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Comment by delfinom | Hacker News Reader

Air superiority means nothing when the opposing side has meat for the meat grinder and it's widely spread out. The West has gotten ridiculously invested in "smart bombs" which cost a fortune and as a result we have less of them. Meanwhile the enemy has no problem sending tens of thousands of waves of small squads to their death.

In fact a study came out in 2022 that made the Pentagon panic because it's estimated in a war with China, the US will deplete its entire anti-ship missile stockpile in only a week.

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>Air superiority means nothing when the opposing side has meat for the meat grinder and it's widely spread out.

Western attack helicopters are just one prong in the meat grinder that would grind up enemy infantry formations and entrenchments far quicker than they can be replenished.

NATO vs Russia in a conventional war is basically the West hitting the delete button. Nuclear blackmail is about the only thing sparing Russian forces from that fate.

A war with China is more of a defensive situation. If large-scale infantry combat even had the opportunity to take place I'd be surprised.

That said it's always prudent to plan for the worst contingencies however remote.

Well I hope they're better than the Russian attack helicopters. They lasted ... I want to say about 3 weeks.

What's the plan, btw, if the west does not have air superiority due to Russians, or Iranians, having drones, and the west running out of smart rockets before they run out of drones, and the denial of communications works about as well for the West as it worked for Russia? (meaning, drone communications can be disrupted at 5 meters, which means the drone explodes 10 cm from your ass as opposed to directly in your face)

>Well I hope they're better than the Russian attack helicopters. They lasted ... I want to say about 3 weeks.

NATO forces are very, very good at combined arms actions in conventional wars. Assets aren't used unless there's a fairly high assurance of surviving and accomplishing the mission.

>What's the plan, btw ...

Western military planners have been watching the Ukraine conflict closely and are aware of the threat that cheap commercial drones pose, seeing as they're partly responsible for the phenomenon.

>meaning, drone communications can be disrupted at 5 meters, which means the drone explodes 10 cm from your ass as opposed to directly in your face)

The US in particular excels at dominating the EM spectrum. I wouldn't be surprised if enemy drones wholesale fall out of the sky en masse or are otherwise rendered totally ineffective.

> NATO forces are very, very good at combined arms actions in conventional wars. Assets aren't used unless there's a fairly high assurance of surviving and accomplishing the mission

And how likely are NATO forces to run out of combined arms ammo after 2 weeks?

We didn't think that we were going to have to fight Russia, or to help our allies kill Russians by the hundreds of thousands. Generals are often criticized for wanting to "fight the last war," but it seems that contrary to all conventional wisdom, that is exactly where the West is headed.

At least, if somebody doesn't take Putin out.

unfortunately war with russia would very likely be the last war as we and they would be nuked back into the bronze age

This isn't that probable actually.

Russia doesn't have nearly the amount of nukes they used to. Apart from the dismantling, all signs point to many of them being unusable due to lack of maintenance (due to corruption). What they have left are smaller bombs.

The fear is overblown.

Nuclear arsenals and capability are regularly assessed by the FAS. The latest numbers leave Russia with around 1,710 currently actively deployed strategic nuclear weapons. [1] And somewhere around 4,000 nuclear warheads beyond that. These figures are just estimates, but do account for dismantling, obsolescence of dated capabilities, and so on.

The reason strategic weapons are generally tracked is largely because these are the massive weapons, both literally and in terms of capacity. For instance a modern strategic nuke on the smaller end would generally be around 500kt of yield. The largest bomb ever detonated, Czar Bomba, was 50,000kt of yield. For contrast, the nuke dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 15kt. Even if our estimate is wrong by 90% in the happy direction, that's enough power to effectively destroy any country countless times over, including the US. Furthermore, those 4000 'rando' warheads are indeed going to be small relative to strategic nukes - but "small" in this case again means sizes of up to ~100kt, once again several times the power of Hiroshima.

I find the propaganda gradually trending towards 'nuclear war wouldn't be so bad' to be quite disconcerting. Let's at least wait until we're a multiplanetary species before we decide to start offing ourselves on a massive scale. Or even better, never do it in the first place. The Fermi Paradox is a real thing, and could be easily explained by people's inability to escape their own self delusions.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_and_weapons_of_mass_des...

I doubt Russia's nukes still work. They would create a localized environmental atrocity where they landed, but that's about it.

It costs a king's ransom to maintain a nuclear arsenal, as Ukraine well understood when they made the decision to give their own weapons up. The people charged with maintaining Russia's nuclear weapons since the fall of the USSR had absolutely no incentive to do anything but divert the funds for their own purposes. That's just how the Russians roll.

Meanwhile, ours will most likely work as intended. The question is, does Putin feel lucky? Well, does he? (Don't answer that, please -- I don't actually want to know.)

Your statements are only as good as your assertion that you know “how the Russians roll”. Great. Can you support that?

(Shrug) I can read and watch the news, just like you can. A country of congenital losers made up a bunch of fairy tales about Nazis to justify an incompetent war of conquest against their peaceful neighbor. They said it would take three days, and now, over two years later, they are bumming weapons from North Korea.

You tell me: what should I think of Russia, given the evidence at hand? They are still powerful enough to cause immense pain and suffering outside their borders as well as inside. If they were content with the latter, that would be one thing, but we have Putin's word that they are not.

Global warming can be stopped by nuclear winter only.

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