Posted on 03/28/2018 12:51:38 PM PDT by Navy Patriot
When more than 8 million Soviet troops died during World War II, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin said that a “single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Stalin is not the only autocrat who has appeared to care little about the loss of his own forces at war. In 1991, Saddam Hussein’s front-line army lost nearly half its men to casualties or desertions. Even his elite Republican Guard lost a quarter of his men. Soviet forces in Afghanistan suffered roughly 50,000 casualties during the 1980s.
Compare these figures to Russia’s losses in several years of fighting in Syria. Russia has more than 4,000 troops based in Syria yet has lost fewer than 50 (excluding private military contractors). Russia has so successfully avoided war casualties that the world was shocked by the news of several hundred Russian mercenaries killed, with the Kremlin scrambling to deny their very existence.
Russia’s casualty aversion in Syria is suggestive of a broader trend. Autocrats, once indifferent to military casualties, today seem less willing to see their troops killed. But force protection has led to less discriminate military tactics that result in high levels of civilian fatalities.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Yeah! What business do they have trying to win a war.
As you point out - this has got to the the stupidest comment ever - what country doesn’t try to minimize its military casualties???
Funny, Syria and terrorism barely factors into Putin’s big speeches to the Russian public.
America, however does. And never in the context of co-operation. Only hostility.
Actually, I believe it exposes the Compost’s, Beehner’s and The American Left’s attitude toward the US Military, and explain’s our losses in Korea, Vietnam, Benghazi, and the never ending war in the Middle East.
Talking to yourself now, are you, Rose?
US limited its casualties in Mosul & Raqqa. Those cites are basically flattened.
Hating Trump, Hating Russia, Hating Putin.
Russia fights the Al-Qaeda jihadists funded by Saudi Arabia in Syria.
Remember Al-Qaeda, they did 9/11.
Washington insiders regularly regurgitate Al-Qaeda propaganda about atrocities and chemical weapons attacks there.
If our presidents had the same aversion to GI casualties, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would have gone a lot smoother. Can’t win wars without inadvertently killing the enemy’s civilian support base, a good chunk of which he also uses as camouflage and human shields.
Russia fights the Al-Qaeda jihadists funded by Saudi Arabia in Syria.
Just because the Democrats are pretending to hate the Russians to score political points against the GOP doesn’t mean the Russians are our friends. Russian enmity vis-a-vis the US pretty much started after the Bolsheviks took power in 1917. We don’t hate them. But they definitely hate us, for much the same reason that post-WWI Germans hated the West - for beating them.
“When more than 8 million Soviet troops died during World War II, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin said that a “single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.””
No, you lying pig, Stalin was NOT talking about loses in war. One of your predecessors at the Washington [Com]Post, Leonard Lyons, said that Stalin had said “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.”
When Stalin was Commissar of Munitions, a meeting was held of the highest ranking Commissars, about a famine in Ukraine. Some communist official there spoke about how this - the death of millions - was a tragedy. When that official rattled off the statistics of the famine Stalin supposedly said “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.”
You don’t deny what I said about the USA-Al Qaeda Alliance in Syria, you distract.
But Russia is being pushed around, one should not be surprised if they react.
Since 1914 and the ill fated decision of European nations to go to war, we have had a century of consequences like those I lay out and those you lay out.
The Russians just brokered agreements with multiple radical militia in Ghouta to open safe corridors that evacuated 128,000 civilians ( past 30 days)
They also monitored the syrian bussing of thousands of radicals and their families to Idlib (instead of killing them)
Not one damn word in the western press or from the UN where our embarrassing Nikki Haley continues to spout full-on propaganda
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