"About problems with the suppression of Ukrainian air defense"

TG / Masno
"About problems with the suppression of Ukrainian air defense or a topic that few people raise.

We wrote a lot about the fact that for the 8th month of hostilities, the Ukrainian air defense as a single system not only continues to exist, but also feels relatively good and even develops, since attempts to systematically destroy it by the RF Armed Forces have not been accepted and are not being accepted. This situation, of course, is depressing, but it has its own reason, unsolvable in the short term - the inability of the Russian Aerospace Forces to carry out operations to suppress enemy air defenses (SEAD in the Western classification).

In the West, this doctrine has its roots as far back as the Second World War, but its "debut" took place during the Vietnam War, where the US Air Force used specially designed aircraft and pilots trained for this purpose to destroy the air defense of South Vietnam. In the future, this doctrine was refined and developed, consolidating the successes during operations to break through and suppress the air defenses of Iraq and Yugoslavia.

However, what does Russia have? Alas, we do not shine with anything like that. Since the five-day war with Georgia in 2008, the military department has made absolutely no long-term conclusions, the Russian Aerospace Forces have not been systematically trained to suppress large enemy air defense groups, and large-scale exercises aimed at such operations have not been conducted. If you look at any footage from large-scale exercises of the Aerospace Forces, then in most cases we will see there work on ground targets with unguided bombs and missiles from low altitudes, which is now happening during the war.

Such operations require a high level of intelligence and cooperation both within the air force and with ground forces. You need to be able to coordinate with each other dozens of different aircraft in the air at the same time, to coordinate their actions every minute - this level of interaction does not appear just like that. Russian aviation, of course, has separate means both for destroying enemy air defense systems and for conducting reconnaissance or suppression, however, these systems have never been used together within the framework of the concept and exercises, and their total number is not enough. At the current stage of development of domestic airborne forces, large-scale operations to break through Ukrainian air defense are not available to us, and therefore the impact on Ukrainian critical infrastructure with the help of cruise missiles or kamikaze drones will eventually run into the ever-growing opposition of modern NATO air defense systems, whose role in the battles for the Ukrainian sky will be extremely difficult to dispute."