People planning this stuff aren’t idiots and they knew that there was no scenario that Ukraine could defeat Russia militarily no matter what weapons they provided. For example, back in 2016, Obama declared Ukraine to be not a core American interest and that he is reluctant to intervene in the country, because Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.
I don’t think their goal was to create a drawn out conflict however. The idea was to use Ukraine as fodder and then break Russia economically. Western planners fundamentally misunderstood the nature of Russian economy, and thought that it would collapse after they froze Russian foreign assets and put sanctions on. Not only did that not happen, but major countries like China and India snubbed the west and continued trade with Russia. That’s where the whole hare brained scheme started to come apart, but the time this became obvious the west was already too invested to pull back.
The Americs really pushing Zelensky to not accept the ceasefire in 2022 is what mostly made me think they did not plan for victory. There were no new plans afterwards and it has been meat grinder ever since.
It’s bewildering to me that they didn’t have a backup plan. Like they just banked everything on Russian economy collapsing, and when that didn’t happen they just kept doubling down instead of adjusting the strategy.
Realistically, what other plan could they have? They’ve used the same playbook since Vietnam and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but since it always funnels a shit ton of money to the pentagon and its contractors pumps the value of the dollar nobody gives a shit, it was a success by the only metric they care about.
That’s very true, the MIC will be happy either way. They’re looking at decades worth of contracts from Europe already.
