whatihear
19hr ago
Ukraines best fortifications are all in the rest of the Donbas, so it is in no way a purely symbolic issue. Also, their whole strategy is to atrit the Russians by playing defense, so every meter of land is valuable because they can make the Russians pay in blood for it. If there was any reason to trust the Russians not to just resume the war after being given the Donbas, the Ukrainians would probably be willing to do that, but there isn’t, so giving it up without a fight is massively unpopular in Ukraine.
whatihear
16d ago
When boiling water for cooking, the temperature doesn’t matter, just the state of matter. That’s what I mean when I say you don’t think about it day to day. The boiling and freezing point of water as they relate to other temperatures almost never come up. The freezing point does matter a bit, but you never care what temperature your water is boiling at, just that it is doing so. I doubt most people living above sea level even know their normal boiling point it is so inconsequential.
whatihear
16d ago
It is objectively true that the range of double and single digit numbers is more fully used by F for day to day use. You can make subjective arguments about how relevant that is, but I think those numbers are easier to remember and work with.
The one advantage of C, that it benchmarks nicely to water, is not really something you need to think about, and doesn’t even hold true for people living at altitude.
I’m an American who goes out of his way to buy metric tools. I’m a big metric fan. Temperature is the one area were it’s just worse.
whatihear
18d ago
Yeah, but most people will just scroll TikTok and eat slop. When they get bored they will do crime. There are plenty of countries with mass unemployment and it does not appear to cause some great blossoming of culture and spiritual living. A UBI future looks like the crime levels of South Africa, a populace that rapidly forgets what little republican virtue remains, and a resentful productive class that flees abroad or sullenly stops investing.
whatihear
27d ago
We have much worse intelligence against the houthies than the Mossad does against Iran, so I don’t think it is apples to apples.
As far as I know basically all the air assets we lost were reapers. If we are flying slow drones over the country at all, that means the air defenses are highly degraded. That’s like saying the VNAF won the air war because a lot of American airplanes went down. The reason the Vietnamese had so many targets to shoot down was because of our constant presence and dominance in the air.
whatihear
28d ago
Not just Russia. We are about to start fielding some shaheed clones ourselves.
whatihear
28d ago
I would not consider Gaza a place where air power is well suited. Air power works on opponents who are at least moderately sophisticated and organized. A tiny band of terrorists who belt toddlers to themselves instead of bullet proof vests every morning is exactly the opposite of the type of target that air power works well on.
I think the way it works well is in combination with good intelligence to wage assassination campaigns against enemy leadership and important weapons systems. You can’t destroy an enemy organization, but you can degrade them and scare whoever the next guy is. I think the right way to think of it might be like a correction for a dog. If you just assassinate their top 10 guys every time they cross some line, they’ll keep filling those spots but the next 10 guys might start to think twice about being as oppositional. It’s definitely not a silver bullet, but I don’t think that means it is useless.
whatihear
29d ago
If we’ve learned anything from the last five years of Happening, it’s that American and Israeli air power is really good. A modern extended bombing campaign against Iran would look nothing like the strategic bombing campaigns of the 20th century. It would look like what Israel did to Hezb. The ISAF and IAF would degrade Iranian air defense into irrelevance, then start dropping precision munitions on anyone regime associated who popped their head up. If you think that the American Air Force with target selection done by Israeli spies would get the same results that air campaigns with massed unguided bombs did 50-80 years ago you just haven’t been paying attention. It is true that you can’t just outright win a war, but you can cripple the command structure of an organization. In a country like Iran where there is lots of internal turmoil already, that could be enough to give the opposition an opportunity.
That doesn’t mean it would be a good idea. Iranians are mostly patriots even if they hate the mullahs, so there would be a rally around the flag effect. Regime officials would be able to hide in bunkers and move around. It is possible that enough of them would survive that they could continue coordinating resistance and ruling, and I think you are right that they would go balls to the wall for a nuke if they retained the capacity to do so. All your points about how this would deplete our munitions and damage us diplomatically are good points. We should not risk blowback just for a chance to destroy the Iranian regime.
Basically it seems like you think it definitely won’t work and we shouldn’t do it. I think it might work and we shouldn’t do it.
The front line has hardly shifted for years. If a literal snail had started where the Russians did it would be halfway across Ukraine by now, and the Russians are nowhere near that. Lately the Russians have started lying about taking objectives at a greater rate because no man’s land is getting wider and wider so they can kinda get away with it. The fact that they are not attacking for the most part does not mean that Ukraine is spent. It’s a deliberate choice to remain on the defensive and win the attritional exchange. If the Russians want to send guys to die on assault, Ukraine is smart to sit in dugouts and pick them off with drones. The win condition for Ukraine is not that they reconquer their territory, it is that Russia gives up. One way to accomplish that is retaking territory to weaken Russian morale, but it probably isn’t the best one. It’s going to take time for the Russian people to sour on the war.
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