what a complete waste...
Rather good evidence that the west can so easily be misled.
The sister ship in question was modified for more conventional radar antennas in the late 1980s. Not really relevant now as we already know they have operational flat panel arrays... or are you going to claim the radar arrays on their new destroyers are concrete antenna arrays?
No, that is not what i ment, they said "naval aviation", notice that they did not mention Kuznecov. You remember Su-33s being for weeks in Palmyra, add two and two. I am saying i am very skeptical about number of airstrikes conducted from the Kuznecov, i am sure naval aviation as whole probably piled up those 400 sorties, but question is from where.
Why does that matter?
At the end of the day if you go training to bomb a target and you are bombing a real target with information provided in real time does it matter whether you launched from a carrier or a runway?
They went there for experience do you think they just transferred all their aircraft to shore and flew all their missions from the land base? Was that what they were there for?
Yeah, it was a waste of resources, if additional aircraft were required wasnt it easier to fly 8 SU-34s from Russia?
If the purpose was to destroy the targets then cruise missiles from Tu-160s over the Caspian Sea would probably have been the easiest option. If the intention was some operational experience with carrier based strike aircraft then they had the opportunity.
Firing a cruise missile from standoff range is relatively cheap and requires no support aircraft and gets the job done, but having alternatives is useful when a cruise missile is not the best option. Investing in alternatives makes sense and is not a waste of resources or time.
It was damn showoff that didnt go very well, it had no strategic or tactical value whatsoever.
I understand you see carrier borne strikes as showoffs... that is what the US does best and so carrier strikes are seen as sabre rattling more than practical ways of waging war, but in this case it was about gaining experience and that is all. It was never about winning any war or carpet bombing anyone... KGs expectations that on this one voyage the Russians will somehow become masters of naval operations world wide and deliver a decisive blow to Assads enemies and end the war are quite frankly amusing. His and your bleating about what a failure it was is equally amusing.
If I had come on this or any other forum 3 years ago and said Russia could send an expeditionary force to Syria and turn the tide of a civil war and then send the Kuznetsov in support to attack targets on the ground without murdering a lot of innocent civilians going to weddings or at churches of hospitals or schools I am sure I would have gotten a lot of stick and I can be honest and say I would have doubted it was possible myself.
Yet we are here at the start of 2017 with the tide of battle turned, Turkey and Russia and Syria and Iran signing peace agreements and helping each other to create peace and stability in the region, but no, lets bitch about two lost aircraft and whine because we don't know exactly what actual ship based experience they got...
No, what i am saying is that they could do whole this ground strikes sharade on North Sea islands, without sailing to Syria. This was not kind of deployment that was teaching crew anything they did not experience already, take off, drop, go back. No enemy air defence, no enemy air force. And no, Americans and other parties flying over Syria are not really interested into making problems these days so... it was basically training flights with live warload just different scenery. Instead of ice they had sand and sun.
Dear god you are a fool. You blow on like a fan boy about how the Rafale is a wonderful super plane... what part of the Libyan Air Defences actually challenged them after the first week of operations?
the fact of the matter is that this was real experience against a real enemy where they helped real people in desperate need of help. Can we compare that with Rafales destroying the legitimate government of Libya which led to the current chaotic situation... where the first few days was SEAD against some pretty ordinary air defence systems that Russia would likely have dealt with using cruise missiles anyway, followed by a cruise missile attack on the air ports and then the situation in Libya would have been pretty much the same as the situation in Syria... big deal.
The things they were doing... finding targets using intel in the form of Spetsnaz as forward observers, communicating target data to the deployed air units and then planning and flying missions to attack those targets in good time and scheduling recon flights to determine if follow up raids were needed and for damage assessment... yeah a total waste of time... they can do all that on a computer simulation but all training and no experience is not a good thing.
You keep calling it a holiday.
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