I am not, just the MIC in general.
What Ukraine is doing is showing how well our shit works and wants people to buy them
This is a really,
really big point.
The Russians opened their invasion by launching hundreds of missiles into Ukrainian territory, and have been conducting follow up missile, artillery, and air strikes ever since. They haven't hit
nothing, but we've been seeing fairly frequent reports of all the shit they hit instead of military targets,
and the Ukrainian military is still very clearly fighting effectively in the field.
Russian military hardware, whether through designed capabilities, shitty maitenance, or shitty training, really has not performed well.
American military hardware on the other hand...
Russian Tanks and APCs were getting smoked and turret-tossing left and right. This wasn't exclusively American hardware being used, or necessarily even
primarily such, but enough was that it's shaped public perception.
And then we sent the Ukies some HIMARS, and ever since Russian ammo depots have been going up left and right.
It's hard to overstate the sheer capability gap demonstrated here. The first batch sent over was something like 4 launchers and 50 missiles, and the
instant that the Ukrainians finished training up on them, they started hitting strategic targets,
and just haven't stopped. There isn't a week that goes by where you don't hear about two or more ammo dumps, bridges, or HQs getting hit.
This is compared to the
hundreds of missiles and launch systems that the Russians have been using, and while they've hit tanks, runways, civilian structures, etc, they haven't been
half as effective, or a
tenth as visibly effective.
The War in Ukraine has been the biggest advertising campaign for competing defense industries since the Cold War ended. Iraq 1 & 2, as well as Afghanistan, demonstrated amply to the world that the US military was going to utterly wreck your ass in anything resembling open field warfare. It also revealed that the US is weak to long endurance low-intensity insurgency warfare, but even in those circumstances it would inflict
hilariously disproportionate losses.
The thing that the war in Ukraine is proving, is that it's not just that the US was fighting third-world muslim forces, it's not just that it has good training and the enemy had bad training, it's that American military hardware
is actually that much better.
You want the ability to strike fear into the heart of your enemies, and especially kick them in the wallet with precision weapons from eighty kilometers away? If you buy American, and take the add-on of training from American advisors, then yes,
you can in fact do that, and it's not just better than old Soviet stuff from 40 years ago, it's better than the best that Russia can field
right now.
This isn't just good for American defense industry. This isn't just bad for Russian defense industry. This has massive implications for the geopolitical balance of power, because if Russia doesn't get outside contracts to buy their latest generation of tanks, jets, SAM systems and PGM? They aren't just going to be out 'some' money,
they aren't going to be able to maintain/put them into mass production at all.
This means the death of the last pseudo-peer military industrial complex the US has had since World War II ended. It's particularly significant, because while up through to Generation 4 aircraft various European nations managed to keep producing their own models, but the
only other Generation 5 aircraft out there is the Chinese J-20, which they
aren't selling to anyone else.
Currently, the world 'sort of' has 1+0.5+0.5 military poles. Neither Russia nor China have enough military strength to
defeat the US/NATO, but Russia has generally been perceived as strong enough to give a hell of a fight, as well as export its stuff throughout the rest of the world, and China's massive build-up over the last 15 years has put them in a similar perceived range.
But with the military capacity of Russia being proven insufficient to defeat
just Ukraine, and basically every single bit of their hardware underperforming?
It's looking like we're going to be in a 1+0.5 military poles world soon, and if the steadily-widening cracks of the Chinese economy
do finally lead to an implosion, we'll very quickly been in the same monopolar world we were for much of the 90's, where US military power was absolutely uncontested, and everybody knew it.
Of course, that's assuming ole Brandon doesn't 'lead' us into a civil war... A world with
no hegemon would be a hell of a shake-up to world politics...
