Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge.
Are we bleeding Russia out in Ukraine, or are we the ones bleeding out?
The Ukraine war has shown us that the economics of war has changed, perhaps forever.
The original premise of our involvement in Ukraine was that we had to bleed out Russia.
It was never clear to me why, exactly, we’re bleeding out Russia. Near I can tell, they’ve been useful partners in the fight against, for example, Islamic extremism.
True, Russia invaded Ukraine to save ethnic Russians being shelled by their government, much like we invaded Mexico to save ethnic Americans being shelled by their government.
But I’m not sure why the average American family much cares who runs Donetsk, especially with existential security issues on our wide-open southern border.
Still, just for argument, let’s accept that, for some reason, it’s worth $300 billion to bleed out Russia.
The question is: Is that actually happening?
The other day I shared footage of $35,000 Russian Lancet drones taking out $4 million Abrams tanks and $5 million HIMARS rocket launchers. Even worse are the Houthi drones in Yemen being launched against western shipping in protest of our involvement in the war. There, it’s $20,000 drones against $2 million surface-to-air missiles.
Keep in mind it’s fantastically expensive to get all this stuff over there to get blown up; the cost of transporting a tank to Ukraine is at least several hundred thousand dollars, and the cost of sending a missile frigate to meander around the Red Sea lobbing $2 million missiles is about $70 million per year—missiles not included.
Note all those million-dollar missiles on million-dollar frigates aren’t making a dent, with insurance costs for Red Sea transit barely moved since the first days of the attacks, at almost a full percent of the ship’s value.
It’s also worth noting American ships don’t actually use the Red Sea—we use the Pacific and Atlantic. So, we’re spending all that for Europe and China.
Heaven help you if you send a carrier battle group in a show of force, as we’re currently doing in the Mediterranean. That cost comes to roughly $7 million per day—about $2 billion per year.
You could house 100,000 homeless veterans for $2 billion a year.
Forget show of force, it’s a show of bankruptcy.
Tallying everything up, we’re looking at a ratio of 100 to 1: It costs them a dollar to take a hundred from us.
That suggests that we are the ones bleeding out.
So what’s next? The new realities of drone warfare raise two very uncomfortable truths: First, that we can no longer afford to jump into every war in every backwater republic on earth.
But, worse, it raises the question of whether our massive military, built with tens of trillions of dollars over decades, is in the process of going obsolete. Has it become not a tool for world control but an iron chain dragging us under the water.
In theory, the U.S. could spend yet more trillions to mothball our legacy military and replace it with hundreds of thousands of drones. But maybe the unplanned obsolescence of our imperial star cruisers is a golden opportunity to quit the world policeman game.
Maybe it’s time for our military to come home and actually protect our own country instead.
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