The only reason you would say “you can’t measure our victories in kilometers” is if it would look bad if you did.
As much as I would like to wish Ukrainians were throttling Russia at every turn, the reality appears to be that the war is at a very costly stalemate and has been for months if not years. Sitting in an undermanned foxhole for weeks or months basically waiting to get shelled or FPV’d to death with no end in sight is not a recipe for high morale.
Sounds to me like a tacit admission of little to no material gain and low morale, sadly.
They aren’t just lying, they’re actively disdainful of the bodies questioning them. I think they’re daydreaming of the point in the coup that they can throw them all in prison for sedition.
In specifically small arms, I’m not so sure. I’d bet that the American public buys enough firearms every year to arm every American soldier two or three times over. Ruger and PSA aren’t competing with Raytheon and L3Harris.
They use in absentia trials to declare people enemies of the state a lot. The author of the Metro series of books-turned video games has a hefty jail sentence on his head for speaking out against the war, but he fled Russia years ago. At its most practical I guess it’s to thinly justify detaining and abusing them on sight.
The moment Demon Miller got on CNN or whatever and said to the host he was belittling “We live in the real world where what matters is strength”, every single one of our allies should have started drafting and updating plans on how to kill American soldiers and wage war against the US.
I believe that was one of the most foreboding statements that has come out of the administration so far. A blatant admission that they do not care about laws or ethics, only strength of arms.
By that time the “minute men” were already a fairly well armed and organized militia, as far as militias go. I see no viable parallel today, even in nascent form.
Any armed group greater than around four people is compromised by federal law enforcement, the far right learned this decades ago.
They won’t be ambassadors by then, they will either agree to become quasi-military emissaries to negotiate concessions and surrenders to our dominion, or they will be retired or just killed.
A 2-inch bruise could technically be considered “internal bleeding.”
IMO just having your personal device on you in the presence of a protest puts you in danger. They have ample tools to track cellular devices that basically cannot be guarded against without disabling the function altogether, such as with a Faraday bag. They will catch and log that you were at a protest, and use that against you later.
That’s just a Polaris RZR with a missile rack on top.
The trend seems to be towards cost effective and low signature systems because everything’s getting chewed up by FPVs eventually.
Those Colombian guerillas have been hiding in the jungle for decades. When the main body of FARC surrendered in 2017, many of them had never seen a smartphone before. They’ve been living the asymmetric warfare life since god knows when, they would prove extremely difficult to root out.
Even in the bizarro world where an arrest warrant or indictment is issued, ICE will close ranks around their brother who just got a notch on his belt. No state cops are gonna slug it out with the feds to make that arrest.
The humble sawzall:
Some lies are not meant to deceive, they are meant to insult you and shove your nose in the dirt to let you know who’s in charge. He’s telling you that in the end, they won, and that the truth doesn’t matter anymore.
He can either arrest his opponent or the administration can just ignore the results of whatever fractured election takes place.
The people posting this want a West that is paralyzed by corruption, ineptitude, apathy, and guilt (demoralization), while China slowly takes the reigns as the world superpower for better or worse, probably worse. They are not interested in constructive thought or action from us because they are probably not Americans nor do they want a reformed US. They want you to be apathetic while you watch your home collapse around you, because we were evil anyway and we deserve it.
The US President is the most protected man in the world, probably in human history, I don’t think he’s sweating.
VZ’s military is quite large but also quite poorly equipped in comparison to the titan that is the US military. Very poorly equipped when you get down to the national guard/militia level.
As a small scale example, a few soldiers with night vision equipment at night could quite easily destroy a much larger contingent of soldiers without them. We saw this in Ukraine. One of many examples of force-multiplying equipment that the US has ample access to but VZ has little or none.
I want Russia destroyed as a polity for what they’ve done. But I’m not interested in repeating these cheap memes from my warm home thousands of miles away while Ukrainians suffer to make that meat grinder you’re so amused by possible. I’m interested in what’s actually going on on the ground, not what Ukrainian cheerleaders and state media want you to hear.