American technological and logistic overmatch would have a crushing effect

Lewis Page

20 August 2025

So, Donald Trump has recently said that the US military would be part of Ukrainian security in the event of a peace deal, offering “very good protection”. Then, shortly after, he said there would be no US “boots on the ground”. Is this just shilly-shallying?

No, actually. The fact is that the USA is perfectly capable of crippling the Russian military, on its own, without the use of nuclear weapons and without the need for a single US boot to touch Ukrainian soil – probably without any large number of US aviators needing to enter Ukrainian airspace, even.

There was some doubt about this reality before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Looking at lists of weapons and units, it seemed that Russia had everything that the US had. America had its iconic, devastating Tomahawk cruise missile, the weapon which took down the air defences of Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gadaffi, much improved since then – but Russia had its Kalibr, supposedly even more capable in some variants. The USA had AWACS radar aircraft that could scan hundreds of miles of sky and direct fifth-generation stealth fighters to dominate that airspace: but Russia seemingly had Beriev A-50 AWACS planes and stealth jets of its own. Putin even had his claimed six “super weapons”, unstoppable by any existing defences: the nominally hypersonic Zircon and Kinzhal missiles among them.

But it has turned out that the Kalibr is no Tomahawk. Then, Russia only had nine Berievs nominally left in service at the start of the invasion. It has lost at least three to enemy action and there is doubt as to whether even one Beriev can now be kept airborne around the clock. Ukrainian drone strikes on Moscow and other Russian targets should not have been possible if there had been Berievs watching overhead. Perhaps it is just that the A-50, as with so much supposedly advanced Russian equipment, doesn’t really work.

Meanwhile the Su-57 “Felon”, Russia’s sole operational stealth fighter, is widely acknowledged not to be up to the standard of US or Chinese fifth-gen planes. Worse still, only handfuls have actually been delivered to the Russian air force, as manufacturing is crippled by Western sanctions.

As for Putin’s vaunted “super weapons”, when they have been used in Ukraine their performance has been unimpressive to say the least. The supposedly unstoppable Kinzhal – actually nothing more than an air-launched version of the 1980s-vintage Iskander ballistic missile – turned out to be quite stoppable by the American Patriot in Ukrainian hands. The supposedly devastating air-breathing Zircon fared no better.

These failures all help to explain why the Russians could not achieve victory in 2022. They were attacking a Ukrainian military which, at that point, was in the same sort of league as Saddam Hussein or Colonel Gadaffi in equipment terms. If Russia had truly been a “near peer” competitor of the USA, the result should have been the same as in 2003 and 2011. Instead the outnumbered, outgunned and supposedly technologically overmatched Ukrainians stopped the Russians cold. Most Russian penetrations were forced back across the border and the war has degenerated into a grinding attritional conflict of artillery and drones in the south and east. Russia is clearly nowhere close to being a near peer of the USA.

What this tells us is that Russia has basically no chance at all against US conventional forces in an air and missile war. If America chooses, it could cripple Russia’s forces in the field. Weapons such as the Tomahawk and the Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) could be launched from afar and fly to their targets. Others such as the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) or its successor the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) could be placed in Ukrainian hands. American technological and logistic overmatch – particularly in the form of stealth, AWACS, electronic warfare and air tankers – would have a crushing effect. We have seen how this capability is real among America and its more competent allies recently, with the total defeat of Iran’s Russian-supplied air defences by Israel and then the US itself.

In theory Russian S-300 and S-400 defensive missiles would protect Putin’s armies, as might its still large forces of Cold War era jets. But these have turned out to be paper tigers even against Ukraine’s improvised propellor drones – and those are First World War technology. Russia’s technology turned out to be more or less completely useless against Israel. Russian chances against the US military machine would clearly be slim: and once the air defences were gone, with Ukrainian or Western drones and jets free to strike, Russian ground forces would soon be pummelled into disarray as Saddam’s and Gaddafi’s were.

The US has not done most of this, basically, because it fears or feared a Russian nuclear strike. Russia for its part has not made a nuclear strike, in large part, because these US conventional options have deterred it. Putin would not wish to escalate to tactical nuclear strikes only to suffer defeat by purely conventional means.

Nonetheless the hard military reality is that President Trump can totally and extremely credibly guarantee Ukrainian security if he chooses to do so, and he can do it without any need for troops on the ground.

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