Yeah, I generally agree. But the obsolescence and impotence of the West’s warfare doctrine goes far beyond just the failure of the airheads. Air power is only one part of true combined-arms warfare, and the 404 War has revealed, comprehensively and thoroughly, that the West has no clue how to fight it. If Western generals did have a clue, they wouldn’t be arguing for a mechanised offensive against entrenched Russian positions without any air cover. The Russians, by contrast, have never stopped studying warfare, and they treat it as a quasi-science in and of itself. They do not view air power as an end in itself, but rather as one part of their overall doctrine of “operative art” – influenced heavily by the works of Isserson and Svechin. The former wrote extensively about “Deep Operations” – engaging the enemy both at the front and deep behind enemy lines. The latter wrote all about attrition and how to break an enemy’s ability to fight. The Russians have never stopped studying the art of real war, and we see the results now. They have completely upended the strategic calculus on the battlefield.

As you allude to, in a world in which a US$20K drone requires a US$2M missile to shoot down, and a US$2M hypersonic cruise missile can completely wipe out a US$13B supercarrier… the mathematics become prohibitively expensive for the Western way of war.

As displayed in the Ukraine, and as recently pointed out by Iran, Russia, and China, Air power is useless now until you have already dominated your enemy on the ground. Fighter planes are relics of the past. Aircraft Carriers that can be dropped by Chinese terminal Mach-7 missiles, Russian rocket-accelerated artillery bombs or even Iranian Drones are nothing more than fat targets since their aircraft cannot even get past air defense anymore.

I grew up loving fighter jets, but air power was a phase. It lasted about a hundred years, but it’s over, and it’s not even worth talking about anymore. It’s all about boots on the ground, artillery, and drones now.

Hell, with the way our artillery program is going, we should probably start rebuilding our battleships. At least those guns worked.