That is pathetic.
I wonder if this is the state of professional military education (PME) in the PLA. Or maybe we should wonder if there is any PME in the PLA at all.
Since am Air Force, am going to stick to airplanes, for now.
The airplane is what we may call a 'force projection' platform, meaning it can carry soldiers far beyond the immediate battlefield. A truck can also carry but a truck can be stopped by the enemy, the ground, or even the weather. But the airplane, the moment it is airborne, is essentially unstoppable. Except by another airplane. What this mean is that if a military power have a weapon that radically altered the ways of battle, like the horse or the machine gun or the airplane, the best way to defeat that military is by matching to the same or better weapon.
Since the airplane can carry the war to practically anywhere, if I am in your airspace, you are immediately on the defensive. See Pearl Harbor, for one example. Defensive measures from the ground cannot deter the airplane. They are line of sight (LOS) limited, meaning you cannot use your AA guns or launch SAMs
UNTIL the airplane is known. Your LOS maybe as simple as your human eyes or complex like a radar. But the bottom line is that ground defensive measures are reactive, not responsive.
Nani? Is there a difference between 'react' and 'response'? Yes. The difference can be life or death.
Being reactive is means you have to wait for a stimuli before you can act. Being responsive mean you can be preemptive which mean looking for/at intelligence, having intuition, be formulaic, and finally predictive. The airplane is a responsive platform. It will carry the fight to beyond your borders and into enemy airspace, forcing him to respond to you over there.
The US did lost thousands of airplanes over North Viet Nam, but very few of them from air-air engagements because the North Vietnamese Air Force had very few fighters. The vast majority of US air losses in VN came from AA and SAMs, meaning the US was always the initiator of the fight and the NVA was reacting. So whenever people brought up raw statistics, they are being intellectually dishonest. They deceived using statistics. They gave off the impression that somehow the NVAF was powerful enough to stop US airpower.
Forward to the current Russia-Ukraine war, or specifically the air war. Now that it is clear that the VKS is a shiddy air force, and I hate to be so blunt about any air force, the numerically inferior Ukrainian Air Force should be wise to husband what they have to attack Russian ground forces. Here is why...
So far, the VKS have not deliver ordnance like the way US airpower did in VN. We seen heavy bombers did the 'carpet bombing' and fighter-bombers like the F-105 and F-4 doing more focused attacks. So what the NVAF did with their few MIG-21s was to do hit-and-run air tactics. For example, in a formation of 50 fighter-bombers, hit one and the entire force will jettison their bombs. If the VKS have been
CONSISTENTLY flying heavy bombing sorties, the Ukrainian Air Force can respond in the same way the NVAF did, thereby saving Ukrainian forces from Russian bombs. But since the VKS did nothing or so little of heavy bombing, the Ukrainians can leave their air defense to reactive ground based methods like AA and SAMs, and use their jets to take the fight to Russian ground forces. If the VKS is as capable as US airpower, there would be no Ukrainian Air Force remaining by the 3rd day latest.
This is what PME does. Your PLA leadership probably could do the same if they had not been too busy making money.
