Laxtonto

Someone has agreed in principal it seems…

Toilet smurf coming out of retirement to scoop chin pubes and stir up the ags...

Great thread. I am not posting all of it here, but in essence, the Ukrainians are now targeting the fixed wing drones that Russia is using for recon. They have built high kamikaze drones that can be piloted by 2 dudes from a motorcycle.

Maybe it might be the other way around of, "You have had several beers, don't open the laptop and instead go fuck someone's wife"

Well.... Poland bought 2k JASSMs recently and nobody is sure if any has or has not been sent to the Ukraine. The 400km version would make things real tough for Belbeck and Sevastopol. The 1000km version would be overkill for the Crimea. Working your way through how this would work is not a super crazy exercise. Use the live map and then work backward to determine the max engagement range based on some simple criteria: Flight paths be over over the Black Sea for a much as possible to limit MANPADS and other groundbased ADs. AD's for the S300 and S400 have a functional engagement range of 120km. Yes, they can engage from a further distance but at a much lower effectiveness. This implies that 120km from the the entire coast of Crimea would put the f16s at risk. F16s are being based at an airfield N of Odessa F16s are on an 800km max range (without inflight refueling or auxiliary fuel tanks). Yes, there are options to expand the range, but this is all about initial conservative estimates. You can then find a reasonable launch point and draw a 350km circle around it and there is your new set of viable targets. Based on this simple math you can even hit the Kerch bridge (which would be right on the edge of several of the arcs for the max range of the f16s, shore-based AD, and JASSM 400km range). By effectively running the Black Sea fleet out of the western half of the Black Sea, you now have a much broader area for launch points that make this exercise much more interesting. The big holdback would be if Russia could establish and maintain ADs west of E97 in NW Crimea (the peninsula directly south of Kherson) and west of H05 towards Mayak (where funny enough 2 AD sites were hit yesterday). Clean that up and you can get well south of the southern tip of the Crimea and still be outside of the 120km AD range and no worry about ship to air AD systems.

So in the last two week or so, I can think of 8-10 reports of attacks on various air defense systems in the Crimea. There is just no way that those attacks are not tied to some sort of operational strategy. Targets generally aren't just picked because of "reasons". So unless the AD sites just keep coming up on the target of opportunity lists (which is an interesting suggestion but with the limited number of ATCAMS that can be fired I would expect other targets to emerge) due to the lack of additional strategic alternatives and AD's cost and limited replaceability, this has to have an operational objective. There is only a finite supply of ATCAMS ammo and if an objective is targeted then that launcher is in effect out of commission until it can move and reload. That would imply that the opportunity cost of the time availability of the system is worth the target. The only way that makes sense is that targeting the AD is a strategic priority vs any other target of opportunity or potential counter battery support. The funny part is that the only reason to hammer Russian air defenses is that they are being successful in countering the various long-range missile platforms being employed by Ukraine or they need the air defenses in the Crimea gone to progress to the next strategic objective. To me, all signs point to the f16s being used to hammer north and western Crimea and as they diminish the AD umbrella, use the f16s to provide cover for a largescale river crossing from Kherson. Look at the map in @KYHorn tweet. Notice where those AD's are. Using a 120 km arc from those air defenses put an effective engagement range just north of Kherson. If you keep rolling those AD's back, then you make it that much easier to mass the troops and supplies for a major river crossing. I would expect to see reports next of targeting of command and control targets in the northern Crimea, and then lots of reports of the massive use of artillery around Kherson. Then once the f16s arrive in mass a major move to hop the river and start the taking of Crimea.

Exactly. So now you have in essence a textbook situation for how US ground war doctrine should be implemented. Control the air, use the air to punish any large groups or well dug in positions and use speed to leapfrog and overrun the area. Now combine this with drone swarms and the occasional ATCAMS for positions that would be too hot for the F16s and you could see the Ukraine army advance into Crimea and get to the point that they need to change their thinking from destroying the Kerch bridge to taking it and forcing Russia to either blow it up or potentially having to redeploy their forces into a new bottleneck. The eventual move on Crimea will be the most interesting aspect of how effective the US systems are in comparison to their Russian counterparts. How will Russia respond to F16s launching from the flying with relative impunity over the Black Sea to hammer the bases on the coast of western Crimea (Sevastopol, Novofedorovka, ect.)? Did we (or someone else most likely Poland) send JASSM to Ukraine and how are they used? How effective is the Russian air defenses vs JASSMs? At the 200-400km launch range over the Black Sea the Kerch bridge would be toast if JASSMs are in play. What would this also mean to the Black Sea fleet, based out of Sevastopol? Once sorties start with the f16's, then Russia will either have to commit their fighters out of Belbek/Sevastopol to attempt to control the Black Sea corridor heading south out of Odessa or see everything on the western coast of Crimea start to get hammered. The problem with that is to be able to engage the F16s they need to then leave the cover of even MANPADS and engage over the Black Sea. With the loss of the two A-50s, their detection range will be limited and so we would either expect ship-based naval air radar to be in action (ie sitting ducks well outside of the normal coverage of the land based systems and aircraft and begging for a naval drone or air attack), a continued rotating Russian fighter screen over the Black Sea (which makes them predictable for the F16s to attempt to ambush and isolated), or find some more A50 MANSTAYS to patrol the Black Sea. Regardless what happens, this makes Belbek/Sevastopol the lynchpinfor the region and due to geography very isolated from the west. The other half of this though is that if you try to approach Sevastopol from Odessa and avoid arcs around the Crimea coast due to potential anti air, you are looking to close to max range of the stock f16 engage near the southern Crimea. So now we need to have a discussion about the Ukrainian availability of air refueling assets, AWACS. etc to go along with the f16s. That entire network is a key component on why US airpower is so effective. The issue is that once you get out of the Crimean peninsula and head east of Melitopol it gets much more difficult for Ukraine to control the air, with Russia having the cushion of placing air defenses in Russia proper while still being in effective range. That will be an entirely different discussion for a different day.

Just a few thoughts on this and the overall impact it has on the current situation. The air defenses and their use are the"canary in the coal mine" for the direction of the conflict for the near future. There is definitely a limited supply and limited production. This makes every system lost that much more of a big deal and leads to even more poignant decisions about placement and the value of what to protect. The problem, in part, is the clash in the strategy of how you protect a front with overlapping overages for integrated air defense (ie Crimea) vs protecting a static high-value target (ie individual refineries or Moscow). To keep the integrated system up and running, you need a much higher density of systems in place to cover the same average area as that covered in a standalone placement. So every system sent to protect other targets away from the front has a multiplicative impact. This becomes even more important when you are trying to protect from air sorties from sophisticated fighter aircraft instead of drones and "dumb" missiles. So as they continue to lose systems, then they have to decide do they protect the economic and social targets well off the front, or the troops along a long continued front. This is in part the beauty of their drone strikes and the changes it has pushed in the modern air defense strategy. These strikes are cheap assets to send from an offensive perspective that can force the opponent to tie up a very expensive very limited defensive resource to cover targets so far away from the front that they do not provide any real additive defensive value to the rest of the theater. Right now we are seeing Russia react to the cheap drones vs the various long-range missile systems. It becomes even more complicated when you mix in the F16s. Right now, most of the integrated air defense is somewhat simplified because the shape of the operating theater in most places is about 100km deep in a forward-facing setting backed up against Russia or the Sea of Azov. This only gets complicated when you get S/W of Melitopol into Crimeia, where there are multiple avenues to approach. It is harder to defend when you have to pay attention in multiple directions with little backstop and have to place your systems within the Ukraine vs. in Russia where they have been protected by an ordnance use order. In the near term, the strikes on these systems are great just to see Russia have to play the "rob Peter to pay Paul" resource scarcity game. It becomes obvious to everyone who/what values more depending on where they place these limited assets. Long-term, the continued strikes on the air defense systems are really all just prep for the F16's arrival this summer. But this is one of those times where you can run with the "why not both" gif and be happy. The loss of the two A-50s plus the continued dwindling of the air defenses will make the arrival of the F-16's real interesting later this summer. There is a major chance that we end up with a "split" in how the war is going where Ukraine is dominating the air in Crimea and using that to support a leapfrog advance in Crimea while seeing in effect a "wall" of air defense N/E of Melitopol. At the same time you could see a concerted Russian push towards Slovainsk and continued pressure toward Kharkiv. How both sides react to this will be very telling. The real thing people need to understand is that if the arrivals of the F-16s doesn't radically change the goings on in the overall theater, I am not sure we will see any form of resolution to this in the foreseeable future.