There’s been quite a bit of discussion about whether the US or NATO or the EU etc., should declare a no fly zone over the Ukraine. Almost always the main reason given for not doing that, for now, is the fear of escalation into a nuclear war with Russia. The Russian Federation (RF) is thought to have between 4000 and 6000 individual nuclear warheads. At least 2000 of them are probably strategic in nature. Meaning large hydrogen bombs in the 250 kiloton to one megaton yield range. In other words, city killers, many times more powerful than the fission bomb dropped on Hiroshima that ended the war with Imperial Japan in August of 1945. The caution is understandable.
But there’s another really good reason to be cautious about a no fly zone. A reason completely independent of the nuclear concern, and one that, unlike World War Three, is a near 100% certainty: we do not have the ability to declare and enforce an immediate no fly zone over Ukraine. Come below and I’ll explain ..
What’s key to understand is that in the past, we have enforced or participated in no fly zones that involved relatively weak countries. If the US wanted to create an NFZ over Iraq, or NATO decided to do it over Serbia, it merely required the will to do it. It wasn’t a game back then, the threat was still real even over smaller countries — Iraq shot down over 50 coalition aircraft in the first Gulf War and the bad guys got a couple over Bosnia, too. But the point is, the RF is not Iraq or Serbia. They are orders of magnitude more capable, orders of magnitude better equipped, and the airspace is orders of magnitude more difficult to pacify in every way.
The RF has highly experienced combat pilots fresh out of Syria, they are flying a modern air-force in a space protected by world class anti-aircraft weapons. That’s about 1500 attack planes and about the same number of attack helicopters, including top of the line Mig-29 and Sukhoi Su-27, they have state of the art SAMs and lots of em along with fully modern radar guided triple A, and they might even have a few AWAC-like forward controller aircraft managing their response and defense. They share a 1200 mile land and sea border with Ukraine, which means they could stage their large inventory of planes, helicopters, and UAVs from inside their own country while we would be flying in from further away. Which means to win significant air superiority over Russia we’d have to strike at least some of those bases inside their borders, probably meaning hundreds of sorties where the airspace is even more heavily defended than Hanoi was in 1972.
Now don’t get me wrong, the US/NATO would (probably) eventually prevail. But it wouldn’t be like Somalia or Bosnia. We would lose at least dozens and quite possibly hundreds of planes. That doesn’t just mean losing lots of really expensive aircraft, it means accidentally and inevitably hitting schools or hospitals or maybe even a bomb shelter or two crammed full of disabled kids in either country, and it means losing lots of crews and seeing scores of battered, tortured survivors in chains paraded around on Russian TV.
It’s always possible the Russians would decide not to challenge us, that they’d let us bomb their convoys and home field airstrips at will. But it’s way, way more likely they’d fight us with everything they’ve got, while working us over diplomatically for every single PR point they can get from the rest of the world and even from our own population.
We’re so used to being able to put up NFZs that we’ve forgotten they’ve all been over places like Mogadishu (where I seem to recall we also lost some aircraft BTW) or Baghdad or Sarajevo and so forth. In fact the whole world takes it for granted that we can just “close the skies” anytime we want almost immediately. But the fact is, in this airspace, that’s simply false.
If we could be sure it wouldn’t go to nukes, if we are willing to go into full on air combat like we haven’t seen since the days of the Memphis Belle over Nazi Germany, and if we’re willing to sustain it for weeks on end no matter how high the price in optics, blood, and treasure, we could probably gain reasonable air superiority and knock out enough Russian ground units that they would have to retreat or surrender thus winning the war for Ukraine. I guess you could call that a no fly zone ... It maybe eventually turns into a no fly zone. But it’s really just a big escalation in an existing war and the benefits to Ukrainians on the ground don’t materialize right away.
We can certainly help with refuges, we can keep shipping weapons to the region. We can arm Ukrainians with fighter jets, bombers, and UAVs so that they can operate those aircraft and get some of the benefits that way. But we literally don’t have the power to create an immediate no fly zone -- where there really is no flying -- with the snap of our fingers against a country as well armed, positioned, and equipped as Russia.