Why the USAF Should Be Folded Back into the US Army, Part CLXIX

A current active duty colonel in the USAF is deploying F-22s to the Ukraine is all that is needed to protect them from a potential Russian incursion:

On March 31, U.S. Air Force Col. Robert Spalding III argued in The National Interest that a “purely defensive deployment” of Air Force F-22 stealth fighters “is just one possible solution” to the Ukraine crisis, which has seen Vladimir Putin’s Russia annex the strategic Crimean peninsula and threaten the rest of Ukraine.

Spalding is wrong—F-22s are not the answer. The colonel’s assertion is yet another example of air power hubris, which has come to define the Air Force. “Without firing a shot, such a deployment [of F-22s] would immediately change Putin’s invasion calculus,” Spalding insists.

Russian aircraft wouldn’t survive a confrontation with American stealth fighters and thus couldn’t support a Russian ground invasion, in Spalding reasoning. Ukrainians would feel more confident about their ability to defend their country, since any Russian invasion would be subject to attack by Ukrainian aircraft protected by F-22s.

This essay does not evaluate the wisdom of Washington extending a security guarantee to Ukraine, an issue that remains fundamentally political in nature. Rather, it challenges the argument that the fielding of F-22s could decisively tip the military balance in favor of the Ukrainian military.

First, F-22s could only destroy the Russian air force if the latter engaged, which of course it would not. The Russians know that the F-22 can defeat any fighter flown by their air force. The Kremlin would respond to a “purely defensive” deployment of F-22s by only operating their own aircraft in conditions of overwhelming superiority.

At best, the F-22s could deter Russia from using its air force to support advancing Russian army spearheads.

But what about using Ukrainian aircraft to attack Russian army formations? Russia’s S-400 surface-to-air missile system, pictured above, can identify, track and fire on targets at ranges of up to 250 miles.

Even if we assume that the F-22 can evade multiple, overlapping S-400 batteries—a deadly proposition we have never tested—Ukraine’s Su-25 attack aircraft cannot.

Moscow can deploy the S-400 such that it provides cover over advancing Russian troops everywhere in eastern or central Ukraine. The Russian army possesses additional, mobile SAM systems that can render any Ukrainian air attacks suicidal.

An F-22 deployment would be similarly problematic, because, as I noted a number of years ago, stealthy is not invisible, and the basic laws of physics, which dictate detection range as a factor of the 4th root of the radar cross section, which gives us this table for the S-400 (SA-21):

Range	RCS	Type
400 km	10m2	B-1, F-15
336 km	5m2	F-16
225 km	1m2	F-18E, Rafale
189 km	0.5 m2	Typhoon
48 km	0.00200m2	F-117 (WAG)
40 km	0.00100 m2	F-35
23 km	0.00010 m2	F-22, B2

Note that the distance at which the targeting radar might reasonably be expected to lock on to the target, but SA-21 also has a very low frequency search radar which should be more effective in determining the general location of a stealthy target.  (To say nothing of targeting AWACS, tankers, etc., for which the limiting factor of the system would be the aerodynamic performance of the missile)

The F-22s would by no means be clay pigeons, but it is also likely that they would not be able to operate with the sort of impunity that has been the norm for recent US campaigns.