Speaking of old/retro kit, there's a desert full of 'em in Arizona.
A-10s would be cut to shreds by S-300. It can only operate safely under air superiority.
If you had an army of 200,000 people and in less than a year grew it to 1.5 million do you think you would need more weapons? The weapons are mostly to fill out new units that have been created since the war began.
In the post WW II order, wars of conquest are no longer tolerated. Putin is acting like a neo-Hitler trying to conquer his neighbors and the rest of the world wants to take him down a peg or two. If Russia can't play nice with their neighbors, they need to have their toys taken away.
You mean the ones they won't get until at least llate 2024? They have as many Abrams today as Tesla customers have next gen Roasters. The US State Department approved the sale in December 2022.
In all those wars the US was facing insurgencies. Insurgencies are famously very difficult to put down once they get started and it doesn't matter how sophisticated the stronger power is.
The best way to stop an insurgency is to do an occupation with enough troops to stop it before it gets started. The rule of thumb is a power doing an occupation needs 50 troops per 1000 population to prevent an insurgency. The US never put in enough troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to stop one from happening, and in Vietnam it was taking over a failed counterinsurgency operation from the French who gave up and went home.
Most successful counterinsurgencies are by the government of the country trying to put down a rebellion and that is still patchy. The only time in the last 120 years where I can think of an outside force pulled off anything close to a successful counterinsurgency was the British on the Malay peninsula in the late 1940s.
When GW Bush's administration asked Gen Shinseki for a war plan for Iraq, Shinseki drew up a plan for a successful occupation with enough troops to prevent an insurgency from starting. Rumsfeld didn't like that and ended up firing Shinseki. History has proven Rumsfeld very wrong.
When I looked at Russia's troops pre-war it was obvious to me they weren't bringing enough troops to occupy the country. I did expect Ukraine's government to fall, but expected a long, drawn out insurgency that would result in Russia leaving with its tail between its legs after the Ukrainians bled them out with a million paper cuts. That's what happened to the USSR in Afghanistan in the 80s.
Russia would have needed to bring 2.25 million troops to have any chance at a successful occupation. Instead they brought somewhere around 100,000. If Ukraine's army had been as inept as it was in 2014, the Russians may have been able to take the country, but they wouldn't have been able to stop an insurgency.
Military historians study this stuff. Things have changed throughout history, but a lot of things haven't. One rule that hasn't changed is if an invader can't seal the deal and loses momentum, they rarely get it back. The US doctrine of "shock and awe" has a purpose beyond sounding good in a press briefing. It's to ensure the US does not lose momentum until the objectives have been taken. It's easy for an army like America's to capture ground against another army in the field. It, like all technically advanced armies throughout history, is weak to an insurgency once it gets going.
Before the 20th century a number of colonial powers were able to put down insurgencies because the colonial power had a vast technological advantage and the occupied didn't have the proper concepts to operate covertly and hurt the colonizers with sneak tactics. In the 20th century there is always someone around to teach the occupied covert tactics if they don't figure them out for themselves.
What is going on in Ukraine right now has some insurgency action going on behind Russian lines. Ukrainian partisans have caused trouble for Russian supply in the south, but the bulk of the war is two armies meeting head to head. That is a completely different calculus than an insurgency.
