{"id":43579,"date":"2014-04-16T06:00:55","date_gmt":"2014-04-16T10:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=43579"},"modified":"2014-04-15T22:02:16","modified_gmt":"2014-04-16T02:02:16","slug":"the-case-for-us-troops-in-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=43579","title":{"rendered":"The case for US troops in Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chief Tango sends us a link from the Washington Post<\/a> written by James Jeffrey, a former ambassador for the Clinton and Obama Administrations who thinks that NATO ad the UN haven’t been fierce enough in the face of aggression in the Ukraine, so he figures that we need to put boots on the ground;<\/p>\n

The best way to send Putin a tough message and possibly deflect a Russian campaign against more vulnerable NATO states is to back up our commitment to the sanctity of NATO territory with ground troops, the only military deployment that can make such commitments unequivocal. To its credit, the administration has dispatched fighter aircraft to Poland and the Baltic states to reinforce NATO fighter patrols and exercises. But these deployments, like ships temporarily in the Black Sea, have inherent weaknesses as political signals. They cannot hold terrain \u2014 the ultimate arbiter of any military calculus \u2014 and can be easily withdrawn if trouble brews. Troops, even limited in number, send a much more powerful message. More difficult to rapidly withdraw once deployed, they can make the point that the United States is serious about defending NATO\u2019s eastern borders. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, no. We’ve gone past the point of sending a “powerful message”. That time was five years ago. Putin’s biggest fear is a missile shield in eastern Europe. Everyone on the planet knows that. Putting some Joe Rucksack in the western Ukraine as a minor speed bump on Vlad’s way to the Adriatic Sea will do nothing except make the US look weaker. the last I heard, the US pulled it’s last tanks from Europe<\/a> last year. I guess that didn’t send a message to Putin, did it? And when you talk about “boots on the ground” you must mean tank treads on the ground, too. So which armored division are we going to reactivate to face the tank-heavy Russians, or would that be too strong of the message?<\/p>\n

These navel-gazing egg heads would make me laugh if they weren’t giving dangerous advice without a thought to the consequences and without considering the resources we’ll have left when the liberals get done slashing the shit out of the Pentagon. The troops aren’t mannequins to propped up in front of Russian divisions to scare them off – they won’t be scared off. The Russians don’t scare with piddly-assed think tank mental masturbation. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chief Tango sends us a link from the Washington Post written by James Jeffrey, a former … The case for US troops in Ukraine<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}