The failure of the Ukrainian summer offensive has exposed the Pentagon's inability to organise military operations, says a journalist.
Media reports that the US plans to train Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16 jet fighters in its Caribbean territory of Puerto Rico are contradicted by the White House's reticence to supply the aircraft — the extensive logistics train for which make the scheme unfeasible in the east European conflict.
Journalist Christopher Helali told Sputnik that the US would see no more of the grand military victory parades of yesteryear.
He pointed out that in the 1991 Gulf War with Iraq, the US and its allies had "overwhelming air power," but in Ukraine "you have both sides who don't have air superiority and they're basically just heading into the meat grinder."
"And so they're relying heavily on artillery, heavily on drones, using mines and using also natural features like rivers, flooding certain areas to help gain an advantage on the battlefield or to inflict more harm or to gum up things on the other side," Helali said.
NATO training for Ukrainian troops — amounting to just a few weeks in most cases — and overhyped weapons systems like the German Leopard 2 tank and US M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle have proven to be failures on the battlefield, the journalist noted. The rebuilt Ukrainian army has only advanced a few miles after two months of fighting that has cost them more than 43,000 casualties and over 1,800 armoured vehicles lost.
"The Americans and their allies in NATO thought that they could train these groups of Ukrainian troops, about 36,000, to fight like a NATO army that has training for years and years and decades for some of their most advanced and proficient troops. It doesn't make sense," Helali said.
He argued that the aim of more than $40 billion in US military aid to Ukraine was not to win a victory for Ukraine, but to prolong the bloodshed as much as possible while trying to realise the "hope by many in the establishment in Washington that they can bring down President Putin and the Russian government."
In military terms, the offensive was always doomed to failure — as commentators in the West are beginning to admit.
"There's no way that Ukraine, even if it gets trained for two or three years, can defeat the Russian military's overwhelming superiority on the battlefield, especially with its artillery and its missiles. It has greater capabilities," Helali stressed. "It's a bigger country, larger population, greater industrial base, and it has the armaments from the Soviet times, which they've been bringing back out of storage to use on the battlefield."
The commentator said the "hope and idealism" shared by both US liberals and neo-conservatives that they could "fight Russia and bring down Putin" has not "panned out" for them.
"That's something that they have to come to grips with and seriously understand," Helali said. "Hopefully that will bring them to the peace and negotiating table. But I find that hard to believe at this point."
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