... how far the US is removed from the realities of warfare and that even in assessments for public viewing the US intel and military still cannot grasp scales and numbers.
U.S. intelligence agencies sounded the alarm on Ukraine’s dwindling battlefield prospects against Russia in an annual report released Tuesday. The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community — released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in conjunction with top officials’ testimony at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing — warns that Moscow has “seized the upper hand” in the war over the past year and “is on a path to accrue greater leverage” to force favorable terms in its negotiations with Ukraine and the West. Intelligence agencies see continued Russian military resilience despite heavy battlefield losses — replenishing personnel and ratcheting up its industrial capacity.
Russian losses, while significant, are not "heavy" for such an operation. Its scale is beyond the grasp of Pentagon and, in general, American war experiences since Korea. You can read the whole thing by following this link. But as I write non-stop, American combat "thermostat" as far as combat losses go is set extremely low and shows an extreme sensitivity to own losses which has been pointed out on many occasions even by the most atrocious warmongers such as late fanatic Richard Pipes:
The United States is accustomed to waging wars of its own choosing and on its own terms. It lacks an ingrained strategic tradition. In the words of one historian, Americans tend to view both military strategy and the armed forces as something to be “employed intermittently to destroy occasional and intermittent threats posed by hostile powers.” This approach to warfare has had a number of consequences. The United States wants to win its wars quickly and with the smallest losses in American lives. It is disinclined, therefore, to act on protracted and indirect strategies, or to engage in limited wars and wars of attrition. Once it resorts to arms, it prefers to mobilize the great might of its industrial plant to produce vast quantities of the means of destruction with which in the shortest possible time to undermine the enemy’s will and ability to continue the struggle. Extreme reliance on technological superiority, characteristic of U.S. warfare, is the obverse side of America’s extreme sensitivity to its own casualties; so is indifference to the casualties inflicted on the enemy.
For the military and "academic" community of the country which was busy rewriting the history of the WW II starting from 1945, it remains inconceivable that fighting REAL war is not a Desert Storm Operation; and that no matter how court "historians" in the US (and Europe) try to rewrite the history, objective laws of warfare are unchanged and represent non-linear (quadratic) dynamics of the losses of warring sides and Russia has a decisive upper hand and much lighter losses, somewhere between 1 to 10-12, while NATO force, which VSU and its appendices of NATO personnel managed to kill in excess of 1.2 millions of own personnel, while NATO's operational planning was exposed for what it is--a blind following of the templates without understanding a real Correlation of Forces and Means (COFM).
So, repeating beaten to death cliches changes nothing, while the US has to accept its highly diminished role, always grossly exaggerated, as a land power and stop referring to Iraq campaigns as a standard in war fighting--they are not and never were. As even Stephen Biddle had to point out:
The startingly low loss rate has had important policy consequences. In fact, it made the Gulf War a shaping event for defense planning today in much the way the painful defeat in Vietnam came to shape U.S. planning in 1980s. U.S. forces are now sized and structured against a Gulf War yardstick.
This is not a yardstick; it is delusion and fantasies of people who, by the virtue of several favorable factors, geography included, missed completely all the realities of continental warfare and in doing so lost the arms race, while developing PR and media skills. Meanwhile, this is the girl, a REAL military correspondent, who Russia lost today. Channel One, Anna Prokofieva. Killed by 404 drone.
