So we are back to the Cold War again?

@Finn dAbuzz,

Red Sox won the World Series, 5 to 1 victory

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I have reported Finn's post for the snide name-calling an intentionally insulting personal reflections.

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Sounds like he's an unhappy guy.

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@Setanta,

Ohhh Noooo!!!

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@oralloy,

Quote:

Comparative spending between countries is meaningless. What matters is the way the left (with the help of traitors like McCain) cuts vital weapons programs and leaves our soldiers defenseless.

. Voicing your "peacefull dissent" again .

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I don't see much here about the original question or proposition put forward at the creation of this thread. A Few Points related to the original question;

1. Russia is not the USSR and the Warsaw Pact is no more.
2. By the usual standards Russia lacks the economic power to become a lasting military threat to a NATO in which the Treaty members live up to their agreed obligations. Unfortunately most don't.
3. Russia has a wealth of natural resources which sustain its economy and which Putin has effectively used to tame Western Powers (particularly Germany) which have largely dismantled their armed forces and have reacted only timidly to Putin's aggressions in the Caucasus, Ukraine and recently Crimea. As a direct result Russia presents an immediate threat to the continued independence of the Baltic States - one which the European NATO Powers appear unlikely to contain.
4. Putin has been violating the INF nuclear arms treaty for over a decade and doing so far without objection from either the US or the NATO members now so concerned about Trump's threats to abandon the treaty.
5. Trump has, with his usual bombast and overstatement, raised a real issue, and the reactions of many of our allies on the matter so far confirm a root cause of the problem.

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The Crimea is, of course, a part of the Ukraine. Sanctions were imposed against Russia beginning in early in 2014, just days after the annexation. Perhaps George thinks we should have gone to war--after all it wouldn't be his butt on the line. Russian intervention in the Caucasus took place during the Baby Bush administration. Those were chiefly aimed at Georgia, and Abkhazia and Ossetia are now puppet "republics" of Russia. Of course, we could have gone to war over those, but then, we were already in Afghanistan and ramping up to invade Iraq. That's how that kind of crap goes down, get it? We get involved somewhere, and the snake Putin is free to play his games. How very naive of George.

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@Setanta,

Some gorilla dust from Setanta, at best only peripherally related to the facts I listed above. Moreover he, in no way, offers a refutation of any of them, or of the evident conclusion as it relates to the question raised in the opening of this thread, which I was addressing.

More angry snarling from A2K's most prolific source of it. What, I wonder motivates him?

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tut tut tut

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@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

3. Russia has a wealth of natural resources which sustain its economy and which Putin has effectively used to tame Western Powers (particularly Germany) which have largely dismantled their armed forces and have reacted only timidly to Putin's aggressions in the Caucasus, Ukraine and recently Crimea. As a direct result Russia presents an immediate threat to the continued independence of the Baltic States - one which the European NATO Powers appear unlikely to contain.

This was false. The aggression in the Caucasus took place in Baby Bush's second term, was ruled by the UN to have been provoked by escalations from both Russia and Georgia. No NATO involvement would have been warranted or even possible. Georgia is not and never has been a member of NATO.

In 2014, the Ukrainian people themselves threw out Viktor Yanukovych, Putin's puppet. It was shortly thereafter that the reptile Putin made his move on the Crimea. (Again, the Crimea is a part of the Ukraine.) Following the Ukrainian revolution there was a secession movement in the Crimea, widely believed to have been fomented by Putin. In March 2014, Yanukovych requested in writing that Putin send military forces to restore law and order in the Ukraine. The next day, Russian troops and sympathizers in the Crimea took over--the Crimea being the only part of the Ukraine that Russia cares about. The Ukraine is not a member of NATO.

You post bullsh*t, I'm going to call bullsh*t. I also don't need nasty personal reflections to do it.

EDIT: So my remarks were addressed to a comment you made, which was not factual at all.

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@Setanta,

Germany depends on energy imports. Russia is the world's largest exporter of natural gas and crude oil and Germany's most important energy supplier. Russia covers about one third of Germany's needs. However, gas only accounts for around a quarter of the energy mix in Germany.

Beyond gas and oil, Russia only ranks 14th in the list of German trading partners. Conversely, Germany is Russia's second most important trading partner. From this point of view, Russia's dependence on Germany is even higher, especially since energy exports account for a significant share of Russian state revenues.

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Ah, then we have another one of George's "facts" which is not factual. I'm not surprised.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

This is all about China. It has very little to do with Russia or Europe.

If we sell 10,000 conventional ground launched cruise missiles to Japan, that would certainly give the Chinese government second thoughts about ever bombing targets on Japanese soil.

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@glitterbag,

glitterbag wrote:

Well, you asked.......

No I didn't.

glitterbag wrote:

it was apparent you didn't know and I do know.

Good for you. Personally I'm not into all the hysteria over Trump. It's kind of boring.

glitterbag wrote:

I'm just a little shocked that a guy who knows everything there is to know would have such a gap in understanding of the legal requirements.

Not knowing what warrant someone is talking about does not necessarily mean that I do not understand whatever legal requirements you are referring to.

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@Blickers,

Blickers wrote:

Defenseless except for the most expensive and sophisticated weapons system in history, the F-35, in which the carefully trained pilot can see all around him in his helmet and which stealth technology enables him to penetrate enemy defenses.

So far the F-35 has proven incapable of detecting enemy fighter jets unless they are right next to the F-35.

Blickers wrote:

US fighters have a 100-0 record against Russian built fighters.

MiG fighter jets were quite lethal to American airmen in both the Vietnam and Korean wars.

Blickers wrote:

The F-35 carries on that tradition, though at great cost. This advantage comes as a result of the money we have spent over the years building these systems. So the idea that comparative spending is meaningless is just silly. We outspend the Russians, and the Russians can't do anything against our fighters.

Outspending other people will not overcome our lack of air-superiority fighters.

Blickers wrote:

There comes a time for you to stop trying to claim that since we stopped the F-22, but kept the F-35 program underway, we are leaving our soldiers defenseless.

Not when we are allowing peer rivals the ability to shoot down all of our airplanes and then bomb our ground forces.

Blickers wrote:

Fact is, the Russians haven't even caught up to the F-16 yet, let alone our new stuff.

The MiG-29 was a match for the F-16 back in 1982. It would have no trouble shooting down an F-35 today.

Blickers wrote:

At some point, when you are way ahead of your enemy already, you have to say "Enough".

We are not way ahead. Our F-15s are obsolete and we don't have nearly enough F-22s.

Blickers wrote:

Additionally, it is nonsensical to even consider calling Democrats traitors when our president gives away military secrets that our allies give us in order to gain approval from Russian representatives at meetings and tells the world that if Vladimir Putin tells him that the Russians didn't meddle in our elections, that's good enough for our president. Not to mention his talk of leaving NATO. Our national security gets weaker each passing day that the subservient Trump represents the US against Putin's Russia, and boy does Putin ever show it.

I think treason is a fair characterization for disarming our military so that they can be killed and defeated by rival powers.

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@Walter Hinteler,

Walter Hinteler wrote:

I don't see the Cold War as us being at "war" with/against Russia but being the battlefield of those involved in this "war".

The US was just as much of a battlefield. The SS-18s and SS-19s alone had 5000 half-megaton warheads aimed at North America.

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@oralloy,

That makes the US a target not a battlefield. How can you possibly be so irresponsible and glib. By the way, our adversaries that have Nukes have never abandoned the likely targets in the US or in Europe. Where do you get off, sitting somewhere in Michigan telling Walter about battlefields?????? Please think, and if that's too hard, consult a library before you start comparing potential nuke targets with the destruction of Europe during WWII.

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@glitterbag,

Perhaps there was something similar to the Fulda Gap in the USA?

Or Russian plans?

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@Walter Hinteler,

I don't think we've planned for enemy tanks plowing thru the Chesapeake and then proceeding up the Severn River undetected to capture the Naval Academy. But I must defer to the brilliant military strategist Generalfeldmarschall (aka oralroy) Rommel.

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@oralloy,

Quote Oralloy:

Quote:

So far the F-35 has proven incapable of detecting enemy fighter jets unless they are right next to the F-35.

Quote:

The MiG-29 was a match for the F-16 back in 1982. It would have no trouble shooting down an F-35 today.

Quote:

We are not way ahead. Our F-15s are obsolete and we don't have nearly enough F-22s.

LOL. You've got to stop reading those right-wing news sources-they get printouts from the RT, Russia Today network and just post them on their sites. Saves money on reporters.

Now here is how it went when Russian fighters , (Syria) met American fighters, (Israel), in the 1980s.

This dogfight between 200 Israeli and Syrian jets was one of the biggest of all time
David Nye, We Are The Mighty
Nov. 23, 2015, 8:54 AM

In what would come to be called the Bekaa Valley Turkey Shoot, 96 Israeli fighters and a squadron of UAVs faced off against 100 Syrian fighters backed up by 19 surface-to-air missile launchers in 1982. It was one of the largest jet battles ever fought.

Israel has a history of conflict with its neighbors, especially from the 1960s through the 1980s. A series of small battles with Egypt resulted in some hard lessons learned for the Israeli Air Force after it lost numerous fighters to surface-to-air missiles.

But the IAF learned its lessons, and on June 9, 1982, it attacked 19 Syrian surface-to-air missile batteries deployed near the border. In the first two hours of fighting, the IAF destroyed 17 of the missile batteries with no losses. Then things really went nuts.

The Syrians sent up 100 MiGs to intercept the 96 F-15s, F-16s, and F-4s that were attacking the SAM sites. The Israelis were flying an E-2C Hawkeye airborne warning and control system aircraft that picked up the incoming fighters. It began feeding instructions to the IAF fighters.

The more advanced Israeli fighters, firing both Sidewinder heat-seeking and Sparrow radar-guided missiles, destroyed 29 of the Syrian fighters.

But the IAF wasn't done. There were still two missile sites it wanted gone. So it returned June 10. Again, the bulk of Syria's air force lifted off to greet the fighters, and the IAF proved overwhelming, downing another 35 Syrian aircraft with no Israeli losses....

...The conflict between the two countries continued through July 1982. In over a month of fighting, Israel lost only two jets, while Syria lost at least 87. ...Source

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So we are back to the Cold War again?

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