"The 1980's are calling to ask for their foreign policy back."

Or maybe some slightly used Mig-29s?

Works for me.

"LAPD Fulcrum three-niner-seven, you are cleared for munitions drop on suspected gang residence..."

Remember how the Soviet Union collapsed in '91? One minute they were a fearsome globe-straddling empire, the next minute there were ordinary Moscovites beating the shit out of the Red Army outside the Kremlin, and the empire was gone.

We're already seeing the Russian military have troubles because of the fact that they're using poorly trained and equipped conscripts, and the Ukrainians are fighting on their home soil. Forget the fact that they know the territory better than the Russians do, Putin's essentially backed the Ukrainians into a corner with no options but to fight or die. What's a conscript got to look forward to, even if they win the war? Years of misery, either as an armed garrison in an occupied country, or misery back home in Russia. Not terribly appealing, in either case.

The rest of the world just has to make this a fast-acting version of what the Soviets got in Afghanistan, and Putin's empire will collapse just as rapidly.

It is kinda insane that Russia has lost more troops in two weeks than the US did in two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan. And with a significantly smaller military.

I really hope after the war Ukraine puts captured Russian trucks up for sale. I'd have to do one hell of a GoFundMe to be able to afford the truck, have it shipped over here, and decent running gear installed, but I'd do it. (Fun fact: During WWII, the US shipped so many Studebaker trucks to the USSR that most folks in the Soviet Union thought that Studebaker was the English word for truck.)

This would have made a cool Clive Custler book, with the combination of new and old tech.

We hook up a generator Reagan's spinning corpse and we could end the planet's need for fossil fuels.

Even Mittens!

Given the perspective of time there are scholars and pundits arguing that the Soviet military was never as capable as was generally believed during the Cold War. The article I linked to is an opinion piece and I have no idea of the credibility of the site. I'm just pointing out that the argument that Soviet and now Russian military prowess has been consistently overstated. Interesting if true. Unfortunately it's much easier to prove that a nation's military capabilities were underestimated than oversold.

I've owned this book since I was in high school in the early/mid-80s and while the author is a little too reliant on Viktor Suvorov as source material, he makes the same points.

Not to mention the potential sowing of mistrust and divisions engendered by having a prominent (former) Western intelligence figure publicly naming the potential assassins

Their lack of support doesn’t fit the media’s pre-ordained narrative that Republicans are tough and always support military funding. Remember when the Biden administration was showing the receipts that Republicans were against police funding? Yea, that got about a half day of play in the national media before it was back to Dem cities are out of control thanks to liberal policies.

Here's a sobering thought.

The Russians lost about 15,000 men during their decade long adventure in Afghanistan.

In just a couple of weeks in Ukraine, the Russians may have lost 6,000.

I don't know what their materiel losses are, but they've got to be enormous. We've seen fighter planes and helicopters shot down, tanks, trucks, armored vehicles, and even a warship(!) destroyed, and expensive air defense systems abandoned.

This war is going to break Russia.

It's awfully tempting to lob a few tactical nukes that you've already paid for.