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Shooting Down 11 Jets In 11 Days, Ukraine Nudges The Russian Air Force Closer To Organizational Death-Spiral (www.forbes.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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An overview of the recent losses by the Russian air force and overall situation for their readiness. Kind of a follow-up on some questions I asked on other posts here.

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[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Can someone ELI5 why Russia isn't able to send 10 jets for every 1 that Ukraine has? (I mean it's good they haven't, it's just that we're led to believe countries like the US, Russia and China have ginormous armed forces and when it's actually come down to it it's been a 2 year long war instead of what was supposedly going to be an immediate annihilation with overwhelming forces flattening out ukraine)

[-] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

Because modern air war has little if anything to do with dogfighting (planes fighting planes with guns). It is all about using missiles to hit targets. Both on the ground and in the air. And those missiles can also be fired from the ground. SAMs (surface-to-air-missile) are used to hit planes, drones, other missiles. Also MANPADs (portable shoulder fired missiles) pose a threat to aviation.

In an air superiority battle overwhelming air power is used to take out the SAM batteries. This is difficult and costly. Something neither Russia nor Ukraine are currently able to do. So both are using jets in a minimal capacity.

Recently Russia has ramped up the usage of jets to hit entrenched targets on the front line. Which has predictably resulted greater losses. And relatively meager gains.

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this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024

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