Revive The Flying Tigers To Protect Ukraine
Russia’s newest tactic in its never-ending attempt to murder Ukraine is as devious as it is brutal.
NOTE: Originally published on Medium, October 18, 2022.
Large numbers of drones sourced from Iran have begun launching mass raids on vital infrastructure all across Ukraine. Even Kyiv’s dense air defense systems are having trouble keeping up with the barrage.
And each use of a precious surface to air missile to knock down a twenty-thousand dollar drone further depletes Ukraine’s diminishing arsenal of S-300 and Buk surface to air missiles, leaving it vulnerable to further attacks.
The impact on Ukraine’s people from this aerial terror is set to grow much more severe as winter deepens. Nearly a third of Ukraine’s power generation capacity is offline. Putin is deliberately , as I feared, inflicting as much pain on the Ukrainian people as possible to give his battered armies a chance to recover.
He hasn’t gone nuclear — yet — but the threat remains and will rise if Ukraine comes close to retaking Kherson or Mariupol, where thanks to the damage to the Kerch Strait Bridge Russia’s supply lines to Kherson are very vulnerable.
The hell of this sad situation is that it could have so easily been prevented. For eight months Ukraine has been begging for modern jets and air defenses. And while the latter plea has finally been heard — though still too late for too many — SAM systems alone aren’t enough to protect Ukraine.
For the first time since the war began, hard estimates about the size of Russia’s remaining arsenal of precision missiles have been published.
Fully contradicting the the smug proclamations of pundits and paid trolls in the US and UK, who have been asserting that Russia was nearly out of these weapons since Spring, Ukraine is certain that Russia still has around 40% of its air-launched cruise missile arsenal intact.
Over 85% of the ground launched Iskander ballistic missiles have been used up, but this still leaves hundreds of accurate weapons available. Repurposing old model S-300 surface to air missiles as janky ground attack weapons has allowed Russia to offset some of its burn. Using its vast stocks of Soviet-era anti-ship cruise missiles has helped too.
But the import of hundreds, soon to be thousands of Iranian drones marks a dangerous turn in the war to secure Ukraine’s skies.
A note about the quality of intelligence about the Russian military effort is worth adding here.
Ukraine likely gets better information than US or allied sources at this point because of the close historic links between Russians and Ukrainians.
Back in 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea and Donbas, I had the privilege of taking grad school courses alongside a couple gals from Kyiv. Even then, with passions running hot, regular Ukrainians and Russians generally didn’t hate each other.
Russian and Ukrainian identities were not clear-cut then and still aren’t today. Plenty of Russian military officers have family members in Ukraine. The opposite is likely true.
Most people in all places and times just want to get by.
What began as a popular revolt against a corrupt President turned into a bitter proxy conflict between Moscow and Washington that has escalated into the nightmare being visited on Ukrainians each and every day.
I stand with Ukraine — but not the United States — because I know these this so-called ally to be a fair weather friend that will take any excuse to abandon Ukraine the moment things get really tough. America supports Ukraine in order to harm Russia — a worthy goal nowadays, but not the same as actually wanting to guarantee that Ukraine actually wins.
Ukraine is fighting the good fight — Putin has made it abundantly clear through word and deed that he seeks to destroy the Ukrainian identity completely.
US types from the D.C. thinktank community, by contrast, will wrap themselves in the flag of Ukraine but still in word and deed treat its people as lesser. They constantly find excuses to not send vital defensive aid like air defenses and fighter jets while Ukraine’s civilians and soldiers pay the price of their calculating cowardice.
Why? Fear that this crosses one of Putin’s hazy nuclear red lines.
Modern Iris-T and NASAMS systems are finally making their way into the fight, and that is undoubtedly good news. But what has been promised so far is woefully insufficient to protect a country the size of Ukraine.
Cheap explosive-packed drones are incredibly hard to detect because they can fly incredibly close to the ground. They also tend to come in groups, making it more likely that one or two will slip through to strike a target.
Because the surface of the Earth is curved, this limits the area any SAM system can protect on its own. A ground-based radar operating on flat terrain like Ukraine can only see out to the edge of the horizon — around 50km. Anything beyond that is invisible, unless another sensor can see it and transmit targeting data to the SAM launcher.
When military tech buffs slobber over a high-tech missile system like the Russian S-400 or American Patriot, capable of hitting targets hundreds of kilometers away, they always forget that this range generally only applies to high-flying aircraft and missiles. And equally important, any missile system has a hard limit to the number of targets it can engage at once, tied to how much computing power is available to process sensor data.
The US Navy spent a lot of time and money designing the Aegis system, allowing ships to engage dozens or even hundreds of targets at a time, because in the Cold War Soviet doctrine planned to fire that many missiles at US Aircraft carrier battle groups. Escort ships were built with magazines containing upwards of a hundred missiles in order to be able to absorb a massive strike. Even one missile getting through to a carrier would be a disaster, because up to a tenth of the US Navy’s combat power would be taken out of the fight in a single stroke — the things are notoriously basically floating bombs.
Inability to protect ground-based targets against mass air attacks has been a known problem for years in US military circles. And since the Russian assault on the whole of Ukraine began in February it was obvious that if Ukraine didn’t swiftly collapse Russia would resort to these sorts of tactics sooner or later.
It’s exactly what Putin did in Syria to protect Assad, after all.
Before he goes nuclear in response to some future battlefield disaster like the loss of Kherson or Donetsk, Putin is going to apply vicious Syria-style tactics across Ukraine, revealing with every terror strike that goes unanswered just how petrified of his nukes NATO is.
Turning off power and heating is the kind of thing that does little useful for Russia’s war effort in the long run, because it only makes the people under attack more angry. But Russian thinking puts a lot of faith in long-term impacts and simple symbolism.
So aside from revenge for the Kerch Strait bridge attack, creating any separation between Zelensky and his people they can create is a badly-needed win. Though Ukraine’s will to fight won’t be broken by terror tactics — these have failed time and again across history — there will be substantial material damage to Ukraine’s ability to resist future offensives if the domestic economy can’t function for want of power.
There is a real chance that Ukraine wins this war in 2023.
But far too many innocent Ukrainians will pay the price of cowardly American hesitation if the country does not get better comprehensive defenses. Because Ukraine’s allies have failed to move fast enough, Iranian drones are now an extremely useful adjunct to strikes by the rest of Russia’s shrinking precision weapons arsenal.
They force Ukraine to waste precious air defenses that could be used on the more expensive and lethal cruise missiles. Their numbers can overwhelm even potent air defense systems. And by constantly trying different attack routes, they can stretch the defenses Ukraine still has.
But SAM systems alone can’t be deployed in the numbers needed to completely protect even Ukraine’s biggest cities and vital assets. They simply can’t be everywhere at once.
What this means is that there is now no viable option except sending combat jets to Ukraine immediately — piloted by foreign volunteers, if necessary.
Putin’s strategy going forward is clear. He needs to buy time to repair his crippled army ahead of another all-out push to destroy the Zelensky regime.
Ukraine has done an astounding job of making the most of its limited resources. But it is still a massive country with thousands of kilometers of border and even more airspace to defend.
Putin is likely to shift the focus of his army’s efforts again, hitting Ukrainian ground forces from multiple directions during the winter. Not massive, all-out attacks, but grinding attritional battles meant to keep taxing Ukraine’s reserves and keep it from launching major offensives elsewhere.
Another push towards Kyiv through Chernihiv and Sumy is well within the realm of possibility, simply to keep Ukraine tied down and suffering casualties on multiple fronts. That could then be developed into a slow grind to Kyiv.
The ability of Russia to regenerate at least partially capable combat forces must not be underestimated. Russia’s messy mobilization process has had the effect of driving potential opponents to Putin’s regime out of the country.
Despite its clear problems and bias towards pulling in recruits from poor regions rather than Moscow and St. Petersburg, the draft will pull enough raw flesh to re-equip his invasion force — plus some. Yes, their equipment will be weaker, but it isn’t as if Russia’s gear was performing well anyway. And that decline in quality will be offset by raw numbers, which, since Russia will be able to stay on the defense in most sectors, will have an outsized impact.
Elite units will be formed and given the best gear, used to turn any success by the conscript units into a dangerous breakthrough. Eastern Front tactics straight from 1943 — but they can work.
Because its allies are not arming it with modern ground equipment fast enough nor seem to want to — apparently for fear Ukraine’s counteroffensives will be too successful and prompt a nuclear response — Russia opening additional fronts will make it much harder for Ukraine to liberate its occupied lands.
After eight months of nonstop intense fighting coming on the heels of eight years of grinding battles in Donbas Ukraine’s soldiers are without a doubt the best in the world. But outnumbered, even the best warrior will eventually fall.
And Russia’s partial mobilization has been large enough to push every battalion tactical group deployed in or near Ukraine back to full strength plus generate several dozen more. The flip side of losing around 90,000 soldiers — half the initial Russian invasion force, though many were likely replacements recruited after March — is that the survivors know how to fight.
There are signs that Russia is copying what Ukraine did to transform its half-trained recruits in Spring into competent fighters — integrate new soldiers directly with veterans, promoting the latter and putting them to work training units in the field.
They pass on what works and what doesn’t to the newbies.
Casualties will be high, given that unlike Ukraine Russia will be trying to ad-hoc a new training regimen on the fly, but Putin is supposedly willing to accept half a million dead, having twenty-five million bodies in the reserves. Like most well-educated technocrats in every country, Putin and his regime see people at the ground level as disposable.
Inputs to a machine, and nothing more.
The usual suspects in English-speaking media want to play off Russia’s resort to drones as a sign of desperation, but in point of fact it marks simply one more predictable escalation in a conflict that has already spiraled out of anyone’s control.
Russia’s drone assault on power infrastructure is, in purely military terms, a no-brainer. Back in 1991 I watched on TV as the US-led coalition did that to Iraq, despite the main fight to liberate Kuwait taking place hundreds of kilometers away.
The only surprise is that Russia didn’t go down this wicked road a lot sooner.
Drones, aside from being hard to spot, cheap, and generally difficult for air defenses to stop, can also make it easier to get bigger, more potent weapons through Ukraine’s defenses. In fact, one of the big unknowns in evaluating Russia’s arsenal of missiles is how many decoys they’ve been launching this entire time.
By overwhelming Ukraine’s air defenses with false targets, Russia can make sure that their more deadly and accurate weapons get through to their targets more often. Ukraine has been taking down more than half of the incoming missiles Russia sends its way, and upwards of ninety percent of all drones.
But the hits keep on coming. Why?
Simply put, because Ukraine doesn’t have enough modern jet aircraft to fill the gaps between the SAM systems it has available. Aircraft have the extreme advantage in this situation of being able to control their radar horizon.
Even flying just a few hundred meters above a mostly flat country like Ukraine allows a jet to see dozens of kilometers farther than a ground-based radar. Jets can also move quickly from one region to the next. If their sensors are integrated with ground-based systems, they can act as spotters to help the latter hit targets with greater precision.
Jets are also a heck of a lot harder to hit with anti-radiation missiles that home in on radar transmissions than anything on the ground. They can also mount optical and thermal sensors that, given the ground clutter radars have to deal with, can make it easier to spot and kill a drone. Naturally the fact they can mount a variety of air to air missiles capable of swatting drones and cruise missiles from the sky is an added boon.
F-18 Hornets, F-15 Eagles, F-16 Falcons, the lovely Gripen, French Rafales, or the multinational Eurofighter Typhoon — it doesn’t really matter what Ukraine gets at this point so long as it mounts the right sensors and carries a bunch of air to air missiles.
Ukraine’s necessary victory in this war need not come at the cost of hundreds or thousands more Ukrainian lives and all the time and resources required to rebuild the entire country’s infrastructure. And it is morally reprehensible to insist that defense systems of any kind need to be held back to defend France or Germany or Canada or even the United States of America from hypothetical threats when people in Ukraine are being killed right now.
To withhold your hose from your neighbor because the fire on their roof might spread to yours turns FDR’s commitment to Britain in the face of Hitler’s attacks right on its head. It is basically making Putin’s argument about the war for him as effectively as any stupid thing that professional troll Musk tweets out for the attention.
Had Ukraine been properly equipped starting in spring, the war could already be almost over by now.
The best argument against giving Ukraine fighters has always been that none are trained on western models. By now, of course, they could have been— and I hope very much secretly are somewhere.
If not, then can someone get this going in Oregon? We’ve got a couple of National Guard F-15 squadrons after all, not doing anything other than make noise and play wargames off the coast.
I’ve learned to never anything for granted with the American federal government. And neither should any of America’s allies abroad ever again.
All should be well warned by America’s failure to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine against ever trusting America too much again. With this country, the leadership will always be either an inept buffoon or a malicious freak, each President worse than all others except maybe the last guy.
Fortunately, while America is a hot mess many Americans have their hearts and heads in the right place. Many former military pilots would be happy to volunteer to defend Ukraine’s skies if given an opportunity.
Back in the day, American pilots were some of the first to volunteer to fight abroad — well before their country’s leaders bothered to get involved. In World War 1 American pilots were serving in the French Air Force with distinction long before America joined the fight. And during World War 2 there were the famed Flying Tigers, a group of volunteer pilots flying in support of Chinese forces against Japan’s murderous invasion of that country.
A new generation of Flying Tigers ought to be set up in western Ukraine. Flying donated Western fighters, they could defend NATO-adjacent parts of Ukraine’s airspace against incoming attacks.
At the same time, they could assist in the process of training Ukrainian pilots to use new jets. Ukraine needs at least a hundred new fighters to be able to cover enough of its airspace that SAM systems can protect targets from drones and missiles that leak through.
It also needs airborne early warning aircraft like the E-2 Hawkeye that normally operates from US aircraft carriers.
Frankly, it is patently ridiculous that an expeditionary air wing from Naval reserves, consisting of retired F-18C and E-2 airframes, has not already been set up in Romania or Poland to at least scope out how a transfer could work.
But foresight has never been a strength of American strategic thinking.
Maybe folks in the private sector, the states, or sane European countries will get it done.
Build a new Flying Tigers for Ukraine today!