Ukraine Always Get What You Want

I defer to three_bags' vastly superior knowledge and experience, but there's also a question of manpad density.

An F-35 can drop a glide bomb from more than 20 nautical miles away. Manpads protecting a specific target would never, ever see the attacking plane.

 

Meh. We sentence ours to death in schools.

\crossthread

 

Right now, we've got to make sure and give Ukraine the resources to be in the same position, with that same right look.

 

Good stuff, 3BF. A Russian wouldn't know a Dash-10 or a 2404 if they hit him in the face.

 

Again, given how much the US spends on its global intelligence apparatus, how we didn't know the terrible state of Russian military readiness is a real scandal.*

We could have intervened earlier and more forcefully to back Putin down.

Instead, we're here:





* presumably, we know just as little about China. You can't do everything from a satellite.

 

also

 

The flaw in your proposal is that as long as Putin thought the Russian military was 100 times stronger than it actually was, nothing the US could do would've shaken him from that delusion.

 

Just as likely Putin knows exactly the state of his own military - but doesn't really care.

He's a mob boss, enforcing a protection racket. His muscle? His nukes.

He's backed the West down all these years by simply taking what he wanted without much fuss. Georgia. Chechnya. Crimea.

Now he wants Ukraine.

As long as he's willing to keep firing white phosphorous rounds at civilian targets - and we let him do so - this will go on and on and on.

 

1) Zelenskyy is lobbying for his country to keep getting supplies as he should.

2) Being the road team in an invasion is incredibly hard. Ukraine fought harder than Russia anticipated

3) Russia severely overestimated Russian support in Ukraine and drastically underestimated their own capability

4) NATO did come through. Russia was hoping they wouldn’t and it paid off.

5) We were never sending ground troops into this fight. We’re saving it for if they attack a NATO country. I know that’s what you want. But nukes are a real threat and we’re not going to get NATO support to do it.

None of this is an intelligence failure.

 

see my post above

Absolute failure of intelligence that the US didn't know Putin's Potemkin army was a movie prop.

And I've never advocated sending US or NATO ground troops.

I have advocated - vigorously, strenuously - for more and better and faster and earlier strategic and tactical help from the West.

Putin shouldn't be able to peel off a third of Ukraine in a negotiated "peace" just because Americans are tired of hearing about it.

 

There is no question the original US intelligence assessment was that Russia would occupy Ukraine much as we did Iraq in 2003, without much organized resistance. That was the Russian assessment, too. The US was much quicker to see it was wrong than was Russia, however. I don't know if our intelligence mistake was so much overestimating Russia as underestimating Ukraine's capacity and most of all willingness to resist.