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Putin didn’t know his army was complete shit. He didn’t take a good gamble and get unlucky. Some limited nato training since 2014 simply eclipsed the entire Russian military.
How do you know here or great men?
Jobs is a great man. Not for inventing the smart phone but for his design ability. We would have bbm or microsoft designed phones. Not sure if this on net was good because industry structure would be completely different and phones probably go the way of being cheaper with many producers.
Musks is a hero. Electric cars might exists without him but he sped it up. And the rocket industry is decades ahead because of Musks.
The founding fathers were heroes. Jefferson and other writers of the constitution and Declaration of Independence gave this country a special mission. America should have been rich because of our geographic advantages and raw resources. But it’s not like great countries haven’t failed before (China disappeared for a millennia and I don’t think their national mythos and authoritarian state is good). I’m fairly certain saying constitution and Thomas Jefferson = good makes me a heretic today.
Milton Friedman was a hero. He gave the intellectual framework to defeat communism and rejuvenate the US economy.
A lot of people in history I believe were just marginally better and someone else would have pushed thing forward a year or two later. But these are some of the people that changed the paths that others built on.
I’ve always liked and believed in the idea of psychic history and mathematical formulas and believe most of history resolves around the sun of many forces. But I do think there have been some key battles or people who changed history.
An interesting debate for an atheist would be whether Jesus Christ changed history or if Roman power meant that the world was ripe for a slave religion to develop and it would have happened as a physics equation to develop an alternative for those under Roman power.
Electric cars are shit. They're bloody expensive, have shit range, are massive fire hazards and the infrastructure to transmit the enormous amounts of energy they use them doesn't bloody exist. Something like doubling grid transmission needed.
Meanwhile, the option for 'energy independence' for europoors was always there. Very simple, mine the fucking brown coal you have tons of, make synthetic gasoline out of it. Worked for the Wehrmacht, worked for Southern Africa, would have worked for Europe. Or if you want to be fancy, use nuclear reactors, get hydrogen through thermal decomposition of water and combine it with carbon from plastic waste and biomass.
Trying to 'save the planet' by crippling your own economy while India and China and anyone else who can is busy rolling out massive amounts of coal power stations while trying to shake you down for 'climate funds' is a mug's game. You could easily prepare for 'massive warming' by doing R&D and preparation for sulphates injection, and if India or China objects tell them to STFU and point meaningfully at their emissions.
Meanwhile, I suspect there's going to be retreat from electric cars because everyone is going to get poor, and the absolute deluded cucks who keep mandating them (in EU, the 'tards in Brussels) are going to get ran out of a town on a rail due to their manifold failures.
You have really curious definition of "worked". German army never solved its crippling lack of fuel.
The problem was not up to scale, but they'd have been absolutely boned in '44 without the synthetic fuel program, which was developed over a long time and at a considerable expense.
They were also completely fucked up anyway. Maybe it would be marginally worse, but their position in 1944 is hard to describe as working.
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Yeah, getting high on own propaganda supply was a fundamental reason for this war.
It is especially painful as utter corruption of Russian army was not something secret, just underestimated.
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Cliodynamics does this and has a healthy amount of publications!
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Perhaps, but if Ukrainian leadership had panicked and fled, I doubt the training makes a difference. See the Afghan Army and security forces in the face of the Taliban just last year.
Even if the war wasn't the utter disaster for Russia, I don't see any plausible scenario where it ended up net beneficial to Russia. It could've been a perfectly smooth two week conquest, but after that Ukraine would remain a constant simmering pot of rebellion that sucks up money for little gain. And Russia would still end up with massive sanctions.
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Had the upper and middle ranks stayed, but leaders have fled, it could easily have ended the same way as now.
It doesn't matter if the idiot president flees; if the army has enough brave men willing to put up a fight against an enemy who expects potshots, you can still win by making the enemy stop which gives you time to regroup and prepare a defense.
The attack was noted to have been lead completely contrary to Russian army doctrine and approved tactics.
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One standard I can think of for whether someone is a Great Man in a world-historic sense is simple; if you took them out of history, imagined that they didn't exist, how much do you think history would change?
In that sense, it's too early to say if Jobs or Musk are Great Men, though I'd say that businessmen rarely are - if you took any single businessman out of history, their function in the global scheme of things would probably be replaced by someone else. "Too early to say" also goes for Zelensky, though from what I observed many prominent Ukrainian politicians also made a point of sticking around and being combative during the very early days of the invasion.
One guy I can feel pretty confident about saying would be an example of a Great Man in world-historic sense is Lenin; reading about the Russian Revolution, the rise of Bolsheviks (as a precise faction) to power in Russia was a wildly improbable event, there were several places where the party almost took decisions that probably would have led to them not attaining power and getting crushed, and Lenin almost singlehandedly steered the party into what turned out to be the correct decision. Without Lenin, the revolution would still have happened and it is likely that some sort of a socialist faction would have risen in power at least momentarily, but Bolsheviks were, even by the standards of Russian socialist movements or Marxist movements in Europe generally at the time, quite distinct in many ways, and without them Russia might have turned out quite differently indeed. Of course, it would have probably been better that day, being a Great Man does not mean you're a good man, or that you did good things, just that your actions had a world-historic effect.
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More like a force of 150k couldn't fight a force of 900k. We'll see how this plays out on a less uneven field soon.
Are you comparing total army size (Ukrainian side?) with deployed combat troops (Russian side?)
See tooth-to-tail ratio why it is misleading. Even Russian army has significant logistical tail.
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