Ukraine, Planes, and Flying Blind through the Political Clouds

The situation with Russia, Ukraine, and lack of fighter planes is a huge mess. Unlike many of the conflicts in which the United States has been involved in recent years, the current conflict runs a very real risk of involving members of NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — that could drag the United States directly into war with Russia rather than fighting a proxy war.

Here’s an article from the Washington Post explaining how Poland appears to have “blindsided” the United States with an offer to send its entire force of MiG-29 fighter jets to Ramstein Air Base, Germany so the United States could pass them on to Ukraine, in return for the United States upgrading the Polish Air Force to American-made F-16 fighter jets. LINK HERE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/09/ukraine-poland-mig-29-fighter-jets/

According to the article, “production for the warplanes is backlogged and the United States has promised Taiwan, under increasing threat from China and spooked by Russia’s attempt to annex Ukraine, that it would receive the next batch. Poland presumably asked for “used” planes to bypass this issue.”

Two decades ago, I was a reporter outside an Air Force base where the pilots were flying F-16s. They were considered “on the way out” back then, and that’s even more true today. The Soviet-era MiG-29s are still more out of date. So why are we sending out-of-date planes to allies?

One reason is they are much cheaper. Another is that Ukrainian pilots are trained to fly Soviet-era planes, not our planes.

The key problem is that time is wasting.

There’s a huge Russian convoy — some reports say it’s 40 miles long — full of great targets stuck on a roadway. If Russia were directly at war with the United States, that convoy would already be a smoking ruin comparable to Saddam Hussein’s “highway of death” with blackened vehicles and blackened bodies. Reports say the Russian drivers know how dangerous their position is, and they don’t stay in their vehicles but rather sleep in the woods in positions well away from the roads.

Sooner or later, either Russia is going to get those trucks off the roadway and into fighting positions, or the Ukrainians are going to find a way to destroy the convoy.

If the convoy reaches its intended destinations, Ukrainian leaders will blame America for not providing the planes that could have destroyed it and will blame America for enabling Russians to destroy Ukrainian cites. But on the other hand, if Russia blames Poland for providing the planes to Ukrainian pilots, and attacks Poland (or some other NATO country), we run a very real risk of Vladimir Putin’s attack on a NATO country forcing the United States and the rest of NATO to defend that country. (A qualification here is that Putin is not stupid. There’s a very good chance that he’d attack Poland through third parties, or via cyberwarfare, using plausible deniability to avoid a clear-cut situation of a direct attack on a NATO member.)

The worst potential problem is that China is watching. Like it or not, the entire economy of Vladimir Putin’s Russia is comparable to the US state of Florida. Russia today is far from the Soviet bear of a bygone era, and it’s been described as a gas station masquerading as a country.

China is a far more dangerous threat, and we should not forget that the planes Poland wants were promised to Taiwan. They were promised to Taiwan for a reason.

If Vladimir Putin gets away with what he’s doing in Ukraine, Taiwan’s leaders have good reason to believe they’ll be China’s next target, and will have good reason to wonder whether the United States will defend Taiwan.

Yesterday’s presidential election in South Korea put a conservative prosecutor in charge of another country that has good reason to fear not only China but also North Korea. We can expect South Korea, which unlike Ukraine has a strong and modern army, to ramp up its military might quickly.

What’s happening in Ukraine, for better or for worse, is going to set the agenda for what happens in many other places.