nortex97 said:
A very good discussion of the strategic situation/strategies here:
Quote:
REBEKAH KOFFLER: Where we are with this conflict is that even the chairman of the joint chiefs, General Mark Milley, has admitted that there is no path to victory for Ukraine. My intelligence analysis tells me this war isn't winnable.
Why? It's because Putin's strategy is to outsuffer and outlast the adversary. Putin has assembled half a million new recruits, 315,000 joining the fight right now, 150,000 in training camps.
As you just said, Brian, this is typical Putin, typical Russia, just throwing bodies into the grinder. Putin also knows there is fatigue right now in the United States and in the west because the taxpayer is realizing that they have been sucked dry with $196 billion, as Lisa pointed out and they just can't continue forever.
So this "oops!" strategy that President Biden just pulled out with his visit is not going to stop Putin. Putin is not afraid. He has a plan. I describe this plan in my book, "Putin's Playbook," which you have.
Biden completely failed at deterrence, failed at strategy, just schizophrenically throwing weaponry at Ukraine hoping somehow it's going to scare Putin. But unfortunately, it won't.
FOX NEWS HOST LISA BOOTHE: To your point, I think a lot of Americans want to know what does winning look like according to Zelensky, how much money is that going to take, and how much human suffering has to happen to achieve that goal.
KOFFLER: Here is what Zelensky stated repeatedly what victory looks like to him. It's evicting the Russians from the entire territory of Ukraine.
BOOTHE: But is that feasible?
KOFFLER: It's absolutely not. Because the Russians are entrenched, especially in Crimea. It's an existential outcome of this war for Putin and for Russia. And so it is just not feasible.
Somebody needs to realize that the strategy of just throwing weaponry is not going to work. Weaponry and technology do not win wars, strategy does. And, unfortunately, despite 10 years' worth of every single piece of intelligence that we had back in the intelligence community, we had scores of war gaming, predicting and going through this conflict and how it's going to unravel, right?
How it's going to unravel is it is going to ratchet up if tensions are escalated, it's going to ratchet up cyber or nuclear armageddon. President Biden knows this. This is exactly why he is not deploying forces into Ukraine, he not sending F-35s into Ukraine.
...
KILMEADE: He miscalculated everything.
KOFFLER: Well, not everything. Not everything. Because, again, Putin is planning for a relentless draining war of attrition. Throwing people into the meat grinder, yes. They lost 200,000 men. In World War II, the Russians sacrificed 25 million. With the population of UKraine being 43 million, the Russians 143 million, can you do the math? That is prohibitive, so the conflict is going to go on forever.
And as long as it goes on, Putin achieves his goal. His definition of victory is very different from ours, it is preventing us and Ukraine from victory. The devastation of Ukraine. Ukraine right now has been decimated. The industrial base is destroyed. The agricultural base is destroyed. It is ceasing to exist as a viable country because we are providing the entire gross domestic product... They are entirely depending on us.
And right now, the Pentagon is already telegraphing to Ukraine that this is unsustainable because we are doing our own review, because our own weapons stockpile is depleting, some of these weaponry is going to take 7-18 years to replace. Ukraine is having an extremely high burn rate of ammo. 5,000 rounds a day, so our production capacity is outmatched.
there is a lot of stupid in this "analysis".
The notion that the taxpayer in the US is being "sucked dry" by supporting Ukraine and it "can't continue" is just incredibly wrong. We borrow $2 TRILLION annually (on a budget of $6 trillion). Somehow $2.2 trillion is just some unthinkable amount that will destroy the country? The only people pushing the unsustainability mantra are people that wouldn't support it if it were free or (the larger majority) can't bring themselves to support it because Biden is supporting it, which is purely political and if Trump was doing it would be 100% behind the policy.
Further, discussing Russian willingness to sacrifice bodies by looking at WW2 is not a meaningful comparison. Russian willingness to sacrifice in a struggle where they were invaded by an opponent bent on genocide and destruction of their country is not comparable to a situation where Russia invaded someone else unprovoked and that is no real threat to Russia at all. The population will go along for a while, but eventually they will wonder why so many of their sons, husbands and fathers are coming home in increasingly small boxes for closed casket funerals over a 100% voluntary war they started and are at best stalemated in that offers no tangible benefit to the average Russian should they "win". Ukraine is not Nazi Germany and the conflict is not even close to WW2. And that doesn't even take into consideration that Russia was then controlled by a totalitarian regime that gave their citizens absolutely no say in whether or not they wanted to fight; it just told them they had to risk death fighting Germans or endure death in the gulag. It's not difficult to keep sacrificing people when they have no real alternative.
