These failures have thwarted Russian efforts to overcome Ukraine’s air defenses and enable significant breakthroughs on the ground, Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said.
And “should the Russian military succeed in a limited land invasion, it would immediately establish surface-to-air missile (SAM) coverage over any captured territory,” Can Kasapoğlu, a Hudson Institute nonresident senior fellow, said recently.
Experts and Western military officers have said that in such a fight, the US and its allies, even with fleets of fifth-generation stealth fighter jets, likely would find it difficult to establish the same level of air dominance they’ve largely had since the end of World War II.
The conflict in Ukraine has heavily stressed stockpiles of precision-guided munitions, but Russia has supplemented its arsenal with Iranian-made and homemade one-way attack drones, particularly for strikes on cities and critical infrastructure.
The ubiquity of drones and long-range missiles suggests that advancing armor columns will need to move forward with shields of electronic warfare and air defenses, assets that are even more important if these forces can’t count on friendly aircraft overhead.
Specifically, NATO needs to boost its air-defense capabilities along the alliance’s eastern flank, where member states have said they could be the first ones targeted by Russia should it succeed in Ukraine, and place a greater focus on force dispersal to make aircraft and their accompanying support assets less vulnerable to attacks.
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