Last time US fighter pilots had to deal with people firing anti aircraft missiles at them in volume was during the opening days of the first gulf war.
Anyone remember the flight recorder video from an F16 over Baghdad being chased by six surface to air missiles? During the chase sustained an average of 3.6G with peak acceleration at points reaching 6.4G. Does seem like the stuff of nightmares.
The US kill-death ratio is also telling.
During the Global War on Terror less than ten thousand US citizens killed in the conflict but around a million Afghans and Iraqis directly killed along with around 4 million people across the region indirectedly killed. Even the Vietnam war was something like 40,000 US citizens killed in exchange for around 3 million killed on the Vietnamese side. Hell… the US kill-death ratio in the World War 2 Pacific theater, some of the most brutal fighting the US has engaged in, was only 70,000 US citizens killed in exchange for 2.5 million Japanese soliders and somewhere around 1 million Japanese civilians killed.
The US has amazing kill-death ratios across all its wars excluding its civil war when busy fighting among itself. It’s disgusting really. The US will lose a few thousand while killing millions on the other side. Even in total war engagements the US loses thousands while the other combatants lose many millions. Since 1775 the US has only lost around 650,000 even when including both the US civil war and World War 2.
People always make the mistake of assuming during colonial adventures the US is doing anything other than smashing everything up (immediately wiping out the opposing military) then sitting back and milking any insurgency for as long as it is profitable to maintain a low intensity conflict. The US has really only ever fought two conflicts on a total-war footing (Civil War, World War 2) but managed to have hundreds of colonial adventures and so-called police actions throughout its entire history. For most of its history the US has been fighting one or more military actions somewhere, starting with westward expansion across North American then the so-called banana-wars advancing US corporate interests across Latin America and various colonial or cold war adventures across the entirety of the eastern hemisphere.
Up side is central African countries are extremely good at containing outbreaks once identified. It’s the reason most of those countries handled COVID better than any European or American countries. Outbreaks of hemorrhagic fevers like ebola (horrific way to die, traumatic to witness) have a way of causing the type of mass psychological trauma that teaches entire generations to take shit seriously.