I don't think this is a matter of stupidity. It appears to be a matter of blind ideology imposed by a very organized and strategic thinking minority who must realize that reducing the supply of fossil fuels and nuclear power which drive manufacturing productivity lowers not only production of goods and services but means a lower standard of lving.
The Chinese are the beneficiaries of the Climate Change/Green New Deal Agenda.
First, Biden need not supply a single pilot. Perhaps your Pentagon source can show you how the air forces of many a rich Arab nation had as many western pilots as their own for a long time flying western aircraft. It's called Mercenaries, and if the West wised up, they could supply jets they have zero intention of ever using or rehabilitating to the most modern standard at AMARG and in Nato countries, and instead of wasting piecemeal amounts of money on equipment, give Ukraine a large sum of money that would be invested in paying foreign ex-military pilots. If the corruption excuse is going to come in, "from leaked sources" (doctored by Russians on the leak, just like the ridiculous kill ratios posted here from leaked sources), let the West screen the pilots and issue the pay, they are still on Ukrainian payroll. They need not fly into Russia's vast integrated air defense (the ones drones do all day), bomb the hell out of Russian positions inside of Ukraine, and can handle incoming Russian aircraft. F-18 A++ and F-16 spares of any type will do. AMARG has roughly 7 to 8 squadrons of the earlier F18's and of F-16 A-D in long term "don't touch" storage category, along with nearly as many hulks which are parts jets. Give them 60, give them a 200k$ per pilot annual allowance, and let those adventure seekers fly. It was pretty damn effective where used in the past such as in Africa against Russian trained troops and any Angolan air, and pilots took money to fly for some foreign arab air forces where the opponent would in the past not have been Iran but other Arabs or more likely, Israel, which seems more daunting than Russian air power. People got good money to be human targets as mercs for Blackwater in Iraq, a pilot flying in the far west of Ukraine (no need for NATO airbases, and Russian jets have a pretty poor chance of hitting those bases and living, and missile stock is pretty bad for the types needed to hit the air bases in the far west- which is still a short combat radius to the east) can make good $ and do what they love to do without all the bureacratic woke crap and forced administrative BS they have to deal with in the Western Air Forces, especially the US. Would anybody have thought it strange Brit and Aussie pilots were training the Reds in China just a year ago? Now we know better, $ buys everything.
Of course, Biden is too stupid to do anything that results in anything other than dragging this out. Negotiate some slices to Russia (is it worth keeping some truly "Russian overrun" towns in the east where the minority maybe Ukes, or at least the far east of Crimea? Only the Ukes can answer), give the Ukes the means to pummel them mercilessly right, tell the Russians any nukes get returned to be used on you so don't use them, ANYTHING, just make a call. Right now it's a drawn out waste of money otherwise, but the Russians can't be rewarded for invading and the west can't always look so inept.
Mr. Nocera confirms what I thought obvious. No one else has said what Free Press has said so clearly.
The US/NATO proxy war is unnecessary and a disgrace to the US and Europe. It must come to a negotiated end.
I have one omission about nuclear safety.Doesn't the US have nuclear powered submarines?
US and France have nuclear powered aircraft carriers and the US has a fleet of nuclear submarines. Wikipedia reports that "O nly the United States Navy, the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom, and France's Marine Nationale field an all-nuclear submarine force. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_navy
I don't recall any malfunctions.
What is the US experience with nuclear power?
I do remember the Three Mile Island malfunction 43 years ago although no one was hurt and the reactor did not leak; the malfunction was contained.
Three Mile Island due to some cleaning goddammit got stuck in a relief valve. Some radioactive coolant leaked out and a bubble started to form in the reactor. No radioactive material was lost, aside from the coolant; and the reactor was safely returned to operation.
Oddly enough, TMI happened 12 days after the release of the dumb movie "China Syndrom." That put the fear of God into many dimwits in the US, thereby preventing new nuke plants from being built. That is until Savannah's plant went online last year.
Quilettle posted a useful analysis of the aftereffects of the Chernobyl disaster. In essence, it was very bad but not as bad as it resides in popular imagination. The unrealistic Linear No-Threshold Model explains much of the fear.
Chernobyl Revisited
Much of the tragedy resides in our collective response to the meltdown.
... The death toll from Chernobyl was radically lower than the worst-case studies have claimed. The United Nations has released several reports that have analyzed the radiation deaths through extensive reviews of the existing scientific literature and concluded that the accident likely caused only a few hundred deaths at most. According to the UN, only 28 of the 134 workers and emergency personnel died who had suffered from ARS.
...
So where do the extreme mortality estimates, or at least those significantly higher than the UN tally, come from? They are usually based on the flawed linear no-threshold (LNT) model. LNT assumes that all radiation exposure, no matter how small the dose, has adverse health consequences—which is unlikely to be true.
There are natural experiments that complicate the LNT hypothesis. Yangjiang, China, has three times the background radiation as a neighboring city, yet a study of over 100,000 Yangjiang residents and a corresponding control group in the neighboring city found that residents in Yangjiang did not have elevated cancer risk.
Stupid will be as stupid is
I don't think this is a matter of stupidity. It appears to be a matter of blind ideology imposed by a very organized and strategic thinking minority who must realize that reducing the supply of fossil fuels and nuclear power which drive manufacturing productivity lowers not only production of goods and services but means a lower standard of lving.
The Chinese are the beneficiaries of the Climate Change/Green New Deal Agenda.
First, Biden need not supply a single pilot. Perhaps your Pentagon source can show you how the air forces of many a rich Arab nation had as many western pilots as their own for a long time flying western aircraft. It's called Mercenaries, and if the West wised up, they could supply jets they have zero intention of ever using or rehabilitating to the most modern standard at AMARG and in Nato countries, and instead of wasting piecemeal amounts of money on equipment, give Ukraine a large sum of money that would be invested in paying foreign ex-military pilots. If the corruption excuse is going to come in, "from leaked sources" (doctored by Russians on the leak, just like the ridiculous kill ratios posted here from leaked sources), let the West screen the pilots and issue the pay, they are still on Ukrainian payroll. They need not fly into Russia's vast integrated air defense (the ones drones do all day), bomb the hell out of Russian positions inside of Ukraine, and can handle incoming Russian aircraft. F-18 A++ and F-16 spares of any type will do. AMARG has roughly 7 to 8 squadrons of the earlier F18's and of F-16 A-D in long term "don't touch" storage category, along with nearly as many hulks which are parts jets. Give them 60, give them a 200k$ per pilot annual allowance, and let those adventure seekers fly. It was pretty damn effective where used in the past such as in Africa against Russian trained troops and any Angolan air, and pilots took money to fly for some foreign arab air forces where the opponent would in the past not have been Iran but other Arabs or more likely, Israel, which seems more daunting than Russian air power. People got good money to be human targets as mercs for Blackwater in Iraq, a pilot flying in the far west of Ukraine (no need for NATO airbases, and Russian jets have a pretty poor chance of hitting those bases and living, and missile stock is pretty bad for the types needed to hit the air bases in the far west- which is still a short combat radius to the east) can make good $ and do what they love to do without all the bureacratic woke crap and forced administrative BS they have to deal with in the Western Air Forces, especially the US. Would anybody have thought it strange Brit and Aussie pilots were training the Reds in China just a year ago? Now we know better, $ buys everything.
Of course, Biden is too stupid to do anything that results in anything other than dragging this out. Negotiate some slices to Russia (is it worth keeping some truly "Russian overrun" towns in the east where the minority maybe Ukes, or at least the far east of Crimea? Only the Ukes can answer), give the Ukes the means to pummel them mercilessly right, tell the Russians any nukes get returned to be used on you so don't use them, ANYTHING, just make a call. Right now it's a drawn out waste of money otherwise, but the Russians can't be rewarded for invading and the west can't always look so inept.
Mr. Nocera confirms what I thought obvious. No one else has said what Free Press has said so clearly.
The US/NATO proxy war is unnecessary and a disgrace to the US and Europe. It must come to a negotiated end.
I have one omission about nuclear safety.Doesn't the US have nuclear powered submarines?
US and France have nuclear powered aircraft carriers and the US has a fleet of nuclear submarines. Wikipedia reports that "O nly the United States Navy, the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom, and France's Marine Nationale field an all-nuclear submarine force. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_navy
I don't recall any malfunctions.
What is the US experience with nuclear power?
I do remember the Three Mile Island malfunction 43 years ago although no one was hurt and the reactor did not leak; the malfunction was contained.
It works. Which is why we must kill it.
Three Mile Island due to some cleaning goddammit got stuck in a relief valve. Some radioactive coolant leaked out and a bubble started to form in the reactor. No radioactive material was lost, aside from the coolant; and the reactor was safely returned to operation.
Oddly enough, TMI happened 12 days after the release of the dumb movie "China Syndrom." That put the fear of God into many dimwits in the US, thereby preventing new nuke plants from being built. That is until Savannah's plant went online last year.
Fear is powerfully persuasive.
Quilettle posted a useful analysis of the aftereffects of the Chernobyl disaster. In essence, it was very bad but not as bad as it resides in popular imagination. The unrealistic Linear No-Threshold Model explains much of the fear.
Chernobyl Revisited
Much of the tragedy resides in our collective response to the meltdown.
... The death toll from Chernobyl was radically lower than the worst-case studies have claimed. The United Nations has released several reports that have analyzed the radiation deaths through extensive reviews of the existing scientific literature and concluded that the accident likely caused only a few hundred deaths at most. According to the UN, only 28 of the 134 workers and emergency personnel died who had suffered from ARS.
...
So where do the extreme mortality estimates, or at least those significantly higher than the UN tally, come from? They are usually based on the flawed linear no-threshold (LNT) model. LNT assumes that all radiation exposure, no matter how small the dose, has adverse health consequences—which is unlikely to be true.
There are natural experiments that complicate the LNT hypothesis. Yangjiang, China, has three times the background radiation as a neighboring city, yet a study of over 100,000 Yangjiang residents and a corresponding control group in the neighboring city found that residents in Yangjiang did not have elevated cancer risk.
https://quillette.com/2023/04/26/chernobyl-revisited/?ref=quillette-newsletter