That the western democracies turned Ukraine - which should've been an easy win for Russia - into a humiliating stalemate and defeat for Putin just by shipping weapons and sharing intel creates a huge ideological problem for authoritarians like Vance and so they're trying to engineer a Russian win
The far-right believes in Russia precisely because Russia's military commits war crimes, doesn't believe in human rights etc. They saw the footage of buff VDV guys doing hand-to-hand combat drills and jerked themselves off to it (even tho all those guys got killed on the first day of the war)
Especially since a lot of the "spend" is in the form of like "ship Ukraine weapons and ammunition that will expire unused in US stockpiles otherwise" bsky.app/profile/cali...
Yes. This is "strength" to them even though the average Russian's standard of living is lower today than it was 35 years ago in the late Soviet Union and the country went from global superpower to regional laughingstock bsky.app/profile/pepp...
You could write a whole book on the concurrent rise of the cult the "operator" special forces guy along with the American fascist movement, and usefulness of these type of units in colonial occupation vs warfare against real armies.
What's weird about it is that all of American history (and indeed most of modern history) has proven that the rich country with a more representative culture beats a more hierarchical, militaristic culture every time, and it's not some secret.
Intrinsic motivation beats coercion. 🤷♂️
(See the Ukrainian vs. Ru. armies, economies too!)
And cooperating, diverse cultures tend to be much stronger than seggregated monocultures.
Fwiw Marine, who have been riding “a few good men” for almost two hundred fifty years, think army is fucking crazy for dropping be all that you can be.
The people who idealize the "operator" also fail to understand that the "operators" will be the ones killing them in their sleep if they try their Fascist uprising. The actual elite-of-the-elite are all ride-or-die patriots that are loyal first to the Constitution then the guy who trained them.
Yeah. While obviously useful for imperial... asymmetric warfare, they're also good at behind-the-lines actions like gathering intel, magicking inconvenient supply dumps out of existence, sudden retirement of commanders, lighting up targets, etc.
important because,
the cult of the operator
was never about military effectiveness,
the cult of the special operator was perceived to be a government sanctioned safe space for racial violence.
There's a certain fantasy that carries alarming weight in strategy discourse that some magic technology is going to win the war, when the basic math that to commanders is still that you have the best chance of winning if you have 3x as many dudes as the other guy (because 2/3 will die).
It’s not because 2/3 will die, it’s because the crush of force overwhelms the enemy morale. Very few engagements go until one side has been eliminated through violence.
In the Ukraine analysis circle in particular there's even a very notable case of one of those guys becoming a complete laughingstock through his total lack of knowledge (Chuck Pfarrer, who was last a SEAL in the 1980s and routinely talks about shit he has no business knowing about).
Like, even when they're on the right side of history, these guys know *very little* about conventional large-scale warfare (which is fine) but press on anyways sitting in 24/7 twitter spaces where they mispronounce a bunch of Ukrainian city names and refer to weapons as shit like "HARM missiles"
An economy smaller than Italy, just wild to think about. Imagine going from a global hegemon to not bring confident you could beat the Italians in a straight fight.
we are shipping things purpose-built to bust Russian tank armor, in some cases; this is only part “we weren’t gonna use it” and a different part “this had no other use”
Exactly this. It would have cost the US money to dispose of these old munitions. It's not like we dug into the school lunch program, which they don't want to fund either. Vance it Thiel's darling and he can't wait to watch the world burn.
Biden should just start shipping our inventory over there now and worry about "replenishment" accounting later.
If Ukrainian troops don't use up these weapons now, American troops will have to later.
It may be the best military deal in history: upgrade/update our existing inventory, reverse losses in equipment imposed by GOP instituted sequestration, rebuilt defense industrial capacity, vastly strengthened our alliances, and it crushed our most obvious enemy all at the same time.
Biden can ship this stuff to them anyway unilaterally, right? The spend is technically to manufacture the replacements as I understand it?
If that's true he should just do it. I'm sure he doesn't want to be seen as depleting our military readiness, but I think it's just as easy to say "no u" here
The point's good, but they don't expire: they get pulled from war stocks and get fired in training. My battery got a lot of Vietnam-era 105mm rounds in 1999. They were a little wonky - first adjustment rounds were all like 200-300 m short.
Shot down in their transport planes after the US told Ukrainian air defense where they were, IIRC.
That was the moment I started to think the whole thing might not go so well for Russia.
