Redbrickbear said:
whiterock said:
Sam Lowry said:
whiterock said:
Sam Lowry said:
whiterock said:
Realitybites said:
America has no Ukraine Plan B except more war
https://asiatimes.com/2024/03/america-has-no-ukraine-plan-b-except-more-war/
Good read, shows where Whiterock's flawed numbers come from. Ukraine is collapsing and barring a foolish move by NATO to ignite WW3 by overtly deploying combat forces to Ukraine the choice is to give the Russians the eastern half, or lose the whole thing.
If sanity prevails President Trump will have negotiators at the table in 2025 hammering out the details of that first option and this latest neocon project will be added to the list of foreign policy misadventures that include Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam.
It's just Sam Lowery-lite, and actually undermines your assertion that Ukraine is out of manpower.
All you have to do to blow his argument out of the water is point to the combined GDP of Russia vs NATO. It's the difference between a pickup truck and a freight train.
Freight trains aren't built for war. Neither is the NATO economy. That's all I needed to say a year ago, and it's only proven truer in the weeks and months since.
LOL you blundered into that one. Freight trains are central to the Russian war machine.....their logistical chain relies upon them to a degree no other military does. Russia has an entire military command devoted to railway operations (+/- 30k troops).
No peacetime economy is built for war. They have to mobilize. And the size of your economy limits how much one can mobilize. The Russian economy is 10% the size of the Nato economy. They have no hope of winning a war against Nato.
https://www.worldeconomics.com/Thoughts/NATOs-Combined-GDP-is-far-larger-than-Russias.aspx
Russia also faces a daunting mismatch in population, 6-to-1:
https://countryeconomy.com/countries/groups/nato
Russia is already at the point where additional mobilizations will affect economic output.....
You missed the point. We never mobilized for Ukraine, and now it's far too late.
Nato doesn't need to fully mobilize to win the war in Ukraine. It has a 10-1 advantage.
But I thought the Russians were this big bad super duper threat to NATO?
Surely won't it take everything we have to hold back the endless hoards of battle trained russkie conscripts read to drive their invincible armies all the way to Paris?
One false dilemma after another.....
Russia cannot defeat Nato is a full-scale war where both sides are fully mobilized. The only way Russia can defeat Nato is with a strategy of unconventional warfare in small-engagement grey zone conflicts (google it) which seeks to destabilize a states/regions to create political ambiguity that makes it harder for Nato member states to build political will to respond effectively. Exactly like Ukraine from 2014-2022. And Georgia. Also Moldova. Russia can and will attempt to do the same to Nato members. The appropriate remedies are to punish Russian miscalculations (Ukraine, 2022) with robust materiel support to Ukraine for the purpose of strategic attrition of the Russian Army and Navy forces (which we are watching occur), then to use superior Nato capital to rebuild Ukraine in ways that Russia will not itself be able to do (which is already being planned).
Weaker powers have won, and will continue to win wars against stronger powers by using guile and resolve, particularly when said stronger adversary is distracted, unprepared, and willing to rationalize away growing threats (latter of which you are working strenuously to do by maintaining studious obtusity to obvious realities.) Such scenarios inevitably afford the weaker power early victories which further embolden their appetites to a point where the stronger power must respond with its own advantages (full mobilization). Problem is, at that point, the resulting war is much larger in all respects than it would have been had it been dealt with in the early stages.
History is a ***** if you refuse to read and learn from it.
