The Other Big Lessons That the U.S. Army Should Learn from Ukraine | Hacker News Reader

The Other Big Lessons That the U.S. Army Should Learn from Ukraine

warontherocks.com

25 pointsrntn8 comments

The authors highlight one important factor that hasn't gotten enough attention, but completely ignore the factor that is turning out to be decisive on the battlefield. They correctly point out the effect of modern surveillance capabilities. They say nothing about the continued importance of artillery. What I'm seeing among military analysts now is a general agreement that regardless of your hi-tech gadgetry, when you have massive forces arrayed against each other along a fairly stable front, the determining factor is still who has the greater artillery support.

It's really strange to me that Russia is still being pushed as a threat to Europe. Like I assume that I'm just ignorant, but Russia seems to be really struggling. How could they possibly attack Europe in a way that the u.s. Army needs special tactics to counter them?

I'm not in any kind qualified to answer this question, but have some thoughts. To me it seems like the US military does not have a reason to do a cost-benefit analysis. They can generally just say what they want and will mostly get it. There are always unknown factors in war, and trying to failsafe against more unlikely ones is generally inefficient, but doable if there is a willing payer.

I also wouldn't put it behind Russia to seriously test European unity. Would an attack of Estonia trigger nuclear war? Unlikely. A counter attack on Moscow certainly would. Russian leadership doesn't have that much to lose sadly.

You are right. The US military is primarily a jobs creation program and defense contractor beneficiary.

Russia is threat to Europe the same way it is threat to Ukraine - it can launch a military operation that by rational thinking person would be not acceptable and Russian society would tolerate or even support it.

Russian army has lost over 35000 men and over 4000 units of armored vehicles (tanks, AFV, IFV etc) and yet it keeps going while in the Western world any such loss would have considered catastrophic.

This is a really old question. Even in the 1980s, some people were saying that standard estimates of Soviet capability were greatly exaggerated, and that we were overestimating how strong NATO needed to be. Since the fall of the USSR, we have learned a lot about Soviet plans and capabilities, but that hasn't really resolved the dispute. On the one hand, Soviet military capabilities really were worse than we thought. On the other had, they really did have plans for invading westward. Maybe it was a massive case of wishful thinking on their part.

Russia is not a real threat to Europe except for nuclear weapons. The defense budget of Russia is not even close to the combined defense budgets of Western Europe. Also, Europe is BIG. It would take an enormous amount of Russian soldier to occupy Europe even if they did succeed in conquering it. The logistics would be a nightmare and easy to sabotage.

Sooo, high speed drones with anti-missile lasers?

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