There's no point in arguing in this thread anymore. People have their minds made up on what's happening and only time will tell who was more accurate.
People are purposely forgetting the word cannon fodder exists for a reason and that it is an age old strategy to send in weaker forces first to probe and see what's what before risking good troops. People haven't seen any modern Russian anything but insist they are getting their shit pushed in. Russia has come out and said the bulk of the ground forces actually doing shit are the Donbaus militias and the actual Russian military is mostly doing support. All that's being ignored because Russia bad/USA military STRONK!
If you're blowing of steam shitpotying here go for it! Actual conversation about what's going on died a few hundred pages ago.
6 more days!
Intelligent discourse is something rarely found, most people are just different flavors of narrativeposters (myself included).
But I like a point that you touched on, the western intolerance for military losses.
The Allies victory in WW2 was bought with American money (Lend-Lease) and Russian blood. I don't know exactly when it was that America lost its appetite for war dead, but it was certainly gone by Vietnam. Perhaps it was due to the tenuous reasons for being there? I know many here will say it was due to communist subversion and agitation empowering the anti-war movement, and perhaps. But I can't say for certain.
Regardless, from that point onwards, it was in firm effect that America had lost its taste for actual war losses. That in many ways guided the military policy and strategy of the US from that point onwards.
Limiting their excursions to bombing the shit out of places, or in the case of the gulf war bombing the country for a month continuously, to the detriment of Iraqi civilian casualties, to ensure the ground war "push" was much more of a formality than an actual military campaign. The American populace at large is more indifferent to towelhead kids getting blown to kingdom come than US Soldiers dying in combat, perhaps.
Hell, the strange direction "Special Forces" has developed into from their original incarnations has been pretty symptomatic of how the political forces use the military forces, in light of US soldiers dying in war being strictly bad press. What was once meant for the training of indigenous populations into combat forces for theatres in which the US could not overtly incur into and other asymmetric warfare missions, began morphing into the "Super soldier unkillable Rambo ubermensch" trope we have today.
It's better to spend Millions training and outfitting a 16 man SF team to do the dirty work with a 10x force equivalence, because 16 who's families have been indoctrinated into the SF warrior cult mindset won't go running to the press and the anti-war movement if they're wiped out, whereas 160 infantry yokels gunned down would be a strong political cudgel.
I can't help but feel that's part of the SF/SEAL worship, to make any losses they incur seen as honorable and heroic instead of indicative of the follies of war.
Anyway, I'm obviously rambling at this point. America is trying to buy it's way to victory in this conflict the same way it did in WW1 and WW2. But to secure victory, the blood gods demand sacrifice. Lend Lease didn't carry the allies to victory until America was willing to put its sons on the sacrificial alter as well. The same goes for NATO.
Russia will gladly pay whatever blood price necessary, and despite the numerous examples posted of Russian military incompetency, I have not seen anything to indicate Russia losing it's tolerance of paying the blood toll as a collective.
The Soviets were willing to spend 10 years sticking their cocks in the anthill that is Afghanistan while the world decried them. They were willing to fuck that anthill even as the world decried them, even when the war appeared completely unwinnable. And they did so for 10 years.
For all the anti-Russia, anti-Putin, "Russia is finished you A&H faggots!" posters, I hope for your sake that Russia is as incompetent as you claim. Because despite incompetence, they are extremely persistent. So, no matter how slow or costly this incursion is going, Russia is likely not as bothered about it as you might hope. I think they're just going to keep doubling down until they win or Russia completely collapses. And I guess we'll see which one it ends up being.
