boytoy wrote: Wed Jun 18, 2025 7:28 pm
For real starting to stress out I have nephews who are serving and this is starting to piss me off
There will be no such thing as a land invasion,
it is too archaic, especially when there is no common
land border to carry out the invasion. Air superiority,
strategic point destruction, including critical infrastructure,
is the main element of achieving an advantage that's to lead
to surrender. This is nothing new - such a strategy was first
used in 1940 during the Battle of Britain; Germany lost this battle
and gave up on a land invasion. Another example comes from
the end of WW2. It was estimated that the US invasion of Japan
to end the war would have claimed even up to 4 million casualties.
That is why the US decided to use nuclear weapons, which
led to the unconditional surrender of Japan.
To be honest, it's very strange that the Kremlin did not decide
on a similar strategy (achieving air superiority, not making a nuclear
strike, of course) in 2022 when it started the war in Ukraine.
Instead, it launched a full-scale military invasion, which is
the worst possible solution, because it absorbs a lot of victims,
entails drastic destruction of civilian infrastructure and takes
a lot of time (and money), which only increases the losses...
And instead of an invincible army conquering Helsinki,
Berlin and Paris, we see many months of fierce battles
for Avdiivka, Prokhorovka and Chasiv-Yar.
But it is hard to say whether the change of power in Iran makes sense.
The West has already forced the end of dictators in Iraq and Libya.
The US has spent about 2 trillion dollars (2*10^12 USD) on building
'democracy' in Iraq. As a result, there is great chaos in these countries
and the situation is worse than before. Ronald Reagan's strategy
was much better - for example, with airstrikes on Libya (1986)
he significantly weakened the Gaddafi regime, but he did not eliminate it,
because he knew that the situation could then have worsened.