“Whatever you think of Putin and his Generals, they are developing every offensive and defensive military capability they can develop or steal, just like the Red Chinese.”
Ummm, haven’t seen anything about their heavy lift capability. The ability to project power requires a large and logistics system. The U.S. excells at this. No other country comes even close, not Russia, not China, nada, nada.....
Russia has a “heavy lift capability”. At one time, and maybe they still do, have the largest air cargo transport plane in the world.
They have been able to do both troop and supply missions to Egypt, Syria and Afghanistan pretty successfully, though there was no real air opposition to them.
Back in Oct. 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, Gen. Sharon had a whole Egyptian army surrounded and was getting ready to pound them to ashes. The Soviets threatened to put their troops into Egypt to prevent this. This force of 3 Airborne Divisions were to be leapfrogged from Yugoslavia to Egypt.
In the face of this Kissinger forced Israel to leave the Egyptian Division alone because the US did not feel it could stop the Soviet invasion.
A truce was signed shortly after this stand-off.
The Soviet Antonov cargo carrier/troop transports are pretty good, and look like they were based on our C5A’s and C17’s (They probably stole the designs to them just like the Red Chinese have been doing the past 60 years).
Don’t forget that the Soviets airlifted several Cuban divisions to Angola in 1974-75 and that ensured a communist victory over Holden, Savimbi and the South Africa forces there.
Never underestimate the capabilities of your enemy.
Russia’s heavy lift capability is so bad that the US was contracting with Russia for aerial logistics support in Iraq and Afghanistan because our feckless Congress didn’t buy enough C-5s or C-17s and we didn’t have enough airlift capability.
Most all of our European partners used Russian or Ukranian airlifters to get to the theater or provide support at least in part.
It’s possible, due to the neglect during the Obama years and how bad our fleet is now, that the Russians *may* have a better functional capability than we do.