America Could Do Better By Ukraine In Providing Needed Weapon Systems!

The U.S. should provide more Patriot air defense batteries to Ukraine; Russia's strategy toward Ukraine is clear they plan to bomb the Ukrainian people into submission and that should not be allowed and America is the only NATO country that has the huge air defense weaponry stockpile that can afford to give more to Ukraine and not hurt its military preparedness. Further there has been much talk about NATO countries giving the Ukraine air force F16 fighter planes to Ukraine some NATO countries have promised them some NATO countries are training Ukrainian pilots how to fly the F16 what is the delay in getting this weapon system on the battlefield for Ukraine? The F16 could be used to shoot down these large pound glide missiles Russia is currently using to cause major destruction in Ukraine and the F16 could be used to counter Russia's on-the-ground major offensive. The American government is really derelict in its duty to stop an enemy that unless defeated will almost certainly trigger a NATO war in the next fifteen years, that country being Russia, by not giving the country of Ukraine a high number of F16 planes America is currently definitely phasing out the F16 combat plane replacing it with a more modern combat plane so America can definitely afford to provide these planes to Ukraine.

Why isn't America and her NATO allies designing and building a better weapon to take out enemy drones such a weapon system could be provided to Ukraine to stop the onslaught of Russian drone attacks on Ukrainian front line forces. Why isn't there a ground based weapon system that operates like combat plane air to air defense systems meaning that there is a laser targeting system connected to a mobile machine gun platform with four machine gun capability in firing and once it picks up a drone and has locked onto the drone target it provides indication to that effect and the machine gun operator fires the machine gun and shoots the drone out of the sky with its precision targeting system. There really seems to be a technology lapse where you have these cheap poor flying performance drones that are able to navigate the air space above a battlefield and cause great harm on ground troops below!

 

Both the left and right wing are now competing for Jane Fonda's affections and having a contest over who can be the most 'anti-war n stuff' now. They are going to have to re-learn history and how military weakness just leads to bigger and more destructive conflagrations than small proxy wars ever will. Even Jefferson had to give up his delusions re 'neutrality' as President. With no military nobody is going to respect your 'neutrality', they're just going to extort you forever.

 

Actually, we really don't. Because a lot of the systems we normally have in reserve are at the time being upgraded.

What a lot of people do not realize is that we actually have not made a "new" system in decades. What we do is pull some from our reserves, upgrade them, then send those out to units. Who then return their launchers as the same thing is done. That was done with the PAC-3, as well as the current PAC-3 MSE. And the goal at this time is that all of the older PAC-2 and PAC-3 launchers will be upgraded to PAC-3 MSE by 2030. And those are not fast upgrades, they are essentially frame down overhauls where everything is removed from the trailer and then replaced.

We have already furnished 3 of their 5 batteries in service, and that will be 7 shortly as both the US and Germany have promised them another battery each. And the US is also providing all of the missiles they need.

But we can not afford to really give them many more systems, as we are already involved in a major upgrade project ourselves. And that is normally how it is with any of our stockpile equipment. When a new upgrade is unveiled, that is actually the equipment upgraded first. Then it is sent to the units and the upgrades applied to those. Sending them much more will hamper our own upgrade program. Especially as this is the most comprehensive upgrade the system has undertaken in over 3 decades.

However, what we do have is a large stockpile of missiles. Especially the older PAC-2 series of missiles like the GEM, GEM+, GEM-T and GEM-C. Many of those are approaching the end of their storage life, and are largely obsolete because of the PAC-3 and PAC-3 MSE. So we have been sending them a ton of missiles, as better to use them rather than simply destroy them.