So the intended strategy is to “settle in” on their own side of the border and spring-2022 frontline, to patiently drain Australia, the EU, Canada, and the USA of materiel, until we are all exhausted by the limitless might of the Russian industrial economy?
Ukraine has problems in the war, to be sure. (A shortage of men in the war of attrition being one of them, absolutely.) But that way of explaining the strategy doesn’t make it sound like winning to me.
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.
UK has announced multiple shortfalls of ammo and personnel
Probably true. Russia has suffered more severe shortfalls, although since their government and military aren’t subject to Western-democracy-style oversight, I doubt they’ve “announced” anything. 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.”
Want me to make an effort to compare and contrast supply levels on the Russian vs Western side?
Germany has deindustrialized
What on EARTH are you talking about?
multiple fronts have opened up against the West (Niger, Palestine, etc)
Yeah, we’ll have to pull all our troops out of Ukraine if it keeps up, and we might need to pull some warships out too, so we can send them to the Red Sea, and supplement all our existing forces in Palestine.
So: I’m starting to notice a pattern in the flow of this conversation. Honestly, I’m comfortable with calling it a day with the viewpoint I’ve laid out so far. 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.
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.
See comment above. Compared to Germany’s baseline, its industrial sector is showing signs of problems. But if Germany “has deindustrialized” past tense, then 97.4% of the countries in the world have never been industrialized at all.
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.
Hey so: You gave me a detailed factual argument with citations, so I’m taking some significant time to respond to it factually. I actually really like this type of debate even if I’m obviously gonna disagree with your conclusions.
I also think it’s ridiculous that you’re accusing me of arguing unfactually. Pretty much every fact you’ve cited, I’ve agreed with (when you give citations you’ve been drawing largely on sources that are clearly based in reality), and then made the argument that there are other things that need to be added to the equation. You can agree or disagree with conclusion obviously, and it’s definitely fair for you to ask for me to add citations, 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.
This is, again, what I was talking about before: 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.
Any quantitative measurement of how much this is going on, versus the total? Similar to what I do down below? I’d assert that this with Japan is a weird one-off thing and not America “running out of weapons” or anything, but you’re free to prove me wrong.
Russia has suffered more severe shortfalls
Citation needed
Want me to make an effort to compare and contrast supply levels on the Russian vs Western side?
I would actually.
Okay, happy to. So, it’s actually remarkably difficult to find open-source numbers on how much materiel over time Russia is supplying to its frontline troops. All I can point to is things like this or this as good examples of Russia struggling with supply levels.
But, those are anecdotes, similar to the ones of yours that I complained about before. They don’t really mean anything. If you want to get an idea of what the actual big picture is, the best way I can see to do it is just to add up the total numbers involved. The 2023 wartime Russian military budget is roughly $100 billion, significantly up from their pre-war spending.
That’s something like 10 times the domestic Ukrainian spend on their military, but obviously that’s not the whole story. 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 would also say that what you’re saying about the grim situation for the Ukrainians right now is accurate in the short term. But that’s not because the west is running out of money. The Ukrainian side of the war started going worse for them around October 2023, when $60 billion worth of aid was held up in the US congress, and they started running out of stuff, and it’s now gotten pretty bad. Some of the stories you highlight are talking about examples of that, and they’re accurate.
That single $60 billion US aid package, though, represents more than half of Russia’s total military budget even in their fully mobilized economy. The total military budget of the US alone is around $842 billion – which dwarfs Russia’s military budget by a factor similar to how much Russia’s dwarfs Ukraine’s. They’re not comparable. 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.
That’s why I say that I wouldn’t agree that Russia can simply sit back and wait and outspend the west. If you want to argue that they can outwait Ukraine’s ability to depend on aid from the west… yeah, maybe. It’s definitely possible. That’s why I say it’s not a settled question whether Ukraine will win or lose.
This article about the threat of a certain amount of deindustrialization, similar to what happened (in a much bigger way) in the American rust belt, is a real story. But if you’re going to hold up that side of the story and then use it to say why Russia can outproduce the whole of the West, then the “deindustrialized” (past tense apparently) industrial sector of the German economy should be put in context; it’s more than half of the entire Russian GDP (all sectors) of about $1.8 trillion. 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.”
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)
So – I actually agree with you that Russia is achieving its actual objectives.
Putin said that the objectives are demilitarization, deNazification, and “neutrality.” At those, he’s failed miserably. There’s not a chance in hell now that whoever winds up on Russia’s border at the end of this will be demilitarized or neutral.
But, I don’t think those were the objectives. I think the objectives were to wreck Ukraine to teach the world a lesson about what happens when you make Russia feel threatened. Whatever happens now in the war going forward, that objective is achieved. Clickbaity title aside, I think this talk actually lays out a pretty compelling case for what is Putin’s real strategic thinking about the war.
So like I said – I actually really like this type of factual back-and-forth argument. I’m going to keep calling out stuff that you’re doing that seems to me like improper argumentation (extrapolating from one datum all the way back to the whole situation being by far the the biggest example), but you’re clearly interested in some level of factual discussion, so cool, let’s rock.
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.
Because I’ve seen people debate like you before and it’s exhausting.
Okay, but they’re not me. If you see me doing bad faith things, please accuse me of them. If you don’t, then don’t.
It’s pretty well contextualized if you are up-to-date on the reporting from even the most propaganda riddled US news.
I asked specifically for an overview of the problem similar to what I provided, not just a bunch of examples. You gave me back a bunch more examples, and a big assertion that if I was informed, I would agree with you. Hopefully it is clear why I’m not into the idea of just suddenly agreeing with you based only on that.
Business Insider and CNN are hardly what I consider legitimate news sources, given how much influence the USA government has over mainstream news media.
What that’s cited in the sources I listed would you factually disagree with? I was actually pretty careful to rely on pro-Western sources (especially the wildly pro-Western ones like CNN or Newsweek) only for points that were tangential to my main argument (“anecdotes”) or points that I don’t think would really be under any kind of factual disagreement (size of the aid packages to Ukraine).
Claiming that I’m using a “biased” source and rejecting my whole argument because of it, without substantively disagreeing with any of the information I’m sourcing, is another type of flawed argumentation (close to the “reality” / “unreality” technique I was talking about earlier).
as evidenced by the upward trend of production numbers
Do you have a cite for this?
The POTUS has overridden Congress on lethal aid to its allies/proxies multiple times. Congress has nothing to do with it.
Do you have a cite for this? The last guy got impeached for overriding Congress’s determinations on aid. It was a lot more complex than that, obviously, but that was one of the big factors: Congress decided one thing and he was unilaterally attempting to decide a different thing (unsuccessfully, though he did delay the aid).
there aren’t enough munitions to in the NATO countries
Do you have a cite for this? How much munitions does NATO have? Roughly speaking.
NATO countries, like Germany, seeing a flatline or even a decline in production.
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.
You get what I’m saying, though, that if Russia is fighting an enemy with a collective production capacity 10 times greater, and one of its enemies (which is suffering most from the sanctions, since it draws so much energy from Russia) has its economy drop by 0.4%, the news stories about what a bad thing the 0.4% is, don’t suddenly mean that Russia can outspend its enemies?
(The AP link is one of the sources in the article you linked me to)
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.
Yes, these are important lessons. There are indeed a bunch of other factors at play besides raw dollar values. One of the biggest in Russia’s favor is purchasing power parity, which I haven’t touched because this is already a complex enough discussion.
So, let’s look at the examples of the USA in Vietnam and Afghanistan as excellent examples of how an invading country’s raw industrial and military advantage, even to an overwhelming degree, can’t always overcome determined resistance. Would you say the lessons of these examples could also apply to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Why or why not?
So, let’s look at the examples of the USA in Vietnam and Afghanistan as excellent examples of how an invading country’s raw industrial and military advantage, even to an overwhelming degree, can’t always overcome determined resistance. Would you say the lessons of these examples could also apply to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Why or why not?
And you think I’m drawing from the right wing playbook? Jesus Christ. You cannot concede a single point lost in the debate. You ask for sources on claims I’ve already sourced. And you think your assessment of how much deindustrialization is noteworthy supersedes the analysis of journalists and economists so that you can hang on by your attempt at distilling a complex economy to a single fungible number that rhetorically feels like it supports your position. And you continue to argue about the ability to outspend when what I have been clearly saying, repeatedly, is that outspending is not the same as outproducing and it’s certainly not the same as producing more appropriately.
Of course the West is outspending literally everyone, they stole over 50% of the world’s wealth. The point is that even with all this money, they operate a capitalist arms industry and the profit motive is a terrible mechanism for national defense. So, despite it being literally impossible for Russia to ever outspend the West, Russia is still producing more relevant and strategically aligned munitions, that are more reliable, and more cost effective, such that they are defeating Ukraine with only a portion of their national force while facing a paper dollar value that exceeds their entire military budget.
Can the lessons of American losses be applied to the Ukrainian context? Absolutely. The US military is full of weapons systems that maximize profit. That means their cost-effectiveness ratio is terrible compared to even improvised munitions. Except in the few instances where Russia used Kinzhal, Russia’s not fielded anything terribly hi-tech. From very low cost drones, old tech that was designed for exactly this theater and these enemies, and Soviet-era armor. All of these reports are from early on when the Western propaganda machine was using this as evidence that Russia was a failed state with no military power and inability to achieve its objectives. Meanwhile, Russia has managed to burn through multiple waves of Ukraine’s army, funded to the scale of the entire Russian military, with only a portion of its national force.
Other lessons? Russia’s strategic use of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Russia’s ability to succeed against entrenched urban warfare, likely from lessons learned watching the US get fucked in similar situations. Russia’s neutralization of likely sleeper cells in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Chechnya.
Again, all part of the larger tapestry of Russia being well organized at multiple levels against the West: military production (not spending, trending better than the West), foreign policy (allies and supply chains), economics (thriving under sanctions, the West harmed by sanctions), intelligence (clearly Russia has enough intelligence to operate), counter-intelligence (evidenced by the multiple failed attempts to open new fronts against Russia and the multiple fronts opened up against the West), and domestic policy (Russian domestic sentiment is higher than ever). Meanwhile, the West is massively divided, public sentiment is terrible, approval of leaders, governmental bodies, and domestic and foreign policies are terrible. And, versus Ukraine, Russia did all this with a fraction of its military power compared to Ukraine going all out with the backing of arms at a dollar equivalent of the entire Russian military budget.
I don’t know how else to present this to you. The debate about German deindustrialization only being 0.4% of its total economy just doesn’t cut it. First off, you fail to use that number correctly. The 0.4% reduction in the last 3 months of 2022. In Q1 of 2023, it dropped another 0.1%. But again, that’s total economy, not industry. https://www.vdma.org/viewer/-/v2article/render/81411795 shows a net 10% decrease in orders across the entire machinery and plant engineering sector as of June 2023, but that net comes from an increase in domestic orders of 9% and decrease in global orders of 18%. It also indicates that there were over 30% fewer orders from all of Europe. Meanwhile, https://www.kloepfel-consulting.com/supply-chain-news/maerkte/vda-umfrage-automobilindustrie-deutschland-6566823/ shows that, in May 2023, in a survey of 128 automotive industry companies, 0% planned to increase their investment in Germany with 27% planning to shift their investments out of Germany. And here we have evidence that total energy consumed in Germany dropped 8% in 2023, mostly because of high energy industry doing less.
I’m sorry if you think pulling 2022Q4 total economic delta is a valid rebuttal to what I’m presenting. I’m calling you out, like you asked me to, your ability to source facts and contextualize facts is not developed. Let’s recap:
Russia:
despite using a fraction of its total military power
is achieving its military objectives
while facing a nation with more military funding than all of Russia (Western aid + what Ukraine contributed)
despite Ukraine using 100% of its military power
while using predominantly low-tech tactics (combined with hypersonics that the West does not have)
avoided multiple fronts against it (Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Georgia)
while multiple fronts open up against the West (Niger, Palestine, Yemen)
strengthened its economy
despite maximal sanctions
while the West suffered from sanctions
increased military production
while the USA claws back munitions from allies
while the UK can’t staff its navy
while German industry is shrinking significantly despite demand from Ukraine and NATO allies for weapons
while increasing strategic ties with its allies
while increasing domestic sentiment
while the West suffers decreasing domestic sentiment and increasing domestic strife
I don’t really know how much more you need to see the pattern here. Nearly everything is sourceable from just being on Lemmy regularly and reading the news. Everything you want sources for I can get you. But you’ve got to do better than just saying I’m taking things out of context while simultaneously trying to give me 1 quarter’s national economic numbers from 2022 as evidence that German industry isn’t shrinking. You’re the one taking things out context. You can’t accuse me of crafting whatever narrative I want while simultaneously claiming I’m not contextualizing things. The narrative emerges from contextualizing things. If you think that just because the narrative is at odds with your beliefs then this means the evidence is being decontextualized, you might just have a bias that needs to be evaluated.
So the sources you already sent about Russian increases in weapons production or about German relative difficulties, those are perfectly good. I wasn’t saying you needed to prove that stuff again. I was saying, do you have an idea of how much total armaments NATO produces versus Russia? Total number of shells, total number of bullets, drones, things like that? You’re right that dollars are a poor way of measuring it; they’re just the best I could find.
Yes, I understand that Germany’s economy is having some difficulties. The 0.4% number is from your source; I followed one of the links from the source you sent. I didn’t pick it out to send to you; I just explored your source a little to try to find out, okay, what are we actually talking about quantitatively?
Regardless of Germany, the UK’s Navy, all of that. Do you have an idea of what is the total armaments production, in a form that reflects it more accurately than dollars?
These are sales, not gifts. And they are valued at $106 million and $147 million respectively, around 1,000 times smaller than what’s being proposed in the current aid package. And that was still a big deal with stories in the paper and all (the first story notes that it’s the first time Biden did it).
And you think I’m drawing from the right wing playbook? Jesus Christ. You cannot concede a single point lost in the debate. You ask for sources on claims I’ve already sourced.
So, I do get why you think this; I think I was a little unclear. But no, I’m not trying to say you’re wrong in the examples you’re giving or need to send proof for the same examples again. I’m saying: If you’re going to say Russia is outproducing the West in terms of weapons, what are the numbers you’re claiming? For total Russian armaments produced vs. NATO armaments produced? Artillery shells or drones are a good metric if it’s too complex to get a whole complete picture without falling back into measuring dollars.
You’re also saying Russia’s using them more effectively, which is a different discussion which is a lot more complex which I’ll leave alone for right now.
Meanwhile, Russia has managed to burn through multiple waves of Ukraine’s army, funded to the scale of the entire Russian military, with only a portion of its national force.
What happened in the north of the country?
are defeating Ukraine
burn through multiple waves of Ukraine’s army
Let me ask you a question. If some middle eastern countries formed into a bloc, funded and armed by Russia, and NATO invaded that bloc, and then the invasion remained within 100 km of the border for 2 years, would you say that represented NATO “defeating” the mideast bloc? Because we were holding off multiple waves?
I honestly have not a ton of nationalistic feeling towards the US. I do have some, yes. Particularly what you’re saying about the West being disorganized is true, although I’d much rather have that than a Russia-style “organization.”
Mostly I just feel a lot for the people in Ukraine getting invaded, although the honest truth is, US troops have done the same to any number of small countries throughout the world. I’m not “proud” per se of the US if the West wins this fight, although I’ll be happy if Ukrainians (and Russian conscripts, for that matter) stop dying. Mostly, I just look at the war the way I look at it, and I think Russia is the aggressor, and so I tend to be opposed to what they’re doing in the same way I’m opposed to the US doing it when we’re in the invader role.
You can’t accuse me of crafting whatever narrative I want while simultaneously claiming I’m not contextualizing things. The narrative emerges from contextualizing things. If you think that just because the narrative is at odds with your beliefs then this means the evidence is being decontextualized, you might just have a bias that needs to be evaluated.
Oh, no doubt. The narrative arrives from details, and it’s a lot more complex then just big numbers. But you get what I’m saying, that the truth doesn’t come from sheer number of bullet points, but by testing your big conclusions against big objectively true things, right? That’s why I keep coming back to things like “the invasion’s gone on for 2 years and hasn’t gone much of anywhere yet” and “NATO’s industrial capacity is $X and Russia’s is $Y.” You can’t just contextualize from details only, and then decide whatever you arrived at is true. Sometimes it will be, sometimes not. Surely that makes sense?
So the intended strategy is to “settle in” on their own side of the border and spring-2022 frontline, to patiently drain Australia, the EU, Canada, and the USA of materiel, until we are all exhausted by the limitless might of the Russian industrial economy?
Ukraine has problems in the war, to be sure. (A shortage of men in the war of attrition being one of them, absolutely.) But that way of explaining the strategy doesn’t make it sound like winning to me.
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.
I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.
Probably true. Russia has suffered more severe shortfalls, although since their government and military aren’t subject to Western-democracy-style oversight, I doubt they’ve “announced” anything. 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.”
Want me to make an effort to compare and contrast supply levels on the Russian vs Western side?
What on EARTH are you talking about?
Yeah, we’ll have to pull all our troops out of Ukraine if it keeps up, and we might need to pull some warships out too, so we can send them to the Red Sea, and supplement all our existing forces in Palestine.
So: I’m starting to notice a pattern in the flow of this conversation. Honestly, I’m comfortable with calling it a day with the viewpoint I’ve laid out so far. 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.
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.
See comment above. Compared to Germany’s baseline, its industrial sector is showing signs of problems. But if Germany “has deindustrialized” past tense, then 97.4% of the countries in the world have never been industrialized at all.
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
deleted by creator
(1/2)
Hey so: You gave me a detailed factual argument with citations, so I’m taking some significant time to respond to it factually. I actually really like this type of debate even if I’m obviously gonna disagree with your conclusions.
I also think it’s ridiculous that you’re accusing me of arguing unfactually. Pretty much every fact you’ve cited, I’ve agreed with (when you give citations you’ve been drawing largely on sources that are clearly based in reality), and then made the argument that there are other things that need to be added to the equation. You can agree or disagree with conclusion obviously, and it’s definitely fair for you to ask for me to add citations, 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.
This is, again, what I was talking about before: 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.
Any quantitative measurement of how much this is going on, versus the total? Similar to what I do down below? I’d assert that this with Japan is a weird one-off thing and not America “running out of weapons” or anything, but you’re free to prove me wrong.
Okay, happy to. So, it’s actually remarkably difficult to find open-source numbers on how much materiel over time Russia is supplying to its frontline troops. All I can point to is things like this or this as good examples of Russia struggling with supply levels.
But, those are anecdotes, similar to the ones of yours that I complained about before. They don’t really mean anything. If you want to get an idea of what the actual big picture is, the best way I can see to do it is just to add up the total numbers involved. The 2023 wartime Russian military budget is roughly $100 billion, significantly up from their pre-war spending.
That’s something like 10 times the domestic Ukrainian spend on their military, but obviously that’s not the whole story. 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 would also say that what you’re saying about the grim situation for the Ukrainians right now is accurate in the short term. But that’s not because the west is running out of money. The Ukrainian side of the war started going worse for them around October 2023, when $60 billion worth of aid was held up in the US congress, and they started running out of stuff, and it’s now gotten pretty bad. Some of the stories you highlight are talking about examples of that, and they’re accurate.
That single $60 billion US aid package, though, represents more than half of Russia’s total military budget even in their fully mobilized economy. The total military budget of the US alone is around $842 billion – which dwarfs Russia’s military budget by a factor similar to how much Russia’s dwarfs Ukraine’s. They’re not comparable. 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.
That’s why I say that I wouldn’t agree that Russia can simply sit back and wait and outspend the west. If you want to argue that they can outwait Ukraine’s ability to depend on aid from the west… yeah, maybe. It’s definitely possible. That’s why I say it’s not a settled question whether Ukraine will win or lose.
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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.
This article about the threat of a certain amount of deindustrialization, similar to what happened (in a much bigger way) in the American rust belt, is a real story. But if you’re going to hold up that side of the story and then use it to say why Russia can outproduce the whole of the West, then the “deindustrialized” (past tense apparently) industrial sector of the German economy should be put in context; it’s more than half of the entire Russian GDP (all sectors) of about $1.8 trillion. 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.”
So – I actually agree with you that Russia is achieving its actual objectives.
Putin said that the objectives are demilitarization, deNazification, and “neutrality.” At those, he’s failed miserably. There’s not a chance in hell now that whoever winds up on Russia’s border at the end of this will be demilitarized or neutral.
But, I don’t think those were the objectives. I think the objectives were to wreck Ukraine to teach the world a lesson about what happens when you make Russia feel threatened. Whatever happens now in the war going forward, that objective is achieved. Clickbaity title aside, I think this talk actually lays out a pretty compelling case for what is Putin’s real strategic thinking about the war.
So like I said – I actually really like this type of factual back-and-forth argument. I’m going to keep calling out stuff that you’re doing that seems to me like improper argumentation (extrapolating from one datum all the way back to the whole situation being by far the the biggest example), but you’re clearly interested in some level of factual discussion, so cool, let’s rock.
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.
Okay, but they’re not me. If you see me doing bad faith things, please accuse me of them. If you don’t, then don’t.
I asked specifically for an overview of the problem similar to what I provided, not just a bunch of examples. You gave me back a bunch more examples, and a big assertion that if I was informed, I would agree with you. Hopefully it is clear why I’m not into the idea of just suddenly agreeing with you based only on that.
What that’s cited in the sources I listed would you factually disagree with? I was actually pretty careful to rely on pro-Western sources (especially the wildly pro-Western ones like CNN or Newsweek) only for points that were tangential to my main argument (“anecdotes”) or points that I don’t think would really be under any kind of factual disagreement (size of the aid packages to Ukraine).
Claiming that I’m using a “biased” source and rejecting my whole argument because of it, without substantively disagreeing with any of the information I’m sourcing, is another type of flawed argumentation (close to the “reality” / “unreality” technique I was talking about earlier).
Do you have a cite for this?
Do you have a cite for this? The last guy got impeached for overriding Congress’s determinations on aid. It was a lot more complex than that, obviously, but that was one of the big factors: Congress decided one thing and he was unilaterally attempting to decide a different thing (unsuccessfully, though he did delay the aid).
Do you have a cite for this? How much munitions does NATO have? Roughly speaking.
You get what I’m saying, though, that if Russia is fighting an enemy with a collective production capacity 10 times greater, and one of its enemies (which is suffering most from the sanctions, since it draws so much energy from Russia) has its economy drop by 0.4%, the news stories about what a bad thing the 0.4% is, don’t suddenly mean that Russia can outspend its enemies?
(The AP link is one of the sources in the article you linked me to)
Yes, these are important lessons. There are indeed a bunch of other factors at play besides raw dollar values. One of the biggest in Russia’s favor is purchasing power parity, which I haven’t touched because this is already a complex enough discussion.
So, let’s look at the examples of the USA in Vietnam and Afghanistan as excellent examples of how an invading country’s raw industrial and military advantage, even to an overwhelming degree, can’t always overcome determined resistance. Would you say the lessons of these examples could also apply to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Why or why not?
Yeah, I gave you 3 in my earlier comment:
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
No he didn’t. He got impeached for quid pro quo.
Here’s your requested sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/world/middleeast/us-israel-tanks-ammunition.html
https://apnews.com/article/us-israel-gaza-arms-hamas-bypass-congress-1dc77f20aac4a797df6a2338b677da4f
And here’s bonus ones for when Obama did it:
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/critics-slam-obama-administration-hiding-massive-saudi-arms/story?id=12192558
And for 45:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/30/yes-trump-can-override-congress-sell-weapons-saudi-arabia-even-over-republican-objections/
And you think I’m drawing from the right wing playbook? Jesus Christ. You cannot concede a single point lost in the debate. You ask for sources on claims I’ve already sourced. And you think your assessment of how much deindustrialization is noteworthy supersedes the analysis of journalists and economists so that you can hang on by your attempt at distilling a complex economy to a single fungible number that rhetorically feels like it supports your position. And you continue to argue about the ability to outspend when what I have been clearly saying, repeatedly, is that outspending is not the same as outproducing and it’s certainly not the same as producing more appropriately.
Of course the West is outspending literally everyone, they stole over 50% of the world’s wealth. The point is that even with all this money, they operate a capitalist arms industry and the profit motive is a terrible mechanism for national defense. So, despite it being literally impossible for Russia to ever outspend the West, Russia is still producing more relevant and strategically aligned munitions, that are more reliable, and more cost effective, such that they are defeating Ukraine with only a portion of their national force while facing a paper dollar value that exceeds their entire military budget.
Can the lessons of American losses be applied to the Ukrainian context? Absolutely. The US military is full of weapons systems that maximize profit. That means their cost-effectiveness ratio is terrible compared to even improvised munitions. Except in the few instances where Russia used Kinzhal, Russia’s not fielded anything terribly hi-tech. From very low cost drones, old tech that was designed for exactly this theater and these enemies, and Soviet-era armor. All of these reports are from early on when the Western propaganda machine was using this as evidence that Russia was a failed state with no military power and inability to achieve its objectives. Meanwhile, Russia has managed to burn through multiple waves of Ukraine’s army, funded to the scale of the entire Russian military, with only a portion of its national force.
Other lessons? Russia’s strategic use of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Russia’s ability to succeed against entrenched urban warfare, likely from lessons learned watching the US get fucked in similar situations. Russia’s neutralization of likely sleeper cells in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Chechnya.
Again, all part of the larger tapestry of Russia being well organized at multiple levels against the West: military production (not spending, trending better than the West), foreign policy (allies and supply chains), economics (thriving under sanctions, the West harmed by sanctions), intelligence (clearly Russia has enough intelligence to operate), counter-intelligence (evidenced by the multiple failed attempts to open new fronts against Russia and the multiple fronts opened up against the West), and domestic policy (Russian domestic sentiment is higher than ever). Meanwhile, the West is massively divided, public sentiment is terrible, approval of leaders, governmental bodies, and domestic and foreign policies are terrible. And, versus Ukraine, Russia did all this with a fraction of its military power compared to Ukraine going all out with the backing of arms at a dollar equivalent of the entire Russian military budget.
I don’t know how else to present this to you. The debate about German deindustrialization only being 0.4% of its total economy just doesn’t cut it. First off, you fail to use that number correctly. The 0.4% reduction in the last 3 months of 2022. In Q1 of 2023, it dropped another 0.1%. But again, that’s total economy, not industry. https://www.vdma.org/viewer/-/v2article/render/81411795 shows a net 10% decrease in orders across the entire machinery and plant engineering sector as of June 2023, but that net comes from an increase in domestic orders of 9% and decrease in global orders of 18%. It also indicates that there were over 30% fewer orders from all of Europe. Meanwhile, https://www.kloepfel-consulting.com/supply-chain-news/maerkte/vda-umfrage-automobilindustrie-deutschland-6566823/ shows that, in May 2023, in a survey of 128 automotive industry companies, 0% planned to increase their investment in Germany with 27% planning to shift their investments out of Germany. And here we have evidence that total energy consumed in Germany dropped 8% in 2023, mostly because of high energy industry doing less.
I’m sorry if you think pulling 2022Q4 total economic delta is a valid rebuttal to what I’m presenting. I’m calling you out, like you asked me to, your ability to source facts and contextualize facts is not developed. Let’s recap:
Russia:
I don’t really know how much more you need to see the pattern here. Nearly everything is sourceable from just being on Lemmy regularly and reading the news. Everything you want sources for I can get you. But you’ve got to do better than just saying I’m taking things out of context while simultaneously trying to give me 1 quarter’s national economic numbers from 2022 as evidence that German industry isn’t shrinking. You’re the one taking things out context. You can’t accuse me of crafting whatever narrative I want while simultaneously claiming I’m not contextualizing things. The narrative emerges from contextualizing things. If you think that just because the narrative is at odds with your beliefs then this means the evidence is being decontextualized, you might just have a bias that needs to be evaluated.
So the sources you already sent about Russian increases in weapons production or about German relative difficulties, those are perfectly good. I wasn’t saying you needed to prove that stuff again. I was saying, do you have an idea of how much total armaments NATO produces versus Russia? Total number of shells, total number of bullets, drones, things like that? You’re right that dollars are a poor way of measuring it; they’re just the best I could find.
Yes, I understand that Germany’s economy is having some difficulties. The 0.4% number is from your source; I followed one of the links from the source you sent. I didn’t pick it out to send to you; I just explored your source a little to try to find out, okay, what are we actually talking about quantitatively?
Regardless of Germany, the UK’s Navy, all of that. Do you have an idea of what is the total armaments production, in a form that reflects it more accurately than dollars?
These are sales, not gifts. And they are valued at $106 million and $147 million respectively, around 1,000 times smaller than what’s being proposed in the current aid package. And that was still a big deal with stories in the paper and all (the first story notes that it’s the first time Biden did it).
So, I do get why you think this; I think I was a little unclear. But no, I’m not trying to say you’re wrong in the examples you’re giving or need to send proof for the same examples again. I’m saying: If you’re going to say Russia is outproducing the West in terms of weapons, what are the numbers you’re claiming? For total Russian armaments produced vs. NATO armaments produced? Artillery shells or drones are a good metric if it’s too complex to get a whole complete picture without falling back into measuring dollars.
You’re also saying Russia’s using them more effectively, which is a different discussion which is a lot more complex which I’ll leave alone for right now.
What happened in the north of the country?
Let me ask you a question. If some middle eastern countries formed into a bloc, funded and armed by Russia, and NATO invaded that bloc, and then the invasion remained within 100 km of the border for 2 years, would you say that represented NATO “defeating” the mideast bloc? Because we were holding off multiple waves?
I honestly have not a ton of nationalistic feeling towards the US. I do have some, yes. Particularly what you’re saying about the West being disorganized is true, although I’d much rather have that than a Russia-style “organization.”
Mostly I just feel a lot for the people in Ukraine getting invaded, although the honest truth is, US troops have done the same to any number of small countries throughout the world. I’m not “proud” per se of the US if the West wins this fight, although I’ll be happy if Ukrainians (and Russian conscripts, for that matter) stop dying. Mostly, I just look at the war the way I look at it, and I think Russia is the aggressor, and so I tend to be opposed to what they’re doing in the same way I’m opposed to the US doing it when we’re in the invader role.
Oh, no doubt. The narrative arrives from details, and it’s a lot more complex then just big numbers. But you get what I’m saying, that the truth doesn’t come from sheer number of bullet points, but by testing your big conclusions against big objectively true things, right? That’s why I keep coming back to things like “the invasion’s gone on for 2 years and hasn’t gone much of anywhere yet” and “NATO’s industrial capacity is $X and Russia’s is $Y.” You can’t just contextualize from details only, and then decide whatever you arrived at is true. Sometimes it will be, sometimes not. Surely that makes sense?
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.