More on the Russian Air Force
By Via Danger Room, David Fulghum has a good post up at Ares on the Russian Air Force. Whatever prep the Army and the Navy may have conducted prior to the beginning of the war, it doesn’t appear that the planning spread to the Air Force. There was apparently no advance recon of Georgian air defenses, no plan for the suppression of the air defense network, and no systematic plan for sweeping the Georgian Air Force from the sky. Perhaps most surprising, Russia did not employ any of its anti-radiation missiles, which are designed to destroy enemy radar installations and SAM sites.
It’s curious, to say the least, that the Air Force apparently didn’t get the memo about the possibility of war against Georgia. Unfortunately, the reasons for the failure are probably so byzantine that we’ll never have a clear picture of what happened.
…in tangentially related news, Axe has a nice post (in which he cites Fulghum) regarding the dueling efforts by the USAF and the Indian Air Force to obscure the capabilities of their most advanced fighter aircraft, the F-22 and Su-30 respectively.