I’d honestly like to read a serious analysis from someone like Michael Kofman on Russia’s strategic bombing campaign.

As I’ve written a number of times before on here, I don’t think that the bombing campaign is very likely to be successful. There have been bombing campaigns far larger than Russia is going to be able to do, and they haven’t had the kind of effect that Russia would need them to have.

But even aside from that, some of the target selection seems really wonky. I’ll grant that I don’t have a nice spreadsheet showing the targets – I see what shows up in the news – but even so, some of this is just bizzare.

Electrical facilities

Okay, this one probably is at about the top of any strategic bombing target priority list. One bomb on electrical infrastructure disrupts activity over a much-wider range. And it’s not just morale, but it disrupts production, communication, etc. It has disproportionate economic impact.

The Kakhovka Dam

If one just wants to cause damage, I suppose that this has a lot of bang for the buck. It may have also had tactical aims, to block the advance of Ukraine’s military, if Russia were concerned about their forces collapsing past the Dnipro and Ukraine continuing the advance.

Grain storage and transport facilities

This one is something that Russia has put a lot of effort into and does not make sense to me.

At first, I thought that maybe the silos were purely collateral damage, and that Russia was going after tactical targets. Silos are tall, and Ukraine might have had radio repeaters or radar units atop them. But they went on to hit many other grain transport and storage facilities, particularly in Odesa, so I’d be pretty sure that that’s not what’s going on.

I’ve seen two arguments put forth for why this makes sense. First, to cut off supply of grain to other countries, and thus create political pressure from abroad to tamp down on the war. Maybe that’d make sense, but that seems like it has a whole lot of potential to backfire, seeing as it’s Russia cutting it off.

Second, as an economic campaign against Ukraine.

From this standpoint, I don’t think that it makes any sense at all. I’m willing to believe that I’ve missed something, but it sure looks to me like it doesn’t make sense, for a number of reasons.

A lot of these structures – grain silos and warehouses and such – are pretty inexpensive, as structures go, and quick to construct. It’s some corrugated sheet metal and girders.

The grain itself is worth something, but it’s not that value-dense. You can cause a lot more economic damage by hitting population centers or something.

But more-broadly, economic campaigns against Ukraine seem senseless. Okay, say the goal is to reduce Ukraine’s economic output. But…economic aid is the easiest thing out there to provide to Ukraine. There are no logistical problems, just push a button and bank account number changes. If Russia could blockade Ukraine – think Germany blockading the UK in WW2 – that could help in that Ukraine could have funds but no ability to import anything, but Ukraine borders a number of EU members over land. And Russia has not, as best I can tell, been trying to focus on keeping road and rail connections to the EU severed (well, aside from any potential political involvement they had in those border protests).

Ukraine is not incredibly wealthy, so trying to cut off Ukraine’s funds by reducing its economic output is not incredibly effective, whereas the countries that back Ukraine represent something like half of the global economy in aggregate, so economic aid is comparatively easy (and for some, politically uncontroversial compared to providing weapons).

Perun commented on this too in one of his videos, so I’m pretty sure that it’s not just me saying “this doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense”, and he’s got more of a grounding in the economics of war than I do.

Population

Some attacks – especially against shopping centers, and possibly housing – seem to be targeting civilian population. I can believe that a few apartments might have been targeted assassinations, but it seems unlikely to be the case for shopping centers. And while in a few cases, I could believe Ukraine putting military facilities – drone assembly locations or something – in a building in an urban area, anything Ukraine is setting up right now is done with the knowledge that Russia is going to conduct a bombing campaign, and I am very skeptical that it would be placed in population concentrations, if avoidable.

And as I’ve said before, I don’t think that Russia has the means to win the war by targeting civilian population. Not with conventional weapons, at any rate.

Not only that, but any weapons Russia is using to target this sort of thing are consumed and unavailable for tactical purposes, and can’t be used against strategic targets that are more-relevant to the immediate military effort. That is, by spreading out resources rather than concentrating them, they’re weakening their direct military effort. While it probably wasn’t actually what tipped the balance, Germany was generally considered to have weakened their battle for control of the air over the UK in the Battle of Britain by diverting their resources from bombing military targets to trying to hit civilian targets, to damage morale. I mean, yes, it’s awful for the people who are being bombed at the shopping center, and I’m sure that it doesn’t make the war more pleasant for people who have a harder time getting groceries…but the bombs that hit the shopping center were also bombs that didn’t hit soldiers in a fortification, a factory assembling drones, or military vehicles.

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