Politics

[sestoppelman]

Gen. Eisenhower was not sure of Allied success on June 6 1944. He was convinced that assaulting the beaches at Normandy was the right thing to do. However, he was prepared with a letter of failure. The choice is between Predicting the future or choosing the right thing to do.

General Eisenhower's Two Statements - Bill of Rights Institute

billofrightsinstitute.org

Which has zero to do with the current situation in Ukraine and our support of it. DE had been at war for nearly 3 years preparing for the event, it wasnt just the right thing to do, it was totally necessary, it had to be done knowing it would be very painful and could have been a catastrophe for which he had to be prepared.

 

[sestoppelman]

Exactly. That is the point. Perhaps you should read what I wrote? I do not expect him to behave. But we can focus far more clearly on other concerns - like China - if he no longer has any meaningful way to misbehave. Ukraine is a tiny investment to assure that.

I did read what you wrote. You asked me if I did believe that. see below

"But appeasing Putin would be the right course of action? Conceding to his territorial demands will make him a good little boy? You honestly believe that?"

Nice try.

 

[WAB]

I asked YOU if Putin would behave, that was a question not a statement. Of course he wont behave, thats the point! Read what I said and not what you think I said.
That one may not totally agree with what we are doing in the way of taxpayer funded support of a country, not on our continent or even a member of NATO does NOT make one an appeaser.
I really tire of that ludicrous argument.
But you really didnt address any of my questions, so thats fine. You can see the future, no one else can, there is no crystal ball to consult.

No one can see the future, that’s a ridiculous statement or accusation to make. What we can do is weigh the risks and probabilities and chart the best course forward based on what we know. No one knows the future of the economy, yet most if not all of us are invested in the stock market. We set our investment strategy based on fundamentals, in large part guided by what has happened in the past. Foreign policy is no different.

I believe that we should contain Russia, you don’t, fine. This war is a little more personal for me. I’ve likely spent more time in Ukraine than most if not all on this forum. I believe that they have the right to self determination, and we have the obligation to help them if we can. You don’t stand idly by and watch evil prevail.

 

[Nevada Mike]

Military aid has been roughly $50 billion over two budget cycles. The US budget this year alone is 6.3 Trillion dollars. 50 billion isn't even round off money.

I can not speak for USAID and other State Dept monitored expenditures, but DOD exerts extensive accountability over military aid.

The 250 K number is ludicrous. The best third party analysis to date (Swiss) estimates 76,700 Russian KIA to date. With a 3 to 1 wounded to KIA ratio that means a total of over 300 thousand Russian casualties. That same analysis concluded there were 17,200 Ukrainian KIA.

The "end game" will be a negotiated settlement with Russia. For the moment neither is eager to negotiate. Putin is hoping for a miracle - the election of Trump would be a big part of it, while the Ukrainians are confident they are winning.

No one is suggesting NATO involvement in this war - conventionally or nuclear.

Red Leg - it is obvious that you are a military man. Fine, we need some of them to actually defend our country. But if you think that a federal government that spends more than 27% of the nation's annual GDP is somehow OK, then I suggest that you examine the economics. To me, at least, $50 Billion is hardly a 'rounding error' when you consider the domestic needs of the country that are going unfunded and the out of control national debt. This is the kind of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

 

[sestoppelman]

No one can see the future, that’s a ridiculous statement or accusation to make. What we can do is weigh the risks and probabilities and chart the best course forward based on what we know. No one knows the future of the economy, yet most if not all of us are invested in the stock market. We set our investment strategy based on fundamentals, in large part guided by what has happened in the past. Foreign policy is no different.

I believe that we should contain Russia, you don’t, fine. This war is a little more personal for me. I’ve likely spent more time in Ukraine than most if not all on this forum. I believe that they have the right to self determination, and we have the obligation to help them if we can. You don’t stand idly by and watch evil prevail.

Dont make the mistake of taking this personal because you may some connection that others dont.

Its not ridiculous or at all accusatory to say no one can predict the future, its simply a fact. No one can, not you, not me, not Joe, no one.

 

[Hunt anything]

Hitler did not have an army in 1932. By 1940 it was the best army in the world. It is amazing how fast that transition took place after a little success.

Same can be said for the US, don’t remember the numbers but we were definitely not ready for WW2, it only took us a year or so to mobilize

 

[sestoppelman]

Too much animosity over this, I leave you guys with this.
I dont have one, I guess some of you must.

 

[cpr0312]

 

[Jfet]

Same can be said for the US, don’t remember the numbers but we were definitely not ready for WW2, it only took us a year or so to mobilize

You are correct. However, by treaty Germany couldn’t build an army in 1933. Hitler ignored that treaty and France and Great Britain did nothing. Meanwhile the US was focused on our own business.

 

[WAB]

Dont make the mistake of taking this personal because you may some connection that others dont.

Its not ridiculous or at all accusatory to say no one can predict the future, its simply a fact. No one can, not you, not me, not Joe, no one.

We agree on that, but your inability to tell the future is not an excuse for inaction in any area of life.

 

[CoElkHunter]

Here's the problem(s)

1. The people in the US who are paying for this proxy war have not been included in the decision making process. $13 billion so far and an open ended commitment to prop up a country that was, not long ago, considered hopelessly corrupt.
2. An estimated 350,000 dead Ukranians to further our "National Interests".
3. ZERO accountability for the funds provided. This is insane. See item 1 above.
4. Watch out for the law of Unintended Consequences. If the end game is to depose or eliminate Putin, we are at serious risk of a greater problem... provided that we "WIN" in this conflict.

Sleepy Joe has been opaque, compromised, bought and paid for. He's the Commander in Chief?

I know what... Let's engage in a nuclear conflict with Russia. Brilliant.

With regards to Sleepy, Creepy Brandon, he is (and has been for decades) corrupt and has now been caught at it. The ONLY thing he'll be a legitimate Commander in Chief of is the nursing home he'll soon be a resident of. The Marxists are pulling his strings enough to keep him upright enough to read a teleprompter. IMO, he's nothing short of the greatest embarrassment in the history of our Presidents. How anyone could have voted for (based on his previous 45 years of Congressional incompetence) or would vote for this buffoon again is beyond my comprehension. The fact that he's our current President says everything about the also brain dead, "group think" voters we have in this country. I guess the "free is for me" mantra that Brandon embraces trumps legitimacy and competence?

 

[spike.t]

Something else now......

Rising methane could be a sign that Earth's climate is part-way through a 'termination-level transition'

The last time methane in the air rose so fast, Greenland warmed by 10°C within decades.

theconversation.com

 

[Foxi]

You are correct. However, by treaty Germany couldn’t build an army in 1933. Hitler ignored that treaty and France and Great Britain did nothing. Meanwhile the US was focused on our own business.

Yes, yes .
Germany had an army of 100,000 men and 15,000 men in the navy after World War I.
This was also approved by the victorious powers.
The so-called Reichswehr.
Heavy weapons such as artillery above calibre 105 mm (naval guns above 203 mm), armoured vehicles, submarines and capital ships were forbidden, as were any kind of air force.
Hitler then overrode this.
England and France certainly did something: they declared war on us
Which I will never understand:
Stalin coldly invaded Poland weeks later, just like Hitler had done before.
They watched calmly

 

[Jfet]

Yes, yes .
Germany had an army of 100,000 men and 15,000 men in the navy after World War I.
This was also approved by the victorious powers.
The so-called Reichswehr.
Heavy weapons such as artillery above calibre 105 mm (naval guns above 203 mm), armoured vehicles, submarines and capital ships were forbidden, as were any kind of air force.
Hitler then overrode this.
England and France certainly did something: they declared war on us
Which I will never understand:
Stalin coldly invaded Poland weeks later, just like Hitler had done before.
They watched calmly

Thank You for bringing in accurate numbers on what Germany was allowed after WW1. Yes, England and France did declare war but they were several years too late. Hitler overrode the Treaty of Versailles shortly after coming to power, which was around 1932/1933. France and England should have taken decisive action at that time which was early to mid 1930’s. I believe in that time period France had over million man army. Unfortunately, because the Allied Powers did not want to get involved in another war, they allowed Hitler to gain strength and confidence in his ability to do what he wanted to do. In the end we all had to fight a much larger war in the 1940’s.

The parallel is that if Putin is allowed to aggressively take over a sovereign country unopposed, then where will he stop. The more success he has the more support he will receive from the Russian people. To maintain this process Putin will then need to threaten another country. As he gains resources from conquered countries, his ability to grow his military might will increase greatly. This is a pattern of an Emperor/Dictator. This is a pattern that allowed people like Napoleon to conquer Europe. I believe it is Louise XIV of France also followed this same plan in the early part of the 1700’s.

I am not sure why individuals want to go down this emperor road it never ends well for them. Planning safaris to Africa is far more pleasant in my opinion.

 

[Mark A Ouellette]

A good short piece of historical analysis.

Why Putin’s Russia cannot accept its borders

Vladimir Putin's attempts to justify the invasion of Ukraine as a just war to reunite historically Russian lands reflect the expansionist ideology at the heart of modern Russia's imperial identity, write Glenn Chafetz and John Sipher.

www.atlanticcouncil.org

As @Red Leg posted several days ago, the linked article explains via history why Putin is and will be a problem for the free world.

Here are a few excerpts from it;

To understand Russia’s current obsession with Ukraine, it is important to recognize that Russia was never a state in the common usage of the term. Unlike the modern Turkish state that emerged from the Ottoman Empire, or Great Britain, which acquired and lost an empire, Russia never had an identity separate from empire. As British historian Geoffrey Hosking observed, “Britain had an empire, but Russia was an empire.”

“Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of fifty square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the earth’s landmass.”

As Catherine the Great famously said, “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.”

We as Americans and perhaps the same for most modern peoples, try to understand the world through our culture. That is a terrible mistake. Russians don't think like the average Americans, Canadians, South Africans or whoever. Russians are survivors. To survive the gangster Putin and his oligarchs need power. To gain that, much like business, growth is paramount. Businesses must increase sales revenues. For a gangster like Putin, he must increase territory. This is much like a street gang at war with another gang over a neighborhood. To increase power, Russia lacking much of what the west has invested in and built over the last century or two, it must take from its neighbors.

Putin won't stop his conquest of territory. Nor will China stop trying to dominate the world. In this world there are Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs;

From "Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs", by Dave Grossman, LtCol USA Ret.
https://www.theexpositor.tv/blog/sheep-wolves-and-sheepdogs-lt-col-dave-grossman/

"If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen, a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath, a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? What do you have then? A sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero's path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed.t"

Which of these shall we be?

 

[Red Leg]

Red Leg - it is obvious that you are a military man. Fine, we need some of them to actually defend our country. But if you think that a federal government that spends more than 27% of the nation's annual GDP is somehow OK, then I suggest that you examine the economics. To me, at least, $50 Billion is hardly a 'rounding error' when you consider the domestic needs of the country that are going unfunded and the out of control national debt. This is the kind of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

I also ran an 800 million in sales business unit for a major corporation for more than a decade. Along with being a combat arms officer, I have served in a major embassy abroad, for the Defense Intelligence Agency, and am a product of places like a small land grant university, and post graduate fellowships at The Walsh school of Foreign Service - Georgetown University, and the Tuck School of Business - Dartmouth. I ran the US Army's Liaison effort with Congress for two years dealing daily with everyone from committee staffs to people like Trent Lott and Hillary Clinton. So I choose not to be lectured to as a "military man" who should mind his place.

Much of the anti-Ukraine drumbeat comes from those unwilling to debate the merits of the issue - many have no understanding of history or any particular interest in foreign policy. It is why the neo-isolationist movement appeals to them.

Many dissenters argue that helping Ukraine detracts from our ability to contain China. As I have noted above many times and as China demonstrated so clearly before the invasion, China's goals are inextricably linked with Russia again becoming a major and destabilizing threat on the West's eastern flank. Therefore, hamstringing Russian ambitions seriously undermines Chinese strategic goals while simplifying our own strategic options.

As you seem to note, the other argument for appeasement revolves around cost. Somehow we are supposed to believe our investment in Ukraine's right to exist and thwarting Russian ambitions is a zero sum game with respect to things like the wall. That is simply not true. Cast away our security investment in Europe, and do you honestly believe for one moment that this administration will spend one dime more on border security or cease spending recklessly on questionable green energy initiatives or buying dependency votes through things like debt forgiveness? And yes, in world with an annual budget of 6.3 trillion dollars, a two-year military investment of 50 billion is a rounding number.

Finally, there are those who oppose our efforts in Europe because Biden and this administration support them or because they believe that is what Trump wants them to do. I'll simply say that I have zero loyalty to any candidate - they are campaigning for the right to work for me - and my personal loyalty to my party and political beliefs are not so pure that I will oppose doing the right thing even when it is being attempted by the wrong people.

 

[Hunt anything]

Red Leg, do you think Putin’s ultimate goal is rebuilding the Soviet Union? Or would he be satisfied with Ukraine? I believe at first it was the former but now it seems he is trying to figure out a way to save face. Very interested in your thoughts and insights on the subject.

 

[PARA45]

I would say that his initial goal was to rebuild, but now he is probably trying to figure how to get out of this mess without him committing suicide by jumping out of a window. .

 

[Red Leg]

Red Leg, do you think Putin’s ultimate goal is rebuilding the Soviet Union? Or would he be satisfied with Ukraine? I believe at first it was the former but now it seems he is trying to figure out a way to save face. Very interested in your thoughts and insights on the subject.

He has stated several times that the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest tragedies of history. However, I personally think his vison is more closely allied to Imperial Russia than the Soviet Union. In either case, control of the Baltic and Eastern Europe was a dominating goal.

In February of '22, Putin was in a position where he had cowed Georgia and neutered Finland and Sweden. He had taken the Crimea and moved troops into the Donbas without any serious protest from the US or its NATO partners. His forces even shot down an airliner over Ukraine - Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 - with no meaningful reaction from the West. He had just sealed a pact, however ambiguous, with China, and he believed he exercised economic control over Western Europe due to its dependency on Russian natural gas.

In one of the great miscalculations in recent history, Putin ordered the invasion with the full expectation that any Ukrainian resistance would quickly collapse. I believe his intelligence services had convinced him the incursion would resemble the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia of August 1968 which ended the Prague Spring. As evidence, senior officers and members of elite units like the VDV had their dress uniforms packed in their gear for their eventual victory parade in Kyiv. I suspect the minimal operational goal was seizure of everything east of the Dnieper River. The Russian Army had been modernizing for more than two decades for just such a mission.

That would have been followed by an operational pause and then he would have begun pressuring what remained of Ukraine and Eastern Europe. The lack of NATO response would perhaps have encouraged him to seize the Baltic States in a coup de main that would have left us the choice of nuclear war or appeasement and the likely collapse of NATO.

What Putin, and for a time, this administration and NATO forgot was that the Ukrainian people had a voice with respect to Russian goals. Because of their heroic resistance, things haven't worked out exactly to plan. It is why I find the "Ukraine is losing crowd" at best so incredibly uninformed or at worst deliberate stooges of Russian propaganda. Lets review the reality.

1. The modernized Russian Army that invaded in February literally no longer exists. Along with massive materiel losses among its modernized formations and weapon systems, the 300k casualties it has suffered include a huge swath of its battalion and regimental leadership. HIMARS and Storm Shadow strikes have also taken out fifteen Russian general officers and inflicted serious losses among the staffs supporting them. The US and British armies take fifteen years just to produce a battalion commander. Russia will be decades recovering its leadership cadres alone.

2. The Russian Air Force has proven a paper tiger. After a year and a half of war not only has it not achieved air superiority, it can not even operate in Ukrainian airspace. Its new hypersonic missiles have proven easy targets for the American Patriot system.

3. Rather than taking a bold step in gaining control of the Baltic, Putin has managed to drive both Sweden and Finland into the NATO Alliance. As result the Baltic has become a NATO lake; Kaliningrad is totally isolated and at the mercy of NATO; and the Baltic States have never been more secure. Rather than enlarging a Russian buffer zone, he has added over 800 miles of shared NATO border thanks to Finland.

4. Economically, he has succeeded in making Europe independent of Russian natural gas, and as I type, the Ruble is worth less than a penny. That puts it on par with economies like Argentina. The measures taken by the Federation's central bank to protect the economy from Western sanctions are coming home to roost and hyper inflation, currently running at 12%, is likely just around the corner.

To date the Special Military Operation has proven a catastrophe for Russia. The strategy now seems to be one of hanging on until the US political situation changes in Russia's favor. With more and more Republicans believing "no more spending on Ukraine" will enhance their standing with the Trump base, that strategy may well bear fruit. Any negotiated settlement that rewards Russia with new territorial gains can and will be spun as a victory for Putin and loss of prestige for the US and NATO.

 

[Red Leg]

As I have posted before, occasional short clips speak volumes. Though we continue to refuse to provide ATACMs missiles to Ukraine, they have made meaningful advances in the south. Those, have in turn, put supposedly secure Russian enclaves at risk to normal HIMARS strikes. Some few Russian commanders have been trying to address the lack of training provided newly mobilized soldiers. In this clip a likely competent battalion commander has set up a firing range for new recruits. The battalion CP is located in the large structure nearby. The rounds fired are two HIMARS rockets each fragmenting into 180,000 Tungsten ball bearings about the size of a marble. Think of it as the ultimate in "HEVI Shot." The second impact gives a good illustration of the coverage. The heavy for size fragments would penetrate every square inch of the buildings.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/15srwvd