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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30293 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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The Russians seem to be pretty close to burning through their soviet inheritance of armoured vehicles, hence the increasing presence of things like Mad Maxified Ladas and golf cart riding stormtruppen,

That's the impression people doing PR for Ukraine want others to think. But in the absence of enemy heavy weapons fire, light vehicles make sense to use. That the various storage areas are emptying out is likely not just down to attrition, but because Russia is creating vast new units in reserve.. Newly produced equipment is rarely even seen near the front line now.

Russia is tailoring its rearmament plans to meet the needs of the new troops to be stationed along its NATO border. Those units will get much of the new equipment. Most of what is being sent to the front line in Ukraine is old and refurbished Soviet-era arms. “Very rarely are newly built vehicles observed or destroyed lately,” said Dara Massicot, senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment, who wrote a report on Russia’s military reconstitution.

Another great quote:

“The Russian military is reconstituting and growing at a faster rate than most analysts had anticipated,” Gen. Christopher Cavoli, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, told a Senate committee this month. “In fact, the Russian army, which has borne the brunt of combat, is today larger than it was at the beginning of the war.”

"We were all wrong and actually, Russian army isn't getting destroyed in Ukraine."

All in all, if NATO continues with business as usual- being ineffectual, stuck in the past due to lack of bloody experience, and Russians settle the conflict and absorb all the lessons of the war, something which used to be only possible in BAP's alcoholic imaginings such as 'Russia swooping through Poland' might stop being very fanciful.

Putin is quite lucky that the western world lives in abject terror of actually winning a war for change

How could the West 'win a war' when a typical NATO army has only enough ammunition for couple of weeks of operations?

The West has an economy based on valuations of Boomer owning expensive real estate and selling each other services. It has consistently fallen short on delivering weapons to Ukrainians, it can't make weapons in large numbers. Most real industry is declining or gone. These days you can read how they're struggling to source cellulose for artillery charges. The West is simply not a serious geopolitical force, it has zero sane ideas, it's a collection of dysfunctional countries that hate their own citizens, whose main interests is keeping the old-age pension scam going for a few more years and where and power is held by people who just want to die comfortably without having to make a real decision.

According to someone who was a serving intelligence officer, NATO is more of an organisation that provides sinecures than a real defence organisation.

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