The only thing that will truly make the war hit home for the elites in Moscow is public, high-profile attacks on well-visible Russian landmarks in Moscow.
A few dozen or hundred cruise missiles striking the Kremlin, Saint Basil’s, Red Square, Russian Federation Governmental House, Moscow24 headquarters, etc. would be undeniable by the Russian regime in any way. It’s too public to be denied. Couple that with some incendiary weapons setting prominent skyscrapers (Imperia Tower, Evolution Tower, Kudrinskaya Square Building, Mercury City Tower, a couple dozen luxury apartment complexes and hotels) etc. to cause a blaze (at night time for best visual effect.) (If the paint is oil-based, it should make the interiors of rooms ablaze pretty rapidly, but there would also have to be some way to disable sprinkler systems.)
Add to that some leaflets dropped over Moscow by drone that inform local Moscow residents that Putin isn’t enough of a man to retaliate, that he knew such attacks would happen in advance, but was too cowardly to do anything about it.
I only read this part of the paragraph at first and I thought you were talking about them spraying oil based paint everywhere. It reminded me of some of the Ukrainian counter-attackers tagging some signs with spray paint. I’ve long thought that a way to lower morale was to spread glitter everywhere, even via drones, because they’ll be seeing the glitter for years. Perhaps reflective blue and yellow glitter.
But then I read that glitter was bad for the environment, so perhaps back to the drawing board for morale breakers.
Another way to easily attack electrical infrastructure is with metallic streamers, disbursed in such a way (air burst?), that a lot of them fall across power lines and short them out. It generally doesn’t take long to repair, but it can be done very quickly.
You guys are being too dismissive. I think it would be effective. My morale is lower just having read those posts. Imagine what it would do to Russian morale.
Focusing on attacking and/or sabotaging Russian infrastructure might have similar effects on morale without the blowback of lots of civilian deaths. Knock out electricity, railway, and telecom services, the closer to Moscow and St. Petersburg, the better. Knock out broadcasting, putting Putin’s propaganda off the air.
You don’t have to bring terror to the parts of Russia shielded from the pain of war when severe inconvenience may suffice. Terror may well make things worse for Ukraine, making on-the-fence, head-down Russians active supporters of hitting Ukraine harder. Knocking out the lights for a couple of days, or tangling train service into knots and stranding thousands of commuters or travelers, sends the message that Ukraine could have make more fatal attacks but the Russian people are not Ukraine’s enemy, Putin and his gang are the enemy of Ukraine and Russia.
Looking at the long run, all of Ukraine’s fighters - including even the recently-donated F-16s - should be likely facing retirement in a decade’s time or so. By that point, the South Carolina F-16 manufacturing facility may be just about winding down its final last orders.
It would be curious to see if the U.S. government tries to sell Ukraine something like 100 brand-new “Block 80” Vipers off of that production plant to extend the jobs of American workers there for a few more years yet (Ukraine should logically transition to an all-Viper fleet if that’s the case) or if Ukraine tries to go in some other direction such as buying whichever new Swedish jet replaces Gripen.
LSLGuy is right. It’s difficult as hell to take out that type of structure with unguided artillery. Any hit above ground is basically blast and shrapnel against a steel beam. It takes a huge amount of luck to hit one of those beams with a direct hit, even with guided artillery. For an analogy, think about a darts player trying to bounce a dart off the wire between different points areas. The other, better, way is to go for a hit on the tower foundation. So a timed fuse or delayed ground detection fuse scoring a direct hit on a reinforced concrete foundation. Without a laser spotter on the target and guided shells, the firing battery is hoping an area-fire weapons system can hit the same target as a precision-fire weapons system. It can happen, especially if a large number of rounds are fired at the target. But the percentage of effectiveness of any single unguided round against a " tall latticework tower" is going to be very low.
Couldn’t an airburst round spray enough shrapnel to sever or damage the lines and transformers, etc. (not to mention the damage that would be done to the wiring by the blast wave itself?)
If you’re talking targeting substations, sorta. If you’re talking targeting inter-city transmission lines out in ruralia, the “spray of shrapnel” is far too sparse to hit anything with any reliable statistics.
Lines no, neither from shrapnel nor blast, other than low percentage occurrences can happen. Transformers, probably. I was thinking about permanent damage and the hard target of the electricity wire tower. But yes, in the same sense that a thunderstorm can knock out electricity transformers, so could an artillery barrage knock out those transformers. I don’t know enough about electricity grid maintenance to say if the replacement effort would be equivalent.
They actually made a specialized bomb for this? What’s the matter with using the old-fashioned explode-a-canister-of-chaff-over-the-substation technique?
That’s the official nickname, but the actual drivers seem to prefer “Viper” (apparently for a perceived resemblance to the Battlestar Galactica Colonial Viper starfighter).
I mean, I don’t think anyone on the inside calls the A-10 Thunderbolt II “Thunderbolt II”. It’s a Warthog.
As I said, I’m old. When I was watching Battlestar Galactica, F-16s were still called ‘Falcons’. (I’ve only watched the original series. My wife has only watched the reboot.)
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