Russian Air Defense & the Illusion of Competence.
A respectful response to "Defending Mother Russia's Skies" by Dr. Thomas Withington
How do we know the quality of a military? This is a question that has bedeviled military analysts from time immemorial. Julius Caesar almost certainly had an officer or two desperately trying to determine the true strength of the barbarians when he marched into Gaul in 58 BC. The situation is little better in 2022. The unpalatable truth is we only know the real quality of a fighting force once it has a chance to demonstrate its capabilities in action.
This has never been more evident than when the Russian military finally got a chance to test its metal against the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) earlier this year. The results shocked entire swathes of the commentariat and analyst community. The vaunted Russian bear was itself mauled by a comparative upstart UAF. In no small part because the Russian armed forces suffered crippling deficiencies in logistics, training, and strategy. Some of these were seen well before the war. Yet mere weeks before the onset of hostilities the most senior serving American military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, was predicting Kyiv could fall within 72 hours.
There are methods of assessment that can provide quality insights short of open war. We can examine past performance, assess levels of training and professional military education, evaluate the capabilities of equipment, appraise existing doctrine to determine how the force intends to conduct itself, and even make some deductions based on the level of military spending the government supporting them puts forth every year. But even then, there are dangers.
Past performance can be misleading if taken out of context. The actual effect of training and professional military education on military readiness and competency is often difficult to determine during peacetime. Equipment capabilities are never fully known before the army crewing that equipment is forced to use it under real world conditions. Doctrine is rendered irrelevant if the army that formulated it refuses to implement it in time of war or hasn’t adequately prepared itself for the practical challenges of executing it. Military spending levels are misleading when widescale corruption drains resources before they ever reach their officially intended destination. Knowing this, assessments of military capability must continuously be critically reexamined with an eye towards confirming or disproving the basis on which they are made.
In his paper “Defending Mother Russia’s Skies”, Dr. Thomas Withington does an admirable job laying out the theory of Russian of ground based air defense (GBAD). The doctrine of their use, organization, capability, related developments on the cybersecurity front, and new projected systems are all detailed therein. He concludes with the understandable caveat that determining Russian GBAD effectiveness is difficult. After a brief overview of recent combat actions to date, he leaves us with this final assessment:
“The ongoing war in Ukraine shows that Russian GBAD is capable of inflicting serious losses on an adversary, despite the assessed desultory performance of the Russian military elsewhere in the conflict. NATO and allied countries need to view Russian strategic, operational and tactical GBAD as a clear threat. Countering this threat requires the continued prioritisation of offensive counter-air capabilities as a key means to defeat Russia’s anti-access/area denial posture. Any alliance, country or military which underestimates the strength of Russian GBAD does so at its peril.”
At this point it is fair to ask how we know Russian GBAD is “capable of inflicting serious losses on an adversary”. What are the counterfactuals?
While the Russian GBAD forces are certainly numerous, there are several aspects to the recent wars in which they have been involved that deserve examination. Russia has been the aggressor in Georgia (2008), Syria (2012), and Ukraine (2014 and 2022). In each case the Russian military had time to preposition GBAD assets to maximum effect prior to the start of any hostilities and with (likely) significant forewarning of when those hostilities would start. This gives air defense crews a distinct advantage in the outset of any conflict.
More importantly, Russian GBAD units did not face an air force comparable in size to their own or that operated aggressively against them, in any of the three conflicts. The hostile air threat to Russian assets in Syria was minimal outside occasional Coalition airstrikes and several skirmishes with the Turkish Air Force. However, in the case of Georgia and Ukraine both opposing air forces were comparatively small.
Georgia operated a handful of Su-25’s and Mi-24’s in 2008. The former were quickly withdrawn from action to preserve the nations only combat aircraft while the latter flew minimal sorties and were also grounded after August 11th. Russian GBAD managed to down three transport planes and four helicopters during the conflict.
At the beginning of the current war, Ukraine’s Air Force had a maximum paper strength of 98 fixed wing combat aircraft and 112 combat helicopters according to Flight Global’s World Air Forces Directory. These numbers are minuscule when compared to Russian figures of 1,511 fixed wing combat aircraft and 1,553 combat helicopters from the same source. Moreover, the Ukrainian Air Force has largely functioned in a guerilla capacity, fighting where and when it had to in order to protect a key target or take advantage of an opportunity. It has not, until very recently, made a concerted effort to suppress Russian GBAD sites. It’s worth noting that once the Ukrainian Air Force commenced targeting Russian GBAD sites, primarily with American made HARM missiles, they achieved significant success. Ukraine lost an estimated 12 aircraft and 12 helicopters during the 2014 Crimean annexation, and a further estimated 105 aircraft during the current war.
While those numbers are high at almost 50% of estimated pre-war strength, excluding the transfers made to Ukraine by several nations, they are somewhat deceiving. Not only is the Ukrainian Air Force heavily outnumbered, but it also crews more venerable Russian built airframes. A similar situation prevailed in Georgia during the 2008 war. From a Russian perspective, this is a significant advantage. Russian forces have an intimate knowledge of the capabilities and performance envelopes of these enemy aircraft, excluding any upgrades that may have been added to them. Russian GBAD units would reasonably be expected to understand the best way to counter domestically produced airframes.
Against a peer opponent using western equipment, this situation begins to change radically. The United States, for example, fields thousands of modern combat aircraft. Virtually all of these are significantly more advanced and capable than their average Russian counterparts. Not only would Russian GBAD crews be forced to contend with more technical unknowns and likely a significant qualitative difference in hardware, but there is also a doctrinal element to American air operations they have not faced in the modern era. American aircrews train specifically for the suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) with airframes specially designed for the role. The British, German, and Italian air forces maintain similar aircraft.
The last time western air forces engaged Russian air defense equipment on a large scale, Coalition forces systematically destroyed Saddam Hussein’s massive air defense network in Iraq in 1991. This example is admittedly imperfect; Iraqi GBAD crews were likely not up to the same standards as their Russian counterparts and technology has significantly advanced in the interim. However, I submit it is highly unlikely the technological gap has closed in favor of Russian hardware in the last three decades when compared to advances in western airframes and ordnance. Nor do I think we can realistically say that Russian GBAD crews have truly been tested in recent conflicts for the reasons I outlined above. If they are at all similar to their compatriots in other branches, as Dr. Withington notes in his conclusion, we can reasonably expect their performance to be substandard when significantly tested by a force capable of genuinely threatening them.
Russian GBAD capability in the face of a peer or near-peer air threat is largely an unknown. However, in my opinion, there is no significant evidence its performance would exceed the dismal display being showcased in Ukraine by its compatriots in the other Russian combat arms. In all likelihood, NATO air forces could devastate Russian GBAD units using proven tactics and superior technology in a sustained air campaign, without suffering serious losses.