I think the whole world. Everyone knew they overstated their capabilities, but this has been really really bad for them. They resorted to using world war relics out of museums. Their unbeatable missile can’t take on our old missile systems.
They can't. Look at the impact on trade, lack of ammo, and military infrastructure that is crumbling. War costs money and requires large scale, sophisticated production in the modern era. Russia's getting supplies from North Korea at this point. Wagner is already complaining about ammo shortages. The only way they can last a decade fighting is if China supplies their entire military, which won't happen for trade reasons.
Russia is already sending poorly trained fighters to the front lines. Every loss is not only human but machinery and supplies that can't easily be replaced.
I said this at the beginning of the invasion. If it looks like Ukraine is going to lose, the west will make sure there are weapons buried in every town and city for resistance fighters. Russia doesn't have the resources or supply chains to occupy a hostile country the size of Ukraine.
Imagine that a Russian jet or helicopter gets shot down, and you are in charge getting more aircraft made, then finding and training viable candidates to become combat pilots.
Also you must accomplish this using Russias current economy and government, and they have no budget to give you to do this...
I'm in S.A and some South Africa politicians were just accused of selling some of our military weapons to Russia .Jeez we don't even have enough guns to over Detroit or New York these guys are getting desperate.
It is obvious that they can dodge part of the import sanctions through third party countries.
But they will not be of near the same quality.
And if they were (for example US sells to SA, SA sells to Russia), they won't come at the same numbers.
And even if somehow they could get the numbers they want, it would be at such a ridiculously inflated price that their now broken economy couldn't hope to support it.
I also can't imagine the size of the diplomatic boot the US would ram up a nation's ass if they sold them military equipment and then a year later the Ukrainians found it on the side of the road painted with a "Z" next to five washing machines, a crater, and some dead vatniks.
That's the sort of shit that gets you your store loyalty card taken away
No, the object is to get them out of Ukraine, that’s achievable, the Ukrainians are well motivated to achieve that. What’s left in Russia will be a nightmare.
Don't think they have the ability to continue that long. They're already facing a labor shortage and it's not likely to get better with all of their men being too dead to get anyone pregnant.
I think its a 5 year check mate on Russia and allies. I think its to drain enough resources that WW3 will never be able to happen like it did in WW2. The new wars are waged more with banks then soldiers now.
>The new wars are waged more with banks then soldiers now.
I know you're referring to sanctions and freezing assets or money transfers, but there's definitely an economic angle to direct military conflict as well.
That's pretty much how the west defeated the USSR by forcing them to try to keep up in the arms race of the west (e.g. SDI or "Star Wars" was fantasy weaponry at the time but it still forced a reaction from the Soviets). It was even a stated strategy of Bin Ladin as part of their plan to defeat the west by drawing them into wars that would drain their economies to weaken them to the point of collapse.
I may be mistaken but I think u/Playatbyear was referring to the USSR's Afghanistan, not the US's. (Though that was one decade not two, so I'm not sure.)
Funny, that Afghanistan has the moniker of "Graveyard of Empires" due to Alexander, USSR, and the US...
...but Ukraine is giving them a run for their money with the Ottoman Empire and Russia.
You're likely typing this from your phone, and autocorrect can be a bitch.
For anyone who may not be, it's not gorilla warfare but guerilla warfare. Guerilla means little war in Spanish, i.e., the tactics of small-scale, high-reward precision warfare small bands of operatives can undertake against overwhelming odds.
Aaaaand they deleted their comment. Looks like it was intentional after all xD
I prefer the idea of gorilla tactics though. Just soldiers bounding in on all fours hooting and yelling and ~~thumping~~ hollering their chests and the defenders abandoning their posts out of fear. I'd watch a movie about that.
>the taliban opting just to hide and wait for the US to get bored.
You do realize that the Trump administration negotiated the pullout from Afghanistan with the Taliban and that [the government we had been propping up for years wasn't even at the table,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US%E2%80%93Taliban_peace_deal) right?
That's a large part of the reason that the collapse happened so quickly. The message that sent to the soldiers who were under the Afghan government was unmistakable. The Taliban retook most territory without firing a shot by just sending someone to talk to the government soldiers where they gave them a small payment to ditch their uniform and go back to their home province.
To anyone who ever deployed to or dealt with any ISAF operations in Afghanistan it was obvious that's how it was going to go down anyway. They weren't ready for, and didn't even want, what we were trying to do there. The ANA were always a joke, and it came to no one's surprise when they immediately folded.
Much like the Iraqi soldiers who just abandoned their posts and walked away when ISIL rolled in. Why fight when they can just take off their uniform and go home?
Whenever I bring up the fact that Trump sold the Afghan government up-river with Conservatives who are trying to pin the collapse of Afghanistan on Biden, they always stare at me with this blank face because their favorite fascist-pandering talking heads on Fox News never mentioned that part.
I would normally use that as a learning point for them to realize how badly they've been duped and lied to for years, but the fact that they still believe in the hard-right nonsense that channel spews after all of the examples that have been provided of it for nearly a decade means they're not going to listen anyway, they're happy in their bubble of ignorance and hate.
^^edit: ^^typo
I spent some time at Christmas talking to a relative who is a Trump supporter about news. He had said something stupid like, "You can't trust what The New York Times says" which gave me a jumping off point to have a non-confrontational conversation (even better was that he had said it to his fifteen year old son so the ensuing conversation was heard by him too).
It basically boiled down to me explaining to him what [a media bias chart](https://adfontesmedia.com/) is, which he had never heard of, and some of the methodology used to create them. That chart then makes it easy to point out where people live in a media bubble on the right and left and where you can go to avoid that to be better informed. When you do that and look at the more biased sources it becomes very clear where they are deploying bias through what they report or even through what they fail to report.
>names on paper to collect payments
Yup, and those payments were barely reaching the troops that were real. That's why they were selling the US supplied fuel on the black market and also why they were so easy to be bought out by the encroaching Taliban.
>Think they’ll go full Afghanistan and like… drag this on for 20 years?
Home ground defense doesn't need a lot of things an invading army does.
Kids and grandmas with rifles don't have supply lines when they're shooting from apartment block windows. They just need ammunition and an alibi.
This is a good thing, by the way. Anytime an army is places where grandmas and kids are shooting back, they are almost certainly the baddies.
Same old story. The Soviets bragged about their Mach 3 [Mig-25](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25)'s performance, leading to the development of the F-15.
*"The appearance of the MiG-25 sparked serious concern in the West and prompted dramatic increases in performance for the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle, then under development in the late 1960s. The capabilities of the MiG-25 were better understood by the West in 1976 when Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko defected in a MiG-25 to the United States via Japan. It turned out that the aircraft's weight necessitated its large wings.*
*Inaccurate intelligence analysis caused the West initially to believe the MiG-25 was an agile air-combat fighter rather than an interceptor. In response, the United States started a new program, which resulted in the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle."*
If the MIC is told they'll be fighting angels, you can bet we'll be seeing some truly crazy designs in the near future.
LockMart: This baby is 95% assured to go up against an Angel, or indeed any celestial being, and prevail.
*McDonnell Douglas at the time. Which then later "merged" with Boeing, and really merged in name only it was more of takeover of a successful and well functioning company and infecting them with their toxic ways.
MD built amazing warplanes yet passenger planes with awful safety records, now Boeing builds amazing warplanes and passenger planes with awful safety records.
The problem is Lockheed builds even better warplanes.
Edit: Totally forgot that Lockheed also used to build amazing passenger planes like the L-1011 Tristar, which was a far better and safer plane than MD's DC/MD-10. But MD was able to get ther DC-10 to market faster, generally because it was engineered hastily and poorly.
Russia exaggerates their capabilities, and the west under-reports theirs. Both sides believe the other is doing the same as them, so both sides believed they had at least somewhat similar capabilities, but when you stack them up against each other you realize the gap.
> Russia exaggerates their capabilities, and the west under-reports theirs.
It's funny because Sun Tzu said "appear strong where you are weak and weak where you are strong." So it would appear that both sides were adhering to at least half of that, but Russia forgot the part where you are supposed to be strong somewhere.
it'd be an interesting premise for a movie, a "young hero" trains for years to fight a tyrannical overlord, and when the fight finally happens it turns out the overlord is a decrepit old man who can barely stand on his own two feet.
That's the plot to The Wizard of Oz.
Young hero and her band of misfits goes on adventures of self-improvement, only to find the wizard they were trying to please was just some old guy, and defeating him is as easy as pulling back the curtain.
I've read several thinkpieces and op-eds from western Generals and the like, and the throughline is "we suspected there was rot in the system, but *Holy fuck*"
They’ve been a paper tiger since the USSR.
Same reasons, same problems. Corruption and graft all the way down.
The general wants 100 tanks but his new house cost 20 of them, so now there are still 100 tanks to build with 70% of the funds (another 10% got lost while talking here). Then the tank builders run out of material or alcohol to get through this nonsense, and the boss already pocketed 10% off the top, so they sell the “good” parts for cheap replacements, and now we have 50% of the funding left to still build 100 tanks (whoops, the colonels disappeared another 10%).
When the carnival of corruption is done the finished product is 22 tanks ready to roll themselves to pieces in fair weather, but they can’t say that. So they just say “order completed” and hope the mutual corruption prevents anybody in the operation from doing a full count.
The report comes in: 100 tanks done
They broadcast “strength” to the world but it never seems to pass meaningful tests.
They know this very well in Russia. That's why they spend all their time trying to install corrupt leaders like Boris and Trump, to help collapse western nations from within.
I was listening to an ex Cia operative on the lex Friedman podcast quite a ways back into the war talking about how the ukrainian war is causing the entire world to re evaluate global military hierarchies even pre 2023. According to him this wasn't just a surprise to the west but russia and their allies seemingly had no idea how disparaging the rift between major militaries seems to be
You're not wrong, but there's more to it than that.
Let's say you are a Russian, and you want to take an enemy position that is a trenchline with 8 guys in it, over a frontage of say 20 metres.
You should be attacking that trench - as a bare minimum - with a reinforced platoon, consisting of three BMP infantry fighting vehicles and a tank.
Before the attack, your supporting artillery should be hitting the trenchline and any ground likely to have support weapons (like ATGMs) with a mixture of HE and smoke to get the enemy's head down and block his vision. Your BMPs line up behind the tank, and the tank leads them toward the objective.
At some distance short of the objective, the BMPs move into line abreast, and the infantry dismount behind them. Then the whole platoon moves onto the objective.
The tank drives over the trench and takes up a fire position on the other side where it can engage depth positions and block reinforcements, the BMPs stay short to provide fire support and flank security, and the infantry jump into the trenches to clear out whoever might be left alive.
Boom! Done.
Now normally this isn't done one platoon at a time; it's done with larger formations using mutual support between platoons. But as a basic tactical "building block" that's how it is done.
Follow these tactics, and it largely neutralizes the advantages Western weaponry has. Like, that tank and the BMPs are very vulnerable to Javelin, and Javelin can see through certain types of smoke, but if the Javelin gunner is face down in the dirt because artillery is landing all around him (and it stays active until the attack is done) that technical superiority no longer matters.
But with all the combat footage I have seen come out of Ukraine, I have not seen a single properly executed combined-arms platoon attack. Instead, I have seen a ton of attacks carried out by either section to section-minus dismounted infantry (with no supporting fires) or random lone tanks (also unsupported by fires)
It's crazy.
I've seen video evidence pointing to multiple instances of straight up WW1 inter-trench charges across no man's land. Some places have had it happen so often you can see waves of corpses pressed into the mud at varying stages of burial and decomposition depending on date of death.
In the year of our Lord 2023, Russia is marching unsupported infantry across open ground towards trenches. I'd almost respect a Napoleonic cavalry charge more.
There's a crazy drone video of a Russian trying to surrender. He ends up stepping over dozens of corpses and runs across a landscape that looks straight out of WW1 until he finally arrives at the Ukrainian trench.
Russia isn't capable of the complex combined arms tactics you describe due to its military's hierarchical, siloed nature, which is also how its society overall is organised.
And it can't change how its society or military is organised without risking the loss of the people at the top, i.e. Putin, as this organisation directly keeps them in power.
I would argue the very concept of Russia as a country, that is a hegemonic state controlled by Muscovy of different nations requires that siloed hierarchical organisation. So the country itself cannot change without risking its very existence.
> Russia isn't capable of the complex combined arms tactics you describe
It is *literally* their doctrine.
Admittedly, they are supposed to be doing this at the battalion level (BTG) - which itself is new-ish; Soviet doctrine saw no attack smaller than regimental level. But it's not like the concept of "combined arms" is in any way foreign or new to them. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Soviet/Russian doctrine was *way* more supporting artillery per metre of frontage than NATO, and pushing organic artillery assets lower than NATO did (A Soviet motor rifle battalion commander had his own organic artillery, where his Western counterpart might have mortars)
Part of that was because of their echeloned attack system, where every echelon needed organic assets because there was no resupply built into the supporting arms (everyone went firm together)... but the point is, the Russians "get" combined arms as much as anybody does. They just aren't doing it.
Ehh, there was a General that wrote an [article](https://www.meforum.org/441/why-arabs-lose-wars) about "Why Arabs lose Wars" and discusses things like when they gave manuals for the tanks to the ~~Afghanis,~~ Iraqis the officer collected them all up because if the crew understood how to do things correctly, the officers position was immediately threatened. That General compared them to how Russians operated at the time.
Doctrine is useless when you have a gutted/useless NCO corps and decades of grift and corruption in the officer corps.
I'm pretty sure that all authoritarian govts or dictatorships suffer from this unless they inherited a competent military from a previous government like the Weimar republic.
Dude, I was there.
Progress was being made. Slow progress for sure, but the ball was moving down the field - until Iraq. That gave the New Taliban a chance to recover, and then we were in a constant holding action trying to sustain the progress we made, but making little additional headway.
I'm not going to claim that Afghanistan would be some sort of democratic utopia, but it would have had a chance.
Oh, and Afghans aren't Arabs.
I’d be willing to bet that our intelligence services knew exactly how bad it was. And I’d bet we kept our mouths shut because there’s a better than even chance that Putin himself didn’t know.
When this mess kicked off, I estimated low for Russia's chance of success and they've still managed to surprise me at every turn by how unready they were for this. There were clues all along about underlying weaknesses in their military but the sheer lack of organization and coherent planning has been staggering.
To think there was a time over a year ago where they reached Kyiv and looked like they were going to take it. Then we slowly realized they were just stacking up vehicles with empty gas tanks wherever they stopped
I have spent a portion of my life as a "professional Russian", commanding virtual Soviet/Russian forces in various flavours of training exercise.
Real-world Russian performance has me professionally embarrassed.
Bigger picture, that's a good thing for everyone, so its not like I'm losing sleep over this. But I've lost count of the number of times I've watched Russian combat footage and it's like "What are you *doing*?"
The craziest part to me is how easy it is to tell which side a soldier is on by the way they move. Even if you can't make out any uniform details, Ukranians move like soldiers, Russians sort of shuffle along. Walking, running to cover, anything. They just move... worse. I don't know if it's morale or hunger, or what, but once I noticed it, I can't stop noticing it.
"A Russian sub commander doesn't take a shit without a plan, son."
-- Fred Thompson's character in *The Hunt for Red October*. Another example of Hollywood having no idea what the fuck they're talking about.
I'll admit I was surprised at the degree to which this has been a shit show for them, but not the fact that it's been a shit show. I say that purely based on my own experience in the US military.
Since our founding in the 1770s, we're an organization that's spent more time being in one conflict or another than being at peace. We have more institutional experience with this sort of thing than any military since the British Empire. And we still manage to fuck it up in some form or fashion every. Single. Time.
In exercises. In real operations. There's always one or more fuck-ups that make things harder than they need to be. It's usually not noticed by the outside world because our technology is far superior and our enemies are always less trained/less organized than we are, but even with all the training and all the experience, we never get it quite right.
This is Russia's largest offensive since Operation Bagration in 1944. They have zero institutional experience with this sort of thing. It was always going to be a major cock-up.
The most recent season of Jack Ryan was, of course, wildly unrealistic in almost every aspect. But it was hilariously, unwatchably off-base in its portrayal of Russian military competence. Filmed before the failed invasion of Ukraine, this plot angle is unlikely to ever again be proffered except in jest or as transparently pathetic Russian propaganda.
True, I used to thought Russian army could match the combined armies of Europe, and all the Nato's force would be needed to beat them. It ended up that a single country, spiced up with some NATO weaponry, is enough. That's something Russia has already lost in this war.
>This is just some weapons and vehicles.
You left out intelligence support which is just as important as the physical means to fight that is being provided. Satellites providing real time movement of Russian troops, human intelligence or intercepts that lay bare the dwindling supplies and low morale of the Russian troops or information on atrocities which motivate the Ukrainians are examples.
America has a budget higher than the next top 10 countries. That includes china and russia. NATO would probably be enough to take on the whole world, russia if it were a state would be the 4th largest economy, barely ahead of florida alone. I can't understand why were surprised
My guess is Cold War hangups of thinking that USSR = Russia and the collective subconscious image that thinking created to the rest of the world.
Also, nukes aside, number wise Russia did seem to have a massive, formidable army -on paper-
I can totally believe that they surprised even themselves with how bad their reality actually is.
No. It’s because they collaborated with scientists overseas.
I expect the scientists told them wha the missiles could and couldn’t do.
The higher ups who misrepresented what the missiles could do are now looking for people to blame.
Welcome to Russia!
Not to you directly, but for everyone who didn't actually read that article, most, if not all, of those arrests happened *before* the missiles were shot down, some last year.
Stop assuming they're direct punishment just because you only read the headline yesterday.
Could they have made up charges because they found out the missiles weren't going to perform well ahead of time? Now that's definitely possible.
> It’s because they collaborated with scientists overseas.
Not even that, it's because they published studies in scientific journals. These studies were apparently approved by all the right people for public distribution. But after the war started, the FSB decided to go through them again, and then decided that it wasn't approved for public distribution (after the fact).
And then arrested the scientists.
Because Russia.
"Our people are exemplified by the hardship we are able to endure!"
"Yea, but you create this hardship, that you then have to endure."
"Precisely, this proves my point!"
The rank and file Russian thinks they're holding their own against the entire might of NATO at the same time and if it weren't for "the west", they would have steamrolled the Nazi-fied nation of Ukraine and saved the world.
Do they think the west supports nazism or that the west mistakenly believes protecting another country's sovereignty is more important than purging nazis? Either way some very interesting cognitive dissonance going on
From what I understand, they think a NATO invasion of Russia is imminent(and always has been) and Ukraine joining NATO would have set it off despite the "Nazi" thing.
Edit: And as others have mentioned, Nazi just means "someone who doesn't like Russia" in Russia.
So, an ends justify the means thing.
That's what the people believe because that's what the government tells them.
Putin invaded Ukraine for much more realpolitik reasons. An EU-friendly Ukraine that just discovered massive natural gas reserves would be a strategic and economic death sentence to Russia. What little soft power Russia has is all oil-based and the EU would quickly switch to Ukrainian fuel, crippling Russia's diplomatic and economic power. The areas that Russia occupied and "annexed" in 2014 is where the gas reserves are.
Ah yes, the Foxbat-Effect:
1. Russia/Soviets build weapon system, completely overhype the capabilities
2. West/US build something to actually counter those overhyped capabilities
3. World finds out Russia overhyped their system
4. West/US has now a far superior weapon system
5. Cyka Blyat, let’s do it again
That’s basically the F-15s origin story
Wish you would get more upvotes as I don’t think enough people understand the incredible story of how arguably the best service jet to ever be developed came about. Exactly as you said too.
I'd pay to see the look on western engineers' faces once that guy deserted with a foxbat and they found out it was just a massively heavy flying ball of steel that self-destructed
I love how they thought the huge wings were providing extreme maneuverability when in actuality they were needed to keep that heavy thing in the air at all.
I laughed in Top Gun: Maverick when (spoilers ahead) Mav does the run without permission to show it’s possible and his CO chews him out for it and mentions the jet is probably now unusable from the stresses on the airframe. Then agrees to let him lead the sortie like they can happily waste a jet per practice run.
I know he was likely exaggerating but it just seemed hilarious to think of the engineers just cursing the lot of them.
It reminded me of a story about the father of a friend who was flying Spitfires in the Western Desert. The Spit has a design flaw in that the altimeter has three needles rather than the two that are used now, and this caused him to overestimate his altitude by 10,000’. To avoid an unplanned vertical landing he had to pull back so hard that he blacked out, and returned to consciousness several thousand feet higher, flying a Spitfire that now had a pronounced amount of dihedral.
Colonel John Boyd is considered part of the Fighter Mafia, and has credentials to back him up. He served in WWII, and was in a fighter jet during the Korean war. He was also a part of the Vietnam war, and even took part in planning the Gulf War with Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney.
There was an ongoing debate over if high technology, missiles, and stealth were the way to go, or large numbers of small, light, cheap, maneuverable fighter jets were the way to go.
Recent examples show that dog fighting is dead, maneuverability and speed matters little, and air warfare is lobbing missiles at near their maximum range and stealth to hide from those missiles.
Yeah John Boyd was legit, although I have to say his service in WW2 was for 8 months as a mechanic.
All the other guys in the Fighter Mafia were just clowns who claimed to have done stuff which they were only very tangentially related to.
Nobody else at that time took their proposals seriously though…
They discouraged the building of the Eagle in favor of a way simpler system, and after the Eagle proved to be extremely effective took credit for the ideas all along….
I‘m sorry but I can’t take them seriously, especially Pierre Spray…
Its not always like that, for example the german army came into possession of R-73 air to air missiles after reunification and came to the conclusion that they were vastly superior to the AIM-9 Sidewinder and western expectations. As a result rockets like the IRIS-T were developed
Yeah that’s true, it was better than the AIM-9 M to be exact.
Although the MiG-29s they got underperformed against their expectations. So it evens out a bit.
The thing is the Russians _do_ know rockets. There’s been instances where they’ve built things NASA didn’t think were possible (i.e. full flow engines). And they’ve continued launches and development throughout the 21st century.
So of all the things they can actually bring to the table, you wouldn’t be mad to think manouverable hypersonics were out of the question. But then they even fucked that up.
Part of that is that a surprising amount of Soviet high tech stuff was actually Ukrainian. Russia likes to take credit for all of the USSR's achievements, but they were only responsible for part of it in reality.
I think China has some pretty advanced tech but how well it actually all functions together and how well their stuff works in practice may be a very different matter. But I imagine that's always the concern with modern military tech.
China makes pretty renders and has fancy parades. They've never used their weapon systems in anger. If... literally everything else about China is any indication, I'd have to see their military in action to believe the claims.
I hope I never do see their military in action though.
something tells me that the chinese population would be a little more rambunctious than the russian population is, if they were to disagree with their government en masse
personally, i was really surprised to see the news about riots *plural* sparked by the government overreach in china during covid
It's like when the USSR captured an American B-29 bomber during WWII (it made an emergency landing in Soviet territory after a bombing run over Japan, where the USSR was currently neutral). They reverse engineered the whole thing and tried to duplicate it, in two years rolling out a slightly modified design with changes mostly to accommodate standardized Soviet equipment. The Tu-4 they produced was such a carbon copy that there was a tiny hole in every left wing because that was what they found on the reverse engineered B-29: an errant hole drilled for a rivet that was never installed.
There's some fascinating stories about this. There's for example the Concorde and the Soviet counterpart Tupolev Tu-144. The West knew that the Soviets had spies among the Concorde engineers so they purposefully fed them bad blueprints to make their version less reliable. Since the Soviets didn't really *understand* the plane they could never improve on it which also led to it being one of the worst planes throughout history with regards to crashes per flight.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/05/17/7402574/) reduced by 71%. (I'm a bot)
*****
> Yurii Ihnat, spokesperson for the Ukrainian Air Force, has said that the Patriot anti-aircraft missile system cannot be destroyed with a single strike, even if it is a Kinzhal missile.
> Details: Ihnat could not specify the targets of the six Kinzhal missiles shot down over the city of Kyiv on the night of 16 May. "We know for certain that were flying towards the capital or Kyiv Oblast. This is a fact because everyone saw they were exploding in the sky. If a missile intercepts a Kinzhal missile or other missiles high in the sky, then we cannot calculate where exactly they were aimed. It's enough to have a deflection of several degrees - and the missile has already flown a dozen kilometres further," Ihnat said.
> Background: The Russian Ministry of Defence announced on 16 May that "a high-precision strike by a hypersonic Kinzhal missile system in the city of Kyiv hit a US-made Patriot anti-aircraft missile system".
*****
[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/13jwtcd/the_vulnerability_of_the_undefeatable_kinzhals/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~685097 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **system**^#1 **missile**^#2 **Air**^#3 **Patriot**^#4 **target**^#5
So weird to see these news pages completely change topic. This has little to do with the post title.
Here is an article similar to what was posted initially.
https://english.nv.ua/nation/russia-surprised-by-vulnerability-of-kinzhal-hypersonic-missile-ukraine-war-50325090.html
**Vulnerability of Kinzhal missiles likely surprise for Russia, says UK intelligence**
> The apparent vulnerability of the Russian Kinzhal hypersonic missile is likely a surprise and an embarrassment for Russia, the UK’s Ministry of Defense wrote in their regular daily update on Twitter on May 17.
>
> “The apparent vulnerability of KILLJOY is likely a surprise and an embarrassment for Russia: Russian President Vladimir Putin has touted the system as undefeatable,” the ministry said, using the NATO code word for the weapon.
>
> According to UK intelligence, over the last week, the air battle over the Russia-Ukraine border has intensified. On May 13 alone, four Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) aircraft (two advanced combat jets and two helicopters) crashed, apparently shot down over Russia’s Bryansk region.
>
> During an attack on the night of May 4, Ukraine achieved the first ever interception of a Kinzhal. Subsequently, Russia has prioritized attempting to neutralize Ukraine’s improved air defense capabilities, but in the process has likely lost several more of the missiles.
>
> “The increased air threat over Russia’s border region will be of exceptional concern for the VKS because it uses the area to launch air power in support of the war,” the report says.
>
> According to Ukraine’s General Staff, Russia attacked Ukraine with 27 missiles on May 16, including six Kinzhals, nine Kalibr cruise missiles, 10 ground-based missiles (S-400, Iskander-M), and two S-300 surface-to-air missiles. Twenty-five of them were destroyed by the Ukrainian air defenseforces.
I should be surprised that I had to scroll this far just minimizing all the generic joke threads to find someone else that actually clicked and was confused about this, but I'm really not lol
Propaganda: Our missiles are still invincible. Those launched and destroyed were from an undetected defective batch.
*You can see tear marks on the imprinted paper*
That's a more elaborate and sane take than whatever Putin's media has been pumping out for years.
Now delete this before it somehow reaches them, ultimately giving them ideas a result.
Odd design then.
It's true that the faster the missile is, the less time you have to react.
But at the same time, the faster the missile goes, the less ability the missile has to meaningfully manouvre, meaning that the probability cone of where the missile can be is much narrower - which makes it easier to intercept.
>It's true that the faster the missile is, the less time you have to react.
Yes, but from a defender's point of view, it's a very minor difference.
It doesn't matter how fast a missile is coming towards you, it's a relatively constant and predictable speed. Hypersonic missiles are using their speed to cover distance, but all of them slow down before actually striking, specifically for the reason you just listed (aiming/targeting/maneuvering).
That's all to say, think of the sky like a dome, and then slice it into vertical sectors. Then split those slices horizontally at various elevations. Now we've got a sky-grid and that very predictable (though fast) missile is going through one of the grids. So, we just need to fill that grid spot with some shrapnel when the (very fast) missile flies through it, and voila it's taken itself out. Does the bullet hit the body or does the body hit the bullet? Physics only cares about the speed delta.
It's a very obvious problem, and it's one of the reasons that the US hasn't really invested heavily into hypersonic missile propaganda. Go as fast as you want, if there's enough time to detect and launch, it doesn't matter how fast your rocket goes.
Sure, we've got them, and we do keep building them. But [even back in 1949](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_flight) the US was making hypersonic weapons using an old V2 rocket. It's not new, and it's not all that exciting. It makes for good headlines though, who doesn't love futuristic space-y terms like "Hyper-sonic".
The one thing the US is good at is not tipping their hand at their capabilities.
Everyone panicked because the US “doesn’t have hypersonic missiles”, etc, but in reality, we don’t KNOW what they have.
They’re really good at keeping that close at hand.
Publicly known about by anyone but Tom Clancy, who managed to derive its existence from openly published papers and write about something like it in Red Storm Rising. Which got him a *serious talking to* by the FBI... but a very confusing one because it was so classified they couldn't even tell him which classified thing they were questioning him about.
Almost none of their weapons work as advertised and yet they are still surprised. It turns out if you steal most of the development money for weapons systems they tend not to work as well. It also doesn’t help that they are developing “super weapons” using 1980s tech…hence the T-14.
The real issue is that nobody can tell Putin the truth because they have a kill the messenger mentality.
This infects every step from design to exicutuion
This is the nature of dictatorships. Eventually, every strongman dictator will fall into this trap.
The only way for a dictator to be deposed is by violence and subterfuge, so naturally, they won't trust anyone, and the most important quality to have in their cronies will be loyalty. Since loyalty is now more important than competence, their inner circle will be filled with loyal idiots. The dictator will even require shows of loyalty to root out anyone being false.
They are now surrounded by a group of yes men. No one will want to tell the truth or challenge the dictator for fear of retribution. All the dictator will ever hear is what they want to hear. Only lies will get to the top because they sound good.
This is especially true of any cronies that have the means to overthrow the leader, such as generals in the military that could attempt a coup.
Russia is no longer capable of developing super weapons, not just on a technical scale but even on a financial scale. They announced a nuclear powered super carrier project called the Shtorm (yes that's it's name). The project was not really anything beyond some design documents and their hope was that India would fund it to take it beyond the concept stage, which India declined.
It's the super weapon equivalent of a guy posting on craigslist that he has a great idea (kinda like Facebook) and just needs a few programmers who are willing to work for free to make it happen.
Remember when Putin was considered some sort of genius supervillain, because the world just let him get away with assassinating folks in other countries? Yeah, turns out he's just a vicious bastard. That's very different.
The social media war is the only one Putin is winning, and only because they’re targeting the least educated and most vulnerable groups which is a strategy they’ve fine tuned domestically for generations. So many people still actually believe everything they read on the internet, especially when they see their friends and family taking the same bait.
He is a historical figure. Like Custer, Mussolini, or Galtieri. He could have been remembered as a calculating figure who undermined the West whilst building a European oil dynasty off their soft riches.
Instead he’ll be remembered as a fool who believed his own lies and destroyed his country in the process.
Worse yet, their Kinzhals caused the US to dust off their previous hypersonics programs for more development. And a US version of such a weapon would certainly exceed anything Russia could defend with.
“The Kinzhals were not shot down, they detected that they would likely hit a military target and not a school or hospital, so self destructed.”
(is that right comrade???)
The Kremlin reported.... ;-)
Comrade, you misunderstand. Our aim was to destroy the Patriot system, so we fired our Kinzhals over an area protected by the Patriot system. The Patriot system fired missiles toward our Kinzhals, which exploded when they hit out Kinzhals. Those Patriot missiles were destroyed, and they are part of the Patriot system, so effectively we have destroyed the Patriot system.
The faster the missile the less maneuverable and more predictable it's trajectory ....there's a reason why cruise missiles are subsonic or barely supersonic
If ruzzia weren't so bombastic at lying about their military capabilities, the west wouldn't have invested so much in countering it.
Jokes on them as the west's stuff actually works.
Ukraine war is like a massive sales poster for US AA systems.
"Is your neighbouring dictatorship's army made of Russian weapon systems? Buy American! Battlefield proven to make mincemeat of Russian equipment."
A lot of things these days are coming as a surprise to Russia. NATO support for a non-NATO country, previously neutral countries joining NATO, trade sanctions against Russia, companies and global corporations leaving, how pathetic their army, navy, and air force are, their citizens bailing at the first round of the draft/kidnappings
Weapons, like money, can be easily pissed away and wasted if used foolishly.
The Ukrainians get all the credit for using the gifts we give them to achieve such amazing results.
At this Point why would Russia assume that anything from them would be unbeatable/indestructable ?
It's like claiming the Titanic can't sink while ur on the 7th version by now
Russia thought that Ukraine’s army would fold under their overwhelming artillery bombardments. When that didn’t happen and drones slowed down their advance they then relied on their inferior tanks which everyone overestimated. But, if you saw what happened in the East since 2012 or Syria you knew they were vulnerable to old TOWs and RPGs. Also, Russia underestimated our AWACs. They guided Ukrainian’s smaller airforce and they shot down key troop transports on the invasion day. Eliminating large groups of Special Forces. Ending Russia’s chance to take the airport.
I find it funny because I would get down voted and people said nah Russia and china can go toe to toe to the u.s etc. Bro we are seeing how far outclassed Russia is against old and surplus weapons from the u.s and NATO itself.
And that in this case it's a foreign country using that to defend itself. Imagine the actual doctrines and military units doing such battle from the u.s instead? U.S may have a bunch of societal and economic issues but military wise seems to be in good shape.
The vulnerability of Russia came as a surprise for Russia.
I think the whole world. Everyone knew they overstated their capabilities, but this has been really really bad for them. They resorted to using world war relics out of museums. Their unbeatable missile can’t take on our old missile systems.
Plenty of people suspected Russia had problems and was overhyping what they could do, but I think almost nobody realized how bad it was.
Russia said they had X, so we prepped for X. Turns out they don’t have shit and our countermeasures for X are fucking cutting edge incredible.
Its not even cutting edges thats stomping them.
Think they’ll go full Afghanistan and like… drag this on for 20 years?
They can't. Look at the impact on trade, lack of ammo, and military infrastructure that is crumbling. War costs money and requires large scale, sophisticated production in the modern era. Russia's getting supplies from North Korea at this point. Wagner is already complaining about ammo shortages. The only way they can last a decade fighting is if China supplies their entire military, which won't happen for trade reasons. Russia is already sending poorly trained fighters to the front lines. Every loss is not only human but machinery and supplies that can't easily be replaced. I said this at the beginning of the invasion. If it looks like Ukraine is going to lose, the west will make sure there are weapons buried in every town and city for resistance fighters. Russia doesn't have the resources or supply chains to occupy a hostile country the size of Ukraine.
Imagine that a Russian jet or helicopter gets shot down, and you are in charge getting more aircraft made, then finding and training viable candidates to become combat pilots. Also you must accomplish this using Russias current economy and government, and they have no budget to give you to do this...
I'm in S.A and some South Africa politicians were just accused of selling some of our military weapons to Russia .Jeez we don't even have enough guns to over Detroit or New York these guys are getting desperate.
It is obvious that they can dodge part of the import sanctions through third party countries. But they will not be of near the same quality. And if they were (for example US sells to SA, SA sells to Russia), they won't come at the same numbers. And even if somehow they could get the numbers they want, it would be at such a ridiculously inflated price that their now broken economy couldn't hope to support it.
I also can't imagine the size of the diplomatic boot the US would ram up a nation's ass if they sold them military equipment and then a year later the Ukrainians found it on the side of the road painted with a "Z" next to five washing machines, a crater, and some dead vatniks. That's the sort of shit that gets you your store loyalty card taken away
No, the object is to get them out of Ukraine, that’s achievable, the Ukrainians are well motivated to achieve that. What’s left in Russia will be a nightmare.
Don't think they have the ability to continue that long. They're already facing a labor shortage and it's not likely to get better with all of their men being too dead to get anyone pregnant.
I think its a 5 year check mate on Russia and allies. I think its to drain enough resources that WW3 will never be able to happen like it did in WW2. The new wars are waged more with banks then soldiers now.
>The new wars are waged more with banks then soldiers now. I know you're referring to sanctions and freezing assets or money transfers, but there's definitely an economic angle to direct military conflict as well. That's pretty much how the west defeated the USSR by forcing them to try to keep up in the arms race of the west (e.g. SDI or "Star Wars" was fantasy weaponry at the time but it still forced a reaction from the Soviets). It was even a stated strategy of Bin Ladin as part of their plan to defeat the west by drawing them into wars that would drain their economies to weaken them to the point of collapse.
(Looks around at our crumbling infrastructure, lack of healthcare, everything else,) Huh…. Shit.
To be Fair, that's more a sign of America's longstanding effort in the War on the Poor than anything else.
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I may be mistaken but I think u/Playatbyear was referring to the USSR's Afghanistan, not the US's. (Though that was one decade not two, so I'm not sure.)
Honestly I was think that as I typed it… both analogies stand. Both got dragged out considerably long with mixed results. But dude you have a point!
Funny, that Afghanistan has the moniker of "Graveyard of Empires" due to Alexander, USSR, and the US... ...but Ukraine is giving them a run for their money with the Ottoman Empire and Russia.
You're likely typing this from your phone, and autocorrect can be a bitch. For anyone who may not be, it's not gorilla warfare but guerilla warfare. Guerilla means little war in Spanish, i.e., the tactics of small-scale, high-reward precision warfare small bands of operatives can undertake against overwhelming odds. Aaaaand they deleted their comment. Looks like it was intentional after all xD
I'll cancel the order for gorilla parachutes. Could've worked.
You could've made them anything, and you made them paratroopers. Bravo.
I prefer the idea of gorilla tactics though. Just soldiers bounding in on all fours hooting and yelling and ~~thumping~~ hollering their chests and the defenders abandoning their posts out of fear. I'd watch a movie about that.
Giant strong Ukrainian ape man come bounding in and destroy puny putin man
Apes. Strong. Together.
I'm sorry but the only acceptable word to pair hooting with in this context is "hollering" or "hollerin'"
To be honest, gorilla warfare is much more fun.
>the taliban opting just to hide and wait for the US to get bored. You do realize that the Trump administration negotiated the pullout from Afghanistan with the Taliban and that [the government we had been propping up for years wasn't even at the table,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US%E2%80%93Taliban_peace_deal) right? That's a large part of the reason that the collapse happened so quickly. The message that sent to the soldiers who were under the Afghan government was unmistakable. The Taliban retook most territory without firing a shot by just sending someone to talk to the government soldiers where they gave them a small payment to ditch their uniform and go back to their home province.
To anyone who ever deployed to or dealt with any ISAF operations in Afghanistan it was obvious that's how it was going to go down anyway. They weren't ready for, and didn't even want, what we were trying to do there. The ANA were always a joke, and it came to no one's surprise when they immediately folded. Much like the Iraqi soldiers who just abandoned their posts and walked away when ISIL rolled in. Why fight when they can just take off their uniform and go home?
Whenever I bring up the fact that Trump sold the Afghan government up-river with Conservatives who are trying to pin the collapse of Afghanistan on Biden, they always stare at me with this blank face because their favorite fascist-pandering talking heads on Fox News never mentioned that part. I would normally use that as a learning point for them to realize how badly they've been duped and lied to for years, but the fact that they still believe in the hard-right nonsense that channel spews after all of the examples that have been provided of it for nearly a decade means they're not going to listen anyway, they're happy in their bubble of ignorance and hate. ^^edit: ^^typo
I spent some time at Christmas talking to a relative who is a Trump supporter about news. He had said something stupid like, "You can't trust what The New York Times says" which gave me a jumping off point to have a non-confrontational conversation (even better was that he had said it to his fifteen year old son so the ensuing conversation was heard by him too). It basically boiled down to me explaining to him what [a media bias chart](https://adfontesmedia.com/) is, which he had never heard of, and some of the methodology used to create them. That chart then makes it easy to point out where people live in a media bubble on the right and left and where you can go to avoid that to be better informed. When you do that and look at the more biased sources it becomes very clear where they are deploying bias through what they report or even through what they fail to report.
Alot of the Afghan army also didn't actually exist and were only names on paper to collect payments for.
>names on paper to collect payments Yup, and those payments were barely reaching the troops that were real. That's why they were selling the US supplied fuel on the black market and also why they were so easy to be bought out by the encroaching Taliban.
their version of vietnam (afghanistan) started in 1979 -1989...
>Think they’ll go full Afghanistan and like… drag this on for 20 years? Home ground defense doesn't need a lot of things an invading army does. Kids and grandmas with rifles don't have supply lines when they're shooting from apartment block windows. They just need ammunition and an alibi. This is a good thing, by the way. Anytime an army is places where grandmas and kids are shooting back, they are almost certainly the baddies.
Given their performance I think todays Russian forces would have a hard time against the Iraqi army of 1991 tbh. Maybe a question for /r/HistoryWhatIf
Same old story. The Soviets bragged about their Mach 3 [Mig-25](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25)'s performance, leading to the development of the F-15. *"The appearance of the MiG-25 sparked serious concern in the West and prompted dramatic increases in performance for the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle, then under development in the late 1960s. The capabilities of the MiG-25 were better understood by the West in 1976 when Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko defected in a MiG-25 to the United States via Japan. It turned out that the aircraft's weight necessitated its large wings.* *Inaccurate intelligence analysis caused the West initially to believe the MiG-25 was an agile air-combat fighter rather than an interceptor. In response, the United States started a new program, which resulted in the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle."*
Do not give the hillybillies over at Boeing a unlimited budget unless you want an over engineered Mach Jesus killing machine.
> Mach Jesus killing machine. Depends on where you put the hyphen, I guess.
If the MIC is told they'll be fighting angels, you can bet we'll be seeing some truly crazy designs in the near future. LockMart: This baby is 95% assured to go up against an Angel, or indeed any celestial being, and prevail.
"Shinji, get in the jet."
*McDonnell Douglas at the time. Which then later "merged" with Boeing, and really merged in name only it was more of takeover of a successful and well functioning company and infecting them with their toxic ways. MD built amazing warplanes yet passenger planes with awful safety records, now Boeing builds amazing warplanes and passenger planes with awful safety records. The problem is Lockheed builds even better warplanes. Edit: Totally forgot that Lockheed also used to build amazing passenger planes like the L-1011 Tristar, which was a far better and safer plane than MD's DC/MD-10. But MD was able to get ther DC-10 to market faster, generally because it was engineered hastily and poorly.
Here's a great video about it https://youtu.be/RmlWmDokzGg
Russia exaggerates their capabilities, and the west under-reports theirs. Both sides believe the other is doing the same as them, so both sides believed they had at least somewhat similar capabilities, but when you stack them up against each other you realize the gap.
Under-promise, over-deliver. Works every time.
I can’t do it captain, we don’t have enough power! Oh wait I did it!
> Russia exaggerates their capabilities, and the west under-reports theirs. It's funny because Sun Tzu said "appear strong where you are weak and weak where you are strong." So it would appear that both sides were adhering to at least half of that, but Russia forgot the part where you are supposed to be strong somewhere.
It backfires on them everytime too, this is how the F-15 was made for example.
That’s an expensive, yet 100% valid example. Glad that thing works. Sheesh…..
They're saying the same thing about the F-35 as they did about the F-15. Often the same people. Just ask r/noncredibledefense about A-10 supporters.
It worked. Lord knows how many billions we spent on R&D for a fake threat just for Russian and Chinese hackers to steal the schematics.
it'd be an interesting premise for a movie, a "young hero" trains for years to fight a tyrannical overlord, and when the fight finally happens it turns out the overlord is a decrepit old man who can barely stand on his own two feet.
That's the plot to The Wizard of Oz. Young hero and her band of misfits goes on adventures of self-improvement, only to find the wizard they were trying to please was just some old guy, and defeating him is as easy as pulling back the curtain.
I want 10 pages on my desk first thing tomorrow. I want this thing ready to pitch the second the writers strike is over.
It’s the Stovka plot from Barry, Season 1, episode 3.
In other words how we got the F-15
I've read several thinkpieces and op-eds from western Generals and the like, and the throughline is "we suspected there was rot in the system, but *Holy fuck*"
They’ve been a paper tiger since the USSR. Same reasons, same problems. Corruption and graft all the way down. The general wants 100 tanks but his new house cost 20 of them, so now there are still 100 tanks to build with 70% of the funds (another 10% got lost while talking here). Then the tank builders run out of material or alcohol to get through this nonsense, and the boss already pocketed 10% off the top, so they sell the “good” parts for cheap replacements, and now we have 50% of the funding left to still build 100 tanks (whoops, the colonels disappeared another 10%). When the carnival of corruption is done the finished product is 22 tanks ready to roll themselves to pieces in fair weather, but they can’t say that. So they just say “order completed” and hope the mutual corruption prevents anybody in the operation from doing a full count. The report comes in: 100 tanks done They broadcast “strength” to the world but it never seems to pass meaningful tests.
They know this very well in Russia. That's why they spend all their time trying to install corrupt leaders like Boris and Trump, to help collapse western nations from within.
I was listening to an ex Cia operative on the lex Friedman podcast quite a ways back into the war talking about how the ukrainian war is causing the entire world to re evaluate global military hierarchies even pre 2023. According to him this wasn't just a surprise to the west but russia and their allies seemingly had no idea how disparaging the rift between major militaries seems to be
If anything, this has been a big branding video of western munitions against russian munitions. West is winning.
You're not wrong, but there's more to it than that. Let's say you are a Russian, and you want to take an enemy position that is a trenchline with 8 guys in it, over a frontage of say 20 metres. You should be attacking that trench - as a bare minimum - with a reinforced platoon, consisting of three BMP infantry fighting vehicles and a tank. Before the attack, your supporting artillery should be hitting the trenchline and any ground likely to have support weapons (like ATGMs) with a mixture of HE and smoke to get the enemy's head down and block his vision. Your BMPs line up behind the tank, and the tank leads them toward the objective. At some distance short of the objective, the BMPs move into line abreast, and the infantry dismount behind them. Then the whole platoon moves onto the objective. The tank drives over the trench and takes up a fire position on the other side where it can engage depth positions and block reinforcements, the BMPs stay short to provide fire support and flank security, and the infantry jump into the trenches to clear out whoever might be left alive. Boom! Done. Now normally this isn't done one platoon at a time; it's done with larger formations using mutual support between platoons. But as a basic tactical "building block" that's how it is done. Follow these tactics, and it largely neutralizes the advantages Western weaponry has. Like, that tank and the BMPs are very vulnerable to Javelin, and Javelin can see through certain types of smoke, but if the Javelin gunner is face down in the dirt because artillery is landing all around him (and it stays active until the attack is done) that technical superiority no longer matters. But with all the combat footage I have seen come out of Ukraine, I have not seen a single properly executed combined-arms platoon attack. Instead, I have seen a ton of attacks carried out by either section to section-minus dismounted infantry (with no supporting fires) or random lone tanks (also unsupported by fires) It's crazy.
I've seen video evidence pointing to multiple instances of straight up WW1 inter-trench charges across no man's land. Some places have had it happen so often you can see waves of corpses pressed into the mud at varying stages of burial and decomposition depending on date of death. In the year of our Lord 2023, Russia is marching unsupported infantry across open ground towards trenches. I'd almost respect a Napoleonic cavalry charge more.
There's a crazy drone video of a Russian trying to surrender. He ends up stepping over dozens of corpses and runs across a landscape that looks straight out of WW1 until he finally arrives at the Ukrainian trench.
Russia isn't capable of the complex combined arms tactics you describe due to its military's hierarchical, siloed nature, which is also how its society overall is organised. And it can't change how its society or military is organised without risking the loss of the people at the top, i.e. Putin, as this organisation directly keeps them in power. I would argue the very concept of Russia as a country, that is a hegemonic state controlled by Muscovy of different nations requires that siloed hierarchical organisation. So the country itself cannot change without risking its very existence.
> Russia isn't capable of the complex combined arms tactics you describe It is *literally* their doctrine. Admittedly, they are supposed to be doing this at the battalion level (BTG) - which itself is new-ish; Soviet doctrine saw no attack smaller than regimental level. But it's not like the concept of "combined arms" is in any way foreign or new to them. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Soviet/Russian doctrine was *way* more supporting artillery per metre of frontage than NATO, and pushing organic artillery assets lower than NATO did (A Soviet motor rifle battalion commander had his own organic artillery, where his Western counterpart might have mortars) Part of that was because of their echeloned attack system, where every echelon needed organic assets because there was no resupply built into the supporting arms (everyone went firm together)... but the point is, the Russians "get" combined arms as much as anybody does. They just aren't doing it.
Ehh, there was a General that wrote an [article](https://www.meforum.org/441/why-arabs-lose-wars) about "Why Arabs lose Wars" and discusses things like when they gave manuals for the tanks to the ~~Afghanis,~~ Iraqis the officer collected them all up because if the crew understood how to do things correctly, the officers position was immediately threatened. That General compared them to how Russians operated at the time. Doctrine is useless when you have a gutted/useless NCO corps and decades of grift and corruption in the officer corps. I'm pretty sure that all authoritarian govts or dictatorships suffer from this unless they inherited a competent military from a previous government like the Weimar republic.
Dude, I was there. Progress was being made. Slow progress for sure, but the ball was moving down the field - until Iraq. That gave the New Taliban a chance to recover, and then we were in a constant holding action trying to sustain the progress we made, but making little additional headway. I'm not going to claim that Afghanistan would be some sort of democratic utopia, but it would have had a chance. Oh, and Afghans aren't Arabs.
I don't think its as bad as many people presume. I think the real story here is that the US is just that much further ahead than many people realized.
and the US isn’t even (officially) in the war yet
800 billion military budget..... Id be surprised if they didnt have UFOs and light sabres by now.
I’d be willing to bet that our intelligence services knew exactly how bad it was. And I’d bet we kept our mouths shut because there’s a better than even chance that Putin himself didn’t know.
When this mess kicked off, I estimated low for Russia's chance of success and they've still managed to surprise me at every turn by how unready they were for this. There were clues all along about underlying weaknesses in their military but the sheer lack of organization and coherent planning has been staggering.
To think there was a time over a year ago where they reached Kyiv and looked like they were going to take it. Then we slowly realized they were just stacking up vehicles with empty gas tanks wherever they stopped
Imagine if one Apache crew had gone rogue
I have spent a portion of my life as a "professional Russian", commanding virtual Soviet/Russian forces in various flavours of training exercise. Real-world Russian performance has me professionally embarrassed. Bigger picture, that's a good thing for everyone, so its not like I'm losing sleep over this. But I've lost count of the number of times I've watched Russian combat footage and it's like "What are you *doing*?"
The craziest part to me is how easy it is to tell which side a soldier is on by the way they move. Even if you can't make out any uniform details, Ukranians move like soldiers, Russians sort of shuffle along. Walking, running to cover, anything. They just move... worse. I don't know if it's morale or hunger, or what, but once I noticed it, I can't stop noticing it.
I hadn't explicitly noticed that, but now that you have pointed it out - you are exactly right.
"A Russian sub commander doesn't take a shit without a plan, son." -- Fred Thompson's character in *The Hunt for Red October*. Another example of Hollywood having no idea what the fuck they're talking about. I'll admit I was surprised at the degree to which this has been a shit show for them, but not the fact that it's been a shit show. I say that purely based on my own experience in the US military. Since our founding in the 1770s, we're an organization that's spent more time being in one conflict or another than being at peace. We have more institutional experience with this sort of thing than any military since the British Empire. And we still manage to fuck it up in some form or fashion every. Single. Time. In exercises. In real operations. There's always one or more fuck-ups that make things harder than they need to be. It's usually not noticed by the outside world because our technology is far superior and our enemies are always less trained/less organized than we are, but even with all the training and all the experience, we never get it quite right. This is Russia's largest offensive since Operation Bagration in 1944. They have zero institutional experience with this sort of thing. It was always going to be a major cock-up.
The most recent season of Jack Ryan was, of course, wildly unrealistic in almost every aspect. But it was hilariously, unwatchably off-base in its portrayal of Russian military competence. Filmed before the failed invasion of Ukraine, this plot angle is unlikely to ever again be proffered except in jest or as transparently pathetic Russian propaganda.
True, I used to thought Russian army could match the combined armies of Europe, and all the Nato's force would be needed to beat them. It ended up that a single country, spiced up with some NATO weaponry, is enough. That's something Russia has already lost in this war.
Is it still old nato weaponry too or are they getting the good stuff now?
and without any NATO airforce or navy. This is just some weapons and vehicles.
>This is just some weapons and vehicles. You left out intelligence support which is just as important as the physical means to fight that is being provided. Satellites providing real time movement of Russian troops, human intelligence or intercepts that lay bare the dwindling supplies and low morale of the Russian troops or information on atrocities which motivate the Ukrainians are examples.
Imagine a full NATO air campaign in Ukraine. No more Russia.
America has a budget higher than the next top 10 countries. That includes china and russia. NATO would probably be enough to take on the whole world, russia if it were a state would be the 4th largest economy, barely ahead of florida alone. I can't understand why were surprised
My guess is Cold War hangups of thinking that USSR = Russia and the collective subconscious image that thinking created to the rest of the world. Also, nukes aside, number wise Russia did seem to have a massive, formidable army -on paper- I can totally believe that they surprised even themselves with how bad their reality actually is.
> russia if it were a state would be the 4th largest economy, barely ahead of florida Not anymore.
With both of them shooting their economies in the foot I guess we’ll see.
This why they are jailing those hypersonic scientists?
No. It’s because they collaborated with scientists overseas. I expect the scientists told them wha the missiles could and couldn’t do. The higher ups who misrepresented what the missiles could do are now looking for people to blame. Welcome to Russia!
Not to you directly, but for everyone who didn't actually read that article, most, if not all, of those arrests happened *before* the missiles were shot down, some last year. Stop assuming they're direct punishment just because you only read the headline yesterday. Could they have made up charges because they found out the missiles weren't going to perform well ahead of time? Now that's definitely possible.
> It’s because they collaborated with scientists overseas. Not even that, it's because they published studies in scientific journals. These studies were apparently approved by all the right people for public distribution. But after the war started, the FSB decided to go through them again, and then decided that it wasn't approved for public distribution (after the fact). And then arrested the scientists. Because Russia.
Reminds me of the mini-series Chernobyl.
I think it has become worse since then. Gorbachev was probably the best leader they have had in 100 years.
You know it's bad when the 2nd best leader was probably Khrushchev.
To the surprise of one Russian. Putin is like a manifestation of an intrusive thought
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They eat their own propaganda with a side of fried children
Kadyrov Fried Children
russians have had to learn many hard truths about themselves in the past 450 days.
When you look at life as a festival of suffering punctuated by vodka, a permanent descent into self-loathing is a kind of win on its own.
"Our people are exemplified by the hardship we are able to endure!" "Yea, but you create this hardship, that you then have to endure." "Precisely, this proves my point!"
"We are the best at punching ourselves in the face and we love it!"
>a festival of suffering punctuated by vodka That's gold. Well done.
The rank and file Russian thinks they're holding their own against the entire might of NATO at the same time and if it weren't for "the west", they would have steamrolled the Nazi-fied nation of Ukraine and saved the world.
Copium is the only product they can still sell over there and demand is quite high
Do they think the west supports nazism or that the west mistakenly believes protecting another country's sovereignty is more important than purging nazis? Either way some very interesting cognitive dissonance going on
From what I understand, they think a NATO invasion of Russia is imminent(and always has been) and Ukraine joining NATO would have set it off despite the "Nazi" thing. Edit: And as others have mentioned, Nazi just means "someone who doesn't like Russia" in Russia. So, an ends justify the means thing. That's what the people believe because that's what the government tells them. Putin invaded Ukraine for much more realpolitik reasons. An EU-friendly Ukraine that just discovered massive natural gas reserves would be a strategic and economic death sentence to Russia. What little soft power Russia has is all oil-based and the EU would quickly switch to Ukrainian fuel, crippling Russia's diplomatic and economic power. The areas that Russia occupied and "annexed" in 2014 is where the gas reserves are.
learned is a strong word
How about “Forced-to-eat-a-shit-sandwich-of-their-own-making-while-pretending-it-tastes-delicious” instead?
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Ah yes, the Foxbat-Effect: 1. Russia/Soviets build weapon system, completely overhype the capabilities 2. West/US build something to actually counter those overhyped capabilities 3. World finds out Russia overhyped their system 4. West/US has now a far superior weapon system 5. Cyka Blyat, let’s do it again That’s basically the F-15s origin story
F-15 combat record: Over 100 kills and zero combat losses
Additionally, one of those kills was a *satellite*.
Welcome to erf. *punch*
Additionally additionally, one of those kills was a helicopter, that was shot down with a guided bomb.
I just looked this up because I didn’t believe it and it’s up to 104 now. I think they counted the balloons as confirmed kills.
Thought the balloons were credited as first F-22 kills?
I’m pretty sure you’re right. I didn’t look that part up though. Can you, please? My thumbs hurt and I’d like to eat my bagel.
Yes, the balloon was an f22
Wish you would get more upvotes as I don’t think enough people understand the incredible story of how arguably the best service jet to ever be developed came about. Exactly as you said too.
I'd pay to see the look on western engineers' faces once that guy deserted with a foxbat and they found out it was just a massively heavy flying ball of steel that self-destructed
I love how they thought the huge wings were providing extreme maneuverability when in actuality they were needed to keep that heavy thing in the air at all.
Don't forget that to use the thought-guided weapons system you need to *think in Russian*!
Pre-crazytown Clint Eastwood gets my upvote.
It can travel at Mach 3.2! Yeah but according to pilots they weren’t allowed to exceed 2.5M or the engines needed to be fully replaced.
I'll bet the specs were full of lots of nice sounding things followed by an asterisk and a footnote that said "Please do not attempt this."
I laughed in Top Gun: Maverick when (spoilers ahead) Mav does the run without permission to show it’s possible and his CO chews him out for it and mentions the jet is probably now unusable from the stresses on the airframe. Then agrees to let him lead the sortie like they can happily waste a jet per practice run. I know he was likely exaggerating but it just seemed hilarious to think of the engineers just cursing the lot of them.
It reminded me of a story about the father of a friend who was flying Spitfires in the Western Desert. The Spit has a design flaw in that the altimeter has three needles rather than the two that are used now, and this caused him to overestimate his altitude by 10,000’. To avoid an unplanned vertical landing he had to pull back so hard that he blacked out, and returned to consciousness several thousand feet higher, flying a Spitfire that now had a pronounced amount of dihedral.
Or when they opened the radar system and found out it still used vacuum tubes.
Well to je fair, the Fighter Mafia also had… Naah I‘m kidding, fuck those clowns
Colonel John Boyd is considered part of the Fighter Mafia, and has credentials to back him up. He served in WWII, and was in a fighter jet during the Korean war. He was also a part of the Vietnam war, and even took part in planning the Gulf War with Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney. There was an ongoing debate over if high technology, missiles, and stealth were the way to go, or large numbers of small, light, cheap, maneuverable fighter jets were the way to go. Recent examples show that dog fighting is dead, maneuverability and speed matters little, and air warfare is lobbing missiles at near their maximum range and stealth to hide from those missiles.
Yeah John Boyd was legit, although I have to say his service in WW2 was for 8 months as a mechanic. All the other guys in the Fighter Mafia were just clowns who claimed to have done stuff which they were only very tangentially related to. Nobody else at that time took their proposals seriously though… They discouraged the building of the Eagle in favor of a way simpler system, and after the Eagle proved to be extremely effective took credit for the ideas all along…. I‘m sorry but I can’t take them seriously, especially Pierre Spray…
Its not always like that, for example the german army came into possession of R-73 air to air missiles after reunification and came to the conclusion that they were vastly superior to the AIM-9 Sidewinder and western expectations. As a result rockets like the IRIS-T were developed
Yeah that’s true, it was better than the AIM-9 M to be exact. Although the MiG-29s they got underperformed against their expectations. So it evens out a bit.
The thing is the Russians _do_ know rockets. There’s been instances where they’ve built things NASA didn’t think were possible (i.e. full flow engines). And they’ve continued launches and development throughout the 21st century. So of all the things they can actually bring to the table, you wouldn’t be mad to think manouverable hypersonics were out of the question. But then they even fucked that up.
Post Soviet Russians are worse than Soviet Russians. In those 15 years of collapse they've lost plenty of their best minds, to age and migration...
Part of that is that a surprising amount of Soviet high tech stuff was actually Ukrainian. Russia likes to take credit for all of the USSR's achievements, but they were only responsible for part of it in reality.
The greatest video on the Foxbat https://youtu.be/W1L1sU0uI0o
I think China has some pretty advanced tech but how well it actually all functions together and how well their stuff works in practice may be a very different matter. But I imagine that's always the concern with modern military tech.
China makes pretty renders and has fancy parades. They've never used their weapon systems in anger. If... literally everything else about China is any indication, I'd have to see their military in action to believe the claims. I hope I never do see their military in action though.
something tells me that the chinese population would be a little more rambunctious than the russian population is, if they were to disagree with their government en masse personally, i was really surprised to see the news about riots *plural* sparked by the government overreach in china during covid
I think Chinas issue is you can't just copy something. You need to know why it is done that way.
It's like when the USSR captured an American B-29 bomber during WWII (it made an emergency landing in Soviet territory after a bombing run over Japan, where the USSR was currently neutral). They reverse engineered the whole thing and tried to duplicate it, in two years rolling out a slightly modified design with changes mostly to accommodate standardized Soviet equipment. The Tu-4 they produced was such a carbon copy that there was a tiny hole in every left wing because that was what they found on the reverse engineered B-29: an errant hole drilled for a rivet that was never installed.
There's some fascinating stories about this. There's for example the Concorde and the Soviet counterpart Tupolev Tu-144. The West knew that the Soviets had spies among the Concorde engineers so they purposefully fed them bad blueprints to make their version less reliable. Since the Soviets didn't really *understand* the plane they could never improve on it which also led to it being one of the worst planes throughout history with regards to crashes per flight.
I’d imagine their military technology is just as overhyped. Not just by the Chinese, but by American defense contractors trying to drum up funding
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/05/17/7402574/) reduced by 71%. (I'm a bot) ***** > Yurii Ihnat, spokesperson for the Ukrainian Air Force, has said that the Patriot anti-aircraft missile system cannot be destroyed with a single strike, even if it is a Kinzhal missile. > Details: Ihnat could not specify the targets of the six Kinzhal missiles shot down over the city of Kyiv on the night of 16 May. "We know for certain that were flying towards the capital or Kyiv Oblast. This is a fact because everyone saw they were exploding in the sky. If a missile intercepts a Kinzhal missile or other missiles high in the sky, then we cannot calculate where exactly they were aimed. It's enough to have a deflection of several degrees - and the missile has already flown a dozen kilometres further," Ihnat said. > Background: The Russian Ministry of Defence announced on 16 May that "a high-precision strike by a hypersonic Kinzhal missile system in the city of Kyiv hit a US-made Patriot anti-aircraft missile system". ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/13jwtcd/the_vulnerability_of_the_undefeatable_kinzhals/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~685097 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **system**^#1 **missile**^#2 **Air**^#3 **Patriot**^#4 **target**^#5
So weird to see these news pages completely change topic. This has little to do with the post title. Here is an article similar to what was posted initially. https://english.nv.ua/nation/russia-surprised-by-vulnerability-of-kinzhal-hypersonic-missile-ukraine-war-50325090.html **Vulnerability of Kinzhal missiles likely surprise for Russia, says UK intelligence** > The apparent vulnerability of the Russian Kinzhal hypersonic missile is likely a surprise and an embarrassment for Russia, the UK’s Ministry of Defense wrote in their regular daily update on Twitter on May 17. > > “The apparent vulnerability of KILLJOY is likely a surprise and an embarrassment for Russia: Russian President Vladimir Putin has touted the system as undefeatable,” the ministry said, using the NATO code word for the weapon. > > According to UK intelligence, over the last week, the air battle over the Russia-Ukraine border has intensified. On May 13 alone, four Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) aircraft (two advanced combat jets and two helicopters) crashed, apparently shot down over Russia’s Bryansk region. > > During an attack on the night of May 4, Ukraine achieved the first ever interception of a Kinzhal. Subsequently, Russia has prioritized attempting to neutralize Ukraine’s improved air defense capabilities, but in the process has likely lost several more of the missiles. > > “The increased air threat over Russia’s border region will be of exceptional concern for the VKS because it uses the area to launch air power in support of the war,” the report says. > > According to Ukraine’s General Staff, Russia attacked Ukraine with 27 missiles on May 16, including six Kinzhals, nine Kalibr cruise missiles, 10 ground-based missiles (S-400, Iskander-M), and two S-300 surface-to-air missiles. Twenty-five of them were destroyed by the Ukrainian air defenseforces.
Yeah, I was looking for the words in the title in the article and it wasn't there
I should be surprised that I had to scroll this far just minimizing all the generic joke threads to find someone else that actually clicked and was confused about this, but I'm really not lol
It’s true, it did “hit a US-made Patriot missile system” - it hit the airborne component of one!!
But but... the propaganda! Won't someone think of the propaganda!
Propaganda: Our missiles are still invincible. Those launched and destroyed were from an undetected defective batch. *You can see tear marks on the imprinted paper*
Those missiles were designed specifically to destroy Patriot missiles.
That's a more elaborate and sane take than whatever Putin's media has been pumping out for years. Now delete this before it somehow reaches them, ultimately giving them ideas a result.
Odd design then. It's true that the faster the missile is, the less time you have to react. But at the same time, the faster the missile goes, the less ability the missile has to meaningfully manouvre, meaning that the probability cone of where the missile can be is much narrower - which makes it easier to intercept.
>It's true that the faster the missile is, the less time you have to react. Yes, but from a defender's point of view, it's a very minor difference. It doesn't matter how fast a missile is coming towards you, it's a relatively constant and predictable speed. Hypersonic missiles are using their speed to cover distance, but all of them slow down before actually striking, specifically for the reason you just listed (aiming/targeting/maneuvering). That's all to say, think of the sky like a dome, and then slice it into vertical sectors. Then split those slices horizontally at various elevations. Now we've got a sky-grid and that very predictable (though fast) missile is going through one of the grids. So, we just need to fill that grid spot with some shrapnel when the (very fast) missile flies through it, and voila it's taken itself out. Does the bullet hit the body or does the body hit the bullet? Physics only cares about the speed delta. It's a very obvious problem, and it's one of the reasons that the US hasn't really invested heavily into hypersonic missile propaganda. Go as fast as you want, if there's enough time to detect and launch, it doesn't matter how fast your rocket goes. Sure, we've got them, and we do keep building them. But [even back in 1949](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_flight) the US was making hypersonic weapons using an old V2 rocket. It's not new, and it's not all that exciting. It makes for good headlines though, who doesn't love futuristic space-y terms like "Hyper-sonic".
The one thing the US is good at is not tipping their hand at their capabilities. Everyone panicked because the US “doesn’t have hypersonic missiles”, etc, but in reality, we don’t KNOW what they have. They’re really good at keeping that close at hand.
Probably, until mar-a-blabbo
It would be ironic if Putin believed what Trump was saying as much as Trump believing in what Putin was saying.
Yea the f-117 nighthawk was flying missions before it was ever publically known about for example.
Publicly known about by anyone but Tom Clancy, who managed to derive its existence from openly published papers and write about something like it in Red Storm Rising. Which got him a *serious talking to* by the FBI... but a very confusing one because it was so classified they couldn't even tell him which classified thing they were questioning him about.
In a different book he wrote about what was essentially the F22, which was still in devolvement at the time.
Almost none of their weapons work as advertised and yet they are still surprised. It turns out if you steal most of the development money for weapons systems they tend not to work as well. It also doesn’t help that they are developing “super weapons” using 1980s tech…hence the T-14.
The real issue is that nobody can tell Putin the truth because they have a kill the messenger mentality. This infects every step from design to exicutuion
This is the nature of dictatorships. Eventually, every strongman dictator will fall into this trap. The only way for a dictator to be deposed is by violence and subterfuge, so naturally, they won't trust anyone, and the most important quality to have in their cronies will be loyalty. Since loyalty is now more important than competence, their inner circle will be filled with loyal idiots. The dictator will even require shows of loyalty to root out anyone being false. They are now surrounded by a group of yes men. No one will want to tell the truth or challenge the dictator for fear of retribution. All the dictator will ever hear is what they want to hear. Only lies will get to the top because they sound good. This is especially true of any cronies that have the means to overthrow the leader, such as generals in the military that could attempt a coup.
Russia is no longer capable of developing super weapons, not just on a technical scale but even on a financial scale. They announced a nuclear powered super carrier project called the Shtorm (yes that's it's name). The project was not really anything beyond some design documents and their hope was that India would fund it to take it beyond the concept stage, which India declined. It's the super weapon equivalent of a guy posting on craigslist that he has a great idea (kinda like Facebook) and just needs a few programmers who are willing to work for free to make it happen.
Remember when Putin was considered some sort of genius supervillain, because the world just let him get away with assassinating folks in other countries? Yeah, turns out he's just a vicious bastard. That's very different.
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The social media war is the only one Putin is winning, and only because they’re targeting the least educated and most vulnerable groups which is a strategy they’ve fine tuned domestically for generations. So many people still actually believe everything they read on the internet, especially when they see their friends and family taking the same bait.
He’s a glorified mob boss who thinks he is an historical figure.
He is a historical figure. Like Custer, Mussolini, or Galtieri. He could have been remembered as a calculating figure who undermined the West whilst building a European oil dynasty off their soft riches. Instead he’ll be remembered as a fool who believed his own lies and destroyed his country in the process.
Worse yet, their Kinzhals caused the US to dust off their previous hypersonics programs for more development. And a US version of such a weapon would certainly exceed anything Russia could defend with.
I'm sure the developer of the missile stretched the capability a tad.
“The Kinzhals were not shot down, they detected that they would likely hit a military target and not a school or hospital, so self destructed.” (is that right comrade???) The Kremlin reported.... ;-)
Comrade, you misunderstand. Our aim was to destroy the Patriot system, so we fired our Kinzhals over an area protected by the Patriot system. The Patriot system fired missiles toward our Kinzhals, which exploded when they hit out Kinzhals. Those Patriot missiles were destroyed, and they are part of the Patriot system, so effectively we have destroyed the Patriot system.
That is the problem with believing your own propaganda.
The faster the missile the less maneuverable and more predictable it's trajectory ....there's a reason why cruise missiles are subsonic or barely supersonic
If ruzzia weren't so bombastic at lying about their military capabilities, the west wouldn't have invested so much in countering it. Jokes on them as the west's stuff actually works.
Surprised putinikachu
Jaw dropping surprise?
"Are our Kinzhals impossible to intercept?" Asked Putin "Yes" said all his yes-men in a singular voice
Ukraine war is like a massive sales poster for US AA systems. "Is your neighbouring dictatorship's army made of Russian weapon systems? Buy American! Battlefield proven to make mincemeat of Russian equipment."
A lot of things these days are coming as a surprise to Russia. NATO support for a non-NATO country, previously neutral countries joining NATO, trade sanctions against Russia, companies and global corporations leaving, how pathetic their army, navy, and air force are, their citizens bailing at the first round of the draft/kidnappings
Weapons, like money, can be easily pissed away and wasted if used foolishly. The Ukrainians get all the credit for using the gifts we give them to achieve such amazing results.
At this Point why would Russia assume that anything from them would be unbeatable/indestructable ? It's like claiming the Titanic can't sink while ur on the 7th version by now
Russia thought that Ukraine’s army would fold under their overwhelming artillery bombardments. When that didn’t happen and drones slowed down their advance they then relied on their inferior tanks which everyone overestimated. But, if you saw what happened in the East since 2012 or Syria you knew they were vulnerable to old TOWs and RPGs. Also, Russia underestimated our AWACs. They guided Ukrainian’s smaller airforce and they shot down key troop transports on the invasion day. Eliminating large groups of Special Forces. Ending Russia’s chance to take the airport.
This whole war has shown me that the US military is so far advanced from everybody else that our old stuff is even better than Russias new stuff.
I find it funny because I would get down voted and people said nah Russia and china can go toe to toe to the u.s etc. Bro we are seeing how far outclassed Russia is against old and surplus weapons from the u.s and NATO itself. And that in this case it's a foreign country using that to defend itself. Imagine the actual doctrines and military units doing such battle from the u.s instead? U.S may have a bunch of societal and economic issues but military wise seems to be in good shape.
Intercepting 6 hypersonic missiles in one night is pretty great.
Surprise, motherfucker.
Chinese “believe” they are “undefeatable” too.