Could NATO Pilots Volunteer to Create a No-Fly Zone?

NATO won’t risk war with Russia, given Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling. But is there a workaround? Not just donating fighter jets and tank killers to Ukraine. What if NATO pilots could join Ukraine’s International Brigade? And take jets, ground crews, equipment and supplies with them?

That has left Ukraine with donations of not enough ground-to-ground and ground-to-air missiles and drones with air-to-ground missiles, and whatever its Air Forces have had since before open hostilities broke out. That has been enough to inflict major damage on Russian forces, most notably on the stalled 40-mile convoy, and some Russian aircraft.

But What If?

In country where high roads intersect, join hands with your allies.

Sunzi, The Art of War

In Ukraine, the highways, railroads, air routes, gas pipelines, and human ties all intersect. All of the EU and NATO and many more countries are Ukraine’s allies. So how can they best join hands?

This was a good start, but we need much more.

• Let us imagine NATO officially approving its pilots and ground crew members volunteering with Ukraine’s International Brigade.
• Let us further imagine NATO officially approving them taking their planes, truckloads of ground equipment, and supplies with them, as donations or loans or leases.

Good.

Except that it officially isn’t happening.

Yet.

You might have something to say about that.

NATO Will Not Be Lending Fighter Jets to Ukraine

This is probably the right decision, as much as it is a frustrating one: “NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday that European Union members will not lend fighter jets to the war in Ukraine, after days of mixed messages from officials across Europe.”

God knows how clearly Vladimir Putin is seeing anything these days, but if Ukrainian pilots are traveling to Poland or Slovakia and then flying into Ukrainian airspace to fight Russian jets or bomb Russian targets… then the Russian military would declare those Polish or Slovakian air bases are now legitimate military targets – and then the war between NATO and Russia ensues.

So said Putin today.

I do wonder if a NATO country could theoretically land their jets near the Ukrainian border, have Ukrainian pilots taxi across the border line, and then take off from Ukrainian soil.

In The End Ukraine Will Not Receive Any NATO Fighter Jet

Not even one of +70 claimed fighter jets will be transferred by NATO to the Ukrainian Air Force.

But. If.

Now, we don’t have to imagine what comes next. We have seen this movie before.

Russia has obsolete, disastrously maintained military hardware of every kind, subjected to the vast Russian kleptocracy for decades.

1. Ukraine’s new fighter jets shoot down Putin’s old fighter jets, while Putin continues to hide his most up-to-date aircraft.
2. Without Russian air cover, Ukraine can take out their missile batteries and radars from the air, and gain complete air superiority.
3. Then the tank killers take out Putin’s tanks in the cities and on the roads everywhere. This is not sport. Those tanks are sitting ducks, unable to go forward or backward.
4. Similarly for artillery batteries, starting with those actively shelling cities.
5. Similarly for any ships firing on targets on land.
6. Then Ukraine can attack Russian supplies, especially hyper-explosive gasoline and ammunition, at leisure.
7. We should leave the Russian food trucks alone, and advertise to the Russian soldiers that we are doing so because we don’t hate them. They are victims, too.
8. Meanwhile Ukraine can relieve the sieges of its cities and major power plants.

There are roads which must not be followed, armies which must be not attacked, towns which must not be besieged, positions which must not be contested, commands of the sovereign which must not be obeyed.

When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.

The general, unable to control his irritation, will launch his men to the assault like swarming ants, with the result that one-third of his men are slain, while the town still remains untaken.  Such are the disastrous effects of a siege.

Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity.  Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.

Sunzi, The Art of War

Good man, Sunzi. He had an unequaled ability to state what should be blindingly obvious to any functioning military mind, but isn’t.

Data

And if the words of the Master Strategist are not enough, let facts be submitted to a candid world. (H/T Thomas Jefferson)

Where is the Russian Air Force? Experts break down why they might be hiding

 It is clear to us that Russia is losing aircraft and helicopters at a damaging rate.

According to Flight Global’s 2022 World Air Forces directory, Russia has 1,511 combat aircraft, while Ukraine has a mere 98. But a week into the war, the Russian air force is yet to steamroll Ukraine’s the way Massicot and others thought.

[T]he roughly 300 modern combat aircraft which the [Russian air force] positioned within easy range of the main contact zones in northern, eastern and southern Ukraine appear to have largely stayed on the ground throughout the first four days of fighting.

wrote airpower expert Justin Bronk.

Russian ground troops don’t seem to be coordinating with their air defense systems, leaving convoys open to air attacks from the Turkish-made TB-2 drones used by Ukraine.

Given how much Russian forces have suffered from the lack of air cover makes it difficult to understand why so much Russian airpower remains on the sidelines. However, Bronk had a few guesses: a limited number of precision-guided munitions; poor coordination with ground-based air defenses; low number of flying hours; and perhaps a hesitancy not to disabuse notions of foreign observers that the Russian air force has modernized and professionalized in recent years.

An addendum to the lack of PGMs [Precision Guided Munitions] could be the fact that stand-off weapons such as cruise and ballistic missiles are proving ineffective against Ukrainian targets, the Atlantic Council noted.

One possible explanation could be that the Russians are worried about shooting down their own planes. Russian forces writ large have put on what Michael Kofman, CNA’s director of Russian studies, called a “ridiculous and incompetent” display of poor coordination, logistics, and tactics. It stands to reason that Russian leaders would not want to risk expensive aircraft and pilots in that mess of miscommunication. But still, Bronk asked, couldn’t the Russian military issue a blanket order for their surface-to-air missiles to hold fire while Russian aircraft flew large-scale bombing missions?

Perhaps the answer is that Russian pilots are not up to the task, Bronk proposed. Official Russian military statements suggest that Russian pilots fly a bit under 100 hours a year, compared to U.S. Air Force pilots who fly around 180-240 hours a year, Bronk said. Without enough training, pilots might struggle to master the hundreds of new jets Russia has acquired in recent years.

“Leadership may be hesitant to commit to large-scale combat operations which would show up the gap between external perceptions and the reality of their capabilities,” Bronk noted.

Morale among Russian air and ground forces is disastrously low, while on the Ukrainian side, morale is unbelievably high. Certainly Putin can’t believe it.