War in Ukraine

You’re caught, pathetic, your miserable proxy is getting crushed and Russia is unbowed even after more than three years of your furious typing.

 

We would get whipped like we were in the military fighting of both Iraq wars. (To refresh your memory, Iraq lost about 100,000 troops in the first war while we lost 150. We lost maybe one tank to enemy fire while Iraq lost 3300. Only a mental defective would characterize that as an American loss.) Russia, based on its pathetic performance in Ukraine, is not a peer military country to the U.S. We excel at the kind of combat involved with the Ukraine War more than any other country on earth; we have the best technology and the best trained troops, and we usually know how best to use them.

We do fight by the Geneva Conventions, so we have more trouble with an insurgent enemy that blends in with the local population, but I do not think that would be the case if the U.S. tangled with Russia.

Obviously, we are not fighting Russia with our own troops for a few reasons:

1) The ass-kicking we would give Russia would convince them they are in an existential war, and that could result in a nuclear weapons launch. Even though Putin may deny it, he knows that Russia is not currently in an existential war.

2) We do not want American troops to die needlessly. While U.S. deaths would be a small fraction of Russian deaths, there would still be more than what we would want. This is Ukraine's fight, and they are doing very well at defeating Russia when they are properly supplied.

3) The costs are much lower in a proxy war than an actual hot war. We do not have to mobilize troops and deal with all of the logistical difficulties of going to war.

 

*yawns* we haven’t won a war since WWII. And guess who did the heavy lifting ? *waits for howling*

 

He was responding to a poster that you block.

 

What other “path” is there? Our government has diplomatic, informational, military, and economic means at its disposal. To say Biden used those, and now Trump is using those, so they are doing the exact same thing is erroneous. There is scope and scale involved in all forms of national power. The Biden Administration never had, or if they did never professed (even secretly to the people who would carry it out), a strategy for defeating Russia. The best you got from Sullivan et al was “we will support Ukraine as long as it takes” without detailing as long as it takes to do what. If we get a couple of months into this thing and it becomes clear that Trump’s approach is similarly astrategic with no sense of goals or how to accomplish them, then I will be the first to concede he is on the same path as Biden.

 

Trump didnt campaign on escalating US involvement so I am not sure what you are expecting. I understood his tactic was that he was going to call Putin and ask nicely for him to leave and Putin would leave because Trump is so dynamic. But maybe I missed the plan since i was concentrating on his gaffes last season.

 

Putin has a lot of skin in the war. I doubt he settles without keeping a lot, if not all of what he possesses of Ukraine.

 

We haven't won a war since WWII? Tell that to Saddam Hussein and I'm referring to the first Gulf War (1990-1991) rather than the second although we won that one too but failed to realize the consequences of the power vacuum in Iraq that we created and although they were relatively minor there was also Grenada in 1983 (not that there was much doubt as to the outcome of a war between over 7,000 US troops and maybe 600 or so Cuban troops and Grenadian police) or Panama in 1989 when there was a similar disparity between the US and Panama.

 

Why We Lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Daniel Bolger

 

That’s what he wants, sure. But then there’s the matter of the enemy he made and what they will settle for.

 

Russia controls half of Ukraine’s resources, allowing it to comfortably finance the war …http://youtube.com/post/Ugkxd2gvwxyKjVi1BarPRIKNEf89QsHcqJML?si=S4vSXQtqSDe4t1uu