The War in the Ukraine

tygyg1111

Captain
Registered Member
The number of visual losses speaks for itself. No need for grammarnazi and shifting the goalpost.
The article is shallow, with a lot of 'pep-talk' - basically another "5 reasons why we're winning" type article.

Regarding the cost-benefit / value trade between US supplying weapons from afar, the true cost is being borne by Ukraine and Europe, the latter being robbed near-blind.

Fifth, the war in Ukraine is encouraging and accelerating the energy transition in Europe, but also Europe’s diversification away from Russian energy. Europe is desperately trying to source alternative energy supplies, and US liquefied natural gas (LNG) is proving to be the obvious beneficiary. 
 

Temstar

Brigadier
Registered Member
I agree with this assessment but let's not sugar coat this. The attacks on power infrastructure is designed to break Ukraine's existence as a modern nation and induce a humanitarian disaster. An ugly form of war, yes. But nevertheless we have seen one example of it working already in the past: Yugoslavia 1999. If these attack continue it would seem to me to be just a matter of time.
 

Zichan

Junior Member
Registered Member
I agree with this assessment but let's not sugar coat this. The attacks on power infrastructure is designed to break Ukraine's existence as a modern nation and induce a humanitarian disaster. An ugly form of war, yes. But nevertheless we have seen one example of it working already in the past: Yugoslavia 1999. If these attack continue it would seem to me to be just a matter of time.
Yugoslavia is a bad analogy. Iraq in 1991 is a good analogy.

The US took out 97% of the Iraqi power generation capacity in the first 3 days of the war. The Iraqis shut down the rest because they could no longer keep the grid stable. This led to failure of water pumps, water purification and irrigation systems. It took them many years to repair the damage.

By the end of the campaign, the US took out the majority of Iraqi oil refineries, but spared their oil pumps so that Iraq could still sell its oil but was forced to import refined products after the war. Even in the years after, when Iraq tried to repair their refineries, the US found an excuse to bomb them back to pieces (Desert Fox)

There are various conflicting estimates on the effects of Iraqi civilian infrastructure destruction: from 50,000 to several hundred thousand deaths through the 90s.
 
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gelgoog

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
The US is spending just 5.6% of its defense budget to destroy half of the Russian conventional military capability:
The Ukrainian armed forces have already killed or wounded upwards of 100,000 Russian troops, half its original fighting force; there have been almost 8,000 confirmed losses of armored vehicles including thousands of tanks, thousands of APCs, artillery pieces, hundreds of fixed and rotary wing aircraft, and numerous naval vessels. US spending of 5.6% of its defense budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s conventional military capability seems like an absolutely incredible investment. If we divide out the US defense budget to the threats it faces, Russia would perhaps be of the order of $100bn-150bn in spend-to-threat. So spending just $40bn a year, erodes a threat value of $100-150bn, a two-to-three time return. 

8,000 armored vehicles. The Russians do not even have that many in service.
Is this another shot down 12 cruise missiles out of 10 moment? Are they counting jeeps as armored vehicles?
Yes they are. And using Oryx's lost vehicles list of course.

Also, even if this was true and each of these vehicles cost the Russians a million USD, that would be 8 billion. So where does the other 142 billion this war is costing the Russians come from? For reference's sake a T-72B3M upgrade costs about that much. And a lot of vehicles in that list claimed by Oryx are actually IFVs or APCs which cost much less. So those lost vehicles probably won't even be 8 billion in losses.

They also ignore that Russia is going to get hundreds of thousands of well trained troops ready to fight a modern war once this conflict is over. And they will know what works and what does not and rearm properly. This will only end up reinforcing their ground forces in the end.

I would not be terribly pleased even if Russia did lose most of its conventional forces. Since this would mean they might be more amenable to start using nukes in retaliation. Last but not least this stupid propaganda piece completely ignores the cost US allies are having in this war with the EU spending about as much as the US.
 
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Atomicfrog

Major
Registered Member
Tu-95 and B-52 doing bombing raids over Kiev.

It could shoot them down without any trouble.
Propably intended for that kind of target indeed, don't know the state of these missiles if they are coming from US stockpiles. Some are still in active duty in Europe, if these are send they could be of some use. Old retired one are probably a big risk for anything around them...
 
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