I also don’t know why they keep saying it’s going to be a stalemate, Russia is already taking kilometres on the north which is more than Ukraine managed to take during the whole two months now.
Once the offensive burns itself out, it’s almost certain that Russia will start a serious offensive of their own.
I think most or many of these politicians and weapons contractors genuinely believe(d) that the Ukranazis can win, they are still just coping, and it ultimately doesn’t matter if Ukraine wins or not to them, but of course they would prefer a victory.
I do wonder now actually. Looking back at the early days of the Iraq war, the yanks seemed to be honestly convinced that their “shock and awe” would win the war in a matter of weeks. That they would face no real opposition and the Iraqi people would just roll over and let them steal their resources.
And in turn with this war, the western narrative has always been “Russia is behaving like the US did in Iraq” when they never did, specifically because they’ve learned from that conflict and learned what not to do. The US meanwhile doesn’t seem to have learned a damn thing.
The thing with the US is that we know the people behind the scenes don’t gaf who wins or how long it takes so long as they can sell as many arms as possible in this war and the next one.
But if the generals agreed, that wars don’t need to be won, there are better ways of wasting weapons shooting at nothing. And if the politicians agreed, they would still have to try to or give the appearance of winning if they want to be voted in again. (Of course, voter-gullibility is reliable to some extent.) If the public agreed, they wouldn’t get so emotional about Darth Potter and the Infinity Avenger.
There are glaring contradictions in the west’s war plans. The public, the arms dealers, the military, the politicians, the fossil execs, etc, all have different interests (some slightly different, some very different). But nobody doesn’t want victory/almost everyone would be happy with victory.
They might laugh when they lose and still make a killing in profit. But I wouldn’t say they set out to lose. At the same time, the exceptionalism runs deep and they massively overestimate their abilities. Every time, even when they have the advantage.
I’m rambling now and no longer sure what I was trying to say. Maybe just that the western military model is riddled with contradictions, which they’ve managed to keep at bay for a long time. But facing Russia in Ukraine may be too much to deal with.
No it’s fine, you’re making sense. The US military industrial complex is filled with a lot of different people with different interests. Some only focused on short term profit, some on longer term profit. Losing a war now means greater long term profit for some, and less for others, winning a war flips those two groups. So it seems chaotic and self-contradictory because it isn’t a monolith, with lots of different groups vying for power. And of course, they’re all human, and make human mistakes, errors and overestimates of their own strength. So there are probably plenty who honestly believed that western weapons would win easily, and those that didn’t.
The one thing they do seem to be lacking is anyone who actually understands how dangerously ineffective their “wars for profit” system is, probably because anyone who points that out doesn’t end up in the higher echelons of a military production company.