He claims that the counteroffensive failed because the Ukrainians were not given time to sufficiently train in NATO tactics.
At this point, I'm 50/50 on whether Ukraine might have done better if they received no NATO training at all. Maybe specifics on the weapons they were supplied but strategically? Higher level tactics? Everything NATO touches seems to be a disaster. I don't have any experience in the military but my experience in other sectors increasingly leads me to the view that there's a layer of power that has consolidated itself across pretty much all industry and government that drive out anybody who isn't part of them and that this layer
doesn't know what the fuck it is doing. It has one talent and one only - the ability to recognise people that might upset the gravy train and to close ranks against them.
He also explains how the war can be re-framed from being about giving money to Ukraine to being about creating high wage manufacturing jobs in western countries:
Some people seem to forget what work is actually for. It's to produce things of value, wealth. Turning your economy into a workshop for weapons (a) is just a epically worse version of the broken window fallacy, written large across the globe. And (b) creates an incentive to perpetuate.
Toward the end of the article, he talks about how the struggle with Russia can prepare the west for an american military pivot to Asia where the majority of American forces will leave Europe to be stationed in Asia against China. He talks about how the Ukraine war can help prepare Europe to manage this pivot better.
It amazes me how completely blind some can be to how their actions are perceived by others. Like to what sort of person is it
normal to talk about undermining the economy of your trading partners (as the USA does when it introduces sanctions to prevent China from, for example, importing microchips for modern AI software) or to surround with bases and missiles countries half way around the world that nobody in their right minds thinks are going to attack America - purely to prevent those countries achieving economic parity with your own country? Adam Smith would be spinning in his grave that people call this "capitalism". It's a nightmare. It's a nightmare that people have been in for so long that they don't understand that to people outside it they seem like lunatics. Does nobody in the US foreign policy understand - this is not normal! This is not friendly. This is
hostile behaviour.
I know lasers and DE weapons aren't that common on the battlefield right now, but wouldn't they be fairly easy to defeat with refractory materials? I know weather conditions are an enormous factor with atmospheric lasers, and I don't know how powerful a laser needs to be to bore through a mirror cruising through the air.
I think someone else answered better already, but when I read up about this years ago the take away was that anything approaching an ordinary mirror just wouldn't cut it for the sort of laser that could take down a missile. Would just heat up and melt, that's assuming could handle flight in the first place. Drones I guess have lower requirements but then also take a lot less of a laser to bring down in the first place. Maybe we'll see anti-drone lasers at some point but due to power requirements they'll mostly be largely static things around sensitive areas. More likely, further refinement in very small missiles. One thing I'm surprised we haven't seen yet is more automated guns. There must be nearly the tech now that would make a human sniper look pretty inferior in accuracy and vastly inferior in rate of fire. Someone a while back demo an anti-mosquito laser. It just zapped the poor little things right out the air - one by one but fast. If there's the tech to point something at a mosquito at 2m away, there should be the tech to point something at a drone at 2,000m away! And anything that doesn't have to be carried around by a person I could imagine you would be able to do a lot with recoil. It wouldn't take much to disable a small to medium sized drone if you shot it. So why not just that? A robosniper that can fire of a dozen shots real quick at better accuracy than a human. The gun part is already a mature technology. Just need some well calibrated motors to point it. No messing around with lasers or $4,000 each rockets.
Congratulations to the deep-cover Russian agent who implemented this policy designed to make sure that Ukraine's population NEVER recovers from all this by ensuring anyone who escaped the pointless meat-grinder can never come back home.
Funny, I thought it was Western govts. that wanted to depopulate Ukraine, all the better to buy it up.
