• BigilusDickilus@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    At the risk of being jingoistic, this type of opponent is exactly what our military is designed to utterly destroy. If the US was an active participant it would have very quickly wiped the floor with the Russian army and would be dealng with Russian backed insurgents in the east.

    Ukraine has been beating them with the stuff we routinely throw away (when the Republicans don’t get in the way), I am convinced they have no non nuclear answer to our actual military.

    • Omniraptor@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      40 years ago maybe, but afaik after 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan the us army has shifted quite far into focusing on counterinsurgency and away from fighting vs mass armor and artillery

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        The USA has plans, thousands of plans and how to modify them agains the russians (well the USSR), and that’s as important as having the right tools/weapons.

      • BigilusDickilus@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I mean, they’ve gotten way better at it, but most of their equipment and doctrine are still targeted at utterly destroying a near peer level threat. The f-22 wasn’t designed to fight insurgents, nor is it suited to that task.

        I would think that the USAF would happily establish and easily enforce a no fly zone over Ukraine and could probably pull it off within a few days of getting the order conservatively.

        There was the story a few years ago when a well equipped and trained Wagner battalion “accidentally” picked a flight with a US army unit or base in Syria and got immediately demolished.

        Writing this out definitely feels like braggadocio and it likely is. But I would think the Russians don’t want to find out why we don’t have universal healthcare first hand.