These are KAB-500S GPS/GLONASS guided bombs and not laser guided so there is no correction of anything once the coordinates are in. They have a CEP of 5 meters. To the extent they look like they are missing its because they are pulling the coordinates to code the bombs off freakin Google Maps. No one is lazing the targets with one of those fancy $20k laser GPS toys.

I can pretty much guarantee they all are falling within the CEP. These are 500kg or 1100 pound bombs meaning anything alive within 30+ meters is not alive anymore. Most likely everyone in that building was killed by the blast wave. You want nice cosmetic kills. They arent necessary especially when throwing 1100 pound monstrosities.

I would also add since in my civilian job I’m a civil engineer that these buildings all appear to be very strongly over built concrete constructions. They like to really pour on the concrete and masonry in that part of the word. A typical Western building would have crumbled Oklahoma City style with that kind of blast adjacent to it. They dont have actual architects doing design over there so everything is twice as strong as needs to be for no other reason than that they dont know what the hell they are doing. The walls are 2x too thick etc…

They Russians know what they are doing and why they are dropping KAB-500’s and not KAB-250’s. Frankly, they wouldnt be Russians if they did it any other way.

The drones are clearly Israeli Searchers. The low res is exactly identical to the footage we saw out of Israel in 2006 when they got into it with Hezbollah. The Israelis have higher res toys now but until 2010 or so basically only the US had anything higher res than this. Its good enough for government work. Anything better is just for eye candy.

12.7mm has lousy range. They ultimately compromised on the twin 23mm on the Mi-35.

Spreading out the targets is supposed to do what exactly against NATO? Make them use 2 JDAM’s instead of one? Is there a shortage of bombs in NATO now?

Better question is can Pantsir engage an incoming round from a BM-21 Grad? Pantsir with an anti-mortar capability would be just what the doctor ordered over there.

NATO isnt going to touch that base unless people have really gone insane and want to start exchanging cities with the Russians in a game of nuclear chess.

It was said they were all modernized variants. So, are they ‘Gefest’ standard Su-24M’s? That was the less extensive (=cheaper) standard, no?

They both got laser ring gyro upgrades and both can lob dumb iron bombs from 5000 meters to within a CEP of like 10- 12 meters. There’s no such thing as inaccurate bombing anymore and operating in tandem with those drones they know if they missed and can come around for a second pass almost immediately. They dont have to wait twelve hours for new sat recon like in the old days in Chechnya. Its a new age. They’ve got 90% of a NATO capability at 30% the cost.

NATO ROE’s in Syria are laughable and basically designed to ensure no progress. Assad forces are fighting Grozny style battles. They need everything in front of them “made level with the earth” as the Russians like to say. US targeted pinpricks of 2 dudes with a DSHK on a Toyota arent changing anything on the ground. The Russians will literally remove entire grid squares from the map if they remember what the hell they are doing from Chechnya. A couple months of Grozny style bombing and you will see progress. At the very least sniping at SAA forces will be made a lot harder when all the rubble piles are blasted into craters. The Russians really need to teach the SAA how to properly demolish a city. The fact that they are are leaving rubble piles and not setting demolition charges as they go — leaving sniper nests for the next day — is part of why this is taking 4 years. The SAA needs bulldozers and engineering vehicles more than jets almost.

And you dont really need all that many aircraft. In Chechnya at the peak of fighting the Russians had only 60-70 helicopters available and these were a mix of Hips and Hinds. The number of deployed strike aircraft wasnt much larger than what’s in Syria now but they did a lot of sorties around the clock and they didnt have the Su-34!

So S-300’s?

There are small number of advisers in Syria. They’ve been there forever. 1,000 is probably an absurd overestimate and its probably no more an a few hundred. What Assad is getting is stepped up deliveries of kit and especially command and control equipment. The stuff you see on those LPD’s is C3 vehicles — older gen but better than anything the Syrians have ever seen. It might make their arty somewhat more lethal and less of a Hail Mary.

The stories of Su-34’s s are almost certainly nonsense. The Israelis would have an embolism and would be screaming about it on every news channel. If I were Vlad I’d send over some Hell Ducks just to get some nice videos out of it, but alas they haven’t made me Czar of all the Commies yet.