Quote (Goomshill @ 8 Nov 2022 04:38)
https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-11-07-22/h_a8bd7e3d75a2044729b97626cd6365a6And now Ukrainian officials, who have spent the past years claiming to have shot down 90% of missiles fired (ie 6 missiles hit kiev, so Ukraine says it shot down 54 out of 58 missiles fired and 'only 4 made it through')
...are saying that they actually have no method to shoot down Russian missiles and the only viable defense would be to attack their launch sites;
I mean, that's just the 'duh' reality to anyone who wasn't guzzling propaganda from either side. When Russia is bombarding infrastructure in Kiev with missiles, Ukraine is totally helpless. They could hypothetically escalate by using western-provided weapons to strike deep inside Russia, at which point we'd be well into world war 3. So back in the non-insane branch of history I hope we're following, its basically just a tacit admissions that oops despite all the billions of dollars of funding and mercenary troops and weapons set up, Ukraine is pretty damn helpless going into this winter.
Quote (Norlander @ 8 Nov 2022 06:52)
Anti Air != Anti Rocket
This. There is obviously a big difference between cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. Cruise missiles take a rather flat trajectory, close to the surface level. Ballistic missiles come crashing down from a much higher angle, using gravity to reach a significantly higher velocity at impact. Even a layman can easily see how that poses a different challenge to missile defense systems.
Even the CNN article you linked touches upon this point:
Quote
we have no effective means of fighting ballistic [missiles], except for their physical destruction at the launch stage."
Ihnat said the Iranian missiles have "a range of 300 and 700 kilometers, which in principle will not create anything new for Ukraine, because [Russian-made] Iskanders were used from the first day of the war."
He's probably referring to these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K720_IskanderSo what he's indirectly admitting is that Russia has started using short-range ballistic missiles to deliberately take out civilian infrastructure. This does not, however, imply that Ukraine is also defenseless against normal cruise missiles or that their previous reports of intercepted missiles were completely made up out of thin air. (Their reported numbers will of course be way overblown, such is the nature of wartime propaganda.)
Maybe this also resolves the debate we had a couple of days ago about the impact of Iranian drones - maybe they were not as much of a game-changer as it seemed at first glance and the recent "success" of Russia in striking civilian targets is more due to these short-range ballistic missiles.
And yes, this obviously poses a big challenge for Ukraine iff Russia can keep it up. The launch sites for these BMs lie outside the range of Ukrainian artillery, they obviously cannot reliably destroy them with whatever is left of their air force, and Russia can once again hide behind its nuclear deterrence to prevent NATO from taking them out. That's the big asymmetry of this war: Russia can commit all sorts of atrocities on Ukrainian soil, but Ukraine and its allies cannot retaliate proportionally.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Nov 8 2022 07:23am