It's at least six by my count, but it's still not great to hear the President of the United States
talking about it as a live possibility. Particularly not this president, with his mental and physical challenges; nor this military, crippled by having the same leadership that has not known accountability for its failure in Afghanistan.
Biden constantly backs away from Putin every time Putin natters on about wider war or getting his nukes ready. It even turns out that it was Biden who personally nixed transferring Poland's MiG-29s to Ukraine--because that might angrify Putin. Never mind that nothing provokes wild animals or barbarians more than weakness.
ReplyDeleteAll of which raises an obvious question (at least to me): what is Biden's limit here? What are his criteria for when it's time to stop backing away from Putin and to stand firm and confront him?
Sadly--almost as dangerously--no one in the press is willing to put those questions to him.
Eric Hines
Today he said we would defend “every inch” of NATO territory. I assume that means there are no red lines in Ukraine.
ReplyDeleteHe's said that before, too. I have to see him actually do that when Putin decides Poland and the Baltics need to give up their NATO troops. Putin has made no bones with his claims that the ex-SSRs and occupied Soviet territories (my term) joining NATO constituted a direct and overt threat to Russia.
ReplyDeleteAside from those empty words about defending NATO territory, though, all Biden has been willing to say that's concrete is what he won't do, since it might provoke Putin, not what he will do in the face of Putin's extant and future provocations.
Eric Hines
Well, what do you think ought to be done? I think encouraging Russia to bite off a decades-long insurgency might be a sufficient condition from the perspective of our national interest; should we manage to get China to do the same, we could almost stop worrying about them for a while. Perhaps permanently: both of them are facing demographic cliffs in the medium term. If they can be managed for a few decades, they may well cease to be problems.
ReplyDeleteWell, what do you think ought to be done?
ReplyDeleteNice try. It's Biden and his syndicate cronies in DC, on both sides of the aisles, who have to answer that. I don't agree with your attempt to deflect for Biden.
I think encouraging Russia to bite off a decades-long insurgency might be a sufficient condition from the perspective of our national interest....
That's shades of what happened in Afghanistan, too, when Russia invaded. What that looks like is us, among others, happy to sit in the coliseum bleachers cheering the contest between the barbarians and Christians. I'm at a loss to understand why Ukrainians or RoC citizens should have to pay that price just so we can spectate. That's not your intent, but that's what sitting on the sidelines yapping, which is what our government is doing, adds up to.
To return to your opening question, which I disparaged, a President Hines would have applied the sanctions, including broad SWIFT bar, 'way last January, escalating faster and farther than Putin could adapt and respond. I also would have shipped anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons--high altitude capable batteries as well as Stinger 'way last January. The operations tempo--which includes diplomatic and economic tempo, diplomacy and kinetic being the same thing--would belong to me.
To deal with the situation as it exists today, I'd still ship those weapons, along with jet fuel for the Ukrainian Air Force and such AAMs and ASMs as we can get that are compatible with the Ukrainian fighters. I'd add to the Turkish armed drones with our own, along with extensive ordnance reloads for both. I'd get out of the way of Poland shipping its wing of MiG-29s to Ukraine. Washing them through Ramstein is logistically stupid. Repaint them with Ukrainian markings and have Ukrainian pilots fly them directly from Poland (the Polish offer of going through RAB was just them biting their thumbs at a contemptible Biden). The real problem with the Polish MiGs is their current maintenance status--they likely need serious effort to bring them up to OR status.
And, yes, I'd support a Ukrainian AF no-fly zone with American aircraft and pilots. It's time to call Putin and make him respond to us, instead of constantly backing down in front of him, instead of abjectly surrendering the tactical initiative and strategic direction to Putin.
Eric Hines
I don't agree with your attempt to deflect for Biden.
ReplyDeleteWell, I don't think I was trying to do that. I thought I was asking your opinion, which you usually enjoy providing (and indeed went on to provide).
I wouldn't support a no-fly zone. I don't think America should go to war with Russia over Ukraine, no more than we go to war with China over the Uighur. We should definitely bleed them for it, though -- both of them, using the clandestine means available to support an insurgency.
Wouldn't be the first time I've misinterpreted a question of yours. Or anyone else's.
ReplyDeleteA) Whose blood should we spend to bleed Russia or the PRC? This isn't a playground Lets you and him fight business.
B) Confronting Russia over Ukraine: do we care about eastern Europe at all? Do we care about the Republic of China? The Republic of Korea? Japan? The nations rimming the South China Sea? The sea lines of commerce on which those--especially RoK and Japan--utterly depend? Do we care about Australia? The sea lines of commerce that ship trillions of dollars of trade to our west coast to the strong benefit of our economy? All of those are dominoes that well could fall, each of them to our severe detriment, if we surrender to Putin over Ukraine.
I'm not willing to bet our national independence on Putin stopping at Ukraine after our surrender of it. Particularly in light of two, seemingly (but not necessarily) contradictory things. One is that there is no particular reason to believe that Putin would not back down if we got tough. The other is that the Soviet Union believed nuclear war was winnable, and they had the doctrine for how to fight one and win it. Putin has that doctrine. If he wants to fight, we'll have nuclear war whether we think that's a good idea or not.
I keep going back to my time in West Germany, sitting across the fence from the barbarians. We're going to fight them sometime, because they're going to fight us sometime. Best to get it on now, while we still have the upper hand (except in the White House), and get the barbarians destroyed once and for all.
Eric Hines
Oh, and this isn't the first time Russia has...abused...Ukraine as a matter of state policy. Russia mass murdered, through a policy of starvation, millions of Ukrainians and White Russians (Belarus) while "collectivising" the Kulaks. Now they're doing it again, this time with bombs.
ReplyDeleteIt's time to put an end to them. Third time is most assuredly not a charm.
Eric Hines
"Whose blood should we spend to bleed Russia or the PRC? ... do we care about eastern Europe at all? Do we care about the Republic of China? The Republic of Korea? Japan? The nations rimming the South China Sea? The sea lines of commerce on which those--especially RoK and Japan--utterly depend? Do we care about Australia? The sea lines of commerce that ship trillions of dollars of trade to our west coast to the strong benefit of our economy?"
ReplyDeleteThose are all good questions. I care a lot about the sea lanes, because (as you say) everything depends upon them. I care a little about Australia, although until they develop the guts to overthrow their tyrannical government they aren't really a free people any more regardless of China. I respect the Japanese and South Koreans and would help them fight if they want to do.
But there are also pragmatic issues. Ten years ago I might have gone to Ukraine myself to help them fight their insurgency; hell, I still might if I were asked in the right way. But Putin isn't going to take over the world; he hasn't got the people. He'll be lucky to take Ukraine the first time, and he can't hold it. He can only even take it the first time by using fires at a degree that will shock all of Europe. He won't take any other nations without adopting a broad-based conscription of a sort Russia doesn't currently have (though they do have conscription), and then he'd need time to train that army.
So yes, I think we should help them fight. We need to do it strategically, though, and nothing that leads to a nuclear exchange makes sense in strategic terms. There are better ways to fight and win that don't require us to go there.
Not, though, that anyone has even asked for my opinion on the subject. I did ask for yours.
Factor into the comparison of a protracted Afghanistan-like Ukrainian insurgency that Afghanistan was on the far side of a lot of mountains and deserts from Moscow and surrounded by people who were, and still are, either enemies of the US or only marginally allies. The Soviets could feel confident the insurgency would not spread from there and had reasons to not be aggressive about interdicting the insurgent supply chains outside Afghanistan's borders.
ReplyDeleteUkraine is sitting at the southwest end of the Eurasian hordelands with few if any obstacles between it and Moscow, and directly abuts several NATO countries. We're putting a lot of stock in the rationality and patience of Putin and his inner circle, who did not talk him down from a full-on invasion of Ukraine, to assume they are going to just sit and bleed while being restrained from attacking the supply routes into Ukraine because Poland, Romania, and Hungary are part of NATO. Biden makes a big show of claiming we'll defend every inch of NATO territory. How confident are the Poles that they won't be solely responsible for fighting a shadow war on their border after the MiG fiasco which now appears to have been personally stopped by Biden because he was afraid it would widen the war?
I hate argument ad Hitlereum but it sure feels like we're slipping into the 1939 'Sitzkrieg'. It's unlikely that Russia is going to get strong enough to really challenge NATO the way Germany got strong enough to turn west after Poland in 1940 but that doesn't mean NATO isn't going to degrade further over time. The Germans are already backing down from their promised steps to reduce their dependence on Russian gas and oil, and it will take years to implement their rearmament promises if they don't backslide there too. I'm almost with Eric that we should just rip off the band-aid now rather than give Putin the initiative again. The Ukraine is not going to be able to kick out the Russians without more outside help, and it's not going to be independent of Moscow with the Russians occupying half the country, either. The Biden administration is being driven by events but they're also desperate to hold on to idiotic ideologies like the Great Reset and the Green Nude Eel even when those are orthogonal to effectively opposing the Russians (and China).
We need to do it strategically, though, and nothing that leads to a nuclear exchange makes sense in strategic terms.
ReplyDeleteThat's the fatal problem, though, IMNSHO. The war that we're unwilling to fight is the one that will be thrust upon us. And apart from that, assuming arguendo we can keep nukes out of it, the longer we wait to confront Putin in Ukraine and stop him, the more expensive it will become--along a host of dimensions--to confront and stop him, whether in Ukraine, or points west post-Ukraine.
And like I've said above, I'm unwilling to bet the welfare of the Pacific nations, including our own, on Xi's restraint if Putin takes Ukraine.
Regarding Australia, the government's behavior is gravely disappointing, but (channeling Kudlow, but, but, but). Which Australian government? Aussie States have far more power vis-a-vis their central government than do our States. Much of the Wuhan Virus-related tyranny is at the State level, with the central government unable to overrule them, even if that central government shares some of the tyranny. In addition to that, they're a highly useful foil for the PRC, much more so than the USSR was against Nazi Germany. I'm disinclined to write the nation off so quickly.
And: there's overthrow, and there's overthrow. As HL Mencken once said, ...the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. The Aussies got that in their last elections--and so did we. There are lessons to be learned there. I'll be watching the next round(s) of elections to see whether either of us overthrow in one way what we got so good and hard.
It's unlikely that Russia is going to get strong enough to really challenge NATO....
Russia already is, since NATO's biggest nuclear pseudo-power is so terrified of Putin that it won't challenge him out of that terror of nuclear war. And the other two NATO nations with nuclear weapons won't employ them unless and until we do.
Not, though, that anyone has even asked for my opinion on the subject.
Well, Hell, it's your blog. You don't need an invitation from anyone else. Besides, your opinions have considerable value, unsolicited or otherwise, even if I do occasionally disagree with them out of my own awesomeness.
Eric Hines
Christopher B..."The Biden administration is being driven by events but they're also desperate to hold on to idiotic ideologies like the Great Reset and the Green Nude Eel even when those are orthogonal to effectively opposing the Russians (and China)."
ReplyDeleteI'd go further than 'orthogonal'...IMO, the America-energy-crippling policies of Biden & Co represent a major reduction in our national power and have been a key enabler of Putin's Ukraine invasion. See my post Deliberate Disempowerment:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/67338.html
The war that we're unwilling to fight is the one that will be thrust upon us.
ReplyDeleteThis was an incomplete statement on my part. I meant to include "or be forced to surrender under threat of."
Eric Hines
Kindly put, Mr. Hines. I appreciate your words.
ReplyDeleteI'm convinced that Sun Tzu is right that sometimes the best wartime victory is winning without fighting. It was crucial to American success in 'both' previous world wars that we came in very late, and did not suffer the beatings that other nations inflicted on each other. Likewise, a crucial factor in our current weakness is the fact that we allowed ourselves to be drawn into two decades of war. The America of the 1990s bestrode the world, but it allowed itself to be dragged down and bound up like Gulliver.
Let Russia do that for a while; and China, perhaps. We would then win the war with them, but would not have to fight the war to do it.
The mistakes of the last 20 years indeed are why we're as weak as we are now, but that's just the situation with which we're confronted. It in no way alters what we need to do today; it merely makes that need harder to satisfy.
ReplyDeleteWhat we need to do today is informed by two things. A moral one: if we're going to ask others to bleed for our convenience, we have an obligation to stand beside them and bleed with them. We just also need to fight like we mean it, not engage in the half-assed half-hearted efforts our national managers made of the last wars we've fought, reaching all the way back through Vietnam and Korea.
The other is practical. The war we're at such pains to not fight, the war we'll thereby be faced with fighting or surrendering to continue avoiding, is not a war of attrition or of industrial production, with our industrial base protected by distance, that we fought in the last century. It's a war where targets in any part of the world can be reached from any other part of the world in minutes to hours, with no need for weeks at sea shipping in troops and equipment and no opportunity for months to years converting and ramping up our war materiel production capacity. And with the PRC's hypervelocity weapons on the verge of giving them a first strike capability, it exposes us to being decapitated and so stripped of any nuclear response, and so of any other response beyond guerilla efforts against the occupying forces. And that guerilla effort would be sorely handicapped until the Left, self-identified "Democrats," have finished their cut and run and so got themselves out of the way.
If we continue to wait, we may well lose that later war, no matter how attritted Russia's or the PRC's conventional forces might become.
A book worth reading (I've recommended it before): Unrestricted Warfare, Colonel Qiao Liang and Colonel Wang Xiangsui of the PLA. The PRC is unlikely to wait.
Eric Hines
I'm not sure what you mean by but would not have to fight the war to do it.. We might have been lightly touched but in both cases we had to get kicked first (in 1917 in the shin, in 1941 in the teeth) before getting serious and Europe got wrecked twice in the span of three decades. In reference to my first comment about the Sitzkreig, if we had given or been able to give full support to the Brits and the French in 1939 the Western Allies might have knocked Germany out of the war at that point instead of battling for four years to get a foothold in Europe again and another year to defeat Germany, with a lot of help from the Russians. We may not have been ready but neither were the Germans, and they were certainly much more ready in 1944, even after being battered by bombing and the Russians.
ReplyDeleteI would feel much better if we were using this time to make real and effective provisions for the possibility that the war would continue and widen but Brandon and his clown car of Obama retreads apparently aren't thinking any farther than using Ukraine as a messaging opportunity for their favorite ideologies.
E Hines..."And with the PRC's hypervelocity weapons on the verge of giving them a first strike capability, it exposes us to being decapitated and so stripped of any nuclear response"...isn't a very-short-warning time attack *already* possible, though? Ballistic missile submarines can reach most US cities in less than 15 minutes, and with depressed trajectories, the time falls to something like 7 minutes for coastal and near-coast cities. Ballistic missile defenses might stop some % of the weapons, but not all of them. Do the hypervelocity weapons really make the situation significantly worse?
ReplyDeleteAnd could any adversary safely count on decapitation? As long as there is someone to give the order, and some surviving adequate communications facility, the American subs would still be able to retaliate.
Ballistic missile submarines can reach most US cities in less than 15 minutes....
ReplyDeleteFifteen minutes--even 7 minutes--gives time to go through the mechanics of getting the launch orders to our missile fields and boomers, and time to get much of our strategic bombers launched, especially those already on alert. 7 minutes, though, does tax the recognition and decision sequence preceding the launch orders.
That time doesn't obtain with the hypervelocity times of flight, especially with recognition at such difficulty.
...if we had given or been able to give full support to the Brits and the French in 1939 the Western Allies might have knocked Germany out of the war at that point....
At what future cost though? An alternate history supposition: we enter the war in 1939 and the alliance knocks Nazi Germany out of the war--how? Most likely via a negotiated settlement. Nazi Germany would not have been utterly destroyed, and it would have continued as a threat. And Fascist Japan would have remained an intact (other than its adventures in mainland China) enemy on our other side. In my alternate history speculation, Russia's USSR would have been left far stronger, and whether or not it ultimately collapsed and disappeared anyway, Russia would be far stronger and a far bigger threat than it is today. We're seeing that play out now, in loose analogy, with Russia in Ukraine and a hostile PRC intact, better armed, and better resourced than Fascist Japan on our other side.
Here, it's not a question (in my mind, anyway) of whether we let (for any reason, good or bad) others bleed before we join the fight, it's a question (a certainty in my mind) that our enemy must be utterly destroyed the first time, so we don't have to fight them a second time with the certainty of enormous cost in blood as well as treasure, and with too great a possibility our enemy will win the second time.
Eric Hines
I think we have two significant differences in our mental frame for understanding this. The first one is here:
ReplyDeleteA moral one: if we're going to ask others to bleed for our convenience, we have an obligation to stand beside them and bleed with them.
I don't see this as us asking the Ukrainians to do anything, either for our convenience or for any other reason. They're fighting because they are choosing to fight. I think that's moral and upright, and I would be happy to support them -- but that is far from recognizing a duty to join their war. They aren't fighting for me, nor for my interests. They're fighting for themselves and their own. I do not thus incur the blood debt you cite here.
War is the most pragmatic of all matters; in war nothing is more honorable than victory. Winning at the smallest cost is a greater victory than a Pyrrhic one. Russia is not my enemy, nor am I theirs. They are a risk and a competitor of sorts to my country, but that should be managed short of war if it can be. Supporting the Ukrainians is a good means to the end of winning the war without having to fight it, the best victory of all.
Second:
The war we're at such pains to not fight, the war we'll thereby be faced with fighting or surrendering to continue avoiding, is not...
I don't believe that we are going to be forced to fight Russia or else surrender to them. They don't have the people under arms to do what they're doing now. They should have had twice as many troops at a minimum for this, but they don't have them to commit to the fight. They're certainly not going to pour over Poland and the Baltic states. If we don't fight Russia today, we probably just don't fight them. The limits of their strength are clear.
So let them wear themselves out against the people who want to fight them. Pitch in, since it's in our interests; but don't join in. We have no duty to do that, and every pragmatic reason not to do it.
I don't see this as us asking the Ukrainians to do anything, either for our convenience or for any other reason.
ReplyDeleteBut you said earlier:
We should definitely bleed them [the PRC and Russia] for it, though -- both of them, using the clandestine means available to support an insurgency.
Maybe I've misunderstood you. You also said this They're [Ukraine] fighting because they are choosing to fight. That makes for some, but not complete, clarity, so...?
Separate from that, but related, we agree that we should support Ukraine, in some fashion, in their defense against the barbarian invasion. How far does that support extend, though, in extremis? What do we do if it becomes clear that Ukraine is on the verge of collapse and defeat--which will be the total destruction of Ukraine physically, and more, the erasure of Ukraine as a political entity? For me that means we stop surrendering our foreign policy--our national security--to the consensus of foreign nations, and we put Americans on the line/in the air with the Ukrainians. Force Putin to react to us and our initiative, and stop surrendering, also, our initiative to Putin's actions. And the sooner the better; if we wait until that verge, it may be too late. It would certainly mean far more destruction and butchery.
To your second point: I don't believe that we are going to be forced to fight Russia or else surrender to them.
Whether Putin has the men under arms to take us on is irrelevant to this. He has made clear that he intends to reconstitute the Russian empire as it was formed under the USSR and the associated "USSR" satraps, the latter which include, among others, occupied Poland and the German Democratic Republic. Those, along with so many of the ex-SSRs, are NATO members in one form or another, so we either fight, or we surrender to avoid that fight.
Numbers of men under arms is, again, irrelevant to that effort. Putin has the nuclear weapons with which to go for it. Nukes are the great equalizer; they're the reason we argued so vehemently for stationing tactical nukes in Europe to counter the Warsaw Pact's--Russia's--overwhelming numbers in manpower (although I saw some wargaming that had some non-nuclear outcomes, assuming REFORGER could occur on schedule).
Don't think, for a minute, Putin's pain points, thought processes, or value sets are anything at all like ours. If, in the end, he's still standing, and Ukraine is his, and then the rest is his, he'll count that as good. He doesn't care the price he'll have paid, he doesn't care the price the Russian people will have paid.
Eric Hines
I think this may have something to do with a difference in how we were trained. You have the concerns of someone trained to fight the Cold War; my view is perhaps that of someone taught to fight in the shadows of the Global War on Terror.
ReplyDeleteI don't care if the government of Ukraine survives, or even if Russia overruns them and seizes their territory -- I only care that they'll win it back, and know liberty having defeated the tyrant. Governments aren't worth fighting for, but the liberty of the people is. They can make a better government on the other side.
Ukrainians are fighting for their freedom because they want it. Good. They ought to want it. It's right for them to fight for it. We should help them. The way that they can possibly win that also accords with our interests is that they can defeat Russia in an insurgency. They will fight this for their own purposes, and we should help them to fight their war. This will bleed the Russians, and will defeat them as a potential enemy because they won't be able to fight any more wars for a while.
He has made clear that he intends to reconstitute the Russian empire...
Clarity of intention does not imply capacity to attain the intended goal. Many times people formulate intentions they can't really execute. Putin can want what he wants, but unless he figures out a way to mobilize a much larger share of the Russian population and turn them into functional soldiers, he can't do that. Nukes won't get it done. You can't control a city with the threat of nukes. Ukraine has a population of forty million; Russia has a hundred thirty thousand soldiers or so.
Years ago "Yes Minister" did a sketch about Russia using 'salami slice' tactics to gather whatever they wanted without it coming to nuclear war. The same theory works in reverse. Your organization kills three Russian soldiers a day; that's not going to suffice for nuking a city. But in a year you've killed a battalion in your town.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o861Ka9TtT4
I understand your position on the Ukrainian fight, and agree that their resistance is admirable and should be supported as much as we can and maybe even more than we dare to right now. I think there might be some assumptions behind holding back that I don't agree with. Nukes may not hold cities but they do shape the battlefield. I'm sure they were part of the calculus of Biden backing down from the Polish MiG transfer.
ReplyDeletePutin has 'win without fighting' possibilities, too. If he can bluff the West into a relatively static defensive posture, simply feeding Ukrainians into his meat grinder, he's eventually going to outlast us (and them). He can lose 2 for 1 so long as he's making progress. The intensity of sanctions is not going to remaining high forever (see Iraq, Iran, etc.), and a good cold snap in nine months will shake the Euros.
As I mentioned before, this pause doesn't seem to be strategic in the sense that we're preparing for further operations. Assuming Zelensky wasn't just coming up with a good line, if Biden's first thought was to offer to spirit him out of the country that would appear to be an admission we not only think the Russians will eventually get a chunk of what they want but the current administration is ok with the outcome, and most of what we're doing now is for show.
At the risk of getting a bit too tangential, I don't see a negotiated peace with Germany in 1939 as being a big failure, nor did I mean to indicate everything would have been sunshine and rainbows if that happened. Hitler getting a good bloody nose in 1939 would have at least kept him out of France and Low Countries, and probably isolated Italy in North Africa. Poland would have been a problem but Eastern Europe may not have fallen under Soviet domination, at the very least the Soviets wouldn't have had the opportunity for an occupation without any Western resistance. The US and the Brits were already focusing on the Atlantic battle in 1941. Being able to pay more attention to the Pacific in the summer 1941 would have changed the war there. In any case, I think it's hard to see how not fighting Germany in 1939 made the subsequent fight any easier, and the Germans weren't really any readier for a war than the Brits and the French. They admitted they stripped their western border for operations in Poland. A fifth of the German tanks in France 1940 were captured Czech models, and another fifth were the Panzer Is and IIs that the German Army considered inadequate.
...unless he figures out a way to mobilize a much larger share of the Russian population and turn them into functional soldiers, he can't do that. Nukes won't get it done.
ReplyDeleteI think you're operating from a couple of false premises here. One is that Putin will limit himself to a conventional war. (Even were he, he may well be able to bluff NATO into backing down in fear of nuclear exchanges, especially given the demonstrated timidity of NATO's allegedly premier nuclear power). Putin will go nuclear as soon as he thinks that will support his ends.
The other is that Putin cares about intact cities or populations. Russia's barbarity with Ukrainians and White Russians during the kulak nationalizations argues otherwise. Putin's on barbarity in Chechnya and presently in Ukraine with his blanket bombing of civilian neighborhoods, hospitals, schools--too many of the press style these as indiscriminate bombings, but they're plainly too deliberately aimed at those areas to be indiscriminate--and his release of his "soldiers" to rape and pillage at will among the survivors also argues against his concern for capturing property or people.
Putin wants the territory; if he depopulates it, well he will happily repopulate it with transfers of Russian citizens into those territories. If nothing else, that supports the Anschluss for which he's using Russian populations in Ukraine now, and will in the Baltics later. If he destroys the physical, well, rebuilding afterward is just jobs waiting to be filled by his transferred citizens. Russia's behavior regarding the forces used in its invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia and its reverse identical behavior regarding the forces used in its invasion and attempted occupation of Afghanistan also stand as Russia's attitude toward territory vs the contents of the territory.
The alternative, a Ukrainian guerrilla war against the occupying barbarians is much more of a meat grinder for the Ukrainians than it ever will be for the Russians. Ukrainians will lose tens of thousands of guerillas, and millions of civilians at the petty cost of some thousands of Russian...soldiers. At a rate of a whole battalion per year to take your example. And in Putin's case, since he only wants the territory, not what might be in it, he'll quickly run out of patience and nuke the place. Even if it does cost him his barbarian occupiers of the place. There are more where those came from.
The sooner Putin's Russia is destroyed, the lower the overall cost to Ukraine and to the rest of civilization.
One last bit, a quibble, since it doesn't conflict with your outlined differences in our training: You have the concerns of someone trained to fight the Cold War. No, I was trained to fight a shooting war in the middle of that Cold War.
Eric Hines
Aside for Grim: I wonder if Huntsman can get a feel for how much, if any, Russia's expenditures of missiles (cruise and otherwise), artillery rounds, and bombs are taxing the military's inventory of those ordnances.
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
I can ask him the next time we talk, but I'm not sure how good his sources are on Russian munitions -- which must be a subject of tremendous OPSEC right now. At the moment I know he's working on an investigation/analysis of a Chinese investment in protein here in the USA, in Grand Forks.
ReplyDelete