Yes, but there are people in the USA who have made systems solving very complex tasks. Suppose people who’ve built Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google - suppose they build the robotized system that is going to fight such a war. (Which is also similar to what Russia and Ukraine did, their new military development is all around local analogs of those companies.)

They have a whole new MIC emerging, with Palantir and more general companies developing new weapons. Mostly, like I said, autonomous drones (meaning far longer range, smaller vulnerability to jamming and miniaturization - what can you do against a killer bird the size of your fist?).

Russia and Ukraine are mostly fighting using drones and artillery now, with very small suicide groups of people used to find openings, infiltrate lines and take pieces of territory.

Suppose a military fighting just like today’s Russian or Ukrainian one attacks an unprepared old one, with very expensive and big AD batteries, artillery, tanks, infantry transports and so on, unprotected from swarms of cheap drones immediately killing anything detected. They might be able to wipe it all out like a week before the world around will realize that such a blitzkrieg has happened.

Also not only swarms themselves, but modern tools of operational control. Lots of blunders are due to living humans panicking or making emotional decisions and shows, or just not being able to process information quickly enough. Due to struggle for power, or crime. A swarm of drones doesn’t have those problems.

In any case, for the purpose of this fear it only makes sense to explore the possibility of it not making a blunder. What if yes - if yes, then either the general west supports such a war and Mexico is done, just slowly, like Gaza, or it doesn’t and then, I guess, the US is going to slowly drift out of relevance.

EDIT: And that fantasy of mine is connected to a situation where US leadership goes almost Khmer Rouge. So - a clearly suicidal, but murderous scenario. So - control over millions in such a model is done by killing many.

But you are right in there not being anything resembling such amount of equipment available now to use. So I’d expect all this to be at least a decade away even if it can happen.

they also lost insane amounts of material, both ground, sea and air war machines;

Intended for obsolete paradigm of war, a lot of them. Very expensive, old and not so efficient. And not just “lost”, also “tested in real life conditions”.

So what can Russia do with its improved army?

Defend from whatever it fears in the future, that’s probably their idea. If you are expecting a war, due to paranoia or not, this might seem justified. Similar to how averting a hunger is far easier than going through it, because during a hunger people who die also consume food before it, just not enough, and work with worse efficiency. In case of such a war of defense your preserved materiel and people will be expended possibly far less efficiently than in a smaller war to get some experience.

My whole line in this thread is that such a strategy seems to be consistent with the claims of feeling threatened by NATO, officially expressed by Russian officials since 00s. It’s funny, but it’s really so.

Russia also lost the Middle East, meaning Syria is gone and even Iran has its own problems. I’m just not seeing any way forward from this, even if they can patch the economy together.

Perhaps it’s optimization. Doesn’t matter how much you are trying to hold under control if you are not succeeding. Similarly to hunger.

Anyway, this is me playing devil’s advocate.

I think this is an evaluation based on wars of the past.

Without 1) autonomous combat drones, 2) new fascism in the USA allowing it to kill any amounts of foreign and its own civilians, 3) surveillance that wasn’t possible before our time, 4) computers making many decisions in real time.

With those present they can launch a swarm of AI killbots, possibly with tactical nukes, and be done before the general population even realizes well enough what happened (that’s a slow thing). No conscription\mobilization\losses - much smaller problems with Vietnam-like protests, morale, fragging.

This is an extreme fantasy, of course. Strongly inspired by Soviet post-WWII doctrine for a nuclear war plus new tools.

To attacking a non-NATO country. NATO’s purpose is not to defend random places and support random revolutions and occupations around the world

Yeah, well, attacking a NATO country with the military Russia had in 2022 would be suicide.

And as shitty the rift is with the US, Russia now has a rearming EU to worry about.

A rearmed EU will be less dependent upon the US. If we are expecting the US to go bad in the following decades, then EU less dependent upon it might be less likely to partake in pummeling Russia when that happens.

He put the country on a war economy which is going to cause an insane recession if not an outright collapse if the war ends.

That depends on the expected outside conditions. If there’s a worldwide crisis coming, then doing this before it is even advantageous.

At insanely low prices, and by creating even more dependencies on untrustworthy partners. Who’s to say China won’t use the new dependency to invade Russia? Can Russia depend on that?

China doesn’t generally invade anyone. Peace works in their favor. They are even catching up as an innovating and not only manufacturing nation. China already controls Russia though its industries’ supply chains. Also China controls much of the world through its rare metals.

So yes, Russia can depend on the Chinese “roof”, so to say, being stable.

Insanely low prices are regrettable, but one of Russia’s biggest exports is grain. Grain demand is different from oil and gas demand, - I don’t think I have to explain why, - so that falling or stopping being profitable is highly unlikely.

It went from an army that could threaten Europe to one that could threaten Ukraine. I know, drones are the new thing, but all of Russia’s adversaries have much greater manufacturing capabilities than Russia, Russia is not going to outproduce the West or China in drones.

From one that boasted threatening Europe to one that actually threatens Ukraine. Also you are writing this as if Ukraine were weak.

It’s not about capabilities, it’s about a whole functioning well-tested system. Russia doesn’t have to outproduce China, Russia simply can’t fight China, it’s dependent upon China in everything. But the good news (for Russia) are that all its potential adversaries are western or western-aligned.

Like training an LLM on a dataset (sorry).

This is the new big lie of Russia. No, defense spending is coming from loans, basically a credit line we didn’t use because the Germans were jacking off to austerity.

You weren’t using it, now you are using it. That’s too “at the expense of everything else”.

Just look at the numbers. It’s a war economy. 40% of the Russian budget is going towards the army, and if the war ends or this money runs out - that’s 2027/28 if we’re being generous - you’re going from a labour shortage to 10% unemployment. That’s “dissolution of the USSR” level economic turmoil.

They are making rules for labor migration stricter, and the number of labor migrants in Russia is enormous, I’d say it’s more than 10% workforce. I don’t have the current numbers, but it’s a few millions of citizens of Tajikistan alone. So - they are slowly impeding labor migration, and making it less attractive. Might be a preparation for this exactly.

OK. I don’t know where the ship is going or what its captain thinks. I’m just seeing that it’s been promised things completely different from what transpired for all my life.

All I’m saying is that if let’s say the end result of this is a ceasefire on the current frontline, Russia basically lost the war.

Russia lost the war the moment it started the war, because with pre-war Zelensky they could make any kind of equal alliance, that’s what his voters wanted and what he was promising.

However - in any case, 1, Russia has developed a modern armed force from the nonsense it had, it paid with plenty of lives for that, but many of those convicts and depressed\poor people who were attracted by the money offered, and, 2, with freezing of the conflict using the current line of contact Russia has gained strategically important territory on the Azov sea coast, connecting it to Crimea, and has almost approached Odessa.

Honestly, if Ukraine becomes de-facto landlocked, it’s over. Taking Odessa is hard, because there are limans to the south and east of it, they’d have to basically encircle it from the north first. In WWII when Soviet troops liberated Odessa, they too stormed the city from the north.

So there are two variants - 1) they make some peace\ceasefire\whatever with Ukraine losing what’s now controlled by Russia, and then after some time Russia commits perfidy and attacks again with the intention of taking Odessa, and 2) the same, but Russia doesn’t commit perfidy and just remains with the current situation.

Before this war Russian-controlled Crimea had a single chokepoint in its connection to Russia. After it there’s also the route through the mainland. We live in an era of developing land logistics.

I’ve already said that the Russian military has gained experience, the best possible kind at that - all other possible adversaries are either too weak or too strong (part of alliances and with their own experience). I suspect that’s even why the war was started at all - to gain experience of modern warfare with an adversary approaching equal, the hard way.

I’ll attribute the situation where it makes sense to western racism and chauvinism. A conflict where two East Slavic nations fight each other won’t have really grave consequences for Russia in terms of western reaction, and at the same time the Ukrainians are too gaining an experienced military. Almost a win-win decision for a psychopath leader.

Yeah, about that - when some kind of peace\ceasefire is made, Ukraine basically becomes a better buffer state for Russia than before. With no wish for more bloodshed, thus no threat for what Russia has occupied, yet a military better not to cross. So if, suppose, EU or NATO suddenly goes fascist in 10 or 20 years after now (all that Chat Control stuff doesn’t inspire confidence in the future), they will have to pass through Ukraine unless they make it a NATO or EU member, which they won’t due to their own arrogance.

So honestly, even without taking Odessa, Russia is improving its strategic position. From a purely military, 1930s-like, point of view. I mean, improving if its intention in the large picture is self-defense, because for pulling a Hitler it’s already a clear failure since the first few months, but honestly what if Putin really believes in bad-bad NATO intending to eat Russia? And nation leaders and powerful people are usually psychopaths, so maybe a psychopath is fitted with a better brain to understand them. Maybe he’s right.

Look, I’m from Hungary. If the peeps who did 1956 got Western help beyond thoughts and prayers, and the revolution ended up with Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg and Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén counties as “East Hungary” or bombed flat and even part of the USSR behind the fence, and the rest as basically a Western country, the memory of that revolution would be much less bittersweet.

Ukraine wasn’t behind anything like the Iron Curtain.

Every time I try pho bo I have doubts that anything is a big power compared to Vietnam.

Like - there are people who like Kipling’s thing about that “white man’s burden”, so - IMHO Vietnamese can take the “yellow man’s burden” and civilize Europeans and Americans and all those. Teach them how you really keep your nation’s dignity. Frenchies - check. Murrkans - check. Khmer Rouge - check. China - check.

For that supposed 20% he reinvigorated NATO (prior to the full scale invasion countries started questioning if we still need NATO), got EU to increase defense spending and got Finland and Sweden to join NATO.

Don’t you see how this works both ways?

He measured NATO’s response, he found a way to fight wars and not break (in the sense of popular outrage at loss of life and economic effect) for Russia, and which categories of population can be recruited for money and which shouldn’t, he confirmed that the resource exports money source can be reoriented to other countries than the West, and he made unofficially NATO-aligned countries officially that.

EU’s defense spending increasing is at the expense of other things.

They also proved they’re a paper tiger and their arms manufacturing is crap. Oh and of course sanctions and the war completely wrecking the economy.

They proved that to themselves too and reacted. Changed the military doctrine, evolved new tactics and strategy, built new MIC production chains. Russian army was inexperienced and thoroughly rotten, now it’s not. Russian weapons were expensive and untested, now there are cheap drones of various kinds produced on scale and used, well-tested and constantly improved.

The economy is not completely wrecked. It really seemed to be going there many times over these years. Some of the people who told me it’s going to crumble are professors. It’s not even approaching that anymore. I live in Russia.

People working in the Russian Central Bank are very competent. One can talk and talk about good and evil, but their work has been perfect basically since 1999 till now. And people making actual decisions too understand a lot.

It seems intuitively (incorrectly) that the way Russian society is built, with its inequality and injustice, it can’t bear a big war. But if slaveholder agrarian societies and feudal societies could fight wars with their plutocratic contemporaries, then Russia’s mafia feudalism can fight Western societies. Which are honestly too slowly changing to mafia feudalism ; perhaps some will flip to fascism.

Considering what all those western nations have shown themselves, I’m honestly not sure there are good guys here, and if there are none, then I’m kinda almost feeling patriotic. But I don’t understand why Putin had to invade Ukraine, Zelensky was fucking elected because of his promises to make peace and restore ties, and for the national interest it made much bigger sense to just do that, Ukraine would still be naturally dependent.

Ukraine wasn’t a certain Russian vassal state. They had the original “orange revolution”.

About prospective NATO/EU member - honestly that’s not good enough. They’ve lost hundreds of thousands of men. Housing and infrastructure and industrial plants.

In return for that to be “considered” for being accepted into a military alliance of former empires and a union for “while civilized people”, only “considered”, some time in the future, like 20 years later, - fuck that.

And both entities have been promising mountains to Ukraine over these few years.

Of course, there’s also the issue of Ukraine’s government being corrupt and becoming the more corrupt the longer there’s no election.

From what it seems, Ukrainians too are not very keen on trying to maybe in 20 years join either. They want agreements and they want to build up their military and country. And they want to start unfucking their political system, when there’s opportunity.

That’s wrong, the US can eat a couple of countries just fine. The efficiency is atrocious, but the sheer inherited strategic power and logistics and stockpiles, and the amount of funding allowing to, say, build drones analogous to Russian “Geran” 100x times more expensive in the same amounts as Russia does, - all these make many wars a certain victory in the sense of destroying the other side’s forces and possibly civilian population.

Anyway. Two things.

1 - In his previous term there was squeal from all sides how he’s going to institute fascism right now. “The boy who cried wolves” may be a valid analogy or it may not. I think before anything like this the US will have an open change of the regime. At the same time - it’s very convenient to have the land border with other countries very narrow, when instituting totalitarianism (resistance fighters, people trying to flee, all kinds of stuff), so possibly eating Mexico and Canada and doing a regime change after that is good enough.

2 - Perhaps any kind of a war is easier done after, suppose, an economic crisis happens. AI bubble burst, or something like that.

I’m saying that this is very common in Eastern Europe. It’s not something only rich people do. Not that it’s fine or not.

It’s not about rich, it’s about rather middle class people somehow allocating a sum to bribe a military commissariat. See the article with 10k$ - it’s a lot in Ukraine, yes, but not what the size of such a bribe would be if only rich people would be doing that.

Trust me, you’ll find an official to bribe in such a situation in Eastern Europe. This is a PR move, to arrest some from time to time and show that in the news. Happens regularly.