[nimbius]

s/drones/air support/

imho the failures observed caused by manpad in the ukrane theatre were directly attributable to an almost comically poor systems integration on the part of the aggressor and an unwillingness to commit longer range artillery and missile strikes to soften what were hardened infantry targets equipped with sixth generation anti-air and anti-tank weaponry.

[lumost]

> an unwillingness to commit longer range artillery and missile strikes to soften what were hardened infantry targets

Given the current state of cities such as Mariupol I don't believe you can attribute an unwillingness to use artillery to the Russian side.

[ethbr0]

Buildings don't move or require much intelligence to find.

[greedo]

Explain how the Bayraktar has been very effective targeting SAM systems? SAMs designed to destroy aircraft in this size range, and operating altitude?

Systems like TOR/Tunguska/Buk should be easily capable of detecting the Bayraktar and destroying it. It's not like Russia didn't see how it worked in the Armenian/Azerbaijan conflict. They knew Ukraine had Bayraktar, but seemed completely unprepared to deal with it.

[simonh]

Frankly they seemed unprepared to deal with anything. I think it’s another case where half of them thought they were going on a training exercise, and the rest thought it would be over in 72 hours.

The Ukrainians have all the same SAM systems the Russians do, so are super familiar with their limitations. They’re also many times more motivated.

[mrtksn]

One explanation is that the Bayraktar TB2 drones are too small and too slow to be targeted by systems designed to shoot on fighter jets.

[ethbr0]

> almost comically poor systems integration on [Russia's part]

Russia's BTGs were explicitly designed to (a) consume minimal manpower (they were composed of non-coscript troops from their parent units), (b) consequently, to maximize lethality:person (tank co + 3x mech inf co + 2 AT co + artillery/anti-air), and (c) to minimize logistical support requirements (by deploying smaller units).

Essentially, they were built to win small-scale conflicts at a price Russia could afford.

Ukraine is not a small-scale conflict.

Consequently, the following chain of events (predictably) occurred: (1) Putin proposes 2003 military reforms [0], (2) Serdyukov realizes many of these in 2008 reforms [1], (3) optimistic appraisal of capabilities vs Ukraine leads to Army grandstanding, little strategic integration with different branches (e.g. VVS, VMF), (4) utter failure of real political intelligence mistakenly assumes Ukrainian population (esp urban) will not support government & defense, (6) infantry-light, manuever-oriented assault predictable bogs down in urban areas, without necessary troop count in assaulting units, (7) strategic approach is locked in, as a consequence of previous choices, (8) everyone involved at a command level scrambles to cover their ass and blame others.

If Russia had wanted to win the war they ended up getting, they should have never assaulted urban areas with BTGs.

They would have manuevered south from western Belarus, bisecting the country, and forced Moldova to declare neutrality and forbid weapons shipments. Then pick key infrastructure apart at leisure. Because that's the sort of thing the BTGs were built to do.

But presumably Russia didn't want to do that because it betrays the "this is all about Donbas (and the criminal Ukrainian government)" talking points, and it didn't think it would need to. Hindsight is 20/20.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ground_Forces#Reform...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Russian_military_reform