On the conventional battlefield, heavy weapons and air control are nearly everything. Without that, the Georgians will eventually be ground down. The question is how long? And what can the US do, or will it do, in the time available? At the start of this engagement, if you look back several posts, I wrote that it might make sense to send an air superiority force to a neighboring country, in order to deter the escalation we now observe. That would have complicated the Russian calculus and might have made them more cautious. Now we don’t know where this will end, and maybe air superiority will have to be sent in the end to reassure Turkey, which is a NATO member.