this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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We obviously can't dismiss different possibilities, but everything we've seen over past two years indicates that US is not having much success. I disagree that US can wait out Russia here because US is increasingly seeing lack of political will to keep going. It's worth noting that exact same thing happened in Vietnam and Afghanistan where US was forced to pull out in the end when the cost of the war got too high. The cost of keeping Ukraine going eclipses those conflicts.
US also has much tougher logistics situation than Russia, and this I would say is the biggest factor. Russia can just ship weapons and ammunition by rail while the west is not able to disrupt that in any way. On the other hand, US has to ship stuff across the ocean and through multiple countries only to have much of it blown up once it crosses the Ukrainian border.
There's also nothing magical in terms of what Russia is doing. They have artillery dominance that they use to great effect. They depleted Ukrainian air defence, and now Russian aviation operates with impunity. They use drones to hunt Ukrainian armor. And finally, they have massive mine fields that are effectively impassible.
There's been no evidence over the past two years to indicate that US has some ace up their sleeve, but I guess we'll see soon.
I agree with your assessment of the Russian position. I disagree with the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
I doubt it was a political will situation, nor a cost thing. It seems more likely that it was a useful base of operations for black ops and asymmetrical covert war and influence campaigns against China. US contractors were making a lot of profit. And 20 years in Afghanistan hadn't managed to get the US to anything resembling Vietnam levels of unrest.
To me, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was either mission accomplished in establishing and embedding asymmetrical capabilities in the guerilla networks and/or a need to remove a weak holding in advance of a war with China to avoid it being a distracting front and/or a need to pull back materiel for redeployment. I am not convinced it was money loss nor political will.