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
That’s the crux of the matter right there. And they then force Ukraine to carry out attacks with this lack of equipment and training. Knowing full well that there is minimal chance of victory. Ghoul empire.
It’s more like “the West” just has that equipment in insufficient numbers.
The NATO (or “Western”) military and political doctrine of the last ~30 years was something like “let’s buy most of them with contracts and convenient deals and Desert Storm the remaining few, cause our combined force is so fucking superior”.
It’s also that to some extent people have really started to believe in this superiority (I mean, it’s counterintuitive, an exceptional force of 10k still can’t defeat a crowd of 500k, but many people in Europe and USA seemed to believe that the dwarf armies of Europe are prepared for a real war if it comes).
NATO equipment is simply very expensive now (and complex, so takes longer to train personnel for) and not produced in sufficient quantities.
I mean, this war reminds us that all revolutions in warfare happen only on battlefields between comparable adversaries. When you imagine something and then “prove” it with a beating like Desert Storm, again, and pretend that this is what modern war will look like, you commit a mistake.
So - it appears that a real modern war still involves lots of ground forces grinding each other. Who would have thought that? I mean, Turkey and Israel have pretty western-style militaries, yet with conscription and large standing armies.
I wonder whether all those EU countries are going to introduce conscript training and reserve, cause if they intend to be militarily relevant, they’ll have to do that over all the “draft is slavery” cultural image.
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.
Proven effective against cold-war era planes maybe. There have been a few improvements in the past 50 years. Those same Russian air-defence systems proved themselves effectively useless against the F-117 in the Balkans, and the F-35 is miles above the F-117.
Vietnam and Korea proved that 1950s and 1970s era technology was not up to the task, not that it was not possible. The main issue with both was the lack of accuracy.
“Running out” in this case meaning dipping below normal stockpile levels.
There’s been some improvements in the past 20 years too, sometimes even not only on paper.
Anyway, the biggest problem of the ex-Soviet militaries is their incompetence, not their tech. The systems employed are up to the necessary tasks and sometimes more adaptable than NATO systems, it’s just that even their normal operation sometimes can’t be achieved by people using them.
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.
The most important word here is “combined”. Consensus is a really bad condition for winning a war, in my opinion.
Not even then, unless you mean precision guided weapons in similar quantities as late Soviet union had Grad missiles.
Not arguing that air superiority is very important.