Replying as a second comment. Just so you see this, but this was intended as an edit. Russia can’t defend its own airspace from drone attacks based out of Ukraine. You realize this right? Not saturation attacks, just straight up commercial grade civilian drones 15 to 20 of them launched at a time. Traveling several hundred miles into Russian airspace and detonating on targets… They cannot detect them, let alone defend from them. I would expect China and India to have much better capabilities however.
This is an idiotic argument. Ukraine has one third of all western AD in Europe and it is still unable to fully defend against Russian drones and missiles. Smaller, lower flying targets are harder to detect and hit than big manned jets. They are also more expendable so you can afford to use them more recklessly. Drones are regularly shot down in great numbers or brought down by EW, if this happened to manned aircraft it would be a disaster. If the US tried using its jets against any country with halfway decent AD its pilots who took years and billions of dollars to train would start dying like flies, not to mention aircraft being destroyed that is thousands of times more expensive than a drone, and there would be the mother of all scandals back home. The US has no capacity to absorb real losses, it’s why they only pick on the most defenseless countries and non-state actors.
Replying as a second comment. Just so you see this, but this was intended as an edit. Russia can’t defend its own airspace from drone attacks based out of Ukraine. You realize this right? Not saturation attacks, just straight up commercial grade civilian drones 15 to 20 of them launched at a time. Traveling several hundred miles into Russian airspace and detonating on targets… They cannot detect them, let alone defend from them. I would expect China and India to have much better capabilities however.
This is an idiotic argument. Ukraine has one third of all western AD in Europe and it is still unable to fully defend against Russian drones and missiles. Smaller, lower flying targets are harder to detect and hit than big manned jets. They are also more expendable so you can afford to use them more recklessly. Drones are regularly shot down in great numbers or brought down by EW, if this happened to manned aircraft it would be a disaster. If the US tried using its jets against any country with halfway decent AD its pilots who took years and billions of dollars to train would start dying like flies, not to mention aircraft being destroyed that is thousands of times more expensive than a drone, and there would be the mother of all scandals back home. The US has no capacity to absorb real losses, it’s why they only pick on the most defenseless countries and non-state actors.