Both planes cruise at around 100 miles per hour and blend in with civilian air traffic, making them difficult to intercept.
And the ruzzkis are not aware that there is some plane coming from Ukrainian airspace travelling 100s of kilometres around their forlorn country? They are that blind on the border to an active battle ground? And why would there be so much civilian air traffic near that battle ground that they can’t oversee all air traffic?
Remembers me btw of German bumblehead Matthias Rust who flew a small single engine plane into ruzzia and landed in front of the Kremlin - in the middle of cold war. They simply didn’t see him coming until he parked his plane right in front of their door.
Also it is a pretty long border with Ukraine and the Ukranians have been hard at work dismantling Russian radar and detection capabilities.
Static radar sites are long gone and the mobile radars are Prime targets for himars, storm shadow, scalp, Harm ER, atacms and homebrew drones.
The occupation of Crimea is very expensive in terms of radar losses, and I would not be surprised if the east of Russia has no more radar coverage at all.
And the there was the hunt for those radar planes, epic show of ingenuity… twice… so not lucky.
And when they identify one of these they still need to act. How quickly and efficiently can they get interceptors up in the air and vectored in? How operational are their ground-based anti-air capabilities and do they dare shoot something down? And how much coverage do they actually have?
Such a system can shoot at a maximum range of 30km. How many refineries and ammo depots does Russia have to protect? It’s a huge bloody country which makes it very hard to cover with radar and air defence.
The edge that allowed Russia to win against powerful invading armies bites them in the ass here. So much real estate is hard and expensive to protect.
During the height of the Cold War, a kid flew across Europe in a small, slow plane and landed on the damn Red Square. Another guy landed a helicopter on the White House lawn.
Buk is 50km, but s300 already over 100 and s400 does 400km range. And for even shorter range you have pantsir and shilka.
But indeed, so much real estate. And the refineries are very vulnerable.
Can you imagine… at this development pace in a year suck a plane will carry 10 autonomous drones with thermite charges that deploy on target and spread even more chaos.
The asymmetry between the cost of defense vs. offense here is absurd.
The operation of air defense networks, missiles, and fighter jet interceptions, all to try to down kit aircraft costing less than the average Porsche sports car. Fancy-pantsy capabilities that required billions not long ago can be had for cheap. It’s no longer the exclusive realm of low-flying supersonic or stealth aircraft to strike the heart of the enemy. What required billions of R&D can be somewhat achieved on the cheap.
Well no. The cost of defence is not actually what pricetag the system is you use to shoot something done. It is what you are defending and an oil refinery is probably in the hundreds of millions, literally a high-profile target
Yeah, spending a hundred thousand to take out a refinery cracker is an amazing trade. What’s a cracker worth, a few tens of millions? Plus lost production etc
The fuel is (relatively) nothing. Interceptors have to haul ass and that means going full throttle for periods which translates into countless hours of maintenance on those planes. This immobilizes the aircraft after the mission and the ground crew to work on it. It also consumes spare parts and reduces the overall lifetime of the airframe.
China does this to Taiwan by playing chicken at the edge of their defensive zone, forcing a smaller air force to keep up with the interceptions.
That was my point indeed… flight hours translate to wear and tear, maintenance and spare part usage. And sourcing some of the spare parts is getting harder and harder by the day.
Some defense industry in Russia is already buying back airframes from abroad… this reduces the value of the Russian defense sector as these countries can shop elsewhere.
And countries with large Russian military hardware stocks cannot get parts in the foreseeable future… so they also cannot wage war without serious risks to their own readyness.
They did know, he was actually intercepted by a fighter jet at one point, who followed him for some distance, and was picked up on radar multiple times. They weren’t sure if he was hostile or not though.
Russia was anticipating an attack using jets and ballistic missiles, they likely didn’t consider a Cessna a threat.
To put the shoe on the other foot, the US had trouble effectively getting fighters up for 9/11. On the surface of it, dealing with a civilian airliner seems like it should be trivial compared to a warplane. But North American air defense had been designed around an assumption that there would always be advance warning of incoming aircraft out over the Atlantic or Pacific or Arctic, not a sudden discovery that an aircraft was already inside US airspace and heading for the Capitol, and alert levels had been lowered after the Cold War.
As a result, at the time, the “ready aircraft” were not kept armed. Loading weapons aboard required time that wasn’t available, and the fighter pilots involved scrambled unarmed, with the intention of suicide-ramming Flight 93.
Orders had come from Vice President Dick Cheney for her squadron to get airborne and stop Flight 93 from reaching Washington D.C. Penney and her squadron leader, Mark (“Sass”) Sasseville, were to launch first. With no live missiles on board, they had nothing but their aircraft to use as a weapon. It would take upwards of an hour to assemble and load the missiles on to a jet. Another pair of F-16s would stay until missiles could be loaded, but Penney and Sasseville were to take off immediately.
“I’m zipping up my G-suit when Sass looks at me and says, ‘I’ll take the cockpit.’ [Meaning that he would ram into Flight 93’s front end.] I would take the tail,” she said. “I’ve had people ask me, ‘Who told you would have to ram the airplane? Who ordered you?’ But no one did. What was said was all that was said.”
In the event, the passengers voted to storm the cockpit, were breaking down the door, and the hijackers power-dived the plane into the ground, thus eliminating the necessity.
I mean, there just wasn’t any realistic threat that we expected from Russia or China or such. We’ve got sensor networks that should be able to pick up any aircraft even being prepared, much less flying in from a long ways out, even if they did take off.
There’s some accident-risk price to pay for readiness – like, you can have accidents with weapons, and any time that weapons are floating around outside arsenals, there’s at least some potential for them to go astray. And the more weapons systems you have in a “ready to engage” status, the more-twitchy it makes everyone else. Suppose we kept a couple thousand fighters armed and on the runway. That’s gonna make some other countries twitchy that they have little time to react.
The “DEFCON level” is basically a slider that trades shorter response time for increased risk of things going wrong.
Armed forces ready to deploy and engage in less than six hours
DEFCON 3
ROUND HOUSE
Increase in force readiness above that required for normal readiness
Air Force ready to mobilize in 15 minutes
DEFCON 4
DOUBLE TAKE
Increased intelligence watch and strengthened security measures
Above normal readiness
DEFCON 5
FADE OUT
Lowest state of readiness
Normal readiness
If we can, we keep it at low levels. Minimizes risk of accidents, avoids putting pressure on other parties.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, we had it at an elevated level. That means that we can respond rapidly, and we’re more-prepared to get hit with a major nuclear strike and still hit back as hard as possible. But it also…creates room for things to go rather badly, accidentally.
At 10:00 pm EDT the next day, the US raised the readiness level of Strategic Air Command (SAC) forces to DEFCON 2. For the only confirmed time in US history, B-52 bombers went on continuous airborne alert, and B-47 medium bombers were dispersed to various military and civilian airfields and made ready to take off, fully equipped, on 15 minutes’ notice.[114] One-eighth of SAC’s 1,436 bombers were on airborne alert, and some 145 intercontinental ballistic missiles stood on ready alert, some of which targeted Cuba.[115] Air Defense Command (ADC) redeployed 161 nuclear-armed interceptors to 16 dispersal fields within nine hours, with one third maintaining 15-minute alert status.[92] Twenty-three nuclear-armed B-52s were sent to orbit points within striking distance of the Soviet Union so it would believe that the US was serious.
As part of that, military aircraft were loaded with nuclear weapons, including a fleet of interceptors, and dispersed to civilian airports and airstrips to minimize the number that could be destroyed on the ground in the event of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.
Some of those airfields were – not surprisingly – not as secured against ground intrusions as military bases. At one point, a security guard saw a shadowy figure moving around the outskirts of one such civilian airfield, fired a burst at it from his submachine gun, but it made it over the fence and away. He hit his sabotage alarm. At that alert level, the presumption is that any detected sabotage attempt would be likely part of a preemptive strike, and doctrine dictated that the whole interceptor force get airborne and start heading towards the Soviet Union. They were rolling down the runways across the US when the sabotage alarm was cancelled – upon further investigation of the traces left, it turned out that the figure was probably just a bear. But…a shit-ton of warplanes armed with (air-to-air, not strategic) nuclear weapons leaving the ground and heading towards the Soviet Union creates further potential for inadvertent escalation.
We had one incident, some years back, where the ground crew at an arsenal dicked up, loaded a bomber with live nukes rather than inert missiles, and the crew inadvertently flew to another airbase before the crew there checked, noticed that they had live nuclear weapons on their field, and started pushing red buttons.
An example of a Bent Spear incident occurred on the August 2007 flight of a B-52 bomber from Minot AFB to Barksdale AFB which mistakenly carried six cruise missiles with live nuclear warheads.[4]
Now, okay, those are extreme examples of risks – a few F-16s armed with conventional weapons don’t pose as much of a concern. But it does illustrate, I think, that there’s a tradeoff involved. At the time, the risk of accidents was considered higher than the benefit from having a more-rapid response.
In any event, after 9/11, doctrine was revised, and the ready fighters are now kept armed. I’m not saying that the move was the right one. I’m just saying that there are real tradeoffs to be maintaining a high alert level. The USAF hadn’t been told to expect to deal with a civilian aircraft in US airspace suddenly going hostile, so they hadn’t structured their response system accordingly. The RuAF may or may not have made decisions about how to deal with civilian aircraft.
The Mathias Rust situation that someone else mentioned, as a I recall, dealt with Soviet doctrine where responses had been relaxed to help avoid accidental shootdowns, and that was part of how he made it to Red Square.
googles
Yeah: “The local air regiment near Pskov was on maneuvers and, due to inexperienced pilots’ tendency to forget correct IFF designator settings, local control officers assigned all traffic in the area friendly status, including Rust.[5]”
Rust disappeared from the Finnish air traffic radar near Espoo.[5] Control personnel presumed an emergency and a rescue effort was organized, including a Finnish Border Guard patrol boat. They found an oil patch near Sipoo where Rust had disappeared from radar observation, and conducted an underwater search but did not find anything.
Rust crossed the Baltic coastline over Estonia and turned towards Moscow. At 14:29 he appeared on Soviet Air Defence Forces (PVO) radar and, after failure to reply to an Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) signal, was assigned combat number 8255. Three Surface-to-air missile battalions of 54th Air Defence Corps tracked him for some time, but failed to obtain permission to launch missiles at him.[9] All air defences were readied and two interceptors were sent to investigate. At 14:48, near Gdov, MiG-23 pilot Senior Lieutenant A. Puchnin observed a white sport airplane similar to a Yakovlev Yak-12 and asked for permission to engage, but was denied.[5][10]
The fighters lost contact with Rust soon after this. While they were being directed back to him, he disappeared from radar near Staraya Russa. West German magazine Bunte speculated that he might have landed there for some time, noting that he changed his clothes during his flight and that he took too much time to fly to Moscow considering his airplane’s speed and the weather conditions.
Air defence re-established contact with Rust’s plane several times but confusion resulted from all of these events. The PVO system had shortly before been divided into several districts, which simplified management but created additional work for tracking officers at the districts’ borders. The local air regiment near Pskov was on maneuvers and, due to inexperienced pilots’ tendency to forget correct IFF designator settings, local control officers assigned all traffic in the area friendly status, including Rust.[5]
Near Torzhok there was a similar situation, as increased air traffic was created by a search and rescue operation. Rust, flying a slow propeller-driven aircraft, was confused with one of the helicopters participating with the operation. He was detected several more times and given false friendly recognition twice. Rust was considered as a domestic training airplane defying regulations, and was assigned the least priority by air defense.[5]
Around 19:00, Rust appeared above Moscow. He had initially intended to land in the Kremlin, but he reasoned that landing inside, hidden by the Kremlin walls, would have allowed the KGB to arrest him and deny the incident. Therefore, he changed his landing place to Red Square.[5] Dense pedestrian traffic did not allow him to land there either, so after circling about the square one more time, he was able to land on Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge by St. Basil’s Cathedral. A later inquiry found that trolleybus wires normally strung over the bridge—which would have prevented his landing there—had been removed for maintenance that morning, and were replaced the next day.[5] After taxiing past the cathedral, he stopped about 100 metres (330 ft) from the square, where he was greeted by curious passersby and asked for autographs.[11] When asked where he was from, he replied “Germany” making the bystanders think he was from East Germany; but when he said West Germany, they were surprised.[12] A British doctor videotaped Rust circling over Red Square and landing on the bridge.[12] Rust was arrested two hours later.[13]
Is it embarrassing? Well, I guess so. Rust made it to pretty sensitive airspace, shouldn’t have. But, big picture…odds are also pretty good that if NATO’s going to have a war with the Warsaw Pact, it’s probably not going to involve sending a little prop plane to Red Square. Not saying that there’s no risk there for a decapitation strike or something, but the Soviet airforce had to make a tradeoff in terms of how many of their own aircraft they shoot down accidentally versus whether they make sure to deal with some little prop plane wandering around.
Maybe they’re flying these drones at very low altitudes to avoid conventional detection. I imagine it’d be through less densely populated areas as well for part of the way.
If they actually used a tactical nuke or attacked a Nato member and we retaliated by shooting hundreds of cruise- and ballistic missiles into Russia, I wonder how many they would actually be able to intercept. I’m starting to get the feeling that not many.
And the ruzzkis are not aware that there is some plane coming from Ukrainian airspace travelling 100s of kilometres around their forlorn country? They are that blind on the border to an active battle ground? And why would there be so much civilian air traffic near that battle ground that they can’t oversee all air traffic?
Remembers me btw of German bumblehead Matthias Rust who flew a small single engine plane into ruzzia and landed in front of the Kremlin - in the middle of cold war. They simply didn’t see him coming until he parked his plane right in front of their door.
Also it is a pretty long border with Ukraine and the Ukranians have been hard at work dismantling Russian radar and detection capabilities.
Static radar sites are long gone and the mobile radars are Prime targets for himars, storm shadow, scalp, Harm ER, atacms and homebrew drones.
The occupation of Crimea is very expensive in terms of radar losses, and I would not be surprised if the east of Russia has no more radar coverage at all.
And the there was the hunt for those radar planes, epic show of ingenuity… twice… so not lucky.
And when they identify one of these they still need to act. How quickly and efficiently can they get interceptors up in the air and vectored in? How operational are their ground-based anti-air capabilities and do they dare shoot something down? And how much coverage do they actually have?
Well as proven with mh17 the buks are pretty good at taking down airliners.
Such a system can shoot at a maximum range of 30km. How many refineries and ammo depots does Russia have to protect? It’s a huge bloody country which makes it very hard to cover with radar and air defence.
The edge that allowed Russia to win against powerful invading armies bites them in the ass here. So much real estate is hard and expensive to protect.
During the height of the Cold War, a kid flew across Europe in a small, slow plane and landed on the damn Red Square. Another guy landed a helicopter on the White House lawn.
Buk is 50km, but s300 already over 100 and s400 does 400km range. And for even shorter range you have pantsir and shilka.
But indeed, so much real estate. And the refineries are very vulnerable.
Can you imagine… at this development pace in a year suck a plane will carry 10 autonomous drones with thermite charges that deploy on target and spread even more chaos.
The asymmetry between the cost of defense vs. offense here is absurd.
The operation of air defense networks, missiles, and fighter jet interceptions, all to try to down kit aircraft costing less than the average Porsche sports car. Fancy-pantsy capabilities that required billions not long ago can be had for cheap. It’s no longer the exclusive realm of low-flying supersonic or stealth aircraft to strike the heart of the enemy. What required billions of R&D can be somewhat achieved on the cheap.
Well no. The cost of defence is not actually what pricetag the system is you use to shoot something done. It is what you are defending and an oil refinery is probably in the hundreds of millions, literally a high-profile target
Yeah, spending a hundred thousand to take out a refinery cracker is an amazing trade. What’s a cracker worth, a few tens of millions? Plus lost production etc
They have supersonic jets. How difficult would it be for a Su27 to intercept a driverless sport plane?
Still a win for Ukraine if the Russians have to start burning a lot of precious flight hours on checking out every aireal anomaly.
The fuel is (relatively) nothing. Interceptors have to haul ass and that means going full throttle for periods which translates into countless hours of maintenance on those planes. This immobilizes the aircraft after the mission and the ground crew to work on it. It also consumes spare parts and reduces the overall lifetime of the airframe.
China does this to Taiwan by playing chicken at the edge of their defensive zone, forcing a smaller air force to keep up with the interceptions.
That was my point indeed… flight hours translate to wear and tear, maintenance and spare part usage. And sourcing some of the spare parts is getting harder and harder by the day.
Some defense industry in Russia is already buying back airframes from abroad… this reduces the value of the Russian defense sector as these countries can shop elsewhere.
And countries with large Russian military hardware stocks cannot get parts in the foreseeable future… so they also cannot wage war without serious risks to their own readyness.
Maybe they decided is was not worth it and they prefer losing refineries and fuel storage rather than using jet hours
If they lose a few more refineries, that will certainly cut into their jet hours.
They did know, he was actually intercepted by a fighter jet at one point, who followed him for some distance, and was picked up on radar multiple times. They weren’t sure if he was hostile or not though.
Russia was anticipating an attack using jets and ballistic missiles, they likely didn’t consider a Cessna a threat.
To put the shoe on the other foot, the US had trouble effectively getting fighters up for 9/11. On the surface of it, dealing with a civilian airliner seems like it should be trivial compared to a warplane. But North American air defense had been designed around an assumption that there would always be advance warning of incoming aircraft out over the Atlantic or Pacific or Arctic, not a sudden discovery that an aircraft was already inside US airspace and heading for the Capitol, and alert levels had been lowered after the Cold War.
As a result, at the time, the “ready aircraft” were not kept armed. Loading weapons aboard required time that wasn’t available, and the fighter pilots involved scrambled unarmed, with the intention of suicide-ramming Flight 93.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/911-takedown-never-happened-180955222/
In the event, the passengers voted to storm the cockpit, were breaking down the door, and the hijackers power-dived the plane into the ground, thus eliminating the necessity.
Wow. That’s a fascinating little nugget that I never heard before. Thanks.
I’d heard this story before, and having fighter aircraft on standby with no weapons seemed utterly ridiculous at the time, and still does.
As does taking an hour to load them.
I mean, there just wasn’t any realistic threat that we expected from Russia or China or such. We’ve got sensor networks that should be able to pick up any aircraft even being prepared, much less flying in from a long ways out, even if they did take off.
There’s some accident-risk price to pay for readiness – like, you can have accidents with weapons, and any time that weapons are floating around outside arsenals, there’s at least some potential for them to go astray. And the more weapons systems you have in a “ready to engage” status, the more-twitchy it makes everyone else. Suppose we kept a couple thousand fighters armed and on the runway. That’s gonna make some other countries twitchy that they have little time to react.
The “DEFCON level” is basically a slider that trades shorter response time for increased risk of things going wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON
If we can, we keep it at low levels. Minimizes risk of accidents, avoids putting pressure on other parties.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, we had it at an elevated level. That means that we can respond rapidly, and we’re more-prepared to get hit with a major nuclear strike and still hit back as hard as possible. But it also…creates room for things to go rather badly, accidentally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
As part of that, military aircraft were loaded with nuclear weapons, including a fleet of interceptors, and dispersed to civilian airports and airstrips to minimize the number that could be destroyed on the ground in the event of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.
Some of those airfields were – not surprisingly – not as secured against ground intrusions as military bases. At one point, a security guard saw a shadowy figure moving around the outskirts of one such civilian airfield, fired a burst at it from his submachine gun, but it made it over the fence and away. He hit his sabotage alarm. At that alert level, the presumption is that any detected sabotage attempt would be likely part of a preemptive strike, and doctrine dictated that the whole interceptor force get airborne and start heading towards the Soviet Union. They were rolling down the runways across the US when the sabotage alarm was cancelled – upon further investigation of the traces left, it turned out that the figure was probably just a bear. But…a shit-ton of warplanes armed with (air-to-air, not strategic) nuclear weapons leaving the ground and heading towards the Soviet Union creates further potential for inadvertent escalation.
We had one incident, some years back, where the ground crew at an arsenal dicked up, loaded a bomber with live nukes rather than inert missiles, and the crew inadvertently flew to another airbase before the crew there checked, noticed that they had live nuclear weapons on their field, and started pushing red buttons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear_incident_terminology#Bent_Spear
Now, okay, those are extreme examples of risks – a few F-16s armed with conventional weapons don’t pose as much of a concern. But it does illustrate, I think, that there’s a tradeoff involved. At the time, the risk of accidents was considered higher than the benefit from having a more-rapid response.
In any event, after 9/11, doctrine was revised, and the ready fighters are now kept armed. I’m not saying that the move was the right one. I’m just saying that there are real tradeoffs to be maintaining a high alert level. The USAF hadn’t been told to expect to deal with a civilian aircraft in US airspace suddenly going hostile, so they hadn’t structured their response system accordingly. The RuAF may or may not have made decisions about how to deal with civilian aircraft.
The Mathias Rust situation that someone else mentioned, as a I recall, dealt with Soviet doctrine where responses had been relaxed to help avoid accidental shootdowns, and that was part of how he made it to Red Square.
googles
Yeah: “The local air regiment near Pskov was on maneuvers and, due to inexperienced pilots’ tendency to forget correct IFF designator settings, local control officers assigned all traffic in the area friendly status, including Rust.[5]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust
Is it embarrassing? Well, I guess so. Rust made it to pretty sensitive airspace, shouldn’t have. But, big picture…odds are also pretty good that if NATO’s going to have a war with the Warsaw Pact, it’s probably not going to involve sending a little prop plane to Red Square. Not saying that there’s no risk there for a decapitation strike or something, but the Soviet airforce had to make a tradeoff in terms of how many of their own aircraft they shoot down accidentally versus whether they make sure to deal with some little prop plane wandering around.
Those self sealing stem bolts take some time to actually seal.
They’re saving missiles for passenger airlines and their own aircraft and quadcopters. Can’t be bothered to shoot down every Cessna.
Maybe they’re flying these drones at very low altitudes to avoid conventional detection. I imagine it’d be through less densely populated areas as well for part of the way.
If they actually used a tactical nuke or attacked a Nato member and we retaliated by shooting hundreds of cruise- and ballistic missiles into Russia, I wonder how many they would actually be able to intercept. I’m starting to get the feeling that not many.
With their ordinance failure rate and low detection, russia should be happy with 1% intercepted.