Fant denne på LinkedIn (Mark Lindsey):
Yesterdays attack of Russia missiles on Ukraine was the biggest military failure of Russia in a long time, maybe ever.
The strategic balance has shifted after less the 24 hours, allow me to explain how Russia lost the "Billion Dollar Brawl" in a catastrophic manner.
This attack involved a very substantial amount of weapons, 105 missiles, fired in a time and space coordinated fashion on select targets. The idea behind such an attack against air defense is to overwhelm the defending side with force, in a so called "saturation attack".
Any missile system only has a limited amount of ready to fire missiles, before it needs to reload. The well known Patriot System has 4 Missiles per Launcher Truck with PAC-2 Missiles, and 16 with the smaller PAC-3 Missiles.
The IRIS-T System is similar, with 8 Ready to Fire Missiles per Truck.
Once they are fired, you need to take a truck, reload the launcher with new "boxes", that are both the storage and launch container.
So why did the strategic balance shift today?
Russia has saved up cruise missiles and other missile assets for quite some time, to plan and execute this attack on critical civilian infrastructures of Ukraine. They have used their intelligence assets to try to understand how the Air Defense of Ukraine is structured. They have employed so called SEAD/DEAD Missions using Anti-Radiation Missiles and Electronic Warfare, both aimed at rendering Air Defense ineffective and destroying it. This was not "nothing", this was likely the best game-plan they could execute, with the assets available.
Despite these efforts, they were only able to hit with less than 5% of the ordnance employed, 7 hits out of 105 targets is pretty dismal. That cost several hundred billion rubles, that's several million rubles for each innocent civilian they killed. They did't kill Ukrain8ian air defenses and they did not overwhelm the air defense system. So the Russian attack was a last ditch effort to destroy Ukraine's critical infrastructure, which the Russians have been trying to do for going on 2 years.
That's a failure of Russian strategic aviation, and signals that Russia, despite gains on the ground, will no longer be able to massively attack Ukrainian critical infrastructures. This would have been unthinkable a year ago, this is a huge triumph for Ukraine but also the countries supporting it.
www.theguardian.com
