Modern militaries that don't like taking tons of unnecessary losses on the ground are in love with controlling the air. It's not like there's a wide variety of proven strategies and countries just pick one that they're "in love" with—there's a fairly narrow set, in these circumstances, which all look pretty similar. It's definitely curious that Russia hasn't committed to establishing and leveraging air superiority, despite dedicating very substantial ground forces and on paper being entirely capable of doing so. One of the following must be true:

1) They do not believe they can, so are not trying.

2) They believe they could, but are choosing not to.

3) They tried, but, for some reason that's not currently clear and isn't evident in battlefield losses, failed. (this is probably the least likely and also the most grave—it suggests severe problems with their command structure)

Whichever's the case, it's a real head-scratcher and is the main reason this isn't going how most folks thought it would.

A combination of 1 & 3 seems highly likely in my uninformed opinion. Economically, losing aircraft will make a war very expensive very quickly. Losing large numbers of top of the line aircraft will severely harm Russian military aircraft exports.

With Europe closing its airspace there aren't many valid approach paths into Ukraine, or ways to get out of Ukraine should things go south. Russia has few stealth aircraft. In the 1991 gulf war, 60's era Soviet SA-2 missiles were able to defend Baghdad against non-stealth aircraft despite weeks of Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses(SEAD) strikes.

A MIG-29 costs ~20 million dollars new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_Q_Strike

>With Europe closing its airspace there aren't many valid approach paths into Ukraine

Europe only contacts the western border. Russian aircraft can approach from the north (Russia and Belarus), south (Black Sea) and east (Russia).

I've often suspected that the F-35 was so expensive only a handful could be built, and would not be risked in combat because it was too expensive to replace.

The F-35 isn't that expensive these days. It's still a huge amount of money to spend on something good for nothing but war, insert your view here, but the price isn't much different than the new F-16s being bought by the Israelis.

That being said however stealth aircraft are not cheap to maintain at all.

Curiously I wonder if a similar problem is occurring with SA-400 missiles and other Russian air defenses. They may be too expensive to shoot at low cost drones such as the bayaktar.

I can imagine a considerable problem with the command structure is that if you've got a war that forces are badly prepared for and reluctant to fight in, you have to tread much more carefully with the orders you give your small number of highly trained (and relatively smart) pilots based on home soil than your large number of dispensible conscript troops you've driven into the conflict (or your gung ho special forces). Easier for them to disobey, and much more cause for alarm if they do, and no matter how dedicated they are to following orders, there are fewer pilots and planes to risk than armoured personnel carriers, artillery units and dated tanks.

> it suggests severe problems with their command structure

This is what my money is on.

Sending ground forces in without establishing air superiority is ludicrous, for reasons that we are seeing now. I guess we have a good idea where the military coup will originate.

The US is "in love with Shock and Awe" because it worked extremely well. Russia doesn't have the air power to pull it off, which is why they are running a version of Deep War, but without a second echelon to prevent their supply lines from getting picked off.

In reality it appears that Russia had a big problem with "ghost units" and rapidly tried to fill their invasion force with conscripts in the weeks before the invasion began. It's why we're seeing so many ill-equipped soldiers and awful tactics where tanks/APCs are driving solo through fields.

Russia absolutely has the air power to pull it off, you clearly haven't seen Syria.

My guess is that they have, correctly, anticipated that mass casualties of white civilians would play very badly internationally and domestically.

e: I'm downvoted.. for what? It's obvious that the ethnicity of the victim matters for both domestic and international perception, all you need to do is look at a bit of media coverage of reporters bemoaning that this is happening to "blue eyed, blond haired" people or in the "civilized world." There is a different standard for what sort of casualties are considered acceptable.

I downvoted you because this line of logic is deployed, I believe, by race obsessed westerners who are privately fuming that a shooting war has sidelined their culture war for a few weeks. "Don't forget about me and the things I care about!"

Just because a talking head or two makes those claims does not mean it is all of the sudden the truth. If Russia was worried about the looks of white civilian casualties, they wouldn't have invaded Ukraine. By the way, how many news reporters didn't make the claim that people only care about this because blue eyed/blonde haired people are involved?

Regardless of race, plenty of people have brought up that this is about as popular to many Russians as the US invading Canada would be.

I agree, but that is a completely different point than "The western world only cares about this conflict because the victims have blue eyes and blonde hair"

But if you compare the outrage about what was happening in Syria (or Iraq or Afghanistan) to the outrage now, we clearly are at a very different level. It can't be because the Russian are acting so much more ruthlessly now.

If you have a theory to explain a set of facts, pointing to the set of facts as an implicit justification for your theory does not logically follow.

Maybe Westerners care more about the Ukrainian situation because Ukraine was by and large a peaceful, lawful country until the war started. Do you think the western response would have been a little different if there was a pre-existing civil war in Ukraine, and Russia stepped in to try to turn the tide for one of the factions?

I don't know how to say this nicely, but you seem not to have been paying attention. There was a pre-existing war happening. Russia annexed the Krim in 2014 and there have been skirmishes in the separatists areas ever since.

Also do tell what was the existing civil war in Iraq?

The guardian had an article about some of the comments made by journalist and politicians and there is no other way then to say they are racist.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/civili...

How was the conflict between Ukraine and Russia playing out before 2 weeks ago? How was the conflict in Syria before US/Russia involvement? Would you call them comparable?

If Westerners only care about blonde hair blue eyed people, why did no one care about the Ukrainian war before 2 weeks ago?

Your link has, I think, 4 people who make a claim about why the West cares about the war. Is there a reason you put so much weight on those 4 people, but not on the thousands of other journalists covering the situation who aren't making those claims? Did you know a single one of those people before hearing their coverage of the war?

It seems like you're trying to shoe-horn in an entirely different point? How does maintaining air supremacy as a military tactic relate to mass casualties?

You can't destroy anti-aircraft guns located in civilian areas without killing civilians.

Worked well to what end exactly? They decimated the North Korean population and made an eternal enemy out of them. They fought insurgents for 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I assume that Russia doesn't want the same result in a neighbouring country.

From the article...

"That would have been "the logical and widely anticipated next step, as seen in almost every military conflict since 1938," wrote the RUSI think-tank in London"

From the development of air power theory a century ago, it's been widely held that strategic bombing of civilian targets is one of the best ways to quickly end a war. The actual failure of strategic bombing to end wars quickly every time it's been tried notwithstanding.

The Japanese surrender in WWII due to sustained strategic bombing of civilian cities without a single troop landing in mainland Japan is a clear contradiction to this take.

It's not a clear contradiction; it's one of only two cases that are arguable (the other one being NATO bombing of Serbia during the dissolution of Yugoslavia).

It's noted that it's not clear how much the atomic bombings influenced the decision to surrender, versus the near-simultaneous declaration of war by the USSR on Japan. Furthermore, by the time Japan surrendered, it was clear that Japan had already thoroughly lost. Recall that similar bombing campaigns against the UK (Battle of Britain) and Germany utter failed to bring those nations any closer to surrender.

In any case, compared to the actual theorists like Giulio Douhet who were, before World War II, arguing that attacking cities would cause the will of the nations to collapse before they fully mobilized, the actual results fell far short of the theorists.

> It's noted that it's not clear how much the atomic bombings influenced the decision to surrender,

My understanding is that communications between Hirohito and Stalin indicate that Japan was attempting to begin negotiation of a total surrender after Midway and that Truman's diary eludes to this moment. The main argument I've seen to contradict this is that they don't believe Japan wasn't actually going to accept a full surrender at this point.

We've got a sample size of one for "conflicts ended via nuclear explosions", though.

If Russia nuked Ukraine they might win the war on Ukraine, sure. Japan didn't even quit until there were two though. Would they have quit with no nukes and just firebombing?

Japan didn't surrender because of anything the US did, but because Russia declared war on them (two days after Hiroshima and a day before Nagasaki).

The US may just as well have dropped 10 more nukes and it wouldn't have changed anything. The Japanese didn't care whether it took a 1.000 bombs to destroy a city or a single one. Even more so, since they didn't know anything about the radioactive fallout and long-term effects. To them, it was just a bigger bomb.

I don't think it is just about shock and awe. It's about controlling the airspace. Controlling the airspace has advantages during conflict outside of bombing.

It's not necessarily about 'Shock and Awe' attacks on Ukrainian targets, though. They're also allowing drone and aircraft attacks on their tanks, troops, and supply chains. You would expect the Russian air force to be seeking air superiority and providing support to their troops.