helicopters at an airport in southern Ukraine (100km from the nearest frontline)
warning no drama, just combat news
Leaked by US officials
When Zelensky met with Biden he apparently promised to finally send ATACMS missiles. They denied it as a policy but the same day 3 different "anonymous sources" leaked it to NBC that they were coming.
another Biden W 
confirmed
Now less than a month later it was confirmed on CNN:
Airport strike
Losses = Reports are it was a mix of K-52s and MI- helicopters
/r/combatfootage gloats
Hilarious reddit jokes
War is officially over now that Ukraine has a couple long range missiles. Even though helicopters and fighter jets have been almost non-existent in this war, offensives are basically impossible now:
STUPID RUSSIANS!! why would you store multiple helicopters at an airport 100km from the frontline instead of in some field?? Bunch of fricking amateurs:
ATACMS cluster munitions
Apparently it was the cluster variant circa 1996 (instead of the single large explosion variant)
Some RU telegram posted pictures of exploded MGM-140 submunition
https://x.com/RALee85/status/1714291525981786265
From wiki:
There is some skepticism but seems to be pretty much confirmed
In closing I love this Marsey, nice work @Igor_Konashenkov
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Can any militarycels answer, how viable is dispersal? Like if the US and China had a land war, would they both be scattering aircraft instead of using bases? Feels like that would be a massive pain in the butt to work with.
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It's definitely a strategy that works- Sweden in particular had immediate dispersal as their plan for a Russian invasion, and set up small facilities near highways to be used as ad-hoc airfields.
The US does the same, and has stretches of interstate planned for use in case of a strike on the US mainland.
In practice, Germany kept flying aircraft until the last days of WWII by shutting working squadrons around various small and improvised airfields despite constant allied strikes and fighter sweeps
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In practice those aircraft need to be refueled and repaired, the pilots need to be taken care of, sleep after their daily runs, and meet commanders. So dispersal in a war over a year plus long is going to get sloppy or become such a burden where the aircraft are becoming ineffective that there will be some sort of middle ground in between.
Tactics on paper vs real life
This was an airbase as far from the frontlines as Russia could get it absent Russia itself. I don't think it's particularly a major embarrassment but it will from now on push them further back or dispersed where they'll be less useful … or not, who knows
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That's the point. You can't run dispersed aircraft as part of a larger campaign for long, it's more to immediately preserve your resources in the face of an overwhelming strike and prevent the enemy from gaining air superiority. Ukraine did this pretty well last year, but they can't do much more than little harassment flights lobbing a few HARMs or launching cruise missiles.
Of course, Russia can't get air superiority either, so for both sides aviation is pretty useless. Ukraine goal here is just to push the helicopters further out so they can't spend as much time near targets or harassing the front lines
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So Ukraine still disperses them? I saw one kamikaze drone strike on an Ukraine aircraft and it seemed to be in a normal airport but I guess the idea is to constantly mix it up. They can break down too I guess
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The whole former Soviet Union is floating in decaying military infrastructure. They don't need to try too hard to find a runway they can fly jets out of
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Expressways should be able to handle them and both have thousands of kilometers of them but yeah I imagine logistics and maintenance would be near impossible for sustained combat ops.
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TFW you're trying to get to Park City and there's a frickin f15 holding up traffic on i80
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