They’ve already done that, and it’s not escalation, it’s war.
These are not mutually exclusive.
How the NLAW anti-tank missile works. Excellent with captions.
How often can the US repeat this kind of aid? The well isn’t bottomless. I’m not suggesting we stop or slow down, just where the limits might be?
It’s like Black Friday for the Americans though - a major adversaries military getting decimated and its global influence being shrunk dramatically for only a few billion dollars and zero American lives.
It’s probably much more cost effective in the long term to keep the Russians at bay.
Well Russia should hit its limit on this war way before the US does, so I’m not sure it matters.
I feel like the US could foot a $20 billion a year “punish the Russians” budget indefinitely, as in decades. Is my scale off? It doesn’t seem like all that much money to me.
How much was the Afghanistan war per year? Way more than that, right?
EDIT: An article from 2019 says that the most expensive year in Afghanistan was $107 billion. So maybe my scale is a little off; I didn’t realize the Ukraine budget was a significant percentage of the Afghanistan budget. I would have guessed it was less than a 10th.
But the type of weapons being used are probably quite different. There wasn’t much need of anti-aircraft systems against the Taliban, after all. So even at about 20% of the Afghanistan budget, the US is getting a deal.
Most of the US arsenal was created to do one thing: Kill Russians. Sending these weapons to Ukraine is the best return on investment the Pentagon has seen since WWII.
You might want to rephrase that. I am fairly certain that there are some Russians who do not actually deserve to be killed.
Most Russians don’t deserve to be killed but, nonetheless, the US spends billions on weapons whose only purpose is to obliterate whole cities of them.
In truth, most of the billions were to be expended in eastern Europe when the Soviets poured through the Fulda Gap (and some other places) and were conventional arms in nature. The tactical nukes were also meant for enemy forces in eastern Europe. Even the strategic nukes were not city busters. US megaton throw was always less but more accurate targeting military and government control nodes.
As such, burning much of the older conventional stocks in Ukraine is as intended; stopping the Ruskies. Invading forces instead of ordinary citizens being targeted.
I’m at a loss why more artillery howitzers (SP M109s) aren’t being sent along with M1 tanks and Bradley IFVs. These have limited/no use in the Pacific theater. I could write a few (many) paragraphs why these systems should be contributed but my wailing to date has had minimal effect.
There were Good Germans too. We still bombed the hell out of them.
M1s, ATACMS, and F16s are examples of arms the US has decided not to provide in an attempt to limit escalation. There is also the very high likelihood that Russia will recover some of whatever we send to Ukraine and learn to build countermeasures and/or sell them on to other adversaries.
There’s also some worry, which is probably just a PR based excuse, that the time to train Ukraine would be high compared to their need timeline.
Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.
–Bill Munny
That day may come…
your link concludes with a hopeful tone:
“this improvisation highlights the level of depletion of Russia’s stock of missiles”
But maybe there’s another, more drastic, conclusion:
Russia fired the missile without its nuke warhead as a test.
Maybe they replaced the warhead with concrete ballast of the same weight, to be sure the missiles will work, when the day comes that they decide to put the nuke warheads back in place.
That could be the explanation, I hope that the British ministry of defence have chosen the right explanation.
I’ll admit I wondered why the Russians didn’t mount some explosives instead of concrete. Your explanation sound plausible.
It’s also possible, if we want to maximize the pessimism, that the Russian military was trying to use nuclear weapons, but didn’t realize that the warhead had already been sold by some corrupt technician. In which case it’s only a matter of time before they find one that hasn’t been gutted, and also means that whoever it was sold to now has nukes.
Yeah, I hope that it’s the good explanation, too.