Dieter Schultz SupplyGuy
a day ago edited

Had we provided air superiority this war would have been over shortly after it began... Did we choose not do so out of incompetence?... Fear of escalation (I'm so sick of that yellow bellied excuse)?
Laocoon, arguably our best, and a much better than average, source of information and tactics with respect to air power, has made it fairly clear, air superiority is not something that will occur with the snap of our fingers or, for that matter, with the delivery of air-superiority fighters like the F-16.

Air superiority occurs when the totality of the equipment, ground support, training, and air doctrine is aligned in something resembling what the US air force has developed and implemented.

Because of that, giving Ukraine F-16 fighters, or for that matter Abrams tanks, regardless of their capabilities, without adopting the totality of the war doctrine, training, and infrastructure that supports and expecting what the US gets is just... dreaming.

Air superiority, or even superiority on the ground, comes about not because we have great fighter jets like the F-16s or tanks like the M-1, but because of all of the other things that our air and armed forces have put in place to go along with the equipment.

I'm all for giving Ukraine what it needs and, I'm even in favor of giving it more than it can use as long as it is a net-positive in the war, but I'm not in favor of arguing that just giving them 'stuff' will win them the war.

If the Ukrainians do... good enough... and eject Russia from their territory... then I'm OK with that even if we might have been able to do it with less. But, right now, I'm not convinced that giving them just the air-superiority tools that they, and you, say they need will result in them winning the war. //

Dieter Schultz Laocoon
a day ago edited
Thankfully, I'm not omniscient and, regardless of what equipment they have or don't have, I don't know whether the Ukrainians will win or not win but if it were just 'hardware' that mattered the Russians would have won a year or so ago.

In fact, if it were just those factors then Afghanistan wouldn't have fallen when we left because we left more than enough equipment to allow the Afghani government to continue operating without falling to ISIS.

I realize this may seem a bit blasphemous but there's an awful lot of what's missing in these discussion that closely resembles what is missing in the area of religions... there's something more than just 'bread' that people need and, similarly, there's more than these 'things' that people want to talk about that matters in these discussions.

It is the 'other' things... that shadow our spiritual world... that matters and we fail Him if we don't realize that the spiritual... the abstract... that comes into play and powerfully affects the outcomes. //

Laocoon Dieter Schultz
a day ago
Completely right. There is a spiritual componant to alot of this that we often just gloss over. Otto Von Bismarck once said:

“God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”

I actually think that the old Prussian got alot of that right.