This is a perfect illustration of how US military industry is optimized for soaking up as much government funding as possible instead of producing reliable weapons that can be manufactured at scale.
This is a perfect illustration of how US military industry is optimized for soaking up as much government funding as possible instead of producing reliable weapons that can be manufactured at scale.
I think the breakdown from this lecture from Mearsheimer is pretty telling in that regard. First, we have the demographic breakdown of Ukraine:
and the election in2010:
As we can clearly see from the voting patterns in both elections, the country is divided exactly across the current line of conflict. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2015 further shows that there is a sharp division between people of eastern and western Ukraine on which economic bloc they would rather belong to:
Just finished watching it and those predictions wrt to China/Russia/Iran/Syria cooperation are so on point I actually started laughing. Only problem is that apparently the USA politicians didn’t watch that one, so all his hopeful predictions for how the USA could avoid that didn’t manifest. Their loss lol.
Mearsheimer understood what was happening in terms of geopolitics, and he tried to warn US politicians about it. Unfortunately, it’s clear that US is run by ideologues who silenced anybody who disagreed with them. Now we’re seeing the results of that.
Yeah, those track. I’ll watch the lecture but I was wondering if, for instance, there are many volunteers eastern regions in the Russian military. I already assume that very few would be in the Ukrainian one since they’ve been at literal war, but I hardly hear much about soldiers coming from the LPR and DPR militias in the Russian military or support among new soldiers from there. Those seem like interesting questions, and with the simple fact that the usual outlets aren’t screaming at the top of their lungs that “separatists actually hate Russia,” I guess I already know the answer.
Yup, and from what I recall LPR and DPR militias did most of the infantry fighting at the start of the war. I guess technically they were fighting since 2014, but it was a frozen conflict for a while.