No one froze in Iraq or Afghanistan where the world’s #1 superpower with the defence budget that’s a large multiple of the entire GDP of those countries used the most sophisticated military hardware to achieve… what?
Well, the US conquered these countries, killed a lot of Taliban, inc. bin laden, toppled Saddam, installed democracy… admittedly things might have got slightly worse after they left, but that’s an ideology problem more than a military one.
But there is a difference. Do the Crimeans see themselves as Russian or Ukranian? Do they care enough to fight a guerilla war? If not, then an analogy to Iraq can’t be drawn.
Modern militaries give very few advantages when it comes to rooting out insurgents hiding in the general populace—you deal with that old-school, either with convincing the local public to join you, co-opting local power brokers, flailing ineffectually, collective punishment, or outright slaughter(on the sliding scale of evil). The US has used the first three in roughly equal proportion.
Russia is unlikely to retreat into the shadows—they’re a line-of-battle army, always have been, and most of Putin’s appeal is restoring the pre-1991 national pride of being able to throw down with NATO and survive. If it ever got to a war, I think they’d fight it mostly straight, and they’d lose badly.
If it ever got to a war, I think they’d fight it mostly straight, and they’d lose badly.
That all depends on what kind of war we are talking about. The biggest issue for the West is political will, and everyone knows it. Even in a full-out non-nuclear war, it’s not going to be like running tanks at full speed through the desert to Baghdad. Russia’s goal would be to bog down NATO army and engage in exchange of heavy casualties. If it manages to do this, it wins—it doesn’t need clear battlefield victories.
No one froze in Iraq or Afghanistan where the world’s #1 superpower with the defence budget that’s a large multiple of the entire GDP of those countries used the most sophisticated military hardware to achieve… what?
Well, the US conquered these countries, killed a lot of Taliban, inc. bin laden, toppled Saddam, installed democracy… admittedly things might have got slightly worse after they left, but that’s an ideology problem more than a military one.
But there is a difference. Do the Crimeans see themselves as Russian or Ukranian? Do they care enough to fight a guerilla war? If not, then an analogy to Iraq can’t be drawn.
Modern militaries give very few advantages when it comes to rooting out insurgents hiding in the general populace—you deal with that old-school, either with convincing the local public to join you, co-opting local power brokers, flailing ineffectually, collective punishment, or outright slaughter(on the sliding scale of evil). The US has used the first three in roughly equal proportion.
Russia is unlikely to retreat into the shadows—they’re a line-of-battle army, always have been, and most of Putin’s appeal is restoring the pre-1991 national pride of being able to throw down with NATO and survive. If it ever got to a war, I think they’d fight it mostly straight, and they’d lose badly.
That all depends on what kind of war we are talking about. The biggest issue for the West is political will, and everyone knows it. Even in a full-out non-nuclear war, it’s not going to be like running tanks at full speed through the desert to Baghdad. Russia’s goal would be to bog down NATO army and engage in exchange of heavy casualties. If it manages to do this, it wins—it doesn’t need clear battlefield victories.