Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

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Let's not kid ourselves; Russia would kick our asses in a shooting war. Actually they just did, in Syria. Our navy can't avoid running into cargo ships. Our air force can't buy a new plane. Our army is crippled when attacked with homemade explosives. Our intelligence agencies are employed mostly in spying on their own citizens.

Any armed conflict directly with Russia would be kicked off in the same shameful shambolic fashion we've gotten underway in the last three nations we've invaded. That is to say, we'd make some stupid claims about hacking, everyone else at the UN would chuckle nervously while voting against us, and then we'd ineffectively bomb the wrong targets. Then the world would witness what a bunch of hungry tough bastards with the right equipment can do. It would not be pretty. Eventually Putin and the oligarchs would figure out a really big number we could probably pay if we stopped all entitlement spending for a few generations, and the pain would stop.

Not even Canada would join us in such folly. Putin doesn't actually want a shooting war with USA; he just wants to keep his subjects thinking about Uncle Sam. Let's not fuck up our lives forever, just so a bunch of Washington assholes don't have to admit they've been very wrong for a very long time.

I really don't doubt what you're saying, although you're probably taking a psuedo-tongue-in-cheek mode, but it would be a crying shame if we would in fact lose horribly if it came to blows with Russia. We spend positively immense sums of money on our prized military -- leaving nothing little left for extras like a single payer health system -- and have posted said forces to outstretched islands and zones all over. How sad it is that we don't have enough tanks to fight the Russians successfully in Europe, for one thing. You can be sure that China, North Korea and Russia coordinate regularly with intelligence on the status on our military, ready to take advantage once the gaps make it possible.

This makes me want to listen to Sean Hannity just to balance out the rhetoric.

Syria is a proxy war, and not a particularly relevant one. Even the wars the US loses tends to leave devastation in their wake. That, and you’re grossly overestimating the Russian military as a non-regional power, but it hardly matters, since the Russians certainly don’t make that error themselves. They’re smart enough to engage in proxy and regional conflicts, for better or worse.

I hope that neither the US nor Russia would be stupid enough to go directly to war, but if they did it would be over in under and hour and we’d all be dead or dying. I’ll pass on that, thanks.

I agree that life is preferable to stupid wars, but in that case what were you trying to say by invoking the risible "sleeping giant" canard?

(Regret posting, sorry.)

For a non-American, you do a great impression of a 73-year-old Midwestern Republican who managed to miss both Korea and Vietnam and who has taken Time magazine for most of his life. I might not convince you of anything, but mostly I would just urge you to be skeptical of American media reports that encourage spending more money on the military.

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