Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.
Exact full quote from CNN:
“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4085063
NATO doctrine relies heavily on airpower for any large military conflict. The NATO ground armies might be relatively small, but their combined air forces are qualitatively superior in every metric and at minimum three times larger than any potential opponent. 10k people can hold off 500k when they have a giant arsenal of precision guided weapons and complete control of the air.
That is verifiably not true. Vietnam and Korea made it very clear that you cannot win a war with air power alone. And precision weapons are effectively useless. The US can’t sustain minor campaigns of shelling random cities in the Global South without running out of munitions. And short of nuclear weapons it has no capability to level cities with it’s air force. The F-35 has, what, like four weapons pylons?
Add to that, the Russia air-defense systems have proven very effective, which changes the game. And the F-35 that is the lynchpin of NATO’s air superiority strategy has a great deal of limitations, not the least of which is how expensive and stretched it’s logistical requirements are.
NATO’s air force is completely untested and reliant on extremely expensive, hard to maintain platforms with very limited tactical flexibility. It’s entirely possible the F-35 fleet will defeat itself through attrition due to it’s enormous maintenance requirements.
Due to modernization in the course of the current war, and against weapons used in it, specifically those Turkish drones and the small copters everybody uses now in every conflict.
I’m not sure how good they’d be against something launched from F-35.
However I should agree that I too just hate F-35.
Well, again, Israeli and Turkish ones are tested somewhat well, but mostly against much weaker opponents unable to get their sh*t together.
Yes.