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Is the Russian Air Force Actually Capable of Complex Air Operations?
I remember that the Soviet Mig-27 pilots were pretty shit-hot in the way back days before Gorby admitted defeat.
That was then...
It makes me recall something I've thought of before.
Combat experience is ephemeral.
Think about it.
The US went from fighting, and winning, a global scale war to being unable to stop North Korea from taking over all but Pusan just under five years later.
What happened to all that institutional knowledge? Why was it forgotten so quickly?
The good news, for South Korea anyways, our way of doing things allowed the knowledge to be recreated and recovered fairly quickly.
It's a system that requires some dedicated core cadre of professional, career, NCO's and officers. They carry the torch to the fire and at least know the theory of what they're trying to do and have read that it used to work.
The Russian system consists entirely of short-timers below middle management officers. There's no core cadre to carry the flame, so everything they learn is lost as soon as the soldiers who know it leave the service. The career officers are far more focused on their career than war fighting, because war fighting just doesn't come up all that often.
Oh and conscription is inferior to an all volunteer force unless you just want a wall of cannon fodder.
Vietnam was where we learned that hard lesson. We weren't getting the level of performance from our Army we wanted because the troops were short timers from day one and we rotated individuals in and out rather than units. And many other mistakes we don't tend to make any more. There's books on this.
Books that, apparently, have never been translated into Russian.
Nothing says that they won't learn on the job and quickly; but they're starting behind the curve and the Ukrainians are inside their OODA loop.
Even in the 70's and 80's, the Soviet Air Force was chronically underfunded and short of fuel for pilot training. From what I've heard, budgets have been low over the past decade and purchases of new planes and equipment are small - their new models are being purchased a handful or a squadron at a time; in real numbers they've purchased fewer new aircraft than Ukraine has in that time.
ReplyDeleteMy understanding is that the Russian military is much weaker than most people realize. Did you notice how few troops they had massed on the border? 140,000 troops is NOT enough to take and hold a country with 40 million people. I wonder if Putin was sabre rattling or wanted a piece of Ukraine and went further because of the foreign response?