Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.
Exact full quote from CNN:
“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4085063
The propaganda from the west is absolutely baffling if you try to understand it through anything other than pure vibes. America claims that Putin is going to genocide every single Ukrainian and the response from the US is to send a dozen tanks in a year or so? Why not promise 200-300 tanks and promise to send them as soon they can get tankers trained on them? There’s literally 2000 of them just standing there in the desert, isn’t a conflict with Russia what they were built for? The west is sending just enough weapons and ammo to prolong the conflict but nowhere near enough for Ukraine to actually have a shot at winning.
That’s the crux of the matter right there. And they then force Ukraine to carry out attacks with this lack of equipment and training. Knowing full well that there is minimal chance of victory. Ghoul empire.
It’s more like “the West” just has that equipment in insufficient numbers.
The NATO (or “Western”) military and political doctrine of the last ~30 years was something like “let’s buy most of them with contracts and convenient deals and Desert Storm the remaining few, cause our combined force is so fucking superior”.
It’s also that to some extent people have really started to believe in this superiority (I mean, it’s counterintuitive, an exceptional force of 10k still can’t defeat a crowd of 500k, but many people in Europe and USA seemed to believe that the dwarf armies of Europe are prepared for a real war if it comes).
NATO equipment is simply very expensive now (and complex, so takes longer to train personnel for) and not produced in sufficient quantities.
I mean, this war reminds us that all revolutions in warfare happen only on battlefields between comparable adversaries. When you imagine something and then “prove” it with a beating like Desert Storm, again, and pretend that this is what modern war will look like, you commit a mistake.
So - it appears that a real modern war still involves lots of ground forces grinding each other. Who would have thought that? I mean, Turkey and Israel have pretty western-style militaries, yet with conscription and large standing armies.
I wonder whether all those EU countries are going to introduce conscript training and reserve, cause if they intend to be militarily relevant, they’ll have to do that over all the “draft is slavery” cultural image.
NATO doctrine relies heavily on airpower for any large military conflict. The NATO ground armies might be relatively small, but their combined air forces are qualitatively superior in every metric and at minimum three times larger than any potential opponent. 10k people can hold off 500k when they have a giant arsenal of precision guided weapons and complete control of the air.
That is verifiably not true. Vietnam and Korea made it very clear that you cannot win a war with air power alone. And precision weapons are effectively useless. The US can’t sustain minor campaigns of shelling random cities in the Global South without running out of munitions. And short of nuclear weapons it has no capability to level cities with it’s air force. The F-35 has, what, like four weapons pylons?
Add to that, the Russia air-defense systems have proven very effective, which changes the game. And the F-35 that is the lynchpin of NATO’s air superiority strategy has a great deal of limitations, not the least of which is how expensive and stretched it’s logistical requirements are.
NATO’s air force is completely untested and reliant on extremely expensive, hard to maintain platforms with very limited tactical flexibility. It’s entirely possible the F-35 fleet will defeat itself through attrition due to it’s enormous maintenance requirements.
Proven effective against cold-war era planes maybe. There have been a few improvements in the past 50 years. Those same Russian air-defence systems proved themselves effectively useless against the F-117 in the Balkans, and the F-35 is miles above the F-117.
Vietnam and Korea proved that 1950s and 1970s era technology was not up to the task, not that it was not possible. The main issue with both was the lack of accuracy.
“Running out” in this case meaning dipping below normal stockpile levels.
There’s been some improvements in the past 20 years too, sometimes even not only on paper.
Anyway, the biggest problem of the ex-Soviet militaries is their incompetence, not their tech. The systems employed are up to the necessary tasks and sometimes more adaptable than NATO systems, it’s just that even their normal operation sometimes can’t be achieved by people using them.
Due to modernization in the course of the current war, and against weapons used in it, specifically those Turkish drones and the small copters everybody uses now in every conflict.
I’m not sure how good they’d be against something launched from F-35.
However I should agree that I too just hate F-35.
Well, again, Israeli and Turkish ones are tested somewhat well, but mostly against much weaker opponents unable to get their sh*t together.
Yes.
The most important word here is “combined”. Consensus is a really bad condition for winning a war, in my opinion.
Not even then, unless you mean precision guided weapons in similar quantities as late Soviet union had Grad missiles.
Not arguing that air superiority is very important.
Europe is wondering the exact same thing: Why are the yanks pussy-footing around? They’re usually much more hawkish. The reason is that the US are shit-scared about Russia thinking the US is trying to invade by proxy or something.
Europe is sending pretty much as much as it can without compromising its own defensive abilities. Have a look at the Baltic states, sending over as large as a percentage of their GDP as the US is sending as a percentage of its military budget. It’s the US which has gazillions of Abrams sitting around doing nothing but collecting dust and is not shipping them over, not Europe.
And also unlike the US, Europe is sending long-range missile systems to hit logistics etc. in the rear so that Ukraine doesn’t have to gnaw through trench lines.
Homework: Go through all your geopolitical takes and get rid of the term “the west” and instead actually be precise.
Because they’re using Ukrainians to grind down the Russian military, and economy, by attrition. The goal isn’t to “win”, the goal is to destabilize Russia. Ukrainians are just ammunition. The longer the war drags on, the more costly it is for Russia.
Russia already thinks that. That’s what turned the civil war in Ukraine in to a proxy war between NATO and Russia.
Okay, so? I could match that if I flipped over my couch and counted the loose change. All of the baltics together add up to one medium-large urban area.
That would be very expensive, and I’m not even sure the US has the logistical capacity for it. Plus seeing Abrams burned out by modern ATGMs would seriously harm the US’s reputation for military invincibility. And, again, they’re primarily concerned that Russia loses. Ukraine winning would be a nice bonus, but it’s not the chief goal.
You have a very active imagination.
Look, it’s that Seppo exceptionalism again.
The US only has those Abrams because it’s cheaper to produce them than shut down the production line for a couple of years and then start it up again. Realistically speaking much of what the US sends should be valued at negative monetary value as Ukraine taking it means the US doesn’t have to pay to dispose of it.
Look up what was happening in Ukraine from 2014-2022. I know the media always refers to the people living there as Russian-backed separatists but they are in fact Ukrainians.
So why hasn’t the US sent 200-300 tanks? Why did the US demand that Ukraine launch a counteroffensive with insufficient tanks and air support? Why is the US trickling in just enough equipment to prolong the conflict as much as possible without giving Ukraine everything it could possibly need to win. Why is US propaganda so different from the actions the US is actually taking?
Force-recruited to fight on frontlines with Mosin Nagants or, alternatively, Wagner green men.
Because they’re chicken and don’t understand Russia. Russia sees such hesitance as weakness and reason to continue on, as evidence that the US isn’t really in it for the long run. And, I mean, they’re not wrong in that regard proper commitment looks quite differently.
When did the US demand such a thing? Ukraine has plenty of reason and grit and will to decide that on their own. Oh and there’s a suitable number of tanks for what Ukraine is doing (they’re not stupid and don’t overcommit), the issue indeed is lack of air superiority, all that fancy NATO hardware is supposed to be used with NATO doctrine which involves throwing air superiority at the enemy until the ground frontline is the enemy’s whole territory. But Ukraine is making the best out of the situation and picking off positions NATO would pick off from the air with various artillery systems, both medium and long range. And they’re very good at it, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone as that’s good ole soviet doctrine and Ukraine always was the core force in the red army anyways.
Because they’re a bunch of chickens who don’t understand Russia. Alternatively, with some conspiratorial thinking, they want to prolong the war – I frankly doubt it, never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. But that’s irrelevant, in any case: Because that should be reason for you to demand that more weapons be shipped, not less.
I wouldn’t know I don’t follow US media way too much of a partisan clown show anyway.
The US is pussyfooting because this was a fight they picked, and did not expect it to be this hard.
All the surrounding nonsense is their propaganda, and the leaders don’t actually believe any of it.
They don’t feel committed because they chose this, and won’t overcommit to a losing battle. They just need to steward the fight into a slow loss that doesn’t eat up many more resources.
Their actions are inexplicable otherwise - if they were truly afraid of Russia, they’d never have joined in the first place.
🤡