Shrike
11mo ago
I think economics are part of it, but I really don't think raising a kid is as expensive as people think. Like the Korean test prep mentioned in the threat, the things that seem expensive are things besides the actual raising of the kid (e.g. swim lessons, private school, tutoring...)
But just "having a child and raising them to adulthood" is not that expensive from what I can tell.
Shrike
1yr ago
If this is correct (and I am sure the real picture is at least slightly more complicated) than low fertility becoming an elite concern will likely boost the status of having children.
I think part of the reason for a lack of children in the Western world was the media emphasis on Malthusian thinking and the difficulties of having children. If the elites double back it seems likely that fertility will also double back, although I doubt it will rise to the same degree.
Shrike
1yr ago
I need to finish Vinland Saga. I really liked The Norseman in part because I think that film was quite happy to more-or-less inhabit the ideas of the people portrayed in the film, instead of the ideas of modern audiences.
Shrike
1yr ago
This is an underappreciated point, which is that the more people are connected to The Internet, the more The Internet will organically tilt Chinese (and Asian more generally). This is true of other markets, too; we're able to see the impact of Chinese preferences on Hollywood, for instance.
Shrike
1yr ago
For the record, about a third of Americans own guns, although I would estimate the number would be slightly higher since a nonzero amount of people will lie to people who call them on the phone asking if they own a boomstick. 44% report living in a household with a gun, which is functionally closer to a useful number (as if a wife can't or won't use her husband's revolver). I wouldn't be surprise if the "true" numbers were closer to 40% and 50% respectively.
Shrike
1yr ago
They've been reversed by using the other three boxes, which is...vastly preferable.
Shrike
1yr ago
Not to mention that it turns out that the PREMIER weapon in modern warfare (for cost-effectiveness, anyway) is not tanks, fighter aircraft, or cruise missiles, but a $25 Chinese Amazon drone with a $2 explosive warhead.
I actually think that bulwark-against-tyranny types often underestimate the difficulty of a successful low-intensity conflict. But imagine a Northern Ireland-type conflict today, except the IRA has the DJ Mavik.
Shrike
1yr ago
This is a bad and inaccurate model for how successful revolts happen. The American Revolution was led by dissatisfied elites who were living at the pointy end of life satisfaction at the time and risked it all for reasons that were partially ideological.
Desperate people foster low-level street violence that is typically easily crushed. Dissatisfied elites are the true threats to regimes, and they don't revolt out of desperation. There's a reason that every few years people discover that DHS or someone has been flagging disgruntled O6s as threats to homeland stability, and it's not because they're stupid.
Shrike
1yr ago
The government can force you into military service if they want, and always has been able to, at least in the United States.
But yes, as IGI-111 says, a strong militia at the state level provides a very potent counterbalance to the capabilities of the federal government. Also, when every single person is either in the military or has military training, it may make your armed forces less reliable for the purposes of tyranny (since you'll have a harder time selecting for loyalists) and it makes the citizenry you'll be looking to oppress considerably more resilient. Interestingly, up to and during the Civil War, the army was actually a very localist organization. Regiments were raised from a certain geographic area, and they selected their own officers democratically – a far cry from the centralized command and control mechanisms that we all assume to be the default today.
But besides this, the reason I floated it is that it actually could be (I think, maybe) a decent mechanism for weeding out legitimately dangerous characters; a dishonorable discharge is the equivalent of a felony and bars people from firearm possession. Maybe, since we're making up stuff in the abstract (Goodguy still being in favor of the Second Amendment in practice) a simple "can you serve your country and community responsibly for a year without committing a felonious offense?" test is a good way of preemptively weeding out the people Goodguy is talking about.
(I'm very much on the fence about this and expect to get at least one comment from someone who served that actually no the psychopaths do fine in military service and then they use their experience to go tip over banks in Chicago or something. But I'd rather be conscripted for a year and then have a free pass to buy whatever gun I used in the service than live under a British shotguns-only permitting regime.)
But I think this comment is a good time to point out something sort of interesting at the heart of American freedom. Today, "freedom" is typically defined as "lack of government coercion" but the American experiment assumed lots of government coercion as part of what made freedom possible. Things like jury service, militia service, and the draft were contemplated and accepted by America's framers as something that would strengthen American freedom. A lot of this was about checks-and-balances, but I think it's worth considering the sort of person they thought such civic participation would make.
Gun ownership is like car ownership: the more you use them, the more exposure to risk you accept, but the more proficient you get at them, the more you lower your risk while using them. (Driving a car for only an hour a year is actually a bad idea!) Today there's so many truisms about "law abiding gun owners" that I think they often obscure the interesting suggestion at the heart of them, which is that unlawful firearms violence is inversely correlated to actual use of firearms. My guess is that people who own firearms to hunt, or as a hobby, get more range time than most murderers.
I don't think that using a firearm makes you a more moral person. But I do think that being part of a culture that teaches you to exercise self-governance (both at the personal level and at the civic level) is more likely to make you into a person who is law abiding and responsible. I wouldn't say we've entirely lost that culture in America, and I'm not confident the schemes people scrape together (mandatory militia service! gun permits! regulation! deregulation!) will be able to return the parts of that culture that have eroded away. But that's the America I want to (and largely do) live in, an America where I can trust my neighbors to vote wisely, serve as just jurors, handle firearms and automobiles with the respect they deserve, and ask if I mind before lighting up a cigarette.
Shrike
1yr ago
Well, one big difference is that cigarettes only play a very minor role in hurting anyone other than the people who use them, as opposed to guns.
I challenge you to rethink this framing, both because secondhand smoking is a thing (estimated cost on a Google: upwards of 40K lives per year; somewhere around 3x the total number of gun murders) and because (IIRC) most gun violence victims in the US either shot themselves or (less likely but still statistically significant) were part of an ongoing criminal enterprise. People getting shot and killed in e.g. a random mugging or a school shooting is far from the median case of death by firearm.
Maybe there is a way to keep whatever deterring-the-government force that the 2nd Amendment has without also making it so easy for apolitical, anti-social psychopaths to get guns?
Yes, mandatory military/militia service.
As for the NSA, I am not convinced that it does much that is good to curtail violent crime in the US.
Yes, because we don't ask it to. Probably it could if so directed.
But I believe that broadly free speech is essential to the kind of society that I would want to live in
This is how many people feel about guns.
Shrike
1yr ago
widespread public gun ownership did nothing to stop NSA domestic surveillance I also see how the Republicans' pro-2nd Amendment position has contributed to the problem [of violent crime]
Well, if the goal is to get rid of or dramatically curtail violent crime, NSA domestic surveillance is Good, Actually. Having the government spy on my data all of the time is an "invasion of privacy" which hurts me only in a dignitary way, except inasmuch as it can be used to construct a domestic surveillance state in the service of a totalitarian regime. But, since the 4th Amendment hasn't stopped said domestic surveillance either, from your position why shouldn't we bite the bullet the rest of the way and go full panopticon?
The answer of course is that freedom isn't a bright-line binary switch [unless you live in a place with actual chattel slavery], it's a back-and-forth, and just because you're on the backfoot for a decade or two doesn't mean you should throw in the towel and embrace the comparative advantages of TOTALITARIANISM. And in the same way that the 4th Amendment is an (imperfect) protector of American's rights, the 2nd Amendment is also an (imperfect) protector of American's rights. Certainly it has protected American's rights to keep and bear arms!
You act as if this right is purely instrumental, but it is not. The 2nd Amendment is good because it does serve as a bulwark against tyranny, and just because the bulwark isn't perfect doesn't mean we shouldn't get rid of it (imagine if we got rid of checks and balances because they demonstrably fail from time to time!) But it's also good because shooting is fun and a good thing for people to do, and it's the sort of good and fun thing that people want to take away, and it's good that there's a rule saying you can't do that. You can see something similar with the 1st Amendment: it's not merely instrumental, with free speech as a bulwark against "tyranny" – free speech is something that is good to exercise.
The problems, in terms of risk to human life and wellbeing, caused by alcohol, tobacco, and drugs are vastly worse than the problems caused by guns in the United States, and they are probably worse contributors to the violent crime problem, but you rarely see anyone endorse banning the former and a great many people are convinced that banning the latter causes or contributes to a lot of modern ills (including, ironically, violent crime.) If we're going to violate people's rights to achieve Good Ends (we swear for real this time!) then I think the cost/benefit calculus is significantly higher there. But, curiously, there seems to be much more demand for taking people's guns than cigarettes (even though about three times as many Americans own guns.) I think one can conclude from this that the desire to take guns has more to do (on balance, perhaps not in every individual case, including yours) from a dislike of guns than it does a Principled Stance on government action that (ostensibly) is for people's own benefit.
Shrike
1yr ago
I agree that it was a war of choice, but I think they had ~somewhat deluded themselves into thinking that Lincoln's election sealed the deal against them. I think this was an exaggeration in the short term, but probably they were correct in the long term: the hostility to slavery was real, even if many people were apathetic about it, and the power of slaveholding states was being curtailed, and geopolitical factors were tilting against the South electorally. Basically, they were inching closer to being permanently locked out of political power as a region, I think.
The South thought they would win because they thought they had superior martial prowess, and because they were fighting a defensive war and believed their situation was analogous to that of the colonies during the American Revolution. They were at least partially correct (they were better at fighting) but the North had more manpower and was able to import vast amounts of additional manpower over the course of the war as well. But they also had convinced themselves, I think, that the struggle was existential. They were willing to fight to preserve their way of life, which I suppose in some ways was easier than changing their way of life, even if the latter was more moral and would have been more beneficial in the long run than losing a war.
Shrike
1yr ago
Or alternatively everyone in North America might have grown to see the "peculiar institution" as a defining trait that set them off from the Brits and when the British moved to crackdown on slavery in the 1800s the combined North American colonies might have steamrolled them with superior Yankee industry and Southern military leadership, resulting in a hundred more years of chattel slavery across the entire Anglosphere!
I find your hypothetical more reasonable than mine. But something one doesn't understand until one reads letters from the time period is how much Northern will to fight the South was motivated by (checks notes) antipathy towards Europe, not slavery per se. (On average I'd say Northerners didn't like slavery but they didn't like black people either.) The Northerners saw the Southerners as oligarchs after the European feudal model, and that was a large part of what they had a problem with. Splitting the Union was unacceptable to them because it meant that the grand Republican experiment had "failed" (read: made them look bad to the Europeans.) Or at least that's what I recall being struck by when I did some primary source readings. Perhaps my memory and/or coursework was selective.
That's not to say that there weren't a very vocal and dedicated group that saw slavery itself as unacceptable and campaigned specifically to get rid of it, even at the cost of war. But (and this is my point) culture works in funny ways and in an alternative history where the Revolution never happened over self-government+taxes it might have happened later over "self-government+slavery." Never underestimate how crotchety people will get over being told what to do.
Just as a technical note, the South wanted the UK to intervene badly, but I don't think that was their best or only chance of winning, and they actively pursued strategies to unilaterally break the blockade themselves. Ultimately I think they lost because they got bled white, not because they were blockaded. Southern casualties were extraordinarily high as a percentage of the population compared to any other American war, and although they had trouble with heavy industry (you know, cannons) they were able to produce basic necessities like gunpowder to the end. In fact, IIRC, their soldiers were better off for powder than they were for food.
Shrike
1yr ago
The Ukrainians had been launching strikes into the region for some time, which means that any troops being built up for an attack were probably still well behind the lines if this theory is correct (I dunno if it is, not being privy to Ukrainian high command's thinking.) If you were to launch such an attack, you'd want to time it before any troops were placed on the border but after as many minefields and roads were cleared as possible.
There have been some open-source reporting suggesting that there might be a Russian attack from this position, although Russian activity in the area seems to have dropped off before the attack. Ukrainians were saying in July that they expected an attack from the North, and the Russians did in fact launch a raid later that month.
A Russian buildup in the Kursk region was reported earlier this spring, although it was subsequently reported that Russian activity in the Sumy area decreased.
Shrike
1yr ago
The best explanation/defense of Ukraine's actions that I saw actually came from a guy I consider fairly pro-Russian (Michael Valtersson, a Swede), who said they were expecting a Russian attack from that axis and attacked preemptively. He said the Russians had begun removing minefields in preparation of the troop incursion and that the Ukrainians infiltrated in sabotage groups and then probably attacked during a routine troop rotation (so they were able to double their numbers for the offensive without it raising alarm bells.)
A preemptive attack at a weak spot seems like, on balance, a good move to me. Throws the enemy off balance, forces them to throw their forces into retaking ground they have lost instead of taking more ground.
Shrike
1yr ago
Absolutely true, but imho they ought to be prepared for something more sophisticated than that. (It's been reported, for instance, that Iran is interested in retaliating against Trump for bombing Soleimani.)
Shrike
1yr ago
Podunk or small-time operators underestimating how much impact even a small surge crowd can have on cell reliability is a pretty common sort of mistake to make -- even local femtocells/microcells often struggle badly, and you aren't going to get them in place for a one-off -- but the flip side is that it's so common that the USSS should not only consider it in planning but also have some (if jank) solution, here.
Plus, cell phone jammers aren't hard to get, I understand, and would be a pretty obvious part of any plot that was more sophisticated than "one guy with a boomstick." I can hardly believe that SS was comfortable relying on "let's swap cell numbers," that seems crazy to me.
Shrike
1yr ago
Germans care particularly about maintaining the integrity of NATO and the European Union.
The EU I believe, but NATO...I think the story is more complicated. Germany has just now gotten around to maybe meeting its 2% spending commitment, and (it seems to me) played both sides by buying Russian gas and "buying Ukraine time" in negotiations with Russia until the US forced it to jump onboard the NATO bandwagon after Russia went into Ukraine. Even now I think that Germany is acutely aware that they're going to have to live with Russia permanently and are hedging their bets.
I agree that Germany sees NATO membership as in its interests, but in a paradoxical sort of way I think that "easier, more prosperous life nestled under the pax-Americana security blanket" undermines NATO by creating the free-rider problem (or, more charitably, perception) that allows Trump to, well, argue is a bad deal. On the other hand, if Germany and the other NATO states had actually spent their 2% GDP as recommended since the fall of the Cold War, it seems less likely that they would need American backup: the EU has a larger population and is wealthier than Russia.
But complicating the paradox, a militarily-independent EU is not what is in American interests (we fought a couple wars over there before putting the boot on the German neck and we haven't removed it since). Everything that's happened recently (coincidentally or not!) has been pushing Germany back towards the Pax Americana safety blanket you describe: Nord Stream exploding, yes, but also the US leaning hard on Germany to deplete its own defense stocks while its economy wobbles. Now with the new understanding that, win or lose in Ukraine, the future of Europe is going to involve a very angry Russia with a larger, more experienced military, and with many of Europe's nations having given away significant amounts of their already-too-paltry defense stocks to Russia...well, who are they going to turn to for security and supplies? That's right, the US Army and Lockheed Martin.
At the end of the day, Russia is largely a threat to the United States via its nuclear arsenal. There are only two powers on Earth that can threaten American maritime dominance, and one of them is China. The other is a united Europe, and America has done a good job of preventing that. And Germany, precisely because of their lack of commitment to NATO, has made NATO all the more crucial.
But, in my opinion, if Germany was really committed to NATO in an...honorable sense, I suppose, they would have met their defense spending benchmarks, maintained their military (which is supposed to be in a sad state) and avoided giving the only real NATO adversary economic leverage.
Shrike
1yr ago
One of the interesting things about the United States currently is that you can have people who see themselves as rallying against oppressive power by supporting the incumbent President and the nation's various intelligence agencies and the like.
The political divisions in the US of course are imho such that both "sides" have at least some credible basis to perceive themselves as the underdogs (or at least sticking up for the underdog) fighting The Man.
Shrike
1yr ago
This is a good call. I think that tech inching towards the GOP – which as I understand it has to do a lot with the other guys threatening bad/expensive new policies – is pretty under-covered but potentially important.
Maybe part of the reason it's under-covered is that the media has been covering tech as a bunch of reactionaries for some time now, so if they actually start to vote right that's almost less of a story then them dabbling in Uncle Ted Thought or whatever?
Shrike
1yr ago
Which is not a reflection of how ratios have changed since the war began, when the ratios were significantly more in the Russian favor.
We can test that theory trivially with tanks. Russia went in with 1700 and now as 3,500; Ukraine then had 1,000ish(?) and earlier this year was reported to have managed to maintain the number it had when the war began.
If light weapons (drones) are more important, Russia currently has a drone overmatch and it isn't drawing those down from Soviet stockpiles. (From what I can tell both sides are largely just buying from China, which is funny.)
So both in light and heavy weapons it appears Russia still has a 3:1 edge. If I had to guess their edge is much less extreme, possibly even negative, in frontline soldiers, but that hasn't stopped the Russian offensive. I'd be happy to see hard numbers on this, or contrarian takes. But from what I can tell the main Ukrainian advantage over time has been fielding (piecemeal) new Western systems like Storm Shadow, which are often effective (at least for at time) but are also limited in number.
For the purpose of attrition- which is the strategy of both sides- the 'lighter' armaments are considerably more important, particularly as the Russian strategy militarily relies on offensive victory, but the Ukrainian strategy relies on defensive attrition until Russia's production / refurbishment rates burn through the stockpiles.
Well, let's keep in mind that the Ukrainian's stated war aim is to regain Crimea. To achieve their war goal, they will need to constitute a very powerful offensive force. Which cuts back around to your overall point (which is well-taken) that Russia needs to maintain not just parity+ but an overmatch of capability in order to continue its offensive. And if that's true, it implies now that Ukraine needs a 3 - 1 advantage in order to win the war (as per their stated war aims.)
It's not even a long-term advantage, as the western coalition still has many resources it hasn't even begun to meaningfully tap but which it has access to, such as the American boneyards, the pre-position stocks around the war, the South Korean ammo stockpiles, and so on.
We tapped the South Korean stockpiles last year (.3 or .5 million rounds out of an estimated 3.4 million.) I agree that South Korea has a lot more, but I think that counts as a meaningful tap.
I don't understand US thinking on our boneyards, but as near as I can figure for some reason we don't want to tap them. Otherwise we would have sent more M1s.
Ukraine doesn't need military parity with Russia in the near or medium term to win the war.
I agree that this is true if "win the war" is taken to mean "preserving some degree of Ukrainian sovereignty or territory." As per your own statements above, though, I do think they need something like military parity at a minimum to achieve their stated war aims.
Now, I think it's easy to discount Ukrainian stated war aims as something they're never going to get – and that's fair enough! I also think it's quite plausible that (Trump or no Trump, NATO support or no NATO support, however you slice it) that Russia does not achieve all of its war aims. It's fairly typical in war for neither side to "win" to the degree that they wanted to.
Shrike
1yr ago
Note that Ukraine's commander-in-chief does not actually make a position on relative assets
He does on equipment, specifically: "there is a ratio of 1:2 or 1:3 in their favour..."
It's also worth noting that, having made this happen, the same dynamics that make it difficult to occur (entrenched political consensus, established interest groups for the status quo) also make it even more difficult to reverse (not only entrenched political consensus, but the active dismantlement of the pro-Russian interest groups in key economic sectors).
I don't think this is true with regards to heavy armaments – the simple fact that Europe has a finite amount of tanks to donate makes it very easy to stop donating them. I find this more persuasive with economic aid and lighter armaments (small caliber ammunition, etc.) However, economic aid appears to be dwindling from some quarters – Germany is reducing its donations, specifically. So clearly cutting Ukraine a blank or even large check isn't set in stone going forward, although perhaps that's merely a German position (Germany of course being one of the most relevant EU nations!)
what Ukraine has gained since the war started in 2022.
A lot of those figures are public, though – somewhere around 500 new tanks were delivered to Ukraine, for instance, whereas Syrskyi says (if I interpret correctly) that the Russians have gained about 1,800 over even Russian losses. The Ukrainians have not made comparative gains. The advantage is moving towards Russia.
as the Russians have increasingly transitioned from internal-economic stockpiles and production to relying on imports of Iranian drones instead of cruise missiles
The Russians are still using cruise missiles (although the Iranian drones are very good for draining Ukrainian air defense stockpiles) and they are improving the quality of the missiles used. (See e.g. the Kyiv Independent). While I certainly believe that the Russians have brought a lot of less-capable vehicles out of stockpiles (T-62s being the headliner item) the Russians are continuing to develop and iterate their weapons capabilities, and they are continuing to manufacture and iterate new weapons systems. The biggest development is probably the Russian glide bomb, which were neglected in the run-up to the war (a huge Russian L!) but is now being used in numbers.
This period of first-mover advantage is concluding, hence why the Russian strategy this year has been about trying to shape impressions before the American political election season, without regard to sustainability over another 4 year period vis-a-vis achieving a nearer-term ceasefire.
This seems plausible to me wrt Russian motivations, but I've still seen no signs that NATO industry is ready to catch up to Russia in mass production within a relevant timeframe. The United States aspires to get to 100,000 shells a month by 2026. Russia is currently producing 250,000 shells a month. Over the next four-year time period there's every reason to believe they could sustain their production, and many reasons to believe that the US and NATO aren't interested in sending another 500 tanks and can't compete in terms of artillery shell production.
Russia's economy is not fine for all the old reasons that government-war-spending driven growth is anti-reliable over longer times and comes with real opportunity costs. This doesn't mean that Russia is anywhere near about to fail, but it is making future problems progressively worse
This seems reasonable to me. My low-economic-IQ take is that sanctions may have helped Russian cashflow in the short term by raising oil prices. Of course it might have hurt them in other areas (microchip access) but that still can translate as a raw economic boost.
Because the Russian military-industrial production is primarily conversion, the production numbers only stay high as long as there are material inputs to convert. Once those stockpiles go, you either produce from scratch- which the Russians have not demonstrated they are set up to- or you import new inputs for conversion- which there is relatively minimal sourcing for- or your don't produce at all.
Again, publicly-available Western sources consistently attest to Russian shell production superiority, so even if most shells hitting the battlefield right now are conversion, Russia will win the shell production battle in the long run unless the West has either deeper stockpiles or deeper production capability – and it doesn't seem that they do. That isn't the only name of the game, but it's a very important part of it. I think the Russians will have more problems with more advanced items, but they're still making tanks (where they've increased production), aircraft, cruise missiles, etc. China isn't going to stop selling them FPV drones anytime soon. In short, Russian military production has in fact increased, and while I agree that production will never equal the ability to casually drawdown a million shells from inventory, Russia merely needs to produce more than the West is willing to donate and Ukraine is able to build to maintain an advantage. So far they have the edge and appear to be positioned to maintain the edge in artillery production and small drones, and unless the US decides to donate more tanks + APCs in quantity it appears that Russian production (even if it's a paltry dozen a month) of ground vehicles will outstrip Ukrainian production.
In my mind, this doesn't prove you wrong with regards to Russia's motives – they would prefer to win before the new US shell production hits, before the F-16s arrive, etc. They would have preferred to win on Day One, and tried such a strategy, and failed. But if they can maintain superior force generation and weapons production, there's every reason to think they will defeat the Ukrainians in the long run, and there's every reason to think they are superior now, because Syrskyi says they are. If they are superior now, then Ukraine needs a massive influx of foreign aid to reach parity, otherwise – even if Russia is at their peak strength, as you suggest (and you may be correct!) – they will both degrade in strength over time, with Russia retaining its edge, which it's maintained on the ground (as seen in its slow gain of territory) after smashing up the Ukrainian counter-offensive.
Shrike
1yr ago
Hmm, OK, DoD definition of a peer competitor here:
"A peer competitor, as the term is used here, is a state or collection of challengers with the power and motivation to confront the United States on a global scale in a sustained way and to a sufficient level where the ultimate outcome of a conflict is in doubt even if the United States marshals its resources in an effective and timely manner." (Source)
And it seems like in 2017 the DoD considered Russia, China, Iran and North Korea as near-peer. Personally I think there's a huge difference between 2017 North Korea/Iran and China/Russia, but the definition of "collection of challengers" might be doing some of the work there.
I think that Russia, China, Iran and North Korea in 2017 are all look harder than Desert Storm actually was, but I also think that it's easier to say that in hindsight. I definitely don't think it's appropriate to consider Iraq a "near-peer" in the sense Russia is or was, however.
Tangent, but – it's not merely a question of production; the war has also revealed that Russian technology is able to adequately counter ours (usually, it seems, after an adjustment period). For instance, the Russians shot down our in-service anti-radiation missiles! That was perhaps predictable before the war, but I still think it's a BIG DEAL because US/NATO air superiority doctrine is premised around being able to destroy enemy SAM launchers with (among other weapons) anti-radiation missiles, and the Ruskies just...shot them down with the air defenses they were supposed to be targeting. And that's just one example of their ability to adopt to our drip-feeding them our most modern (surface) weapons systems at an inoculatory rate.
This really gets my goat since in a real no-holds-barred war with NATO where the first two weeks might be determinate, if it takes the Russians two weeks to adjust to our tactics, their ability to adjust eventually is no big deal. But if we give them that month to adjust now, they'll be better prepared if there's ACTUALLY a confrontation with NATO. And presumably so will Iran and China. (The one upside is that this knife cuts both ways; the West has a much better picture of Russian capabilities now.)
If you see the war as a way to manipulate NATO countries to US interests by ensuring they are weak and dependent on US military aid so that they do not develop their own, independent military and the foreign policy that is downstream from that, 'we' (the US) absolutely don't need to do either of these things. Letting Ukraine bleed dry and letting Putin station a massive, battle-hardened army rebuilt with modern technology on the Polish border is, from a certain point of view, a massive win for US foreign policy.
Whether or not that's actually the US goal here I obviously can't say but I can't help but notice that everything 'we' (the US) has done seems to be nudging things in that direction.
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