6194

Why would you believe that perceptions about our military are wrong? Unfortunately you we been in wars for the last 20 years, and while we have our weaknesses, we’ve evidenced nothing like the inability incompetence we’ve seen in Russia. I’d say our incompetence falls in areas outside of operations.

6195

Only VISA. Mastercard is, by their statement, stopping all transactions in Russia.

6196

I wonder what the half-life of that Visa position will be?

6197

I posted the response because that was the tweet with the English translation, which I figured would be much more useful than the original Russian. I figured if you wanted to see the original source you could easily look up the Twitter thread. That was my “some reason”, FWIW.

6198

Yes, I’d expect them to fully cancel Russia operations in days at most.

6199

Again, it was about our smart weapons, not logistics. And it was caveated very thoroughly as my personal musings about how wrong we were about Russia and wondering if we could also be wrong internally, again well-caveated as no information, just personal speculation.

To be clear: the way to confront what I have been posting the last 30 minutes would be to say, “How dare you question our military capability!” That’s about it.

6200

When they are not discarding some of the most lethal nerve agents known to man into a bin like a used condom you mean…

6201

The Russians in Ukraine will face a dramatically harder fight than what we faced in either Afghanistan or Iraq.

In those places, those forces fighting against us were minority sects. In Ukraine, Russia is going to be fighting against the entire population of the country, bent on killing them and throwing them out.

Imagine being in a country where essentially every single person you see wants you dead.

6202

Eh, full credit to the UKR people, but they ain’t as hard as Afghanis by a long shot. Nobody is as hard as Afghanis.

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

6203

There is no doubt there is lots of corruption and broken stuff in the Russian nuclear arsenal, and attendant personnel. This is Russia after all. However they have so many of them even if they had a 95% failure rate it’s still game over. Nukes really did change everything.

6204

Yep.

Even if the Russians were performing better, and had avoided excessive material losses, there would still be little reason to fear a Russian attack on NATO in the near future as the Russian army would have gotten bogged down trying to pacify Ukraine.

6205

That, and we’re trying so hard not to escalate to a direct conflict, if they escalated to it then sub-nuclear they are going to get stomped, stomped, stomped.

6206
6207

Wikipedia says Russia has 1600 ready missiles, so if 95% of those fail that’s only 80 nuclear strikes. Assuming those are spread over NATO countries I think we’re down into hair mussed territory at that point.

6208
6209

Just as long as they’re consulting with Ukraine and making sure Ukraine has final say. We don’t want this like the Munich Agreement where, as I understand it, the Czechoslovakians weren’t even in the room as UK, France, Germany, and Italy decided their fate.

6210

Yeah, a mediator shuttling between Moscow and Berlin, in this situation, seems…suboptimal?

6211

Are. You. Serious?

6212

Very much not.

6213

Whew, just checking, you kinda cruised that in there with little context.