Not in the middle of a fucking desert, on a military base, far away from any potential market.
Unless you are going to claim that the soldiers stole wheat to sell to locals, for local currency, that they can then use to… do what exactly?
This would’ve been more believable if they left off the wheat. Oil I can imagine, but no fucking way are US troops stealing wheat of all things.
Do they think there is a mill at their base? What the fuck would they use it for? It has negative value.
Yes, you can make the argument that a hyper-modern vehicle is a vastly more effective weapons system, so the disparity in cost is justified.
That isn’t what we are seeing in Ukraine - relatively modern NATO-standard tanks are being knocked out by old artillery, immobilized by old mines, and killed by cheap drones. Industrial warfare in the vein of WWI and WWII is clearly not dead yet.
This isn’t to say Russia would win a direct conventional war against the west, but we also can’t sit here smugly and claim it would be a steamroll like Gulf Storm given the observations from Ukraine.
The raw spending figure isn’t what is important, but the PPP figure. Russia’s economy is about 1/5th the size of the EU’s in PPP, and its defense sector is vastly more efficient on a monetary basis than the west - The US alone has given Ukraine close to $60 billion and it is a fraction of the hardware that Russia has produced with fewer dollars.
This isn’t a ‘Russia stronk, Europe bad’ post, it just bears emphasizing that Russia has a large industrial base and has brought much of it into arms production over the past two years. The West hasn’t, and defense procurement remains an almost artisanal process where high tech goods are bought - in low volumes - at inflated prices.
The terms seem agreeable?
The terms that restrict the size of the Ukrainian military, bar Ukraine from receiving foreign assistance to rebuild its military, forbid it from seeking security guarantees from any country or bloc, … The terms that would have made it trivial for Russia to further invade at any point in the future?
Those terms seem agreeable?
Towards the end, drafted troops would refuse to go on patrol, attack their officers with grenades (nearly 500 were killed this way during the war), and refuse deployment while still in the US. 50,000 troops deserted.
The lesson the military learned from Vietnam is that drafts are counterproductive. The civilian protests helped set the tenor in Washington, but it was the collapse of morale within the military itself that ended the war.
Early heat seekers wouldn’t reliably lock an aircraft from the front, since the heat signature is really only visible from the rear.
Something like this would almost certainly need to be actively guided, but then the RWR needs to be more expensive and that cuts into yacht money for the Lockheed execs.