A mango, I tell you!
When one looks at a lot of the military analysis out there, we need to acknowledge something important, there has not been a near peer military conflict that involved the west since the Korean War armistice was signed in 1953.
There have been other near peer conflicts, the Arab-Israeli wars, the India-Pakistan wars, the China-India war, and the conflict between China and Vietnam, but the neither the US nor any of the NATO powers have engaged in a war with a near peer since they fought against the Chinese on the ground, and the Russians in the air, in the early 1950s.
What this means is that no one that you are seeing on the TV right now has any meaningful experience with this sort of conflict.
It's clear that Europe/NATO over-matches Russia in a potential war, both in number of troops and the underlying technology, excluding nuclear weapons,* but the military establishment, whose military establishment has been engaging in asymmetric warfare against brown people (see the video for the "mangoes" context) for the past 70 years likely to find such a conflict more complex, and more costly, than they anticipate, much like WWI.
It will no more be a cake walk than Russia's current experience in the Ukraine.
In the interest of honesty, I would note that the main reason that I posted this was because I love this Blackadder clip. I love the "Mango" bit.
*Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
3 comments :
Putin may be using these attacks (on Crimea, Ukraine, et al) for the same reason Hitler and Mussolini attacked Spain.
... to test new tactics and gear, and get their troops "blooded" for the REAL war they planned.
World War II.
Putin may be planning World War III.
... even tho it would be ruinously expensive, even tho Afghans had just beat them, even tho it would bad for business, Putin doesn't care, because autocrats and sociopaths never care. They do whatever the hell they want, and dare sane people to stop them.
Who's gona stop him this time?
One of the things that is clear is that the entire Russian polity, from the knuckle draggers to liberals agree that NATO expansion in general, and expansion in particular, is a dagger directed at Russia.
Gorbachev and Yeltsin before Putin declared that expansion might constitute a causus belli.
This "dagger" could be easily removed by a dissatisfied oligarch "retiring" Vlad the Imp Jailer, then applying for admission to NATO.
I read something similar happened to Yuri (turn black) Andropov, after he killed Brezhnev's nephew, Leonid's son shot him in the liver.
A comedy of errors ensued as the Swiss transplant team searched the whole of Russia, but could not find a healthy liver.
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