Re:Ukraine attacks Moscow in one of largest ever drone strik...
by protomolecule on Thursday August 22, 2024 @09:37AM
(#41320136)
>Every war zone is a testing/advertising zone for weapons manufacturers.
I don't think that civil war in Myanmar, for example, is much of testing/advertising zone.
>do not direct it
They do. There were many articles in western press about, for example, the role of NATO in planning of last year's failed Ukrainian offensive.
> But Ukraine has taken a weak hand and, without a navy, bottled up the Russians in the Black Sea.
That's an old thing: "another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected." [0]
And NATO’s role in the war is crucial, of course, as a supplier of materiel, but not as deep as the conspiracy theorists like to think. They did not launch this war and do not direct it.
Also, despite my comment being voted down, it’s not a joke that NATO was shocked by how Ukraine has fough, not just how well. Its influence is openly discussed in the US and a European press and can be seen, for example, in the rush to embrace low cost disposable drones.
But it’s more than that: Ukraine has been more nimble and creative than the stogy western militaries who stopped taking Russia’s military that seriously in the early 1990s. Russia has underperformed, but not by a lot. But Ukraine has taken a weak hand and, without a navy, bottled up the Russians in the Black Sea. They demonstrated and used a flexibility far from the capabilities of any of the western militaries at scale. NATO needs not just to embrace that (which will likely take a generation) but also be ready to fight an adversary that has a similar attitude.