“Your conclusions are wrong. Patriot and HIMARS are a huge success...”
Which is why Russian glide bombs are SMASHING the hell out of Ukrainian cities.
Can’t have it both ways.
By the way, any luck on the Kerch Bridge? LOL.
Blowing up apartment buildings is a poor use for scarce cruise missiles. These should be aimed at important infrastructure, not civilian homes.
And, unfortunately, defending them is a poor use for scarce Patriot missiles. Scarce because the US Congress wont let the US send Ukraine more, and their resupply from other sources is difficult. So Ukraine has to choose which missiles to intercept. A bitter calculation.
The tradeoff for Russian manned aircraft however is excellent.
And that is the answer to the glide bombs. Thats what all those SU34’s were doing, popping up to high altitude to give the bombs speed and range. The risk is getting detected and targeted by long range SAMs. As we see.
The USAF, btw, has much better glide bombs (like the smallest, the SDB) with more range as they are aerodynamic, and stealth (or stealthier) aircraft to drop them. And this has been so for about 20 years.
The Russians are at least 20 years behind the US in this tactic and this type of weapon system. And in the rock-paper-scissors game of aerial warfare, the US has a dozen sorts of SEAD methods to further reduce the effectiveness of SAMs, none of which it seems the Russians have managed to implement. And then there is ... Well, by now you should get my point.
The Russian glide bombs are used against targets on or near the front line, not cities, because that was the safest approach to close air support the Russians could manage. Not so safe now it seems.
I thought you meant cruise missile attacks, which did change focus this year from infrastructure to “terror”.