Another quality video from Perun. Some takeaways:
- Despite occasional lapses and a barrage of internet mockery, Russian air defense and Russian air defense systems have for the most part done what they're supposed to.
- In this area, the attrition game seems to actually favor the Russians as things are, meaning that there's no guarantee Ukraine can keep denying Ukrainian airspace for perpetuity, which is obviously a potential problem in the future. While they've lost more systems, Russians can also afford to lose more, and Ukrainians aren't being resupplied with captured air defense systems.
- (Relatively) cheap drones and high performance rockets have proved to be problems for current air defense systems. In the case of HIMARS for example, those fast, those small and really fast rockets have simply proven to be quite hard to counter. Cheap, plentiful drones on the other hand create an attrition/cost problem, as the ammunition used to shoot them down is often a lot more expensive/valuable than the drone. Both are issues that require some technological advancement to solve.
Personal, tangentially related comment:
- While I don't want to be overly pessimistic, this video just reminds that it's very premature to suggest that the Russian military is all but beaten in Ukraine, and that a Ukrainian victory in the battlefield is all but inevitable. It's possible, but Russia is just so damned big, and while Ukrainians are extremely motivated, there's likewise no signs of there being a limit to what the Russian population is ready to put up with when it comes to fighting this war. The question of popular support seems to be mostly irrelevant when a dictator has such an iron grip over his people.
As long as Russia just keeps pouring men and resources into Ukraine without consideration for the country's future (let alone moral implications), they are very likely to stay in the fight, and they will learn from their mistakes, no matter how slowly. We might mock and/or stare at horror at the Russian way of feeding untrained and poorly equipped men to the grinder, but it does work to some extent.
This war is very far from over or decided.
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