The reason Putin is invading is because he knows the U.S. is weak, its leadership is politically weak, and there's very little it will do, and even if it does, it doesn't have popular support. It's the effect of clear incentives.
If the U.S. intervenes, a retaliatory cyber op from Russia against critical infrastructure would make america amish again. Then, wait until midterms when the president loses the house and senate and doesn't have the power to muster a draft when China takes Taiwan. This is one of those happening slowly and then all at once events in history I suspect.
> If the U.S. intervenes, a retaliatory cyber op from Russia against critical infrastructure would make america amish again.
Cyber crimes with significant impact are still in the realm of fiction. Scare mongering about it does not help.
That said, one should not make stupid decision how to connect and control such infrastructure and you should prepare with working backups instead of another security product.
Have family that are vp cybersecurity in infrastructure; I wish you were correct, but the free market went for quick and cheap implementations, not secure.
Basically, no one wanted to bear all the costs of having secure infrastructure components, this is the tragedy of the commons that government is supposed to solve, but when all the leaders are over 70, it’s hard for them to grok the new reality.
Sure, it could happen. There were hospitals that got knocked out for weeks with as simple ransomware attack.
If you have a dedicated hacker with means to acquire exploits, security is probably almost impossible. This is why effective mitigation is very likely the safer approach. Manual overrides or air gapped systems would help too.
But it is wrong to panic about it. The best mitigation is boring, but yes, some investment in IT could really help.
Maybe you missed Stuxnet / Olympic Games? Not sure how much ICS/SCADA security work you do, but there's a whole field dedicated to it. Can't tell if this is just someones narrative shaping work or sincere ignorance.
Is it in the realm of science fiction because nobody has pulled the trigger yet? Or is it because the gun doesn’t exist?
Ukraine has been subjected to Russian cyberattacks for nearly a decade now. They’ve accomplished knocking the power off multiple times. It would seem the gun exists.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine they could have some success with cyberattacks against the US. How impactful that would be to disrupting day to day life though is a question that remains to be answered. When the power was out in Texas recently, there was quite an impact. Imagine millions losing power in the rust belt in the winter. There would no doubt be loss of life and significant physical damage.
>Cyber crimes with significant impact are still in the realm of fiction. Scare mongering about it does not help.
I wish. The gas pipeline shutdown last year was just a rehearsal I imagine. If the Russian government went full send on a cyber attack, we would probably be completely fucked for months at this point.
Post-Vietnam the US hasn’t engaged in large scale active combat against communism or Russian-backed forces. It has instead favored selling weapons to Eastern European states and building the NATO alliance.
Putin has been clear about the breakup of the USSR being a mistake in his eyes. He’s been annexing territories (or in his eyes, re-annexing) since 1999. He looks for countries with strong Russian cultural and linguistic backgrounds and props up allies that will take over. If that doesn’t work he ratchets up the pressure until he feels comfortable using military force. See: Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea and now Ukraine.
The US is far stronger militarily than Russia, but with nuclear weapons in the equation, no one wins.
It’s easy to be an arm chair hawk and say we should go fight, but it’s another thing to look you kids in the eye and explain they’re going to die from radiation fallout.
Instead, the US will likely prop up the resistance once Ukraine falls and try to make occupation as costly as possible just like we did in Afghanistan.
> Instead, the US will likely prop up the resistance once Ukraine falls and try to make occupation as costly as possible just like we did in Afghanistan.
a band-aid solution at best. The fact that putin has desires to resurrect the soviet superpower, is the problem, and i doubt there would be any possible diplomatic solution to that.
Nobody likes war (least of all nuclear war), but if the threat of such weapons is shown to be a bluff, the peace brought about from it's use in WW2 would all but be in vain.
Somebody must back down, and i would say putin and his ambitions must be the one to back down, or the US & allies must escalate. Otherwise, the next authoritarian country is going to want in.
The moral of this era seems to be: no one attacks a country with nuclear weapons.
France has nukes, so this isn’t going to be Hitler 2.0 with Putin posing by the Arc de Triumph.
There are several ex-Soviet countries that are NATO members, so that’ll be the real hot spot if it gets there as the US et. al. will be required to act militarily in their defense (in theory).
Doesn't even make sense for Putin strategically because the alliance will get consolidated by this. On the other hand there are just few diplomatic tools. They were all used up more or less.
the alliance is already pretty consolidated. I think putin sees a NATO ukraine as more dangerous imho - esp. if ukraine becomes more and more democratic.
The invasion would be successful if the west does not deploy troops and intervene. I say the west has already failed, and this sets a precedent to which china would follow.
And if the west waits for too long, the military edge that the west has would diminish. Unfortunately, the public is reluctant to commit to war, because in the minds of those who are used to peace, diplomatic solutions seems to be the only cost they're willing to pay.
The West has failed at what, though? All wars are tragedies, but nobody promised they were going to protect Ukraine in the first place, and it’s a long standing international precedent that two countries can go to war without everyone on the planet sending troops.
Ukraine got a raw deal, there's no doubt about that, but they didn't and don't think that it was ever a mutual defense pact. A lot of us have skewed perceptions, because a lot of us live in countries that have never in our lifetimes been invaded, but the general expectation on the international stage is that countries can fight wars without friendly third parties sending in their own troops.
It is out of respect to those that have to fight the wars that those that are not on the front lines should do everything to prevent it from breaking out in the first place.
I agree that there are difficulties in developing arms in peace times, war can be a driver of innovation. But it is not the only one and there are preferable alternatives, even if arms suppliers see that differently out of egoistic ambitions.
A civilian population rejecting involvement in arms manufacture is preferable to one that calls for a war.
I don't think Putin has a single reason, the reason you stated is one in particalur an US one. From a Western European view, my best guess is, he also wants to destabilize EU (with a lot of NATO memebers). Remember Syria an the refugee crisis? This gave TailWind to a lot of right wing parties, which are mostly ProRussia (AFD, FPÖ etc). Incidentally left wing parties, "Die Linke" comes to mind, are also Putin fans. So any polarization within EU will help Russia to sell its resources and don't get sanctioned to much. IMO Putin is playing the divisor.
You mean "fought their draft" in the sense of "avoiding being sent to Vietnam"?
Sure, that would make hypocrites of those who were draft dodgers back then, and advocate the draft now. But how many of those are there? I'd guess the vast majority of baby boomers who now advocate the draft weren't draft dodgers.
And AFAIK, compared to those who went, draft dodgers were a small minority.
>You mean "fought their draft" in the sense of "avoiding being sent to Vietnam"?
No... fought their draft as in "We think the draft is bull, this war is bull, and we don't want to go."
Hey, I could be wrong - I wasn't there to observe first hand what happened in the 60s and 70s. I only assumed the Vietnam draft was unpopular based on pop culture. Maybe boomers didn't sit around college campus blocking up traffic, chanting slogans, and smoking pot? Maybe there were never peace marches? The soundtrack of Boomer's youth? Largely works of fiction! 80s anti-war films? Anti-American propaganda!
If you're telling me only those who actively avoided the draft were against it, I believe you.
I should have just used my own eyes and ears to observe what Boomers have done since then. Baby Boomers in Congress and in the White House sent troops to Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with overwhelming approval at the time. Yes, there was lots of backtracking and second guessing after we stuck of fingers in those pies, but I guess that's a development that's arisen after Vietnam. Maybe the problem with those wars was there were no Commies to shoot.
I just didn't realize how much blood-lust Boomers held deep inside.
I stand corrected. Thank you for setting me straight.
> Maybe boomers didn't sit around college campus blocking up traffic, chanting slogans, and smoking pot? Maybe there were never peace marches? The soundtrack of Boomer's youth? Largely works of fiction! 80s anti-war films? Anti-American propaganda!
Cut it out with the bullshit: You know very well I never said or meant any of that.
But how many people does it take to sit around and smoke, chant, and block traffic? It's not as if it was necessarily new people at every sit-in, is it -- they could very well have been the same pot-smoking, slogan-chanting, and traffic-blocking protesters at most of those protests, right? Sure, they became the cultural phenomenon remembered from the time. To a large degree because, as you point out, of those 80s Hollywood blockbusters... And how many tens or hundreds of thousands of Hollywood blockbuster producers and directors did it take to make thoseand leave this huge imprint on the collective consciousness of posterity?
OTOH, AIUI a majority of draftees... didn't dodge the draft. The USA sent what, half a million young men? (or more?) over there. I'm not saying they all went willingly -- far from it, AFAIK -- but at least, those who went cannot, by definition, have been "draft-dodgers". So by my reckoning, compared to active protesters quite possibly, and compared to actual draft dodgers almost certainly, there were more non-draft-dodgers.
And also by definition, pretty much exactly all of those young men who were sent to Vietnam to fight -- the non-draft-dodgers -- were baby boomers.
So "boomers are hypocrites because they all advocate the draft now but dodged it back then" just doesn't make mathematical or logical sense. For one thing, even if many of them advocate the draft now that's not all of them; maybe the ones advocating it now are the same ones who obeyed it then, and maybe they've been quite consistently and non-hypocritically in favour of it all their lives. And for another, of course the bit about "they all dodged it then" is BS: If they had, there wouldn't have been any of them there.
Your rantings and ravings about Boomer Bloodlust aside, all I was pointing out was the bullshitness of this collective-hypocrisy accusation.
If the U.S. intervenes, a retaliatory cyber op from Russia against critical infrastructure would make america amish again. Then, wait until midterms when the president loses the house and senate and doesn't have the power to muster a draft when China takes Taiwan. This is one of those happening slowly and then all at once events in history I suspect.