Honestly, Russia is a far bigger threat to the world than the jihadis. While the Muslims have religious fervor in their corner, which makes them crazy, they lack the financing to pose a major threat to anyone. Russia on the other hand is giving the US and NATO the middle finger left and right and they actually have the money and manpower to pose a serious threat to anyone.
The jihadis do shit like 911 and kill a few thousand people and all the sheep start baaaa'ing and making a big deal about it. Russia decides they're going to take part of a NATO country and make it a part of Russia and nobody does anything about it because they're scared of kicking off WWIII. If you're powerful enough to take a portion of a NATO country and the US doesn't respond with military action, that says a lot.
I think you're talking about different Arabs. The Arabs fighting right now are rolling RPG's and are stoked when they get armored vehicles. Those Arabs don't even have an air force, let alone access to nukes. The Russian military is probably pound for pound as strong as the US military. In addition, the Arabs fight each other as much as they do outsiders whereas the Russians are united.
You're right about NATO, I thought they were part of it.
Vermithrax] The Russian military is probably pound for pound as strong as the US military.
Nooooo way dude. Russia's blue water navy compared to the US is practically non-existent. Their fixed wing, rotary wing, and umnanned aircraft are also not comparable. They would lose the air battle pretty damned quick, if they even managed to get their planes off the ground in the first place. Once the US has air superiority, the bombers and A-10s would play havoc with ground forces.
Switching to land forces, Russia does have a great deal more artillery, anti-air, and armored vehicles, but the vast majority of it is still old technology. We've had recent examples of what the US can do against old Russian technology (Iraq 2x with the 4th largest land force in the world).
Then if you compared logistics and communication capabilities... And the added benefit that the US currently has the most veteran professional military in the world.
Current day Russia would definitely be a top 3 opponent in the history of the US, but I don't doubt the US would knock them out cold.
Oh god they're talking politics, quick, damage control.
This is probably the wrong crowd for this one but here it goes.
Aloha Snackbar is a thousand year old Arab meme that means everything from "Hooray" to "Oh shit". There are many explanations given for why Jihadis shout it. My theory is that the Jihadi is actually a form of Pokemon shouting his own species name.
Sorry, it was a poor choice of words on my part. I am at work and was in a hurry. I was talking purely about nukes. At the end of the day, they are really all that matter when a super power faces another super power. Ever since the nuke was invented, super powers haven't fought other super powers because the end game of the escalation is nukes, which means end of the world for everyone.
When the USSR collapsed, we assumed they had roughly the same nuke strength as we did. While that may no longer be the case on paper, every country that has nukes keeps the extent of their arsenal secret, even if they claim they are transparent. If there is any country in the world that could rival us in terms of nuclear capability, I have to believe it would be Russia. Even if we do have more than they do, and who really fucking knows if that's the case or not, I'm certain they have enough nuclear capability to set off an end of the world nuclear scenario.
I personally don't think we'd ever go toe to toe with Russia because the people that make those decisions on both sides of the table know that both countries have nuclear capability and that would be the end game. That's the whole reason the cold war happened and why we sort of seeing a remergence of the cold war with Russia right now. They are meddling in the affairs of other countries but are politically savvy enough to dance around an outright conflict.
