The Falcons Have Landed: Employing Ukraine's New Archer
After a brutally long wait, Ukraine officially has its first modern combat jets. They won't change the war in a day, but the capabilities they bring to the table will take a toll on unwary orcs.
Introduction1
The biggest Ukraine War news this week was the much anticipated public reveal of the Ukrainian Air Force’s spiffy new F-16 jets. Well, new to Ukraine, anyway - tak, Denmark!
The bulk of this week’s post will focus on what Falcons can do to reclaim Ukraine’s skies. For the next six to eight weeks, until the next batch of pilots arrives and doubles Ukraine’s effective strength, it is likely that Kyiv will keep its jets on a tight leash, proving a general concept of distributed operations while waiting to see how the orcs adapt.
Quick note on terminology: the official name of the aircraft is actually the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon. Lockheed-Martin bought GD back in the day, and between a lot of pilots calling the aircraft Viper and the term sounding cool in marketing brochures it stuck. I’m old enough to remember after the First Gulf War when Falcon was used more often.
Also, you might notice footnote markers next to each subsection title. This is part of a readability experiment since these get long and it’s hard to find your place again. Hope it’s helpful.
Weekly Overview - Pokrovsk Crisis, Deep Strike Wins2
The ruscist breach of the Vovcha line that I covered last week continues to worsen, with the situation on the Pokrovsk front overall looking difficult for Ukraine. What good news there is stems mostly from the limited pace of advance and the difficulty the enemy will run into the closer their troops get to Pokrovsk itself.
It isn’t ideal to have a major support base come within range of enemy artillery fire, but on the flip side Ukraine’s guns will have ample cover and the range to severely punish ruscist troops trying to advance. The farther the orcs get from Avdiivka the more opportunities Ukrainian forces will have to intercept supplies and reinforcements with drones.
Moscow is also now pushing uphill again after being able to advance over nearly level ground along the rail line. Once across the Vovcha’s upper reaches, orc supply lines will have to pass across a few choke points that should make excellent drone hunting grounds. The enemy is also nearing bigger settlements than any it has taken so far since forcing Ukraine out of Avdiivka.
I had hoped that Ukraine would be able to use the Vovcha to reduce the number of brigades needed to hold this front, but I have also been expecting Moscow to do the operationally sound thing and support the frontal assault on Toretsk with an effort to outflank the place. At this stage, it looks as if Ukraine will need to commit a fresh brigade or two to avoid being pushed behind the Vovcha all the way down to Karlivka. Even this would hardly constitute a serious breakthrough, but the high ground in this area is necessary for Moscow to secure to sustain further progress towards Pokrovsk and ought to be held if possible.
All things being equal, I’d rather the orcs march towards Pokrovsk than try to surround Toretsk. But being steadily forced back from an area that should have been defensible may be a sign of Ukrainian brigades getting too stressed. They need relief, and though Ukraine is reportedly adding as many soldiers every month as Moscow, the Biden-Harris administration still isn’t moving fast enough on weapons to arm them.
On the whole, ruscist operations remain disconnected. Moscow’s push towards Pokrovsk is concerning, but ultimately risks becoming counterproductive. While Ukraine has not been able to execute operational counterattacks on an exposed flank yet this year, if the glide bomb campaign becomes unsustainable in the coming weeks having several divisions sitting in a pocket exposed to attack from three sides could be very bad for Moscow.
Toretsk continues to see heavy fighting, the orcs performing their standard ritual of obliterating anything Ukraine might use to defend. It seems likely that Moscow will try to force Ukraine fully behind its main defense line, capturing Niu-York, Zalizne, and Nelipivka over the next few weeks.
Toretsk itself remains a fortress, however, and though Moscow can be expected to throw a lot of glide bombs at it Ukraine has control of both flanks. Until the lines west of Niu York or near Chasiv Yar crack, actually taking Toretsk stands to cost the enemy tens of thousands of dead.
Chasiv Yar looks to be in for a renewed wave of orc attacks, unfortunately, with Ukrainian media reporting ruscist troops crossing the canal that shields the town’s eastern flank. There hasn’t been much confirmed movement, just indications of heavy fighting consistent with the orcs trying to advance again.
Vuhledar represents an area where Moscow clearly would like to make progress but appears to be hesitant to commit too much thanks to fierce resistance in the past. As I’ve mentioned, this sector could turn into a springboard for an extremely dangerous Ukrainian counteroffensive, so Moscow would like to clear it.
So far the orcs haven’t had much luck, just pushed a little closer to a frontline highway that Ukraine doesn’t really need to keep Vuhledar supplied. However, if Moscow is able to push through Kostiantynivka ten or fifteen kilometers, it would threaten to cut off supplies to Vuhledar. Interestingly enough, 31st Mechanized Brigade, which supposedly got beat up north of Prohres, just appeared alongside the experienced 79th Air Assault on this front. They’re joining the similarly elite 72nd Mechanized and Leopard-equipped 33rd.
Up north operations in Kharkiv are ongoing, with rumors of each side preparing a new push continuing to flow but little progress visible. Similarly orc attacks continue against Ukrainian strongholds on the south bank of the Dnipro, but haven’t had success. Pressure in other areas comes and goes, but in general of late the ruscist offensive effort has mainly focused on exploiting the Vovcha breach east of Pokrovsk.
While the situation on the ground is somewhere between stable and concerning, the disparity between the two sides in the sky was shifting even before Vipers appeared over Ukraine. This week Ukraine achieved two new milestones. It launched a complex drone strike, possibly augmented by domestically produced Neptun anti-ship missiles converted for a land attack role, against a major orc airfield near Morovovsk. Also struck (again) was the submarine Rostov-on-Don, partially repaired after being hit by cruise missiles in drydock last year and afloat when struck by more Ukrainian missiles, possibly an ATACMS.
An ATACMS strike also obliterated the better part of an S-400 battery near Sevastopol. Ukraine has been visibly working to reduce ruscist air defense capabilities ahead of the first deployment of F-16s, this only the latest incident in a long string of defeats. There’s a reason executives at the company which makes the S-400 have been arrested on allegations of corruption.
While Moscow is able to launch raids that strike important targets in Ukraine, the arrival of more Patriot and other air defense systems - along with interceptors for them - appears to be having an impact. Moscow’s efforts lately have focused on airfields and logistics depots in areas where Ukraine doesn’t have Patriot coverage, though drones fly into Ukraine to map out air defense system’s operating areas on a regular basis.
Of concern is the latest trend of launching dozens of cheap recon drones that can fly hundreds of kilometers. Some are set to switch on only once they’re over a target area to reduce the warning time Ukrainians nearby have to shoot it or move gear under cover. A ballistic missile can hit central Ukraine from Crimea in under five minutes. These new drones also fly a thousand meters up, too high for ground-based drone hunters using machine guns, meaning that more effective drone interceptors are needed, fast.
Otherwise, even the newly arrived F-16s will have a very hard time surviving whenever their wheels touch the ground. They can’t stay aloft forever, unfortunately.
Science Section - A Profile of Initial F-16 Operations In Ukraine3
Whether you call them Falcons, Vipers, F-16s, or multirole fourth generation combat aircraft, their arrival in Ukraine is the harbinger of a tidal shift that will take a couple years to fully unfold but is set to radically alter the balance of power in the Ukraine War. I sense a big orc missile strike coming soon, and Putin is right to be afraid.
Generations of popular historians have distorted the record of air power in military conflicts. Americans are taught that the atomic bombs forced Japan to surrender when in reality the Soviet conquest of Manchuria and the destruction of the Imperial Japanese Army’s colonial fiefdom forced Tokyo to seek terms. Americans are also wrongly taught that the destruction of German cities was morally and strategically justified despite it being attacks on the Nazi transportation network that finally brought Hitler’s war machine grinding to a halt.
It doesn’t matter how many tanks my enemy builds if they can’t transport them, or the fuel they require, to the front. Similarly, having all the fighter jets in the world doesn’t matter if you can’t protect their bases. Even small but routine attacks can make high intensity operations almost impossible, and the more complicated the aircraft the more it will rely on centralized and inherently vulnerable facilities.
Frustrating a NATO-style air power led military campaign isn’t hard if you’ve got the resources and space. Putin attempted his own version in the early days of the all-out invasion. Employing tactics used by the Vietnamese, Iranians, and Serbians, Ukraine recovered from initial setbacks and made flying crewed aircraft over free Ukraine too costly for the orcs to continue.
Unable to neutralize every Ukrainian SAM site, ruscist jets have to either stay on their own side of the lines or put together a massive package capable of suppressing all air defenses near where their jets aim to fly. This is why NATO air planners require a massive SEAD/DEAD - Suppression/Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses - effort before attempting to control the skies over enemy-held territory.
Good luck trying that against an enemy like China, friends. Whenever I read some U.S. Air Force general or civilian enthusiast wax on about flying stealth bombers over China in a future war, I cringe. It’s the 21st century equivalent of thinking that future wars will be decided by lines of battleships dueling at sea.
Air power is essential, and crewed aircraft aren’t going away any time soon. But it’s only one domain. That, paradoxically, is why the arrival of modern jets in Ukraine will actually have more of an impact on the conflict than many analysts claim. They obviously won’t win the war alone, but they represent the addition of an essential capability that can be used to bleed out a source of ruscist combat power.
In the near future, F-16 pairs will begin launching aerial ambushes of ruscist jets and helicopters operating close to the front line. Sometimes, they’ll even bag a couple Sukhoi bombers coming in to release glide bombs. Probably not even one a day, at least at first, but the losses will mount. And when they do, fewer glide bombs will strike. Ukrainian lives on the ground will be saved.
Though Putin’s available air assets badly outnumber Ukraine’s, fewer than a dozen Su-34 bombers - the primary platform for delivering glide bombs - are produced each year. Moscow has only 100 or so in service. They deliver a hundred or more glide bombs every day, each jet releasing two or four from about 65km behind the front lines.
If they could come all the way up to the front they’d be able to hit Ukrainian targets deep in the rear. Fortunately the threat of wandering Patriot systems keeps them back. However, ever since losing one of these detachments to an Iskander ballistic missile strike after it got spotted by a drone while parked for too long, Ukraine appears to have decided to keep Patriot launchers at least 60km from the front and their radars even further back.
Although ruscist jets carrying glide bombs fly at high altitude and are easy to spot, a 120km+ shot from a Patriot puts the weapon at the outer edge of its effective range. The enemy jets approach their release point at something like 1,200 km/h, so spend a few minutes at most inside the Patriot’s engagement envelope. Since launchers have to be in the open to fire and can’t sit in one place for long, a ruscist jet at high altitude can likely survive if it turns and runs away before coming closer than 60km to front.
Aircraft approaching at lower altitudes, where ruscist Su-25 close support jets fly, can get within 5km of the front line as long as they fire their rockets and quickly turn away. Even though they fly slower and spend more time inside the Patriot’s theoretical engagement zone, the horizon limits the ability of a ground-based radar to track low flying targets.
Incidentally, a European country recently gave Ukraine a model of short-range SAM, the French Mistral, that can hit targets twice as far out as most in its class - 8km. That has resulted in several ruscist Su-25s being taken down by Ukrainian troops from the 110th Mechanized Brigade in recent months.
Even if limited to using mid-range AIM-120 AMRAAM series missiles, which have a maximum official range of 105-120km, Ukraine’s Viper jocks now have the technical means of intercepting both the low-flying Su-25 and high altitude Su-34 jets.
The true power of the F-16 or any equivalent NATO-standard jet lies not in its own weapons, but a secure network link to the rest of the Ukrainian air defense net. Thanks to encrypted and robust communications networks like Link-16, a pilot can receive information about the battlefield while flying at treetop level to avoid being detected by enemy radar and keeping its own radar turned off.
If a Patriot radar or one of the Saab AWACS aircraft Ukraine will receive spots a group of ruscist jets approaching the front, it can pass on all the necessary targeting information to a missile carried by the nearest F-16. All the pilot has to do is act like a glorified delivery driver, setting up the link then getting to a launch point and away without being shot down.
Recently, general Syrskyi made an interesting comment about Vipers keeping at least 40km behind the front lines. That’s actually much closer than I would have expected them to come. I’ve been hoping to learn that an ally has given Ukraine at least a few dozen long-range AIM-120D model AMRAAMs with a range of 160-180km, which can take town enemy jets from 100km inside Ukrainian airspace.
Even using an older model of AMRAAM, an F-16 that can survive 40km from the front line is capable of hitting a Sukhoi as it releases glide bombs from 65km on its own side of the front. It’s a long shot, but there are thousands of old AMRAAMs in circulation, so if two F-16s fire eight missiles for one hit, that’s a fair exchange.
The big challenge, of course, is doing this without getting whacked by an S-400 or R-37 missile in the process. Moscow has Ukraine ringed with long range SAM batteries and maintains a couple dozen interceptors in the sky armed with air to air missiles with a 200km range. S-400 missiles can theoretically hit targets out to 400km, though in practice 200km appears to be the true max, and then only when supported by AWACS.
On the plus side, neither MiG-31 or Su-35 interceptors are keen on coming closer than about 100km to the front, since to shoot their R-37s to maximum range they’ve got to fly high and fast. They’re not small aircraft and use powerful radars to guide their missiles when AWACS support isn’t available, so a wandering Patriot that dares to hang out 50km from the front is positively lethal.
As far as AWACS coverage goes, thanks to reducing Moscow’s effective fleet by three this past year, once by using an updated Soviet-era S-200 very long range SAM with a 300km range, Moscow doesn’t seem to risk bringing its remaining AWACS within 300km of the front. That puts Ukrainian jets flying low right on their side of the front lines at the outer edge of an A-50’s effective tracking range.
Without AWACS support, the S-400 complex is having trouble dealing with Ukrainian MiG-29s coming just fifteen kilometers from the Kharkiv front to toss glide bombs at orc positions. An F-16 is smaller than a Mig-29, and though a Viper pilot will likely need to fly higher before releasing their weapons, they have much more modern missile defense systems to fall back on.
Moscow long ago began keeping its long range SAM batteries at least 65km from the front line thanks to the threat of HIMARS attacks. Now that ATACMS is in the field, nowhere in occupied Ukraine. Unfortunately Moscow has upwards of a hundred of the things, though only a fraction are the newer S-400 and ten to twenty have been destroyed during the war. Still, having them pushed back so far has resulted in a lot more breathing room for Ukrainian pilots. This has been ably exploited in recent weeks by MiG-29, Su-27, and Su-25 sorties to deliver their own glide bombs.
A flight profile that involves F-16s popping up to launch attacks 40km behind the front line against orc glide bombers looks viable even without the D model AMRAAMS. Whether this is truly the case depends on the quality of the missile defense systems they use.
Open source analysis has already revealed a couple very interesting details. First, Ukraine’s Falcons are equipped with a European missile defense system that looks to be state of the art. Aside from incorporating missile warning and decoys, it’s also one of those neat bits of electromagnetic warfare kit that can degrade the performance of hostile radars.
Guiding a missile to a target is a classic cybernetic relationship where signals received and interpreted by a machine allow it to self-correct. A thermostat works on the same principles. So does any AI. Human brains aren’t any different, just infinitely more complex.
At the heart of all radar-guided missiles is a little computer that aims to bring itself as close as possible to whatever radio wave signal pattern it is locked on to. As long as this blob of radar returns is getting more intense, the missile is happy. If it declines or shifts position, the computer alters the position of fins on the missile’s body to make the signal return back to the middle of its detection field.
Evading a shot is a matter of making the signal the missile has been told to chase escape its field of view too quickly for the computer to adjust. Having a decoy signal appear where the missile was expecting to see yours is always helpful too.
A problem arises when a target is far away. Signal strength declines with the square of distance, and the bigger the guidance package on the missile the heavier the entire thing has to be to reach a target.
It’s kind of a waste to put millions of dollars into a computer that gets used once. The solution is to have a companion platform with more energy and space allocated to a high quality radar tell the missile where to go until it is close enough for a smaller seeker to handle the terminal intercept. In Vietnam, US jets constantly got into trouble because they had to keep their noses pointed at hostile aircraft until their radar guided Sparrow missiles got close. But between their rules of engagement requiring visual target identification and glitchy technology, that often meant that they never got a second shot off before being caught in a dogfight.
Thanks to Link-16 and similar networks, all that targeting data can be sent to the AMRAAM direct from an AWACS or Patriot battery. All the F-16 pilot has to do is get into launch position, tell the missile what target to get data for, then send it off to the rendezvous. The missile will fly high into the atmosphere then dive down towards wherever the distant control radar says the target should be. Once close it flips on its own radar, acquires the signal, and races in at many times the speed of sound.
Messing with the control signal that gets a missile to its target at the various phases of its flight is the job of defensive electromagnetic warfare. Generating junk signals can have a variety of different impacts, from creating destructive interference to generating radar ghosts. The goal is simple: make the missile chase a phantom or prevent it from spotting the signal it’s looking for in the first place. If an enemy targeting radar loses track of an F-16 racing away from the front at 2,000km/h for even a few seconds, the missile is unlikely to have enough energy in its final moments to close the gap.
Simply put, modern missile defense systems are capable of substantially reducing the effective range of enemy weapons. Further, Moscow’s missiles have all been so heavily used these past two and a half years that the initial impact of the pods Ukraine’s Vipers are using is likely to be very strong.
If Ukraine is able to score even a few kills each week for a sustained period, within a few months the ruscist glide bomb campaign will rendered unsustainable. Stop the glide bombs, and Moscow’s offensive potential is exhausted for the foreseeable future. Even defending positions it holds will become far more difficult. Neuter the glide bomb threat, and Moscow is in deep trouble.
The orcs will make every effort to destroy Ukraine’s F-16s. The recent trend of ruscist drones appearing over Ukrainian air bases 100km or even 150km behind the front is extremely concerning. Moscow has the technical ability to deliver a missile anywhere in Ukraine in about five minutes, meaning that if it can observe an F-16 land and park to refuel it will likely be able to launch an attack in short order.
Ukraine is eventually going to lose some F-16s, both to attacks while aircraft are on the ground and accidents. Sometimes Moscow will pull off a trick that lets it hit F-16s flying close to the front lines, too. Electromagnetic warfare tends to become less effective the more the enemy has a chance to seek workarounds.
What matters is that pilots and ground crew survive. Ukraine has been promised over 80 F-16s. Pilots and ground crew are the bottleneck it needs to clear to fully utilize what’s already been pledged. The biggest challenge that Ukraine faces in operating F-16s isn’t combat itself but maintaining a high tempo of operations that keeps the jets airborne as much as possible.
Unfortunately for Ukraine, all of its major cities, the places it has to commit Patriot batteries to protect, are within drone range of ruscist territory. Kyiv likely has two long-range SAM systems and several mid-range ones protecting it, making it the safest place in the country - though not invulnerable, obviously. Kyiv is also over 500km from the front lines, which creates its own challenges.
I expect that Ukraine will use one base in Kyiv as a central deployment and maintenance hub, with several in the very center of the country acting as distributed bases for aircraft that need to refuel, rearm, and swap pilots before taking to the skies again. Being at least 200km from any ruscist territory - occupied Moldova doesn’t count, lacking long-range SAMS - will reduce the drone threat substantially. There will also have to be designated diversion bases close to the front lines in case of damage, malfunction, or low fuel, ideally near Patriot batteries that are now or hopefully soon will be protecting Kharkiv and Dnipro. Here’s a crude map to give a sense of the battlespace:
The only safe place for an F-16 in Ukraine is over the center of the country. Every minute spent on the ground increases the risk of detection and attack. It also wastes a precious asset. Much as airlines have discovered, it’s most efficient to keep aircraft working as much as possible, swapping out crews as needed until the maintenance schedule calls for an overhaul.
Ukraine’s F-16s are older, but they have several years of hard flying left. Ukraine is likely to accelerate the acquisition of more modern combat jets going forward, so if the first few dozen are all lost or worn out by the end of 2025 it shouldn’t much matter. There are plenty of Vipers out there, but far fewer air and ground crews.
It seems that a small squadron of ten is in service. Ukraine also appears to have gotten hold of static airframes to use as decoys, with sharp-eyed observers noting that the aircraft behind president Zelensky in the big photo op this week are old models. The ones that actually fly are former Danish jets.
Having Ukrainian jets shuttle between fields in central Ukraine solves both the need for distribution as well as the distance between Kyiv and the fronts. The official combat radius of an F-16 on a ground attack mission is a bit over 500km, but in an air combat configuration an 800-1,000km combat radius is possible. Combat radius is usually taken to mean the distance a jet can fly a given combat profile, spend up to fifteen minutes actively fighting, then return to base, so it along with most other aspects of range depend tremendously on the aircraft’s loadout and how the pilot chooses to fly.
An F-16 flying out of Kyiv will eat up half its fuel getting to and from a patrol area set far enough behind the front to avoid coming under attack but close enough to engage within a few minutes of detecting an inbound threat. The basic operating pattern for the F-16s will look like a shuttle service. Only the most simple and speediest ground tasks will be handled at the forward bases to minimize the threat of drone or missile attack.
A two-ship Viper flight can leave Kyiv, patrol for an hour over the Dnipro, then land at separate bases to refuel, rearm, and swap pilots in a bunker. In under half an hour the jets will be turned around like a pit stop at a racetrack and sent back up. When aircraft is operated for long enough that it needs maintenance spanning several hours, it can cycle back to Kyiv for work in an underground shelter. When major work needs to be done the aircraft can shuttle back to Poland.
In theory, ten aircraft in the inventory could mean that Ukraine perpetually keeps two in the sky with another two ready to take off. Two more will be recovering from a mission, a fourth pair preparing to fight, with the fifth in maintenance. Any aircraft not available within a day can be replaced by one stored abroad.
That would mean that every one of the twelve or so Viper pilots in Ukraine goes up twice every twenty-four hours until more arrive. Historically speaking this isn’t an extreme load, especially if the mission profile is usually fairly simple and keeps pilots over friendly territory.
U.S. Navy aircraft carrier operations are a useful rough guide to what will prove sustainable. They boast the ability to maintain over 300 sorties a day for several in a row, or 150-200 for up to six months. They carry seventy aircraft, meaning that each flies two to three times a day, but likely enough pilots that each only flies once. Carrier operations are notoriously taxing, forcing a pilot to land on a surface that’s always moving in multiple dimensions.
So a 24/7 patrol cycle appears doable, if difficult. It might not seem like much to have only two jets airborne and another pair ready to scramble, but each pair can theoretically take down a dozen orc cruise missiles. How many hospitals or schools will that save? More than none, which is why this counts as a big win even if Ukraine can’t go actively hunting Sukhois for a while.
In September the number of trained Ukrainian pilots should roughly double. By the new year they’ll hopefully have doubled again, reaching 40-50, though it’s difficult to be certain going by news reports. There has been a lot of talk in the American press about how few pilots Ukraine will have and the limited number of aircraft it can use at once. But everything is relative, and the US media is an active participant in shaping perceptions about Ukraine. Not necessarily, sad to say, for the benefit of Ukraine.
No one should expect spectacular dogfights. In a successful encounter a Ukrainian F-16 pair will be alerted to an inbound suspected glide bomb attack while they’re cruising high over the Dnipro to conserve fuel. They’ll dump their spare fuel tanks and dive to treetop level, accelerating past the speed of sound. Around 40km from the front they’ll pitch up in a zoom climb lasting up to a minute and release missiles, then dive back to the deck and run for safety.
Even if detected and targeted during the climb, if the nearest orc shooter is 120km away a nimble little jet like an F-16 equipped with a modern anti-missile system should stand a very good chance of evading. There are always risks. But soldiers in the trenches accept their own. In war, everybody gets their share.
I’m not focusing on the F-16’s ground attack capabilities (or the 20mm cannon mentioned in nearly every media piece for no apparent reason but to sound technical) because for the time being its main value is securing the sky. That’s the form of close air support that Ukrainian soldiers need most.
Vipers are the best hope Ukraine has of stopping the glide bombs. Hitting orc airfields is always good, the the hard truth is that Moscow has a lot of them. It can distribute its own operations at the cost of making them less efficient. What it can’t do is replace more than one or two combat losses each month, even if Moscow is happily evading US-led sanctions.
F-16s are another crucial piece in the jigsaw puzzle of winning the war in Ukraine. And from now on, every time orc aviators take to the sky, they’ll wonder if this flight will be their last. Soon they’ll learn what it’s like to be hunted.
Strategic Brief - The Middle East Aflame, US Political Degeneration Ongoing4
It’s worth noting that Putin has not responded to F-16 deliveries by attacking NATO or going nuclear. Once again ruscist threats have been proven hollow. It’s ridiculous but unsurprising that the US allegedly pressured Ukraine to call off an attack on Putin’s Navy Day parade because Moscow threatened uncontrollable escalation.
Just about the only lasting victory that Putin has won from this inane war has been shredding the USA’s claim to be leader of the free world. This nation’s politicians are all cowards who would sell the rest of us out at the drop of a hat. They couldn’t care less about the Constitution, either.
If you can ignore the naive knee-jerk nationalism that too many Americans resort to whenever one of their precious cult delusions are questioned, the bald truth of the collapse of America’s superpower status is too blatant to deny in good faith. The past three years have demonstrated conclusively that American foreign policy is rooted in pure fantasy. Bush, Biden, Trump, Obama, it doesn’t matter - they all inherited a system from their parents that they don’t understand and can’t hope to manage.
Political leaders around the globe pretend that American power is indispensable solely because this is more convenient than admitting how incredibly weak the USA is. If it weren’t, Ukraine would have already won this war. The equipment it needs exists; Biden won’t let Ukraine have it. It’s that simple.
In contrast to my initial expectations, the Middle East conflict has proven to be a strategic disaster for Ukraine. I underestimated the degree to which American foreign policy is driven by emotional obsession with a simplistic national mythology that’s a pure insult to the veterans of every past foreign war.
Professors, journalists, pundits, politicians - virtually anyone who writes or speaks about foreign affairs in the USA outright lies to their audience the same way that NORAD lies about “tracking Santa Claus” on Christmas Eve. While it might seem like a white lie on the surface, the way Americans are taught to think about foreign policy sets the country up for all the traps its leaders walk into generation after generation.
American policy towards Israel is without a doubt the most glaring evidence of just how broken foreign policy has become. No matter what Israel does, the US government is bound and determined to justify and support it. Every step of the way the Biden-Harris administration has been ruthlessly playing good cop to Bibi’s bad.
As Israel slowly self-destructs by transforming into a theocracy little different than the one that rules Tehran, it’s determined to expand the war that Hamas began last October into an existential struggle to slay all foes at once. Somehow Israel gets to portray itself as a democracy and friend of the USA while extremists break into military bases to prevent the prosecution of soldiers accused of criminal mistreatment of detainees. Meanwhile, Israel literally starts a war with Iran that threatens to drag the US in.
Despite Israel having an extremely potent air defense network that Ukraine can only dream of, US military assets are flowing to defend Israel, but not Ukraine. Israel is allowed to kill whoever it wants wherever it pleases, subsidized every step of the way by American taxpayer dollars and defended with American blood. Ukraine, on the other hand, has to beg and scrape and accept stupid restrictions just to get the weapons it needs to hold the line.
Why? Honestly, as someone who has studied policy and the Middle East, it’s pure Hannah Arendt style banality of evil at work. It’s just easier to shuffle along and wait for the latest Middle East crisis to blow over. Beats being labeled antisemitic. There’s no conspiracy involved, just cowardice.
The net effect of the cruelly hypocritical difference in treatment has been to make Ukraine look subordinate to the US - just as Putin wants. Despite Ukraine being enmeshed in a classic war of liberation against a colonial oppressor - this is the biggest why the USA attempts to maintain such a tight leash, fear of the spirit of Ukraine spreading - countries like India that had the experience of overthrowing a colonial invader choose to buddy up with Moscow in exchange for cheap oil. Why not, when all the American talk about a rules-based international order is objectively nonsense?
American foreign policy always fails because its leaders adamantly refuse to face hard facts. They have no incentive to do so, the accountability mechanisms put in place by the Constitution mostly bypassed by partisan interests. Now a legion of pundits and partisan journalists will rise up to defend anything their cult hero does, creating a totally de-realized social system.
At a certain point internal contradictions ultimately trigger a collapse. That might well be happening in global markets right now as the AI hype and high interest rates meet to spark an overdue correction.
As I type this, the world waits for news of how Iran will retaliate to Israel killing Hamas’ civilian leader in the middle Tehran while on an official visit. My bet is a series of drone and missile strikes over a period of days, just strong enough to get through Israel’s defenses to hit targets and kill some military personnel. I expect air bases to be a primary target. Hezbollah and the Houthis are sure to join.
The Hamas leader was a moderate and probably essential for securing a ceasefire and hostage exchange in Gaza. The Israeli government explicitly chose to sacrifice its own citizens to prolong a war for political gain. Killing your enemy’s military leaders is one thing; murdering the head of a peace delegation sends the message that you scorn the very idea of negotiations. Even former IDF leaders were appalled at what Netanyahu has done.
I only hope nobody will target Americans - the US has a carrier group in the Gulf of Oman in what looks like awfully suspicious timing. As if the Pentagon knew Netanyahu would do something after his visit to the US.
But insanity is on full display these days, especially in the US as the presidential election season heats up. As it turns out, swapping out the titular leader of the party doesn’t alter the nature of a broken institution. Harris is already determined to make Clinton’s worst mistakes in an election that should not be as close as polls indicate remains the case. Harris is still well behind where Biden and Clinton were at this point in their prior campaigns, the race dynamics simply reverting to where they stood right before Biden’s debate debacle.
Employing “weird” as an attack line is yet another example of how American politics is nothing more than a schoolyard or professional wrestling event. The whole thing fits into a conservative paranoid fever nightmare guaranteed to play in the rural rust and sun belts like deplorables did once filtered through the right targeted ads.
Instead of even attempting a unifying, post-partisan approach, the Democrats are so determined to have a donor-satisfying cage match that they’re determined to make the same mistakes that doomed them in 2016 and nearly sank Biden in 2020. The imminent selection of Harris’ vice president pick will say a lot about what the future holds. If she goes with a Beltway favorite like Pennsylvania’s Shapiro, it’s bad news: a continuation of Biden in every way and a probable loss in November.
Of the shortlisted contenders Arizona’s Senator Kelly is best for Ukraine and likely Harris too, but the abiding power of Northeast Yankee Puritan egotism likely means that she’ll pick Shapiro or maybe Walz, governor of Minnesota. Regardless, it may not matter. Most Americans have already made up their minds about which dystopia they prefer - the one where the stock market rages and inflation does too but people are entertained, or the tired technocratic vision of everyone doing what an expert on TV tells them they must this week to be good citizens.
The margin of victory will be mere thousands, less than 1%, in about half a dozen swing states. Whoever loses can be expected to challenge the result, leading to more rancor and division. The winning side, if there is one, won’t be able to implement its agenda any more than Biden was, his “historic” wins being much less so if you correct for inflation.
The war in Ukraine is, unlike the American partisan civil war, winnable - and a first step towards a better future anyway. It broke out for the same reason that effective climate action will never happen the way things presently are: inadequate governance. Too many essential global institutions are, like the USA, running on autopilot.
In Ukraine, all that has to happen is enough democratic countries get together and decide that victory is the only option. Sooner or later, the democratic world has to replace America.
Conclusion
I haven’t spent any time evaluating the prisoner exchange that D.C. and Moscow concluded in this brief because there isn’t much to comment on. These things shouldn’t be so difficult to arrange, even with prisoners of war.
However, as many Ukrainians are pointing out, here as with Israel the different treatment America metes out to allied countries is stark. Those who wonder whether US leaders will conclude a side deal with Putin without considering Ukraine’s interests are, unfortunately, right to be worried.
American leaders lie. More importantly, they lie feeling entirely justified in doing so as long as leading pundits agree this is in the national interest.
This is why it is always so important to take every promise made by an American leader with a hefty dose of salt and probably some vinegar too. If they say that something will absolutely happen in the future, watch out. If they insist that something is impossible, it usually isn’t. F-16s are a case in point.
To Americans, treaties - even NATO Article 5 - are all just words on paper, the meaning ultimately negotiable, because isn’t everything? The good news is that the rest of the world hasn’t truly needed American leadership for at least twenty years.
In Europe, NATO is slowly becoming the EU’s defense force. Over time, Europe will develop indigenous capabilities to replace what the US used to. A group of Pacific democracies working with NATO needs to be prepared to do the same.
The fact that it has taken two and a half years since the all-out invasion began to get Ukraine F-16s despite Putin’s overt aggression beginning back in 2014 is a warning to the rest of the world. If you have nukes - and Iran almost certainly will by the end of this year, you are untouchable.
To stop a war in the Pacific or the conquest of Taiwan, the democratic world needs a new solution. The alternative is stumbling into a war with China that we’re probably bound to lose.
If you don’t know yourself or your enemy, you’re doomed. And can anyone truly say that American leaders understand either?
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