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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

Sort of an interesting argument, I suppose. Militarily Russia is heavily outclassed by the West. But perhaps that’s why they’re engaging in information warfare: western populations are weary of war and with sufficient prodding Russia can keep the major western powers away from their conflict.

I feel like I’m playing Civilization again.

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> western populations are weary of war

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.

I suppose I’m speaking theoretically here. But American populations tired of Afghanistan and Iraq. The war in Ukraine does not involve US boots on the ground and thus is a very different proposition.

I'm actually happy to hear that you claim people were tired of it, but I just had no direct experience with people discussing how they should end. It just was never discussed in any conversations this statistic of one person experienced. Now, something like current election campaign, it is discussed non-stop. It's not like there were protests like in Vietnam to end the war. So maybe my sensitivity settings were set to the extreme??

>there's essentially been no burden on the citizens.

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"

Their problem is using their tax money for a foreign country, instead of a: lowering taxes b: using it for US citizens. Your framing is disingenous.

If you believe that 70 million Americans live in a different reality and have isolated themselves, well, perhaps it is you who fails to emphasize why one may have different political standing than you?

The reality is, that people have different priorities when voting.

If you want to talk about propaganda weapon, the strongest in the US is the Israeli one. Both candidates take huge amounts of $$$ from Israeli donors. Both candidates simp for Israel.

Is it? The Russian jam GPS that it is useless, but their own (much newer) system can't be jammed easily. I just read an article about it. Europe has nearly no military equipment left. Russia is loosing more tanks and artillery in a month than some big countries in the EU have.

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.

Russia is having quite a struggle against Ukraine with like a quarter of its population and mostly old western weapons that were on the way out. NATO with stealth fighters and the like would be quite different game.

I remember the US military vs Iraq with mostly Russian gear was almost embarrassingly one sided.

All the air defense and much of the artillery aid has been state of the art. Ukraine benefits from the massive surveillance and targeting capabilities from air and space - also state of the art. The long range missiles given have been current generation.

Not to mention that cutting-edge drone based warfare has quickly become Ukraine's most effective staple.

Sure, some of the tanks and IFVs are older, but overall it's not really fair to say Ukraine is mostly using old weapons or that it's fighting Russia alone. The total financial value of external aid to Ukraine per year has been rivaling Russia's total annual defense budget.

Well fair enough it was a simplification. But two and a half years on they are yet to receive a single western jet. ATACMS were only supplied very grudgingly with instructions not to hit the Russian bases that are daily bombing and firing missiles at Ukraine as they are in Russia and doing that might upset the Russians. And were given partly because some of the ATACMS were scheduled to be destroyed due to old age and it would have looked embarrassing in America to be doin that while the Ukrainians were dying fighting. The Crimea bridge could have been taken down by Taurus but that might have annoyed Russia etc.

The ATACMS missiles that Ukraine is getting are soon to be expired because they are reaching their end of life (of course they are still in production but it shows these are not the current generation)

The current generation missiles "PrSMs" have not been given to Ukraine

The M777 howitzers are from 40 years ago

The stinger missiles have been used in the Afghanistan war

Even the F-16 planes are from 30 years ago

And Patriot air defense systems are several decades old

So it is fair to say that Ukraine has been using mostly older weapons

The one caveat here is that the Patriot missile system was originally made in the 80s. Like most of the US arsenal, it has seen significant improvement since then. Ukraine got fairly modern and capable Patriot systems and missiles.

The M777 also included fairly modern fire control hardware and counter battery radar.

Everything else has been purposely downgraded to ancient specs, like removing armor from the Abrams, and sending ancient F-16s. The stingers we sent Ukraine have been out of production for decades, and the US has not fielded them in mentionable capacity since the early 90s.

The table scraps of the US desert storm military is providing Russia a stalemate in Ukraine vs an army barely trained to use their new equipment, that had several high level traitors in it during the invasion.

Meanwhile, ignore that Russia cannot keep tiny kit-built aircraft out of it's airspace, which has always been a problem for Russia despite supposedly being the Premier anti-air missile system maker since the 50s. One of these kit built cruise missiles killed several important people in a Naval Command post in Crimea, despite immense investment in S400s to protect it.

The Russian Navy has been shown to be not just non-threatening, but jaw droppingly incompetent. I'm sure they blame whoever runs Russian air defense systems, but the flagship of the black sea fleet was sunk by the same intensity of threat as the damn Houthis taking pot shots at tankers. This wasn't a "occasionally the missile gets through" situation either. The Moskva had multiple redundant and cooperating missile defense systems that on paper, and even in foreign military knowledge, would have defeated a couple incoming missiles. Either they weren't turned on, in which case why not, or worse, they are inoperable or ineffective, in which case WHY

There are notable unfortunate outcomes however. The small diameter bomb, as I understand, did not perform well. Russia's GPS jamming is powerful and effective, though this isn't as dire as it seems. In a GPS denied warfighting environment, the US still builds significantly better ordinance guidance systems than Russia. The Krasnopol laser guided artillery shell is pretty good, and gets you the outcome of an Excalibur shell for significantly less money, and is harder to defeat electronically. The Lancet is way more cost-effective and useful than anything the Switchblade company has shat out, and we should be copying it as hard as possible cough Anduril cough. Russia now has a production quantity JDAM style system, which is effective.

You're referencing a small fraction of cherry-picked American weapons Ukraine is receiving. Other nations are giving other weapons, many of which are current generation. Patriots are current generation, and are continuously updated with new missiles and software. If you consider any weapon system that was not initially designed a few years ago to be old, then almost every weapon system the US and Europe is currently fielding would be "old".

To name a few current generation systems given to Ukraine: IRIS-T AA missile systems, StormShadow / SCALP cruise missiles, AGM-88 HARM missiles, AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles, NLAW anti-tank missiles, Martlet missiles, Starstreak AA missiles, Aster AA missiles, Krab artillery systems, CEASAR artillery systems, Excalibur guided artillery, ECV90 IFVs, and on and on the list goes.

> To name a few current generation systems given to Ukraine

Just checked 3 of your list:

* AIM-120 AMRAAM was fist used in 1991

* AGM-88 HARM 1985

* CAESAR system 2008

All look pretty old.

"Russia is having quite a struggle"

Does she? How many people has she lost in the war? She lost nearly a 1000 in the second world war. Per hour. So in 2-3 days she sustained the losses that the US had in Vietnam in a 10 years war.

Well, since March 2022 when the Russians occupied 24.4% of Ukrainian territory, the Ukrainians have now pushed them back to about 16% in return for about 400k Russian casualties. It doesn't seem a spectacular success.

Although I'll give you Putin doesn't seem bothered by Russian casualties so I guess from that point of view all's good.

Patriots have intercepted the hypersonic missiles (Kinzhal) before [1][2]. The S-400 is not as invincible as was touted -- there's plenty of evidence of successful drone and missile strikes against Russia by Ukraine. And Ukraine is still flying aircraft.

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...

What's funny is that right as you were typing out your bullshit, an ATACMS strike took out a S400 battery in Donetsk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikgDkf4ATEo

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.

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