Following up on my own post regarding forward deployment of fighters to the Arctic here to avoid further derails in the Ukraine thread.
I'm still trying to understand what military need is being met by permanent forward deployment of our fighter fleet in the high Arctic.
Let's be realistic. If Russian missiles come over the Arctic it will be thousands of strategic nuclear ballistic missiles and forward deployment of a few F-35's won't make a difference to that.
Please give me a plausible scenario where Russian missiles launched across the Arctic doesn't trigger a massive US nuclear counter strike. Any missile attack by Russia against continental North America will have to be seen by NORAD as a potential decapitation first strike and would trigger an American counter strike. The Russians know this which is what actually makes MAD work.
You can place all 88 of our F-35's in the high Arctic but what is that going to really do against approx.
5,900 Russian missiles? If anything we'd be better off both militarily and economically signing on to BMD with the US and building ABM sites around our major population centres/key infrastructure rather than forward basing our fighter force.