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No matter how war randy Biden gets I don't see what he can do about any of this. A handful of jets flying from a carrier bombing the same rubble the idf has been bombing all day isn't going to matter. The carrier and sending supposed secret weapons seem like pure PR. America doesn't have shells or missiles to send. It's not going to put troops on the ground. For that matter what could America even do against Iran. America is spread all the gently caress over the place and even bombing weddings was getting harder. They could fling some cruise missiles to 'send a message' at best. An invasion seems so impossibly beyond what current American can do they'd be better off invading mars.
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Oct 11, 2023 08:48
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In this metaphor is coachella held near a concentration camp or not.
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Oct 11, 2023 22:45
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Conscripting your entire population and using settlers as offensive weapons also kinda confuses the whole valid military target idea.
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Oct 11, 2023 23:09
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Why would anyone, much less Iran, ever expect America to honor any agreement. I hope they only released prisoners as the money came in.
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Oct 11, 2023 23:20
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I don't think you are going to get the majority of the US population to support troops on the ground in Israel or elsewhere in the middle east no matter what bullshit the media spins. People are tired of it all no matter how righteous the media try to make the cause. Isolationism has always been popular in the US, except when the US is attacked directly, and will remain so no matter how much both parties try to ignore it. However the opinion of normal people is irrelevant to dumping billions more into Israel, bombing people, intelligence fuckery, random mayhem via drones or cruise missiles, etc. To whatever degree the US can still do these things.
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Oct 12, 2023 08:04
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If America fights ww3 it'll be outsourced like everything else. Americans today have no taste for actually fighting. They'll bomb, they'll drone strike, they'll roid up some operators to try to do little poo poo, but the kind of massive public commitment that invading any kind of real country like Iran or NK or even clearing Gaza is beyond us. Even if the US was dramatically attacked they'd support the war, make memes about being tough, but when the fighting starts they'll all be sitting in the parking lot waiting for someone else to do something.
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Oct 12, 2023 09:52
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Has there been absolutely any actual pro-Palestinian response from any countries in the area? I know MBS of all people was calling up leaders, but I didn't hear of any result. It seems like at best you'll have a few countries protest in the UN that Israel is a bit too messy with their genocide.
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Oct 14, 2023 02:17
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Whatever the opposite of bullish is me about the US military. I don't think we could invade Iran even if you believe we would actually draft. I'm not sure we could even invade Mexico successfully. People underestimate what a chicken poo poo nation this is.
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Oct 15, 2023 02:52
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Please don't make me stop hating crypto.
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Oct 18, 2023 21:48
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Smythe posted:another question i have is how important is israel to the american imperial project? if we are to assume all this cruelty to the palestinian people is known and understood by the "real dead-eyed operators" behind the scenes, are they correct in their course of action? is funding (and possibly perpetuating themselves) this genocide "worth it" to the american geopolitical position? devoid or morals or conceptions of justice. I think all the dead eyed effective psychos are actually dead. They were Bush Sr's generation. Today's elders are fail sons still cosplaying as they imagine what their fathers would've done. There is no secret hand on the till. Just people pretending so they personally don't get in trouble. They don't care about the american project in general just their position at whatever think tank or bureaucratic position they hold. The mega rich just care about looking good in the media or among their billionaire peers. Even Cheney might've been personally enriched by the GWoT but it was a net negative on the empire. There is no plan.
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Oct 18, 2023 23:22
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Smythe posted:she was a babe and zankou chicken (what i believe palestinian chicken is based on, since the santa monica location opened around then i think) is divine. get the extra garlic sauce. Nutty to see someone mention zankou. Many years ago I put in the point of sale system at all the zankou chicken locations around LA. Surprisingly tasty chicken for the price but the management did seem crazy.
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Oct 19, 2023 05:38
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Ardennes posted:There are people on this subforum that think American elections matter and "at least we have Biden." Elections were always a poo poo heap but especially now that I am never going to vote for another politician that supports Israel it makes them totally pointless. Considering how much money aipac throws around even county comptrollers and such are pro-Israel if they are remotely connected to the two parties so who could I even vote for.
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Oct 19, 2023 05:43
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mila kunis posted:there was like a decade of protests in the arab world and nothin much changed, do you think the governments are just gonna ride the wave until these atrocities pass and go back to business as usual If the US had any role in keeping a lid on things then there's no way it can do it to the same degree now. The empire has never been weaker since it was established after ww2. I hope people across the world realize the current historic weakness of the US and its allies and exploit it.
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Oct 19, 2023 05:55
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Trump is the harm reduction candidate for foreign policy just by the simple fact that he's a dumb rear end who will gently caress up plans from the blob with his imbecilic juvenile horse poo poo. Biden is a dumb old man too but he believes in this crap. Trump believes in nothing and he's also too much of a narcissist to ever pay much attention to anything that isn't about him. He'd get bored with an Israeli conflict so fast. He'd have to keep getting reminded why we even care. Also he's such a petty crook he wouldn't be thinking about 100 billion dollar arms deals but small time corruption like getting the Israelis to rent extra space in trump tower in exchange for not talking poo poo on twitter about them.
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Oct 20, 2023 07:16
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Trump did famously encourage two wars to start during his reign so I can see why people would be worried about him getting elected again. I am so glad everyone voted correctly in the Most Important Election of Our Lives so that abortion was protected, the MIC wasn't massively increased, US weapons weren't shipped out abroad, we made peace with our enemies to avoid future wars, American diplomacy became so much more softer and more nuanced, since it was so important to save the US postal system DeJoy was removed as postmaster general, student loan forgiveness could be passed, the economy was saved, we all got the remaining covid relief funds, covid vaccine boosters were funded to become a regular part of our lives, police brutality was reigned in, border patrol putting kids in cages was stopped, etc etc just so much important stuff that could've gone horribly!
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Oct 21, 2023 01:48
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Of like 500ish elected at the federal level politicians there are like 1 or 2 that don't support Israel? Are there any others that even support a ceasefire? Thank god we've got a democracy to really represent the will of the people. It's scary how Republican gerrymandering can disrupt our representative democracy but if we all donate enough space president Abrams can fix that so it'll be perfect.
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Oct 21, 2023 01:59
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Nearly 100% of the US political establishment is pro killing innocents. Reading people worried about Trump of all the useless loving people while the world burns just makes me crazy. How the gently caress can anyone think any US election matters for stopping people from being brutalized by us abroad. The only thing that impairs America's ability to cause global mayhem is our own incompetence, so I am for anything that makes our government dumber and more chaotic. Bring on weekly January 6s to keep us chasing our tails so the rest of the world can have some peace. Shut down the government so Ron Paul can sermonize about the federal debt. We need at least one hundred more hearings on Trump's phone calls to Russia. The entire MIC should be replaced by even more expensive silicon valley grifters to make sure our weapons are useless.
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Oct 21, 2023 02:20
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Death By The Blues posted:Houthis again shot missiles and drones at Israel and where intercepted it's remarkable for how brutalized the Houthis have been for so long that they are still willing to try to aid the Palestinians. The brutal US blockade of Yemen is yet another happily bipartisan issue. Someone needs to be flooding the Middle East in cheap anti-ship missiles.
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Oct 21, 2023 02:41
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sleep with the vicious posted:https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1715487365836210555?t=b8Mk1B7PxxcDQXGctGNo8g&s=19 crepeface posted:a steel supplier that was used for something like 30% of the US's submarine fleet was found to have been faking their strength tests. lol grifter mic contractors have done more for the cause of anti-imperialism than our supposed left wing. Countries around the world need to realize our weakness and tell us to gently caress off forever.
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Oct 21, 2023 04:44
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Clip-On Fedora posted:And all for imaginary monopoly money too. Paper money is only worth the promises it can back up. that and our supposed nuclear economic war has shown to be useless so it's consequence free. OPEC my people cry out for $10 gas (or even better 73 元) do not forget us at your next meeting.
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Oct 21, 2023 05:09
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The only moral stance is pro-terrorism for colonial conflicts. The occupied don't get to pick the setup so if the occupiers don't like how this has been going maybe they should change the venue. They have the option to gently caress off to the old borders and take their shithead settlers with them.
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Oct 21, 2023 05:29
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Al-Saqr posted:one good benefit of the west backing ukranian nazis so fervently is now them claiming other people are anti semites has zero value anymore because they literally clapped for a holocaust perpetrator, its over for the 'youre an anti-semite' slander industry. the last couple years has definitely muddied the waters on anti-semitism into uselessness. The ADL are terrorists.
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Oct 21, 2023 06:17
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Ardennes posted:As for if they are doing anything big, Israel keeps on talking up their ground invasion and the Eisenhower still is a ways off. Hezbollah had a massive bunker/tunnel network, I don't know what the USN is going to do besides bombing some random villages. Probably also produce some amusing gently caress ups from crews not used to working at any kind of pace. I'm hoping they accidentally bomb Tel Aviv.
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Oct 22, 2023 00:56
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The comedy option is a repeat of the Liberty incident and after the US fucks something up the IDF goes and intentionally sinks the carrier. Real awkward day for the US media!
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Oct 22, 2023 01:02
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:the US military has never been this vulnerable or operationally limited since the Korean War. I think it's far weaker now than after the Korean war. At that time you still had plenty of knowledgeable professionals in the military and the US had a stable industrial base that was the greatest in the world. The military today can't keep trained people in important areas, can't recruit, is riddled with mic corruption, and the country absolutely cannot support a draft so this is all they get. Someone posted an article in the ww3 thread about how the supply and manufacturing situation is even worse than it seems and it's going to take years to even understand the scale of the problem. The five years to replace everything sent to Ukraine is likely deliriously optimistic. US economic soft power has also been shown to have more limits than expected. The US is entirely a paper tiger. We can bomb weddings and make life miserable for lots of people while still being unable to do anything significant militarily. The carriers being in the med is a huge risk for exposing the weakness if the bluff is called.
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Oct 22, 2023 09:45
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It's funny how much our victory in Iraq is overestimated because like WW2 we had someone doing most of the fighting for us: Iran. The scale of the Iran Iraq war was huge and before any deserts were stormed Iraq had been devastated. It's completely absurd to crow about a victory over Iraq later after ten years of sanctions had reduced it to ashes. I think basically the only war of any note America has won on its own is the Spanish American war. Truly a proud military legacy. tbf, America has previously and continues to kick rear end in the absolute middle of the Pacific. Nimitz is totally underrated. If some country wanted to meet us way out in the ocean hundreds of miles from any land resources America would crush them. Somehow I don't think Iran, NK, Russia, etc are going to be as accommodating as the Japanese on that point though.
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Oct 22, 2023 09:58
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Ardennes posted:The US is very good at shock and awe campaigns there is identifiable infrastructure and equipment that can be hit in a pretty predictable manner, the longer the war goes on or if their opponent compensates for that, it gets a lot more tricky. How much evidence is there for that really though? Schwarzkopf/whoever can write a lot of theory about how we've fourth generationly preemptively won all battles in all possible futures but there's not a lot of evidence. As mentioned, Desert Storm was kicking somebody already down. Bosnia was multinational and also not a particularly formidable foe. Even in that short campaign there were plenty of mistakes. Iraq II was practically running drills against a broken country in the perfect terrain for air dominance. Afghanistan was half assed from day 1. Panama shows something we do excel at which is shanking our old allies. Grenada? Even the air campaign in Vietnam wasn't nearly as successful as the mic boys wanted it to be. Strategic air power has been overblown since its inception. They were blowing up tons of *something* in Germany but too often nothing useful. You can level towns and still leave the factories producing munitions and the soldiers sitting alive though unhappily in their bunkers (it is certainly hard on morale). Which is really what America did do really well: mayhem. It can blow up a lot of poo poo and kill a lot of people. It can rain down destruction and break up more concrete and devastate more jungles better than anyone else. It can gently caress up Southeast Asia from one end to the other. It may not be killing the right people or destroying the right things, but a whole lot of something can be destroyed. With all that America has lost since the GWoT's peak I don't think they can even do that to a large degree anymore. There were articles about the fairly low tempo operations in Syria during Obama's era really straining some resources due to inadequate pilots and equipment. It must be unfathomably worse now.
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Oct 22, 2023 11:41
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Russia's struggles in Ukraine had people thinking that Russia was uniquely incompetent, but I think we've forgotten some 20th century wisdom: invasions are loving hard. Countries poured everything into their war machines to invade not just whatever happened to be lying around and was convenient. Even small countries are a bitch to invade (yuk yuk invasions are easy, but occupations are hard said everyone after the US waltzed into two broken countries) if they don't collapse politically like France in WW2 or Georgia more recently. We don't have the magic tech yet to just dropship to anywhere in the world or resupply with anything but slow ponderous methods that would look familiar to WW2 vets. If the IDF works themselves up to it, they'll be getting reminded of this again. If the US decides to invade anyone it might consider itself lucky to look as incompetent as Russia because Russia is fighting on their borders while the US will be fighting on the other side of the planet surrounded by hostile or indifferent countries. The GWoT was peak assistance from other countries as no one is going to be excited for the US to come gently caress up their region even if they don't care for whomever the US in invading.
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Oct 22, 2023 11:56
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gradenko_2000 posted:This came up a lot in the Ukraine thread but the US adopted the German way of war after WW2 which is wild because it lost two world wars. The Germans way of war did teach the America military the skill of rewriting your defeats as victories and your lucky happenstances as tactical brilliance. The rest of Korea sucks we only wanted Seoul anyway! We cleverly lured the Chinese into almost driving us into the ocean so it would relieve the pressure on the KMT cronies hiding in Taiwan.
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Oct 22, 2023 12:29
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Horseshoe theory posted:All Green parties are liberal parties with a greenwashing veneer. Also, the AfD is the true id of German identity, but like Trump the As an outsider it seems like the Greens have become particularly more bloodthirsty and hawkish than the other German liberals.
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Oct 23, 2023 00:11
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parties like the Social Democrats, CDU, Free Democrats, Greens, etc. try to pretend they're above AfD's base ideology when they are not.
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Atrocious Joe posted:https://twitter.com/CENTCOM/status/1716216584551932214 Never mind my posts denigrating the might of the US military. Truly no one can match our ability to adopt a strong posture. Other countries look at just how much we've strengthened our posture and they weep. The empire will last a thousand years.
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Oct 23, 2023 01:11
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Didn't some Palestinians on the ground say that seeing protests in America was actually really good for their morale? I get cynicism about protesting because I think it does seem pretty useless for convincing Americans to do anything counter to media interests, but if it helps the good guys hold out that's actually significant. If it makes shithead zionists mad that's just a bonus. As it is I'm gonna try to drag my old carcass to the next protest around here.
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Oct 23, 2023 11:50
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Lol like any US politician ever cares about polls when it comes to foreign policy. They never care what little people think. They don't need to rally the public to support bombing poo poo in support of Israel. They've never had to do that to send money and arms abroad or bomb anyone. A ground war against Iran or Lebanon would absolutely require massive public support but they'd never get that. I mean support in the form of draft, large industrial mobilization, accepting restrictions to all the treats and toys we depend on, finance accepting some restrictions to their unlimited profits, etc. Even America getting attacked on 9/11 didn't galvanize that support. The Iraqi invasion was done on the cheap.
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Oct 26, 2023 01:14
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BARONS CYBER SKULL posted:The funny thing about all this is watching the IDF prove all the “YOUR GENERATION COULDNT HANDLE A WAR” boomers right as they complain on tiktok about how they can’t get vegan food at the genocide rave They couldn't handle war either. Their parents barely could. It's wankers all the way down.
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Oct 27, 2023 06:24
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Clip-On Fedora posted:I don’t agree with this, I’m sorry. They don’t need us, and they don’t need our bullshit validation for their existence. This. Only regional voices really matter. Whether that's people directly aiding the Palestinians or pushing their governments to act. America and other Western governments are mostly spectators. They can bomb people, hand out some arms, and cause more misery but they can't affect the outcome on their own anymore. This drives Americans nuts because they expect to always be driving global affairs. It's all up to us to decide whether to be merciful or wrathful. It's always our story.
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Oct 27, 2023 07:17
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Sudden Loud Noise posted:My (uneducated) fear at this point is that the only thing holding Israel back at the moment is they are waiting for more munitions from the west. Enough so they can literally level Gaza while still having enough to deter the countries around them. Funny thing about those munitions from the West 
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Oct 28, 2023 01:08
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As far as complaining about Iran/Hezbollah not doing enough. Keep in mind, both have been fighting America/Israel for over 40 years. Both have been internationally isolated. Iran has been supporting forces fighting the US in the region from Yemen to Palestine for a long time and usually the only country doing so. Lebanon has gotten proper hosed lately by both circumstances and Israel/America, but Hezbollah has been keeping pressure in the North. I can't think of a country that has aided the Palestinian cause more than Iran under extremely limited material circumstances. There's not much reason to waste energy trying to ponder how pure the motivations of some imaginary Iranian leaders are in this context. Sounds like some useless lib poo poo to me. As it is I seem to recall from books on the revolution that Iranian hardliners have been fairly consistent since the beginning in the 70s of seeing their Islamic revolution as a movement they expected to export elsewhere. They aren't like the Taliban whose focus was generally local as Iranian leaders had a global perspective. You can debate the merits of spreading those values abroad, but their motivations and commitment have been consistent.
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Oct 28, 2023 01:32
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TheSlutPit posted:That’s all well and good but I have to think the old sxe saying applies here: “if you’re not now, you never were” I don't know what you mean. Is this about Iran being bad for not using their vast instant resources to invade Israel immediately? They don't have like space marines that can drop at a moment's notice anywhere in the globe. There are reports they've been moving forces to Syria via Russian bases to avoid them getting bombed by America/Israel enroute. They can't nuke Tel Aviv with a missile they don't have after Israel and the US have disrupted all their weapons programs for decades. Their air force is still leftover Shah planes and what they've figured out on their own in the decades since. They have material constraints. Even the US despite spending an unknowable infinite Lovecraftian amount of money per year on their military is going to take months to do anything of consequence (of course most of that goes to graft but the point stands). 21st century warfare is 20th century warfare except people tweet while they wait for their transportation. It's still pretty slow.
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Oct 28, 2023 02:06
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crepeface posted:i am calling on the international rules based order to implement a no-fly zone over the levant to support humanitarian aid deliveries lmao after liberals wouldn't shut up about no-fly zones last year (that would just magically prevent Russia from flying with no WW3 at all) this should be shouted everywhere. Please let me write an op ed NYT
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Oct 28, 2023 02:24
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Ardennes posted:Everyone shat on the Russians but the patient approach with heavy use of artillery was the right call and even so it took months and they were dealing with much smaller urban areas (also the tunnel systems they were dealing with weren't as extensive). Isn't that basically how the US fought its only significant battle since Vietnam (Fallujah)? It also took them a month or two with the might of the US focused on a single city (back when it was mightier and had ammo). I don't think there's any magic tech that can shortcut the basic 20th century strategy of blowing the hell out of everything and then advancing slowly behind further waves of destruction. That seems basically the only way to handle urban areas unless the enemy collapses for political reasons (Georgia, French in WW2, etc).
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Nov 1, 2023 09:18
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