Hmm… I’m not sure how the arguments relate to one another, but my understanding is that the USA would eradicate all russian conventional forces within five to seven days, precisely because we do NOT rely on ground forces, but on ‘distance’ using missiles and air power. In fact our only strategic weakness at present is that we lack sufficient inventory of those standoff weapons – and that we have reduced the scale of our military industrial complex so much that scaling is almost impossible, and the Biden administration is not reacting to the changing crises around the world by adapting to that challenge.

The only ‘case’ russia has at present is 1) they are happy to lose vast numbers of people and the west is not (russians do not respect human life any more than muslims or chinese) 2) some number of their nuclear weapons are still viable – we don’t and they apparently don’t know how many and they *might* be willing to use them – though, it would be suicide for them to do so.

We should note:
a) that we are having problems with our own silo missiles despite maintaining them with more than a bit of discipline.
b) that we have restored production of nuclear material in order to respond to chinese increases in production.

Reply addressees: @Oceanave1980