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.
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.
I could send you ten different accounts of Russian soldiers going through their own version of the hell this guy was going through. If I did that, would you say they should have equal “journalistic weight” as this guy’s (assumedly very real) suffering?
Edit: I ask this because your separation of what information into “reality” and “unreality” is a very, very effective propaganda technique when those terms are given a certain type of definition. My suspicious is that accounts of suffering Russian soldiers or Russian losses, no matter how well-documented, would be classed as “unreality” or rejected for some other reason. My way of looking at the world is that as long as it’s pretty well-documented, either “side” of information can be accepted. A propagandistic view of the world is that only one “side” can be accepted, and the other side is “unreality” or has some similar reason for being dismissed. For that reason it’s a pretty important question.
You clear far ahead of what’s defensible, set up your defenses, and hold.
The west side of the Dnieper river is “cleared” by Russian forces, is it? Is that what you’re saying?
Edit: Actually, let me ask it differently. So your assertion is that “winning” a war looks like pushing your forces over a river, advancing a few tens of km, then engaging in fighting and pulling back to the far side of the river, then having your enemy’s troops cross the river and entering into a protracted monthslong stalemate on your own side of the river. That’s the intended goal of the operation (“how war works”) when you’re winning; is that your assertion?
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.
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.
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.
I could send you ten different accounts of Russian soldiers going through their own version of the hell this guy was going through. If I did that, would you say they should have equal “journalistic weight” as this guy’s (assumedly very real) suffering?
Edit: I ask this because your separation of what information into “reality” and “unreality” is a very, very effective propaganda technique when those terms are given a certain type of definition. My suspicious is that accounts of suffering Russian soldiers or Russian losses, no matter how well-documented, would be classed as “unreality” or rejected for some other reason. My way of looking at the world is that as long as it’s pretty well-documented, either “side” of information can be accepted. A propagandistic view of the world is that only one “side” can be accepted, and the other side is “unreality” or has some similar reason for being dismissed. For that reason it’s a pretty important question.
The west side of the Dnieper river is “cleared” by Russian forces, is it? Is that what you’re saying?Edit: Actually, let me ask it differently. So your assertion is that “winning” a war looks like pushing your forces over a river, advancing a few tens of km, then engaging in fighting and pulling back to the far side of the river, then having your enemy’s troops cross the river and entering into a protracted monthslong stalemate on your own side of the river. That’s the intended goal of the operation (“how war works”) when you’re winning; is that your assertion?
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.
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
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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.
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.