this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
222 points (96.6% liked)
Technology
60355 readers
4323 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I was talking about mass. Cannon fodder. That thing Ukraine is running out of, and that Western countries are not supplying.
Any army that treats their troops as “cannon fodder” deserves not only all the casualties they rack up, but the long term social, political, and economic hardship that is pretty much a guaranteed result of such a policy.
The constant rounding up & minimal training of “cannon fodder” is expensive both in the short and long term. Better to protect well trained resources and have them continue to gain experience by using more advanced weaponry that minimizes risk to them.
Ukraine is supposed to have allies which are capable of, as you said, fighting wars without the concept of cannon fodder.
They should show class then.
However, as you might have noticed, the Russia-Ukraine war started, well, with "elite", better trained troops fighting each other. And later devolved into what there is now.
Not just that, WWII started with "professional", "elite", better trained troops, but you know how it was fought. And before WWII all the sides too were theoretizing about new, swift, well-organized, mobile warfare. Guderian, Liddell Hart, Tukhachevsky and who not. And they were right, but only in adding a less bloody layer, so to say, that gets eroded before things are done the old-fashioned way.
So it could just be that this - it being possible to fight a big war with an equal adversary without eventually devolving into WWII-style warfare, - is another Western myth invented to support some kind of exceptionalism.
Pretty easy to invent various myths about wars between equals when you are not ever going to fight an equal adversary, only a much weaker one.
I hope you don't think wars in Iraq in 1991 or in 2003 or bombings of Yugoslavia are indicative of anything.