War in Ukraine

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#23,102
McDad said:
Hog is good for a something creative about 2 times per year.
It's the only reason we allow him to stay.
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It started because someone refused to answer a question I asked because they didn't like that I said Mandeans were an ethnic group.
 
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Rickyvol77 said:
Sure just like the Russians were doing the same thing on the other side. However the US didn’t unilaterally invade a sovereign country and have its military directly kill innocent people
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Yup. Whataboutism is a fun excercise and has its place. But once one side chooses to directly move its forces across a border, all such games end. There is no “but what about….” that can answer that.
 
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allvol123 said:
Good. Our advanced weaponry allows for us to kill at a higher rate per soldier than previous iterations of our army, I would assume.

I guess TherealUT no longer posts here. He was quite the military expert on here and if I remember correctly, he argued for a substantially smaller armed forces.
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Kill ratios are one metric bit by themselves are less than telling. Killing the enemy in one place at one time is good but it does not in the end win a war. You still have to physically occupy ground and deny its use to the enemy. A drone cannot hold a single square foot of land. For that you still gotta have boots on the ground and they have to be able to stay as long as the enemy is still actively contesting that spot. We killed enemy combatants by the truckload in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. So how are we doing there now? Who is in possession of the battlefield when all is said and done?
 
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#23,116
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OrangeTsar said:
Kill ratios are one metric bit by themselves are less than telling. Killing the enemy in one place at one time is good but it does not in the end win a war. You still have to physically occupy ground and deny its use to the enemy. A drone cannot hold a single square foot of land. For that you still gotta have boots on the ground and they have to be able to stay as long as the enemy is still actively contesting that spot. We killed enemy combatants by the truckload in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. So how are we doing there now? Who is in possession of the battlefield when all is said and done?
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Hopefully we are not looking to take any ground. Meaning we are at home.

I don’t think Iraq nor Afghanistan was a numbers problem. More of a we really don’t know what we are trying to accomplish here problem.

I’m good with a smaller army.
 
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#23,117
#23,117
allvol123 said:
Hopefully we are not looking to take any ground. Meaning we are at home.

I don’t think Iraq nor Afghanistan was a numbers problem. More of a we really don’t know what we are trying to accomplish here problem.

I’m good with a smaller army.
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Even given the assumption that we are “at home” a military still has to hold ground. And the Navy has no “home” to defend but must keep open all sea lanes of communication. Once again, drones can do neither of these things. And we will have to hold ground at home whenever those sneaky hockey playing hosers from the North invade again. They SHALL NOT burn our White House a second time, eh! 😉
 
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#23,118
Rasputin_Vol said:
Even if we could get rid of the present leadership tomorrow and get someone in there with common sense, we are still looking at a decade or more to get us back to where we are close to being on firmer footing economically. The boomers are retiring and dying off and taking a lot of the knowledge they have of these industries with them to the grave. You lose all of that tribal knowledge of certain industries... you just can turn on and turn off a lot of these manufacturing and industrial processes like a light switch. Plus, our citizenry doesn't have the necessary skills to feed the manpower needs because we have far too many learning soft sciences and humanities rather than trades and engineering. We are looking down the barrel of steep decline in living standards and productivity if we don't get our s^^t together.

Being delusional or being optimistic saying "we've proven it" before is not productive and realistic. I really don't think a lot of you fully appreciate the dire situation this country is in right now.
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Again I agree with you. I come from a nuclear background, and I don't know that we could build a reactor right now - perhaps still the ones for the Navy. I think maybe we are still building replacement steam generators. Some of the stuff (consumer electronics) we gave up is obsolete, and probably factories couldn't have been converted anyway. At least there seems to be a move to fabricating chips for our technology. We still build military hardware and at least assemble cars. The weakness is whether we can still produce the metal and machine the parts that goes into the cars - that's some of the point about Canada and Mexico. Wouldn't want to foul our air by producing steel. Corporate agriculture is a joke apparently by the amount of stuff grown elsewhere.

The college for all idiocy is killing us; some professions require it, but a lot of what is taught in universities is drivel. Again you are right on generations and skills and incentive. One thing you didn't touch on that I do is corporate management - it sucks - at least to a lot of us. Older management grew up in the business before running it - now we pump out baby managers who think they know it all - and there's too many of them - and too many layers of management; I can't see them doing much more significant than something like Amazon which is really an updated Sears knockoff. We're service oriented today when we need to be industrial again.

One other killer is our cost of labor and supposedly our standard of living. It's all inflationary, and we've priced ourselves out of business. There's no way that the incessant union demands for more pay and benefits with no matching productivity gains could ever bee seen as anything but inflationary - mob rule style, and politicians supported unions because it got them income and reelections. We need to be oriented more toward keeping people working than keeping them supplied with cheap toys/electronics and other distractions.
 
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so anyone buy into the US strategy being to slow walk this war in an attempt to drain Russia economically and militarily? I've heard rumblings but I hate to think we'd so callously consider a prolonged entanglement with Ukraine (and the corresponding suffering) to be in our long term best interests.
 
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OrangeTsar said:
Kill ratios are one metric bit by themselves are less than telling. Killing the enemy in one place at one time is good but it does not in the end win a war. You still have to physically occupy ground and deny its use to the enemy. A drone cannot hold a single square foot of land. For that you still gotta have boots on the ground and they have to be able to stay as long as the enemy is still actively contesting that spot. We killed enemy combatants by the truckload in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. So how are we doing there now? Who is in possession of the battlefield when all is said and done?
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There's a lot of weird thinking about military matters. For example, drones. There's the idea of using drones to replace fighters with pilots, and obviously there are some advantages. But look at the endgame; we send squadrons of drone fighters against squadrons of Chinese drone fighters, and we both waste billions or trillions, but what does anybody gain? We could supposedly do the same on the ground - then robots own the territory? Maybe it all makes sense to somebody, but I'm not one of those somebodies. I still see troops on the ground helped with air support, and that air support covered with fighters to protect them from enemy fighters. You take ground and hold it, or it's simply an exercise in futility. And I definitely don't subscribe to the McNamara one plane does it all - not one of the F-35 enthusiasts club.
 
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AM64 said:
I've always considered Indians - at least the ones allowed to be well educated - to be very intelligent. Their alignment with Russia is baffling. Sure they are getting a great deal on oil and military hardware, but it comes with an extreme downside - especially with Indian/Chinese enmity and Russian/Chinese alliance.
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Russia woos India with hefty discounts on oil; offers $30-35 a barrel discount on flagship grade (msn.com)

Russia is offering a hefty discount of as much as $30-35/barrel on its flagship Ural grade to India; the discount will be applied on prices that were prevailing before its invasion of Ukraine on February 23, added the sources. Since Brent oil prices have since risen from about $97 per barrel to $107, the discounts may go up further.
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#23,125
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AM64 said:
There's a lot of weird thinking about military matters. For example, drones. There's the idea of using drones to replace fighters with pilots, and obviously there are some advantages. But look at the endgame; we send squadrons of drone fighters against squadrons of Chinese drone fighters, and we both waste billions or trillions, but what does anybody gain? We could supposedly do the same on the ground - then robots own the territory? Maybe it all makes sense to somebody, but I'm not one of those somebodies. I still see troops on the ground helped with air support, and that air support covered with fighters to protect them from enemy fighters. You take ground and hold it, or it's simply an exercise in futility. And I definitely don't subscribe to the McNamara one plane does it all - not one of the F-35 enthusiasts club.
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Preach brother! You said it much better than I.
 
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