I think people are used to the last couple of decades of Western powers (especially the “super” one) facing underequip militias or 3rd World armies with 4 generations-old equipment.
If you don’t “control the skies” - which means the other side either never had long range AA or all of it got taken out - options like high altitude bombers and cruise missiles, that just worked unimpeded in places like Afghanistan and Yemen (so the only viable strategy for the other side was “don’t get spotted”, which highly limits the whole " bomb the other side’s bridges") don’t actually work all that well.
Militarily Ukraine is nothing at all like Afghanistan: they started already having S300 and meanwhile they’ve received even better AA systems from the West such as Patriots, plus they have to expertise to make and maintain their own modern(ish) military hardware since they were one of the prime designers and makers of it back in Soviet times, so strategies involving air power against them won’t at all work the same (cruise missiles have to be used in large numbers with low rates of success, especially in the most well protected areas like Kyiv, bombers have to stand 100s of kms from the Ukrainian airspace otherwise they’ll be dodging long range AA missiles).
This is actually a modern day version of a the traditional war between two equivalent nations, not asymmetric warfare like every single conflict the US has been involved in since WWII or a the least Korea.
I think people are used to the last couple of decades of Western powers (especially the “super” one) facing underequip militias or 3rd World armies with 4 generations-old equipment.
If you don’t “control the skies” - which means the other side either never had long range AA or all of it got taken out - options like high altitude bombers and cruise missiles, that just worked unimpeded in places like Afghanistan and Yemen (so the only viable strategy for the other side was “don’t get spotted”, which highly limits the whole " bomb the other side’s bridges") don’t actually work all that well.
Militarily Ukraine is nothing at all like Afghanistan: they started already having S300 and meanwhile they’ve received even better AA systems from the West such as Patriots, plus they have to expertise to make and maintain their own modern(ish) military hardware since they were one of the prime designers and makers of it back in Soviet times, so strategies involving air power against them won’t at all work the same (cruise missiles have to be used in large numbers with low rates of success, especially in the most well protected areas like Kyiv, bombers have to stand 100s of kms from the Ukrainian airspace otherwise they’ll be dodging long range AA missiles).
This is actually a modern day version of a the traditional war between two equivalent nations, not asymmetric warfare like every single conflict the US has been involved in since WWII or a the least Korea.