Russia has been forced to cannibalize jet planes because sanctions have starved it of spare parts.
Even the US Navy gets its ships built in South Korea now.
Britain's remaining industries are very niche. With a small domestic market, you can't get economies of scale. You have to specialize.
You aren't going to send your steel navy out when one side can see you from space and you can't, almost regardless of the numbers. Your big army of steel tanks is useless against a bunch of drones directed by distribute satellites.
Back to "dead men dominate UK politics". In this case, we're trying to refight a war from 70 years ago.
It's like planning for your house burning down V dying. If you're dead you don't really need to worry about the after.
So yes the military plans for everyone but global thermo nuclear war, because there's no point planning for that anyway.
I wouldn't say were planning for the next ww2. Look at the number of tanks we have. If anything were over optimised for helping the US fight insurgencies in the middle east at the expense of being able to fight a high intensity war.
You wouldn't be able to win the war in your scenario, but you could still do a lot to make sure the other side isn't winning either.
Check out Russia's Black Sea fleet to learn the fate of your navy sitting by your shores.
They might not be taking Kiev for a hundred years, but the fortress belt is well within reach in the next couple of years
If they were to negotiate an end tomorrow, Russia certainly wouldnt be giving up territory in ukraine. i dont see how thats not winning
The only barrier between Russians and anarchy is the last nine meals they’ve had. How's the summer harvest coming along?
This.
Russia is suffering over 400 casualties for every square km (1036 per square mile!) of territory captured in Donetsk, screwing their own economy and turning themselves into a pariah. Russia certainly isn't winning.
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian...
They need a peace deal but external parties don’t want Ukraine to do this. The same ones lending the money
This was supposed to be an imperialist land grab by Russia. This war did not emerge organically. Russia had a goal, to seize Ukraine - easily and quickly. Russia have failed at that goal. Failing is not winning. Not only have they failed to secure their objective, the attempt to do so has cost several orders of magnitude more than intended. The land they do control is of low value.
Again, spectacularly failing to carry out your goals is not "winning", in any sense of the word.
And then this just kept iterating until suddenly everybody's fighting everybody, tens of millions are dying, and absolutely nothing was achieved. Then you get the Treaty of Versailles which desperately tried to justify it all by being excruciatingly punitive on Germany, but of course that ultimately did nothing but essentially guarantee WW2 where tens of millions more would die again, and again for basically nothing, with a good chunk of Europe left in rubble.
In the modern war Russia claimed that their motivation for the war was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys (like the decapitation strike) and within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions, but primarily focused on Ukraine not joining NATO. Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West, and so here we are.
If Russia is so terrified of NATO invasion, why do they keep taking defenses off the boarder with Finland which just became a NATO member as a part of this war? Why does Russian state TV insist they should nuke Britain?
Why didn't Russia invade any of the NATO members already on their border?
>Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West
It is well known that the US admin had prepared to airlift Zelensky out of Ukraine and support a literal insurgency because they expected Russia to win easily, and were not actually prepared to support Ukraine in a regular war. This resulted in Zelensky's famous "I need ammo, not a ride" statement.
Why did Russia violate their treaty terms with Ukraine, which explicitly guaranteed their security? Why should you ever trust negotiations with a leader who has clearly demonstrated they do not respect what they sign?
>Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys
No it wasn't. Attempting to take Hostomel was standard doctrine, and they fully expected to succeed, which is why their convoy was not in fighting shape, and carried parade uniforms.
Russia, at the very top, fully believed and intended to defeat Ukraine in 3 days. They were literally not prepared for a drawn out war.
The only other NATO members that bordered Russia before the Ukraine War were were the Baltics. They have poor geography for an invasion and would also be immediately cut off from mainland Europe in the case of a war by the Suwalki Corridor - a tiny stretch of about 40 miles that is the Baltics only connection to Europe outside of Russia/Belarus. By contrast Ukraine has ideal geography for an invasion. Kursk is also the path the Nazis ended up taking when trying to press into Russia during WW2, and also where they suffered a very costly defeat.
I do fully agree that Russia expected their negotiations with Ukraine to be successful, and had the West not intervened they likely would have been right.
[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/even-russian-propaganda-was-hesitan...
> within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions
So you think the plan was to invade Ukraine to scare them into a hand shake that they wouldn’t join NATO? I really don’t want to insult you but…
There's a nice timeline here [1] of relations between Ukraine and NATO. It's an archived version from the day before the invasion began, so there's no hindsight posts. Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front. In January 2022 there was apparently even a bill that was to be introduced in the US declaring Ukraine a "NATO+ country" immediately. And NATO's responses towards Russia's expressed concerns began to be completely dismissive with not even a vague allusion to reconciliation.
So I think the main goal was certainly to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, but I think a major secondary goal was for Russia to make it clear that their claims of red lines and such are not toothless. If a country makes repeated claims of things being a red-line but never acts on such claims, then their future claims will be casually dismissed.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ukraine%E2%80%93N...
> Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front.
We saw with Finland and Sweden how quickly entry into the organization can progress if there's a will in the alliance to accept new members. We have not seen such will regarding Ukraine.
The whole "blame NATO" narrative is just a waste of everyone's time and completely ignores the internal developments in Russia and the ambitions of Putin and his clan. The main goal of the ex-Soviet security apparatus is to restore their lost empire and the special privileged position of the security services within it. To Europeans, the Cold War and the Iron Curtain were abnormalities that have been rectified; to the current generation of Russian decision-makers, the Cold War was a normalcy that they strive to return to. Russian dissidents have been warning for decades that the destruction of Russian democracy would sooner or later lead to resurgence of Soviet imperial thinking, and that's exactly what we're seeing.
NATO itself bears little importance in this. Russia is against all forms of European cooperation and would prefer to see countries alone and isolated, because it would permit attacking them one by one, instead of facing a joint front that they can't beat.
Heck, were Belarus to overthrow Lukashenko, they have a better chance of joining NATO than Ukraine now.
WW1 changed all that with the tank, the machine guns, the toxic gas, the trench, the air warfare.
That’s not my very objective understanding of Russian history.
By Russia's own accounting, they lost years ago. It does not matter what the outcome is, Russia has taken massive pain to sustain this war they never planned to sustain. They entirely used up their immense Soviet inheritance, which was something they held in high regard and used to insist made them strong. It's gone now. Used up.
The gas station of Europe can no longer produce sufficient gasoline for internal use. It will take at least months to get that capability back.
They have utterly failed to substitute sanctioned components, having switched back to imported components after their internal substitutions performed so poorly.
Their navy is being taken apart by a country that scuttled it's own navy on day one. Ukraine sunk the flagship of the black sea fleet with supposedly just a few missiles, something which the Moskva by all accounts on paper, should have handled just fine. Except all their craft are in such poor condition that many of the systems on the Moskva were likely just nonfunctional, including defense radars, communications, and anti-missile defenses.
Russia was totally reliant on an American private company for their battlefield communications, and is not coping with the shutdown of their access, which they should have been prepared for long ago. They were also dependent on Discord and Telegram.
Russia is being seriously wounded by a country much smaller than it, which also ostensibly had all the same problems as Russia, like poor soviet doctrine, corruption, a poor economy, and demographic issues.
Russia is failing to compete industrially with a former vassal.
Russia had to import soldiers and ammo from north korea.
Russia's weapons export industry is dead. Nobody wants their trash that has proven terrible on the battlefield. Nobody expects Russia to actually be able to build what they claim to sell anymore.
Russia is so run dry on arms that they couldn't help Venezuela against the US invasion. They sent a single anti air weapon system.
Half a million Russians are dead.
If the war ends today and Russia is allowed to keep all the land it is currently standing on, it still has lost. It's not even a Pyrrhic victory at this point.
Based on? The fact it tried to take Kyiv in the first week? That it's still trying to advance?
If Russia were to collapse tomorrow, they would lose everything, I don't see how that's winning.
Russia can't even keep what it previously took. Crimea is becoming indefensible.
The UK ran out of both a fair while ago
Newcastle is proverbially built on top of the stuff.
Although renewable energy sources and electric arc furnaces that consume scrap are preferred these days.
Cotton was another matter.
i.e. if you have a lot of financial resources and can buy 1000 ships cheaply for the cost of propping up your steel industry to build 100 ships, should you buy 1000 ships (or the steel needed to build them quickly) to instead?
Ironically I think it's the same for both steel and farmers: they provide votes.
There's been two world wars and access to or stockpiling of steel has been a critical strategic factor in both.
Most consumable military assets are made from steel, for example and it underpins most machine tools and factory components as well.
Royal Navy.
Its better to pay 5 cents more for a loaf now than pay $20 a loaf with rationing later, or if we went back to granary system possibly getting moldy food.
Vaccines is a more interesting one, and would be something that might indeed be of interest to a nation. On the other hand I don't think many governments are that concerned about another pandemic, sometimes the discourse regarding it very much sounds like "what are the odds it'll happen again"
Gambler's fallacy will keep striking until we do better, won't it.
My rhetorical point is just that steel gets special treatment probably because it's politically expedient. There are large, politically-relevant parts of the country that are still emotionally tied to the idea that we're an industrial nation. People under the age of 30 still go on about Thatcher and the miners.
There's no real shortage of steel around the world that I know of. We could just stockpile it instead, for example. And in the hypothetical tail-risk scenario this is all supposed to insure against... how do we even get the raw materials for making steel anyway?
The more I learn about steel, the more I realise it's not one single thing but a whole collection of different families of things, each with different tradeoffs.
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-strength_low-alloy_steel#...
A wartime effort has to keep supplies moving daily, or the front collapses.
Whereas the need for vaccines is heavily deferred - your population is already vaccinated in peacetime, and you are unlikely to need to make a novel vaccine over the course of a war, nor vaccinate new population during one either: that large vaccinated population providing herd immunity gives you a lot of runway for children with less access.
.. what were you doing in 2020?
> you are unlikely to need to make a novel vaccine over the course of a war
The lab leak people are probably wrong, but in the present era we're a lot closer to "hook AI up to a CRISPR machine and generate a biological weapon" than we have ever been.
Everyone seems to assume that we might get in a war that we recognize and can fight with the tools of WW2, ships and tanks, rather than a war we don't recognize fought with weapons we don't understand and have no counter for. Or, more likely, simply get bought out at the top. Why fire a missile when you can buy a political party for a mere £5m?
Waiting several years for widespread vaccine availability, and practicing good hygiene and social distancing.
Viruses aren't so good at seizing and holding territory.
(And that was just the cost to the USA, not the world as a whole).
Coronavirus wasn't bullseyeing vaccine shipments in the Pacific or taking down air freighters.
EDIT: I mean I don't know why you think this is a catch-22: countries pursue both capabilities, and the UK has a pharmaceutical industry and on shore manufacturing capabilities.
Whereas many industrialized nations are struggling to keep steel making capabilities on shore and running. So why is steel special? Because currently it's the one we're in danger of losing (and much harder to ship globally even if you have allies).
Neither is infantry that's sick with the flu, which may have been a factor in the ending of of WWI.
Tis hard to practice good hygiene and social distancing in the trenches.
If one side had better access to vaccines or access to better vaccines in a conflict during a pandemic, it would be significant, regardless of how the pandemic came about.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Qu...
Very few people would claim that there is no testimony for the lab leak claim, it's simply that relatively few domain scientists support that claim.
I spent a decade at a national Science and Technology Research Center responsible for a twelfth of NSF's research budget. We studied biology at all scales and the algorithms it uses to solve difficult problems. I've looked for holes in Quay's testimony and didn't find any big ones. Most of his claims seem to be independently verified.
One thing I can say from my decade of experience is that scientists are not dumb people, and are acutely aware of how their work is perceived, and the connection that has to their research funding. You'll find as many scientists warning about the dangers of lax lab regulation as you will coal miners warning about climate change. Private conversations are very different.
Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all?
Enough.
> Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all?
People love to think in black and white. All on or all off. It is metabolically inexpensive to reduce reality to the binary. But reality is all the colors in between. To the best of anyone's ability to reconstruct the events which led to the outbreak (I think Quay makes a compelling case in that testimony which summarizes a great deal of investigative work by others) many things went wrong. Many of which were predictable. Many choices were made. All that suggests opportunity to reduce risk through less extreme means: restricting gain of function research to higher-BSL labs, removing those labs further from population centers, more closely monitoring inflows and outflows around such research, changes are possible in the review and approval process, the list of possibilities is extensive.
What would your motivation be for seeing it any other way?
So someone with expertise in other non relevant fields is enough? Yet people that have expertise in relevant fields dispute his conclusions and its not relevant somehow?
Not a word yet about your motivation. Huh. You'd think anyone out here demanding others' credentials would lead by presenting their own.
You still haven't offered your own credentials.
on a similar note, medical supplies and logistics are a huge deal for going to war, to handle casualties
Countries that import large shares of their food and medical supply chains are constantly trying to develop domestic capacity.
Right, and where is the iron coming from in the scenario where we can't import steel?