In case you are wondering, there are about two and one-third Americans for every one Russian, so in a fair fight, we can whup 'em easy.
Small wonder Gospodin Putin acts antsy: he's out of his depth and he knows it. You can fuss all you like about the current (or previous) Commander-in-Chief, but U. S. Presidents don't win wars; we don't even let them declare wars. It's the boots on the ground that do the winning and the supply lines that keep them winning. Better fed and better supplied citizen-soldiers have a long history of winning over tough professionals -- often not with any great brilliance of plan or elegance of execution, just the long, difficult, ugly slog.
Is old joke. Khrushchev boasts to Nixon 'Our Spetnaz soldiers have diet 4000 calories per day!' Nixon: 'Our special ops soldiers get get 8000 calories per day!' 'Is bullshit! Nobody eat 2 bushels of potatoes every day!'
ReplyDeleteAnd the forward progress of society, afterwards, will be made possible by bridges built out of the bodies of the dead.
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty easy to be nonplussed by the idea of a slow, attritional slog through a conventional war, when you're not the one who will be doing the slogging.
Personally, I'd like to get through my entire life without ever participating in an attritional slog. Hell, I'd be glad to get through without ever having to shoot at another human being.
I'm a year away from no longer being eligible for the draft, and my engineering expertise would likely lead to me not being put at the spearhead of the slog, anyway. I'd be "in the rear with the gear". But that's also why I'm not suggesting that a war with Russia would be NBD: I'm not the one who would be bleeding my own blood on a muddy steppe somewhere crying for my mother.
Even an assured victory would be small comfort to a young man who is discovering what his own intestines look like in a ditch somewhere outside Kiev.
Goober: war with Russia, NBD? I never said that. Vlad knows he'd have to back down in a conventional war. And Kiev? The last time I checked, it was in Ukraine, not Russia. Perhaps you need a new map. Or maybe you heard something?
ReplyDeleteChina wants to be a superpower and is working hard at it. Russia used to be. The U.S. (and NATO) still is. Not quite as unchallenged as we were for awhile, but still nothing to sneer at.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that you were saying it was NBD, it wasn't my intent. I was kind of going off on a rant about war in general. Not really a fan. I can totally see why you'd think that from what I wrote, but you'll just have to take me at my word - no disrespect meant.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, I'd fully expect that a war with Russia would absolutely include fighting in Ukraine. I'm well aware of where Kiev is. I was kind of under the impression that one of the many reason we're at odds with Russia right now is because of their aggressive attitudes towards Ukraine, and so I'm assuming that the majority of a war fought with Russia wouldn't actually be in Russia, proper, since only an absolute moron would actually try to invade Russia, itself. It's never really gone all that well when folks tried it in the past.