It isn't like NATO would have air supremacy by default. Russia is wholly capable of shooting down a lot more than zero warplanes. Brokedick Serbs shot down a state of the art F-117 back in the Balkans and they did it with a 30 year old Soviet AA battery. Plenty of the planes sent over are gone now. Though most were destroyed while they were on the ground.
Russia has been forced to replace Moscow's NATO-facing AAD net with Pantsirs on stilts. Which we saw in internal documents has trouble dealing with a F-16 let alone anything more advanced.
Other peopel have covered the F-117 so I'll just add that it was only possible because there was no HARM support package due to weather, and the tricks the Serb commander used would be less effective today because of the modern HARM's ability to track to last-known location. Also the guy in charge of the battery was that 1 in a million RADAR autist.
The Baryaktar and all of the other fresh new UAV type drones seemingly got blasted out of the sky. Hence why everyone stopped talking about them. The attack helicopter is pretty much DOA now though.
I don't think the attack helo is DOA, its currently suffering from failure to adapt being both a #1 target for drones and everything that hits drones also hits them.
Edit: Also not helped by Russia only started with about 100 of their latest model helos, vs the US having a couple thousands. They also aren't very good at attritional warfare, but their ability to soak damage and remain mission-capable means for assaults on hard targets.
Ukraine also lacks modern attack helo and even if they had them they would be prime targets for Russian jets.
As we've seen from video, Rotor wash is a hell of drug for light drones and
@Snekposter pointed out its not like the environment isn't already rife with threats. I think we're going to see attack helos come back just packed with more EW and some sort of missile defense. Currently their use, besides rocket-lobs, would be like Russia used them in 2023: quick reaction to armor incursions with stand-off weapons.
The US and by extension NATO simply cannot suffer losses in any real capacity. This is at an ideological level. If a half dozen warplanes were shot down with actual US pilots in them we would collectively lose our shit. Losing a battalion of infantry is not something today's army could replace in 5 years.
Just the way it is until we have serious leadership making serious decisions
THat I can't disagree with you on. The US has more F-16s than Russia has fighters on book, to say nothing of airworthiness or mission capability, but just because Viper pilots could 1v1 the Russian airforce doesn't mean that the US public would swallow the related death toll.
While these services had a liberal left bias, they did fill a pro US space that will now be vacated for dictators and their lies. Cheong and rubbish like beanie boy will benefit as their employer in Moscow will have far less push back.
I think the question will come down to how quickly they can be reconstituted. Trump tried a slow-boil of such institutions in 2016 and didn't work as the ticks just burrowed deeper. Very bad in the short term I agree.
Also "liberal left bias" is a hell of an understatement.
Trump will be under pressure to move from a mollifying stance to Putin if the Russian dictator remains intransigent. I for one am not so sure. Trump seems poorly informed at times, allows Putin to select the US envoy (Kellogg now just basically doing nothing as envoy to just Ukraine), and seems to accept and also slights like his envoy being kept waiting.
Trump is mollifying Russia but also still fucking with them and not giving them their demands nor rolling back sanctions.
So I dunno, trying to act like he's going to give Putin the shop to get the Euros off their ass? Because if so, lol, it seems to be working.
this sounds like people reading out of context quotes on social media or telegram and coming to weird conclusions.
So basically the NYT but they don't have printing presses.
@Fuck It We'll Do It Live
Sounds like that that's the package Scholz spiked in a futile effort to not get wrecked by the AfD finally going through.
Bro I was active duty 82nd Airborne. I spent multiple years in the ME. Nobody in the 82nd was using small tactical drones in the 00's in the entire division. They were in no way part of everyday operations for anything. That is pure fantasy if you think that.
UAV operation was an entirely separate unit and you had to call on them to go fly over and observe whatever it was you were looking for them to do.
If anyone was at all it the usual suspects in SF and such.
I am specifically talking about small tactical level drones and quadcopter and stuff here. I am not talking about the variety of UAV type drones that were everywhere.
Forgot to respond:
I don't know about UAV squad level coverage, but I also care to point out that 3 years ago, Ukraine nor Russia had any of that.
RE: EW systems, I was in a sandy place after Iraqi Combat operations had wound down. I had occassion to share a shift a guy who talked to outer space and knew much more about the maths of such things than I did. We talked a lot about the EW stuff that kept anyone from getting a UAV like the ones we using to drop hellfires within anything close to where were were, and told me with some equation, that any attempts to operated unwanted UAVs near by would need 4-5x the transmit power of the EW system to overcome the effects because it could could sniff, analyze and in less than a minute figure out exactly what waves map to datapackets and what datapackets to fuck with to make it drop connection and put a hostile UAV into an endless "trying to reconnect" spirals. He said it would also do fun things to anyone trying to find the base via standard GPS.
He showed me when I went to lunch and took my phone of the locker and to the DAFC, he was able to shut down it down and no one else's.
