Summary: Ukraine’s military weakness is it’s military

Strawmen do not become you. No one is saying Russia’s military might will make the USA tremble. They are tiny. The point is that, like other tiny enemies the USA has faced down, the USA will lose, because despite their clear dominance in size, scale, supply chains, etc, they’re still losing.

Yes, it is possible to say that Russia had it’s economic capabilities completely ransacked by the West during liberalization and also that Russia is winning this proxy war and the USA can’t do anything about despite spending the equivalent of the entire Russian military budget on it in a single year.

And, despite them spending that amount, Russia’s entire military budget did not get spent on Ukraine. Again, Russia has not deployed half of its military to Ukraine (it can’t because if it overextended itself like that it would be too vulnerable), so no, Russia did not spend the equivalent amount of money to occupy Eastern Ukraine and destroy most of Ukrainian production, it spent a fraction of its military budget on it, while the entirety of the aid that was equivalent to their entire budget was spent on defense and failed.

As for being “stuck on the border” you keep assuming their objectives and their strategy and then judging by those assumptions. It’s pretty clear to most observers that Russia is simply not advancing rapidly and they have stated they don’t intend to advance rapidly. And if you look at the terrain, there’s good reason for it - it would require very long vulnerable supply chains in completely open fields. It’s precisely why both the Germans and the French attempted to invade Russia through Ukraine. Russia is holding a position that prevents that kind of invasion, with a fraction of its force and it is growing it’s total military size while doing it and it’s doing it under massive sanctions.

As for Vietnam, you can easily see who’s bleeding whom by looking at the maths of attrition. Russia is growing faster than the most powerful economies in the world, while increasing the size of its military (UK dropped swimming tests for its navy to bolster the ranks) and while outproducing all of NATO. The trap is for the USA, just like it was in Vietnam and like it was in Afghanistan. This time, however, the USA invasion didn’t look like invasion because it was NATO expansion, which is physically just moving soldiers, bases, and weapons platforms into a sovereign nation in order to threaten the next neighbor. Russia sparked the conflict to stop that expansion and call the bluff of the NATO nations, and it looks like it was a bluff because, here we are.

As for Ukraine in the North, again, tactical gains are not changing the collapsing line nor shooting down missiles landing in Kiev. The North has been shown to be immaterial.

As for the economic might point missing the entire to topic, if Russia’s economy grows its people and institutions will benefit. If NATO countries economies contract, its people and institutions will suffer, despite the dollar values being higher.

I think the Russian GDP is roughly half of Germany’s GDP alone, even though Russia is 50 times larger and came with some natural advantages as of a few decades ago

A few decades ago was USA economic shock therapy that absolutely destroyed the country. “Natural advantages” don’t factor into it.

I do think it’s accurate that Russia’s surviving the sanctions overall surprisingly well.

It’s literally growing faster than every country in the G7 while under the West’s most aggressive sanction regime possible and you think it’s “surviving”?

I don’t think it’s a strong advertisement for Russia that they have managed, by mobilizing their entire economic and military might, to penetrate a hundred miles or so across the border of a fairly tiny neighbor of theirs and then get stalled there for 2 years.

Russia’s military is literally larger than it was when they started the SMO but nearly all measures. They haven’t mobilized even half of their military might in this SMO. And they fought not only Ukraine’s entire military but also military aid from the US that literally is equivalent to Russia’s entire military budget. So they fought, dollar-for-dollar, a military that was larger than it and it came out bigger. How’s that math for you?

I remember you saying that that was exactly the plan, so that they could bleed the western economies to death right there at the eastern border of Ukraine, but that doesn’t seem believable to me.

I never said they were trying to bleed Western economies to death. I said their objective was to make the West overextend itself, because that’s how the USA lost Vietnam and Afghanistan. If history isn’t believable, what is?

I would expect that if the US aid comes through, then Ukraine will either slowly or quickly start winning the war again

Ukraine was never winning to begin with, aid or no aid. There has been no point in this conflict where Ukraine had the upper hand on the war writ large. Every thing that made any gains got swallowed up quite quickly afterward. And that was with aid equivalent to Russia’s entire military budget.

I don’t think that’s a good statement about the relative economic / military prowess of Russia as compared with the whole West as a whole though.

If the West goes through a recession, or worse, while Russia goes through a boom cycle, you’ll quickly see that absolute dollar values don’t matter.

Going from $1 to $2 is a 100% increase but you’re still fucking broke afterwards, and the guy whose $1,000 only grew by 1% still made 10 times more money than you lol

This is, of course, why all economist measure economic health in pure dollar amounts and never consider rate of change because it can be misleading. Investment decisions are always based on raw dollar amounts, which is why everyone only invests in blue chip stocks, and only the top 3 at that, because rate of change is deceptive and irrelevant. When we talk of recessions and depressions, of course, we only discuss raw dollar values, which is why the USA has never had a recession because it’s GDP has been higher than every other country, and despite what those crazies say about the 1920s, the rate of change, while negative, didn’t reduce the USA’s total economic dollar value below other countries. You’re 100%, uhhh, I mean you have a quantity of correctness that is very very high, quantitatively higher than the correctness of others.

Maybe instead of spending all their money murdering Ukrainians

If they were doing this, then they’d have no money left over for anything else, and yet, that’s not actually what we see, is it?

they should be trying to create a country where the leading cause of death for young men isn’t alcoholism

They are, by ensuring the West can’t continue to dominate them economically like they did when the USSR was dismantled and USA economic shock therapy to liberalize the economy created the oligarchs and caused a decline in life expectancy so stark it was as bad as what the USA experienced during COVID.

Speaking of spending their money murdering people, maybe the USA should spend its money on health care instead of being the richest country in the world with the highest death toll from COVID despite spending billions on Operation Warpspeed in a foolish attempt to make vaccines faster. Why foolish? Because Cuba produced vaccines on the same timeline without all that money while under a brutal 60-year collective punishment regime.

@mozz@mbin.grits.dev Regarding our prior discussion from months ago about the effect of sanctions on Russia and on Europe, I think this particular piece from the BBC is highly relevant and also has the benefit of time away from our initial discussion to show a bit of a trend, don’t you think?

Should I at mozz again?

Here it is! The moment we’ve been waiting for. Japan slowly starting to thaw towards China as it realizes the emulating the West is a failing strategy.

It’s stunning how quickly they shut up when you expose their brain rot.

Serious question, have you been able to find ANY Western reporting about any Russian feints during the first week of the invasion? I haven’t been able to. Which is strange, because we have West Point saying that during some counter-offensives there were Russian feints, appearing to earnestly be asking the question of whether deception is still a major part of war. If you read the Wikipedia article about that 64km convoy, it’s pretty much relying entirely on Western reporting, and the reports are pretty silly. Soldiers captured from that convoy only had 3 days of rations? Does that sound like a viable approach to capturing and holding a capital city? I don’t think so. Just read that article and the sources critically - it doesn’t look like a serious maneuver. It looks a lot like a feint.

So if Russia is known to use feints, but NONE of the initial maneuvers were reported as feints, then we are left with either A) Russia launched zero feints, or B) we haven’t labeled which maneuvers were feints. That convoy looks A LOT like a feint to me. And how would a successful feint be reported by Western propaganda rags? As a victory for the West for having defeated such a great maneuver that also demonstrates the silliness of the opponent. That opponent, by the way, has destroyed Ukraine and there is no chance of Ukrainian victory at this point. So, do we trust the analysis that the convoy was an earnest maneuver, or do we see the evidence and think “perhaps this was a feint”?

Capturing Kiev requires invading Ukraine first. Russia has invaded Ukraine. It has demonstrated absolutely zero intent so far to march troops into Kiev.

Honestly, that man had foresight that psychics and mystics dream of

It tried? I’m fairly certain it did.

With that said, Iran does very transparently fund terrorists to do their dirty work for them (not that this is unique to Iran).

This is a mischaracterization of how force works. Guerilla war is far superior to “<country> doing the dirty work themselves”. You can train a guerilla force as part of your main military, but by its very nature it needs to be decentralized or it’s not effective, it needs to be distributed or it’s easy to decapitate, and it needs to be constantly shifting in response to conditions. In essence, using guerilla forces IS doing the dirty work yourself, it’s not delegating it to another group so you don’t have to get your hands dirty.

The terrorist label is a useless term anyway. Terrorism is strategy for using civilian terror to effect change. The USA military uses the strategy of terrorism, they call it “shock and awe doctrine”. But calling rank and file soldiers “terrorists” doesn’t make any sense. Similarly, guerilla fighters don’t actually use terrorism, IEDs target military caravans. Shooting rockets at air defense systems to understand their limits is a military intelligence campaign. Enforcing a blockade/embargo is a core military function. Hit and run tactics works. Urban warfare is as necessary as mountain warfare and jungle warfare. In essence, the USA invented the label of terrorist to vilify people instead of tactics, and then drifted its usage away from “using civilian terror” towards “guerilla tactics”. This became enshrined in law in the USA as “enemy combatant”, a third label never before seen in law. Previously there was civilian and military. There’s a thousand years of law and jurisprudence using those two categories, from international treaties to domestic military courts to penal codes. This new third status, invented by the USA, discards all of that and allows the USA to do anything they want to anyone they deem fits this new legal category, which maps directly to whoever they call a “terrorist” which, as I think I’ve established, is far more about fighting guerillas than it is about fighting terrorism.

You’re really going to have to withhold judgment on damage reports from entities with deeply vested interests both domestically and internationally to not talk about damage. From the video footage, it looks like damage was done to military targets deep inside Israel and that’s all that’s needed. The prevailing Israeli strategic hypothesis was that their air defense prevented Iran from striking inside Israel without exposing itself. The video footage appears to invalidate this hypothesis. For a very paltry amount of money, Iran causes Israeli air defense to consume hundreds of millions of dollars of materiel and still fail to stop the attack. A slightly larger attack will therefore do more damage, and a coordinated multi-actor attack will do even more. That’s all the victory Iran needed, it broke the taboo of attacking Israel directly, it broke the hypothesis of impenetrability, and it did so while giving Israel advanced warning. Remember, during the strike, the skies in Gaza were quiet because Israel downed its entire air force.

No, Iran did not launch a decapitation attack, no it didn’t launch a massive attack. It launched a precisely measured attack and it was the most cost effective attack we’ve seen so far. Couple this with Iran seizing a massive Israeli shipping vessel and gathering support from allies, and this is a major development in the conflict.

It will be Israel, the USA, and Western Europe who will expand this conflict, and that will bring further international condemnation and collaboration. If Iran went significantly bigger, not only would it risk strategic depletion, it would also be more politically ambiguous for its allies and future allies.

But all accounts except for total damage done, this was a successful operation.

Even Russia’s “hypersonic” missiles are shot down by plain ol’ patriot systems on the regular.

This is untrue. Patriot systems have only downed missiles that travel at hypersonic but slow down in final approach (Kinzhal). The US military recognized that these are not “true hypersonics” because of this. The Zircon missile has only been used 5 times in Ukraine, none of have been shot down. It is currently considered the fastest missile in the world with no known defense.

And even with that, the Kinzhal has been incredibly effective, as you can easily see based on the fact that Russia is hitting strategic targets in Western Ukraine including the capital.

Really though? The USA has been at war for 222 Out of 239 Years – Since 1776. I don’t think Bush started the trend.

plenty of escaping Nazi officers fled…

This is a misattribution. Nazi officers were protected, transported, and given new lives by the US military and the Vatican working together.

Do you have any idea how long senators serve? Racist, violent, war hawk, regressive leaders stay in office in the USA for decades. How about family dynasties? The number of years American and European democracies are managed by family dynasties is terrible. And then of course you have fascists getting elected to high office in Italy.

All the evidence shows that Western democracies are going to end in violence.

Interestingly, Cuba has more democracy than anything ever experienced in the North Atlantic. Because the point isn’t to use democracy to get representation, it’s to use democracy to change society in the interests of the people.

Harvard conducted a study of Chinese sentiment for literally 15 years and found 95.5% approval among Chinese citizens of their national government and communist party.

No, because the very simple logic doesn’t work out. War destroys production.