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Small scale, huh?
I’m not an expert, and I think trawling Twitter for OSINT and tell-all insiders is a waste of time. So my suspicion is not specific to Russia. No, I think what we’re seeing today is the natural consequence of two factors.
First, waging war is hard. Consider the Falklands War: one side was a second-rate Cold War navy, and the other was Argentina. In less than 3 months, over 1000 people were killed, three times as many were injured, and millions of dollars of aircraft, ships, and munitions were thrown into the ocean. Ultimately, the UK held the islands and their population of less than 2,000 souls.
For a more thorough write up, I recommend SSC user @bean’s rather extensive series, especially Logistics at Ascension and Siege Pt. 1. Suffice to say that getting materiel in place was hard, avoiding mishaps was hard, but contact with an enemy was harder. Imperfect information and tactics made for a series of bloody jabs rather than any decisive action.
Now compare Russia. More troops, more armor, more artillery. Shorter supply lines and more reliable communications. Which brings us to the second point: people don’t want to believe the first. They want to improve on Blitzkrieg and take out all major resistance with their superior military. Seems like a much better deal, yeah? Especially when imperfect information strikes again. I don’t know if Putin’s advisors are yes-men or incentivized to boast, but for one reason or another they gave the wrong assessment of Ukraine’s durability.
So it is a waste—but it might not have been.
Fair point, I looked it up, and the Vietnam war is much bigger in scale (so far).
If I recall correctly, NATO estimates casualties in the hundreds of thousands for either side in the Ukraine war (to be fair these claims aren’t necessarily accurate because there is an ongoing conflict)
On the other hand, the sum total of the American casualties for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (including 1991) are far lower than for either side in Ukraine.
Seems like materiel losses in those conflicts (excluding Vietnam) are similarly much lower. This indicates to me that whatever benefits were gleaned from those conflicts had a lower cost than whatever Russia will get out of invading Ukraine.
(Civilian casualties are another matter, I’m mostly interested in the military cost/benefit here)
I used this resource to estimate American casualties in all of the Middle East conflicts: https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/app/conflictCasualties
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Interesting series on the Falklands War, thanks for that. One of the comments on the glossary mentions a book with the approximate title “A Citizen’s Guide to Stupid Wars” which sounds about like what I’m looking for.
It seems like what you’re suggesting is that:
The expected result of the invasion for Russia was a short conflict (days or weeks) followed by the installation of a pro-Russian regime (Belarus II?), somewhat like the US invasion of Iraq
This turned out to be wrong, and the question for Russia became “What now?”
The new reality has become an attritional conflict to maintain control of the captured territory in the east while the Russian government figures out how to unfuck everything?
I guess the next question is what does Russia do now? It’s more isolated from the global economy than before (and my understanding is that it was already isolated). Does Russia just fade into obscurity as its economy and power wither?
Edit: @rov_scam said essentially the same thing here with additional context about the expected behavior of the west/Germany
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