Day: July 31, 2025

• Ukraine has a new way to continue a key strategy for keeping its air force alive.
• It has new complexes to keep its F-16s moving, away from fixed bases.
• The West has been increasingly embracing dispersal, and Ukraine has shown how important it is.

Being able to fight from non-traditional locations is a growing priority for the West amid concerns about peer-level conflict against a foe like Russia or China and the risk that fixed bases could be destroyed early in a conflict.

For Ukraine, dispersal and mobility, while maintaining agility, have been critical to the country’s air forces surviving Russia’s onslaught.

Ukraine is using two new truck-mounted complexes to support its US-made F-16 fighter jets with mission planning, maintenance, and munitions. These systems, developed and provided by the group Come Back Alive with support from Ukraine’s military and energy sector, replace functions typically confined to fixed bases.

One of the new complexes has a command post and workstations for mission planning and briefings for pilots, as well as space for personnel to rest, and another comes with a workshop for testing and prepping weapons and trucks for putting munitions on the planes.

It’s very important because “Ukrainian airfields are one of the enemy’s priority targets, so it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep the aircraft safe,” Come Back Alive said. Ukraine also has not been able to build the support infrastructure its F-16s need, so flexible solutions are required.

Tim Robinson, a military aviation specialist at the UK’S Royal Aeronautical Society, described it as a very innovative step that could be “critical” to helping Ukraine’s few F-16s survive.

“You actually need to keep F-16s on the move, shift these vehicles around, and allow them to keep operating in these conditions where Russia is looking for them,” Robinson said. With steps like this, he added, Ukraine is “getting to where a lot of NATO would like to be.”

Ukraine’s dispersal

Keeping aircraft dispersed and disaggregated has stopped Ukraine’s air force, far smaller than Russia’s, from being wiped out. A US general said Ukraine lost relatively few of its aircraft on the ground in the first 18 months because “they very seldom will take off and land at the same airfield.”

Russia, on the other hand, didn’t noticeably start trying to disperse its aircraft until Ukraine started hitting its bases with long-range drones, putting the war on Russian soil. And even though Russia now moves its aircraft to keep them safe, Ukraine continues to score hits on Russian aircraft due to the tendency to keep them clustered.

Ukraine has had more success in targeting Russian air bases than the Russians have hitting the Ukrainian ones.

Many Western nations depend heavily on permanent bases and fixed installations to support their aircraft fleet, which works well in peacetime or in conflict scenarios in which the opposing force lacks the means to reach them, as has been the case in Middle East conflicts over the past few decades. But countries with far more advanced arsenals and the capacity to eliminate enemy airpower on the ground make it necessary to have alternatives.

A sense of urgency in the West

The West has been leaning into dispersal, disaggregation, and fighting from austere locations amid concerns over both Russia and China. China’s military has a growing reach, making US bases across the Pacific more vulnerable, and Russia is also on a war footing, increasing its missile output.

Amid efforts to boost air defenses, others are aimed at ensuring essential allied airpower isn’t a sitting duck.

This is a driving force, for instance, behind what the US Air Force calls its Agile Combat Employment strategy, which involves operating from dispersed locations and keeping airpower agile and flexible. It considers this practice critical in the Pacific as China’s military expands.

The US and allies want less reliance on traditional runways because it is much harder to target every piece of concrete in a country than it is to prosecute air bases.

Some fighter aircraft, like Sweden’s Gripen, are built for rugged operations, and aircraft like MQ-9 Reaper drones and A-10 Warthogs have taken off and landed on dirt airstrips. Other jets like F-16s and newer F-35s have executed highway landings alongside other planes, and big C-130 transport aircraft have even landed on beaches.

The urgency has been ramped up as militaries closely watch Russia’s war to see how it is fighting and to see what sort of changes they may need to make.

Robinsons said many Western militaries were already looking at dispersal, but “Ukraine has just kind of accelerated that, fast-tracked it, and put it back into people’s minds.”

A French lieutenant colonel, for instance, said that a 2023 dispersal exercise conducted involving British, American, and French air forces was “the new way of doing it, in order to face the peer threats that we are having at the moment.”

The US has also noted the change. Gen. Kevin Schneider, Commander of US Pacific Air Forces, said in March that “the days of operating from secure, fixed bases are over,” saying that the threats in the Indo-Pacific region require “a flexible, resilient force that can operate from multiple, dispersed locations under contested conditions.”

Jarmo Lindberg, a former Finnish fighter pilot who served as commander of the Finnish Defense Forces, told Business Insider last year that front-line NATO countries should adopt more dispersal tactics.

He said Finland, which borders Russia and designed its military with a Russian threat in mind, has embraced the idea of dispersal for decades, including by having road bases and jets that can use civilian airfields, not just military ones.

Big changes, though, are hard, hugely expensive, and can make air operations less efficient.

A former Western air force intelligence officer, who spoke to BI on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak about what he learned in the role, said it’s “a cultural thing that most Western air forces are used to operating from centralized bases.”

But he said there needs to be some change away from full centralization, as “lining them all up to get whacked is not really an option.”

A different sort of war

Ukraine’s fight against Russia isn’t necessarily what a peer-level conflict involving the West would look like. The West has far larger air forces and more advanced jets than Ukraine’s. Kyiv, meanwhile, has Soviet-era jets and only a handful of used F-16s and Mirages.

There are still important lessons in this war, though.

Warnings that the West may not be ready for a major war with a near-peer adversary are now sparking major defense spending, and the air war is front of mind. Watching Ukraine, there’s a growing realization, for example, that there is a huge shortage of ground-based air defenses in the West. These are vital systems for protecting bases and other targets.

Taras Chmut, the director of Come Back Alive, highlighted how different this fight is for Ukraine compared to how the jets were used by Western partners.

“The aircraft received by Ukraine appeared and existed in a closed ecosystem,” he said. “They were not used the way we use them. Ours operate under the conditions of a full-scale war — with constant sorties and continuous Russian hunting for the aircraft.”

He suggested the West wouldn’t need to copy this exact solution. Ukraine doesn’t have time “for the full deployment of infrastructure for the F-16; the most rational solution is to invest in a mobile ecosystem.”

Developments in Ukraine are driven by immediate necessity, but the West is paying attention.

“Turning F-16 style, permanent base ops into Gripen-style dispersed operations is something that I think a lot of air forces will be looking at with interest,” Robinson said.

• The meme-stock craze is back as retail traders bet big on companies like Opendoor and Kohl’s.
• The movement began in 2021, when investors rushed to buy GameStop, AMC, and other heavily shorted companies.
• Meme-stock status can allow managers to raise cheap capital, but gurus tell BI that this carries risks.

Can being a meme stock actually help a company, or is it just good vibes?

Four years after retail investors coordinated on Reddit’s Wall Street Bets forum to save GameStop from short sellers, they’ve been piling into shares of Opendoor, Kohl’s, Wendy’s, American Eagle Outfitters, and other embattled companies in recent days.

Good vibes and social-media buzz might seem like hot air, but two senior investors told Business Insider how savvy managers can turn the attention into cold, hard cash.

Cashing in

Opendoor has gained 239% in the past month, while Kohl’s and GoPro have jumped 58% and 127% in the past three months without traditional catalysts like bullish outlooks or strong earnings.

Stock gains of that scale can be transformative. GameStop has sold shares to capitalize on its elevated price, boosting its cash pile and magnifying the benefits of higher interest rates.

But its brick-and-mortar business, which is what originally attracted short sellers, remains under pressure. The video-games retailer’s net sales plunged 27% to $3.8 billion last fiscal year as it shut nearly a quarter of its roughly 4,200 stores.

However, an increase in net interest income from $50 million to $163 million meant the company earned $131 million in net income, up from only $7 million in fiscal 2023.

Capitalizing can pay off, but it carries risks

Mark Malek, Siebert Financial’s chief investor, told BI that companies can be wary of issuing stock as it dilutes not just the ownership and voting power of existing shareholders, but also the company’s earnings per share, which can raise a stock’s price-to-earnings ratio.

“A higher P/E can make a stock appear expensive, potentially deterring new investors — or worse, attracting short sellers,” Malek said.

But when a company becomes a meme stock, a higher P/E ratio might not deter buyers, Malek said. “For a corporate treasurer, this is a dream scenario,” he said, adding that “issuing stock into that kind of froth can fund operations, pay down liabilities, or shore up balance sheets.”

While meme-driven gains are often temporary, “selling into strength isn’t just smart, it’s prudent,” Malek said.

A financial lifeline

Meme-stock status can provide a “financial lifeline” for older or troubled companies as it’s a “rare arbitrage window between market perception and operational reality,” Naeem Aslam, chief investor at Zaye Capital Limited, told BI.

Aslam said that companies can use their trendy shares as an overvalued currency to raise cheap capital, but whether that pays off depends on how management spends and invests the fresh cash.

Bosses can use the proceeds to not only cover costs and pay off debts, but also fund technology investments and restructuring initiatives that can help revitalize their operations, he said.

However, Aslam added that, without a viable turnaround plan, issuing shares can alienate core investors and contribute to the market perceiving the stock as a speculative play.

Not every meme stock has been able to ride the Reddit wave to greener pastures.

“Firms like Tupperware and BlackBerry saw brief meme-fueled rallies but failed to translate them into lasting recovery due to structural headwinds,” Aslam said.