When I cast doubt upon that, you responded by praising Russia's 20 million in reserves - who, if you are to be believed, are champing at the bit to jump into the trenches.
Nice evasion!
(Don't want to contribute to the further meandering of this conversation away from the actual topic at hand, but: I wonder if Russia could even kit out 20 million conscripts.)
Whatever you care to say about Russia's military prowess and/or might, the facts on the ground belie your bold claims.
The combined forces of NATO are greater than Russia's already severely attrited forces, both numerically and qualitatively.
The economic power of the NATO countries exceeds that of Russia's already (due to the sanctions) hamstrung economy.
Russia has a higher tolerance than Western countries when it comes to bearing incredible levels of self-inflicted damage and demoralization - samogon' is apparently a very effective panacea - but Ukraine need only survive to prevail. For Russia, anything other than a clear win will be counted as a defeat.
Regards,
I had several replies and likely mushed points together at you. Probably a mistake on my part.
Technology points mostly at the hypersonics. These are overwhelming weapons, fully deployed and in theater. The crushing reality of them is they defy the issue of stealth. If you can manage to do a track while scan (which HAS been around a long time, then you still have to hit it, and do so with a missile of slower speed.
The more effective tracking you can do is with the on site radar augmented with AWACS input from afar. You are asking a lot of AWACS assets over Poland or Romania to frequency / encoding find the launched Patriot missile and direct to a target that is giving you only seconds to do anything. Anything at all. That means no time for IFF. No time for multiple target priority assessment, AND no time to repair whatever a low altitude drone strike did to the Patriot site 20 minutes ago.
Hypersonics are pretty serious business. We are far behind.
Example, their Zircon labeled missile is Mach 8 (that’s 6,000 miles/hr) and Khinzal KH47M2 are Mach 10 capable (about 7000 mph, not linear increase from Mach 8). At 7000 mph (which is not entirely achieved until terminal guidance) the trip from Sevastopol to Kiev is about 5 minutes, with the final 10 seconds accelerating.
We have nothing like this. We certainly can’t intercept because you might see launch over Sevastopol, but you have no idea what the target is. You can’t point all your missiles around Kiev at it and have its true impact point be some depot 40 miles south or 20 miles west or whatever. You can’t shoot soon enough because you don’t know where it is going.
But no matter. The most important issue is yes, it is hypersonic, but it is guided via integrated GLONASS and linear accelerometers/Ring Laser Gyro technology. It’s not jammable.
It has the overwhelming advantage for about 2-3 yrs before US testing is far enough along to pretend to be ready to deploy.