Something about the smug announcement of how efficient the proxy war is chills my blood. :doomer:
Using % because if you say $114 billion you can see that that’s a higher number than Russia’s yearly military budget and Ukraine still isn’t winning
Yes, but we're only spending 6% of the overall national budget. You're missing the point. These numbers mean that you can do this shit 16x over, globally while operating at-cost. We could have 16 different Russia-Ukraine Wars right now, if we bothered to spend at this level of efficiency.
The efficiency would plummet off a cliff if the US even tried to approach that level of conflict.
This is incredibly GDP brained thinking. The numbers are not immutable facts that exist as a natural law, ultimately you have to produce those items in the real world. Trying to support that many conflicts at once, which would be fighting on a scale of a world war, would see the US forced to spend 30-40% of it's GDP on war.
That's definitely embarrassing and shows that quantifying the military in dollars is misleading. For instance, last year the Pentagon said China was acquiring weapons 5x faster than the US. But China's budget is about a third I believe. To make matters worse for the Americans, you need industry to build weapons, and American industry is much smaller than China's. So there's probably not even the industrial capacity for the Pentagon to quintuple its weapons acquisitions.
bc most of the money is funneled to MIC shareholders, execs, and DoD PMCs
The shareholders were upset we left Afghanistan so we need something else to dump money into.
Oh, America offshored everything but weapons manufacturing. Those factories, we still have in abundance.
Distributed evenly throughout every congressional district, so if there is ever a cut in spending, they will make sure to hurt all of them.
even if that was true how does killing Russians make anything better for me
"It's a cheap way to kill russians" who told you I wanted to kill Russians
Libs still really blame russians for making :hillary-apartment: lose lol
I love that phrase because it's fundamentally and openly contemptuous of democracy
It means that the voters should understand it's her turn. The script was all written, they had nothing but a bit part. They just had to stand in the back and be a tree.
And they couldn't even do THAT right!
Maybe you understand the depth of the anger and contempt for them now?
6% of the US military budget is probably enough to give every Amerikan free healthcare and a free college degree tho
Since free universal healthcare would cost less than our current shitshow, you'd probably be right
If half of Russia’s army had been destroyed shouldn’t we be anticipating total Ukrainian victory in the next couple of days?
Hold on, my sources are telling me the reason for that discrepancy is that this is just made up.
Hollywood ass understanding of war. It’s like a board game to them.
all of life is like an HBO series for them. a few years ago the evil China covid and Uyghur arc started, a bit later the evil Muslim arc was wrapped up on a cliffhanger a la Afghanistan. the China arc has been shelved for the season premier of evil Ruzziya vs holesum ukrainiiyye. and its all building up toward a series finale where all the old villains show up and we get closure and a series finale :posadist-nuke:
Paradox Games and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race
The entirety of amerikkkan society is built around desensitizing people to “righteous” violence (see capeshit)
look, zelensky just needs to rearrange all his divisions into combat widths of 10, 15, 18, 27 or 41-45, and he can roll over the AI-tier shit putin is doing. simple as :very-smart:
Me, an Enlightened Liberal: "The United States spent $40B/month for the last year. But if you take that number and divide it by the total money we spend globally, its actually a very small fraction. Therefore, this is money well spent."
You, a Stupid Leftist: "What did the money accomplish?"
Me: "We defeated Russia!"
You: "Didn't the Russians just retake Bakhmut?"
Me: "You don't understand anything about military spending."
Bakhmut is actually the near perfect scenario for a bloodletting proxy war. Just absurd losses on both sides ("but the Ukrainians lost more!" so what) and no real change to the strategic/geopolitical situation.
As I understand it, this is one of those "I can't take X until I've secured Y" situations. So Bakhmut gives Russians access deeper into Ukrainian territory without risk of encirclement or direct bombardment.
lmao you're basically just parroting the lib line of "Bakhmut has no strategic value".
Most sources say it's a stepping stone for a stepping stone for one strategic goal, so... hell yeah worth it? Big L for Ukraine sure but the killing of military age Russians and the depletion of the soviet stockpiles will continue
Only half? What a putin bot, I've heard from hardcore NATO sources it's at least 75% which is why Ukraine is about to conquer Crimea
Left unchecked, Ukraine will become the new, new, China and threaten the entire cosmos.
The military industrial complex will create a new problem only the military industrial complex can solve which will create a new problem
uh actually ukraine destroyed 2000% of the russian army
russians do not exist anymore, it is fake news
no, no, russians do exist, because ukrainians had to make more so they could kill more.
by the time ukraine wins, there'll be a trillion russians.
matt yglesias in shambles, a paltry billion americans vs a trillion russians
It's definitely not half. These figures are the most embellished ones that come from Ukraine itself, they lie.
Ukrainian losses are likely around 100k and Russian losses are probably similar but slightly below.
This represents somewhere between 6-10% of the total Russian military.
And it's definitely not 6% of the military budget. Doesn't include existing stockpiles given to them, which have sometimes been taken directly out of the hands of US units (several publicly complained about having things like missiles they need to operate as an effective unit taken) and it does not include all the ongoing support being provided. The US is basically all of Ukraine's intelligence and massive quantities of money and resources go into maintaining that.
Libs are full of shit.
similar but slightly below
that Mossad estimate had Russian losses at about 1/6th of the Ukrainians iirc
Also...how do dead Russians improve ANYTHING here? Even if Ukraine somehow wins this war and destroys Russia, the US gets no better domestically. Still shit min wage, healthcare, social services...
But yeah, we helped kill a ton of Russians for the crime of 'kind of preventing the Clinton dynasty from happening'
I guess they really do hate Russians that much AND want some kind of win for the fucking loser known as Joe Biden
half of Russia's army? surely this means that Ukraine will have no trouble winning the war :thinking-about-it:
These people always lack the smallest bit of self-awareness.
They could've said "held back" or "resisted" the Russians, but instead make silly childish claims like "destroyed half the army". Zelensky should be sitting inside the Kremlin right now instead of doing random photo ops in the same "battle" shirt from 12 months ago if that was remotely true lol.
You really can't have both ways.
This is an era where "destroyed" can mean "smirked at someone woke while live streaming" :kubrick-stare:
Literally by what metric? Soldiers? No. Supplies? No, plus they are continually manufactured so it's more of a rate of replacement calculation, which by all accounts Russia isn't struggling with. Like, where are they pulling these numbers from?
The main point that is never addressed though:
“Helping Ukraine does not make the world a safer place”
The implication is that if Russia didn't have any army then the world be safer.
Because destroying Russian military is an unquestionable goal. American hegemony is not to be questioned.
Honestly the US military is the biggest obstacle and best argument against worldwide disarmament, unfortunately.
We only used 6%. Sure, all of NATO is out of ammo, but our leaders are telling the truth. Only 6%!
all of NATO is out of ammo
This line is such silly bullshit. We have some of the most advanced and efficient arms manufacturing industry in the world. To quote Khrushchev, we're turning out missiles like sausages.
This is just some fucking assholes in media being fed pure propaganda. They're sitting at the firing range, watching a guy emptying his clip, and frantically reporting how we've run out of bullets.
Damn I’ve been so owned all those official figures were meaningless
Look up how many artillery shells are made a year, then how many are used daily, and get back to me
We played this game in Iraq twenty years ago. The supply ramped to meet demand. Nobody in the green zone was running around empty handed.
Comparing this to the Iraq occupation is utterly absurd.
This war is far more intense than even Vietnam, which nearly destroyed the US empire.
It is impossible to materialize the sort of resources necessary to fight this kind of war without moving to a war footing.
Oh wow you've killed a bunch of russian soldiers, that's an important goal I'm sure. Now, let's see how the war has effected civilians.
1/3 ukrainians displaced
Power grid and various infrastructure completely fucked
Large global increases in the prices of staple goods
Ukraine indebted to the west probably forever and will be IMF'd to death
Enormous amounts of greenhouse gas generated by both militaries
European energy prices skyrocketing due to US sabotage of Nordstream 2
:curious-marx:
