Here's Why Russian Bombers Are in Venezuela.

You've missed by too much a major Pentagon policy realignment to state to state warfare. Pentagon is now focused on Russian conventional state to state warfare. Pentagon is doing this because the Russian General Staff is doing exactly that. We see this currently in relation to the Azov Sea and the Russian conventional buildup at the Ukraine border, for instance. You're not doing that only for show.

From the Journal of the US Army War College in 2016 and which now dominates Pentagon military policy toward Russia...

The war in Ukraine has refocused Western attention on
Russia and its ability to project power, particularly in terms of “hy
brid warfare” through the so-called Gerasimov Doctrine. At the
same time, Russian military thinking—and actions—are rapidly
evolving. This article reflects on the increasingly prominent role of
conventional force, including the use of high intensity firepower, in
Russian war fighting capabilities, and advocates the need for a shift
in our conceptualization of Russian actions from hybrid warfare to
state mobilization.

Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) | US Army War College


US Army Chief Gen. Mark Milley has invested his past four years armoring up agile infantry brigades with armor made of new composites and he's already doubled heavy weapons range and firepower while introducing new individual weapons that revolutionize firepower accuracy, lethality, intensity. USMC has reinvented its squad tactics and it has adopted the new individual lethal weapons to go with its upgraded and daring maneuver warfare. Prototypes of an intermediate main battle tank are on the ground that have the significant weight and muscle while being agile and light enough to cross common bridges with dispersed and rapidly advancing forces (which is an Abrams limitation).

The fear in the Kremlin is the same fear that exists in Beijing and it is the US integrated Global Rapid Strike Force Gerasimov referenced in his address. If you might want to discuss Gerasimov and the 2016 election of Potus you and I can do that too thx in advance.

Tangmo said:

When Slipchenko coined the term Sixth Generation Warfare he coined a term rather than created an existing thing, i.e., reinvented the wheel. Slipchenko was in fact describing and focusing on what Israel did in 1981, i.e., create a radar path in Iraq to blast the nuclear plant under construction at Osirak and return otherwise unnoticed and unscathed. This was during the Iraq-Iran war when incoming aircraft were always spotted on the combatants radars. The Iran-Iraq war was in fact more the 2GW defensive fortifications of WW I than the swift maneuver warfare of WW II which itself was 3GW. Moreover nowhere in your alleged discussion did I say 6GW was going to defeat Russia or the US in a full scale war.


Rather I cited this by Gerasimov speaking of the USA Global Strike capacity and capability:

"As you know, the United States has already developed and implemented the concept of rapid global strike. The US military is calculated to achieve the ability to, in a few hours, deploy troops to defeat enemy targets at any point of the globe. It is envisaged [as] the introduction of a promising form of warfare – of global integrated operations. It proposes the [introduction] to any region of forces capable of joint action to defeat the enemy in a variety of operating environments. According to the [commanders], this should be a kind of blitzkrieg of the twenty-first century."

The plain and simple translation is that the US armed forces integrated, Global Rapid Strike capability has the Russian general staff scared and scrambling. US developed and has a global strike "blitzkrieg" armed force that can show up anywhere, anytime and defeat anyone.




Gerasimov's hybrid warfare was this:

When members of the 810th Naval Infantry Brigade in Crimea [Marines] took off their unit patches and moved out to seize key roads on the peninsula in February 2014, they did not become “hybrid warriors.” They were merely naval infantry without unit patches on. Is there anything hybrid about using special forces, with the support of elite infantry, to prepare the battlespace for a conventional invasion? This is standard practice for military forces around the world, to include those of the United States. If a Russian missile cruiser lowers its ensign, does it become a hybrid cruiser about to engage in a new form of naval hybrid warfare? Of course not. There is simply not much hybrid war to be found in the case of Crimea.

In late February and early March of 2014, Russia, together with vested Ukrainian oligarchs in the eastern regions, leveraged their influence to mobilize protests and advance those on the fringe of Ukraine’s politics. Throughout the conflict, Moscow sought to scare Ukraine’s government into agreeing to a federalization scheme, that would neuter its ability to move the country in a more Western direction, and result in de facto political partition of Ukraine along regional divisions. The entire affair was cheap political warfare and done in a hurry.

It was only at the end of May, when irregular warfare had run into too much resistance from Ukraine’s volunteer battalions and armed forces, that we began to see Russia backing into a hybridized approach. By August 24, the hybrid approach had demonstrably failed in the vein of previous efforts. Moscow traded it in for a conventional invasion by regular Russian units, which it had sought to avoid. The invasion in August of 2014 marked the transition to conventional war as the deciding approach, but with limited political and territorial objectives.

https://warontherocks.com/2016/03/russian-hybrid-warfare-and-other-dark-arts/


You're missing a lot in your already failed campaign to elevate Russia and leverage the US into retreat.

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TRANSLATION : He was spot on.

Any Russian Bomber will be seen and intercepted long before even getting close to the United States and is useless without bombs anyway. This silly propaganda campaign was a Joke when it started and is now just embarrassing.

tecoyah said:

Any Russian Bomber will be seen and intercepted long before even getting close to the United States and is useless without bombs anyway. This silly propaganda campaign was a Joke when it started and is now just embarrassing.

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Those things move faster than our jets can intercept and anti aircraft missiles can shoot down, hence they require missiles like the aim54 which have the range to catch up to them, but the aim54 was retired with the f-14 and it is beyond me why no one has brought them back and modified them to work with an f-15 or f-22.

Fyi they rarely use bombs in those strategic bombers, they use standoff off cruise missiles most of the time with ranges varying from a few hundred miles to 3-3.5k miles with the kh101 and 102 missile, the era of flying over their target with bombers has been long gone in strategic bombers.

beerftw said:

Those things move faster than our jets can intercept and anti aircraft missiles can shoot down, hence they require missiles like the aim54 which have the range to catch up to them, but the aim54 was retired with the f-14 and it is beyond me why no one has brought them back and modified them to work with an f-15 or f-22.

Fyi they rarely use bombs in those strategic bombers, they use standoff off cruise missiles most of the time with ranges varying from a few hundred miles to 3-3.5k miles with the kh101 and 102 missile, the era of flying over their target with bombers has been long gone in strategic bombers.

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Golly...I is ascared.

Russia is invincible :shock:

Get it here first.

Every weapons platform and system is useless against 'em. Just ask 'em cause they'll tell you so. Every time. :lamo

beerftw said:

Those things move faster than our jets can intercept and anti aircraft missiles can shoot down, hence they require missiles like the aim54 which have the range to catch up to them, but the aim54 was retired with the f-14 and it is beyond me why no one has brought them back and modified them to work with an f-15 or f-22.

Fyi they rarely use bombs in those strategic bombers, they use standoff off cruise missiles most of the time with ranges varying from a few hundred miles to 3-3.5k miles with the kh101 and 102 missile, the era of flying over their target with bombers has been long gone in strategic bombers.

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Current iterations of the much smaller and lighter AIM-120 exceed most of the performance parameters of the last iteration of the AIM-54 especially in regards to range.

PirateMk1 said:

Current iterations of the much smaller and lighter AIM-120 exceed most of the performance parameters of the last iteration of the AIM-54 especially in regards to range.

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I will admit you are correct, the large majority of the aim 120 was unable to meet the mission of the aim54, while the newest aim120d is only slightly less range than the aim54, with much less weight, the range iss essential because with a combat load even the f-15 would not catch a tu-160 since an unloaded f-15 can reach mach 2.5 governed but fully loaded for intercept their speed is much lower, as with most aircraft, this gives the tu-160 the advantage until long range mmissiles are used as missiles travel faster than jets, the aim120 for example is mach4 but needs the range still to catchup, which is why most standard missiles never worked for the role of air interception of aircraft of mach 2+

beerftw said:

I will admit you are correct, the large majority of the aim 120 was unable to meet the mission of the aim54, while the newest aim120d is only slightly less range than the aim54, with much less weight, the range iss essential because with a combat load even the f-15 would not catch a tu-160 since an unloaded f-15 can reach mach 2.5 governed but fully loaded for intercept their speed is much lower, as with most aircraft, this gives the tu-160 the advantage until long range mmissiles are used as missiles travel faster than jets, the aim120 for example is mach4 but needs the range still to catchup, which is why most standard missiles never worked for the role of air interception of aircraft of mach 2+

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The meteor series the UK developed is even nastier than the aim-120.

Russia does not have the capacity or capability to win this race or even to stay in the race without collapsing well before the finish line. The flaw is that Putin's Soviet Russia provides no lesson to Putin's post USSR Russia. Russia went bust twice in the 20th century yet Putin the KGB guy is still on self-destruct mode in the 21st one.


The Pentagon Is Quietly Developing A Next Generation Long-Range Air-To-Air Missile

The Office of the Secretary Defense (OSD) launched a two-year engineering assessment of a new long-range engagement weapon (LREW) designed with the goal of “maintaining air dominance”, according to budget documents released last March.

Analyses of the design, engineering and kill chain requirements were expected to be complete in the last fiscal year, although details are classified. “When successful, LREW will transition to multiple services,” the documents show.

The programme offers the first indication that the US military is interested in a new missile to replace or surpass the capabilities of the Raytheon AIM-120D AMRAAM.

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/a...-missile-project-emerges-in-us-budget-442816/


In 2017 SecDef Mattis put a line item in the defense budget of 2018 to provide the capability. Major Nato military forces have the British Meteor. Purtin's pursuits against superior states with superior resources are the sign of a madman. Putin does think he is Superman.

beerftw said:

the era of flying over their target with bombers has been long gone in strategic bombers.

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One caveat there. It is dead, only so long as the air-space is contested or not secure.

Taking such a bomber say to drop a load of bombs over say Afghanistan or Iraq, that would not be much of a problem. Or dropping them on rebels Syria, since the rebels have no real air defense at all.

Using them to drop bombs on say the UK or Israel? Not a good idea if they want the bomber to return at the end of the mission. Both of those potential enemies have significant air and ground based air defenses.

We have been using such tactics for 18 years now, quite successfully. Of course, the US has had air superiority from the start in Afghanistan in 2001, and what defenses Iraq had were eliminated very quickly in 2003. We rarely used them in 1990-1991 in that way, because we never had enough air superiority that we were comfortable with using conventional bombers in that manner.

tecoyah said:

Any Russian Bomber will be seen and intercepted long before even getting close to the United States and is useless without bombs anyway. This silly propaganda campaign was a Joke when it started and is now just embarrassing.

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Not really. There are any one of a thousand ways and more for a Russian bomber to enter the US largely undetected.

And one of them is rather simple, it is one they have used before. And not only that, it was even used in a rather well known movie of the Cold War.

At the start of Red Dawn, you have the iconic scene of Russian paratroops landing in the school yard. And if you read the original script, it explains this. The transports entered the US unopposed, because they were flying the route of a scheduled commercial airliner, sending the transponder code that matched that aircraft. So long as the RADAR return and flight characteristics match what is expected, a RADAR operator has no reason to suspect it is anything else (and no way to tell that it is not the expected aircraft).

And yes, they had done this before. The first airborne troops that landed in Afghanistan and seized the airport at Kabul flew in military transports, using the transponder codes of an Aeroflot airliner. The Afghans had no idea they were under attack until it was to late.

The writers of Red Dawn knew this, and used it in their movie.

Our entire defense is based upon differing levels of threat. For this threat, we use DEFCON. It ranks from 1 to 5, with 1 being nuclear war, 5 meaning no threat at all. We are pretty much always at DEFCON 4, the next to the lowest level.

At that level, we are not looking for single bombers going to make an attack. We are not sending up aircraft to look for threats 24-7. A country like Russia sending in a single bomber and saying it was a IL-76 would be a piece of cake. Because sending in a single bomber to do an attack is insanity. Sure, it would finish it's mission no problem, then set off an intercontinental nuclear war.

No, if say they launched 5 bombers, then DEFCON would increase, and more steps would be taken. CAP missions checking inbound flights, restricting the number and course of international flights entering the country, things like that.

But if Russia wanted to fly a bomber and land it right at Denver Airport, likely it would barely be noticed until it touched down. And this is not a big deal, the US could likely do the exact same thing to them if it wanted to. Say a BUFF was a Boeing 747, use a transponder code for a United Airlines flight that was grounded in the states, and simply fly the B-52 in the exact same manner (speed, elevation, climb and turn specifications, etc) and there is no way a RADAR operator would be able to tell the difference.

Maybe next time Russia does one of these kinds of flights, they can help the people out there and load it with food first. They have to be running out of rabbits in Venezuela about now.

Doc91478 said:

Here's Why Russian Bombers Are in Venezuela. And Why the U.S. Is So Angry About it​

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/worl...-so-angry-about-it/ar-BBQV0FI?ocid=spartanntp
When two of Russia’s most modern, nuclear-capable bombers landed in Venezuela earlier this week, American officials quickly took note.

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Honestly, I doubt that the US really cared. And to be honest, I really do not care that Russia and Venezuela did this.

I for one do not go around trying to interfere with what other sovereign nations do. If Russia wants to land a bomber in Mexico, or Canada wants to send troops to train with the Swiss National Guard, I really could not care less. They are their own countries, and I honestly believe that unless they are using force or threatening force that is entirely their own business.

And the same goes in return. Russia has no right to complain the if the US wants to send some forces to train with the Polish or Bolivian governments.

Now why Russia or any other nation would want to try and do some kind of meaningless military show like this with Venezuela is beyond me to be honest. They are suffering a real famine over there. Not because of crop failures, but because the government is so failed that they can not feed their own people. Their own economy has collapsed, and people are largely unable to buy food other than through barter because their money is worthless.

Think I am kidding? In 2008, the Venezuelan Bolivar was worth right around $0.50. So a single US Dollar got you 2 Bolivars.

Today? Well, today a single US dollar will get you just under 250,000 Venezuelan Bolivars. That is why the people are starving, and why they are a disaster of a nation. Nobody can buy anything, because nobody has enough money to even buy a loaf of bread.

I suggest the next time the Russians send a bomber to Venezuela, they at least load it down with some wheat first. Then their little publicity stunt will at least have done some good.

Saudi Arabia has a bigger defense budget than Russia does.

Cordelier said:

Saudi Arabia has a bigger defense budget than Russia does.

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Which is misleading.

Unlike most countries like the US and Russia, Saudi Arabia really does not have a "National Police", or anything resembling organizations in the US fulfill a similar role. Border Patrol, INS, Marshals, FBI, CIA, NSA, Coast Guard, and all the rest of what makes up "Civilian Security Agencies" in Saudi Arabia are actually part of their military.

And it makes sense, when your country is only 830k square miles, and 33 million people. Cheaper to have all "defense" agencies all fall under the same umbrella organization, and share the same budget.

Oozlefinch said:

Which is misleading.

Unlike most countries like the US and Russia, Saudi Arabia really does not have a "National Police", or anything resembling organizations in the US fulfill a similar role. Border Patrol, INS, Marshals, FBI, CIA, NSA, Coast Guard, and all the rest of what makes up "Civilian Security Agencies" in Saudi Arabia are actually part of their military.

And it makes sense, when your country is only 830k square miles, and 33 million people. Cheaper to have all "defense" agencies all fall under the same umbrella organization, and share the same budget.

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Saudi Interior Ministry spending isn't included within it's Defense Ministry spending.... neither is spending on the Saudi National Guard.

Oozlefinch said:

One caveat there. It is dead, only so long as the air-space is contested or not secure.

Taking such a bomber say to drop a load of bombs over say Afghanistan or Iraq, that would not be much of a problem. Or dropping them on rebels Syria, since the rebels have no real air defense at all.

Using them to drop bombs on say the UK or Israel? Not a good idea if they want the bomber to return at the end of the mission. Both of those potential enemies have significant air and ground based air defenses.

We have been using such tactics for 18 years now, quite successfully. Of course, the US has had air superiority from the start in Afghanistan in 2001, and what defenses Iraq had were eliminated very quickly in 2003. We rarely used them in 1990-1991 in that way, because we never had enough air superiority that we were comfortable with using conventional bombers in that manner.

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Well You know I meant in a strategic standoff sense vs nations, even russia still uses conventional bombs when they control airspace like during syria and in chechnya, as conventional bombs are cheaper. Cruise missiles just became the thing because even with something like a tu-160, it can rach mach 2 loaded, but requires it's after burners which sucks up fuel, if they went deep into enemy territory with full afterburner booking it, that 7-10k mile range might turn into a 2-3k mile range, so with conventional bombs it would end up being a one way trip.


Last time I went through old doctrines on conventional bombs with the tu-95 and the b-52 I remember reading since icbm's became a thing they were never meant for first strike, but rather to hover near enough to the territory and after the icbm strike be used to finish off what either side needed as most civilian and military infrastructure critical to either side would have already been hit. Granted I am not sure how well this doctrine works today or if it is even still doctrine.

beerftw said:

Last time I went through old doctrines on conventional bombs with the tu-95 and the b-52 I remember reading since icbm's became a thing they were never meant for first strike, but rather to hover near enough to the territory and after the icbm strike be used to finish off what either side needed as most civilian and military infrastructure critical to either side would have already been hit. Granted I am not sure how well this doctrine works today or if it is even still doctrine.

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That is pretty much correct.

They were also to be used for low priority targets, or in the event a secondary strike was needed. Until the mid 1960s, there were not enough ICBMs to be used reliably to hit all critical targets.