The Russian "advance" was insignificant compared to the losses. The Russians only expanded the gray area.
The War in the Ukraine
- Thread starter SampanViking
- Start date
We see some light military utility vehicule but they are not the majority used. The number of civilian vehicules used is surprising me quite a lot. If something have been build in numbers is light military vehicules... more than a quarter of a million Humvee have been build, more than 100 000 M151, where are they ???
All the old ones are scrapped and Humvee got so savagely attritioned in IRAQ and Afghanistan that they have just enough to give a couple of thousand ( less than 2000 on paper) to Ukraine ?
We don't even know what "the losses" are. I've seen how OSINTers count them. How many men actually lost? How many vehicles irrecoverable? How many Ukrainians killed by the Russians during the advance?
Let's not just jump to conclusions please.
Russia is a big country. You can't have full radar coverage of every square mile of the country.
Yes, of course there is a war and you have high alert, but likely this plane is flying quite carefully below the radar horizon of large search radars. Once it gets past the bulk of the short range sensor networks which are deployed near the front, then how many AD assets do you expect to encounter?
The US ignored a Cessna was crashing on the White House lawn BEFORE 9/11. It took the Pentagon attack, the HQ of all US armed forces, before they installed NASAMs around DC.
Russia's air force is a top 3 air force when it comes to quantity and quality (at least on paper) and for over a year now the nation they are at war with has been penetrating Russian air space but this latest one is inexcusable. This latest attack was done by more than one cessna aircraft which have the RCS of a barn. Where was the Rusian air force? Why during wartime knowing their airspace is getting penetrated is there no CAP? There's two answers to this, sheer incompetence or they don't have the capability to secure their airspace from their neighbor they are at war with.
These aircraft came from within and during peace time if US was at war with Mexico the US would have 24/7 CAP with AWACS especially if they one time penetrated US airspace and struck a target in the US.
Just seen some posts, they have many of them left... just waiting for it.
My point is that you can never have 100% coverage and 100% interception. You are just dreaming if you think otherwise. In any case, it's not like Su-24s are flying into Russia and lobbing Storm Shadows at Moscow.
If 50 Cessna-drones got through and killed Putin and all the senior government officials along with blowing up the Winter Palace and the Kremlin, then we can say it's inexcusable. 3 getting through becomes a carefully planned attack.
You say "RCS size of a barn", but a Cessna is a small aircraft, it is hard to detect. This is why civilian aircraft normally carry transponders, makes it easier and more precise to track.
You've also invalidated your own excuse. Your logic is a prior attack should be a reason for heightened precautions. Do US presidents still ride in convertibles just because JFK was killed in peacetime?
Putting it another way, why do you think it is "Russians don't know what they are doing" rather than "Ukrainians know what they are doing"?
Or the "spy balloon" they didn't pick up until it was over the midwest.
There were multiple articles about how many of the tactical vehicles received by Ukraine were outright junk given the state they were in, with Hummers with rotten tires, seized engines, etc.
Or the Italians who sent trucks rusted and in pieces