John Rossomando: Ukraine Needs Close Air Support

The U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II, a.k.a. “Warthog," demonstrates its capabilities at the New York Air Show at Orange County Airport, N.Y., on June 24, 2023. (Petr Svab/The Epoch Times)

Commentary

Ukraine struggles to press its offensive against Russian forces. Too much emphasis has been placed on modern Western armored vehicles such as the Leopard 2, Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, and the M1A2 Abrams tank.

No one has put adequate emphasis on airpower and tipping the balance in Ukraine’s favor. Instead of pinprick attacks using Storm Shadow missiles and HIMARS that do little to change the landscape on the battlefield, giving Ukraine air supremacy must be the objective.

Giving the Ukrainians the ability to eliminate Russian defenses from the air in conjunction with ground forces should be a key objective.

The United States and its allies need to provide the Ukrainian forces with close-in air support in the form of AH-64 Apache helicopters, Italian Mangusta, Eurocopter Tiger, and other assault platforms. The A-10 will be retired in the coming years due to aging airframes. Congress should consider selling Ukraine A-10s, and the United States should train Ukrainian pilots to fly the A-10s and use them to blow holes through Russian lines.

Current Ukrainian tactics will not give them the ability to kick the Russians off their soil.

Lessons for Ukraine are direct and immediate. Russian forces are heavily dug in along their front lines in fortified positions such that Ukrainian forces have great difficulty in breaching the fortifications.

“The best [approach] is to bypass [the frontal defenses] and hit them from the side,” a Ukrainian soldier told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). “That’s what we do: reconnaissance by force. We go in, make contact, then if they are entrenched, we pull back and try another spot. There is always some place where they will crack.”

The New York Times notes that no sooner do Ukrainian forces breach Russian minefields than the Russian defenders seed them with new mines. The stalemate continues because President Vladimir Putin refuses to withdraw and the Ukrainians lack the force structure to decisively win.

Ukraine lacks air supremacy, which dooms its effort to dislodge Russian forces from its territory. It also has a shortage of experienced pilots who can man the aircraft. Anti-aircraft missile systems such as the S-400 have longer ranges than their NATO counterparts, such as the Patriot.

Gaining air supremacy over Russia is essential for Ukraine to win.

Soviet-Era Tactics

Tactics employed by both sides in Ukraine focus around Soviet-era tactics that emphasize the primacy of artillery strikes to support advancing armor and infantry. The Ukrainian army will continue to fail on the battlefield as long as it continues using Soviet tactics that were discredited decades ago.

Sure, Ukraine has 40,000 Western-trained soldiers; however, if they’re deployed using failed tactics, they will go nowhere. Defense One notes that the Ukrainian army has baked in Soviet tactics at the corps level. This means the Ukrainians, like their Russian enemies, are top-heavy and don’t give adequate emphasis on lower-level initiative or airpower.

American advisers want to help the Ukrainians transition to a decentralized way of doing things that emphasizes greater initiative among officers at more junior grades.

“Soldiers complained of Soviet-style leaders who provided inadequate training. In one instance [professor Will] Reno heard about, combat engineers learning de-mining techniques were told to use pot lids as mock mines. They were then told to practice their skills by miming defusing the pot-lids,” Defense One said in an April article.

“The soldiers instead taught themselves how to work as sappers, but couldn’t get certified by the military because the training wasn’t official, he said. Several Ukrainian soldiers Reno spoke with complained that individuals who did complete official courses would be certified, but not actually competent in their assigned specialties.”

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy should demand the resignation of every general who was brought up in the Soviet system.

Training among Ukraine’s forces is uneven. Some units have Western training and doctrine. Others do not. Some units have minimal training. The Ukrainian army isn’t a first-rate force. It’s holding its own against the Russians but is incapable of attaining sufficient overmatch against the Russians to win outright at this point.

Need for Air Superiority

Hype that Ukraine will magically kick the Russians out of its occupied territory without airpower and the ability to airdrop soldiers behind Russian lines is silliness. Since 1939 no army has been kicked out of defensive positions without the attacking army first gaining air superiority.

Ukrainian propagandists say it took over a month to breakout out from the Normandy beachhead in 1944, but they forget that the Allies gained air superiority over the Germans before that happened.

Ukraine will not be successful until adequate attention is placed on reforming Ukraine’s military and on increasing the offensive role of Ukrainian airpower against Russia. This means giving the Ukrainians more modern close-air support in the form of tank killers like the A-10 and Apache and the ability to take down Russian air defenses. The A-10 is in a league of its own that Ukraine’s Su-25s can’t match.

“The U.S. Army got it very much right before the 1991 Gulf War. Its AirLand Battle doctrine, adopted in 1982, anticipated fast-moving operations by ground forces supported by air forces using precision-guided munitions. The U.S. Army had been planning to fight such a conflict on the plains of Europe against the Red Army, but it proved ideally suited for fighting the Soviet-equipped Iraqi Army in the deserts of Arabia. The result was one of the most lopsided conflicts in modern military history,” Washington Post columnist Max Boot recalled last November.

A look at the 1991 Persian Gulf War shows that coalition forces faced a similarly dug-in Iraqi army that deployed many of the same equipment that the Russian occupation forces in Ukraine. Coalition forces gained air supremacy over the Iraqis that Ukraine simply doesn’t have over its Russian foes.

Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf had the luxury of hundreds of miles of open desert and the lack of serious Iraqi defenses in the deep desert and simply swung a left hook and hit the Iraqis from behind. Iraqi defenders were shellshocked by B-52 strikes and surrendered as they were overrun. Assessments after the war found that Iraqis were most terrified of B-52s and A-10s.

Get air superiority and give the Ukrainians the ability to put thousands of airborne troops behind Russian lines to hit them from behind.

Ukraine will not win without a serious revamping of its force structure and strategy. History shows that only airpower can throw out an entrenched defender. The faster Ukraine gets air superiority, the sooner it will be until the war ends.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.