I wonder if the loss of pilots doesn’t matter even more than the loss of air frames. I’ve heard that the Russians have the bad habit of using up their best pilots until they die. This might be the kind of situation that Japan found itself in the WW2.
Even so, unless the US can somehow get itself to provide arms to Ukraine all this might not matter for what I’m afraid could turn out to be the first stage of the next world war.
As we convince our current and potential western Pacific allies not to trust us, Russia is destroying its air force but rebuilding its industrial base and Europe is slowly rearming (and potentially deciding it has less of a need to be tied to US global political decisions).
I’m sure everyone is tired of parallels being drawn to the 1930’s, but I can’t help but see alarming similarities.
“I’m sure everyone is tired of parallels being drawn to the 1930’s, but I can’t help but see alarming similarities.”
In the 1930s the best way to understand what was to come was to read Adolph Hitler’s book Mein Kampf (My Struggle). To understand a potential for WW3, a valuable source is the book below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics [This book by a man many call “Putin’s Brain” was published in 1997, and Putin has made it required reading in Russian military colleges. It lays out a step by step process for taking over all of Western Europe, and then moving on to the rest of the world. Very troubling is his recipe for destroying America:
“In the Americas, United States and Canada:
* Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States and Canada to fuel instability and separatism against neoliberal globalist Western hegemony, such as, for instance, provoke “Afro-American racists” to create severe backlash against the rotten political state of affairs in the current present day system of the United States and Canada. Russia should “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics”.[9]
Is this why the past decade has seemed especially maddening aand confusing in the US?