To Protect The Glide Bombers, Ukrainian Pilots Fight Like Russians
One fighter stays high, another goes low
This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.
The Ukrainian air force is borrowing a key tactic from the Russian air force. A tactic that could become a lot more effective once the Ukrainian air arm begins deploying its new Swedish-made Saab JAS-39 Gripen fighters.
Ukrainian warplanes are now attacking in pairs, according to the Telegram channel The Commander Speaks, which appears to have close ties to the Russian air force.
One of the jets will fly low with a payload of precision glide bombs, aiming to bombard Russian forces in or near the gray zone. A second jet will fly nearby, but higher. Its job is to protect the bomber by flinging an air-to-air missile at any Russian jet that tries to intervene in the bombing.
“The tactics remain the same,” The Commander Speaks wrote. “A single aircraft approaches aggressively, pulls up into a climb and releases its payload.” This low-to-high flight profile is typical of both Russian and Ukrainian jets trying to avoid enemy air defenses during ingress while still maximizing the kinetic energy, and thus range and impact, of their satellite-guided glide bombs at the moment of release.
Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.
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