But I do hope Western militaries are not counting on Russia's "incompetence and inexperience".
The gist was that the US goes immediately for dominating the sky. Russia sees ground forces as the main engine of the army, and the Air Force only supports the advancement of ground forces near the border, without bombing far into enemy territory (which is a task for the army's missiles).
I could not find the source article I read, and I guess there's a non trivial chance it might even have been based on Russian propaganda... as usual, take everything with a grain of salt. I just find it hard (and reassuring) to imagine that Russia's army and air force are in such a terrible state.
Maybe that's what parent comment is concerned about when saying "I do hope Western militaries are not counting on Russia's 'incompetence and inexperience'"
First as a doctrine, it would be a stupid one - they tend to use paratroopers for surprise taking of advanced positions, and air support is vital to help them keep their position until reinforcements can arrive. Point in case, the failure at Hostomel. Their doctrine emphasises anti-air defenses because air superiority against a superior enemy ( NATO) isn't certain, but that doesn't mean the Air Force shouldn't be used at all, especially against an inferior enemy
Second, they don't seem to be even doing that - there are small scale ( 1-2 planes) raids deep in Ukrainian territory, and neither their planes nor their SAMs can deal with the drones Ukraine fields, even over Russian held territory
This is not a reason to relax, but one can certainly observe that.
I would take the (sadly looks more like wishful thinking) incompetence over the current destruction.
But yeah let's hope they keep like that
Mass bombings is almost the bluntest last-resort weapon you can use. A bloodless coup followed by a (probably quite bloody) purge would have been the best outcome for the Russians.
You get me wrong there. The current destruction is a result of the incompetence, not an alternative to it.
If they were a well organized well maintained troup going full Blitzkrieg they would have overwhelmed the Ukrainian forces so fast they already would have taken the capital more than a week ago. This is what they intended to do.
Now if they can't get forward because the majority of their transport can only happen on roads they are definitely in dire need of air superiority, because air superiority would keep the convoys safer. They started shelling civilian infrastructure because they want to break the unexpected fighting spirit and they have no other ways to do it. But this was definitly not what the leading heads in Russia would have preferred, they thought they would go in full Blitzkrieg and after 3 days the capital would have fallen due to overwhelming force.
Does "Fallujah" ring a bell? The mirage of the clean, surgical war was created by the Clinton administration for the first war in Iraq. Such a thing does not exist and has never been observed accept in carefully manufactured narrative.
If there's any thing I'm taking away from this, it's that Pacifism is dead. You need serious deterrence. Pacifism is what let Putin get this bad.
Come on, now. The mirage of a clean and easy war is probably as old as war itself. Hell, just look at the media just when WWI was getting started. I can criticise American imperialism as well as anyone but this is ridiculous. Besides the fact that the first Gulf war was under Bush.
A small dictatorship like NK can be controlled by a handful of people, often relatives. The family model also works for mafias, up to a certain size. But grow your association of lawlessness beyond a point and you’ll find yourself in desperate need for the protection of the law.
Consider USA where there is a mismanagement problem with healthcare -- onerous regulations, rent-seeking, gatekeepers, state capitalism, crony capitalism, corrupt bureaucracies, anti-trust issues, and insufficient investment in training and development.
If healthcare is unnecessarily expensive by 10% -- then that's 2% of the American economy misallocated. Also, the lost human potential because of worse healthcare outcomes is another drain.
Now imagine if that was par for the course everywhere you look.
This is an interesting observation because it is the opposite of Alexis de Tocqueville‘s observation that democracy was well-suited to small states like Athens and Britain but large states like Russia needed autocracy.
This state of indecisiveness wasn't anticipated by anyone. Germany did even want to skip the sanction part since the war would be over in 3 days.
Now we have to actually deal with it; and the plans on both sides are made up as we go.
The fact that this has clearly failed to happen indicates that the war is not going as planned.
For comparison, it took the US three weeks total from launching their invasion of Iraq to taking over Baghdad, despite there being approximately 5x more distance to cover and Iraq fielding an army twice as large as Ukraine.
Maybe we (and the Russians) actually underestimated the Ukrainians a lot more than overestimated Russians...
So it is both: Russians doing fat worse than expected and Ukrainians are doing much better than I feared they would do.
That is somewhat of a fiasco for someone who is supposed to have deployed order of magnitude more soldiers, tanks and airplanes than their opponent, and claimed they will win in few days.
EDIT: thanks for the correction, got the cities mixed up.
You are probably thinking of Kherson (a much smaller city, population 300k, in southern Ukraine).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukrai...
The only way to spin a false narrative is thorough censorship and control of the internet and public media, and we just don't have that in the west. We do have high levels of surveillance, and a tiny amount of editorialising on social media compared to Russia and China, but not state censorship and suppression capable of obstructing public discourse.
Easy: The war is still going on. There is a lot information that is indeed very unreliable, but undeniable Russia has not yet won the war. A thing that Putin himself said on Russian television could be easily done within two weeks. We are now way past that and there is no end in sight.
Now if we take that indicator of bad performance seriously we can wonder what got into the way of the Russians. And there are some suggestions like badly maintained vehicles, lack of logistics (fuel trucks), vehicles that are unable to drive offroad, bad morale, lack of airsupport and so on.
Now we can take all these theories and try the ones that fit the perceived reality most — not looking at individual instances but on trends — and the theories that fit that picture best win (for now).
The fact is, that Russian explainations don't square with what can be observed long term. Ukrainian explainations are propagandistic (and sometimes lies), but they fit what can be observed if you look onto the bigger arcs of development much better.
What makes you say they are unquestioning? There's a lot of evidence of Russian military incompetence, including that they are struggling against a much smaller, much less-funded and less-equipped military.
Other than in the US where russian Oil is like 3% of the used oil and russian gas is basically not used, in Europe no russian gas means cold houses and problems in the industry.
Similarly, if NATO starts politely performing military exercises near any of the other borders of Russia, Russia needs to be able to demonstrate that they have an army guarding said border.
It's more likely the russians are a) incompetent, or b) saving the bulk of the air force for a potential escalation of the current hostilities. One does not have to exclude the other.