Having won pledges for NATO battle tanks rusting in the garage, Ukraine’s president is lobbying for Western fighter jets his pilots can’t fly

(Originally published Feb. 10 in “What in the World“) Russia’s new offensive in Ukraine is apparently underway, with artillery launching intensified drone and missile attacks in support of new divisions in eastern Donbas.

While Russian forces are reportedly overstretched and undersupplied, it’s becoming evident that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is running up against its own

limits in Ukraine. Already facing troubling shortages of artillery that have sent it as far as South Korea in search of new supplies, NATO now faces questions over a shortage of battle-ready tanks. NATO members have promised to send Ukraine German-made Leopard 2 tanks, but it’s now clear that it could take months before they can send them. Many, if not most, of Britain and France’s 440 tanks need repairs. And the dearth of operational NATO tanks has raised troubling questions about how prepared the alliance might be if Russia were to expand the war beyond Ukraine using whatever remains of the 12,000 tanks it had at the start of the invasion.

Having overcome earlier resistance to providing him battle tanks, however, the sky’s the limit now for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. After a whirlwind tour of London, Paris and Brussels, Zelensky said that he is confident his request for fighter jets, or “wings of freedom” will be met by members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But like the tanks, the question is how soon Ukrainian pilots will be able to use any NATO fighters. While the United Kingdom has expressed a willingness to consider sending Ukraine Typhoon fighters, it has said it would take years of training before they could be used in combat.

Now if only there were a way to give Ukraine NATO jets together with pilots who already know how to fly them without declaring war on Russia… Like that time U.S. Navy and Marine pilots were contracted out to the Republic of China with Curtiss P-40 fighter aircraft to fight Japan’s invasion of China—eight months before Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of war against Japan.

Or if there were jet aircraft NATO could supply Ukraine that don’t need to have a pilot at all… Ukraine already gets U.S. intelligence about the whereabouts of Russian forces. It has also revealed that it relies on target information from U.S. military personnel on bases in Europe for firing its U.S.-supplied Himars, the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System launchers.

Washington still hasn’t learned that poking around in Russia’s sensitive border areas only generates the need for more U.S. military intervention. Or maybe it really has learned that. Either way, after years of providing weapons to Ukraine and then entertaining its inclusion in NATO finally provoked a Russian invasion, the U.S. is now stepping up its security assistance to Georgia. Not the peach state bordering Florida, the former Soviet state that sits on Russia’s southern border in the Caucasus and that Russia invaded in 2008.

Speaking of role reversals, Washington continues to express mock outrage over the Chinese surveillance balloon that wafted across the United States before being shot down by one of Raytheon’s Sidewinder missile over the Atlantic coast. The White House says the balloon is part of a fleet of spy balloons used to, well, spy on more than 40 countries. It knows this in part because it used one of America’s U2 spy planes to spy on the balloon during its flight before it was dispatched.

The U.S. Air Force still operates about 30 U2 fighter planes to conduct spy, er, reconnaissance, missions. No U2 has been shot down since 1960, however, so they’re apparently much sneakier than China’s balloons.

News flash: countries spy on each other. All countries. China and the U.S. maintain a network of spy satellites capable of eavesdropping on each other’s cellular communications. China last year protested (and admitted) that the U.S. National Security Agency had managed to hack into its telecommunications network. And the U.S. is still smarting from Beijing’s detection and execution of at least 30 CIA spies in China a decade ago. The scandal is that the U.S. didn’t move against China’s 60-meter tall balloons until civilians spotted one from the ground, instead tracking it all the way from Alaska to South Carolina.

But spying is like any infidelity in a relationship: no one gets hurt until someone gets caught in the act. And the idea that China flew its balloons right over the U.S. Midwest in plain view, and that it may be operated by “Strategic Support Force” of the People’s Liberation Army, just seems so frightening and makes us feel so, ugh, violated and dirty.

The incident has thus raised already high diplomatic tensions between Washington and Beijing just when the latter appeared to be trying to patch things up. Now the Biden Administration is suggestion punitive action that may go beyond making China sleep on the sofa. Beijing has countered with its own more ridiculous level of outrage over the downing of the balloon, which it still maintains was just a friendly civilian meteorological aircraft that just happened to be outfitted with a massive payload of antennas “the size of a regional jet” and needed some comforting after losing its way in some particularly tough weather.

Washington is also pretending to be scandalized by the revelation that China’s military buys its spy balloons from civilian Chinese companies. Meanwhile, the Pentagon buys its hundreds of billions of dollars of weaponry each year from companies like Boeing, which sells commercial jets to China, and Raytheon, which sells the Pratt & Whitney engines that make those jets fly.