[gherkinnn]

This is all good news, but one must remember that airpower alone does not win wars.

> Overall then, the promise of strategic airpower, that it could win wars entirely or primarily from the skies, turns out so far to have been largely a mirage

> Instead, efforts to use strategic bombing to coerce surrender have repeatedly shown that being bombed hardens civilian resolve to continue resisting. By contrast, bombing can have some effect on industrial production, but only in wars where that production matters and is available to be bombed

> Crucially, the coercive effect of these bombing efforts is not only limited, but it is also not delivered via popular will but rather through the political calculus of the leadership

https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...

[walrus01]

> By contrast, bombing can have some effect on industrial production, but only in wars where that production matters and is available to be bombed

The russian oil refineries that have been very successfully attacked seem to meet the definition of this. One obviously useful thing for the Ukrainians to do is to cut off the supply of refined diesel and petrol to the Russian army's vehicles.

If this also has the effect of causing significant pain to the russian domestic economy (lack of fuel for general civilian vehicle uses of all types), it has the additional benefit of being a very real and public pain point causing dissatisfaction with the average russian civilian.

[gherkinnn]

Indeed. And bringing the attacks deep in to Russia may embarrass the regime and may have led Putin to (allegedly) stage a frontline visit [0].

And yet we must never forget that there is no such thing as a wunder waffe and reducing German cities to rubble did not break the civilian resolve.

Throughout the Russian invasion of Ukraine I saw a common pattern: one side gains a technological or doctrinal advantage, may or may not make progress, the other side adapts and the situation levels out again.

0 - https://xcancel.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/20733425637973812...

[walrus01]

Thing is - there's no need to break the Russian civilian resolve, because nobody has the goal of invading and occupying Russia. It just needs to become far too painful for Russia to continue on its present course of action.

Let's say theoretically that Ukraine successfully takes 90% of Russia's oil refineries out of action and this crashes the domestic petrol/diesel supply so thoroughly that plowing, seeding and harvesting with mechanized agriculture equipment also crashes in Russia. Or there is a breakdown of cold chain transport warehousing/trucking and grocery supply due to lack of diesel fuel for all of the trucking. Could it result in a collapse of the russian state and civil war? Very possibly.

[red-iron-pine]

> And yet we must never forget that there is no such thing as a wunder waffe and reducing German cities to rubble did not break the civilian resolve.

perhaps not, but exhaustion did lead to the Russian Revolution, and toppling the Tsar is what the AFU is explicitly hoping for...

[simonh]

The general point on air power is a real thing, but I don't think we can directly conclude that bombing will always harden civilian resolve. It very much depends on the population's pain tolerance.

In Vietnam when the NVA attacked a chain of US military bases simultaneously they lost every single battle, by a huge margin. It wasn't even close, the USA suffered about a quarter as many casualties, yet it broke the back of US commitment to the war. That's because the NVA could take 110k casualties and maintain their commitment, but for the USA about 25k casualties was intolerable.

On the battlefield Russia is losing masses of troops, but as Vlad Vexler points out, because these are mostly essentially paid mercenaries this is seen by the Russian population as a transactional risk they are taking.

Direct pain for the general civilian population is another matter. Most Russians seem oblivious to the fact they are actually in a war with a neighbouring country. They seem utterly bewildered by the fact Ukraine is even attacking Russia at all, it doesn't seem to make any sense to them. This is why the government has done everything they can to avoid resorting to a wave of conscription, they want the whole thing to seem very distant and abstract.

I think the pain tolerance of the Russian population over this is minimal, bringing it home to them is really important. The only thing is they have no accessible ways to translate that into political action, but if they are ever going to wake up, prods like this play an important role IMHO.

[gherkinnn]

Your point about avoiding conscription and using contract troops (mercenaries) or undesirables is supported by War on the Rocks' reporting. And who knows, maybe setting the periphery of St Petersburg and Moscow on fire made the war very real to the otherwise insulated cities. One can hope.

And yet, the lower bound of Russian deaths (not casualties) is 230k [0], a speculated upper bound 500k. In comparison, the US counts 250k military deaths in the European theatre of WW2 and the UK 383k. [1] If true, those are staggering losses for Russia, even when controlling for population sizes. I am not convinced that Russia will buckle anytime soon, even under crippling long-term costs.

I wish for a swift and decisive victory for Ukraine.

0 - https://200.zona.media/

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

[mopsi]

  > They seem utterly bewildered by the fact Ukraine is even attacking Russia at all, it doesn't seem to make any sense to them.

There was a recent comment chain on HN that showcased very well the pretzel that a surprisingly large number of Russians are turning themselves into to "explain" the events: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876070

They have been propagandized to such extent that they just cannot accept the reality even when it becomes completely undeniable. Ukraine blows up something near them in Russia, and they go completely off the rails explaining how this has nothing to do with Russia nor Ukraine, but is some IMF-Blackrock-NWO scheme against Slavs, with references to the 1999 staged terrorist attacks in Russia that solidified Putin's rise to power. The war isn't real and a "third party" is in charge of both militaries and using them to play mind games on Russians to coerce them into accepting "globalist plans".

It's utterly fascinating to observe the breakdown of sense of reality in real time as lifelong propaganda narratives (like the might of the Russian army) turn out to be lies and the world they thought they lived in turns out to be a mirage. And it's remarkable that these conspiracy theories are not coming from central figures, such as a small circle of social media grifters (vaccine-autism, chemtrails, flat earth, etc), but appear from the grassroots, which is why there are so many variations. Many millions of people are still trying to make sense of these events within a propagandized worldview that they cannot let go of.

[red-iron-pine]

hyperreality and "the russian firehose" of propaganda means they're constantly blasted with distractions + real and false explanations.

a busy person doesn't have the time to evaluate all of these and ultimately slips into intellectual shot-cuts, which is usually defaulting to a curator or aggregator they trust (which is also easy to control), or just rationalizing whatever stream of BS they feel most comfortable with

similar methods were every effective in the US' Iraq/Afghanistan efforts, where the busy population was too distracted by mustache memes and Imagine Dragons and Fox News to mount any serious intellectual discussion; it was a volunteer-only war, and unless you have some skin-in-the-game already you didn't think about it. Why get upset about Korignal Valley when the new season of The Walking Dead is on?

[bulbar]

I think a lot of people are aware of the propaganda going on and never believed attacking Ukraine was about Nazis to begin with.

[pseudohadamard]

You don't need to win militarily to win a war. This is how Germany was defeated in WWI. What Ukraine is doing is removing popular support for, or at best indifference to, the war.

[bulbar]

> airpower alone does not win wars.

Not convinced that "winning" is the same as "stop the attacker from attacking"

> shown that being bombed hardens civilian resolve to continue resisting

Resist against what exactly in this case? Russian population is well aware they are the attackers and that Putin tries to invade Ukraine.