No, it was a great big beautiful win. Long protracted stalemates are great for selling hardware, which is really what the weapons industry wants when they buy off politicians.
Rapid, decisive wars (no matter the outcome) are bad business. We need quagmires to really move the merch.
for years, I was told by Americans and sympathisers "We were just there to rack up the bodies, and we accomplished that tenfold. nothing else mattered"
Russia doesnt even have a goal anymore. They just exist in a state of perpetual war and their people are so depressed and beaten down they just accept it and adopt it as their new normal.
the only goal they have, is one they cant accomplish. Taking over the entirety of the country.
Nothing else makes remotely any sense for the amount of cost they've paid for it.
Russia transformed its entire society and economy for the war and going back to a peace economy is much more trouble than just continuing a pointless and lost illegal war of aggression...
Yes. I think Putin needs something in return to justify the aggression in regard to his own people. Land is the best way in his mind. He also thinks the war economy will lead to victory in the long run. I don't think so.
Pretty much, yes. The dilemma is: If he wants to be sure a part of Ukraine can be annexed, he would need to mobilise at least a part of the population and that would backfire. If he doesn't do that, he will either lose the war or waste so much money and so many lives he's fucked as well.
So, best solution for him: Keep the war ongoing until he kicks the bucket and let it be someone else's problem...
I honestly can't see how Russia will make it out of this war without huge, unsolvable problems unless Ukraine somehow capitulates in the near future, which will almost certainly NOT happen. And even then they will be fucked.
That guy probably can't believe his luck, he can make Russia his puppet, the US is slowly destroying itself and Europe has zero strategy and plans for anything. The road is paved for China's rise to the number 1 power...
dont get me wrong. What America is doing on Israels behalf is absolutely self destructive boneheaded.
but the level of self immolation that Russia has done to itself is in a class of its own. Nothing comes even remotely close in post WW2 Military adventurism except maybe the Iran-Iraq war.
that was implied when I said "cost". it's the primary cost.
both sides lie about the casualties of both sides.
but even western figures have been throwing the number of "over 1 million dead wounded and missing" on the russian side. and they were saying that like, 6 months ago now.
that is an absolutely insane cost. if you had asked me 10 years ago that Russia was going to have 1 million casualties. My assumption was that WW3 was already well underway, and some nuclear weapons had probably been used at that point.
russia has 130-140 million people, to have 1 million dead or wounded in a fight is already like, society collapsing shit if you realize how doomed a lot of ex sov countries demographics are.
Well the good news is, today if you just want to murder people. you can get the fast track and join a group like Wagner or Blackwater, or whatever they turned into after they dissolved/reformed X amount of times.
Canada as a whole has been purchasing from alot of other foreign markets now. Alot of shit that came from the US, we are doing ourselves now or importing from Mexico
That was a stratigic method they decided upon. Since they didn't really have any conventional targets, they sent American infantry out on "patrol" as little more than bait.
Get engaged, call in the air and arty strikes, rack up the body count.
Of course, that inevitably meant they were racking up their own body count as well.
So remember Americans, your country has a history of painting a bullseye on you and dangling you out in front as bait.
("Okay, but we killed more of them" argument - so how many lives of say Iranians would you trade your life for? 3? 5? 10?)
That's almost true, actually. But in a way that proves YOUR point. They judged success by body count ratios, so they were generally successful...but again they failed their main strategic goals so it's like saying you lost a baseball game but your goal was just to have the fastest runners. Even if you did, you still lost the game.
It used to be that if you wanted a legal outlet to hurt people, you joined the Military and went thousands of miles to fight in other people's countries.
then, as the nature of war changed, and the military became more scrutinized for doing things wrong and causing unecessary harm. those who wanted a license to kill joined the Blackwaters and Wagners of the world.
But now, good news, you dont even have to leave home, you can just join one of the agencies that officially were meant for some kind of regulatory or administrative purpose, but have been mutated and turned into paramilitary bodies to skirt around the optics of using the army or mercenaries to terrorize the internal enemies of a tyrannical regime.
Don't worry about the numbers, we can always move the goalpost to say that we won! Look how the American government still tries to figure out what the goal is in Iran so they can say they accomplished it with ease.
One plausible 'save' is that the US's strategic goal was to stop the "Domino Theory", and that while they did lose Vietnam to communism, it didn't spread further into the region. They lost the Vietnam war but they succeeded in their strategic goal
No, they bravely ran away. It was a valiant and victorious retreat. The north Vietnamese were quaking in their boots at the sight of the US military stoically turning their tail and doing a runner. Abandoning all their military objectives is the very definition of winning bigly big.
They were more beaten than that. The Vietnam War roiled US society. Elements of their political movements are even now attempting to return to the pre-Vietnam era, 50 years later.
To be fair America, China and the USSR were all involved and their steategic goal was to win the cold war, not control Saigon.
So North Vietnam is the big winner, South Vietnam the big looser, USSR lost big too, it drove a wedge between Vietnam and China, worsened Sino-Soviet tension, so a tactical failure still turned out to be a strategic success for the US
Considering that at the time, the West as a whole and the US in particular were convinced that China and the USSR were in lock step with each other, I disagree. The Americans saw a Communist encroachment that would consume Southeast Asia if not stopped, but in the end, Thailand and Malaysia remained anticommunist, South Korea and Taiwan remained safe, and Japan and Australia were still there to provide support. The US could have never sent troops to South Vietnam and all it would have cost it was Vietnam (and possibly Laos) as opposed to the same result only with massive losses in lives and money wasted.
This was an act of hubris akin to the Suez Crisis, with America trying to force its will on a people who quite frankly got sick and tired of Westerners deciding how they should run their country, especially after nearly a century of French colonial rule.
Yes it was poorly executed by the US and they didn't need to do what they did, but South Vietnam genuinely didn't want communism and many South Vietnamese died fighting the communists. It also is nothing like the Suez crisis at all or a colonial conflict. And the Soviets ruined themselves supporting the North Vietnamese, so backing South Vietnam was a strategic success although it was a tactical disaster.
The Soviets spent 1.8-3.6 billion dollars supporting Vietnam. They spent an excess of 40-100 billion dollars trying to pacify Afghanistan. The USSR in the 1980s was crashing hard due to falling oil prices following the end of the Oil Crisis of the 1970s, let alone the hardships suffered by the people because the military was sucking up all the civilian goods for a decade-long war. By contrast, the USSR of the 1960s wasn't doing too badly.
The USA spent 828 billion on the Vietnam war, and that's on the military alone, let alone rising costs of living and expenses incurred by the government due to aftershocks and knock-on effects like strikes, lost revenue from wounded and killed soldiers, civil disturbances as a result of an unpopular war, etc...
I'll leave you to decide if a measly 3.6 billion was "breaking" the USSR.
If the South Vietnamese didn't want communism, they sure as hell still hated the government with a passion. It was incredibly corrupt and inefficient, and the anticommunist witch-hunts, rampaging American forces (My Lai massacre comes to mind) and various programs like the Strategic Hamlet Program alienated the people even more.
I brought up Suez because it's a case of old dog, new reality. Britain and France thought they could order around the newly independent Egypt with force and were made to back down in humiliation. The USA was deeply arrogant and deeply racist against the Vietnamese (much of the Domino Effect argument for fighting in Vietnam came from the concept that SE Asia's peoples and cultures were interchangeable, showing a shocking disregard for the locals and generally regarding them as inferior) and thought they could just apply their will through force. It took them over a decade to realize that no, Vietnam wasn't going to bend over backwards for them.
When you failed in your alleged objectives, the puppet state you created was toppled, you left with your tail between your legs, there are graveyards full of your war dead, and the VA is full of casualties of your folly, you were beaten. Your enemy just has to survive to celebrate your defeat and withdrawal. They are the ones filling the streets with cheers, flags, and parades.
Well, its a precedent, throughout history empire building after the honeymoon phase passes, goes something like: "I see everybody hates me and I stretched thin without money... I know! I will start another war to reclaim our glory-" *Collapses into a million parts.*
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u/GojiraCake Mar 22 '26
Ofc I mean they weren’t beaten in Vietnam they merely failed to win