Episode Notes:

On this episode of the Russia Contingency, Michael Kofman is joined by RUSI senior research fellows, Justin Bronk and Jack Watling. The discussion is the first in a two-part episode focused on RUSI's latest report, The Russian Air War and Ukrainian Requirements for Air Defence. 

The Russia Contingency is a bi-weekly podcast featuring in-depth analysis of Russia's military power and the war in Ukraine.

Episode Transcript:

Aaron Stein: Hello everybody. My name is Aaron Stein, Chief Content Officer at War on the Rocks. Before we begin, I want to let listeners know that this is the first of two episodes on Russian airpower and the Russian military with RUSI senior fellows, Justin Bronk and Jack Watling. With that said, let's get on to the Russia Contingency with Michael Kofman.

Michael Kofman: Welcome back to the Russia Contingency, my new podcast at War on the Rocks. I'm Michael Kofman, the host. Today I have two good colleagues and friends for discussion. I've been talking with them for a long time. I've, in some ways, been exchanging notes with them for quite a long time, and the group here today around the table has something in common. It's not only people who are interested in the Russian military, they're not only folks that I would technically describe as Russian military nerds in terms of their analytical proclivities, but also all three people who have done field work in Ukraine and have gone or seen or experienced some aspect of the war zone. But the first thing I want to talk about is the recent product they put out on Russian airpower and the performance of the VKS Russian Aerospace Forces. We talked about this a while ago.

We've been talking about it over the course of the year. Some of the things that maybe we thought, some of the things that we suspected, didn't quite know. It's the hardest thing to actually get a good read on in terms of what's available in open sources and the penance for a good product, just saying Jack, is that you're going to have to talk about it for a little bit when it comes out, right. So let me start off with Justin first. Justin. All right. Basic question. It feels like the initial Russian aerospace attack and the first couple of days in terms of Russian airpower performance, there's a lot more to it than first met the eye and that Russian airpower perhaps may not have been well coordinated with the actual ground invasion, but did attempt to go after Ukrainian integrated air defense, Ukrainian radar sites, fixed sites, and attempted forms of electronic attack. Would you say that that's a fair depiction and would you add to it based on at least your work and research?

Justin Bronk: Yeah, definitely there was a lot more particularly going on in the first three days of the invasion than I could see. I put my foot in it a bit by writing a piece saying, the mysterious case of the missing Russian air force, we don't see it. Now in one sense, the bit that I and others got right was they had not got the capacity to run what we would expect as a Western air campaign where achieving air superiority through SEAD/DEAD, as a large coordinated force is kind of the first thing you do in the outset of a campaign.

They tried to do it, and in fact, in many ways the targeting was pretty synced up between the strategic missile forces in particular. So the Iskander, the Kalibr, Kh-55, Kh-101, Kh-555, all of these different relatively strategic platforms coupled with a fixed-wing air campaign and really quite effective electronic attack capabilities from the ground and to a degree from the air, really was coordinated well to essentially disable and suppress the Ukrainian air defense system very effectively in the first couple of days. And it took until day three for them to really have much that was starting to come back on into play on the ground.

During that time, there was a lot of fixed-wing air activity, several hundred sorties a day, in some cases pushing up to 300 kilometers behind the lines and very much going after air defense targets. It was coordinated with the long-range strike campaign and what's more, the fixed-wing strikes in particular were concentrating on trying to go after air defense targets that would be protecting the routes that they expected, the air assault formations, for example, Hostomel to take. So relatively well-planned, given how little time they had to plan, and in some ways an indicator of what the VKS can do despite the fact that the overwhelming message from the early phase of the war and what has sort of dictated it up to now is still they can't do SEAD/DEAD properly.

And that has meant that once the Ukrainian ground defenses came back into play, the activity we saw in those first three days that was, thank goodness, focused on a target set, that their overall targeting process was a little bit slow to keep track of the mobile bits wasn't something they were able to do longer term.

Michael Kofman: So here's my take on it. I'm curious what y'all think. I thought that the first thing that we saw was that they did attempt a strike campaign and they did attempt to suppress Ukrainian air defense to the extent they could in the first couple of days. However, once Ukrainian air defense was able to recover from the shock of the initial invasion, they were able to displace at least those units that displaced in the night, in the hours running up to the initial aerospace attack. Then the Russian air force showed that it wasn't very good at battle damage assessment. It wasn't very good at reassessing and trying to find and fix targets and it couldn't actually prosecute a complex campaign like that. And there are two questions I have. First and foremost, is that a fair assessment and could we say that they could engage in complexity, but not in large scale?

And the second one, and this to Jack, it's hard for me to intellectually reconcile the logic of the Russian campaign with the logic of a Western airspace campaign because attempting air superiority over Ukraine would've taken months, and I don't think the Russian air force was necessarily capable of it, but certainly it wasn't very compatible with the notion that in five days they conduct regime change in Kyiv and in two weeks they'd sort of be done. I'm curious how you read, at least, would you interpret to have been the plan of the Russian aerospace forces, what their job was supposed to be in initial theory that Russia had an invasion that went rapidly pear-shaped?

Jack Watling: Yeah, I mean, this is the big challenge with analyzing the war is that the Russian plan was intended to achieve control over all major administrative centers and critical national infrastructure in 10 days. And then for there to be a suppression of resistance and counterintelligence campaign that would go through until August. And then you would have annexation. They were supposed to be in position in three days and shift to kind of screening and mopping up what was left of the Ukrainian resistance by day 10. Massive amounts of optimism bias in the plan that just compounded at each level. And when you read the Russian orders, the strange thing about them is that there is no contingency, right? It's very detailed and everything is mapped out and where everything should go is there.

Michael Kofman: Yeah, but there's no plan B.

Jack Watling: Right. And so this is particularly a problem for the VKS, I think because their job was to punch a hole in the defenses, to enable the VDV to seize the airfields, to enable those initial penetrations so that the ground forces could get to where they needed to go within the timeframe. They did that, right? There were two waves of aviation that managed to get into Hostomel, despite there being two air defense sites that they had to fly past in order to get there. Those were destroyed. But the ground forces slowed down for lots of reasons, we can get into that. And so as soon as the air defenses started to recover and reorganize, the VKS was then in a very different situation, which was dynamic targeting. And I think to come to your point about BDA, it's not just BDA, it's also their intelligence cycle.

I remember days before the invasion being in Kyiv and the presence of Russian penetrations in terms of troops and their intelligence surface coverage of those areas was extremely high. And so they knew where a lot of the stuff was and they knew where it was when it was moving. That's still the case, by the way, today. The Russians are still getting regular updates on the locations of their targets, mainly from HUMINT. Their ability to get that to their air force in a timely manner is nonexistent. So it's not a collection problem, it's an analytical problem.

And from a BDA point of view, they basically learn three things, which is does the pilot say they dropped and hit the target? Quite partial, pilots don't make a second pass and check. Can they pick up the next day that there is evidence of damage from their satellites? And their satellites do not have very good electro-optical capability. And the third one is SIGINT, which they do have very good capabilities, but they analytically are challenged because the Ukrainians just always jump on the net and say, “Oh no, my equipment's broken.” And so it gets chalked up as, yep, killed that, and then next aircraft flies in and is engaged by the system that is not dead.

Justin Bronk: I would also add, just at a technical level, if we're talking about the air force specifically, a huge portion of their arsenal, both missile and air-launched, is geared towards hitting fixed targets at range because of the, it's not an overarching doctrine, but the no-contact warfare idea of being able to hit concentration points and attrit away from the close fight because they're worried about a fair close fight. And also the fact that their GBAD was supposed to be their main line of defense against NATO. NATO doesn't really do large-scale GBAD. And so for them, why would they have a highly developed SEAD/DEAD capability or a major ability to go after organic battlefield targets? It wasn't a core part of the doctrine.

Jack Watling: One important thing there, and again it comes back to that original campaign plan, is that the Russians bizarrely didn't strike force concentration points particularly. The Ukrainians were successfully moving two to three echelons a day through their railway system throughout the first month.

Michael Kofman: The forces were not the center of gravity of the Russian campaign. It's one of the most puzzling things because it was genuinely a regime change operation.

Jack Watling: And therefore the orders to the Western Military District, who were mainly commanding the forces that were engaging with the bulk of the Ukrainian armed forces in the Donbas was to fix them. Fixing was the plan in terms of how they were going to be defeated. And therefore, I remember before the war going through with Ukrainian officers and they were deeply concerned about their ability to resupply, about the VKS's impact on logistics and therefore the sustainability of the defense line in the line of contact. They didn't get hit at all, which is again about planning and force employment, not about capability.

Michael Kofman: Sure. And to me, force employment's always king. Look, you can assess potential based on quantity and quality, but force employment, military strategy, and cost of operations at the end of the day, very deterministic of outcomes. So my sense of this in some respects is that in a lot of ways Russian military is very your theory, but organizational adaptation, developing the structures that you would need to put your theory into practice at scale is one of the observable challenge in employment of the Russian air force. Couple questions I have. The first is if the Russian ground forces didn't know within 17 to 24 hours exactly what their orders were, how is the air force supposed to support them? How is that air to ground cooperation going to work, and integration, if the ground force itself didn't know exactly what its orders were in the last couple of days, right up until the run up to the war? The air force sure as heck couldn't have supported them.

But the second question is it seems as though the center of gravity was neither the actual Ukrainian military, the echelons of their forces, because it was clearly not a combined-arms operation when we look at the initial invasion, but also they didn’t have a mission to interdict the flow of any additional support from the West, or am I wrong on that? Because that would've involved an aerospace operation or trying to attain air superiority in other parts of Ukraine. And it looked like the Russian air force eschewed that and tried to create local air superiority corridors alongside wherever the ground forces were going. I don't know if you have the same view, Jack.

Jack Watling: So I'd say firstly, the air forces were subordinated to the military district command posts of the ground forces. And so as soon as the ground forces got into trouble, a lot of the air campaign was pulled towards trying to help them. And in that sense, any logic of a kind of airpower theory of how they were employing their aircraft disappeared. It was subordinated to ground force interests. On the point about Western aid, I think it's really important to flag that when the Western analytical community came to the conclusion that the Russians were not serious about invading in March, April of 2021, that wasn't the lesson the Russians took from that. What they took from that was, okay, if your logic is you don't think we're serious until all the enablers show up, if you only start reacting at the point where the enablers show up, then you are not going to be able to influence the outcome.

The Russians’ confidence in their ability to do this was premised upon the fact that we were waiting for those indicators to show up before we would actually respond. And so this is relevant to the air force and interdiction of Western supply because they thought it was all going to be over before that showed up. And in many ways, in terms of the impact of Western equipment, they were actually correct. So the propaganda value of Western equipment going into Ukraine was extremely high at the beginning of the war. It didn't really have a substantial material effect on the course of the fighting, Western-supplied arms, until I would say April, when the Ukrainians started to run low on their own stockpiles of capability. What blunted the Russians north of Kyiv was two brigades of artillery firing all their barrels every day.

Michael Kofman: For all the footage of Javelins and NLAWs, at the end of the day, this was an artillery fight.

Jack Watling: And Western aid after that became critical. And now the West is Ukraine's strategic depth, but the Ukrainian assessment was they would be able to fight for six weeks based on their stockpiles at maximum, and they were anticipating losing a lot of their stocks to the VKS. Fortunately for the Ukrainians, they managed to disperse a lot of their arsenals just before the initial strikes. And there were two things that saved them. One, the dispersal. Secondly, and this does come back to the competence of the Russian forces, I still haven't unpicked why this is the case, but their allocation in terms of volume of munitions against a particular target makes absolutely no sense.

Michael Kofman: Yeah, it's completely irrational force employment. Let's get into this a little bit. This is a rabbit hole, but it's one of my favorite ones. I saw almost two different Russian strike campaigns. At the strategic level, it felt like there was a person who was assigning sort of one, two, three cruise missiles per airbase or bridge or something like that, and then taking a long time to do BDA and feed the intelligence back. And they were sort of checking it off like a spreadsheet or a list of some kind, and then realizing that it's a grossly insufficient number of weapons to actually service a target. And then coming back to it much later, weeks later to find out that, oh, this is still functional, that's still operational and firing again, two, three missiles.

And then on the other side, when it came to supporting at the tactical operational level of depths, there was somebody firing Tochka-U ballistic missiles, SRBMs, at any artillery piece that they could see that, as there was somebody with a completely opposite approach to employing precision-guided weapons at the tactical level who were basically firing everything they could find in their arsenal to service a target of minor tactical relevance. It almost seemed like there were two different military staffs in action. Justin, do you want take this? I'm curious what you think.

Justin Bronk: One thing I would flag is I would be interested, I don't have the data to know whether this is the case, but my instinct would be that the difference is partly in what service or what branch of the service is launching what. So for example, I could easily see it being the case that Kh-55, 555, and 101 being launched off strategic bombers flying at angles, which are being tasked at the general staff level down. They might be being allocated targets out of Akatsiya either from general staff direct or from the military district. But that is a strategic asset and I can see a scenario where there's a much tighter control over the kind of targeting and allocation process of missiles there. Same potentially, I don't know, but maybe for the navy in terms of Kalibr, vice, for example, firing land-based Iskander cruise missile, as well as ballistic missiles, long-range rocket artillery where you're getting really still quite high-value long-range pieces, but being used in a very tactical role.

Same for Tochka-U. So my instinct would be it depends where that force element actually fits in instinctively, if not doctrinally, into the kind of planning hierarchy, which might explain where those taskings are happening. Same for, interestingly, the VKS repeatedly kind of fell back on when things were going badly on Kh-59 employment, but against their defense targets then against ground targets then against CPs. And in that sense, in the air force, that would fit with the Tochka model of just fire at the thing that the military district is worried about here, because that's being done at a lower echelon in terms of allocation, even though technically Kh-59 is supposed to be quite an expensive high-level asset.

Michael Kofman: Yeah, it's a prized missile, but all right, playing devil's advocate. In the initial campaign, the Russian aerospace assault did strike many fixed targets. They did catch quite a few Ukrainian S300s in the south. I think the campaign was probably more successful there than it might have been in other areas. My impression was that they attempted an electronic attack operation, they did jam a number of Ukrainian radars early on in the campaign. And you're welcome to chime in if you don't. And my sense is they were something to fragment Ukrainian command and control.

Jack Watling: I remember just before the war, sitting down with people from the Stavka and they were flagging that they would get three minutes warning if Russian aircraft came against their air defense positions from the sea. And so they knew that was a vulnerability before the war. And it's not surprising really that given the very short notice that the defenses had at that point, they were caught. There was also quite a lot of fixed air defense systems in the south that were caught. In the north, it kind of depends how close you were to the border as to how much warning you got. But there was much better radar coverage. And so that helped. The other point being that when it came to electronic attack, specifically the Russian electronic attack was pretty successful. And also using aerial targets and decoys to just generate spoofing masses of false targets.

Michael Kofman: I saw testing drones being used in the first couple of days the Russians fired that I think were designed to stimulate Ukrainian air defense.

Jack Watling: That's correct. Like E-95M going over, generating hundreds of false positives was a really consistent tactic. And then using direct electronic attack to scramble the radars. Where the Russians I think went wrong on that, is that the Ukrainians have modified a lot of their radars and they have a very capable industry when it comes to building them. And so the behavior of the radar, while it was often affected, was also not necessarily consistent with the effect that the Russians had anticipated.

Michael Kofman: Yeah. I want to emphasize this point. Russian military likely thought that they knew Ukrainian air defense incredibly well. It's the exact same Soviet-built air defense, but they likely didn't suspect that Ukrainians made modifications.

Jack Watling: And even if they did suspect that, didn't necessarily know how those modifications worked.

Justin Bronk: I mean it is also, since we're on the beginning, it is worth flagging one thing the Russians actually did really well, albeit not the way we would've done it, in the sense that their fighter coverage was really effective. It wasn't tied into large complex strike packages. The strike packages were still overwhelmingly singles, less than 25 percent were even pairs. No strike formations more than six in those early days. But at the same time, those roving fighter patrols, really, really effective against Ukrainian fighters. Now there's huge force overmatch there in terms of at a technical level and at a numerical level. But at the same time, this is a force that had very little time to plan. This is a force with air-to-air, almost no experience of any sort. And they were really effective. The Ukrainian kind of take coming out of those three days when the air force was really holding the line in terms of the aviation side of it was, we can't do this again.

Michael Kofman: So let me ask two questions. Those are great points by the way. And I actually want to get a little bit into the tactical interaction. One, it felt like there ultimately wasn't really something that looked like a strategic aerospace campaign or, if it was, it was only the first couple of days. And the second part is, it felt like the Russian air force was divided into four air forces, each one of them supporting four military districts, each military district with its own joint strategic command having deployed in theater with multiple operational acts of advance. And so it felt a little bit like you had four Russian air forces fighting in support of four different districts after the first couple of days when things didn't quite go to the plan. Is that a fair assessment?

Jack Watling: Yes, ultimately, except for certain orbits like A50M whereby necessity because of the numbers that they had up, those were working more widely. There's also an important element, which is that there was a centralized tasking for long-range precision strike through the GRU, which was generating targets to be serviced either by strategic bombers or by the navy or by ground-based fires. And that process obviously wasn't subordinated to the military district command posts.

Michael Kofman: So then the question was coming at the general staff, main director of operations and whatever cell they had put together to task assets.

Jack Watling: Yes.

Michael Kofman: And I think one of the comments, at least one of the thoughts folks or me had, was that it looked like the Russian military had the theory, they hadn't had the organizational adaptations to employ this at scale, especially when they were both pressured and there was a strong pull demand signal. Unlike in Syria, when they sort of tested the capabilities, but they could use them at will and they could put the package together at leisure. Here, they had to actually go through the full cycle. One of the biggest differences is that the United States, we had matured the organizations and the processes along with the technology over the series of a number of wars that lasted these decades and something the United States can do at scale that the Russian military does not appear to be able to do, or at least is woefully inexperienced in doing.

Justin Bronk: This is something I would really, really stress is, we take it for granted in the West, in the military community how indescribably impressive a U.S.-led allied air tasking order is. Even in a relatively minor campaign, you are talking thousands of sorties often a day, intricate, incredibly detailed, and also interestingly, having to be flexible as well because things go wrong and it must adjust on the fly quite literally.

Tanker sorties, AWAC sorties, launch and recovery sequences, combat search and rescue, integrating all the different planning and briefing cycles, the maintenance, the logs that reach all the way back in many cases across continents, and the munitions, the planning with the ground staff, and the sequencing with the campaign. That is something that we kind of take for granted because we've, as you say, honed it over decades. The Russian military has never done anything like it and nor would any, by the way, European militaries would never be able to do this on our own. We sort of get tempted to sneer a bit I think, “Oh look, the Russians messed up airpower 'cause they don't understand it.” We can only do it because we plug into the Americans.

Michael Kofman: I say that quite a bit too, as a chauvinistic American. I do often make the point that European military power has a lot to commend it, but at scale Europe does not have the ability to employ military power like that.

Jack Watling: Well, I think one of the things that's really important to understand about this war is that the Ukrainians entered this conflict, and I might be a couple of numbers off here, but orders of one or two barrels off, with 1,178 barrel artillery pieces and 1,680 MLRS and 60 divisions of air defenses. Ukrainian Air Defense Division being an expanded battery with organic logistics and command and control. So it can function a bit like one of our air defense battalions, but it has fewer launchers. But nonetheless, that is essentially more air defense and artillery systems, and by the way, they went in with 900 main battle tanks too, than the vast majority of European NATO combined. And they had ammunition for it for six weeks, which no one else other than maybe the Finns in Europe do.

Michael Kofman: That's five weeks longer than the typical European military. Let me wrap up this conversation a bit and hear me get us a bit in trouble in two ways if I'm perfectly honest. And I will lead the part of the conversation that gets us into trouble. First with the TB2 Bayraktar people and you know where I'm going, which is in the first two weeks it looked like because of the challenges of sorting air-to-ground integration between the Russian ground forces and the Russian air force. And the Russian air force is definitely afraid of PVO, the ground forces' air defense because it can easily get shot down through friendly fire by its own air defense, especially those that are not part of the aerospace forces. It looked like Russian air defenses assigned to the ground forces were not engaging targets beyond the forward line of troops. And so early on Ukrainian TB2s have successes, but then after that it felt like they largely got shot down and-

Jack Watling: So TB2 was successful for the first three days because the Russian orders were, if it flies, its friendly, don't shoot. And then between day three and day 10, the Ukrainians observed fewer and fewer locations where they were able to use them and they would survive. By day 10, they were essentially denied in most areas. They transitioned to being a lure and ISR platform and in particular maritime ISR. They've been useful, they've continued to be useful, they have not been delivering significant effects. And actually even in terms of when they were able to get in and strike targets, they were dropping far fewer munitions than the Ukrainian air force's fixed-wing aircraft.

Justin Bronk: Yeah, if you look at the confirmed tally for TB2 footage, it's a hundred and something vehicles, half of which are trucks. That's a drop in the ocean for, it's not to say that it wasn't effective for the first couple of days, but I think there's such a distortion from the fact that Ukraine recognized very quickly as part of an overall extremely effective information operations strategy that this was some of the best footage they had. Not only was it compelling and therefore incredibly likely to go viral because of the quality of it, because you can see that they're air defense systems and therefore are really, but it's also humiliating for the Russians. You are seeing kit, including some air defense systems on active, clearly scanning that are just not engaging these relatively cheap, slow-firing UAVs.

Michael Kofman: Yeah, I saw it at the beginning and it's not because they couldn't attack them.

Justin Bronk: And so the Ukrainians stored up a lot of that footage and kept drip-feeding releasing it with having got rid of the whatever the electronic equivalent is of Tippexing over the date and time and location stamps on the footage. But to give the impression that this was still a major thing a couple of months in, which not only served the purpose of convincing the West that even aid from non-established major military powers was effective and something that Ukraine should get, but also that for Russian air defense operators potentially the idea that no, no, you still need to keep your doppler gate wide. You still need to deal with clutter, you still need to look at this stuff.

But equally the flip side of all of that is having made that success out of it in the information space, Ukraine has then had to actually use quite a lot of money and quite a lot of people at an opportunity cost, because everything's an opportunity cost, doing TB2 stuff because people have kept donating them, that frankly is less useful in some cases than other potential uses of that money and those people. So it's a bit of a double-edged sword there. But for the people who took off it, and apologies for sounding slightly like I'm banging a nail into a dead coffin here, but people saying this shows how useless manned airpower is, it's all about cheap, remotely piloted air systems. It's just not true. The moment the air defenses went back up, it just wasn't a viable close-attack platform.

Jack Watling: The other thing is that there were a number of successful strikes in the ground control stations for them.

Michael Kofman: And I saw that. I even literally saw video footage of Russian Lancet strikes against Ukrainian TB2 ground control stations. But I wanted to put that issue a bit to rest because I think TB2s have a value. I won't make a comment regarding their cost effectiveness. I think they were effectively used on the ISR role. I think they were very effectively used in the information campaign. I think they're value is primarily there and I heard a number of Ukraine colleagues when I was there basically saying, they're good at this, they're phenomenally good at PR, but let's not expand that conversation to their actual tactical utility against a country with integrated air defense, ground air defense, and an air force. Because in that regard they were shot down pretty rapidly.

And here comes kind of my second question then I think we can tie up our air defense conversation, which is, so after the initial attack you have both air forces trying to make adaptations. Ukrainian's air force seemed to be pretty successful first at luring and convincing the Russian military that they had taken much higher losses than they actually did. They were able to recover and reconstitute to an extent. It's not clear to what extent they've actually been effective at really making a difference on the battlefield in terms of firing, just like the Russian military, firing unguided rockets behind the forward line of troops and things of that nature.

But the Russian air force, it wasn't neutralized when there were pockets of air superiority or when there were pockets of, let's say localized artillery advantage such as in Luhansk, where the Russian military was using artillery and drones to try to take out Ukrainian air defense. They could operate, you saw them in Mariupol, you saw them in other parts of Luhansk, saw them in parts of Donetsk. But on the whole, I hate to put you to this, how would you summarize the role of the Russian air force, let's say after April? If I was to make a cut line and the adaptations on both sides, what are the things that you find interesting?

Justin Bronk: So I would say in a couple of sentences, since April, the Russian air force has been largely held at bay in terms of its strike capabilities. It's punished lapses in basically comms discipline because it can still hit fixed targets well, from enough standoff with CAR 29T or L, with Sukhoi-34, particularly where it has the ability to approach close to the front lines where that Ukrainian SAM coverage has been pushed back a bit. And it's been increasingly effective, particularly since early September in the fighter role because the latest iteration of the strike campaign with the ballistic missiles and the Shaheds has forced Ukraine to keep so much of its aired defense around the cities and infrastructure. And frankly, the Orlan-10 complexes, particularly with Lancet-3 more recently, have been attriting Ukrainian air defenses near the frontline quite well. The Russians have their fighter caps pretty close to the Ukrainian front lines. And as a result-

Michael Kofman: I heard them in Kherson too. To be perfectly honest, sorry to interrupt you. Two weeks ago I heard Russian aircraft, I was there enough far behind the four line of troops. And it was very clear because on the Ukrainian side, there wasn't that many weren't aircraft overflying.

Justin Bronk: Ukraine basically got a period where it was doing a lot more aggressive close-air support, particularly down south in this sort of couple of weeks to a month after they got AGM-88 HARM because the Russians took a while to adapt their TTPs on the ground to the fact that there were significant numbers of launches of anti-radiation missiles up to that point because they'd been largely invulnerable. They'd been banging away pretty much on active the whole time and it took them way longer than it should have done to adapt that. So the Ukrainians actually got a reasonable number of hard kills with HARM, which is quite surprising. HARM is not really supposed to be a hard kill weapon. It's meant to mainly suppress. If you get a hard kill, that's great, but that's not the point.

So the Ukrainians achieved, they think up to about kind of 30 percent reduction in threat emitters relatively close to the front lines in a few weeks of HARM ops-

Michael Kofman: It's pretty impressive-

Justin Bronk: And up to a 50 to 60 percent decrease in some places in effectiveness because of then the behavioral changes that followed on as well. And so they were kind of trying to pulse quite a lot more aggressive close-air support, particularly in the south. And the Russians responded really well with the fighter caps unfortunately, and have really punished the Ukrainian ground-strike aircraft because that ability to operate high and fast, reasonably close to the front lines, with long-range missiles, particularly R-37 now with the MiG-31s and integrated onto the Su-35s, it's just brutal for low level Ukrainian attack, attack aircraft and fighters that can't even really try because they have to stay low because of the GBAD, and so they're just completely outranged. So in that sense, Russian airpower has not been effective in being a major shaping force on the battlefield, but it has kept the Ukrainians at bay in terms of the air, and it's also a serious threat in being.

Jack Watling: Right and take up where you left off, there is a current dynamic where the VKS can't push in at medium altitude because of Ukrainian air defenses and they can't push in at low altitude because of a mixture of training issues. And secondly, MANPADS. If the Ukrainians run low on their tactical air defense systems in terms of stocks of munitions, then all of a sudden the VKS can sit at medium altitude and a lot of the stuff that we've seen in Syria where they are actually able to drop accurate strikes on targets becomes viable. At that point they have a lot of fighters still and they have a lot of munitions and that can really have a significant impact on the tactical situation. So making sure that the Ukrainians do not run out of medium-altitude-capable SAMS.

Justin Bronk: So medium-range specific, because they actually got very high, but it's basically SA-11 and things in that class. We can be pretty specific about it. It is SA-11 and a little bit of SA-8. The problem with SA-8 is it has to get so close to the front lines to have any effectiveness that it's pretty vulnerable.

Jack Watling: And the system can be defeated, 3W and others so it means-

Justin Bronk: With all and yeah-

Michael Kofman: Can I interject? 'Cause I have a basic question. I think one of the things that folks have gotten the most wrong about this war is the role of electronic warfare, and I think it's been very significant. I think as Russia has used it extensively, it's been one of the biggest challenges for Ukraine to deal with and the electronic attack and various types of ECM pods the Russian aircraft have employed. However, they also present a challenge for Russian aerospace operations as well, I suspect. I've seen quite a bit of what to me looks like EW fratricide interference in terms of mission efficacy and all these challenges. It's not quite as easy as it looks and as they've attempted to employ these means, I think they've discovered a lot of operational problems on their own, but that's just my own take on it.

Jack Watling: There's a great conversation that was picked up between two Russian pilots talking in clear, so it's a two-ship flying along and both of them are complaining that their radars are scrambled, not picking up anything like, what's wrong. They start talking to the ground control station and they realize it's their own EW pods that automatically targeting each other's radar and then the ground control station says, we'll turn off your EW suite. So they go in without EW protection.

So the level of fratricide on the Russian side is very high. I think the conceptually most interesting thing about this is before the war, lots and lots of analysts talked about denial of the EMS, right? For ground forces and others. The reality is the EMS is almost never denied. However, it is continually disrupted and it is continually disrupted in unpredictable ways, and the force that is more effective is the one that can plan where it's achieving disruption, where it can exploit advantage and track that faster.

Because if you try and execute an effect using the part of the spectrum that is being disrupted, you're going to miss, your process is going to be slowed down, et cetera. You won't be competitive. And so tracking what electronic effects are being targeted against you is critical, having that in terms of informing your command decisions about when you employ capability is critical.

And that's not just a challenge in terms of what the enemy is doing, but as the Russians are finding regularly, it's also about friendly force employment. If I am protecting myself from precision strike by denying navigational systems, great, but that also interrupts my ability to find targets with UAVs. So I have a trade-off there that's direct. How do you deconflict those things? That's actually a complicated thing to do. And one challenge I think for Western forces is that we don't have many exercise areas where we can actually turn all of our EW equipment on. So there is actually quite a big unknown here, which is yes, the Russians have really struggled to deconflict, but we can do it in niche contexts. We have not tested doing it at scale.

Michael Kofman: Can I add something? We also have a very different force structure in terms of employment of EW. The Russian military downloaded EW into companies, battalions, into brigades supporting military districts. Here's a big difference. We often have phenomenal EW capabilities or various things that are at a particular brigade level, but very few people exercise with it, very few commanders know what they can do for them. It is not a company or a battalion that they work and live with, so they often do not regularly train with, it is another brigade with its voodoo magic in the electromagnetic spectrum that they may have encountered or maybe not, and they're not fully sure how to use it. They don't know what they can do with it, what it can do for them, and just very different in terms of force structure. And to me, often that's deterministic when you download those capabilities and you spread them through your force, a lot of commanders have a better sense of what they can actually do with that capability.

Justin Bronk: Just to feed in on that, in terms of the one area where this is immediately relevant in terms of the interaction between security classification, individual programs, and broader force design is if you look at something like the F-35 at the moment, which has extraordinary electronic attack capabilities, particularly when you're looking at the block four upgrade, but is SAP-clearance required for anything in the EW spectrum that it's doing. It's an interesting one where both many of your allies will be operating it, every single branch of the U.S. armed services except the army will be operating it, and yet because anyone who has access to the details of what it does needs to be SAP-cleared and that's expensive and difficult, there's a question about whether that pushing down of an incredibly capable EW platform to a very broad user base is actually going to enable more commanders and more people throughout the joint force to appreciate what it can do for them.

But of course, also one real benefit from the Ukraine war, just looking at it from a pretty realist construct kind of viewpoint, is we've been sucking up the most unbelievable amount of ELINT from, sorry, electronic intelligence and signals intelligence as well from Russian emitters doing stuff in Ukraine. For example, the Black Sea. There's a lot of international airspace out there in international waters, and the Russians have a lot of things nearby that are literally banging on in their full-on war mode. And so the West has got the most extraordinary opportunity for electronic collect. It's not just a case of learning from what the Russians did right and wrong on their own terms. It's also a question of how do we ensure that collectively and as an alliance, we are better than we have been in the past about breaking those security silos and pushing the lessons from what we've intercepted from the most extraordinary learning opportunity in that sense across the alliance and across the services in each country.

Aaron Stein: Thank you everybody for listening to part one of the Russia Contingency with Michael Kofman. Part two should be coming out shortly. Thank you again.