This is one of the favourite red herrings that many individuals who want to diminish the Russian threat to Canada often point out. It used to be a joke among some senior military leaders that the biggest threat they faced from Russia was how they were going to rescue them if they ever tried to invade any of Canada's Arctic islands or lands. The reality is that it has never been about a conventional land force invasion. I want to make it very clear: that is not what we are talking about. We did not talk about that during the Cold War and that is not the threat today. It is about aerospace, and it is about maritime.
I'd like to start off with a response to your initial premise in terms of difficulties the Russians have demonstrated in the land battle against the Ukrainians. One of the things that we have to watch and that we are all guilty of, basically, is ignoring the Russian military interventions when Canada and the western allies were involved with the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns that were being conducted. Since the time they were occurring, the Russians have maintained a series of wars, starting in 1999 against the Chechens, in 2008 against Georgia, and then again in 2014 with the Ukrainians.
If we look at the Russian way of war, they do it very differently from us. We have what the Americans refer to as “shock and awe”. We like having that big punch; we use the highest tech, and the air force is intrinsically involved in all of this. What we've seen from the Russian way of war is the exact opposite. They like to bleed their enemy. They will use their least-trained troops first, and they will often come very close to what we think is a defeat, mainly to, basically, exhaust the enemy and then overwhelm them. We saw this with the Chechens and with the Georgians, and we saw this in the context of the eastern Ukraine in 2014.... Well, they did use shock and awe in the Crimea. I think the Ukrainians were not expecting the degree of intervention they saw.
We have to be very careful about drawing any conclusions, because we tend to compare it to ourselves. We say, that's not how we engage; that's not how we did it in Afghanistan and Iraq. Once again, remember, in Afghanistan we ultimately pulled out, so there are questions in terms of our utility, of how we conducted that combat. The Russians stopped Georgia from joining NATO; the Russians did succeed in putting down the Chechen revolution, and when the Russians seized Crimea they created very little international reaction. From a Russian perspective, their way of war is actually more effective than the western way of war.
Having said that, we return to the Canadian threat, and it is the aerospace and maritime. We need to be watching what the Russians did in cutting the cable to the Svalbard Islands in February of this year. We need to be looking at the Russian capability of destroying the Nord Stream cable. That all points to an undersea capability that we're not focusing on.
As you point out in your preamble, the Russians have not been using their air force to any degree whereby we can come to any meaningful assessment of its efficiency. The air force and the navy are what we would be facing in a threat, not land forces.