When Cope Harder Phrase ...

 ... fully applies))

US wins against Russian and Chinese air defenses in other countries risk teaching the wrong lessons. US forces that executed a raid in Venezuela to capture its now-former leader walked away with no aircraft lost to the country's Russian-made air-defense systems and Chinese-made radars. In the aftermath, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that it "seems those Russian air defenses didn't quite work so well, did they?" He didn't elaborate any further, but in briefings, the top US general spoke about how US forces dismantled and destroyed enemy air defenses. While the US can draw a certain degree of confidence in its capabilities from the success of the mission, there's a risk of reading too much into that success, especially when it comes to weapons made by American rivals in the hands of other militaries. Some of the failures of the Venezuelan-operated foreign air defenses, for example, have been attributed to issues like inactivity, incompetence, and a dearth of functional cohesion between different systems.

Some? You mean Venezuelan military being corrupt and bought out and thus disabling air defense?  WOW! There is a reason why Russia was wrapping up her presence in Venezuela in a duration of the last five years or so. I know, many people from Latin America are afraid of facing reality, but it was exposed in Venezuela and how it gladly sold its President to the US. Moreover, Pete Hegseth with his basic education in "Politics", whatever that means, and ROTC (a euphemism for pseudo-military "training") wouldn't know a first thing about Air Defense, nor will understand it due to a complete lack of an academic and experience tool kit for that. 

Having said all that, people with a much broader (still amateurish) grasp of technological realities in Pentagon (yes, there are still some there) put their input into the 2026 National Defense Strategy and tacitly admitted what I was warning about for the last almost two decades. 

Russia will remain a persistent but manageable threat to NATO’s eastern members for the foreseeable future. Indeed, although Russia suffers from a variety of demographic and economic difficulties, its ongoing war in Ukraine shows that it still retains deep reservoirs of military and industrial power. Russia has also shown that it has the national resolve required to sustain a protracted war in its near abroad. In addition, although the Russian military threat is primarily focused on Eastern Europe, Russia also possesses the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, which it continues to modernize and diversify, as well as undersea, space, and cyber capabilities that it could employ against the U.S. Homeland.

But even here, the atrocious level of incompetence in the US military and intel circles shines through:

Fortunately, our NATO allies are substantially more powerful than Russia—it is not even close. Germany’s economy alone dwarfs that of Russia.

You cannot fix stupid and that is why US loses all of its wars and will continue to do so because it learns nothing and American military institutions do not provide advanced military education for the XXI century other than Hollywood mode representation of the warfare. So, they cope, they lie to themselves, they lie to the world because they have no guts to admit that the "finest fighting force in history" would crumble in real war within a few weeks and will immediately escalate to the nuclear threshold. I know, it hurts. But today, in Russia, it is a Day of General Staff. 

It was established by the Order of Catherine the Great in 1763 based on the Quartermaster Office of Russian Army established by Peter the Great in 1711. The US will try to emulate it, it will continuously fail--there is no staff and national and military culture which exists in the US capable to support that--US "operations" in 404 exposed what kind of delusion the US military lives in. Nor will the issue of procurement be fixed because you have to have a system in place which the US doesn't have. Just to demonstrate how Russia's General Staff and Russian economy won the arms race. 

Here is comparison of Sarmat and Minuteman III. Yes, hypersonic weapons (such as Avangard), unlimited range and almost 10 times larger payload. But I am sure Germany can replicate it, after all its economy "dwarfs" Russia's. Good luck and cope harder.