The United States is taking the next couple of weeks to hold massive war games over the skies of Europe that are meant to send a message to Russia. 

But does U.S. military power live up to the hype? Let’s break it down and get into a side of the story you are unlikely to get from the corporate mainstream media.

This exercise has been dubbed “Air Defender 23.” It kicks off today, June 14, billed as the largest air-deployment exercise in NATO history. Germany will serve as the host and logistical hub. Three flight zones will be temporarily closed to civilian air traffic over Germany, and authorities are warning there will be delays to civilian flights.

From June 12 to June 23, up to 250 aircraft will be stationed across six military bases, with 25 countries taking part. The U.S. alone is sending 100 aircraft across the Atlantic.

This “training” exercise is so intense, that some analysts have even warned about the danger that it could actually be cover for a surprise NATO attack on Russia and the launching of World War III. We all know that if the U.S. and its allies take us down that path, such a war would likely escalate to nuclear exchanges. But even a conventional war with Russia could result in significant damage to major U.S. cities and military installations, all of which would become easy targets for non-nuclear hypersonic missiles — these are super-fast missiles that the U.S. Patriot system appears helpless to defend against.

To hear former U.S. Marine intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter tell it, much of Western military power is built on perception and not on real-world war scenarios. He says Russia, on the other hand, is focused more on making sure its military hardware works and works consistently, rather than on trying to bedazzle the world with a glitzy public relations campaign.

I can’t vouch for how accurate Ritter’s assessment is. I don’t know him. But I do think it’s important to give him a full hearing and make up your own mind. He does have actual military experience in Iraq and has inspected the weapons he talks about up close and personal. Does he have some secret motive to lie to us? I don’t know. And time will tell whether his perspective is the right one or not, but again, I think we would be foolish to write him off without even giving him a full hearing.

The Patriot anti-air defense system is one weapon that Ritter focuses on in an interview that was livestreamed today, June 14, on YouTube. If the truth about U.S. capabilities lies halfway between what Ritter tells us and what corrupt U.S. military officials like Gen. Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin tell us, which I suspect may be the case, then U.S./NATO military power is not nearly as invincible as Americans and Europeans have been led to believe.

Ritter says many of the weapons systems in the Western NATO arsenal are “overhyped” and “don’t work,” at least not as advertised in the slick propaganda videos put out by NATO member states or even as seen in the skies during their vaunted military exercises. Why? He gives an intriguing answer to that question.

“Because they were built by criminals,” he says. He then goes on to explain how the U.S. defense industry works, with contractors putting out weapons that maximize profits rather than focusing on functionality during actual military scenarios against a fellow superpower like Russia or China.

“The Russians, their stuff might not look as cool or as down-draft but their stuff works,” he said.

The Patriot system, for example, is “filled with glitches in its radar. It is a problematic system, at best,” he said, especially when run on full-auto mode.

To run it effectively, he said it must be run on manual mode, but that requires several operators per unit to get months of training.

If running the system on full auto mode, which the Ukrainians have been trained to do, it can take up to six or seven missiles to hit one enemy missile and knock it out of the sky. “That is unsustainable,” said Ritter, who goes into detail about how these systems are designed and how they are not vastly superior to Russian counter-weapons, at least not in a real-world scenario of how wars are fought.

We can argue about how much credibility should be assigned to Ritter’s analysis, but here’s the bottom line: The U.S. military has never gone up against a force like Russia or even China. If you look at all the wars we’ve been involved in since the end of World War II, they have all been against countries that have little or no real air force. Iraq had SCUD missiles but nothing like what Russia possesses in terms of the numbers and capability. We have never seen war against a country with an air force comparable to ours, armed with hypersonic missiles, thousands of tanks and armored vehicles, all supported by its own defense industry capable of churning out endless munitions.

Have we been lied to by a succession of U.S. presidents, going back to the early days of the Cold War? Has our government, combined with a corrupt media, given we Americans a false sense of security and invincibility? Please hear this man out and draw your own conclusions. Share with others if you find him credible. We cannot allow our government to continue to escalate this conflict and steer us into World War III and nuclear Armageddon.