One sided commentary about how the war is going? What kind of fantasy world do you live in where reality and unreality have equal journalistic weight.
As for your understanding of how war works, it’s about as bad as your understanding of journalism and propaganda. The fact that Russia pushes past the areas that it now occupies is how it came to occupy those areas. You don’t march your forces to a line and just stop. You clear far ahead of what’s defensible, set up your defenses, and hold. That’s what you’re seeing in that map and the idea the Russia is losing because of that is, quite literally, lying Western propaganda.
You mean holding the ethnically Russian territory and then settling in for a long conflict to drain your opponent of materiel? When your primary advantages are size, production, population, and patience? Yes. I would say that the particular position of the Russian army is achieving it’s strategic objectives quite well.
Considering the US is clawing back munitions from allies, UK has announced multiple shortfalls of ammo and personnel, Germany has deindustrialized, and multiple fronts have opened up against the West (Niger, Palestine, etc) and Russian production is in full swing, it sounds like a winning strategy to me. Every war the West has lost they lost against an entrenched enemy.
Questioning the deindustrialization of Germany is… Rather silly tbh. Have you seen Germany’s manufacturing PMI? That’s after an absurd amount of energy subsidies from the government.
Because Russia is not subject to the anarchy of production for profit that the West is, weapons manufacturing is nationalized and directed by strategic plans and oversight to ensure more efficient and more effective production.
This is another one-sided approach, where one (accurate) aspect of the problem gets magnified as if it existed in isolation without putting it in context or examining counterbalancing factors on “the other side.”
You haven’t done this (putting it context / counterbalancing). You made no attempt at sourcing anything. You only demand to hear things that make you feel better and when you only hear things that make you feel worse you automatically assume ill intent from the message.
Want me to make an effort to compare and contrast supply levels on the Russian vs Western side?
Honestly, I’m comfortable with calling it a day with the viewpoint I’ve laid out so far
That’s because you don’t have a viewpoint based in reality but instead prefer to live in the world of comfortable narratives masquerading as fact.
If you don’t want to agree, and feel like Russia is dominating in this war, that’s your right to think that, and I won’t stop you.
And here’s my evidence. You leap to strawman. No one ever said Russia is dominating, least of all me. I said Russia is achieving its strategic objectives (no country can join NATO while engaged in an active border dispute), Russia is not running out of munitions, the West is running out of munitions, the West is suffering economically, the West failed to open multiple fronts against Russia et. al, and multiple fronts have successfully been opened up against the West. None of this stuff is in dispute and none of it says Russia is dominating. If that’s what you think it says, that’s on you. What it says to me is the West is failing to meet its strategic objectives, militarily and economically. If you can’t handle that and require all journalism to also write some narrative about how those resisting the West are inevitably losing and suffering just as badly or worse and also they’re stinkydoodoo heads, well, then I think you’re making the right choice by ending the conversation here.
I also think it’s ridiculous that you’re accusing me of arguing unfactually.
Perhaps you doth protest too much.
but IDK how at all you got from that to that I was doing any of the bad-faith things you accuse me of towards the end of your message.
Because I’ve seen people debate like you before and it’s exhausting.
Taking one soldier’s experience, or one single “clawback” of however-many interceptors, without putting it in context of the other 99.9% of the situation. Basically, you can construct any type of little propaganda universe, if you’re allowed to pick individual anecdotes and blow them up context-less to create the whole picture you’re trying to create.
It’s pretty well contextualized if you are up-to-date on the reporting from even the most propaganda riddled US news. The USA is slowing or potentially even stopping it’s shipments of weapons to it’s proxy, Ukraine. The deliveries from all of the NATO countries have been riddled with delays, small batch sizes, and difficulties in repairs. Despite the weapons shipments, Ukraine was still repairing Soviet-era systems because they were so low on supplies. Ukraine has been complaining about running low on supplies for over a year now.
Then you’ve got the Palestinian resistance reporting that indicated there was concern in the USA/Israel that the Iron Dome could be depleted because of the limited availability of missiles for the batteries. It was reported that it was clearly possible for rocket attacks to overwhelm the Iron Dome, and that if enough rockets were fired the Iron Dome could be significantly depleted because each missile in the Iron Dome was orders of magnitude more expensive than the rockets they were defending against.
And again that same low-tech quantity beats hi-tech quality was reported on when discussing the conflict in the Red Sea. The cost of producing munitions to enforce the blockade in the Red Sea was orders of magnitude cheaper than the missiles that the USA used in defense.
It’s been unsustainable for a long time. It’s why IEDs were such an effective weapon against USA occupation in West Asia. Cheap, deadly, high quantity. The USA has never won a guerilla conflict. Contemporary guerilla conflicts are now armed with things that 50 years ago seemed like dream weapons to everyone.
So when the USA starts actually taking missiles out of the Pacific theater, where 60% of their Navy is deployed, while the USA has spent the last 2 decades in a “Pivot to Asia”, while current USA military doctrine is “Near-Peer Great Power Conflict”, it’s a pretty important development. And not merely an anecdote. It’s evidence of a strained inventory.
All I can point to is things like this or this as good examples of Russia struggling with supply levels.
Business Insider and CNN are hardly what I consider legitimate news sources, given how much influence the USA government has over mainstream news media.
The 2023 wartime Russian military budget is roughly $100 billion, significantly up from their pre-war spending.
It’s going to be really hard to compare military budgets when the USA is spending $100Bn/year over 10 years on upgrading it’s nuclear arsenal and the cost of fighter jets and individual missiles. The exact point I’m trying to make here is that Russia is spending far less on its military than the USA is but isn’t running into supply issues, as evidenced by the upward trend of production numbers over the course of the war when compared to NATO countries, like Germany, seeing a flatline or even a decline in production.
Total direct military assistance to Ukraine was a little under $100 billion in the first year-and-a-half of the war, with most of that coming from the US. So, you’re correct that Russia is outspending Ukraine+allies by a certain amount.
I’m not talking about outspending. The USA provided lethal aid in dollar value that was greater than Russia’s entire military budget. And most of it has been destroyed.
The US has money. Our congress is just a shit show right now, so the Ukrainians aren’t getting any, and they need it to be able to fight the war.
This is just ostrich behavior. The POTUS has overridden Congress on lethal aid to its allies/proxies multiple times. Congress has nothing to do with it. The DoD has never passed an audit, they have more money untouched by oversight than entire national GDPs around the world. The USA will send weapons to whomever it needs in order to achieve its military goals. It’s not political. The military does not live or die by what the morons in Congress are doing.
That’s why I say that I wouldn’t agree that Russia can simply sit back and wait and outspend the west.
That’s not what I said. I said they can hold the territory they need to hold because Ukraine is spent and there aren’t enough munitions to in the NATO countries to turn the tide while defending multiple fronts. There certainly aren’t enough Ukrainian soldiers left to do it either. It would require deploying soldiers, which, given the reporting from the UK, there also aren’t enough in the NATO countries. Evidence that there aren’t enough munitions? Read above (Iron Dome depletion threat, Patriot missile clawback, deindustrialization of Germany, multiple active fronts, US slowing aid, etc). Evidence that there aren’t enough soldiers? UK reporting not enough soldiers to run even their current Navy, which is 2 years after demands for the Navy to double in size, and after 18 months of recruitment crisis.
Russia doesn’t need to outspend the West. Russia able to align Russian production with Russia’s strategic aims better than the West has been able to align the West’s production with the West’s strategic aims. Those big dick waving numbers are being shown for what they are - corruption.
Germany’s “has deindustrialized” industrial sector currently stands at 23% of their $4.4 trillion GDP, or about a trillion dollars. They’re still among the top exporters of things like vehicles and armaments in the world.
And yet, during war time, after needing to send weapons to an ally, under heavy pressure to expand NATO, German industry is in decline. So yes, German industry is big and shrinking while Russian industry is growing. These trend lines do not lead to the conclusion that Germany has what it takes to compete with Russia. It says the opposite. It shows that during the conflict, Russia is benefiting and getting stronger and Germany is suffering and getting weaker. There’s not really another way to spin that except to say the suffering’s not that bad and the shrinkage is just an adjustment while Germany gears up to really leap forward next year, or whatever.
This article about the threat of a certain amount of deindustrialization
Remember, sanctions are part of the war, and Russia is winning the sanctions war.
So it’s a little weird to extrapolate from “problems in Germany compared to Germany’s baseline” to “Russia’s in the dominant spot economically in Ukraine.”
Again, absolute dollar values are a signal, they are not reality. If 2 militaries go to war, one with 2x the money, and the poorer one wins, what does that tell us? This is what happened to the USA in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Yes, the USA had larger budgets than those countries. They still lost. That means we have to see dollar value as a signal, but not as reality. We have to look at the reality and then look at the dollar value and then dig deeper for insight. What have we seen? We’ve seen the USA provide lethal aid equivalent to the entire national military budget of Russia and we saw Russia destroy all of that lethal aid with only a fraction of its national force while simultaneously increasing production, growing its economy, and likely providing material support for the subsequent new fronts against the West (remember Wagner group saying they were heading to Africa next?). Meanwhile, multiple NATO countries are suffering from Russian sanctions and the USA is clawing back munitions from allies and reducing or possibly eliminating support for Ukraine.
So you can keep trying to isolate things and argue technical details against each of them, but you’re not going to get useful insight that way when the trends we’re talking about span at least the last 3 years and the direction of the trends matter far more than any individual talking point.
One sided commentary about how the war is going? What kind of fantasy world do you live in where reality and unreality have equal journalistic weight.
As for your understanding of how war works, it’s about as bad as your understanding of journalism and propaganda. The fact that Russia pushes past the areas that it now occupies is how it came to occupy those areas. You don’t march your forces to a line and just stop. You clear far ahead of what’s defensible, set up your defenses, and hold. That’s what you’re seeing in that map and the idea the Russia is losing because of that is, quite literally, lying Western propaganda.
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You mean holding the ethnically Russian territory and then settling in for a long conflict to drain your opponent of materiel? When your primary advantages are size, production, population, and patience? Yes. I would say that the particular position of the Russian army is achieving it’s strategic objectives quite well.
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Considering the US is clawing back munitions from allies, UK has announced multiple shortfalls of ammo and personnel, Germany has deindustrialized, and multiple fronts have opened up against the West (Niger, Palestine, etc) and Russian production is in full swing, it sounds like a winning strategy to me. Every war the West has lost they lost against an entrenched enemy.
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Questioning the deindustrialization of Germany is… Rather silly tbh. Have you seen Germany’s manufacturing PMI? That’s after an absurd amount of energy subsidies from the government.
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Agreed.
https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3625683/us-department-of-defense-statement-on-japans-decision-to-transfer-patriot-missi/
Citation needed
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-increases-weapons-production-2023-despite-sanctions-armed-forces-1856938
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-ramps-up-output-some-military-hardware-by-more-than-tenfold-state-company-2023-09-19/
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-increased-stock-long-range-missiles-faster-than-expected-isw-2023-11?op=1
Because Russia is not subject to the anarchy of production for profit that the West is, weapons manufacturing is nationalized and directed by strategic plans and oversight to ensure more efficient and more effective production.
You haven’t done this (putting it context / counterbalancing). You made no attempt at sourcing anything. You only demand to hear things that make you feel better and when you only hear things that make you feel worse you automatically assume ill intent from the message.
I would actually.
2022 https://www.economist.com/business/2022/09/11/germany-faces-a-looming-threat-of-deindustrialisation
2023 https://www.politico.eu/article/rust-belt-on-the-rhine-the-deindustrialization-of-germany/
Late 2023 https://www.ft.com/content/7095e5d7-7a72-483f-9464-52d36bac03f7
What on EARTH have you been reading?
That’s because you don’t have a viewpoint based in reality but instead prefer to live in the world of comfortable narratives masquerading as fact.
And here’s my evidence. You leap to strawman. No one ever said Russia is dominating, least of all me. I said Russia is achieving its strategic objectives (no country can join NATO while engaged in an active border dispute), Russia is not running out of munitions, the West is running out of munitions, the West is suffering economically, the West failed to open multiple fronts against Russia et. al, and multiple fronts have successfully been opened up against the West. None of this stuff is in dispute and none of it says Russia is dominating. If that’s what you think it says, that’s on you. What it says to me is the West is failing to meet its strategic objectives, militarily and economically. If you can’t handle that and require all journalism to also write some narrative about how those resisting the West are inevitably losing and suffering just as badly or worse and also they’re stinkydoodoo heads, well, then I think you’re making the right choice by ending the conversation here.
Edit: hot off the presses
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/13/ukraine-says-russia-launched-barrage-of-missile-attacks-nationwide
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Perhaps you doth protest too much.
Because I’ve seen people debate like you before and it’s exhausting.
It’s pretty well contextualized if you are up-to-date on the reporting from even the most propaganda riddled US news. The USA is slowing or potentially even stopping it’s shipments of weapons to it’s proxy, Ukraine. The deliveries from all of the NATO countries have been riddled with delays, small batch sizes, and difficulties in repairs. Despite the weapons shipments, Ukraine was still repairing Soviet-era systems because they were so low on supplies. Ukraine has been complaining about running low on supplies for over a year now.
Then you’ve got the Palestinian resistance reporting that indicated there was concern in the USA/Israel that the Iron Dome could be depleted because of the limited availability of missiles for the batteries. It was reported that it was clearly possible for rocket attacks to overwhelm the Iron Dome, and that if enough rockets were fired the Iron Dome could be significantly depleted because each missile in the Iron Dome was orders of magnitude more expensive than the rockets they were defending against.
And again that same low-tech quantity beats hi-tech quality was reported on when discussing the conflict in the Red Sea. The cost of producing munitions to enforce the blockade in the Red Sea was orders of magnitude cheaper than the missiles that the USA used in defense.
It’s been unsustainable for a long time. It’s why IEDs were such an effective weapon against USA occupation in West Asia. Cheap, deadly, high quantity. The USA has never won a guerilla conflict. Contemporary guerilla conflicts are now armed with things that 50 years ago seemed like dream weapons to everyone.
So when the USA starts actually taking missiles out of the Pacific theater, where 60% of their Navy is deployed, while the USA has spent the last 2 decades in a “Pivot to Asia”, while current USA military doctrine is “Near-Peer Great Power Conflict”, it’s a pretty important development. And not merely an anecdote. It’s evidence of a strained inventory.
Business Insider and CNN are hardly what I consider legitimate news sources, given how much influence the USA government has over mainstream news media.
It’s going to be really hard to compare military budgets when the USA is spending $100Bn/year over 10 years on upgrading it’s nuclear arsenal and the cost of fighter jets and individual missiles. The exact point I’m trying to make here is that Russia is spending far less on its military than the USA is but isn’t running into supply issues, as evidenced by the upward trend of production numbers over the course of the war when compared to NATO countries, like Germany, seeing a flatline or even a decline in production.
I’m not talking about outspending. The USA provided lethal aid in dollar value that was greater than Russia’s entire military budget. And most of it has been destroyed.
This is just ostrich behavior. The POTUS has overridden Congress on lethal aid to its allies/proxies multiple times. Congress has nothing to do with it. The DoD has never passed an audit, they have more money untouched by oversight than entire national GDPs around the world. The USA will send weapons to whomever it needs in order to achieve its military goals. It’s not political. The military does not live or die by what the morons in Congress are doing.
That’s not what I said. I said they can hold the territory they need to hold because Ukraine is spent and there aren’t enough munitions to in the NATO countries to turn the tide while defending multiple fronts. There certainly aren’t enough Ukrainian soldiers left to do it either. It would require deploying soldiers, which, given the reporting from the UK, there also aren’t enough in the NATO countries. Evidence that there aren’t enough munitions? Read above (Iron Dome depletion threat, Patriot missile clawback, deindustrialization of Germany, multiple active fronts, US slowing aid, etc). Evidence that there aren’t enough soldiers? UK reporting not enough soldiers to run even their current Navy, which is 2 years after demands for the Navy to double in size, and after 18 months of recruitment crisis.
Russia doesn’t need to outspend the West. Russia able to align Russian production with Russia’s strategic aims better than the West has been able to align the West’s production with the West’s strategic aims. Those big dick waving numbers are being shown for what they are - corruption.
And yet, during war time, after needing to send weapons to an ally, under heavy pressure to expand NATO, German industry is in decline. So yes, German industry is big and shrinking while Russian industry is growing. These trend lines do not lead to the conclusion that Germany has what it takes to compete with Russia. It says the opposite. It shows that during the conflict, Russia is benefiting and getting stronger and Germany is suffering and getting weaker. There’s not really another way to spin that except to say the suffering’s not that bad and the shrinkage is just an adjustment while Germany gears up to really leap forward next year, or whatever.
The earliest one I linked is about the threat, yes. The subsequent articles are about the actual deindustrialization happening. But here’s evidence as of July 2023 that it was already happening, and here we see their economy faltering in an analysis from Sept 2023.
Remember, sanctions are part of the war, and Russia is winning the sanctions war.
Again, absolute dollar values are a signal, they are not reality. If 2 militaries go to war, one with 2x the money, and the poorer one wins, what does that tell us? This is what happened to the USA in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Yes, the USA had larger budgets than those countries. They still lost. That means we have to see dollar value as a signal, but not as reality. We have to look at the reality and then look at the dollar value and then dig deeper for insight. What have we seen? We’ve seen the USA provide lethal aid equivalent to the entire national military budget of Russia and we saw Russia destroy all of that lethal aid with only a fraction of its national force while simultaneously increasing production, growing its economy, and likely providing material support for the subsequent new fronts against the West (remember Wagner group saying they were heading to Africa next?). Meanwhile, multiple NATO countries are suffering from Russian sanctions and the USA is clawing back munitions from allies and reducing or possibly eliminating support for Ukraine.
So you can keep trying to isolate things and argue technical details against each of them, but you’re not going to get useful insight that way when the trends we’re talking about span at least the last 3 years and the direction of the trends matter far more than any individual talking point.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
this talk
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
a pattern in the flow of this conversation
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.