Russian Air Power: An OVERHYPED Threat?

hello everybody it's chris from military aviation history and for this video i have a very simple question considering air power and the strength of especially soviet air power during the cold war where does russia stand right now now of course in recent events we've seen russia using their air force or now aerospace forces since they renamed their service and also repurposed their service in certain aspects where do they stand at the moment what are their capabilities what are maybe their shortcomings and should western countries and nato countries perhaps be concerned with certain developments that are happening over there in russia to help answer this question i have invited justin bronk who is a research fellow for air power and technology at the royal united services institute and he has recently also released the whitehall report on russian and chinese air capabilities and i just want to deep dive with him into this topic and ask him a couple of questions of where russia stands right now with the aerospace forces all right justin thanks for joining us today and i think just to set the scene here uh my first question would be you know during the cold war the soviet union they obviously operated a large and very strong air force which resulted now in russia sort of inheriting this reputation one might say so before we go into the technical aspects could you maybe so lay out some of the the background of how russian air power has developed ever since the the end of the cold war russian air power as you say inherited a huge kind of baseline from uh not just the russian parts of the soviet union but they also sort of repossessed as it were a lot of assets uh from former soviet client states but of course what they then suffered was uh a pretty much a lost decade or more more recently the last decade and a half where there was essentially almost no money for modernization there was very little money for flying so most of the crews lost their proficiency you you ended up with this tiny little core of basically test pilots and a few very experienced unit leaders or folk who for example were able to do some work with the the manufacturers with sequoia with meg all with things like tourist companies you know taking people to the edge of space just to keep the flight currency up um so you had a huge decline in in kind of relative technology levels compared to the west for about 10 to 12 years and then you also had a huge decline in terms of organizational capacity and particularly pilot capacity around kind of 2012 particularly after the georgia war in 2008 there were a number of reforms put in the the vvs now vks so um aerospace forces um as they're called performed extremely badly in 2008 and this this basically kind of set in in train a load of reforms which accelerated after 2014 and the confrontation with the west that kind of really ignited after the seizure of crimea by russia in 2014 and the war in donbass um against ukraine so since then we've kind of seen a large-scale introduction of things that externally look quite similar to to a lot of what we're used to from the kind of late soviet period so they still fly things that look like mig-29s and sukhoi 27s but you you have a lot of for example twin seat multi-role sukhoi 30 and variants which are based off the 27 ub which is the the twin seat trainer of the old flanker and we also have of course the the sukhoi 34 the fullback which is being brought in in increasing numbers and they're now looking at a modernization as well to replace the the su-24 the the fencer with a sweet sweet wing in effect the soviet tornado equivalent the russian air force now looks pretty similar outwardly to a non-specialist but they've essentially completed a lot of that modernization effort that they've been undertaking for the last five to ten years they're equipped largely with what we would consider you know advanced fourth or perhaps you know four and a half generation um in western parliament's combat aircraft across the board and now that you're you're already starting to talk sort of about the comparison with the west where does the vks currently rank and sort of technical competency in in some ways it's very difficult to to assess because of course we would only find that out for sure if if there was actually a flash point which we or rather hope there isn't certainly the the vks has benefited enormously from its extensive combat experience in syria as well as in in donbass to a limited degree although there the the kind of implausible deniability strategy that moscow has pursued around direct russian military involvement as in with badged military units in uh luhansk and donetsk has meant that the air forces had a relatively limited role but in syria you now have essentially a situation where most pilots uh of of fixed wing and indeed rotary assets in the russian air space forces have combat experience admittedly that combat experiences is mostly flying around dropping mostly unguided munitions on mostly civilian areas but it's it's a similar sort of combat experience to what a lot of western air forces have spent the last 10 15 years doing um and because syria was a contested environment in the sense that it was at least there were tense encounters on a regular basis between american-led coalition aircraft and russian aircraft but of course turkish aircraft specifically and the russian air force including the shoot down of asuka 24. so even though there wasn't kind of active combat operations against the peer adversary or a state adversary it was at least a complex and congested environment so crews have gained a lot of benefit from from operating there and the russian air force has has greatly improved um particularly its multi-role capabilities um since it intervened in syria in 2015. and what's sort of the the greatest divide would you say between what the russians have at the moment and what the west has in at the moment maybe even you just said the crews the russian crews have gained experience but how about technical aspects with the equipment that they're actually using the majority of russian crews are not really multi-role capable in the way that we would think of it in most western air forces i able to perform well across a range of precision guided munitions types for different attack mission sets as well as the air-to-air combat set um albeit not as not as proficient as you know a community like the american f-15 or f-22 community that spends a huge that should be f-15 charlie of course but uh that spend the vast majority of their time doing exclusively air-to-air most russian pilots have had experience dropping munitions but they are predominantly unguided uh which is a different skill set but also a more kind of niche skill set because uh it doesn't for example it involves you know standoff attacks with things like storm shadow or you know jasmine type standoff weapons which require a different set of competencies um as well as the russian air force generally doesn't use targeting pods so specific um attack types like the the sukhoi 34 and sukhoi 24 have kind of retractable equivalents to a targeting pod but they only face forward they're of much lower resolution less zoom level and the majority of multi-role fighters yes they're multi-role in the sense that they can conduct ground attack operations but they don't have the kind of targeting pod and and the the regular use of precision guided munitions that you would associate with something like an f-16 unit in the usa for you know the raf tornado and then typhoon fleet now it's more of a kind of swing role if you like you know they might go off and do an unguided attack sortie but then that's yeah as a fighter pilot if they're in a if they're in a a 35 unit a super 35 unit that would be a relatively unusual and a specific tasking and they'd normally be doing just combat air patrol and equally if you look at the the full backs and the fences so the 24s the 34s and of course the frogfits the 25s they almost exclusively do ground attack um so again they tend to be more specialized which again you see to a degree in the u.s air force because it by dint of size they they can specialize more and how does this sort of this technical proficiency in these these competencies how does that translate then into russia's ability to actually operate on the field and against what sort of targets and in what sort of environment so generally the russian air force has an enormously capable set of capabilities for attacking fixed pre-identified targets so things like buildings or depots ports air bases anything like that as well as fixed positions on a set of front lines for example um they're very capable of of hitting those with either standoff or or direct attack munitions of various kinds and they're pretty capable in the air-to-air role albeit they don't really have much representative combat experience or training um because the lack of that uh access to something like a red flag um with that level of of adversary simulation as well as multinational multilaterals multilateral kind of participation is something that the russians can't really replicate they try with some of those ipad exercises and things in terms of joint exercises but they're really not um the same kind of fidelity or intensity as you see with things like red flag within their roles the russians are pretty capable where they really would struggle is if they were tasked to for example conduct large-scale attacks against organic battlefield targets so targets that you don't know where exactly they are whether maybe they're moving or they're you know concealed or they're moving around where western pilots have a lot of experience often in for example you know using targeting pods to to kind of find identify and then attack difficult hidden targets or you know ones that may not be exactly where they're briefed um as well as you know being talked on quickly to pop-up targets the ground attack you know ground troops might for example be being attacked because the lack of target pods that's something that most russian multi-role pilots just don't really have any way to do um if you look at something like the the the sukhoi 30 mk 2 or sm series they're very similar they're twin seaters because russian precision guided munitions are generally more reliant on for example tv guidance uh optical guidance or indeed radar designations so you are kind of that there's a higher workload um associated with both identifying the target and also with guiding the weapon onto it particularly with things like tv guided munitions but also because you don't have a targeting pod you're essentially restricted to kind of acquisition within a front cone of that weapon and with a relatively restricted range all of which kind of compresses the task of both flying the airplane and getting the weapon on target and making sure that it's on the right target before you release if you imagine you're you have to kind of do that when you're at least within about 30 degrees on off flying directly towards it um whereas with the targeting pod you can kind of stand off further and you can sit in an orbit and you know take your time more and so if you're looking for that battlefield interdiction role that's something which russia doesn't have such a good analogue for but again it doesn't really need it because if you're looking at the pier um kind of scenario that the russian forces trained for so uh you know a conflict with the nato uh force for example because there's so much firepower and of course so many tanks and so many armored vehicles they don't have the same imperative to get large-scale responsive organic tactical air support in that than western forces do and i'm going to ask you specifically about that as well but before i do that i just wanted to go into the this mythical realm of stealth and you know lower observables and we of course have the russians coming out with a system there how competitive is then you know what the russians are pushing out compared to what the west has essentially the 57 fixes or at least has the potential to fix almost all the key drawbacks of the flanker series of aircraft as their superiority machines so the flanker the original sukhoi 27 is very very much an analog of the the american f-15 it shares almost exactly the same strengths and weaknesses in the sense that it has excellent performance relatively long range on internal fuel it can fly fast and high and therefore its missiles will go further than something that has less performance but the sort of the drawbacks are it has an enormous radar cross section it has an enormous visual and infrared cross section so it will almost always be detected from a long way away comparative to most competitors um and it also because the the the russians haven't um so far mastered uh what are called active electronically scanned array uh type radars or aesa's yes it can detect nato fighters that are not very stealthy from hundreds of kilometers away but it will also be showing those nato fighters exactly where that sukhoi is from even further away the radar range equation means that because energy for a radar to detect you the energy has to go from the radar to the target and then back whereas to detect a radar that is scanning you it only has to reach you if you look at the sukhoi 57 the felon while it's not nearly as stealthy as something like an f-22 or an f-35 particularly from angles other than the front and you know one of the reasons for this is is i mean a just the shape itself and and you know russian relative inexperience with designing very low observable aircraft it's basically their first serious try but also they've gone for for example things like having these these leading edge control surfaces on the leading edge root extensions which even further increase the already incredible maneuverability arguably to not much point apart from being better in air shows um because it was already super maneuverable with thrust vectoring and even better maneuverability than a flanker and anyone who's seen one of those at an air show knows how incredible the agility is within visual range already um but but the actuators and things and and kind of the inherent gaps that you always have to have with a control surface further increase the radar cross-section exactly where you don't want it on the front frontal hemisphere the infrared scan and track is also quite poorly placed from an rcs point of view as are things like the ram air intakes on the base of the the the canted stabilizers so all in all it's basically a lot less visible to radar than a flanker and probably significantly less so than something even like a eurofighter or a rafale which both have significant radar cross-section reduction features but it isn't true very low observability like something like an f-35 or an f-22 and so with with the performance of modern radars where even true vlo aircraft are actually being detectable at you know significant ranges kind of 20 30 kilometers maybe under some scenarios you know that the level of stealth that the 57 will give you and the time when it's properly operational in numbers is probably not hugely useful but what it does is fix a lot of those inherent drawbacks of the flanker so against anyone other than an f22 or an f35 it's massively more competitive fantastic so um considering that these limitations you already started to talk a little bit earlier about how the vkas sort of fits into russian military doctrine and russian operations um we talked a little bit about what the russians are going good at the moment and what their limitations are but how does this actually fit into the bigger picture you know how do these technical limitations and these technical capabilities um reflect the vks ability to perform within the russian military the task that is meant to carry out the primary task for the vks is as it has always been uh under the vvs before as well um you know the defense of russian airspace um and in that role essentially the the the interceptors are actually secondary and importance to the ground-based sounds of the the integrated air defense network most of which are also owned by the the vks um so they're part of the same organization the art the ground forces the ground troops have uh their own strategic sounds and their own mobile sims as well but um the the integrated air defense system is kind of the ground-based elements including the kind of long-range over the horizon detection which is probably better than almost any other country russia has consistently invested in meter and decimeter band very long wave radar which in practical terms i mean it's optimized for ballistic missile detection for for nuclear attack warning but what it gives them is the ability to for example tell that a strike package is taking off from air bases in let's say southern england or central england like somewhere like fairford where the u.s bombers stage out of and your or is roughly kind of you know there are there are aircraft building up over the north sea let's say it doesn't get you anything close to a tracking solution but it does give you very important early warning a very useful warning about where to focus your sensors your more your high resolution sensors and then you have a whole range of multi-static um as well as as well as single radar arrays so multi-static um is a technique where you employ different radars often in different frequencies um the basic relate relationship there is that the higher frequency you go the lower range you will get for a given power but the better resolution you have for example the better it is at guiding a missile um whereas the the if you stay in the higher higher wavelengths the the the the lower frequency bands you can go a lot further um and you can potentially get better detection against things like small stealth aircraft but you can't necessarily guide a weapon in what you can do is guide an interceptor or perhaps an active weapon that can take over guidance once it gets close enough if you have a multi-static array you can try and look at an object from different angles with multiple different systems and ideally in different frequencies what that does is that for stealth aircraft that there's no optimal direction to point or at least it it's not it's difficult to always keep your your kind of least visible uh aspect towards the threat because the threat is looking at you from multiple angles especially the closer you get so so this this system of radars both mobile and fixed and all these things guide in a whole range of very long range down to very short-range missiles um so you always hear about the s400 there's also the s 300 v4 um these are kind of have 400 kilometer class missiles they also have a range of smaller missiles that do kind of you know 270 120 70 kilometer brackets as well this is the big challenge for western air forces because those long-range sams can kind of push a threat envelope well into nato territory without ever leaving russian soil particularly from kaliningrad and then the vks in terms of the airborne elements kind of sits behind this and and therefore yes while it's not nearly competitive if you were to take aircraft to aircraft with the best that that the west has to offer i mean you know a sukhoi 35 is still incredibly dangerous um to anything that isn't a fully fledged stealth fighter you know a typhoon four ship or you know a rafale four ship or something like that with meteor can probably handle a a sukhoi 35 for ship um with the the rough average crews on each side without too much difficulty in a vacuum but these russian aircraft will actually be operating in tandem with and you know sort of behind and around this incredibly dangerous dense integrated air defense network um so they're a sort of secondary aspect there but of course the west will struggle to deal with the ground defenses alone let alone with all of these modern things as well and then you have things like the foxhound huge interceptor that really doesn't have an analog anywhere else anymore with an absolutely enormous radar in these long-range missiles that sits at sort of 60 000 feet 100 kilometers behind the front lines and can still menace things like low-flying attack helicopters cruise missiles or any kind of strike package that comes in within that context the vks can still do a huge amount of damage to for example nato forward troops who will not have regular close air support at least for the initial couple of weeks of any conflict because that close air support will have to wait for the suppression of enemy air defenses task to be at least significantly progressed so the vks can do a huge amount of damage before the the iadz gets rolled back if they're willing to take losses they do have the capacity to fight through and put significant amounts of firepower on the relatively few military runways on which nato you know eastern firepower is based um they do of course still have the the strategic bombers um so the the blackjacks the bears the the backfires they're modernizing and re-manufacturing in fact the the the um the tu-160 so the the enormous blackjack it's a beautiful thing um and the also the backfires that the tu-22m3 m's i think they're now m3m russia does this they just add more designations just like the americans um but essentially because those platforms actually rely on standoff missile attacks whether against american carriers or against things like air bases um usually with nuclear weapons in a great power conflict with a thousand kilometers standoff often the properties of the aircraft themselves don't make a huge amount of difference to the role just like the b-52 it's why the b-52 is still part of the american nuclear triad it's the same reason the russians still use the tu-95 ultimately if you're using standoff missiles with that sort of range yeah a good electronic warfare suite and you're kind of halfway there anyway um so yeah that's kind of where the weakest it's at least in my estimation what are sort of the the major developments in russia at the moment in the introduction we talked about sort of the reforms that were started in the early 2010s uh what what's going on at the moment and are we seeing any sort of big changes in the future with uh with the vks and russian aerospace so at the moment one of the interesting things that's going on in the russian aircraft business is that mikhail has kind of finally been absorbed by what's now the united aircraft corporation and effectively is now donating expertise in parts to uh you know in terms of engineers and kind of facilities to what is kind of suhoy and albert name so basically mccoyan is kind of done as a fighter manufacturer at this point um and you're seeing this consolidation around sequoia um you're you're seeing still a continued buy rate of both the sukhoi 35s and you're seeing continued production of the sukhoi 34 in its modernized 34m variant um and modernization of the original 34s which are continuing to to finally replace this the 24 uh the fences in in in the kind of what we would term fifth or next generation kind of area there's an order for 76 so uh 57s that's obviously not enough even if they get all of them and and for now the funding that's been announced doesn't cover most of that order um if if you assume that the funding announced covers the order then they cost something like 30 million dollars a plane which is completely absurd but so essentially assuming they get 76 that will still be about 10 of the fighter inventory by 2030. um so they're they're going to be very much a a you know modernized flanker derivatives dominated air force um but what they are doing is pushing ahead with what's called the su-70 the hodnik b which is their um unmanned combat aerial vehicle or ucav um concept now a ucav essentially is distinct from what what most people refer to when they say as drone uh which which i insist on trying to say it should be remotely piloted air system as the raf says remotely piloted air systems like the reaper predator or the german heron that they're buying um essentially all you're doing with is taking a light aircraft type airframe and putting the crew on the ground with a radio link otherwise it's flown pretty much like a regular aircraft you've got a joystick you've got a weapon system operator you've got a sensor ball operator the problem with doing that is that you're then dependent in on real-time connectivity either through line-of-sight radio or through satellite communication links and that means that if you go up against any any nation that has even a semi-respectable electronic warfare capability the iranians are a great example then it's just not going to work you cannot use unmanned systems against that sort of opponent the americans developed something called the rq-170 which is a now acknowledged very stealthy remotely piloted spy drone and even though the iranians had no radar even close to capable of tracking it they were able to detect its presence because of the command link the satellite communications link and in 2011 they actually captured one they were able to override the command link and get it to land intact and then let the russians and the chinese have a good look at it which is partly why the russians and the chinese are now developing stealth the uav is quite so fast but anyway it's a good illustration of how even if you're not worried about russia as in or china as in like the really big threats you just can't rely on remote piloting for for drones that are or you can uavs however you want to say it for warfare and for now the russian oconic is still remotely piloted um so even though it's a semi stealthy airframe they have a lot of work to do there it's a difficult thing to do to make a working stealthy airframe where you have all the sensors and weapons and everything you need in a clean airframe that is a low observable and also doesn't overheat a big problem is thermal management you can't just put like ports or ducts in because that would ruin the stealth the russians arguably are going to struggle to to get the levels of automation required to make this work but they're doctrinally talking about having it they're calling it the hunter it's it's not just for strikes which you know a strike against a fixed target arguably a cruise missile has been doing that for years as an autonomous system for decades getting a ucav out to go and strike a pre-planned target like an airbase and then come back well fine that's not too difficult but they're talking about having it go and hunt down things like tankers a wax you know basically do the offensive counter air roll yeah um alongside the sukhoi 57 that requires a very much higher level of autonomy um and it'll be quite interesting to see whether the russians are able to do this um because if they are um whether they cut corners ethically or legally as we would see it or not it offers them a way to to to generate combat mass that doesn't rely on one of the things they've always found very difficult which is sustaining a pool of combat capable pilots um because for a pilot to be combat capable they have to have hundreds of flight hours a year a couple of hundred at least and you know russian pilots at the moment struggle to get 120. um nato air forces are struggling too but not to that degree um whereas with a ucav because it has to be so autonomous arguably all you really have to do is crank them out of the factory and then unless your opponent really wants to test them in a shooting war they have to treat them as a genuine threat regardless of whether you could train crews for them because you know they just need operators they are they are click and fly rather than remotely fly so i think if russia can prove the s70 sg70 they will go quite heavily into that technology but there are some barriers to them doing fantastic i think you you pick the interest of quite a few viewers by now and in this subject you have a publication on this yourself i'm also going to be linking it in the description below but what sort of recommendation would you give to people um if they want to branch out a little bit and do more reading about what's going on recently in russia there's basically some of the best open source stuff that you can find on russia in the english language at least uh is by an analyst called pyotr budovsky much better than me he he can speak russian so he can actually read the sources originally rather than relying on um you know external translations and you know analysis of the airframes and things and then operations um so piotro bratovsky's books uh which are published through harpier uh are fantastic on this stuff uh so that'll be my kind of first port of call um i've certainly got a copy of most of his stuff on my desk at work so he's excellent so i hope all of you enjoyed that if you did like subscribe the whole youtube combo jumbo you know what's up but fundamentally let me know what you thought about this topic put the comment down below if you agree with some of the assessments maybe you want to add anything to the discussion or if you disagree on some points and hey perhaps some of you are russians and you can give you us your insights as well that would be interesting to read as always make sure to check also the description below for more helpful links for example some of the uh publications talked about in this video as well as justin wrong's twitter page and you can also find links on how to support the channel either via patreon or channel memberships if that is something you would like to do as always i wish all of you a great day and see you in the sky

Channel: Military Aviation History

Views: 381,318

Rating: 4.8056812 out of 5

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Id: lf1uQF38ZeA

Length: 28min 49sec (1729 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Mudhen69]

It was a very high quality video. Binkov did a similar video a few months ago on it and it’s really interesting learning about the state the VKS is in

[u/Deadluss]

Wasn't Su-35 beaten by Rafale in Egyptian Airforce trails?

[u/__Geg__]

Can anyone drop the bullet points? I cant listen to 30 min for a while.

[u/Knife_Kirby]

I choose to believe the Russian propaganda from Combat Approved.

[u/Su-27_dot_Com]

This guy has one of the best military history channels on the web.

[u/Cephelopodia]

Good find! Thanks for that one.

[u/nealius]

This was really enlightening, and helped explain why Russia's IADS seems so much more complex and robust than NATO defense systems.

[u/Corsair8X]

Justin Bronk is a really good guy and if you’re on Twitter well worth a follow because he mentions interesting stuff.

[u/FirstDagger]

Sukhoi's Su-75 "Checkmate" also finally fixes Russian jets always having two engines.