Ukrainian portable missiles are inflicting startling losses to the Russian air force

It’s not hard to explain the startling losses of aircraft and pilots the Russian air force has suffered as the Ukraine war enters its third week.

Russian air-warfare doctrine, plus a shortage of precision-guided munitions, all but forces its fighter and attack pilots to fly low and slow underneath cloud cover within just a few miles of Ukrainian troops.

It’s a recipe for disaster. A low, slow flight profile along the front line puts Russian fighters and attack planes in range of the one type of defensive missile that the Russians have no hope of suppressing: man-portable air-defense systems such as the Strela, Igla and Stinger.

Those MANPADS, backed by bigger and longer-ranged air-defense systems such as the S-300, Tor, Osa and Tunguska, have badly bloodied the Russian air force, or Vozdushno-kosmicheskiye sily (VKS) as it’s called in their native language, since Russia widened its war in Ukraine starting on the night of Feb. 23.

The Ukrainian defense ministry claims its forces have destroyed 77 Russian fixed-wing aircraft. Independent observers have confirmed at least 12 of those kills. Verified losses include five Su-25 attack planes, two Su-30 and four Su-34 fighters and an An-26 transport.

Ground-based air-defenses including infrared-guided MANPADS probably have accounted for most of the attack jets and fighters Russia has lost. What’s remarkable is that MANPADS are very short-range weapons. A shoulder-fired Igla flies just three miles out and two up.

But that limited range is no problem for Ukrainian air-defenders. Russian doctrine and technology compel fighter pilots to fly within an Igla’s envelope in order to deliver their weapons.

That’s because the Russian air force isn’t an “air force” in the sense that many Western observers understand the term. Russian doctrine doesn’t require VKS warplanes to control huge swathes of air space in order to pursue campaign goals via that same air space.

That is to say, the VKS isn’t like the U.S. Air Force, which in most contingencies aims totally to control the air over an entire war zone. Rather, the Russian air force is an extension of the Russian army. It’s airborne artillery. In Russian doctrine, air-to-air fighters exist briefly to control small swathes of the air in order to allow attack jets to fly in, drop their bombs, and fly out.

Those attack jets, meanwhile, strictly bomb pre-planned target coordinates, usually employing “dumb” gravity bombs. The VKS never has purchased large quantities of guided weapons—and probably couldn’t do so, even if it wanted to, owing in part to the effect of foreign sanctions on Russia’s acquisition of high-quality electronics.

In its air campaign over Syria, the VKS only ever armed its two-seat Su-34s with precision-guided munitions. “Even these specialist strike aircraft have regularly resorted to unguided bomb and rocket attacks,” Justin Bronk noted in a recent analysis for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

“This not only indicates a very limited familiarity with PGMs among most Russian fighter crews, but also reinforces the widely accepted theory that the Russian air-delivered PGM stockpile is very limited,” Bronk continued. “Years of combat operations in Syria will have further depleted that stockpile, and may mean that the bulk of the 300 VKS fixed wing combat aircraft massed around Ukraine have only unguided bombs and rockets to draw on for ground-attack sorties.”

You have to get low and slow, below the clouds, to have any chance at hitting your coordinates using dumb bombs or rockets. Put another way, you have to run the gauntlet of infrared MANPADS and other short-range air-defense systems. All you can do is pop flares, say a prayer and hope your god smiles on you.

Tom Cooper, an author and expert on the Russian air force, blamed low flying and gravity bombs for the loss of a Russian fighter on Sunday or Monday. “It was once again the practice of descending below the cloud cover that proved fatal,” Cooper wrote. This “is a bad idea” as long as the enemy has short-range missiles.

“However, it’s something the VKS’ crews have to do if it wants to bomb precisely, because its jets simply can’t ‘see’ through the clouds and lack PGMs,” Cooper added.

It helps Ukrainian air-defenders, and further vexes the VKS, that MANPADS are the hardest surface-to-air missiles to suppress. They’re light, portable and cheap. They don’t emit active electronic signals you can track. They don’t require long-range radars to cue them. Friendly infantry in theory could flush out MANPADS crews, but Russia famously lacks adequate numbers of trained infantry.

It gets worse for the Russians. To back-fill its preexisting arsenal, Ukraine has tapped several foreign sources for new MANPADS. The United States, Germany, Poland and Latvia are sending Stingers. Germany also is sending old Strelas that, admittedly, might be expired. The United Kingdom is sending Starstreaks.

Ukraine isn’t about to run out of shoulder-fired missiles. That means that, three weeks into this war, the threat to low and slow Russian planes might only get worse. forbes.com