Unfortunately Russia is figuring out that they can't handle high tech, but they can handle lots of low tech.
"Quantity is a quality of it's own".
Quantity is a quality of its own if you have unlimited manpower, i.e. if you are a low-tech agrarian society with naturally high birth rates and an effectively limitless pool of expendable serfs the Czar can press into canon-fodder service whenever he needs to wage war. Unfortunately for the current Czar, these things no longer hold, and no amount of pontificating about “traditional values” will turn this around by itself.
To be careful: I am not a supporter of Russia. Let's be clear on that.
Agreed he can't do this forever, but he only needs to hold out long enough for funding to run out, and is happy to spend lives and low tech equipment in the meantime. Look at the losses in avdiivka.
So for all interested porpoises, he did have unlimited lives and gear
All we can do is hope trump doesn't win and whatever Congress is next doesn't hold funding hostage
I maybe don't get the meme, but why would western communists like modern russia? the most supporters of russia I know irl are far right
It's not a very good label for this. There's a certain subsection of the left that sees anti-Americanism as an ideology, and therefore any state that opposes America is categorically good.
They're not common, and they tend to overlap with the sort who's mom found their weed stash and made them throw it away. Lacking weed, they turn to making a lot of loud noises on Lemmy.
Hi, western communist here. Russia is a christo-fascist state but some fellow commies have accepted the position that any faction against US global dominance is one worth supporting regardless of their actual policies and humanity. The idea being that the #1 goal should be the distruction of the hegemony that has oppressed many of the worlds nations in the hopes that communism can rise out of them now that they would be free to make that choice.
Most communists in the West are not like this. This is a specific subsection of communists who want to knowingly support christo-fascists. Most western communists fucking hate Russia.
should be labeled tankies but yea
Yep. Tankies love it when you refer to all communists as tankies.
They love it when you point out that the term "tankie" was coined by other card carrying communists to shit on tankies. Make sure to mark the "no true Scotsman" space on your bingo card when they respond.
In other news, the remaining T-84s come with cope cage mounting points installed at the factory!
Not enough budget for the cope cage though.
I’m not a tank guy, but didn’t half of it’s gimmicks didn’t work or were hopelessly outdated in the first place?
The NATO-beating AI targeting systems are literally a potato, though their development did pay for a number of superyachts off Monaco and stately homes in Surrey.
The thermal optics are outdated shit that the French offloaded on them after pulling them off the Leclerc.
The "Active protection system" requires manual input from the crew. I don't really need to elaborate on why that's bad, right?
The engine was never designed to be used in a vehicle. It's meant for running fuel pumps. There is no evidence that it can hit its stated top speeds.
The internal electronics are all visibly outdated, and have no backups. If the monitors go down, the crew are blind.
The autoloader is just the same tech they've been putting in tanks since the sixties.
To be fair, the B1 bomber (which we never actually used in action) was also built to fuel economics and enrich plutocrats.
Then there was the Sea Wolf attack sub, created not because we really needed a replacement for the Los Angeles class, but our small society of submersible-savvy engineers needed to stay in practice making submarines, so the US gave them a project to do.
half of its* gimmicks
*half of it is gimmicks
Makes sense that a relatively small economy like Russia can't afford expensive pieces of hardware like that. Especially when at war. They probably already knew it. Just announcing it now.
I mean, "at war" is the one time a small economy should be able to afford expensive equipment, since military spending becomes a priority. Look at isreal for an example of an economic midget nonetheless building the Merkava
You hearing this Xi? Yladivostok is up for the taking in a "3 day special military operation." You can go protect the large minority of Han (Chinese, but the type they actually care about) citizens, score an easy military and political victory, regain territory that China lost in like 1900, and pull attention away from Taiwan, all at the same time.
Deng Xiaoping missed his chance in 1989, the last time we bankrupted The USSR/Russia. Don't miss your chance to regain glorious Chinese territory!
HAHA HAHAHAHA
Image unrealistic. The Western Communists aren't jerking each other off.
Why aren't we jerking each other off?
Should we also hear the same headline, but for Su-57?
Meanwhile, in the F-35 program…
There have been over 1,000 F-35 produced and they are continuing to sell in droves. The F-35 is kicking ass.
Yeah, it's just like the people hating on the Osprey- the read the media about all the crashes and don't realize that the overall crashes per mission hour is on par or lower than other military helicopters. The military just takes more chances. Even though they do try to minimize the unnecessary risks being in the military is still inherently risky.
The F-35 might have gone wildly overbudget, but it was never going to be out of reach of the US economy. There are over 2,500 orders of it from foreign governments, which run around $80M each. That's $200B on a development cost of $416B (the >$1,000B figures cited are for total lifetime costs). Given that this was never meant to be profitable on foreign sales, that's pretty good.
Russia cannot afford a next gen tank and next gen aircraft program (and they're doing two next gen aircraft, Su-57 and Su-75). Countries in its economic peer group buy their military hardware from bigger countries. They're trying to pretend they still have the resources they did under the Soviet Union, and they just don't.
Edit: for another way to look at this, the $416B development cost of the F-35 represents less than 2% of US GDP for a single year and the cost was spread over 20 years. If Russia was able to do it for half as much, it would be about 12% of their single year GDP. They would need to spread the cost over 80 years to get close to GDP percentage parity with the US on this project.
This economic reality is why Putin is so hard for conquering Ukraine, btw. Losing Ukraine was like Texas seceeding.
Yeah, you don't really need them, and they can be more trouble than they're worth, but it's still a very sizable chunk of your resources, population, and technical capability. A chunk that let you play with big boys.
That said...
Do it, Texas.
You pussies.
