Monday, February 28, 2022

Caveat Emptor 🇺🇦

Let's start there: that none of us want to attend "Twitter war college." For one thing, it's not accredited! For another, you get what you pay for. That said, consider the facts on the ground as we can know them (accepting, again, "fog of war," Twitter is not journalism, blah blah blah.) I'm old enough to remember the egregious "Red Dawn," where the only thing that stopped Russian tanks was a handful of Colorado kids with bows and arrows. We all thought it was ludicrous at the time. How were we to know the Russian military really was that weak? These Urkrainians don't even have weapons!* And yes, the Russians do appear to be getting grimly serious: But still, the question lingers: is the Russian military bear a myth? It's certainly going slowly: And not going as expected: And what is the endgame here? Install a puppet government? It's clear Ukraine will never accept that. Occupy Ukraine? Russia can't even blitzkrieg it; how would they occupy it? Not exactly working out, is it? This is an extremely cogent thread; although it may be complete shit. How would I know? But it seems valid and fairly carefully reasoned. And the conclusions are in the first tweet.  I think the thread presents a cogent argument.


*I'm also old enough to remember the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event that caught U.S. intelligence absolutely flat-footed. No one in U.S. intelligence (no one taken seriously, anyway) saw that cataclysm coming. You'd have thought it was an earthquake, which we can't much predict, either. Except it should have been as predictable as a hurricane in the Gulf. That abject failure brought into question assessments of Russian military might, a re-assessment that was quickly abandoned because the military industrial complex demands an enemy to fear, and Middle East terrorists just weren't going to fill that bill. Once again we see the Russian military in action and, once again....nobody seems to believe what they see right before their eyes. What's that quote from Orwell about seeing what's right in front of you?

1 comment:

  1. I'm at a total loss to know what's happening or what's going to happen or any of it. I hope the People of Ukraine defeat him, in combination with Russians anti-Putin resistance, ideally but I've learned never to get my hopes up, ever. I'm still learning how to not let my despair get up but that's a harder thing to do.

    ReplyDelete