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Implications of the Introduction and Use of Hypersonic Missile Warfare into Russian President Putin's War Against Ukraine
(Edit rewrite: Start of “Hypersonic” Aerial Warfare in Ukraine)
On March 19, 2022, a hypersonic ballistic missile (with a velocity 10 times the speed of sound, https://www.news18.com/news/india/what-are-hypersonic-missiles-russia-ukraine-kizhal-india-china-us-4890584.html), alternatively, and at will on the part of the Putin regime in Russia, capable of carrying and delivering a nuclear warhead strike, launched from within Russia and struck and wreaked considerable destruction and casualties on its Ukrainian military-weapons-storage-base target in far western Ukraine, demonstrating in war to Ukraine, NATO, the USA and world, that it has a supply of supremely fast, powerful airborne weapons, that cannot be intercepted and destroyed in the air by counterparts' antimissile, anti-rocket and antiaircraft weapons, and which can outrace their counter-weapons by multiple magnitudes of speed and strike their targets undeterred.
Moreover, the said demonstrated Russian hypersonic missile attack, by its demonstrated target-striking accuracy and unrivaled speed, indicates with high or highest probability that it alone, in ample supply, could easily defeat an attempted NATO-imposed no-fly zone over Ukraine. Its belated use in this war may have been because that when the war began there were a few prototypes of it, as well as of hypersonic fighter jets, one of which in recent months the Russian government had had publicly flown for all the world to witness, in inventory that in the interim may have been produced in sufficient numbers to be deployed in this war. Several successful, unintercepted and so undestroyed by the opponent armed forces, actual-war Russian hypersonic missile attacks on militarily valuable and most protected sites of Russia's Ukrainian opponent armed forces would clear the way for Russian hypersonic fighter jet to be used in the war without an evident risk of their being shot down and their engineering being studied and appropriated by the opponent armed forces and their NATO nations supporters. Its use also may have served as an actual war arena test of the opposition’s ability to intercept this hypersonic aerial weapon’s technology for both the missiles and the obviously more expensive fighter jets before deploying the fighter jets in the Ukrainian war. The psychological effect of Russia’s war-arena demonstrated hypersonic aerial-war technology would also tend to secure and strengthen the close military-economic relationship recently established between Russia and the Peoples Republic of China.
Consonant with the Putin power cabal’s prior, recent rhetoric referencing the possible first use of nuclear weapons or war by the Russian armed forces, this hypersonic missile strike demonstration conveys to the concerned parties that their arsenals would be incapable of deterring a massive Russian nuclear first strike on multiple fronts and targets and that by comparison their nuclear retaliatory strikes would be slow in response -- for instance, a flight and strike time of 6 minutes for an intercontinental hypersonic nuclear warhead missile launched from Russia would entail as much as a 60-minute (one-hour) return or retaliatory supersonic velocity-level-1 (or Mach 1 level of Mach 1 thru Mach 4 supersonic levels of speed) nuclear-missile strike from the USA, or thereabouts less time if USA military GPS satellite and radar detected and verified the Russian hypersonic nuclear-warhead missile attacks early in their attack flight. (According to the technical literature on hypersonic weapons, hypersonic missiles and aircraft actually range in speed, depending on their speed-calibrated engineering, from five to up to ten times the speed of sound.) The mere act of the Putin regime mentioning nuclear weapons in the context of its frustrated and embarrassingly hindered war of aggression against Ukraine is a telling sign and indicator that the Putin regime is desperate to not lose but to win its war of aggression against Ukraine at pyrrhic, or any, risk or cost, and that it has a comparatively short psychological fuse, being a comparatively lower threshold than other nuclear-weapons armed nations, in succumbing to or leaping into a nevertheless mutually suicidal nuclear war.
While Putin's imperial war against Ukraine smashes Ukraine's cities and towns to rubble, and their people to lives and deaths of hell on Earth, it also pummels and crumbles his homeland Russia to a globally social and utter economic shambles and to the status of an overwhelmingly isolated pariah nation-state in the community of nations of humanity as the expense for doing the former. I’m sorry to say it, but this situation appears to ensue from and be a case of a 69 ½-year-old Czar Vlad the Mad, [bounced] off of his rocker, with whom the world must cope and is grappling.
Incidentally, the greater the critical level in nuclear strike-time advantage one adversarial apex nuclear weapons nation-state power has over its rival also apex adversarial nuclear weapons nation-state power, the greater would be the temptation and incentive for the advantaged power to strike against its disadvantaged rival power. As a result of this critical or dangerous imbalance in strike-time capability between the apex nuclear-weapons rival powers, the more uncomfortable and insecure would be the disadvantaged rival or rivals with the critical level of advantage of its or their advantaged adversary and the more motivated it or they would be to achieve (catch up with) or exceed the critical level in strike-time advantage of its or their advantaged adversary, as well as the more it or they would be disposed to make a fatal strategic mistake in protecting itself or themselves from the advantage and danger of the advantaged adversary, with this situation being a basis for a constant spiral of competition for strike-time advantage or parity, and for the increasing susceptibility to the making of fatal defensive and offensive strategic mistakes, between the rival nuclear-weapons powers. Ultimately, sooner or later, this state of affairs is inclined to push us beyond the brink to the apocalyptic thermonuclear-war slugfest flashpoint of the irrevocable end of our species Homo sapiens and our civilizations and history, perhaps, in its wake, emitting from our planet Earth an enigmatic EMP FRB cosmic memorial of us to and throughout outer space and spacetime.
Part II
There is no mystery as to what Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted and wants from Ukraine
There is no mystery as to what Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted and wants from Ukraine in his war on Ukraine. He wanted an unconditional surrender and as an alternative wants a face-saving negotiated conditional surrender of Ukraine with his new war strategy replacing his failed initial war strategy to militarily conquer Ukraine. He initially intended a surprise blitzkrieg ground, air and naval big-guns-and-air armed forces war of all-out, coordinated-and-concerted, attack on Ukraine, a top-secret surprise to his unwittingly so positioned and provisioned armed forces and their commanders, under the ruse and deceived, wrong impression that they were conducting ordinary military field exercises, until the moment of the order to action was given, meant to defeat and capture Ukraine’s major cities and central government capital, capitol building/s and leaders within mere days, like in circa 5 days or less. He and his regime's power cabal overconfidently and blunderingly provisioned their ground armed forces for that war strategy and time frame, which failed terribly and has resulted in a logistical nightmare for the invasionary Russian ground armed forces and great losses of their ground troops and major weaponry, as well as the death in combat of seven of their ground-forces generals as of March 27, 2022, a war launched against Ukraine by the Russian Putin regime on February 24, 2022. As a result, Putin and his war cabal have resorted to primarily a war of airborne rocket, missile and artillery attacks, from a distance and largely out of harm's way, in which their military has the overwhelming generally destructive advantage, attacking and destroying key Ukrainian cities and towns (ringed by Russian ground forces) and their habitability and population-survival infrastructure, with Russian territory not subject to Ukrainian retaliation, to terrorize the Ukrainian population and national government into anguishing and petitioning Russian war negotiators in war disengagement talks with them for relief from the air bombing and artillery attacks and offering to surrender to them for relief and peace. Initially, Putin and his war cabal wanted, by rapid all-out military conquest, to seize, own and control the whole of Ukraine, as a vassal nation-state to Russia, in a super-secret, surprise blitzkrieg war against Ukraine. Now, in having learned that a conquest of Ukraine is pyrrhic in personnel, materiel, financial, economic and time costs, as well as doubtful altogether, via ground war, they are likely amenable to negotiating an end to their invasionary war of aggression on and conquest of Ukraine with the withdrawal of their ground armed forces in exchange for Ukraine’s national government ceding pockets of Ukraine to Russia that Putin and his cabal have politically and/or militarily claimed since and following 2014.
Those pockets of Ukrainian territory ceded by Ukraine to the Russian Putin regime in war disengagement and peace negotiations as well as those surrendered to and captured by the Russian armed forces, and their boss the Russian Putin regime, would be and become Russian political-military homestead foothold-stronghold full-scale infrastructural and services bases, by repair per locality as selectively politically-militarily relevant and to the extent needed, for Russian invader-occupier troops in and on the territory of Ukraine. Thusly, they would be usable by the Russian armed forces and the Russian Putin Regime in a continuation of untrustworthy Putin’s war of conquest of the whole of Ukraine, following the conclusion of the negotiations and implementation of their terms of settlement, and renewed immediately or interrupted and deferred for a short time thereafter.
A solution to the logistics and internal NATO-diplomatic issues with the donation of MiG-29 fighter jets that the NATO-member government of Poland has offered to Ukraine, under Russian ground-troops invasion and aerial attack siege, might be for Ukrainian air force pilots to travel to or be airlifted to Poland to take possession of the MiGs in Poland and fly them to appropriate locations in Ukraine for them to land and permanently base there, and then go on combat missions. Though Ukraine's defender armed forces have been able to blunt the advances and territorial conquests of Ukraine by the Russian invader-occupier ground armed forces, and efficiently destroy airborne, attack Russian fighter jets and helicopters and keep them out of Ukrainian skies, nonetheless the military-aggressor Russian naval, air and ground armed forces, some within Ukraine and others outside of and bordering on Ukraine, have been able militarily to control the sky over Ukraine, from nondirect-contact positions, internal to Ukraine, in relation to Ukrainian armed forces, and at a distance and out of harm's way to themselves from outside of but adjacent to Ukraine, by bombing, shelling and blasting the cities and towns of Ukraine to smithereens from the sky. These donation jet fighters from Poland to Ukraine would enable the Ukrainian defense forces to attack and snuff out the Russian military rocket, missile, and mortar-shelling launch and artillery sites, armaments and craft within and off the coast of Ukraine that are wreaking this destruction and mortal terror on Ukrainian cities and towns, and the populations of them, and, together with their antiaircraft weapons, Ukrainians would have considerable control over much of the Russian aggressor-invader warfare attacks and destruction and mortal terror of Ukrainian civilian society and centers of civilization from the sky.
III
Words to the Wise and Unwise Concerning Normal Russian Military Effectiveness, for which Its Failed Ground War Against Ukraine Is an Exception
I have been reading and listening to the analyses and judgments expressed in the news media of retired and active duty US military generals, an admiral, and colonels on the aggressor-invader Russian versus defender Ukrainian military-to-military combat in Ukraine and the dramatic failure of the comprehensively much more weaponry-advantaged Russian ground armed forces and air force (with regard to the latter’s attack aircraft) in Ukraine, as opposed to their indirect military warfare strategy of Russian ground troops encircling, blockading and besieging Ukrainian cities and towns and these being structurally demolished by continuous day-and-night aerial bombardment by Russian ground and remote-aircraft rocket and missile strikes as well as by such mortar shelling and artillery gunfire, shifting direct Russian military warfare to sociopolitical-military warfare against key Ukrainian population, production and strategic-location centers for the purpose of socially and psychologically pressuring by mortal terror the population and national governing leadership of Ukraine into capitulating to the Russian Putin regime for relief from the demolition by primarily multilevel aerial ballistics warfare of Ukraine's key cities and towns and that warfare’s horrors to their populations. Condensing their analyses and insights on the failure of the military-resources overly advantaged aggressor-invader Russian armed forces over the defender Ukrainian armed forces in direct combat, their convergent conclusion is that the Russian armed forces' failure was the result of: 1., the overconfidence of the Russian political-military leadership, 2., its underestimation of the will to resist of the Ukrainian populace, national leadership and armed forces, 3., as well as of the military-power ability of the Ukrainian armed forces to resist, the planned and intended Russian armed forces' rapid invasion of , attack on and conquest of Ukraine, 4., and the Russian Putin regime’s top military leadership budgeting the logistics of the planned Russian ground offensive for an intended short war of less than a week, exposing their mobile, encampment, occupier ground forces to the potential depredations of an unforeseen and unprepared-for protracted war and consequentially related food, weather, sanitation, hygiene, health and morale and discipline vulnerabilities and problems (for a war exceeding the expected victory time frame by indeterminately too long, relative to normal extra logistics budgeting for a modest extension in the planned victory time frame). This is to say, the Russian Putin regime and its military leadership did not commission an outsider or such team to do a rigorous and thorough devil's-advocate or Murphy's-Law critique and did not itself do a so self-critique of its primary war plan and consider and prepare for worst-case scenarios with it. Their conclusion for the Russian Putin regime's direct military-to-military failure in Ukraine summed up to hubris, lack of caution and superficial, or in Jeff Leong’s words, of my university days, “half-baked,” war planning of the invasion of, attack on and occupation of Ukraine on the part of the Russian Putin regime and the military leadership of the Russian armed forces. The Russian Putin regime’s shift to a warfare strategy of demolition of key Ukrainian cities and towns, and the physical and existential terrorization of the populations in them, by aerial bombardment and blasting from, for the most part, a safe or relatively safe distance, is a shift to a corrected warfare Plan B in replacement of its failed military-to-politico-military warfare Plan A. It is the Russian Putin regime’s Plan B warfare strategy against Ukraine that is in effect now, and, as the Putin regime reports, it is doing what it is supposed to do according to plan.
Words to the Wise and Unwise Concerning Normal Russian Military Effectiveness, for which Its Failed Ground War Against Ukraine Is an Exception
I have been reading and listening to the analyses and judgments expressed in the news media of retired and active duty US military generals, an admiral, and colonels on the aggressor-invader Russian versus defender Ukrainian military-to-military combat in Ukraine and the dramatic failure of the comprehensively much more weaponry-advantaged Russian ground armed forces and air force (with regard to the latter’s attack aircraft) in Ukraine, as opposed to their indirect military warfare strategy of Russian ground troops encircling, blockading and besieging Ukrainian cities and towns and these being structurally demolished by continuous day-and-night aerial bombardment by Russian ground and remote-aircraft rocket and missile strikes as well as by such mortar shelling and artillery gunfire, shifting direct Russian military warfare to sociopolitical-military warfare against key Ukrainian population, production and strategic-location centers for the purpose of socially and psychologically pressuring by mortal terror the population and national governing leadership of Ukraine into capitulating to the Russian Putin regime for relief from the demolition by primarily multilevel aerial ballistics warfare of Ukraine's key cities and towns and that warfare’s horrors to their populations. Condensing their analyses and insights on the failure of the military-resources overly advantaged aggressor-invader Russian armed forces over the defender Ukrainian armed forces in direct combat, their convergent conclusion is that the Russian armed forces' failure was the result of: 1., the overconfidence of the Russian political-military leadership, 2., its underestimation of the will to resist of the Ukrainian populace, national leadership and armed forces, 3., as well as of the military-power ability of the Ukrainian armed forces to resist, the planned and intended Russian armed forces' rapid invasion of , attack on and conquest of Ukraine, 4., and the Russian Putin regime’s top military leadership budgeting the logistics of the planned Russian ground offensive for an intended short war of less than a week, exposing their mobile, encampment, occupier ground forces to the potential depredations of an unforeseen and unprepared-for protracted war and consequentially related food, weather, sanitation, hygiene, health and morale and discipline vulnerabilities and problems (for a war exceeding the expected victory time frame by indeterminately too long, relative to normal extra logistics budgeting for a modest extension in the planned victory time frame). This is to say, the Russian Putin regime and its military leadership did not commission an outsider or such team to do a rigorous and thorough devil's-advocate or Murphy's-Law critique and did not itself do a so self-critique of its primary war plan and consider and prepare for worst-case scenarios with it. Their conclusion for the Russian Putin regime's direct military-to-military failure in Ukraine summed up to hubris, lack of caution and superficial, or in Jeff Leong’s words, of my university days, “half-baked,” war planning of the invasion of, attack on and occupation of Ukraine on the part of the Russian Putin regime and the military leadership of the Russian armed forces. The Russian Putin regime’s shift to a warfare strategy of demolition of key Ukrainian cities and towns, and the physical and existential terrorization of the populations in them, by aerial bombardment and blasting from, for the most part, a safe or relatively safe distance, is a shift to a corrected warfare Plan B in replacement of its failed military-to-politico-military warfare Plan A. It is the Russian Putin regime’s Plan B warfare strategy against Ukraine that is in effect now, and, as the Putin regime reports, it is doing what it is supposed to do according to plan.
Let us not make the mistake of hubris and incaution that the Putin regime has made in its inept, half-baked Plan A war on Ukraine, by dismissing and underestimating the military competence of the whole of the Russian armed forces, or any part of them for over the long term. It is always best to exercise, and err on the side of, circumspect caution on matters of security and life and death. Russia has had a hardy number of military interventions or involvements since Vladimir Putin became its president, starting with the second Russian-Chechen war, won by Russia, and the Russian armed forces under his tenure as the Russian president, begun in 1999, have been on the side of the victor in all of them except for one, which is the source of the military hubris of the Russian Putin regime. Click on the following hyperlink and read a chronicling of most, but not, all of them, some of which, in the minds of victim [indigenous] people and nations of insurgent caliphatists, have been invited and appreciated interventions, as in Mali, the Central African Republic, plus.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russia
