I’m fairly a fairly-knowledge and well-studied student of military history and a war veteran myself, but I am not omniscient.
This is a legitimate question:
I cannot think of a single conventional major military campaign between two conventional militaries (not talking about guerrilla warfare) from the beginning of WWII until February 24, 2022 where one side did not achieve air supremacy.
Is that not correct?
And furthermore, I cannot think of one example of conventional-to-conventional where the side with air supremacy lost?
That is what makes this seem like such an aberration, but also consistent with the above.
Neither side has air supremacy (as opposed to some modest air superiority), and … it is a stalemate. Unsurprising to me.
Say what you want, but, aside from all that, Russia’s inability to dominate the skies over Ukraine suggests to me that we could put scores of F22s, F35s, and B-2s over Moscow or any battleground NATO may have with Russia. That, plus the reality that Russia has an economy the size of Texas’s economy, aside from the NATO allies, suggests that a conventional war between Russia and NATO would end poorly for Russia.
But Russia has nukes. Whether they are spending the massive amounts of money to maintain those as functional, rather than just a perceived deterrent, is curious to me.
I asked my father this question some years ago. He was a nuclear scientist in NM. All he said was: "If I knew, I could not tell you."
You completely miss the reason there has been no air superiority over Ukraine. Modern air defenses are too effective to fly over. The Russians have always put their money into air defense not projecting air power as we have. Even the remnants of air defense remaining in Ukraine make the use of aircraft in and near Ukraine extremely risky. Our front line aircraft are incredibly powerful yet still extremely vulnerable. Stealth aircraft were shown to be vulnerable way back in the nineties. We the USA would suffer unsustainable catastrophic losses if we had to fly over a modern air defense. Modern warfare has rendered our methods of mobile armored attack under the cover of air superiority obsolete. War has now returned to attrition warfare. Ukraine is approaching the finale phase where they’re completely depleted and can no longer control their skies and deny Russian air superiority , materially support the army , and replace lost manpower. We the west cannot replace the war material being used by the Ukraine. The deindustrialization of the USA and Europe has left us collectively unable to support even this limited war in Ukraine. Our stockpiles are depleted and our ability to replenish them severely limited. Only our Navy still remains supreme. But even our Navy cannot survive near a peer like China or Russia. We can rule the open ocean but no longer near modern coastal defenses.
‘TO LEARN WHO RULES OVER YOU, SIMPLY FIND OUT WHO YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO CRITICIZE’
Conspiracy theorists are the ones who see it all coming…
