Originally Posted by
dead_pan
Its bizarre because almost every country on Earth would be vulnerable to such attacks. Its like no military planner ever considered that their power grid would be make such an obvious target.
I'd wager this has set in motion lots of 'studies' here in the west.
I'd also wager that there are a lot of threat assessments regarding Russia that have been hastily re-written over the past few months. I've been well out of the loop for twelve years, but the last time I went to a RUSI conference that was discussing the potential threats Russia posed (would have been around 2008 or 2009) the capability of their air force and land forces were definitely considered to be significantly better than has been borne out by the war in Ukraine. Medium range missiles seem to be just about the only threat that might have been assessed reasonably accurately, I think.
The impression I have is that we (as in the West) paid too much heed to weapon and platform technical capability, and far too little heed to Russia's ability to effectively deploy their military capability. Ukraine has undoubtedly performed massively better than most in the West would have expected, but there seems little doubt that this has been aided by the incompetence of even some supposedly highly capable Russian forces (like the air assault force at Hostomel). Clearly, Russian logistic support seems to be poor, bordering on non-existent in some areas, which has aided and abetted Ukrainian forces.
I'd also question the decision made by Russia to initiate this war with a ground forces attack with limited top cover. The tactics seem to have been deeply flawed, and very different to those that I think Western countries might adopt. Before starting the ground forces attack against Iraq, for example, there was the "shock and awe" air and missile attack that both knocked out a fair bit of Iraq's air defences and must have played a significant part in putting the fear of god into their ground forces. We didn't see much of that from Russia at the beginning of this war, yet from what's been happening over the past few weeks it seems clear that Russia had the capability to do that.
I believe that the study of this war is going to be a set piece in military colleges around the world for years to come.