How Is Ukraine's Air Force Still Operational?

NATO doctrine for a generation now has been based on the assumption that Russia would use its abundant missiles to take out western airfields and air defense systems. 

When Russia's Ukraine invasion became imminent, NATO started feeding warnings to Ukraine, which have continued. As a result, Ukraine have moved their planes and other assets frequently - including using roads such as the one in the picture - enabling them to husband their resources. JL 

Abhirup Sengupta reports in Quora

At the beginning most were under the impression that Ukrainian Airforce would soon cease to exist. (But) Ukraine retained the bulk of their fleet. This is  due to NATO intelligence sharing and flawed Russian doctrine based on weapons with questionable accuracy and poor capability. Ukrainian Airforce got a heads-up from the US about Russian missile strikes in the opening hours. This allowed Ukraine to move its fleet to safer locations and a major reason why Russia’s pre-emptive strikes didn’t produce the desired results. Since then the Intelligence sharing with Ukraine have intensified (allowing) Ukraine frequently moving their aircraft

This is one of the most interesting aspect of this conflict. At the beginning most were under the impression that Ukrainian Airforce would soon cease to exist. Well, it turns out that Ukraine did in fact retain the bulk of their fleet. This is likely due to a combination of NATO intelligence sharing and flawed Russian doctrine based on weapons with questionable accuracy and poor ISR capability.

You see NATO and in particular the US have been facing a serious threat of Tactical Ballistic missiles (TBM) on their air bases from decades now. A large arsenal of TBMs like Iskander-M is Russia’s counter to vastly more capable Western Air Power. The idea is to launch a large number of TBMs on NATO bases in the opening hours of a conflict in order to significantly disrupt their air operations in the region. The US faces the exact threat in the Pacific theatre from China which over the years have built a large arsenal of Short and Medium-range ballistic missiles to hit US bases in South China Sea to all the way to Guam. Over the last decade much of the US Air Combat doctrine is built around operating amidst that threat.

The idea is to have a robust Early Warning system in place and to be able to keep rotating aircraft between bases. A damaged air base can be repaired rather quickly but that’s not the case with damaged aircraft on the ground. So there’s an emphasis on decentralising the fleet and having the ability to operate from smaller airstrips with minimum support. Last year the USAF had an exercise in the Pacific where it deployed a small 70-man crew on a tiny airstrip in Tinian, located 90 km from Guam. The crew got the base ready to refuel, rearm and carry out flight-line maintenance on F-15s in 3 hours after landing on the airstrip.[1] This is what the USAF calls Agile Combat Employment which allows it to forward deploy a portion of the fleet to small airstrips in the region on a short notice.

In a major conflict this ensures that your fleet will survive and remain operational even when your home base is hit. Countries in the Baltics have a number of makeshift runways made out of highways which can be used to keep the aircraft moving based on the Intelligence while also keeping them operationally viable.

Finish F/A-18C/D Hornets practicing a quick landing, refuelling and take-off from a highway

So right at the beginning of this invasion Ukrainian Airforce got a heads-up from the US about Russian missile strikes in the opening hours. This allowed Ukraine to move a lot of its fleet to safer locations and a major reason why Russia’s pre-emptive strike didn’t produce the desired results. Since then the Intelligence sharing with Ukraine have only intensified. Based on this Intelligence in addition to their own Ukraine have been frequently moving their aircraft from one base to another on a regular interval including using smaller airfields. This kind of flexibility is something Ukrainian Airforce have been training since 2014 as a Ukrainian Mig-29 pilot by the callsign ‘Juice’ explained in an Interview with Drive.

“Of course, we use that during our training: low-altitude flights, using alternative airfields, etc.” Above all, the training since 2014 has emphasized flexible tactics and keeping aircraft on the move, reducing the chance of the enemy catching them on the ground as part of their air interdiction efforts.

While hopping frequently from one airfield to another is now a regular part of air force operations, Juice said that, so far, these distributed operations have been limited to runways and airstrips rather than highways. Although the air force has practiced operations from roads in the past, there are currently sufficient alternative airbases to remove this particular requirement.

– Drive: Ukrainian MiG-29 Pilot’s Front-Line Account Of The Air War Against Russia

Keeping the aircraft on the move significantly reduces the odds of them being targeted by Russian TBMs or even cruise missiles. There’s a video of a Ukrainian Mig-29 taking off an airfield just moments before an artillery strike.

This kind of mobility is what’s keeping Ukrainian Airforce operational. In addition to this there have been a number of problems with Russian strategy. The bulk of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian Airforce is from TBMs like Iskander-M which doesn’t appear to live up to the claimed accuracy claims. Take a look at this missile strike on a Ukrainian airfield.

Image source: Planet Labs (February 24).

Of the 6 or so missiles only 2 managed to actually hit a runway (an auxiliary taxiway nonetheless). You don’t even need to repair this airfield before resuming operations… Part of this is just physical limitations of a Tactical ballistic missile when using conventional warheads and part of it is just Russian components unable to match desired performance.

Even in cases where Ukrainian aircraft were served on a silver plater the missile strikes were poorly executed. This is the aftermath of a missile strike on an airfield in Mykolaiv, Southern Ukraine. Several Su-25 ground-attack aircraft were destroyed by Russian strike but Mig-29 parked next to them were left intact.

Planet Labs, February 24.

In fact the bulk of aircraft including a number of Transporters and Su-24M remained unharmed. Such screwups helped save a number of Ukrainian aircraft that were grounded during the initial days of Russian invasion and allowed Ukraine to use some of the damaged airfields.

This is not really surprising as TBMs and to a degree even cruise missiles are quite limited in their ability to fully destroying airfields. In order to be successful you need to dedicate a large number of missiles on an airfield, and after a while it just becomes impractical to do so against more than a handful of airfields. This is why your missile strike needs to be supported by a large air campaign with your strike platforms targeting remaining assets in those airfields while expanding the scope of initial attack – failure to do so will give the adversary an opportunity to keep its Airforce operational.

This is something Russia failed to do because of their inability to achieve Air Superiority over Ukraine; ultimately forcing it to rely on the same TBMs and cruise missiles used in the initial attack and of course, the advancement made by their ground forces.

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The Gulf War, Serbia, Iraq and every major conflict before them involved large air strikes in the aftermath of initial cruise missile attacks. The idea that you can eliminate enemy Airforce solely from ballistic and cruise missiles is wishful thinking. The only silver lining for Russia is that Ukraine doesn’t have any aircraft to seriously challenge them in the air or perform large scale precision bombing. Of course, this has not stopped Ukrainian Airforce to continue fighting, especially in ground-attack role but ultimately they’re fairly limited in what they can do. Had Ukraine operated NATO aircraft this would have been an entirely different game.

This conflict proved that keeping your aircraft on the move can indeed save them from being targeted on the ground even in case of massive missile strikes (Russia had launched more than 2,500 cruise & ballistic missiles till last month). It has been a valuable experience for Western Airforces to be able to test some of their tactics.