„In Venezuela konnten die Growler und andere US-Flugzeuge problemlos die alternden, überwiegend sowjetischen und russischen Luftverteidigungssysteme des Landes umgehen.“

So this demonstrates that the US at any time could have removed Russia from Ukraine, but no…..’escalation’

They may have been turned off…

It’s not just russia, China supplied their new radars as well. JY-27 and JYL-1 in exchange for oil and minerals.

Russia supplied radars as well, but Chinese ones were probably more important and were a bigger failure in my view

Aging, predominantly Soviet- and Russian-made … and also not in operation because the Venezuelan military supported the attack. That helps quite a bit when you want to make a clean sweep of things.

But anyway this kind of thing should hardly be a surprise anymore. NATO arms were proven against Soviet arms in the Persian Gulf War. The Soviet military establishment even wrote about it, in papers that were, as it turned out, about to become declassified during the collapse of the Soviet Union. A major reassessment of existing assumptions about both NATO equipment and doctrine was needed.

Nevertheless, little changed since then. The S-400. Some new equipment that was really just upgrades to old equipment. And as the 2022 invasion of Ukraine showed, doctrine didn’t change either.

That is the danger of cynically believing that history doesn’t matter and can be rewritten to fit the exigencies of the present political moment. You end up believing that you alone won the Great Patriotic War through nothing but mass sacrifice, and that gets baked into military doctrine so deep that in less than 4 years you’re nearly 1.5 million troops down, have completely lost the largest armored corps ever assembled in history, and gone from the second largest global military power to somewhere south of #8… and still don’t understand what went wrong.