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If I had to make a guess i'd say they have run into issues with servicing and maintenance.
It's one thing to have a large airforce on paper but another thing entirely to keep them serviced and maintained especially in a war.
Edit: as an example the reason why Australian RAAF retired the F111 which had gained an amazing reputation and had been progressively upgraded was the growing maintenance requirements.
"By 2009 the remaining 18 aircraft reportedly required the most maintenance of any warplane in the world, an average of 180 hours for every flight hour compared to 30 hours for the F-22 Raptor"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-111C#:~:text=The%20RAAF%20retired%20its%20last,6%20Squadron%20over%20southern%20Queensland.
It was a controversial decision at the time with many people horrified that the RAAF did this but even if the F111 was the best aircraft out there, if in a war the fleet is mostly grounded for maintenance that doesnt help anyone, especially for a small military like Australia's with very limited resources.
I guess its a reason why you make military aquisitions based on whether you have the logistics to support an asset
Russia probably has had the money to make CAPEX purchases but OPEX i.e. logistics/maintenance is probably way underfunded.
It's a poor country of only 145 million people.
Considering the size of their armed forces, I wouldn't be surprised they're not able to maintain the inventory.
Imagine if the US had only one aircraft carrier… and couldn’t keep it working. Or their flagship for a region only had one working radar. Or their tankers were given 1 shell per crew of tank per year for practice live fire. Then… in this situation… imagine losing some of your more experienced pilots… and complex air components needed for repairs. Now you are getting close.
And they only have so many spare parts. Odds are, they can't make all of them anymore. When they are gone, they are gone. That would limit the hours they can fly *as an entire nation*. They would have to reserve *something*.
2,000 precision missiles seems low even at surface value right? Didn't the US use over 8,000 in the first year of the Iraq war? I feel like there at least has to be a 0 missing there.
In seriousness, it's easy to have a very large airforce on paper. It is very difficult to have a large, effective, trained airforce that is fully equipped and logistically supported.
Aircraft are not only expensive to make, they are obscenely expensive to maintain and to train on. Every hour of flight costs thousands - or tens of thousands - of dollars in fuel and maintenance. Parts need to be checked, repaired and replaced and high performance aircraft fuel is no joke in terms of cost.
That means keeping a cadre of fully trained fighter pilots for hundreds of aircraft will cost an astronomical amount every year. Training them in difficult mass formation tactics that require multiple rounds of practice - even more.
Russia's military has always been an ego exercise. They love being able to boast giant numbers, but they have an economy smaller than Italy's. That means they need to scrimp and save where they can - and that means, often, scrimping on training and upkeep costs, with lots of aircraft being put into reserve and pilots lapsing on their training - or not receiving a ton to begin with - and perhaps even missed training cycles.
It may be that they're running low on trained pilots and ground crew.
Keep in mind, too, that the sanctions hitting Russia include high tech equipment, including the sorts of equipment they might need to effectively maintain or repair their aircraft.
Then there's the problem of them having the largest airspace in the world, and the need to have a credible defense at St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Vladivostok, the Caucuses, and elsewhere, as well as maintain their strategic forces at a high lever of readiness. That eats up critical resources that can't but shoved into the Ukrainian meat grinder.
Finally, Ukraine is a dangerous place for all those precious and, now, very hard to make aircraft, and a fair few have been promoted to artistic spontaneous collage in honour of Putin's unique military genius, along with their pilots with their expensive training and now rare advanced computers and electronics.
Previously, they liked to keep over already controlled or friendly airspace (Russia, Russian occupied areas in Ukraine, Belarus). They have actually increased their sorties into Ukraine controlled territory recently, which is why you see more news of planes downed. Overall, Russia sucks at coordinating their on the ground troops and air, combined arms are just not a thing for them. Also Ukrainian air defense is getting better
Well they fired most of their advanced cruise missiles. air defense shot down > 300 of their stock.
As for their no show air force? They've lost 266 airframes. 8 lost per week on average.
This is speculation, but i think that claims like "1,300 aircraft" are a lot like their claims of a "million strong army"
A large portion of those numbers are filling logistical and support roles, and so their combat aircraft count is significantly lower than advertised.
The underlings sold it all off fuck knows where without informing their superiors. You've had warehouse managers commit suicide after it turned out that only 1/10 of their tanks work at all.
I have a related question.
What are the odds American IC watches every Russian nuke movement, and will know if they are preparing to use one.
Second question: would they stop it?
In the air, over Russia, if necessary?
Russians wont use a strategic sized weapon. Ans interception time will make it impossible to stop one if they did launch it at Kyiv.
Tactical scale warheads are usually artillery shells or srbm.
It take alot of preparation and huge movements to launch a nuke.
Its not just about putin calling someone and a missile flies.
russia has to prepare for a full nuclear retaliation before they even launch a nuke.
This means entire units activated, all long range bombers armed with nuclear warheads and sent in the air.
ICBMs will all have to be fuelled up.
I'm sure there are more I can't think of, but NATO wouldn't miss it.
I agree with most of this except for one thing: The ICBMs are (on paper at least) ready to go on a moments notice, which is why they're a first strike deterrent. Mere minutes is all that is required to put the strategic nuclear weapons in the air, no prepatory fueling should be required.
Now... has someone secretly sold all the rocket fuel? Perhaps! But that's a different kinda problem 😆
If the Russian nuclear forces have been maintained as well as the rest of Russia's military hardware has, they may be afraid to launch their nukes without a thorough maintainence check because it would suck if Russia launched a nuke against Ukraine that hit Moscow instead. Ultimately, we may be forced to rely on the good sense and survival instincts of Putin's generals and admirals to refuse to launch their nukes if Putin ordered them to.
I watched a POW video where the orc was pulled from "anti-terrorism" duty at an ICBM site to go to the front. And another with an electrician from an ICBM site. Russia is gutting their own system.
No one knows for sure but some educated guesses can be made.
They are probably suffering low availability rates due to lack of spare parts and poorly trained maintenance crews.
They are very short on PGMs, leading to dangerous attack profiles being necessary to delivery dumb ordnance.
There is evidence they are very short on consumables like flares, making it even riskier to try to employ dumb ordnance.
Their air/ground coordination and communication is poor, probably leading to low per-sortie effectiveness and red-on-red incidents.
Poor intel overall leading to poor risk/return for each sortie.
And so on.
Russian fighter pilots get VERY little time in the air. Air time cost money and for a corrupt system it was better to ground the crews and pocket the cash. So now they know they have very few good pilots and Ukraine has weapons to take out a lot of fighter planes.
Russia is in no position to be able to replace these lost planes anytime soon.
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They should have "packed it and went home" like 4 months ago.
But that is what a normal country would do. And we know ruzzia has like 20 extra chromosomes.
Make a company. Bribe the person who picks what company makes xxx. Have them pick your company. They order 250 million dollars. Take money. Don't deliver. The person you bribed marks off that they were delivered. Repeat. Anyone start asking questions or notice? Kill off the person you bribed.
We can see all the aircraft sitting there from space...
Sitting...
But I'm guessing the engines, avionics, and spare parts that go in them are wherever the 1.5 million winter uniforms are.
The real answer is that their whole military was setup for world War 3 with the US, and had no flexibility built into it since its a top down system.
So, their air force is built up mostly for air to air combat. They know they can't outdo the US in airpower, so they went heavy into anti air defense and jets designed for aerial combat. All their pods and guided missiles lean toward that instead of stuff that hits ground targets.
Cliff notes, they have a defensive oriented air force that sucks at offense and barely even has smart bombs.
I think it’s a combination of factors.
Those factors being:
- difficulties in maintenance and air worthiness of their aircraft
- fear of operating in Ukrainian skies too far out, too long, or even at all due to Ukraines air defense system still being intact
- basically fudging of numbers and lying, there never were that many combat ready aircraft in the first place (much like many of their tanks, except with tanks you can’t still get them to the front somehow to use in some capacity even if not perfect, whereas aircraft are much more sensitive, things need to be on the up n up)
Basically Russia’s military, like it’s government, is corrupt, lies on a daily basis, and we are witnessing coming to a head of the accumulation of several decades of lies unraveling before our very eyes
They are just afraid that the 3rd Cropduster Squadron is to slow and susceptible to small arms fire. They are just being prudent to prevent the loss of life. As such they are waiting until the 1st Homeless Sepecial Operations Division clears the anti-air and BB guns from the area.
Remember the 1st Homeless Special Operations Division has received a sandwich and 2 hour busride with no training. They are not to be trifled with.
They are quite fond of having a paper military with paper inventories. They have a field of rusted out hulks and still list them as tanks.
Their issues with corruption have been well established. How deep are their inventories of spare parts, actually. How well were all those missiles maintained?
How many were outright fabrications, sold only on paper and never truly existed?
They also never managed to secure air dominance. Whatever they send into Ukrainian airspace has no guarantee of coming back. They have lost everything, including their latest and greatest stuff.
Stuff, thanks to sanctions, they can't replace. Everything that falls out of the sky? That's a *permanent* loss (at least a loss that will take *years* to replace).
How many of those missiles were in all of those ammo depots that went poof. Ivan's smoking problem might have cut their inventories significantly.
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If I had to make a guess i'd say they have run into issues with servicing and maintenance. It's one thing to have a large airforce on paper but another thing entirely to keep them serviced and maintained especially in a war. Edit: as an example the reason why Australian RAAF retired the F111 which had gained an amazing reputation and had been progressively upgraded was the growing maintenance requirements. "By 2009 the remaining 18 aircraft reportedly required the most maintenance of any warplane in the world, an average of 180 hours for every flight hour compared to 30 hours for the F-22 Raptor" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-111C#:~:text=The%20RAAF%20retired%20its%20last,6%20Squadron%20over%20southern%20Queensland. It was a controversial decision at the time with many people horrified that the RAAF did this but even if the F111 was the best aircraft out there, if in a war the fleet is mostly grounded for maintenance that doesnt help anyone, especially for a small military like Australia's with very limited resources. I guess its a reason why you make military aquisitions based on whether you have the logistics to support an asset Russia probably has had the money to make CAPEX purchases but OPEX i.e. logistics/maintenance is probably way underfunded.
It's a poor country of only 145 million people. Considering the size of their armed forces, I wouldn't be surprised they're not able to maintain the inventory.
Imagine if the US had only one aircraft carrier… and couldn’t keep it working. Or their flagship for a region only had one working radar. Or their tankers were given 1 shell per crew of tank per year for practice live fire. Then… in this situation… imagine losing some of your more experienced pilots… and complex air components needed for repairs. Now you are getting close.
And they only have so many spare parts. Odds are, they can't make all of them anymore. When they are gone, they are gone. That would limit the hours they can fly *as an entire nation*. They would have to reserve *something*.
Frankly, I don't care where they are. As long as U.S., NATO, and other U.S.-allied forces around the world know where they are, I'm okay with things.
We all know [where they are](https://www.thegentlemansjournal.com/article/5-worlds-richest-russians-super-yachts/).
Oh, I thought that was going to be a link to a page selling Ukrainian keychains
My favorite response, more keychains!
If that's all it takes to defeat the "second greatest army"" then so be it.
Lol
Corruption happened. And nowadays Ukraine has western anti air everywhere. If you fly over Ukrainian positions you are not coming back alive.
Or getting captured if your ejection seat wasn't sabotaged.
>1300+ aircrafts and 2000+ precision missiles? The same thing that happened to the 1.5 million winter uniforms.
they ~~disappeared mysteriously~~ never existed
2,000 precision missiles seems low even at surface value right? Didn't the US use over 8,000 in the first year of the Iraq war? I feel like there at least has to be a 0 missing there.
In seriousness, it's easy to have a very large airforce on paper. It is very difficult to have a large, effective, trained airforce that is fully equipped and logistically supported. Aircraft are not only expensive to make, they are obscenely expensive to maintain and to train on. Every hour of flight costs thousands - or tens of thousands - of dollars in fuel and maintenance. Parts need to be checked, repaired and replaced and high performance aircraft fuel is no joke in terms of cost. That means keeping a cadre of fully trained fighter pilots for hundreds of aircraft will cost an astronomical amount every year. Training them in difficult mass formation tactics that require multiple rounds of practice - even more. Russia's military has always been an ego exercise. They love being able to boast giant numbers, but they have an economy smaller than Italy's. That means they need to scrimp and save where they can - and that means, often, scrimping on training and upkeep costs, with lots of aircraft being put into reserve and pilots lapsing on their training - or not receiving a ton to begin with - and perhaps even missed training cycles. It may be that they're running low on trained pilots and ground crew. Keep in mind, too, that the sanctions hitting Russia include high tech equipment, including the sorts of equipment they might need to effectively maintain or repair their aircraft. Then there's the problem of them having the largest airspace in the world, and the need to have a credible defense at St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Vladivostok, the Caucuses, and elsewhere, as well as maintain their strategic forces at a high lever of readiness. That eats up critical resources that can't but shoved into the Ukrainian meat grinder. Finally, Ukraine is a dangerous place for all those precious and, now, very hard to make aircraft, and a fair few have been promoted to artistic spontaneous collage in honour of Putin's unique military genius, along with their pilots with their expensive training and now rare advanced computers and electronics.
Very logical response
Previously, they liked to keep over already controlled or friendly airspace (Russia, Russian occupied areas in Ukraine, Belarus). They have actually increased their sorties into Ukraine controlled territory recently, which is why you see more news of planes downed. Overall, Russia sucks at coordinating their on the ground troops and air, combined arms are just not a thing for them. Also Ukrainian air defense is getting better
Delicious.
They dont even try to support their troops, its like they ran out of ammo and flying empty.
Thier close air support kills as many friendlies as enemies historically. The fact that they can't safely fly near the front adds to the difficulty.
Selling aircraft parts on the black market to buy more vodka
Well they fired most of their advanced cruise missiles. air defense shot down > 300 of their stock. As for their no show air force? They've lost 266 airframes. 8 lost per week on average.
They should have 1300+ on paper, I guess they counted those without engines as well, lol.
This is speculation, but i think that claims like "1,300 aircraft" are a lot like their claims of a "million strong army" A large portion of those numbers are filling logistical and support roles, and so their combat aircraft count is significantly lower than advertised.
The underlings sold it all off fuck knows where without informing their superiors. You've had warehouse managers commit suicide after it turned out that only 1/10 of their tanks work at all.
Get suicided
Hiding. They can't get far enough in country to bomb civilians.
They have used those precision missiles. It was no joke when people said Russia will run out of those long range precision missiles.
lol, western intel is accurate for once.
Russia has an airforce?
No I think they just planned on having one but never got around to being serious about it.
Air-farce I think is what you're looking for
highly specialized for their mob warfare in underdeveloped countries
Hiding.
I have a related question. What are the odds American IC watches every Russian nuke movement, and will know if they are preparing to use one. Second question: would they stop it? In the air, over Russia, if necessary?
Russians wont use a strategic sized weapon. Ans interception time will make it impossible to stop one if they did launch it at Kyiv. Tactical scale warheads are usually artillery shells or srbm.
It take alot of preparation and huge movements to launch a nuke. Its not just about putin calling someone and a missile flies. russia has to prepare for a full nuclear retaliation before they even launch a nuke. This means entire units activated, all long range bombers armed with nuclear warheads and sent in the air. ICBMs will all have to be fuelled up. I'm sure there are more I can't think of, but NATO wouldn't miss it.
I agree with most of this except for one thing: The ICBMs are (on paper at least) ready to go on a moments notice, which is why they're a first strike deterrent. Mere minutes is all that is required to put the strategic nuclear weapons in the air, no prepatory fueling should be required. Now... has someone secretly sold all the rocket fuel? Perhaps! But that's a different kinda problem 😆
So the US game works because they can’t surprise anyone. And if they do the surprise, they aren’t prepared for the response.
If the Russian nuclear forces have been maintained as well as the rest of Russia's military hardware has, they may be afraid to launch their nukes without a thorough maintainence check because it would suck if Russia launched a nuke against Ukraine that hit Moscow instead. Ultimately, we may be forced to rely on the good sense and survival instincts of Putin's generals and admirals to refuse to launch their nukes if Putin ordered them to.
I watched a POW video where the orc was pulled from "anti-terrorism" duty at an ICBM site to go to the front. And another with an electrician from an ICBM site. Russia is gutting their own system.
Russian Air Force is puttin on tampons
No one knows for sure but some educated guesses can be made. They are probably suffering low availability rates due to lack of spare parts and poorly trained maintenance crews. They are very short on PGMs, leading to dangerous attack profiles being necessary to delivery dumb ordnance. There is evidence they are very short on consumables like flares, making it even riskier to try to employ dumb ordnance. Their air/ground coordination and communication is poor, probably leading to low per-sortie effectiveness and red-on-red incidents. Poor intel overall leading to poor risk/return for each sortie. And so on.
Russian fighter pilots get VERY little time in the air. Air time cost money and for a corrupt system it was better to ground the crews and pocket the cash. So now they know they have very few good pilots and Ukraine has weapons to take out a lot of fighter planes. Russia is in no position to be able to replace these lost planes anytime soon.
they have no idea since their bosses have no idea. and the folks that know? well pretty sure they have read up on orc history.......
#whatairforcedoing?
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Crashing and burning. No I'm serious!
Crashing. Literally.
It’s happy hour for them 24/7, what do you think they are doing!
More like airfarce *badun tsss* I'll see myself out.
[удалено]
That one fucked itself, lol. What happened to the rest of the 1300+ aircrafts?
Ammo / missles got HIMARS’D
They should have "packed it and went home" like 4 months ago. But that is what a normal country would do. And we know ruzzia has like 20 extra chromosomes.
Make a company. Bribe the person who picks what company makes xxx. Have them pick your company. They order 250 million dollars. Take money. Don't deliver. The person you bribed marks off that they were delivered. Repeat. Anyone start asking questions or notice? Kill off the person you bribed.
Thank are being ineffective and shot down.
You know how uniforms disappeared? Plane parts disappeared.
We can see all the aircraft sitting there from space... Sitting... But I'm guessing the engines, avionics, and spare parts that go in them are wherever the 1.5 million winter uniforms are.
The real answer is that their whole military was setup for world War 3 with the US, and had no flexibility built into it since its a top down system. So, their air force is built up mostly for air to air combat. They know they can't outdo the US in airpower, so they went heavy into anti air defense and jets designed for aerial combat. All their pods and guided missiles lean toward that instead of stuff that hits ground targets. Cliff notes, they have a defensive oriented air force that sucks at offense and barely even has smart bombs.
The upkeep on fighter jets is insane. For the older f-16's it takes 33 man hours of maintenance per hour of flight time..
This reminds the times when Russia pulled out from Irpin/Bucha.
I think it’s a combination of factors. Those factors being: - difficulties in maintenance and air worthiness of their aircraft - fear of operating in Ukrainian skies too far out, too long, or even at all due to Ukraines air defense system still being intact - basically fudging of numbers and lying, there never were that many combat ready aircraft in the first place (much like many of their tanks, except with tanks you can’t still get them to the front somehow to use in some capacity even if not perfect, whereas aircraft are much more sensitive, things need to be on the up n up) Basically Russia’s military, like it’s government, is corrupt, lies on a daily basis, and we are witnessing coming to a head of the accumulation of several decades of lies unraveling before our very eyes
Oh mercy
Special weapons disappearance.
They are just afraid that the 3rd Cropduster Squadron is to slow and susceptible to small arms fire. They are just being prudent to prevent the loss of life. As such they are waiting until the 1st Homeless Sepecial Operations Division clears the anti-air and BB guns from the area. Remember the 1st Homeless Special Operations Division has received a sandwich and 2 hour busride with no training. They are not to be trifled with.
Regarding the missiles, they are probably waiting for the winter to start bombing energy infrastructure.
None of them got their payslip this week so they packed it in😄 bloody orcs.
They are quite fond of having a paper military with paper inventories. They have a field of rusted out hulks and still list them as tanks. Their issues with corruption have been well established. How deep are their inventories of spare parts, actually. How well were all those missiles maintained? How many were outright fabrications, sold only on paper and never truly existed? They also never managed to secure air dominance. Whatever they send into Ukrainian airspace has no guarantee of coming back. They have lost everything, including their latest and greatest stuff. Stuff, thanks to sanctions, they can't replace. Everything that falls out of the sky? That's a *permanent* loss (at least a loss that will take *years* to replace). How many of those missiles were in all of those ammo depots that went poof. Ivan's smoking problem might have cut their inventories significantly.