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[Maximum Spin]

I think the only think keeping Russia alive is, honestly, the fact that Russia has nukes.  If they didn't, NATO or others would have air-forced them into rubble by now.

That's fairly accurate. We could send hypersonic jets to bomb Moscow, but then we would get to enjoy a strange game where the only way to win is not to play. And the thing is, most western countries have really underprepared for doing anything LESS than that. Our theories of power projection are outdated and may never have really made sense in the first place. Boom-boom-go-fast doesn't really win protracted wars.

Let me add though: I don't agree at all with the thesis in the rest of your post that we should kill tons of civilians to "punish" their overlords for being bad. Bombing Dresden was wrong and it's good that the general attitude of humanity has turned against it.

[Strongpoint]

the ability to spin something up on short notice to produce reasonable amounts of something you need right now. The US has done far more to specialize in huge expensive toys - like 5th-generation fighters and aircraft carriers - that just aren't efficient in modern combat scenarios in the new UAV/USV regime. We saw this problem on the small screen in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Russia keeps cranking out Lancets.

Yes, Russia keeps cranking Lancets... with contrabanded or stockpiled Western components. Do you think the USA can't start producing a huge number of something like those should it find any need to do so? I know that Nvidia and AMD prefer to produce stuff in Asia nowadays, but the core of the Lancet is THEIR civilian technologies. I think they'll manage and organize the production of something like Lancet in the USA should the need arise. Within weeks. Well... maybe months.

But the USA doesn't need such crap

[McTraveller]

Oh I didn't mean to say that I think bombing civilians is good - just that it's really hard to win a war if you "play by the rules" and your opponent doesn't.

Makes you sort of long for the dystopia where wars are like sports, refereed by an AI or something, where you get some kind of actual penalty if you break the rules.

[Lord Shonus]

As to whether what I actually said was right, have you heard of Sputnik? Tsar Bomba? VVERs, which are still being built by countries around the world?

Sputnik wasn't a matter of the Soviets being "ahead", even if it was taken as such by the public in both countries. The first US satellite could have been launched as early as spring of '57, but Eisenhower cancelled the military program - he wanted it done by a civilian agency using a civilian rocket because he feared that flaunting the US ICBM program would be considered provocative. That delayed things considerably. Sputnik was a outgrowth of the Soviet ICBM program (which was considerably behind the US one, to the point that if the Cuban Missile Crisis had gone hot the US would have had a good chance of surviving unscathed - fortunately Kennedy didn't know that).

Meanwhile there was nothing preventing the US from creating a Tsar Bomba equivalent either. That weapon wasn't a brilliant design, just an ordinary Soviet H-bomb built out more. It was also developed purely as a propaganda piece, intended as a "look! we aren't way behind you anymore!" message that was quite effective. A nuclear bomb that large is effectively useless for a number of reasons - soft targets like cities are much easier to destroy with multiple smaller weapons because of the way area scales (a 50mt warhead does not destroy twice as muchas a 25 Mt one!), hardened targets (where high yield was often used as a substitute for accuracy) don't need that high a yield and would create obscene amounts of fallout (hard targets like silos and bunkers are targeted with groundbursts, not airbursts), and a big enough nuclear detonation escapes the atmosphere and dumps a large portion of energy harmlessly into space. This is why the Soviets never intended to -and didn't- build more than one. Their largest deployed warheads were in the same 10-15 megaton range as the US ones.

The VVER is just one type of pressurized water reactor. Everybody who has reactor technology developed those, and the use of any one design is more down to political reasons than technological.

Boom-boom-go-fast doesn't really win protracted wars.

No, that's wrong. The primary reason that Ukraine is struggling right now is a lack of "boom boom go fast". If one of the US air forces was involved in this war, the Russians would never have been able to build such protracted defensive lines in the first place due to air attack, and what defenses they did have would function far less effectively if they were constantly at risk of attracting an ambient JDAM. The existing "stalemate" is primarily because both sides are fighting a three-dimensional war in two dimensions, because neither side has the ability to provide significant air support.

[Maximum Spin]

Sputnik wasn't a matter of the Soviets being "ahead", even if it was taken as such by the public in both countries. The first US satellite could have been launched as early as spring of '57, but Eisenhower cancelled the military program - he wanted it done by a civilian agency using a civilian rocket because he feared that flaunting the US ICBM program would be considered provocative. That delayed things considerably.

"They weren't ahead, they just did it first."
I don't understand what other definition of "winning a race" you have.

Look, I think we're talking past each other here. Everything you said goes to the point I was making. They didn't have a spectacular missile program, but they launched the first satellite. They didn't have a spectacular weapons program, but they made the biggest nuke. There was nothing particularly special about their nuclear reactors, but they built a bunch of them.

This shows that it is honestly not that hard.

They just chose to focus on those things, mainly for oneupmanship reasons. The fact that it doesn't take a global superpower to make a technological propaganda win is exactly what I mean. And this is even more true now than it was then, since everyone's buying from the same relatively small technological pool, eg, Nvidia chips.

[McTraveller]

Huh? My claim was that “boom boom go fast” is indeed how you win wars.

[Maximum Spin]

Huh? My claim was that “boom boom go fast” is indeed how you win wars.

That was a quote from me. I didn't even notice it got messed up.

It's really not, though. I mean, it can HELP, but it doesn't win on its own. Look at the US' experience with it so far in - any part of the middle east, really. The US military's theory of power projection for some time now, maybe since the end of WWII when boom boom go fast actually did make Japan surrender, seems to have been too focused on showboating.

ETA: Sometimes with actual show boats. Aircraft carriers, man. You don't even know how much of a waste of money that is these days.

[Madman198237]

The Russians aren't blind at night because they've got technological and industrial parity with the US, they're blind at night because they don't have the industry or technical knowledge necessary to produce night-vision equipment. Russia didn't reactivate T-62s and T-55s of all things because they have the industrial capability to outproduce the US, they did it because their stockpiles of more modern vehicles are decrepit for a variety of reasons (irrelevant to this discussion) and they can't produce more. And don't get me started on the idea that Russian military equipment has kept up with modern NATO standards. It hasn't, and it hasn't at any point in the last forty-five years or so.

The US, and NATO overall aren't anywhere near a war footing. The last time the US went to a war footing it produced so many tanks, ships, and planes that we were changing factories back to civilian production a full year before the war would end in Europe. The stockpiles of torpedoes, artillery shells, and bullets produced during WWII lasted decades even through several other wars. Even if we say "sure, we're definitely deindustrialized and I don't drive past a dozen active heavy industry plants just on my commute to work everyday", the US still retains the know-how and manufacturing capability to build the factories to do it, in record time as well.

In short, and to avoid actually reading the previous conversation about war industries, lol, no, Russia does not have industrial or technological parity with the rest of the world. Their tech is not equal to ours, the world has not been equal in tech all over for a century (where even did you get this idea?), and were some of the nations of NATO to actually go to a war footing and just start giving everything to Ukraine, Russia would have a Very Bad Day^TM and it would just keep getting worse.


Spin where is NATO going to get a hypersonic bomber? There are none in service in NATO countries so far as I'm aware, heck I don't think there's any hypersonic bombers in service anywhere. Quick Wikipedia check says no hypersonic planes in service at all, at least going by the Mach 5+ definition. And a ballistic missile would work a lot better.

"Winning the space race" is an unending argument, apparently. The US unquestionably did because we came out of it with more and better technology and were able to actually USE that technology in many, many, many, MANY places. The Soviets came out of it with a bankruptcy problem and fell apart.

Sheesh, Spin, do you have a gripe with every decision made by military leaders? Do you not admit even a bit that they might, might, know what they're doing? Carriers aren't useless, just check the combat radius of a loaded fighter aircraft to understand precisely why, while you be sure to consider that the pilot needs to sleep and the plane needs maintenance and if it gets damaged the pilot is going to want a nearby landing strip and...

There's huge differences between fighting a nation like Russia that doesn't want to be in the war it's in (as in, the people mostly don't) and trying to perform policing actions after the major fighting is over somewhere in the Middle East. The issue isn't with the power projection, which worked quite handily in demolishing every regime that bothered us. It's with what comes after, when you're occupying a territory and a significant fraction of the people don't want you there.

[Maximum Spin]

I thought it was incredibly obvious that the thing about hypersonic jets was facetious. No, to the best of my knowledge, they do not exist.

Aircraft carriers are giant sitting ducks to submarines and you will enjoy your extended combat radius very briefly before you get sent on a surprise exploratory expedition on the seafloor against a modern submarine fleet. And then your fighter probably takes a UAV to the face.

I don't know why you think Russia doesn't have night-vision equipment, though. They have night-vision equipment, it's basically functional, we've seen it on spetsnazzers. They just don't issue it to regular soldiers because their military system is hopelessly moribund and corrupt. Well, I understand they tried to get more equipment into the hands of soldiers at some point, but I don't know to what extent that's worked, probably not very much.
Of course Russia's tank production isn't comparable to the US. That's exactly the kind of big specialized effort I said they're not good at. On the other hand, their production of things that blow up tanks has, unfortunately, been solid. Frankly, modern tanks are not cost-effective, being designed more for pitched tank-tank battles that never really happen anymore. This is a running theme with modern equipment, because military contractors like money and aren't too fussed if you have to order a new tank because your old one ate an anti-tank mine costing perhaps a couple hundred. In those conditions, you might as well use a T-55; it'll die just as hard, but at least it didn't cost much and it's probably lighter.

I mean, this is the only sane way to evaluate technology. Not "is it functionally the same in its specific category", but "is it actually worth using". The thing about the US producing so many tanks, ships, and planes that blah blah blah is that the era of tanks, ships, and planes, in the conventional sense of those things, is basically over. If the last dozen or so wars around the world, especially the Nagorno-Karabakh war, haven't convinced you of that, you haven't been paying attention.

I'm not saying NATO couldn't have rolled over Russia if it tried, either. In context, I said that Russia has a stronger industrial base than Westerners imagined and that it's not surprising that what was sent to Ukraine wasn't adequate, because it's not leaps and bounds ahead of what Russia has in any way that matters. And yes, that means including asymmetrical comparisons, like loitering ammunition beats tank. You cannot possibly argue that this is untrue because it happened. We all watched it. Russia has been flinging shells and missiles at Ukrainians in massive numbers for over a year with no sign of running out, even though everyone was sure they'd have to, because this is what they chose to specialize in. And unfortunately, it works.

Although I think it's funny that you specifically called out night vision equipment and tanks when I just read this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/08/07/a-shortage-of-optics-was-holding-back-russian-tank-production-that-shortage-may-have-ended/?sh=513f21a43dff

ETA: Look, I'm not trying to be a doomer here, but the facts on the ground are that we didn't do enough, and that sucks, and we're going to need to adapt if we want to beat Russia, which is something military bureaucracies absolutely hate doing. And if this adaptation goes through the traditional military contractor pathway, it's going to take two years to work its way to preliminary proposal status and come out more bloated than Microsoft Office. It's like The_Explorer said to begin with - Russia has turned out to be much nimbler than anyone gave it credit for, and the US has not invested its resources in nimbleness for a very long time. And we need to start.

[MaxTheFox]

Makes you sort of long for the dystopia where wars are like sports, refereed by an AI or something, where you get some kind of actual penalty if you break the rules.

There was a Star Trek TOS episode where two planets were having an unending simulated war to prevent infrastructural damage, and soldiers who get "shot", or civilians who get "bombed" are instructed to go to vaporization chambers. I got reminded of that.

Anyways, 🍿

[Strongpoint]

Frankly, modern tanks are not cost-effective, being designed more for pitched tank-tank battles that never really happen anymore.  This is a running theme with modern equipment, because military contractors like money and aren't too fussed if you have to order a new tank because your old one ate an anti-tank mine costing perhaps a couple hundred. In those conditions, you might as well use a T-55; it'll die just as hard, but at least it didn't cost much and it's probably lighter.

A similar thing was true since day 1 of tanks being a thing. WW2 tanks could be knocked out by a single Molotov, you can't go cheaper than that. Yet, tanks were cost-effective then, and they stay cost-effective now.

And the difference in firepower and protection between T-55 and some modern tank is immense. It is simply wrong to assume that their chance to cease function after a land mine is the same.

[Maximum Spin]

A similar thing was true since day 1 of tanks being a thing. WW2 tanks could be knocked out by a single Molotov, you can't go cheaper than that. Yet, tanks were cost-effective then, and they stay cost-effective now.

They were cost-effective then because nobody had figured that out yet. They aren't now because people have.
I mean. Look. We can SEE the amount of tanks that have blown up, and calculate the cost in dollars. It's not like this is a theory. We need to use different tactics.

And the difference in firepower and protection between T-55 and some modern tank is immense. It is simply wrong to assume that their chance to cease function after a land mine is the same.

Neither that extra firepower nor the kind of protection that modern tanks are designed with (which is mainly against fire coming in more or less horizontally) help against mines. The truth is that their chance to cease function after a land mine really is very close to parity, close enough that you don't want to try driving over a mine to chance it. Some modern tank types are actually worse due to designs that, while a good idea in the theory of tank-tank combat, make mines more deadly to the occupants. As far as I know, no modern tanks come standard with measures that effectively defend against those newer anti-tank mines that fly up and smash into the roof that Russia's so proud of. Yes, the modern tanks are very fancy. The problem is that it doesn't help.

[Strongpoint]

I mean. Look. We can SEE the amount of tanks that have blown up, and calculate the cost in dollars. It's not like this is a theory. We need to use different tactics.

It is literally what tanks are made for.  - To go into places where the enemy will try to destroy them with various means. Naturally, most of them are destroyed sooner or later. It is how it worked in every war that had tanks except very lopsided ones.

Neither that extra firepower nor the kind of protection that modern tanks are designed with (which is mainly against fire coming in more or less horizontally) help against mines.  The truth is that their chance to cease function after a land mine really is very close to parity, close enough that you don't want to try driving over a mine to chance it. 

This is not exactly accurate. Ask surviving tank crews of Leopard 2s, who would be in space if they were in a T-72.

[Maximum Spin]

I mean. Look. We can SEE the amount of tanks that have blown up, and calculate the cost in dollars. It's not like this is a theory. We need to use different tactics.

It is literally what tanks are made for.  - To go into places where the enemy will try to destroy them with various means. Naturally, most of them are destroyed sooner or later. It is how it worked in every war that had tanks except very lopsided ones.

That's entirely true, but you must see how this is a problem when the tank costs millions of dollars and the means of destroying it costs a few hundred bucks. At that point, something has gone very wrong and new tactics are needed. At the very least, new specifically anti-mine tank designs which no country currently has. Right now, really practical demining equipment does not exist in the world. The best demining equipment is slow and expensive (read: vulnerable) and don't even individually cover enough area to safely run a tank convoy behind one even if this wouldn't get the tank convoy shelled to hell because the demining equipment is slow. The country that invents that will, indeed, have a genuinely important technological advantage, for however long it takes for everyone to copy it.

This is not exactly accurate. Ask surviving tank crews of Leopard 2s, who would be in space if they were in a T-72.

More survivors is great, although I will caution you that, again, some modern tanks are worse; but you don't actually win wars by having more people limp home after losing a battle.

You said yourself that the current tactics aren't working. I agree that they're not working. I don't understand the dispute here, honestly. Technology and tactics have to evolve to meet the needs of evolving circumstances.

ETA: Honestly, I don't know why you guys aren't - unless you are and it's not making it over here, in which case never mind - mining the hell out of the Kupyansk front and probably also around Kherson in the direction they'd have to go to reach Odessa. Yeah, it'll suck to have to demine them later, but it'll suck even more if Russia advances on them, because then they will mine the hell out of it, and now you have to get it back and then demine it.

[Strongpoint]

ETA: Honestly, I don't know why you guys aren't - unless you are and it's not making it over here, in which case never mind - mining the hell out of the Kupyansk front and probably also around Kherson in the direction they'd have to go to reach Odessa. Yeah, it'll suck to have to demine them later, but it'll suck even more if Russia advances on them, because then they will mine the hell out of it, and now you have to get it back and then demine it.

We simply don't have as many mines as Russia. Unlike them, we didn't produce those after the fall of USSR and while we inherited huge stokpiles in 1991...  Some were sold both officially and via corrupt means, some went bad due to neglect. Some went BOOM in storages under mysterious circumstances. Some were destroyed for Western money in wonderful projects like this

Sure, we are getting mines from the former Warsaw Pact stocks.  We are even getting some modern and cool ones but it is not nearly enough to mine such a huge front to the same extent as Russians do.