Fumble

h/t WRSA

Matt Bracken, whom we generally agree with, has misdiagnosed badly in his analysis of the latest Russian tactic, the Iranian-supplied Shahed-136 drone swarms.

He gets most of it right, until we get to effects, both individual, and collective.

It's anything but hard to intercept, as Ukraine has been swatting down 80-85% of them every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. Their success is limited, but not nil, because when Russia launches five of them, that means one gets through, and when they launch 100 of them, 20 get through. With a fairly small and limited-effectiveness warhead. Their saving grace is that they're enormously cheaper than heavier Russian rockets, so unlike their own heavy rocket artillery, Russia can afford to waste 80-85 to get 15-20 through. Provided all you wanted to do was scare people and hit soft targets, which is what terrorists do. But we're talking about Putin, so we repeat ourself.

Their effect, to date, is negligible. Zelensky himself noted outages in 30% of their power grid from the totality of all Russian strikes. But that's temporary, unless they're hitting items that can't be repaired or replaced, which is the difference between breaking windows, and actually demolishing a building.

To date in world history, only two bombardment campaigns have had any strategic effect in any war, and only one of those effects lasted beyond three years' time.

Bombing London in WWII, twice, including both conventional bombers, and the V-1 and V-2 campaigns, did nothing but piss off the British people, stiffen their resistance, and have them resolve to accept nothing from Germany but dismemberment and unconditional surrender. Epic fail.

Bombing Germany, even obliterating Dresden with a conventionally-created firestorm, didn't get the Germans to quit until Russia marched into Berlin and held the Nazi leadership at bayonet-point. Fail. Japan was wholesale bombed into oblivion as well, and it gained us nothing in the long run. Fail.

Linebacker II in 1972 convinced North Vietnam to return to peace talks, but that just gave them a couple of years' respite to re-arm, wait until the US was navel-gazing and war-weary, then wait until Watergate and near impeachment in Washington left them an open door to invade and conquer the South in 1975, barely two years later. Half-credit.

The only bombing campaign that ever "worked" for any strategic value of that word, was performed by the 509th Composite Bombardment Group under Col. Paul Tibbetts, in two pivotal missions. One over Hiroshima, and the second over Nagasaki, in August of 1945. Perhaps you've read about it. Strategic win.

Russia can't bomb tactical formations in Kherson or the Donbas, because they're too busy retreating, which is why those offensives keep rolling along, with the ultimate goal of dislodging Russia from Ukrainian territory altogether, including the increasingly probable loss of the entire Crimea, in perpetuity, by the end of this year.

So all that leaves them is non-mobile soft civilian targets in Ukraine, and their success rate is down around 15-20%. And as fast as they blow targets up, crews work to fix them.

Thus, when you're trying five attempts to get one small hit, they're simply a terror weapon, and the Ukrainian citizenry isn't afraid of the Russian wolf snarling any more.

And the offensives in the east and south continue completely unimpeded and unaffected by Russia bombing civilians.

The multi-billion dollar question is, where the F**k is the Soviet Air Farce, which has been almost entirely MIA since February 25th. If Russia really could bomb anything effectively, they would be doing that, rather than using second-hand Iranian-made drones (because they literally can't even make those drones themselves.) They're that hard-up.

Flash back to 9/11, and tell the class how those bombings in America convinced the US to get out of the Middle East, mind our own business, and roll over and play dead.

That's where Putin is, and there's no amount of lipstick that will make this pig into a prom queen.