Why does the US choose to fight wars this way?

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But if you take out Russia's satelites first, could they still be able to aim their missiles correctly at everyone else's?

If you take out enough of theirs you will probably take out most of everyone else's as well... It would be too much trash in Earth orbit. They probably can still, I'm sure it's the same reason they didn't hit Western satellites that are feeding intelligence to Ukraine.

That's true. So I guess Ukraine is doomed then because no one will help fight directly, because Russia is just too powerful?

Russian army is messy and corrupt and if Ukrainians use it to their advantage (which they appear to be doing), with substantial help from the local population and international shipments, their outlooks aren't that bleak.
It's blood, sweat and tears but not doom.

^ TBH military analysts that comment to the press are all surprised why the Russians are fighting a ground war in Ukraine. They run almost no sorties in the Ukrainian airspace. They have the aircraft but didn't put them to use. Is there some narrative or deniability that this would allow? I really don't understand what's going there, what their objectives are and now they approach them.

maybe it's to keep the story of how this is a quick "operation" to "de-nazify" the country intact, and jets dropping bombs looks too much like, well, war, to the Russian public? Though I doubt the Russian public has any illusions about the extent this has reached...

People in Russia are very carefully sheltered from pictures of what's going on in e.g. Mariupol. They don't want to believe and they are given feed not to believe.

Most likely IMO, Russian aircraft suffer the same problems as the rest of the army - there is only small number of modern or modernized equipment, the rest are old wrecks that look good only in charts and tables.

Our newest employee, a programmer/tech guy, is Russian. (I could tell by his last name even without knowing he speaks Russian and some other languages I think - but it’s his tech capabilities and coding languages we’re interested in.)

Anyways, he said the population is very split there much the same as Americans about trump. He said some of his older generation family members support putin and he and his immediate family just roll their eyes and go “Wtf? How can you believe anything coming from this guy or his propaganda?”

Imo it’s the same sort of cult psychology that trump was able to build his following on.

Hopefully they can’t win wars based on delusions.

But the thing is, can people be so controlled from what they see in the internet age, and the world wide web where all you have to do is go on your cellphone to see what a government would not want you to see?

The Internet providers only allow you to see what you're allowed to see. If the Russian authorities tell these companies to block anything related to the truth about the invasion, most of it will be censored.

Yes, some things will slip though the cracks, but most will be withheld.

There are ways around this, but the average person isn't going to be bothered.

But I didn't think the internet companies had time to go through all the content posted and decide what is truth and not truth for him. I thought the companies would say sorry Putin, we don't have time to do all that.

Wut?

Different rules in different countries. The entire internet is extremely censored in China, almost completely inaccessible in North Korea, and for all we know very censored/limited in Russia as well.

Oh okay I see. Well if NATO hopes that the sanctions will get Putin to back down, what if Putin manages to defeat all of Ukraine before the sanctions manage to do that? Would NATO then lift the sanctions and go back to business with Russia, because they figure they might as well, if they have lost, and the Ukraine is a part of Russia now, etc.?

They kind of did just that back when Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine. "OK, no big deal, lets just keep engaging in trade and diplomacy, and maybe Putin'll settle down." Er, turns out he didn't.

Chances are, if he takes Ukraine, he'll move on to Belarus. Then to the Caucasus, and maybe even to the Baltic states and Poland, which are part of the EU. Even without that, no-one in Eastern Europe wants a full-scale occupation going on over the next border. Keeping up sanctions might be our only way to force him to withdraw from Ukraine - war is expensive, and if the rest of the Russian economy is taking a hit too, a long occupantion will be hard to sustain.

(In Korea, the US faced heavy resistance from the Russian-armed Communists, plus Chinese troops and Russian air support. Meanwhile, the South Korea government was corrupt, tyrannical and incompetant, preventing their army from really pulling their weight. The Northern forces were driven back almost to the Chinese border at one point, before in their turn driving the Southern / US forces back into a couple of tiny enclaves in the south. Most major cities were bombed flat, with 3 million civillian casualties and millions more refugees. During peace talks, North Korea fortified the entire length of the ceasefire line into a concrete killing zone that no army could survive. Even ignoring the threat of nuclear anhilation, I don't think this is an experience anyone is keen to repeat in Ukraine.)

Oh okay, but how can you say that keeping up sanctions may be the only way to get him to withdraw, but you also said at the same time, it didn't work, and he's advancing. So how can people think it might work, when it hasn't been? Isn't that contradictory?

War is expensive but doesn't Russia theoretically have enough money to take over Ukraine though, with what they have now?

Ah, no, I meant that NOT continuing to sanction him over Crimea proved to be a disaster. So maybe they'll keep the sanctions up this time. Apologies if unclear!

Also, never underestmate what a country being stony broke can do. One major reason Britian gave up so much of its empire without a fight is that, after what fighting WWII did to our bank balance, we just plain didn't have the resources left to suppress the independence movements.