Ukraine's growing success in shooting down Russia's workhorse Su-34 and 35 fighter bombers is putting increase stress on the Russian air force due to lack of replacement planes, spare parts, air crew and maintenance staff.
The result is an increasingly ineffective combat support role for Russian air as it tries to manage demand for sorties with degraded readiness and capability. JL
David Axe reports in Forbes:
The Russian air force lost another Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber, shot down by Ukrainian air defenses. Those 13 losses (in one week) are worse than they seem for the increasingly stressed Russian air force. In theory, the air arm has plenty more planes. In practice, it is close to collapse. Sensing an opportunity after Avdiivka, the Russian air force is flying more sorties closer to the front line. This means Ukrainian air-defenders are shooting down more Russian planes. Russian pilots increasingly are blind to Ukrainian missiles as it shot down one third of Russia's A-50 AWACS. Escalating losses, exacerbated by anemic plane-production, increases stress on surviving planes and crews.The Russian air force lost another Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber on Thursday, the Ukrainian air force claimed. If confirmed, the Thursday shoot-down would extend an unprecedented hot streak for Ukrainian air-defenses.
The Ukrainian claim they’ve shot down 11 Russian planes in 11 days: eight Su-34s, two Sukhoi Su-35 fighters and a rare Beriev A-50 radar plane.
But those 11 claimed losses are worse than they might seem for the increasingly stressed Russian air force. In theory, the air arm has plenty more planes. In practice, the service is dangerously close to collapse.
Exactly how the Ukrainians are shooting down so many jets is unclear. It’s possible the Ukrainian air force has assigned some of its American-made Patriot missile launchers to mobile air-defense groups that move quickly in close proximity to the 600-mile front line of Russia’s two-year wider war on Ukraine, ambushing Russian jets with 90-mile-range PAC-2 missiles then swiftly relocating to avoid counterattack.
But the distance at which the Ukrainians shot down that A-50 on Friday—120 miles or so—hints that a longer-range missile system was involved. Perhaps a Cold War-vintage S-200 that the Ukrainian air force pulled out of long-term storage.
It also is apparent the Ukrainians have moved some of their two-dozen or so 25-mile-range NASAMS surface-to-air missile batteries closer to the front line. After all, the Russians found—and destroyed with a missile—their first NASAMS launcher near the southern city of Zaporizhzhia on or before Monday.
It’s possible Russian forces’ own actions have contributed to the spike in aviation losses. After finally defeating, at incredible cost in people and equipment, the ammo-starved Ukrainian garrison in the ruins of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine two weeks ago, the Russian army in Ukraine is advancing against other Ukrainian garrisons that also are running out of ammo—all thanks to Russia-aligned Republicans in the U.S. Congress, who have been blocking further U.S. aid to Ukraine since October.
Sensing an opportunity, the Russian air force is flying more sorties, closer to the front line, lobbing glide-bombs to suppress Ukrainian troops. “The enemy has overcome the fear of using aviation directly over the battlefield,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies explained, “and although this results in the loss of aircraft, their ground forces gain a significant firepower advantage.”
This surge in Russian sorties presents Ukrainian air-defenders with more targets. So of course they’re shooting down more Russian planes.
It helps the Ukrainian effort that Russian pilots increasingly are blind to Ukrainian missile-launches. The Russian air force once counted on its nine or so active A-50 radar planes—organized into three, three-plane “orbits” in the south, east and north—to extend sensor coverage across Ukraine.
In damaging one A-50 in a drone strike last year and shooting down two more A-50s this year, the Ukrainians have eliminated a third of this sensor coverage, and created blind spots where Russian pilots might struggle to spot approaching missiles.
In any event, the consequences of the Ukrainians’ recent kills, for the Russians, are dire. The Russian air force is losing warplanes far, far faster than it can afford to lose them. Russia’s sanctions-throttled aerospace industry is struggling to build more than a couple of dozen new planes a year.
Escalating losses, exacerbated by anemic plane-production, almost certainly are increasing the stress on the surviving planes and crews. The Russian air arm isn’t yet in an organizational death spiral. But it’s getting closer.
The numbers tell the story. The Russian air force has acquired 140 of the twin-engine, two-seat, supersonic Su-34s. Counting this year’s unconfirmed shoot-downs, the air force has lost 31 of the Su-34s.
But 109 Su-34s still is a lot of Su-34s, right?
Wrong, according to Michael Bohnert, an engineer with the RAND Corporation in California. Shoot-downs represent “only a portion of total losses” of Russian fighters, Bohnert wrote back in August. “Overuse of these aircraft is also costing Russia as the war drags on.”
“In a protracted war, where one force tries to exhaust the other, it's the total longevity of the military force that matters,” Bohnert added. “And that's where the VKS”—the Russian air force—“finds itself now.”
Bohnert assumed the air force went to war two years ago with around 900 fighters and attack planes and, in the first 18 months of fighting, lost around 100 of them to Ukrainian action. The problem for the Russians—besides the losses—is that the requirement for fighter and attack sorties hasn’t decreased even as the fighter and attack inventory has decreased.
So those 800 remaining planes are flying more frequently in order to handle taskings the Kremlin once assigned to 900 planes. And that means more wear and tear, deepening maintenance needs and a growing hunger for increasingly hard-to-find spare parts—imperatives that effectively remove airframes from the front-line force.
“The extra hours that it's pressed its aircraft into service since February 2022 have effectively cost [the air force] an additional 27 to 57 aircraft in imputed losses,” Bohnert calculated. And that was before Russian aircraft losses spiked starting in December, and Russian sortie-rates also spiked as the battle for Avdiivka culminated.
In other words, the imputed losses likely are even higher. They, combined with recent shoot-downs, could mean the Russian air force is down to 700 flyable fighters and attack jets. Two hundred fewer than it had two years ago.
To avoid even greater wear and tear and steeper imputed losses as the shoot-downs continue, the Russian air force soon could face a hard choice: fly less often, or risk a downward spiral in readiness.
All that is to say that, if Bohnert is right, the Russian air campaign in Ukraine is unsustainable. And it becomes even less sustainable with every additional jet the Ukrainians shoot down.
0 comments:
Post a Comment