David Axe
The Ukrainian air force went to war against invading Russian forces in February 2022 with just 125 combat aircraft concentrated at around a dozen large bases. Given Russia’s overwhelming deep-strike advantage—hundreds of deployed warplanes and thousands of cruise and ballistic missiles—few observers expected the Ukrainian brigades to survive the first hours of the war.
But they did survive. And 38 months later, they’re still surviving—and flying daily air-defence and strike sorties.
It has been an incredible feat. Can the equally outgunned Taiwanese air force duplicate it?
Almost certainly not. Geography, and the scale of the Chinese threat, will be harder on Taiwan’s air force and its 400 fighters.
The Ukrainian air force escaped the initial Russian bombardment because, tipped off by Ukrainian and allied intelligence agencies, it had dispersed its people, planes and munitions away from the big air bases. It spread forces across potentially scores of smaller civilian airfields and even stretches of highway. ‘The targets of each strike had moved by the time the missiles hit their designated aiming points,’ analysts Justin Bronk, Nick Reynolds and Jack Watling wrote in a 2022 study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.
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