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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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Everyone looking at the price tag vs the results knows a proxy war with a well-trained army, the side of the US and Ukraine, against formerly your biggest adversary is the least costly way to cripple your foe while hardly lifting a finger.
~$125 billion TOTAL, including humanitarian, in a sea of $800B+/yr is play money in war, and throwing Russia back with dollars is the largest blow to a man who thinks he’s militarily strong.
It even makes China hesitate. I’d pay a lot more just for that.
Edit to add: This is a sad justification to be involved in ending human life, regardless of merit.
It's especially peanuts when you consider that the VA won't have to take care of the veterans either. In the long-term, that's where most of the funding actually goes after you put boots on the ground.
Edit to add:
Source:
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic/budget/veterans
That is roughly 1/3 of the total estimated past/future costs of the wars.
Damn good point.
It is Patton by proxy - "The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard to die for his." Except instead of "the other bastard" being an enemy, it's your allies.
Don't worry, there's still going to be plenty of vets who "hurt their backs" during training excersize and get lifetime disability pay. I got a cousin who brags about his.
Yes your cousin is still allowed to have a comfortable life after being hurt on military duty... That's not "bragging". That's being recompensed.
I bet if you actually talk to your cousin about the stuff they miss out on in life due to their disability... You'll find that the trade still isn't worth it. Things like being able to play with their kids without worrying about debilitating pain. But you know... At least they don't have to actively work to live a normal life.
Even if they're 100% disabled. I don't know anyone who "brags" about $45k a year. I have military associated hearing loss. The time I waste every day just trying to parse things other people are saying isn't worth the ~$200 a month I'm given for it.
Ya, so he's not really disabled. If his back does actually hurt it's cuz he's fat. He's scamming the system and votes Trump because only he deserves a second free income.
That's a stupid amounts of ableist...
Has it occurred to you that they might be "fat" because they can't be as active as they once were in service... because they're now disabled?
Yes, you definitely know my cousin I see multiple times a year better than me. The multiple times he's admitted he's gaming the system to my face mean nothing. He's super disabled. You are right. I'm a bad person who has no idea what I am talking about.
It could very well be his way of coping... A lot of people wit disabilities don't want to be treated as less than... and making you believe that he's "gaming" the system is a better outcome in their mind than you treating them as less of a human for being disabled.
"Gaming" the system in this case would require many doctors to sign off on his disability. And yes, I will believe trained doctors over you simply talking with him.
When you equate all veterans (or even just "plenty") to what you believe your cousin to be doing? Yes...
You've convinced me, trailerpark ultra welfare is good.
Wow... you must really be a bad person if that's what you took away from what I said.
It's not just that. It's about oil & gas too. Ukraine is gar friendlier to the US and the EU. They also has the ability to sever Europe's need for Russian energy.
Every dollar is worth it.
https://hexbear.net/post/736808
And it provides your weapons industry with real life data from a large-scale conflict with equipment from multiple origins.
And it advertises a competitors products as inferior, and yours as superior.
I despise all these things, but from a purely economic viewpoint, this is interesting for business.
Meanwhile, people die.
You can blame those deaths on Putin.
Ukraine wouldn't need those equipment if Putin didn't invade a sovereign nation.
He can literally decide tomorrow to pull back and no deaths would follow anymore.
True, but unclear what that implies. Some people say weapons kill people so we should not produce / supply weapons, expecting less people would die. Others point at aggressors using (their home made) weapons to kill people, pointing at the need to supply their victims, expecting less people would die.
Comparing the track records of Russia (frequently invading and killing neighbors) and Ukraine (not so much) it's easy for me to take sides. But the tragedy exists, which is why I despise all these things.
Please don't call it a proxy war, because it's not.
I don't think the definition of "proxy war" must include "instigated".
Amusingly, with North Korea providing munitions to Russia and Korea providing munitions to Ukraine, it's now a proxy Korean War, which never ended.
Technically... this war was "kind of instigated" by the EU out-bidding Russia in 2013 for the investment in a commercial agreement with Ukraine. Everybody at the time knew that Russia had to keep Ukraine under its boot or risk getting fucked long term in the Black Sea, so buying-out Ukraine's allegiance was sort of like poking a bear... and the bear reacted pretty much as expected, by instantly invading Crimea... which also worked as expected to fortify Ukraine's allegiance towards the West... which ultimately lead to Russia launching its "special military operation"... which everyone kind of expected to end in a couple days with the loss of Kyiv... but instead turned out to spectacularly show off Russia's hand and military weakness, allowing for a proxy war to begin.
The instigation was very tactful, playing the long game over 10 years, but it was there. Which is also expected when trying to start a proxy war against a nuclear power; even this low-key instigation, already got Russian crazies clamoring for nuclear retaliation, even when the war was obviously their own fail.
If you know your history, the Yanukovych-administration in Ukraine at the time reneged on the deal with the EU and switched deal to Russia at the last minute, angering the ordinary Ukrainians (which caused tensions with the pro-Russian Ukrainians but that is another story). I distinctly remember it as it was all over the news at the time. So, it is Russia who outbid for Ukraine's support in 2013 if anyone looks at it objectively.
The EU agreement included higher investments than the Russian one (aka: EU outbid Russia)... that's why, when Yanukovych (expectedly, as a Russian puppet) switched to the Russian one, the ordinary Ukrainians got... well, kind of pretty pissed.
Russia didn't outbid the EU, they puppeteered Ukraine away from the EU agreement, precisely because they could not outbid it.
The rest worked as expected.
Wasn't Russia expecting Ukraine to capitulate (basically, like what Armenia did against Azerbaijan)?
They only sent, what, 80000 troops on the initial drive to Kyiv?
There is that... then there is this:
It's failure after failure after failure after failure... and it keeps going, a full clown show. There are actually some more that aren't in the video.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://youtu.be/D_Jizt8AAa4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
If Ukraine wanted to join Russia, they wouldn't need to send any troops.
So that is about 79999 troops too many.
Bullshit. The country that did the invading was the instigator, full stop.
Not how wars work. They're like domino chains, if you know which one to push, you get the desired result.
In this case:
Do you need me to look up sources for the remaining dominos? (I'm on mobile, so I'd rather not)
That's not how full stops work.
Bitch please, Russia and EU have a much longer history.
The real "first domino" is somewhere during the Roman empire or even before.
But the invasion domino is a much bigger threat than the dominoes before.
Putin could just have decided NOT to invade. He had that power. Yet he pushed the domino anyway.
Putin could have tried to clean up shop in Russia around 2000-2008, he had that power back then. By instead trying to become a new Tsar, he set up himself to either invade over and over, or get killed.
It's no coincidence the same year 2012 he got "reelected", is when the EU started to sweet talk Ukraine; by then, the large dominoes were all set up, just needed that tiny first push.
By 2014, and 2022, any negative to invade would have him windowed.
I wouldn't call $125 billion "play money", even if the US yearly military budget is $900 billion.
The US military budget is egregious, and this just shows how much war is about funneling taxpayer money to the MIC.
Idk, nearly a trillion dollars a year is hardly easy to overlook so I find it hard to believe that this of all things is a red line.
(Accidentally deleted my previous post, sorry for the confusion!)
Russia's military budget in 2019 was $65 billion. It's a waste of money that's only practical because the US is literally swimming in taxpayer money (mostly because the US doesn't invest in itself, but that's another issue).
At the federal level, taxes don't pay for anything. They literally used to be burned when we still collected actual dollars. These days a number in a digital ledger gets set to 0. Taxes are the primary anti-inflationary device that government has to maintain inflation.
Deficits don't cause inflation, if they did Japan would be in hyper-inflation because of the massive deficits they have been running for 30 years. Instead they are barely able to hold off deflation of the Yen.
Interestingly China could still invade and expand their territory, without the rest of the world getting involved. Not Taiwan. Vladivostok. That peninsula was part of China till Russia took it, and a fairly large section of the population is ethnically Chinese. They would just be "looking out for the interests of 'their people .'"
This allows Xi to take advantage of the current situation, expand territory to look strong at home, and maintain the status quo everywhere else.
Sometimes when I'm bored, I'll do some google maps "tourism", and just cruise the globe. One of those spots I've visited, is right at that tri-border with Russia, N. Korea, and China.
I always thought it was weird that China doesn't have a direct shore/port on the Sea of Japan. It doesn't really look like the Tumen River would cut it to give sea faring ships access either. Annexing Vladivostok would fix that.
That's the Men in Black fund. Defending the Earth ain't cheap. 👾
Oh thousands of people are dead but at least it wasn't me and all it cost was billions of dollars.
We didn't start the invasion. We're helping the defenders of the invasion fight off the invaders.
Everyone would be better off if Russia packed it in, but sometimes the barbarians are at the gates and you do in fact have to fight them off.
Yeah bro just roll over when you're getting taken over and if you ask for help you should think of the thousands you're going to kill.
Way to victim blame.
What