A GBU-62 strikes the Russian HQ.
Ukrainian air force capture
To Russian commanders in Kherson Oblast in southern Ukraine, a defunct air defense command bunker—once associated with a Ukrainian air force S-300 missile battery—may have seemed like a safe location for a field headquarters.
After all, it was mostly underground and likely featured fortified doors.
But for the Ukrainian air force’s modified Mikoyan MiG-29s, newly equipped for precision bombing using a boutique American-designed munition, the bunker was just another target. On or just before Monday, one of the supersonic MiGs hurled a GBU-62 glide bomb, seemingly sending the winged munition right through the bunker’s door.
The raid “minuses the high-ranking officer corps along with equipment,” one Ukrainian blogger quipped. “Such strikes deprive enemy forces of clear control, and also significantly demoralize the military unit.”
The aim of the HQ raid was to render leaderless the Russian regiments and brigades responsible for attacks on islands in the wide Dnipro River. “No leadership—no landing on our islands,” the blogger explained.
The aerial attack was just the latest in a long series of them as the tiny Ukrainian air force inducts new munitions and aircraft and continues its transformation into a small but potent precision strike arm.
A GBU-62 under the wing of a Ukrainian Sukhoi Su-27.
Ukrainian air force capture
Precision bombers
It’s likely every one of the roughly 100 combat aircraft in the Ukrainian inventory—an eclectic mix of ex-Soviet MiGs and Sukhois, ex-Danish and ex-Dutch Lockheed Martin F-16s and ex-French Dassault Mirage 2000s—is equipped for precision bombing using a host of satellite- and inertially-guided glide bombs: American GBU-39s and GBU-62s, French Hammers and potentially even a new Ukrainian model.
Of course, the Russians conduct precision bombings, too. And with hundreds more jets than the Ukrainians have, the Russians have the numerical advantage in the air.
But Ukrainian jamming of satellite radios throws off Russian munitions’ accuracy more than Russian jamming throws off Ukrainian accuracy, as the Ukrainian bombs have superior backup guidance in the form of inertial systems that calculate a munition’s position by way of precise accelerometers.
The GBU-62 that popped the Russian headquarters in Kherson is American-made but uniquely Ukrainian. Shortly after Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022, the administration of ex-President Joe Biden rushed to equip old Ukrainian MiGs and Sukhois with an inexpensive but precise glide bomb combining a standard 500-pound dumb bomb with the wings of the new Small Diameter Bomb and the guidance kit from the U.S. military’s non-gliding Joint Direct Attack Munition.
The approximately $50,000 GBU-62 is a killer—and allows Ukraine’s MiG-29 brigades to do what the Russians have done with their much more expensive Iskander ballistic missiles, each of which costs upward of $3 million.
When the Kremlin wanted to eliminate a Ukrainian headquarters in a buried bunker in Kharkiv in the early hours of the wider war three years ago, it first located the Soviet-built HQ in long-forgotten archives—and then aimed an Iskander at it.
Ukraine duplicated the feat with a small surveillance drone, a single old fighter and one cobbled-together precision bomb.
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