Of course "any military" actually means "any western military" here, continuing the proud cracker tradition of just ignoring anyone who was ever on the recieving end of those western militaries and their genocidal campaigns to crush all dissent.
But seriously though, it's just fucking true.
I'm pretty sure the Vietnamese/Koreans/Iraqies/etc weren't going "oh this war shit is so easy lol" while they were being carpetbombed back to the stoneage by the US and their lackeys.
Well they are specifically talking about defensive lines. It’s not like the Iraqis and Koreans were really on the offensive all that much.
Sure, but I'm not about to give "A retired Australian general" the benefit of the doubt here.
There's a 99% chance that what he really means is "war used to be so easy for us when we mass-murdered poor brown people, and now that we're facing actual opposition I want to cry like a little baby"
From what I understand Russia really does have extremely powerful defenses. They've got an enormous amount of artillery and apparently unlimted number of shells for it, and since the Ukrainians are apparently mostly down to unsupported light infantry, ie cannon fodder, the Russians have just been letting them move in to prepared kill zones, wiping them out, rinse, repeat.
And the Ukrainians are being trained by the US, and the training is shit
The us hasn't been in a real pitched battle since vietnam afaik. The closest thing was Fallujah 20 years ago and that was mostly just a turkey shoot. They surrounded Fallujah with heavy weapons and just unloaded in to the city until nothing was moving.
Oh, what is it? I thought Russia was "still stuck in 1970's mentality" and "hasn't adapted to modern battlefield"?! Are you suggesting that the media and the "osint" were... Talking out of their ass?! I am shocked, shocked I tell you!
US managed to build up a lot of mythology around their military capabilities over the years, and actually putting that to a test was a huge blunder. Before the war started, most of the world was convinced that NATO military was superior to Russia in practically all the respects. They were supposed to have better training, better tactics, better tech, etc. Nobody seriously questioned that.
Then things got put to the test and turns out that Russian army is far more effective on the battlefield. All the NATO weapons proved to be ineffective, their tactics don't work, and they're not able to adapt the way Russia is. Drones are a perfect example of that. Russia started out lacking in this department, and now it managed to develop and put cheap and effective drones into production at scale.
This war exposed NATO as the emperor with no clothes.
One of the few good things about this. Seeing Leopards getting swatted and Javelins fail to make a difference, all while watching NATO deplete it's stocks, has likely done a lot to hurt NATO's intimidation factor.
Also, I don't think anyone is going to miss that the US fragged Europe's energy supply to make them dependent on US energy, or that the US is gutting the EU's industrial sector. With BRICS gaining steam this was a bad time to play that hand (I hope).
NATO invincibility myth being shattered is really important because now everyone can see that NATO can be fought and it can be defeated. And completely agree that the relations between US and Europe are very likely to sour going forward. Once it starts sinking in that Europe got cynically used by US, there's going to be a backlash.
Once it starts sinking in that Europe got cynically used by US, there's going to be a backlash.
i wouldn't hold my breath. it isn't like this is the first time europe's been fucked over by the US. we'll probably come crawling back like we always do
Yeah, they'll just blame Russia while the US continues to empty Europe's pockets.
NATO invincibility myth being shattered is really important because now everyone can see that NATO can be fought and it can be defeated.
"No Korea doesn't count because muh human waves."
"No Vietnam doesn't count because trees. Also, muh KDR."
"No Iraq doesn't count because muh insurgency."
"No Afghanistan doesn't count because muh mountains."
"No Ukraine doesn't count because muh..."
don’t think anyone is going to miss that the US fragged Europe’s energy supply to make them dependent on US energy
Except for every lemmy lib, it seems. I doubt they are representative of the overall sentiments in Europe and certainly not the world, but I would argue they are representative of the liberal worldview, that seems fairly universal regardless of geography
i think the scales have tipped on some illusions about NATO technology & doctrine but to blow this up to "no clothes" veers into underestimation. NATO, for the deficiencies still has a shittload of military equipment and personnel
Sure, NATO still has a lot of equipment and personnel, but it's no better than the equipment and personnel China and Russia have. Meanwhile, where we see NATO shitting the bed is the logistics side of things. The thing that turned out to be most important in this war is just being able to produce large volumes of ammunition. NATO is not capable of doing that at the moment.
Seeing NATO gear falter may increase confidence in the systems of other countries and bolster arms trading between non-western-aligned nations. Not a good thing per-se, but it might be a check on NATO. If someone builds an air defense system that can kill F-35s NATO is militarily broken I think.
If an F-35 ever gets within the range of S-400 systems it's toast. There's a reason US flipped out when Turkey got them and refused to supply F-35s. Even a German radar vendor says it was able to track F-35 back in 2018
https://www.c4isrnet.com/intel-geoint/sensors/2019/09/30/stealthy-no-more-a-german-radar-vendor-says-it-tracked-the-f-35-jet-in-2018-from-a-pony-farm/
The whole stealth thing is incredibly overblown in my opinion, and it's another example of hyped up military tech that's not going to perform as expected if it's ever tested.
I've heard the overwhelming focus on radar invisibility in a small number of radar bands doesn't translate to the whole thing being radar invisible.
I was also thinking about, with neural nets and large learning models, you could probably train a system to look for F-35 shaped anomolies in a radar network's data the same way they train models to look for signs of cancer in a lung. One radar might not be able to see it reliably, but what about a series of networked radars using different wavelengths and methods, all networked together to create a single data stream for interpretation?
in all likelihood everyone's had this technology for a while now. i lean a bit towards giving the f35 the benefit of the doubt though, and just assume that its signature is small and fuzzy enough for it to have a smaller confidence interval than other less stealthy aircraft
same goes for submersible gliders equipped with passive sonar systems, just saturate an area with those and suddenly the ashbm kill chain is a lot more cloud cover resistant than nafo would have you believe
That's my expectation as well, and on top of that, the jet necessarily produces emissions in a lot of different spectrums, such as heat and sound. So, I can't see how you hide something like a jet from an integrated system that observes and integrates data across multiple spectrums. Back when computing power was low this was likely not practical to do, but it's definitely something that would be done today.
It's rumored that both China and Russia have radar systems capable of detecting stealth aircraft. Nobody will know for sure unless shots are fired though and hopefully that never happens.
The other area where America has a military tech lead is in submarines (at least over China, question mark about Russia). However, there are also rumors that China has found some sort of countermeasure as evidenced by that American sub crashing into an underwater mountain last year. Either the US Navy is so fucked up that they're crashing subs into immovable objects (honestly not impossible given that their ships hit shit all the time) or China has a weapon that can fuck with their systems.
I definitely hope we never find out as it would mean WW3 and a likely nuclear holocaust. I do expect that stealth air craft detection is possible, especially with modern technology where you can integrate multispectrum data. Radar is just one way to look for the aircraft, it produces a whole spectrum of emissions, such as heat and sound. These are pretty much impossible to hide, and I imagine that once you see an anomaly in one spectrum it allows to check more closely across different spectrums to home in on the target.
In terms of subs, Russia and US are about even in terms of the number of subs, while China has the most at the moment. Russian and Yasen class subs can carry more weapons, and in particular hypersonics which US doesn't have. I imagine there's been a lot of tech transfer happening between Russia and China here as well which is what allowed China to develop their own fleet so rapidly. Also agree that the most likely scenario is that US sub got intercepted as opposed to having run into the ocean floor all on its own.
If someone builds an air defense system that can kill F-35s NATO is militarily broken I think.
Remember that Iranians shot down the most modern and expensive US stealth drone worth 200 million with a soviet missile from 60's with domestically build guidance system. And F35 isn't even any particular breakthrough compared to earlier stealth designs, i would say Russia is quite capable of that.
Note how US try to push F-35 down the throats of their allies but don't even want to try it in Ukraine. I suspect getting it shot down would botch the sales, not to mention it could prompt something like a real investigation of that entire project which is like pandora box of corruption.
The advancement in drone warfare over 18 months is honestly shocking
Yeah, I don't think anybody expected that drones would play such a huge role. It does make sense in hindsight though, surveillance is incredibly important for knowing what the enemy is doing, and for coordinating artillery fire. Meanwhile, cheap kamikaze drones are a really cost effective way to take out multi-million dollar tanks. What's interesting is that it looks like Russia invested a lot more into electronic warfare prior to the conflict and they're able to jam western drones and guided weapons.
I'm guessing that in the future, as jamming becomes more prevalent, we'll see more push for development of autonomous weapons. And that's a bit of a scary thought when you consider the implications.
I remember reading from 5 star reddit armchair generals that their militaries weren't intended to be fighting guerilla warfare, which is why their oh-so-humanitarian-totally-never-target-civilians militaries struggled so much against guerilla fighters in their wars against Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. They instead said that they were designed to obliterate traditional militaries in uniform such as those of their current state department designated enemies.
For all the "Russia's a bunch of poor commies still using USSR era equipment", sounds like NATO and its proxies had a wakeup call when this time they're on the receiving end where they didn't have superiority in firepower, on the ground and the air.
their militaries weren’t intended to be fighting guerilla warfare
Oh hey, I think I've actually seen one of those here on the Grad!
Like the military, they're not set up to challenge people who argue back.
One of my favorite armchair general things to hit people with is that the T-72 is a smaller, lighter, less protected tank... because it was built to cross bridges in Eastern Europe that would collapse under the weight of the massively over-engineered Abrams.
yea its almost like you are fighting a (former?) superpower and not goat herders and farmers.
Yes, of course one of the largest countries on the face of the earth fighting a country right next door to them is not the same kind of opponent as an impoverished nation being bullied by imperialists.
There was so much talk about Russia's economy being smaller than Italy's when this started. I guess when your country still builds stuff it changes the math a bit.
There's quite a lot to be said about how investment banking doesn't translate to food, bullets, and replacement equipment that the west is quickly having to come to terms with.
Russia had significant deindustrialization since 1991, tho.
Point. Don't they still have a significant arms manufacture sector?
It is just a shadow of former RSFSR capabilities, but Ukraine had been even more deindustrialized to the point where they barely even have repair capabilities.
to The Economist
Challenge: The Economist proving Lenin wrong (difficulty: impossible)
I mean, i agree, but Australia also lost more than one war against wildlife so I wouldn't pay much attention to their general staff.
What do you expect from a country whose defining military moment is getting fucked over by incompetent Brits to get massacred on a beach by the Sick Man of Europe.
Giving the Russians many months notice to fortify their positions and attacking straight into it is what shattered the myth of German invincibility in summer at Kursk. Absolutely ridiculous to attempt the same thing again and expect different results.
Mick ryan? Fucking shill. He's been saying for years in every Australian newspaper and TV outlet that would have him how ukr would just roll over inept Russian training and outdated systems. Just reality detached , essay after essay. I'm surprised he's pivoting, cause it wasn't for lack of evidence over the course of the war; he didn't know what he was talking about from then till now . I would be circumspect on anything this guy says : imho his US DoD handlers must be pushing the new message.
