@Lionsmane8 and very unnecessary. We can talk all we want about superiority of hardware / strategy / experience etc It's all totally subjective.

Most military watchers are 'gear heads'. They drone on and on about this and that gen tech. They furiously rub their little cocks while looking at stealth bombers and drones and missiles.

None of this matters. You can have the highest tech military in the world, and still lose because you have forgotten about the economics of war. The US military has 'overshot' on tech. They have created systems that are just too costly. The entire US military system is too costly. It is why they lost in Vietnam.

The Ukraine war is good evidence of this problem. The Russian military budget is about $75bn p.a. The US military budget is more than 10x that. Clearly, Russia is not spending all of their military budget on Ukraine (neither is the US) but if you add up what Russia is actually spending, and then compare that to the combined spending of Ukraine and all the western allies 'pledges, support, donations' (high interest loans), its fairly plain to see that the west is outspending Russia by about 7 to 1. For a stalemate.

This is why Russia is content to play the long game. They can go on as long as they like, the west cannot. The US is running out of money, the Europeans are running out of political capital, the Ukraine is literally running out of able bodies men, and Russia is doing just fine.

In the end, you have to be able to wage war economically. The west does not have that skill.

@Vermillion-Rx one of the issues is this....

As soon as woman goes on OLD (or any social media, tbh, they work the same way) if she is not fat or pig ugly, she will get swamped in likes, clicks and DMs.

Honestly, have a what it is like as an OK looking young woman online. It's a wall of thirsty simps, thousands of them, telling her that she is 'amazing'. It's actually more than they can deal with, its just overwhelming.

This is the origin story of entitlement and their 'demands'. They will list crazy demands in order to try and cut down the overwhelming tsunami of contact from thirsty dudes. It's not possible to drink for a fire hydrant - they are trying to use demands to cut the flow down to a manageable flow.

The mistake these women make is that they see hundreds of likes, swipes and clicks and they start thinking that they are special. They confuse thirst with guys wanting to LTR them. We don't. We just want to smash and dash.

@Vermillion-Rx That's just the thing - China is so much of a threat that western leaders are not even allowed to say they are a threat. That's how much of a threat China is.

The very fact that they are engaging in a proxy war with Russia reveals how little of a threat the west estimates Russia to be (they are wrong, but anyhow).

Just look at the obsequious snivelling that went on when Xi visited San Francisco recently. The leader of the 'free world' prostrating himself and bootlicking before the all powerful Xi. Not humiliation was too great for Biden, including a very barbed snub to the long suffering residents of California - by clearing away all the human garbage on the streets that Xi would be driven down, he was pointedly saying

"I will clean the streets of dreck (drug addicts, street prostitutes, homeless beggars and the assortment of needles and human shit) for a foreign dictator, whom I hold in the highest regard, but I'm not interested in doing it for voters, whom I hold in the utmost contempt."

The west only attacks or fights people that are no threat whatsoever. A few rag tag camel fuckers wearing sandals in the desert with 50 year old small arms? LETS ROLL!

A modern army with nuclear power threatening peace and obliterating democracy where it goes? Let's roll out the red carpet.