from rugged airstrips.
"Gripen is the only option that combines austere and short runway capabilities with comparative ease of maintenance, high in-cockpit automation, and the Meteor missile," Bronk told Insider."
Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds a master's in political science. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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