If Putin had been able to steamroll through Ukraine, it would have presented the appearance of strategic capability to the Eastern European nations (who actually have been investing in their defense), because they still have pictures of their family members that were murdered by Russians from the last times (Winter War 1939, WWII, Hungary 1965, Czechoslovakia 1968).
The billions in US aid have mostly been older weapons stockpiles scheduled for destruction assigned a monetary value we already paid, remember? It’s actually a net-gain for us in weapons disposal, not that comrade Biden jumped on that opportunity anytime soon. There was still corruption through CIA and USAID, who have been used by NGOs for personal gain as a rule ever since JFK was assassinated. They will do that with any conflict as long as they are allowed to.
The Eastern Europeans, especially Poland, are stuck between a weak European core run by male feminists and stupid women in their parliaments....and adventurist Putin to the East. Not a good position to be in right now.
This is why Finland and Poland quickly invested so much in their national defense in the 1990s. Finland replaced their aging fleet of SAAB Drakens and MiG-21Fs with F-18C/D (not F/A-18, a side note but interesting to dive into), while Poland replaced their MiG-29s, Su-20s and Su-22Ms with F-16C/D Block 50/52s.
Meanwhile in Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy, and France, they drug their feet developing Typhoon and Rafale, which are at end-of-life relevancy for modern air combat. Now Finland and Poland are F-35 customers, looking to replace or augment their 4th Gen fleets of fighters. Because Germany never invested in a Tornado replacement, they had to order F-35s too. This was after they fired their Luftwaffe Chief many years ago when he recommended they invest in the F-35 program ASAP.
I would absolutely love to debate Col MacGregor. He’s an Army Armor officer who thinks tanks and artillery are central to modern combat power. That hasn’t been true since Korea at the latest. It shifted during WWII in favor of air power, and the US is without peer in that space.
He is painfully-uneducated about the overall US force structure, where our centers of strength are, and how we actually fight. This is especially-alarming because he was front-and-center in Desert Storm’s Battle of 73 Eastings. He was in the last war where the US military actually was let off the leash a little, so he should know, but he either doesn’t or misrepresents his statements about modern US military force structure.
You will notice though that he reverts to expressing US combat power in artillery and armor terms. These are really after-thoughts and dinosaurs left over from early 20th Century institutional inertia. While 73 Eastings was the most decisive armor victory in the history of armor warfare, F-111Fs and F-15Es could have attrited the same number of tanks in relatively short order.
The F-111F attrited more tanks than the A-10A did in Desert Storm, in 1/4 the sorties flown by A-10s. What we have nowadays are far more-capable than F-111Fs, 1980s-era F-16s, early F-15Es, and A-10s.
McGregor is not comfortable speaking on air power because it isn’t his career field, so he defaults to silly discussions about how many artillery shells we can produce and at what rates. It’s embarrassing.
