The Russians Sent Their Slow Attack Jets On Virtual Suicide Runs

The six Russian air force brigades and regiments flying the twin-rotor Kamov Ka-52 attack helicopter probably have suffered the highest casualty rate of any Russian flying units in the air war over Ukraine. The Ukrainians have destroyed at least a quarter of the units’ combined inventory of around 100 Ka-52s.

The three regiments and single independent squadron flying the Sukhoi Su-25M attack jet are a close second. They’ve written off at least 23 of their 110 jets. Not quite a quarter, but nearly so.

There’s one main reason the Su-25 force is getting wrecked: the Ukrainian army has thousands of man-portable air-defense systems, including at least 1,400 of the latest American-made Stingers. There are so many Ukrainian missileers along the flight path of a typical Russian attack sortie that Russian pilots sometimes run into several missile traps in the course of a single sortie.

Worse, Russian planners have assigned Su-25 pilots to missions they’re unlikely to survive. Including the most dangerous task in all of aerial warfare: the suppression of enemy air-defenses, or SEAD, which requires pilots to fly directly at enemy missile batteries.

It’s a mission most air forces assign to their best supersonic jets firing their best guided missiles. Incredibly, the Russians sent in subsonic Su-25s firing unguided rockets.

Analysts Justin Bronk, Nick Reynolds and Jack Watling from the London-based Royal United Services Institute detailed the Su-25 force’s tragic plight in their definitive study of the first phase of the Ukraine air war.

Roughly speaking, the Su-25 was the Soviet Union’s answer to the United States’ Fairchild Republic A-10 tank-killer. The single-seat Su-25 with its widely-space twin engines, long thick wing and armored cockpit is meant to fly low and slow with a heavy load of rockets and bombs in order directly to support troops on the ground.

It was a dangerous mission back in 1975, when the Su-25 first flew. It’s even more dangerous now, after 50 years of advancements in air-defenses. The proliferation of shoulder-fired MANPADS convinced the U.S. Air Force its A-10s no longer were survivable; only Congressional action has kept the A-10 in service this last decade.

MANPADS are at least as dangerous to the Su-25—if not more so, considering the superior quality of American countermeasures.

There are so many Ukrainian MANPADS along the front lines that the Su-25s often avoid flying into Ukrainian territory in order to conduct direct attacks on Ukrainian forces. Instead, their pilots stick close to Russian territory and conduct “loft attacks,” angling up their jets’ noses and firing unguided rockets in high ballistic arcs that maximize their range.

The problem is, the rockets in this mode still travel no farther than two or three miles—and are wildly inaccurate.

A Stinger MANPADS can range as far as three miles, so Su-25 pilots executing loft attacks still are vulnerable. The good news, for an Su-25 pilot, is that his infrared flares work pretty well against a Stinger or similar missile. The bad news is that an Su-25 packs only so many flares.

“Defensive aids suites have performed consistently well against most MANPADS,” Bronk, Reynolds and Watling noted. “The losses have come from repeat exposure in areas with high concentrations of MANPADS teams, rather than a high probability of [a] kill during individual engagements.”

The Su-25 force’s normal mission exposes pilots and airframes to extreme danger. In a choice that reflects stupidity, desperation or callousness—or all three—the Kremlin also has tasked the force with suppressing Ukrainian air-defenses. Bear in mind, this is a mission the Pentagon never has assigned to the A-10.

The best Western air forces cultivate special communities for the suppression of enemy air-defenses, or SEAD. The German and Italian air forces maintain dedicated SEAD squadrons with special Panavia Tornado bombers. The U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy respectively assign the mission to specialized Lockheed Martin F-16 and Boeing EA-18G squadrons.

All four air arms equip their SEAD units with Raytheon AGM-88 anti-radiation missiles, which can “remember” where an enemy missile battery is, even after the battery switches off its radar.

The Russian air force, by contrast, this spring kludged together an ad hoc SEAD system combining fast jets and slow jets—the Su-25s—firing an array of much dumber weapons. It started with Sukhoi Su-30s, armed with Tactical Missiles Corporation Kh-31P or Raduga Kh-58 anti-radiation missiles, flying high in order to bait Ukrainian missile batteries into turning on their radars.

If the Ukrainians took the bait, the Su-30s would fire their missiles then light their afterburners and flee. The idea wasn’t actually to knock out the batteries with the Kh-31Ps and Kh-58s—although that occasionally did happen. Rather, the expectation was that the Ukrainian crews, detecting the incoming missiles, would switch off their radars. That’s when Russian Su-25s would attack with unguided rockets.

But the Ukrainians layered their air-defenses. To reach a Buk or Osa missile battery, a flight of Su-25s would have to fly past a whole lot of MANPADS crews. It was suicide. The Su-25 pilots “frequently paid for their bold tactics by being hit with MANPADS,” Bronk, Reynolds and Watling wrote. And “none of the low-level Su-25 [SEAD] rocket attacks was successful.”

Nine months of flying through thick Ukrainian air-defenses has taken a toll on the Su-25 regiments—and not just in terms of destroyed airplanes and dead pilots. The regiments are tired and stressed. And now they’re getting sloppy. Several Su-25s have crashed owing to pilot error or incomplete maintenance.

The Russian Su-25 force eventually could break. It’s hard to say exactly when, but it’s worth noting that the demands on the regiments aren’t letting up. As twin Ukrainian counteroffensives eat into Russian gains in eastern and southern Ukraine, the Kremlin has thrown the Su-25 force into its desperate—and so far failing—effort to slow the Ukrainian advances.