Air Power and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine: The Repeat of a Major Mistake

SEAD determines

Hello All,

Sorry if I havent been as chatty in the comments section this week—I’ve been travelling lots. The highpoint was definitely giving the keynote lecture at the US Air Force’s Air Command and Staff College (ACSC) at Maxwell AFB in Alabama. They were holding their inaugural Air Power Practitioners Conference and I was given the opportunity to think about the meaning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine for airpower—by both looking back and looking forward. Below is a slightly expanded meditation on one part of the address, which I thought you might find interesting.

No one, least of all me, can tell you what the lessons are for air power from the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Anyone trying to do that now will be simply engaging in boastful speculation. It will take many years—after the war ends—before any possibly correct lessons can be learned. No, all we can do now is try and work out the research questions we need to help guide our learning. Even then, I will start with a word of warning. What we think the questions are now—will almost certainly not be the exact same questions we will choose to explore once the war ends.

What this talk with do, on the other hand, will start to try and identify some key questions we might want to consider. It will do that by looking at our vision of the air-war over Ukraine and Russia today, looking back at how it works

In some ways, the best way to start this discussion is to start with how air power and the air war was supposed to work before February 24, 2022.

The Vision of the Air War Before the Russian Full-Scale Invasion

The amount written about the possible Russian invasion of Ukraine was vast. Coming from think-tanks, universities, even open-source government documents, and quoted in the media from television, newspapers to podcasts, this was one of the most widely anticipated wars in modern history. Almost all the works that discussed the shape of the war mentioned the air-war that would be part of the conflict. And within these works there was a widely shared consensus about how effective the Russian and Ukrainian air (and anti-air) forces would be, and how a Russo-Ukrainian air war would develop.