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> So, having failed at a complicated, fast campaign, Russia has moved to a simpler form - bring up many troops and artillery and slowly pound the opposition int
by msla 4y ago
> So, having failed at a complicated, fast campaign, Russia has moved to a simpler form - bring up many troops and artillery and slowly pound the opposition into rubble. It's like WWI. That kind of war can go on for years if enough resources are available. It seems to be working for Russia.
"Working" to the extent a country with a GDP smaller than California's is in a war of attrition against NATO.
- pessimizer 4y agoTo be fair, the US has made a habit of losing against countries with GDPs closer to Ukraine than to Russia.
- shakezula 4y agoThere’s gotta be some like inverse square law for how difficult a war is to win against a smaller and smaller nation.
- jcranmer 4y agoSmaller nations rarely win wars. Consider the success rate of the various Native American groups against the US. The better metric is how interested you are in pursuing a war for the length of time necessary--it's a lot harder to get people to care about a war halfway across the other world than it is when it's prime farmland just next door. (Note that the author here also has a series that touches on this topic--the Fremen Mirage.)
- bryananderson 4y agoI think to make it make sense you have to define what “winning” means. It’s usually not the same thing for different sides of a war. When we say the US lost the war in Vietnam, we obviously don’t mean the Viet Cong rolled tanks down Pennsylvania Avenue. The Mujahideen didn’t hold a giant missile parade in Red Square. For those groups, winning didn’t mean taking the enemy superpower’s capital, it just meant making the war costly enough for long enough that the enemy (who had far less skin in the game, it not being their country) gave up and went home. For an occupying force, the victory condition is much more onerous—you must occupy a country (potentially far away) and pacify the local forces who have a lot of skin in the game and can make this whole ordeal very costly for you for a very long time even if they have no hope of being a threat to your homeland. And you must do this indefinitely. At some point it’s just not worth it. Zelensky doesn’t need to hold a victory ball in the Grand Kremlin Palace, he just needs to make the war so costly, with no breakthrough in sight, that Russia can’t or won’t sustain it.
- sbierwagen 4y agoRussia has a "smaller" GDP than California, but check the price of electricity in western Europe today. Few industries in Germany can survive energy prices tripling. It won't be much of a war of attrition with "NATO" if a bunch of NATO members drop out and pursue a separate peace.
- labster 4y agoIt’s too bad when countries like Germany haven’t learned to live within their means. Decades of mismanagement have a price.
- eastbound 4y agoEvery country borrows billions a year nowadays. No country lives within their means, we’re all transferring future power to China and Gulf countries through the means of letting them produce for us on credit. Which every politician profits from. “The state will pay!” as said Macron, borrowing an additional 600bn until 2048.
- spoonjim 4y agoIf all the countries are borrowing from China and Gulf countries, then they don't really have to repay it. The combined military of NATO is more than enough to resist China and the Gulf's ability to recoup a default. Of course it would require an alternative manufacturing center or China would just repo all that shit.
- mdemare 4y agoEU countries and the US mostly borrow from their own citizens.
- WheatM 4y ago
- WheatM 4y ago
- watwut 4y agoImo, while they are trying hard to make it war against NATO, NATO is not fighting back beyond supporting Ukraine. Had NATO actually committed to push Russia back, it would be all over at this point.
- TomMckenny 4y agoTrue but then none of us would be alive to comment about it.
- watwut 4y agoI don't think it would became nuclear war.