You're French, stfu. America takes over Alstom by taking hostages, scuttles your submarine deals with Australia, and all you people do is beg for more Yankee cock to suck. The only people more cucked than the French are Germans.

I agree it's likely Russia took higher casualties as they were attacking heavily fortified positions...and they'll have lost a lot more materiel too.

Military experts have opined that Ukraine have very good fortifications just to the West of Bakhmut that will attrit the Russians further if they keep on pushing forward.



Last year Russia had a manpower problem and enough materiel, this year they've got a materiel problem and enough manpower. I think it's a lot easier for the Russians to hold the defensive line this year with abundant manpower and less equipment, so I don't see them ceding ground rapidly if Ukraine launched a counteroffensive.

And before someone says Russia have like 20k tanks so there's no materiel problem: while technically they've still got a lot of equipment in storage, they're outdated and dilapidated. Tanks have to be restored and upgraded, which takes time and isn't enough to cover the losses on the battlefield.

whenever a tank is not moving, its not moving, for a long time (repairs/maintenance).

The first link literally is titled "taiwan will defeat china" How is that evidence that supports your stated position?
Everyone has heard of the of the 2002 war games, that was 20 years ago.

China has very serious threats to make the US navy anxious. Hypersonic missiles being the main one which you alluded to, a technology which the US is predicted to have online this year.
No doubt they are behind China and even Russia in utilizing this tech, however; That is not a a scale tipping factor in a US vs China matchup.

If you don't think that US subs alone would unleash devastation on mainland within minutes of any conflict starting, you are most certainly wet behind the ears.

The US has force multipliers that China is not on par with, yet.

In fairness the Russians have brought to bear a substantial amount of soviet era hardware that was probably on its arse for decades; I wonder if part of the motivation for Putin acting now rather than in 5 or 10 years time was the life expectancy of the soviet arsenal.

Essentially a now or never kind of scenario.

I don't think 5 more years would have made a difference for stuff that had been rusting away in a warehouse since 1991. The fracking boom had taken off in roughly 2014 and caused oil and natural gas prices to collapse, robbing Putin of the income and the economic leverage to strike in the years after the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbass. It was only in the aftermath of covid that energy markets rebounded and Western economies suffered from shortages of raw materials and upstream products. Covid also put a strain on public finances and the collective psyche of the West, so the calculus imho was that they would shy away from the economic damage that comes with the decoupling of their economies, and particularly their energy supplies, from Russia.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 4 2023 05:18pm

They also found oil reserves in the black sea right next to Crimea in 2012.

Not saying it was THE motivating factor, just a sidenote that I thought of in terms of countries and their military stockpiles/ becoming defunct over time.

To be fair though, the old soviet stuff has a very binary durability distribution: either it's cheap garbage and breaks in no time, or its giga-durable and lasts for decades. Most military equipment should belong to the latter category.

Because my position is that it has silly assumptions and restrictions placed on the Chinese side, which I stated at the start. My position is that these war games are systematically, every time, created to make Americans feel good about their prospects.

This sort of thinking is universal in the west. It's why we thought the sanctions would cripple Russia, it's why we thought tariffs would bring manufacturing back, it's why we thought democracies handle pandemics better. It's just self-deception all the way down, no one can ever be honest about anything in the West, because it's too painful to our precious egos.

Case in point:



Just absolute nonsense, directly contradicted by the simplest google search. But he read it online from some "Russia Expert", and even looking at 2018 and 2019 incomes, he'll just come back with some reason why he's actually correct and Russia is a 'gas station with nukes' or whatever.

The West's primary products are hope followed by cope. These wargames are the hope. Later comes the cope.