Is this still true in light of the recent Ukraine events? Russia certainly isn't losing if no one's going to stand up to it.
I feel like I’m playing Civilization again.
are they? for the most part, Americans haven't really noticed apart from family and friends of service members. There's been no rationing of goods, there's been no campaigns to buy war bonds, there's essentially been no burden on the citizens. In fact, we've had multiple tax cuts and gains in the financial markets. The sheep have been well fed.
Unless you watch Fox News, in which case we are "wasting" hundreds of billions on Ukraine while Americans starve!!!! What's that? A bill to feed starving Americans? Why that's socialism, which is communism!
70 million Americans voted for Trump in 2020. It doesn't matter that some of them don't live in the same reality as the rest of us, because they have isolated themselves so aggressively that they will never be snapped out of it, and millions of other people are enabling their insanity for political gain.
Check out Ryan McBeth on youtube for someone with experience refuting and examining Russian disinfo campaigns, and weep in fear as statements that could be trivially debunked with a look at a single wikipedia page, or like, a book of what different weapons systems look like, and realize in horror that the millions of people falling for this shit aren't just "media illiterate", but rather are so deep in the kool-aid that they explicitly trust information MORE if it has been labeled as "fake news".
It's insane. We aren't handling it. The truth is literally a less effective propaganda weapon than people silo'ing themselves so thoroughly that they have CHOSEN to watch Russian propaganda outlets like RT as "news"
The S400 is considered superior to the Patriot system. They have hypersonic missiles. And now a battle hardened army. Don't forget, western systems are heavily overpriced. I think we pay 10 times the amount for a shell than Russia does. It will take years, possibly decades, to build up military industrial capacity. Germany has ammunition for 1 day of war. Trick question: With what will they fight on the second day?
Also, dont forget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)
Germany had the best tanks in WW2. But Russia hat many T34. In insane numbers.
I remember the US military vs Iraq with mostly Russian gear was almost embarrassingly one sided.
Russia's production isn't almighty either. They purchased millions of artillery rounds from North Korea for a reason [3].
And I think a big thing to remember is that NATO has tons of weapons, they just don't have tons of the weapons that are being used in the Ukraine war. The U.S. only fired ~34,000 155MM artillery rounds during the Iraq War (Second Persian Gulf War). [4]
And yet at the time the US had millions of cluster bombs in stockpiles [5]
The Ukraine war definitely seems to be a wakeup call on western munition production rates and how mass artillery is still important to modern warfare but I don't think that means Russia would really stand a chance against NATO.
The real reason the conflict (hopefully) will never happen is nuclear bombs.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/air-defence-systems-rep...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/05/16/world/russia-ukraine...
[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/28/n-korea-sent-russia...
[4] https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2018...
[5] https://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/arms/cluster0705/2.h...
This is the Block I ATACMS which stopped production in 1996 and is considered too old to be usable by the US Army itself. Mean while the Patriots have no issues taking out multiple "hypersonic" missiles, which are mostly just marketing bullshit.
