Hacker News Reader

Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

The US conducts war with a scalpel. Russia does it with a rusty hatchet. Those cruise missiles from Russia are (relatively speaking) very cheap and inaccurate.

View on HN

Russian cruise missiles (true ones, not Shahed drones) are not cheap. Kalibrs cost around $6 million USD, KH-101s around $13 million. And both are quite accurate. The issue the Russians are facing isn't inaccurate cruise missiles, but a lack of accurate targeting data (combined with wanting to use them in terror attacks as opposed to degrading Ukraine's military capabilities.)

In all recent US wars civilian casualties vastly outnumber military ones. In the Ukrainian war civilian casualties constitute less than 10% of overall casualties. Outstanding precision for a rusty hatchet.

Most recent US wars have spent most of their time in an asymmetric counterinsurgency phase, the Russo-Ukrainian war is (in style of warfare) basically a symmetric force-on-force international war.

These have very different dynamics, inherently.

We also don't know the full extent of civilian casualties.

Mosul, Fallujah, etc were quite bloody. You can't actually take cities cleanly, you can only win the propaganda war in your own sphere of influence.

This reads like propaganda. The US military does a fine job of destroying entire countries

It's actually worse. I read this as Russia accidentally hits civilians because they have no choice where as we do it with intention.

Russia hitting civilians isn’t really accidental. They’re quite happy to terrorize the population, and are quite comfortable deliberately committing atrocities (see Bucha, et al). Flattening whole cities is longstanding practice of theirs, too; it’s largely how they won Chechnya 2.

At best, their weapons aren’t terribly precise and they don’t particularly care about that.

Using cruise missiles to terrorise civilian population will be incredibly stupid move. Hits into houses are usually accidental. If you want to terrorise civilian population, it's so much cost effective to use cheaper unguided rockets from MLRS systems or artillery shells. You have this news in your echo chamber, haven't you?

Artillery and MLRS is being used for that purpose in places where Ukrainian cities are within range. But that does not apply to most of the country.

Given that Russia has openly talked about targeting civilian infrastructure to "freeze them out" (and then tried to pull that off last winter), I think you should be rather careful with your assertions about others' echo chambers...

Yes, Russia army attacked electric infrastructure, that's common knowledge. No, there is no use of precision weapons to willingly attack apartment houses, that's definitely a lie.

There is a lot of cases of Ukrainian army to use indiscriminate and "dumb" weapons to attack civilian districts of Donetsk (and now, Belgorod) just to terrorize population.

The use is terrorism, of course. Breaking the will of the population is very much a war strategy, and it has been tried before (notably in WW2). If you believe that it is effective, there's no reason why precision weapons can't be used for that purpose if that's the only thing you have that can reach and hit.

And, sure, the Ukrainian attack on Belgorod is similarly problematic. But if you're willing to go there, how many attacks have Russia carried in the same time period?

It's not that more precise weapons are being used to target civilians, it's just that if they miss the target, the Russians aren't really heartbroken about it. There's plenty of examples of "precision" weapons hitting apartment buildings, train stations, hospitals, schools, etc. I don't think those are targeted specifically, just that any carelessness isn't considered a bug.

But the "echo chamber" framing you use for what's at best a nitpick/misinterpretation of what I said, that says so much more about you and your own biases than anything about me.

> if they miss the target, the Russians aren't really heartbroken about it.

Something like 90% of deaths by US military are civilians, and huge chunk of that is women and children. This isn't a uniquely Russian thing.

> but whatabout

Setting aside the numbers you've opted to pull out of your ass, there's absolutely no comparison between how the US wages war vs the Russians. Your attempt at drawing an equivalence is ignorant, at best. Just stop.

It isn't whataboutism to point out the propaganda-like language being used when the higher level comment this descends from is about propaganda-sounding language. There is so much endless Russian boogyman shit flying around and while yes, the Russian invasion is horrific and awful, and it's massively frustrating for people to be so overwhelmingly critical of it being Russian specific while completely ignorant of the US having done things that look almost identical for 30+ years.

Claiming these bad things as Russian specific is flat out wrong, harmful to the discourse, and massively lacking awareness.

You also make a claim with zero support. Here's mine:

The 90% number is a pretty accurate number for modern wars in general: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/30823/qc7809568enc.pdf (ctrl F 90%)

For Iraq specifically, the number calculated by one group is 77% civilians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#Iraq_W...

Google for yourself, there's tons of information to corroborate this. Other US wars have much worse figures.

Your tone is frustrating especially given the appearance of hypocrisy when calling someone ignorant when there's easily verifiable evidence if you put in any effort to look. I don't see the need to be nasty to me like that especially when your bold black and white claim is so very clearly wrong.

whatabout, but in more words

"the Russians aren't really heartbroken about it" - I don't understand this. How you can make such assumptions about hearts? Definitely there is a grief from common Russian people and denial of willingness from Russian propaganda. I don't know if Putin personally "heartbroken" and neither do you.

I advise you to educate yourself. The US killed 300 thousand civilians in the second Iraq war using their 'precision' strikes. That compares to 10 thousand civilians who died so far in the Ukrainian war. Both of these numbers are provided by the US gov itself.

> Both of these numbers are provided by the US gov itself.

URL? that's got to be super interesting data.

Wikileaks. Obviously US gov wouldn't say something like that publicly so you need to look into the leaked classified material.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com