Ukraine has many problems, and perhaps the most serious problem is that they are dependent on western weapons that all resemble ED 209, the “urban pacification” security drone from Robocop.
ED 209 looks great, like something out of science fiction.
But in ED 209’s first real-life battle, it can’t climb stairs and immediately flips over.
ED 209 is over-priced, over-engineered, and over-hyped, with huge flaws that were overlooked or deliberately covered up during development. But OSCORP, the corporation that built ED 209, doesn’t care. In the words of OSCORP executive Dick Jones (yes, I’m sure naming him “Dick” was deliberate):
I had a guaranteed military sale with ED 209, a renovation program, spare parts for 25 years, who cares if it works or not?!
True, it’s just a movie, but Robocop is talking about real life problems. All of the USA’s top weapons were built by greedy capitalists like Dick Jones who do not care if they work or not.
Saddam Hussein was defeated so quickly in 1991 that American weapons didn’t need to endure much scrutiny. But even then, the Patriot air defense system’s alleged 90–100% success rate didn’t pass the smell test and led to a congressional inquiry. However, the inquiry went nowhere and the Patriot’s true success rate against Saddam’s SCUD missiles was never revealed.
By the 2010s, cracks started to appear in the Patriot’s reputation. For one, it had to be used much more often. Also, the prevalence of smart phone cameras and social media made military failures much harder to cover up. By 2018, even mainstream pro-war propaganda outlets like Foreign Policy were getting fed up.
Ukrainian and NATO apologists can try to deny there is a problem, but that’s pretty hard to do when all of the Patriot failures in Ukraine – such as high rates of failure to fire or failure to guide – were all well documented in the Middle East. Look at this video from Saudi Arabia – one of the Patriot interceptors does a 180 degree turn and crashes straight into a city block, injuring almost 20 people.
When Ukraine authorities complain of high civilian casualties, it’s probably from their own defense missiles spinning out of control and hitting the city.
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Ian Kummer
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Back in 2004-5 the Bush regime was putting great pressure on the spineless rubber stamp unelected Manmohan Singh, who was the alleged prime minister of India, to buy the Patriot. This included planting stories in regime mouthpiece rags like The Times Of India. One such story went “It may be true that in the first Gulf War the Patriot did not intercept any Iraqi SCUD missiles, but it has been drastically upgraded and improved since. The proof is that during the invasion in 2003 not one SCUD hit American forces.”
I immediately wrote back (this was in the previous website days and they didn’t have any comment forum) pointing out that Iraq did not *have* any SCUDs in 2003, and if that had had any it would have given legal ground for the invasion.
The paper didn’t print my letter, of course.
i guess in this analogy the citizens of ukraine are mr. kinney? it’s “only a glitch”, folks.
if you remember when record/CD stores were a thing you probably saw the little “cut out” bargain bin full of random stuff that didn’t sell or went out of print. that’s the comparison i would use; ukraine as a dumping ground for the crap other countries need to surplus and can’t arsed to maintain.