SFCityBear said:
dimitrig said:
SFCityBear said:
A US Army hospital in Germany which has been treating the wounded from the war in Ukraine is now treating American fighters wounded in that war. 20 have died during the conflict so far, according to this article in the NY Times. As we inch closer and closer to WW3.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/23/us/us-soldiers-ukraine-hospital-germany.html
I don't think you need to worry about WW3.
"For years, there was fear that providing certain types of aid would provoke Russia," said Mr. Taylor, who now oversees Europe for the United States Institute of Peace in Washington. "It turns out, they didn't need to be provoked."
The United States has crossed numerous so-called red lines in the last year, by providing Ukraine with rocket artillery, tanks and pilot training, Mr. Taylor said, and Russia has not responded by escalating the conflict."
Gee, somehow that does not make me feel any better.
Just because you start poking a bear a little bit at a time, and he hasn't responded in kind, does not mean he will never react.
There are two main players in this game. One is a calculating bully, and the other is increasingly inept. We are the one doing the escalation at the moment. There will be a point where Putin may say, "Enough is enough", and depending on whether his forces are equipped and trained well enough, dedicated enough, Putin will either escalate or give in and sue for peace. It is a game of chicken, and it could go either way or somewhere in between. In any case, American lives, volunteer or regular military, are American lives, which may or may not eventually enter in to the calculus.
You think Putin is the bear? With what army is Russia going to escalate? He's got close to 100% of his army in Ukraine holding on for dear life at the moment. What have you seen that has made you believe that Russia, which is 600 days into its 3 day war with Ukraine and which has lost terrain in the last 12 months, would pose a military threat to anyone else, let alone NATO and the US? If Russia's military was so strong, why have they been unable to make any territorial gains in like 18 months other than the pyrrhic victory in Bakhmut which only happened because the now-disbanded Wagner chose to do it?
Russia had ~16 million rounds of artillery before the war and has pretty much burned through it all by now. They are begging North Korea and others to sell them artillery because their industrial base can't even come close to producing as many as Russian military doctrine requires to continue to muddle about in Ukraine. They would love to burn 10M+ per year but can only
produce 2M or so. I'm sure some shill will come here and claim that I'm wrong and that the real number is 3M or some other made up number but everyone paying attention knows that the current production rate is nowhere near enough to sustain the initial pace which caused them to burn through decades of artillery stockpiles. Russia is unlikely to ever again be in a position to fight a large scale war like they fought in 2022 and the early part of 2023 and it wasn't enough to actually win the war.
If I recall correctly, you are of an age that means that most of your adulthood was during the cold war. As you probably recall, when the iron curtain eventually fell, we learned that we had over-estimated Russian military might for decades. The famous
missile gap that wasn't is but one example. You have a lot of Russian shills (whether knowingly or not) working very hard both on BI and elsewhere to convince people like you that Russia is many fold stronger than it actually is and that the US and NATO are far weaker than we actually are. By and large, Ukraine is fighting Russia to a brutal and bloody draw using decades-old western technology combined with modern commodity (and home made) drones. Russia is throwing everything it has at this war and hasn't been able to accomplish any strategic priorities. Their famed Kinzhal missiles have proven themselves completely ineffective and Russia jailed the inventors. The shills here spent months telling us what a gamechanger those hypersonics would be and they've been completely neutralized. The US is slow-walking decades-old technology like F-16s and ATACMS and there has been no discussion of ever arming Ukraine with modern Western capabilities. Hopefully one of the big takeaways for the US is that we can replace big dollar weapons systems with drone technology which will be far more cost effective, faster to develop and which is more than enough to defeat what has proven to be a paper tiger in Russia's military. The same may not be true of China but lord help us all if we ever find ourselves in a hot war with China. That would be a disaster for humanity.
To the extent this really is a game of chicken, it's a game of chicken between two very unequal parties and if Putin is the "calculating bully" that you claim he is, he will turn tail just like schoolyard bullies who get punched in the face. Only instead of a 90 lb kid bullying a 6-year old, the bully tried to square up a heavyweight boxer.
