“Everywhere” meaning undefended airspace into which one masses a significant fraction of one type of strategic armament.
This was the savvy exploitation by Kyiv, once again, of Russian operational incompetence.
> there isn't anyone who will stop you from pre-positioning weapons adjacent to American strategic assets
You want to try driving a truck up to a USAF base? (EDIT: Where strategic arms, e.g. B-2s, live.)
This is a novel threat vector. It needs to be protected against with vigilance. That to requires active effort to counter doesn’t mean it’s OP. Just that defensive perimeters need to be expanded, units not needlessly amassed, air defences kept in check and those perimeters constantly (and completely) monitored.
The air mobility command in the Bay Area is similarly totally surrounded by urban civilization.
Isn’t Tinker mostly logistics, intelligence and AWACS? Don’t get me wrong, that’s important. But you’re not taking out a significant fraction of any U.S. armament hitting Tinker with drones.
And that's ignoring all the other functions the 25k+ people working there serve.
This drone attack worked because small explosives detonated close to an airframe can do catastrophic damage. That simply isn’t true for most equipment, civil or military. (The exception at Tinker being the AWACS.)
Tinker being nuked would be a strategic disaster. Dozens of drones causing small-arms damage around the base would be embarrassing, but nothing on the order of America losing a third of anything in its possession.
The analog would have to be us putting e.g. most of one class of unit at Tinker simultaneously for maintenance.
I count over 60 aircraft on the Google Maps image of Tinker, not all of them AWACS (there are less than 20 AWACS total so most of these planes aren't AWACS). And that's not counting what may be in hangars which could also be a target of this hypothetical attack. USAF has about 5500 aircraft, so this accounts for over 1% of the current USAF air fleet. It's not as critical an attack as what's happened in Russia, but it's still very damaging.
It's an operational airfield so it has large fuel tanks which would be targeted and are hardly immune to small explosives themselves. Attacking those and the ensuing fires would be costly to repair and recover from. That alone, ignoring any attacks on aircraft, could lead to months of downtime for the airfield and various disruptions as you relocate your operational units to an airfield that still has fuel tanks (if the aircraft survived the attack).
They’re slow to make, critical to modern war and we don’t even have two dozen of them. (I think at least a quarter of our AWACS are at Tinker. Hence the analogy to Russia concentrating its bombers.) For everything else we have redundancy in droves.
> not all of them AWACS
Yup, refuelling, logistics, cyberwar. Nice to have. But not critical and few among many.
> months of downtime for the airfield and various disruptions as you relocate your operational units to an airfield that still has fuel tanks
You’re not detonating fuel tanks at Tinker with drones. (Not unless they’re storing munitions within blast range of the tanks.)
I’m not arguing such a strike wouldn’t be damaging. It just would not be disabling to scale of this attack. It would also be unusual for the highways around bases to be unrestricted during major wartime. (Or drones to remain uncontrolled, for that matter.)
Why are you so certain of this? IIUC (I am far from an expert) the insurgents in Iraq regularly utilized improvised shaped charge devices to attack armored vehicles. I don't understand those to have been particularly large or heavy. Consider that fiber FPV drones are carrying upwards of 2 kg of fiber (IIUC) in addition to the payload. Fuel tanks are stationary so you can dispense with the fiber.
Anyway, I invite you to visit America some day. I think it's obvious to Americans that anyone can drive a truck to within a mile or two of every military installation, usually much closer.
One type of a retiring aircraft. Not comparable to a third of Russia’s entire bomber fleet.
> it's obvious to Americans that anyone can drive a truck to within a mile or two of every military installation
Fair enough, in peacetime. Russia is at war.
but if all aerial refueling fleet is damaged, like KC-135 Stratotankers then it will be over very quickly.
or blowing up Navy's ice cream supply depots and it will be over as well
One can compensate for the loss of AWACS with satellites and low-flying drones in the way one can compensate for a sprained ankle with crutches. See the recent Pakistan-India skirmish, which Pakistan appears to have won on account of sensor fusion powered by its AWACS.
They sent the planes for suicide mission without suppressing enemy air defense. Indians planes flew too close to the border without suppressing AD.
Pakistani planes flew from highland valley which was invisible from radio perspective
>Anduril has clinched a $642-million contract to supply counter-drone technology for the US Marine Corps (USMC).
I think it would be reasonable to assume that almost everything except for explosives were commercial off-the-shelf parts and trivial to acquire.
The best way to protect them is maybe not invading and trying to commit genocide on a neighboring country.
It's like developing a good relationship with Ukraine wasn't a possibility, it had to be through corruption and now war.
This attack, potentially, might spell the end of that treaty.
START has long since been a dead treaty, replaced by New START. New START has two verification methods, none of which rely on overflight by satellites; instead, verification is performed by onsite inspections of nuclear facilities.
Though they are unlikely to exceed the treaty warhead numbers, as nukes are expensive. It's too bad really, the START treaties were some of the best "reduce military spending" treaties ever made. Trump called it a bad deal back in 2017 and told Putin that he didn't want to extend it because it was too favorable, which is dumb since it was only ever a boon to both parties.
Despite all the bluster and bullshit and "Super duper turbo America killer 9000" weapons like the Satan, Russia does like the START treaties and wanted to keep them going, at least until the war.
As of today(!), the US has suspended the VISAs of Russia nuclear weapon inspectors as retaliation.