Oh, ok since you asked nicely and stroked my ego....
I honestly think my best insight on this subject comes from the trips I made to China a few years ago to bid on some work on some commercial airplanes. I know China is not Russia, but trust me, there is no bomber gap. On paper, Russia has extremely capable aircraft that would push even the latest American hardware to its limit, to say nothing of European. Maybe it's hubris and bias, but I just can't see Chinese or Russian hardware holding up over a campaign lasting more than a few weeks in the real world. Building airplanes that are technologically advanced enough to have the command and communications infrastructure necessary to defeat an enemy's ground defenses and are also maintainable and reliable enough to perform daily sorties is hard. The Chinese are not close. At all. I can't imagine that the Russians are all that far ahead, since the Chinese steal more technology from them than they do from us. I think definitely think Europe would have a hard time establishing air dominance over Russian territory, but the idea that the Russians could do so over Europe just doesn't pass my sniff test. Ground-based air defense is 100x easier than developing the attack aircraft capable of defeating them, so it would be a stalemate, where neither side would be able to generate effective offense against the other side's defense, and the battle line would be dictated by the ground war - whoever controls the territory can install sufficient defensive capability to control the sky over it.
Right now, I really believe that the US is the only country with the capability (read: stealth) to break that stalemate and "knock down the door" of an adversary's air defenses. The Russian fighters may turn better, fly higher, accelerate quicker, but those attributes are only useful for surviving against a missile that has already launched - they are irrelevant for being able to locate, track, and destroy the launcher it came from.[/QUOTE
I once read an article (can't cite, sorry) which compared our military during WWII to today. Then, we buried Germany with our not so advanced technology. They had better planes, tanks and submarines (not to mention the Vengeance weapons). But the ME262, King Tiger, Type XXI and all the rest came along too late, were inappropriately employed and were produced in insufficient numbers. Now it is the United States which relies on technological leaps to remain ahead of our potential enemies. So far, we seem to be getting it right.
But it is a never ending, expensive effort.
