US pilots havent really been engaged in a war against a peer since ww2. It might be true. But we probably shouldnt extrapolate from bombing terrorists in the desert to actually fighting against say China.
The US airforce cannot survive the attrition rate that a war with Russia or China would bring.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_losses_of_the...
That's 7,500 aircraft lost over 5.25 million sorties, or 14 lost per 1,000 sorties.
The loss rate was 5 times higher in Korea and 25 times higher in WW2.
And as the other comment mentioned, most were helicopters (5,600) and UAV's (1,000). Only 3,400 fixed wing, manned aircraft were lost.
Nuclear exchange by ICBM would destroy most aircraft, their crews, their maintenance crews, and the factories for the replacement. There will be no dogfights.
For Balkans, there were minimal air activities for Serbian air force. They were up against NATO (not only US) and all of the little opposition they had were using air defence systems which managed to down a couple of Nato air Jets. I wouldn't describe each of these two as significant in any meaningful way. Just to give example on scale. In Balkans, serbian air force had like a dozen modern air craft against ~ 1000 NATO aircrafts.
One can say that the it was a little bit different in Korea and Vietnam but this was much closer to 1945 than nowadays.
Vietnam in particular saw the cost of allowing the SAC/bomber mafia from dominating strategy. The Soviet and Vietnamese pilots were pretty badly mauling the US Air Force and Navy, whose armament and tactics were built around bomber interception.
> One can say that the it was a little bit different in Korea and Vietnam but this was much closer to 1945 than nowadays.
Korean war started almost five years after the end of WWII and Vietnam war is 50 years old now. The two wars in Balkans and Iraq is much relevant in experience compared to the earlier two. And while the soviets provided the Vietnamese with AAA and aircrafts, there were little soviets engagement in the actual fighting (regarding the air).
One might say, crudely, that US military superiority is based on an overwhelming advantage in materiel, plus troops skilled in the use of advanced weaponry (so that one soldier has the impact of 10, say).
That might work in large scale massed battle against a mid range opponent, but is untested against a true industrial peer like China, and has been shown not to work especially well against highly dispersed, low tech adversaries such as in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Vietnam and Afghanistan are examples of how when faced with overwhelming military might, asymmetric conflict ultimately rules. The anti-colonial movements in India, Ireland and other places underlines that.
I think what Ukraine demonstrates is that we collectively don’t realize that Ukraine is a segment of a larger conflict. The long term influence campaign by the Russians to destabilize NATO and the US has been phenomenally successful. They have managed a brilliant operation in the UK and US to sow chaos internally.
Afghanistan was an evolution in American military strategy. Post 9/11 the Americans did what no one thought was possible - They (using the CIA and then JSOC) infiltrated Afghanistan secretly, forged alliances (bribed) with local militias/tribal leaders and within weeks had significantly degraded Taliban/Al Qaeda's fighting ability.
The world (and Al Qaeda) expected cruises missiles and "death from above". That they got was "death from within AND above". Whether this was a positive development for the US military is up for debate, but it certainly wasn't the traditional "big military pound small military with might" approach until later in the war.
It's the 20+ year long occupation which failed and clearly, like Vietnam or Afghanistan for the Soviets, or Russia's current efforts to destabilize, American patience is shorter than the enemies will to fight.
I'm not sure whether it was genuinely degraded (eg, Taliban controlled areas giving up their weaponry and not permitting new stocks) or temporarily interrupted (cash buying a temporary cessation in attacks).
I wasn't there so I can't comment but from 15000 miles away Afghanistan looked a lot like Vietnam to me. Maybe not in the Westmoreland mode of body count, but in the failed attempts to win hearts and minds as a counterinsurgency tactic and the difficulty of crossing a cultural chasm in order to do so (and failing). Plus the propping up of local potential leaders that really had no national legitimacy and doomed attempts to localize the war (aka what Nixon once called Vietnamization).
I'm not saying I could have done any better. Afghanistan was and remains a fiendishly unwelcoming place.
But… 20 years of grind. Asymmetric always wins.
We've been at 'peace' for too long.
This is making an example for the rest of the team to get ready for things to 'get real'.
Maybe Korea, where there were Chinese and Russian-trained and sourced jets?