Comments by "Antony Wooster" (@antonywooster6783) on "Bakhmut Operationally Encircled, Russia Advance Zaporozhye; West Talks Tank Deliveries Ramstein" video.

49:42 What is the purpose of all these deliveries of weapons to Ukraine from its NATO partners? I heard a video about a week ago, by an American ex-marine who had been fighting in Ukraine as a mercenary, at a fairly senior level, and he gave it as his opinion that it was mostly "virtue signaling" on the part of the various countries. He added that the stuff that was arriving looked to be in pretty poor condition and as though these deliveries were being used to clear redundant and obsolete equipment from the countries' storage spaces.
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I think I see how this situation has come about. Over the last few years there have been two groups of people in our ruling class. There have been the politicians with practically zero military experience and the arms manufacturers. The arms manufacturers have grown accustomed to getting large amounts of money to engage in producing very expensive research and development projects, rather than building up stock of “boring ol' e.g. 155mm shells or run-of-the-mill equipment”. They did this because they understood that the Russians and the Chinese were not going to initiate a war and they thought (Mistakenly as it has turned out) that the politicians would have more sense than to push the Russians or the Chinese to the point that they felt they had to resort to arms. The politicians on the other hand, believed their own propaganda and having no practical experience of running a war, did not understand how small the depth of stored supplies was, nor how the facilities needed to make the materiel needed to wage a war had become obsolete or had gone out of existence nor even how little they understood about the problems they were going to face. Finally, they got so carried away with their own imagined power and prowess that they forced the Russians into a situation where they had, actually to either respond militarily to the western provocation or suffer a political backlash in Russia that might have overthrown the government.. The rest as they say, is history. That is how, IMHO we got to where we are today.
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