ObessesedNuker
A US staff officer once observed that you could have swapped the two sides equipment and the results would have been little different...
… their part, the Serbs fired around 800 missiles in turn, scoring only two (manned) aircraft kills, mostly due to this suppression effort
If the exchange rate is 800 x SA-3 SAM’s for 2 x US planes shot down, then the Soviets would run out of SAM’s long before the Americans ran out of aircraft.
The US staff officer that said swapping equipment would lead to the same result never went up against a Patriot missile battery,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot
Patriot missile batteries were involved in three friendly fire incidents, resulting in the downing of a Royal Air Force Tornado and the death of both crew members, Flight Lieutenant David Rhys Williams and Flight Lieutenant Kevin Barry Main, on March 23, 2003. On March 24, 2003, a USAF F-16CJ Fighting Falcon fired a HARM anti-radiation missile at a Patriot missile battery after the Patriot's radar had locked onto and prepared to fire at the aircraft, causing the pilot to mistake it for an Iraqi surface-to-air missile system. The HARM missed its target and no one was injured and the Patriot Radar was examined and continued to operate but was replaced due to a chance that a fragment may have penetrated it and gone undetected.[48] On April 2, 2003, 2 PAC-3 missiles shot down a USN F/A-18 Hornet killing U.S. Navy Lieutenant Nathan D. White of VFA-195, Carrier Air Wing Five.[49][50]
That’s probably something like two blue on blue kills for 4 or 6 missiles fired., or a massive PK rate of 1:3, not 1:400 like the SA-3.