There is a lot more to air-superiority than having more planes, that's something the Soviets learned the hard way back in the Winter War with Finland. The Red Air force nearly had the Finnish air force outnumbered 100-1 but that was not as big of an advantage as they hoped. The Finns did not have a lot of heavy industry so there were no major targets for the Soviets to bomb combined with poorly trained crews with little to no combat experience and the damage they inflicted was almost negligible.clearspira wrote: ↑Wed Sep 21, 2022 6:27 am Putin has just come as closest as he has ever come to admitting that the Ukraine war is actually ''a war'' by announcing he is going to send in the reserves. He is also going to ''offer'' referendums to the occupied territories.
Thing is, more men on the ground is not going to make all that much of a difference because Ukraine seems to have won the air war, American weapons are 50 years ahead of anything Russia has, and Ukraine has apparently liberated so much Russian gear that they are now one of the best equipped armies on the planet. Putin is hoping to do ''a WW2'' on a country that is readying itself for WW3.
During the Vietnam war the USAF had a sizable advantage, not like they had over Germany in WW2, but enough for the North Vietnam Air Force to face an uphill battle, which they effectively.
I'm just saying that air superiority might not be a game changer if Putin is clever about this, something he hasn't really been so far. If he pulled all his forces back into Crimea and dug in with heavy weapons he might be able to hold off the Ukrainians for a long time, maybe long enough to force a settlement of some kind.
