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Comment by throwboatyface | Hacker News Reader

Do you think the American government can't already find Russian ships? America gets their ass beat consistently in unwinnable wars against guerilla armies, but in terms of identifying giant warships I think they're pretty capable.

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I think it'd be more accurate to say the US consistently signs itself up for wars based on political or economic motivations with little intention of doing what would be needed to actually "win" the war.

Specifically, we either don't define metrics for success or we define completely unrealistic metrics. Worse, we go to war with no intention of destroying an enemy that has left us with no alternative other than to risk many, many human lives to stop them. We go for political wins at home, to claim ground in a geopolitical power struggle, or for natural resources.

Finding them is actually likely much less of a problem than listening in, though providing the Ukrainians with additional ways of finding and tracking their enemy without us directly providing intel does offer the US plausible deniability.

>US plausible deniability

*snort*

It never really has to be believable, it just needs to be enough that you can deny direct involvement in a specific attack. I have little patience for politics and which we didn't let pur world be run this way, but that's the way we do it.

So the usual 'it's okay when USA does that, totally not okay when someone else does that'.

Guerilla tactics just raise the cost of steamrolling an opponent to an unpalatable level, hiding among civilians, civilian infrastructure, etc. American loses these matchups not because they can't blockade a country, raze their farmlands and wait a few seasons while they all starve, but because fully eliminating and "winning" would be the worst possible choice.

I'd still argue that the problem is not defining "winning" beforehand. That could mean any number of thing, but without defining that first we can't weigh the likelihood of success or cost of tactics that will be required.

I agree I'm not sure when a goal of eliminating the enemy completely is one that I could support, though interestingly enough that is precisely what Israel's claimed goal currently is with regards to Hamas. I believe its also the stated goal of Russia, though I'm not familiar with what faction of neo-nazis they claim to be targeting or whether they even exist in any meaningful numbers in Ukraine.

Ass beat? More like outlasted. The Taliban went to Pakistan for 20 years until the US left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Enduring_Freedom

The US lost 2,380 and the coalition killed 72,000+.

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