Depends on whether you think they will launch them knowing that it means annihilation rather than mere regime change. It's a huge gamble.

Not even slightly. America has nuclear-capable cruise missiles with a range of up to 1550 miles. There is not a single target anywhere in Russia that could not be reached by those missiles when fired from out in the ocean.

Either the cruise missiles are capable of evading Russia's air defense systems and taking out the silos or they aren't. If they are detected first (and realistically, they would be flying for probably multiple hours, so the odds of not being detected are rather poor), nothing else matters, because the nuclear missiles are either going to launch or they aren't. Flying for a hundred extra miles over a neighboring country on its way to such a target would neither make it easier for Russia to detect nor cost it a critical bit of extra range.

The way you take out the nuclear launch sites suddenly would likely involve sabotage from the inside and/or compromising computer systems, not missiles from a neighboring country.

That's a fair point.

I mean, they're not useless to NATO. When you need more planes quickly and Russia is willing to sell them cheaply, it doesn't matter if they would be outclassed in a dogfight with an F-35, because you're not going to be fighting against those anyway.

They're still way, way behind.

Define successfully. A few hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from subs off the coast, and the war with Ukraine would have been over years ago. Russia's military tech is decades behind at this point, and although they might get off a lucky shot or two, they are hopelessly outmatched by NATO.

Their war with Ukraine made this obvious to the general public, but you can bet the spooks at various three-letter agencies knew it many years earlier, if not decades.

The only real threat Russia poses comes from the possibility that they would decide to launch nuclear ICBMs to destroy the entire world as a final act of spite. Were it not for that, they would be a total paper tiger from a military perspective.

If your definition of "successful" is "regime change" or "destroyed all military targets", yeah, they could have successfully attacked Russia long ago. The only definition of success that they probably can't achieve is taking out all of Russia's nuclear launch sites before they can launch.

Yup, the sad truth is that if you really want to save children, you need to ban parents.

In the new CEO's expertly crafted I-am-villain statement; he explains: "The past, he added in an email, is “simply not relevant to the new future.”"

I, um, guess it was polite of him to not talk about "the bigger picture" to the people whose eyes he shut down?

Clearly. If NATO wanted to attack Russia, they could have done it ten thousand times by now.

To be clear, NATO likely *is* attacking Russia's *political power* because of the way Russia has repeatedly abused that power, but NATO is not attacking Russia's land, people, military, or buildings. And NATO would stop doing that if Russia would stop threatening its neighbors.

I'm not saying the military action was handled well, but the fact that even Russia, with its long history of defending dictators who mass murder civilians, said that Libya's government was doing something bad is quite telling. And there's still hope that Libya might end up with a stable, reasonable government at some point.

The thing is, you're going to have chaos almost any time a totalitarian regime falls. Gaddafi wasn't going to live forever, and it wouldn't matter if he died from natural causes or from Arab Spring. The power vacuum would still have probably been bad. Russia is going to see the same thing when Putin eventually dies.

Don't forget....booze on an airplane also seems to be exceptionally good too!!!

Something about some beer or a good mixed drink just seems to make the works GREAT at 30K feet....

Will these ones retain vendor support longer than the last batch?

The United Nations overwhelmingly said it was justified, and more to the point, was authorized by the U.N. Security Council, and one of the two resolutions was unanimous; the other had 5 abstentions (the usual suspects). The United Nations overwhelmingly said Russia's invasion of Ukraine was unjustified. These are not the same.

Afghanistan provided material support to and knowingly harbored a terrorist organization that hijacked aircraft and flew them into the World Trade Center, killing thousands of Americans.

A rational person would say that it has been in their interests for many years. Russia has continually attacked its neighbors on so many occasions that I've lost count. And Russia's tendency to buddy up with the most tyrannical world leaders and support them against international punishment for crimes against humanity has made the world a far worse place on an ongoing basis almost continuously since World War II.

The world would almost certainly be better off if Russia's current leadership were buried under a ton of rocket rubble. Yet the U.S. has not attacked. Do you honestly believe that it is because they haven't brought Ukraine into NATO, and because that extra 200 miles compared with Finland is an insurmountable distance? Do you honestly believe that if NATO decided to go to war with Russia, Finland wouldn't have helped even before they joined NATO? Or Türkiye, or Georgia, or Azerbaijan, or any of the other dozen countries bordering Russia that pretend to be friends with Russia out of fear, but actually hate Russia's government and would love to dance while watching it burn?

Tell me you're not serious. Russia isn't afraid of NATO attacking it. Russia just recognizes that every country that joins NATO is one more country that it can't bully into doing what it wants them to do. Russia recognizes that it won't be able to put puppet governments in NATO countries, because the elections will be monitored more closely. Russia recognizes that it won't have the level of regional power that it currently enjoys because of its aggressive, bullying, almost sociopathically militaristic behavior towards its neighbors.

Again, if Russia is doing nothing wrong, Russia has no reason to fear NATO. The problem is that Russia is pretty much always doing something wrong. And that's the real issue here. The last time the U.S. invaded one of its neighbors was 1846 to 1848. In that same time, Russia in one of its various incarnations has probably done so triple-digit times.

And to the extent that Russia does fear NATO because of a genuine belief that NATO is going to invade, that's just because its what they would do in their place. In other words, it's irrational, and represents Russia's gross failure to understand the rest of the world, coupled with a naïve belief that everyone else would act like them if they could.

Let's see:

• Serbia: Stopping mass genocide (on my list of reasons above).
• Kosovo: Stopping mass genocide (on my list of reasons above).
• Libya: Enforcing UN no-fly zone mandate (peacekeeping, on my list of reasons above).
• Afghanistan: Defensive/retaliation for a direct attack on the United States (on my list of reasons above).
• Iraq: Not a NATO mission. The only actual NATO-authorized action in Iraq was providing training for Iraq's security forces *after* the 2003 mission.

Care to try again?

In comparison with Russia, yes, it's tiny. Russia's military was somewhere around 3 million including reservists, versus 980k for Ukraine. And Russia has almost five times the population, which means almost five times as many people who could potentially be conscripted.

The part you're conveniently omitting is that the number is that low only because so many of them died. Russia has *lost* over a million troops since the war began three years ago. The fact that only 150k were in the battlefield at any given time only makes that number more shocking, because it means they sent wave after wave of people to be slaughtered.

Put another way, Russia has already *lost* more troops than Ukraine ever had.

I maintain my original statement.

Ah, but here's the thing. NATO is a defensive organization. In approximately every NATO military action, either the legitimate ousted leadership of a country asked for NATO's help, NATO was acting defensively, NATO was acting to stop mass genocide, or NATO was providing peacekeeping forces to stabilize a region. NATO is not a military force that goes out and attacks other countries unprovoked, and it never has been.

So the only reason Russia should consider NATO expansion to be a threat is if they intend to attack their neighbors and subjugate them.

So are you saying that Russia is dangerous to all the countries around it and can't be trusted to follow international law and stay the f**k out of neighboring countries' sovereign territory?

No, Russia funded paramilitary terror groups and had them take over Donetsk and Luhansk by force. And after eight years of fighting, Moscow invaded to make it easier to provide weapons for their proxy army.

That's some pretty seriously messed up propaganda you're spewing there. In the entire history of NATO, it has engaged in non-defensive, non-peacekeeping wars how many times again? And you think it is going to suddenly start now because...

Horseshit. Russia sent people into the Donbas to rile them up and stoke anti-government sentiment after Ukraine's previous Russian puppet leader got ousted. Russia provided money and weapons for paramilitary groups (otherwise known as "state-sponsored terrorists") to rise up against the government of Ukraine and divide the country.

The Donbas region had not done anything to separate from Ukraine even one day before they requested assistance from Moscow. Russia funded and supported the DPR and LPR secession attempt from the very beginning.

What invasion? It was their country. The closest thing that region had to invaders were the Russia-backed terrorists who took over part of the country. They were a fringe group that took control of the territory at gunpoint and caused most of the population to flee. Were some of the people fighting for a right of return for those refugees bad people? Maybe. Do I care? No.

There's a right way to secede in the modern era, and it isn't with a violent overthrow of the government. See Brexit for an example. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who took money and/or weapons from a foreign government and used them to overthrow their own government gave up any claim to moral high ground long ago.

You said it, not me.

Only because Ukraine wiped out all of Russia's tanks right off the bat, shot down a large percentage of their missiles and drones, etc. Russia had more soldiers, but their technology is so far behind that Ukraine has basically been holding them back with a relatively tiny force, and at this point, Russia has lost so many troops that they're having to borrow some from other countries in bulk just to keep the war going.

Russia hasn't killed many civilians because they have basically lost rather badly, despite dogged determination to turn it into a win, no matter how pyrrhic.

The U.S. should have done that a long time ago, IMO. There should have been a U.N. peacekeeping force in Gaza and the West Bank for the last thirty years, and then we wouldn't be dealing with any of this s**t over there.

But although the best time to do that would have been decades ago, the second best time is now. It's not too late to fix that mistake.