War Changing Patriots Arrive in Ukraine
“Do you know how to visualize a dream,” asks Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister
PATRIOT air defense systems made in the United States have arrived in Ukraine. There is no information about how many systems are in Ukraine, but the odds look reasonable for all four promised systems to be there.
Earlier this week, the Germans listed the PATRIOT systems as delivered on their federal government website.
“Do you know how to visualize a dream? We must tell about it to the world and give it life!. Today, our beautiful Ukrainian sky becomes more secure because Patriot air defense systems have arrived in Ukraine,” Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, wrote in a tweet.
Reznikov thanked Americans, Germans, and Dutch people, but he did not disclose how many systems are present in Ukraine and when they arrived.
When it comes to air-defense, nothing comes close to Patriots , which is why Ukraine always dreamed of having it. In addition to being unique, battle-tested, continuously improved and well stocked, it is very expensive, a single battery costs more than a billion dollars and each missile costs about four million dollars.
It seems the cost is well worth it.
The impact of Patriots on the Battlefield
The Patriot is a game changer in the Ukrainian conflict since it changes the rules of engagement. Ukraine previously had no means of stopping ballistic missiles fired by Russia, but now they can.
A single Patriot battery placed near Zaporizhzhia can cover nearly the entire Ukrainian lands occupied by Russia in the South and parts of eastern Ukraine as well. In addition to protecting each other, multiple batteries will also deny the Russian air force the opportunity to dictate battle terms.
The Russian S-300 was the farthest range (150 kms) air-defense system Ukraine had until now. However, the allies are running out of ammunition. With a range of 40 kilometers, the western-made NASAMS are the next on the list.
The Patriots expand the operational flexibility of Ukraine’s air defenses. Ukrainian air defense systems are more effective against aerial targets such as aircraft and cruise missiles. Conversely, the Patriot is better at engaging ballistic missiles and stop the fighter jets from getting closer to their targets.
Moreover, because the west has provided Ukraine with multiple systems, it is extremely difficult for Russia to target and kill the Patriot batteries.
Patriots, in theory, are mobile. But it is very difficult to keep moving them around because of their large size. “A PATRIOT battery has six major components: a power plant [two vehicle-mounted 150 kilo watt (KW) generators], radar set, engagement control station, launcher stations, antenna mast group, and interceptor missiles (PAC-2s and PAC-3s)”.
Using a shoot and scoot strategy will reduce the Patriots’ protective power. Rather, Ukraine will use all its air defense systems to work as a cohesive unit, protecting each other while maintaining control over its skies.
Patriots are battle-tested
Patriot’s scale of deployment and battlefield experience are among its biggest advantages. The integrated air and defense missile system is being used by 18 countries. According to Raytheon:
“Since it was first fielded, Patriot has been used by five nations in more than 250 combat engagements against manned and unmanned aircraft, cruise missiles, and tactical ballistic missiles. Since January of 2015, Patriot has intercepted more than 150 ballistic missiles in combat operations around the world; more than 90 of those intercepts involved the low-cost Raytheon Missiles & Defense-made Guidance Enhanced Missile family of surface-to-air missiles.
Those engagements were possible because Patriot is built on a foundation of more than 3,000 ground tests and over 1,400 flight tests.
Each and every time a Patriot is tested or live fired, engineers uncover new ways to further improve or enhance the system. The improvements are necessary because the threat is constantly changing and becoming more sophisticated”.
Each intercept and every failure provides data for improving algorithms, which in turn improves the whole system.
The Importance of Air-Defense
Russia keeps moving from one defeat to another because Ukraine reduced the war to a ground game by taking Russia’s air power out of the equation. A small power with less than 70 fighter jets was able to silence a large power with more than 700 fighter jets, missiles, and a strong naval force.
Ukraine’s air defenses knocked the goliath off his perch. A year of war has almost depleted Ukraine’s air-defense arsenal. Ukraine’s air-defense stocks were depleted by Russia’s calculated attack on civilian targets using cheap Iranian drones.
As a response, the west provided Ukraine with a variety of weapons systems. Until now, Ukraine did not have a system that can replace its dwindling S-300 missile defense system with a 150 km range. If this issue had gone unaddressed, Russia would have re-introduced its air force in the Ukraine war.
- Patriots have corrected this looming imbalance.
- In addition, the allies have enough stock of the PAC-2 and PAC-3 missiles used by Patriot systems.
- Patriots are widely used around the world, which has led to a well-developed supply chain.
Established Production Chain: “Lockheed Martin has steadily increased production numbers of PAC-3 MSE since achieving a full rate production decision in 2018, currently producing more than 300 PAC-3 MSEs each year and expecting to increase to 500 PAC-3 MSEs”.
COMLOG, a 50:50 joint venture of MBDA and Raytheon, based in Germany, “ maintains, repairs and modernizes PATRIOT PAC-2 family missiles in Europe”.
Allied forces already have hundreds of Patriot missiles on hand. Combined with the established production chain for manufacturing PAC-2 and PAC-3 missiles, should keep Patriots in Ukraine busy for quite some time.
→Ukrainians won’t be concerned with procurement as much as protecting the weapons system.
Why Russia Badly Needs its Air-Force
It is impossible to call the Russian military a professional army. I am not talking about the brutal war crimes committed by Putin’s army or the kidnapping of children. Specifically, I am referring to the training soldiers undergo before joining the military.
Can someone become a marine in two weeks, hop on the helicopter, fly into Abbottabad, and kill the world’s number one terrorist?
Untrained soldiers might not even witness the helicopter take off!
In order to be a soldier, you need intensive training, combat experience, the right gear, and an insatiable desire to serve. Without any of the qualities listed above, a group of men cannot be called an army. This group needs a name. This Russian army is worse trained than even terrorist organizations.
In the Second World War, the Soviets fielded nearly 80,000 troops for the defense of Crimea, now they don’t even have half of that capacity to protect southern Ukraine. This Russian army is now entirely dependent on the physical barriers to stop the Ukrainian army from breaching them and racing to the rear section.
Russia badly needs air-cover to have a chance to stay in the fight.
After Ukrainians kept bringing down the Russian fighter jets at an alarming rate during the early stages of the war, Putin pulled back the force. There are still over 600 aircrafts cooling their wheels in Russian hangars. Putin would love to bring them back, and he will, when things go badly during the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
However, I am not sure that it is going to work due to the following reasons.
The Russian Air-Force Doctrine:
Russia has probably lost more than 50,000 soldiers in Bakhmut and a whole lot more than that number would have been injured. It is a tiny town of no more than 41.6 square kilometers.
Why did this happen?
Why did Russia not carpet bomb the Ukrainian positions around Bakhmut from the sky?
Because they did not have carpet bombs and they never manufactured enough precision guided munitions to be used by their air-force. Unlike the western forces that start the war with a primary objective to take full control of the sky above the war zone, Russia uses its air-force as an extension of its ground forces. The Russian air-force is designed to behave like an artillery unit from the sky.
This forces the Russian pilots to get closer to their target zone, exposing themselves to ground based air-defenses and MANPADS. The accuracy of the western systems then come into play taking the multi-million dollar air-crafts at an alarming rate.
We never witnessed this issue because Russia never engaged in a large scale war where it had to use its ground forces as well as air-force at the same time. Hence we assumed they will use the same western air-power doctrine.
Russia’s shortage of precision-guided munitions
For this one, we don’t need a lot of details.
If Russia had precision guided weapons in sufficient quantities, they would have decimated the Ukrainian power grid in the winter, plunged Ukraine into darkness, and declared victory by now. Due to a lack of precision weapons, Russia had to buy hundreds of drones from Iran and use them as cover for their missiles. It is no surprise that hundreds of Russian aircraft are still cooling their wheels in various Russian bases.
The balance favors Ukraine once again
Putin’s army furiously worked it’s way to deplete Ukrainian air-defenses. And it was succeeding, as the leaked U.S intelligence documents show. Ukraine was expected to run out of its air defense arsenals by mid May. It would have completely upended Ukraine’s counter-offensive plans.
The arrival of Patriots has fixed this problem to a large extent.
The Royal United Services Institute says Russia’s “operational commanders have very little practical experience of how to plan, brief and coordinate complex air operations involving tens or hundreds of assets in a high-threat air environment”.
Yes.
They can’t.
Now they have to plan for the world’s best air-defense system.
They won’t.
This war will remain a ground war for the near term and that might be enough for Ukraine to break the back of the Russian army.
