Comment by giardini | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giardini | Hacker News Reader

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We've burned up Russia's military equipment, we've killed and wounded thousands of Russian soldiers, all ostensibly w/o sending a single USA soldier into combat. The neocons have drained off Russia's conventional firepower and male population for a generation by merely poking the bear repeatedly. The Russians can claim victory but it was a Pyrrhic victory.

Russia is now militarily a hollow shell, except for nukes. They're like North Korea but they eat better (they always did, though). Neither of those nations could engage the USA in a conventional conflict for longer than a half hour. This is sometimes termed "victory" or "success", and I don't think its a bad outcome.

Of course you can imagine fairy tales where the Russians are abjectly defeated and humiliated and such fairy tales would give you more happy Social Media discussions. But such viewpoints also cause multi-generational problems in peoples of Slavic mindsets who view history as a list of wrongs against their ancestors going back centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory

https://www.belfercenter.org/research-analysis/3-years-later...

Here's an excerpt from The The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters Volume 53, Number 3 (2023) Autumn [1]

The Russia-Ukraine War is exposing significant vulnerabilities in the Army’s strategic personnel depth and ability to withstand and replace casualties. Army theater medical planners may anticipate a sustained rate of roughly 3,600 casualties per day, ranging from those killed in action to those wounded in action or suffering disease or other non-battle injuries. With a 25 percent predicted replacement rate, the personnel system will require 800 new personnel each day. For context, the United States sustained about 50,000 casualties in two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In large-scale combat operations, the United States could experience that same number of casualties in two weeks.

[1] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

And another one:

The Russia-Ukraine War makes it clear that the electromagnetic signature emitted from the command posts of the past 20 years cannot survive against the pace and precision of an adversary who possesses sensor-based technologies, electronic warfare, and unmanned aerial systems or has access to satellite imagery; this includes nearly every state or nonstate actor the United States might find itself fighting in the near future. The Army must focus on developing command-and-control systems and mobile command posts that enable continuous movement, allow distributed collaboration, and synchronize across all warfighting functions to minimize electronic signature. Ukrainian battalion command posts reportedly consist of seven soldiers who dig in and jump twice daily; while that standard will be hard for the US Army to achieve, it points in a very different direction than the one we have been following for two decades of hardened command posts

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