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Christy's avatar

I have a son who is part of the 101st. Half his battalion is over in Poland. If anything is about to happen over there he will hear about it and I’ll let y’all know. So far not a peep.

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J Kaz's avatar

Prays and safety for all of them. And tell them thank you for serving

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Fla Mom's avatar

So much for OPSEC, I suppose. (Operational Security; not telling the world what a particular unit is doing/will do, as the open-source intelligence gatherers can put together quite a lot to, in essence, figure out what's in the classified info.) When I was on active duty, we were told that we could put our own lives at risk by telling our loved ones too much.

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Christy's avatar

My husband did special forces for 20 years. I’m quite aware of opsec. It’s public knowledge and far from classified.

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Chevrus's avatar

OPSEC is for civilians these days....no way you are hiding battalions in todays world.

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Benjamin Two N's's avatar

It's pretty common knowledge they are over there.

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Based Florida Man's avatar

US troops will not do well against Russian forces in the Ukraine area.

Note how bad we did in Afghan. The NATO provisioned Ukrops are failing now so I do hope the Western troops stay out of this.

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Unapologetically Me's avatar

The Soviets retreated from Afghanistan after 10 years of losses which nearly bankrupted their country...

12 years later: The US went in. (Because, you know, a better army... 😉)

I was wondering whether the Soviets left millions of perfectly good munitions and extremely expensive tanks behind.

So I did a bit of digging.

"The main thing was that it was organized. From our perspective, the evacuation was done just right," he says. "We left civilian infrastructure but took every tank and machine gun with us."

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/30/1040536017/afghanistan-withdrawal-russia-soviet-afghan-war-veterans

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daverkb's avatar

Nice that the General and his son were the last ones to cross the bridge back into Soviet territory. All the General's troop were ahead of him.

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Unapologetically Me's avatar

If you read that story carefully, he admits it was propaganda, but I believe the part where he says they took all their equipment...

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daverkb's avatar

Ah! The slippery world again! I didn't catch that! And good for you!

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Benjamin Two N's's avatar

They actually didn't. There were huge fields of armor left abandoned around kabul along with tons of planes.

They then collapsed shortly after.

If you google it you'll see they were still there in 2001 and I think were only scrapped in the 2010s.

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J Boss's avatar

I suspect it depends on tactics. Russia has an army with standard large army tactics required. Afghanistan was an insurgent force, fighting based on fundamental religious values (whether or not you agree with the values doesn't affect their commitment to their cause). US large armed forces tactics won't work against insurgents, but might against traditional large unit enemies. Also, quite possibly US never intended to win in middle east , just to expend consumables that Raytheon sells so senators get rich off the war action.

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Christy's avatar

With all my being I agree with you. I pray for the troops everyday!!!!!

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Benjamin Two N's's avatar

Very bad take.

American forces would do very, very well against Russians.

We actually have a functioning air force, logistic trains, and motivated forces without a draft.

Fighting counter insurgency doesn't equal fighting conventional style.

Russia struggled to fight unconventional forces in Chechnya and Syria and Afghanistan.

The USA beat Iraq in under a month, 12000 miles from home.

Our equipment actually works.

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Benjamin Two N's's avatar

Nothing will happen, just like when Trump put an armored brigade on Russia's back door.

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