Certain factions in USA and the military industrial complex will want to maintain the capability to invade and occupy Iran or really any other middle eastern country who is currently “allied” but might change their mind if US was less of a hegemon.
I think our capabilities in the Middle East/Africa/Middle East need to go entirely away. I don’t think we have any interests there that aren’t economic/diplomatic and our military is making the whole situation worse. In fact if I was deciding what to cut one of the first things I’d do is get rid of every single thing we have that exists exclusively to help us project military power in the middle east.
So are we talking about what w would do in power or what the current people and factions that have power in the US will perceive as the rational thing to do? Because sure, go for green energy and reduce the soft power of the middle east is a much better approach than investing hundreds of billions on top of trillions to maintain hard power hegemony, I think this would be agreed by most on this board but it’s not really the prevailing viewpoint among the people in power or the American electorate
Yeah here I’m just talking about optimal policy from here. I think the US will find this line only if forced to make real cut backs. When things get bad and cuts have to be made they get made in the order of how awful the result of the cut will be politically/etc.
I think about this a lot when I’m investing actually. I visualize it like a flood map. In the event that there is significant economic pressure where is the path of least resistance for the economic pain?
This is why I generally won’t invest in companies that depend on the US healthcare system existing for viability, or defense stocks. They’re living at the lowest part of the floodplain and will be the first to be underwater.
Wonder if this was just a matter of trying to hit a target when opportunity arises or if they have some push planned and this going to keep the helicopters off them a little
Assuming this picture real gives a kinda amusing image that this missile has just been gathering dust for 30 years until they found it under the couch or something
Yeah the idea that we were going to run out of ammo to send the Ukrainians is pretty funny. At some point people are going to realize that the part of war that America is really good at is making weapons. If your plan is to exhaust our ability to make weapons you are already entirely fucked.
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That’s the best part: we’re basically shredding the Red Army with hand-me-down munitions.
That’s why I said we could keep our military dominance for 40% of the spend up thread. We absolutely humiliated the Russians military technology with current gen -2 weapons from cold storage.
Seeing some rumors that Putin has had a “cardiac event”
it’s from the same people that always report he’s dying of cancer etc, just noise
Yeah this seems extremely questionable
it popped up in a few channels i monitor today and people just immediately dismissed it because of the source
there’s a weird video of a russian vehicle running over a bunch of its own soldiers and then driving away and blowing up making the rounds. no one can seem to say where it was or what the heck happened there. so much out of that area is propaganda from both sides
none of the usual ukraine news aggregators picked it up. the fake was basically dropped, and was dead less than an hour later.
Man, with the benefit of a little bit of time I have come to the conclusion that Prigozhin was just motherfucking dumb as hell. Like, really, starts a coup, gives up halfway, and then continues to globetrot like he isn’t marked for death is just ludicrously stupid.
Yeah, this is what happens when you select the people for high government positions on the basis of ‘is this person a threat to me’. Prig was a caterer before he ran Putin’s answer to the SS. It’s possible the story there isn’t that he was such a genius that he rose from being a caterer to being a warlord and instead that Putin decided to make his caterer a warlord so that he wouldn’t have to worry about a coup. Turns out he was wrong about the coup part, but the caterer was a such an imbecile Putin won anyway with air.
I do wonder what would have happened if Prigozhin kept marching to Moscow. Sure seemed like the Russian army was continuously standing down in front of him. Ah well, I guess we’ll never know.
Yeah anyone with an IQ over a hundred would have gone as far as they could to finish once they started marching. Best situation ever to describe something as ‘crossing the Rubicon’. Literally the exact same situation. There’s a point of no return and once you cross it you gotta see it to the end.
I sleep like shit anyway so in Prig’s shoes I wouldn’t get more than 2 hours until Putin was confirmed dead dead.