PSA For The Thinking Impaired

 

Swing away.

We get comments, for most of which we're grateful. But a non-zero number of which, if not outright straightforward trolls, lead us to despair the dearth of common sense and critical thinking of the average population.

Case in point:

About that whole "Russia's artillery usage is unsustainable" thing...

https://www.zerohedge.com/military/decision-arm-ourselves-or-arm-ukraine-navy-secretary-admits-crisis-us-defense-stockpiles

Ignoring the obvious question ("Since when did any appointed idiot in the Biden fustercluck become an authority on anything military, let alone factual?"), we're aware we get a bad rap on this blog from certain reasoning-challenged people, because compared to them, we come off as a never wrong know-it-all. (T'aint so.) That's because to anyone sufficiently primitive, modern technology is indistiguishable from magic, and to anyone sufficiently stupid, common sense, reasoning, and applied intelligence seems like witchcraft.

We get that just because this is the internet, this blog looks easy, because you've got keyboards too, so how hard can it really be? So maybe if we break down what we do before we reply, readers who inhabit the left edge of the bell curve could level up their game somewhat. (We live in hope.)

We're wrong on occasion, but damned seldom, because we know how to think, and because we check and double-check the relevant facts. Which do not include random quotes, but rather actual numbers of actual things.

We will break it down for the diligent. Have another look at the above comment.

Go to Durden's linked post. RTWT.

Then follow the link in our reply to that comment.

Therein we find that the annual US military budget is over 15½ times greater than that of Russia.

Think about that for a minute. The US spends, in any month, more than the entire Russian military spends in a year. Every. Single. Year. Since they stopped being Soviets, and simply became a Turd World failed nation with a nuclear arsenal.

Do some more research. Knock yourself out. Look anywhere. Google. Even Wikipedia, worth every penny you pay for it, but better than throwing messages in a bottle and waiting for a reply. Whatever.

So ask yourself a couple or three questions:

How big is the Russian military?

How big is Ukraine's military?

How big is the U.S. military?

Then ask the same questions about the military budgets of those three countries.

Call those questions 1a, 1b, and 1c, and 2a, 2b, and 2c.

Now calculate the military spending per capita for each country's military.

Call that 3a, 3b, and 3c.

Answers*:

1a: 1M active, 2M reserve

1b: 246,445 (pre-war)

1c: 1.35M active, 800k reserve

2a: $65.9B

2b: $10.4B

2c: $782B

3a: $22k@

3b: $42.2k@

3c: $363.7k@

We now arrive at the common sense portion of today's lesson:

What kind of military do you think Russia is getting, spending the ruble equivalent of $22k per troop? How do you think those troops compare to Ukraine's, at twice that level of spending, or the U.S.', at eighteen times as much?

(Masters-level students: we get it's not this simple, but it illustrates the basic point.) 

Do you think Russia is able to field and equip someone by spending 8% of what the U.S. spends for the same product?

Looking at those expenditures, are you really that surprised that Ukraine, with a huge influx of more equipment and munitions from the US and Europe since last March, is kicking the shit out of a Potemkin army that runs on vodka, lies, and graft, and hasn't won (nor even fought) a serious conflict with anything close to a peer in over 75 years? Srsly?

Have you seen videos of modern US recruits barefoot, unfed, with rusted over weapons, or no weapons? Where are the YouTube videos of recruits at the rifle range yelling "bang!" because they don't have any bullets, or even rifles? With Russia, that's the last six months.

So, what do you think happens to Russian military adventures, when motivated but poor Ukrainian troops, who hate Russian invaders with a passion, are given a sudden shitton of the best weapons America can produce?

And finally, given their respective budgets, which military do you figure is more likely to run out of ammunition first: that of the U.S., or Russia? Show your work.

With that in mind, and recent articles showcased on CDR Salamander's website at the front of our mind, we suggest Navel (not a typo) Secretary Shitforbrains would be better off spending less time talking out his bilge outflow, and more time supervising rust and paint details, so that half the US Rustbucket Navy isn't decertified for combat operations because it's rusted to the pier.

USS Zumwalt Rustbucket

And people who think the substantial but relative pittance of military largesse we've showered onto Ukraine's military this year is going to leave the US military defenseless, probably need to learn to count without taking off their shoes before they swallow the kind of codswallop that Shitforbrains is pimping.

Is the US military short of ammunition in its war stockpiles, and for annual training?

Fuck YES!!! And has been for over 50 years, since even before Jimmy Carter's regrettable presidency, and counting, because congressweasels keep buying boondoggle pieces of shit like the F-35 Thunderjug, Little Crappy Ships, and carriers like the USS Edsel, while underallocating funds requested for things like maintenance, training, training, training, training, and war reserve stocks, while fully funding Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, gender reassignment surgery for confused mental defectives, and staffing the TO and E of the 69th Intersectional Dildo Brigade of LGBTEIEIO Transdykefaggotry Force, in preference to paying for fighters, bombers, destroyers, submarines, armor, artillery, and by-God combat troops, let alone the munitions they need to train and fight wars. That problem didn't start last February, it's been an open scandal for decades.

Ukraine's contribution to actual ammunition shortages is so small as to be negigible by comparison, and anybody with 5 minutes' actual time in military service knew that without being told any of this. Which is why the never-served contingent of Internet featherheads are so baffled by that obvious truth. They have no idea how much they don't know about how much they don't know.

And they're too f**king lazy to waste five or ten mouseclicks self-educating, when they could be obliviously bloviating far beyond their IQ or experience.

Which is why, with them, you get what you get, and get dumber the more of it you read.

Suture self.

And ponder that every cabinet secretary since Benjamin Franklin was postmaster has complained that his trough needed more government funding to do its job, and that maybe they're talking out of their ass for mercenary, rather than factual, reasons, before throwing their quotes and any extrapolations based thereon at us as if they were actual information, or contained any relevancy to any topic under discussion.

A quick follow-up would be to ask anyone quoting them to name every competent person appointed by the current administration to any position of trust and responsibility.

We'll be right here while you work those two things out.

*[We used Wikipedia for illustration, purely for speed/simplicity. You could have tried any number of other sources, if only for comparison. Whatever else the Agency f**ks up, the CIA's annual World Factbook online is a five-star excellent and reliable resource. So is anything published by Jane's. Ditto SIPRI (for facts, not politics). And many others. The answers will thus be slightly different, but like bullets, will fall in a grouping on the target not drastically far from each other if you don't choose bullsh*t references from the outset. Like some whackjob's axe-to-grind website, where they pull information out of their underpants and pass it off as facts. Now guess why some people who do that are accused, rightfully and precisely, of eating other people's sh*t. Don't be That Guy.]