The article title makes it sound like they found them in a couch cushion. TL;DR The Greeks offered to sell the US 5k rounds to pass on to Ukraine.
Also the article is dated Dec 1st, quoting a Greek source article dated Nov 28th. Nearly 2 weeks old reporting.
It’s good they attached an AirTag to them. Otherwise they would have been lost forever.
Honestly, given how the US military loses stuff all the time, I’m surprised that wasn’t the case.
wouldn’t be surprised if they did though
Well, the US Army lost nuclear bombs before, so artillery shells being randomly found in a warehouse someday wouldn’t be surprising.
Interesting, one would think Greeks are likely to suddenly need ammunition too, with that stain to the east of them.
Bruh. They both bicker but when earthquakes happen, they help each other. I find the loudest “Greek nationalists” tend to be Americans and Russian Medieval Total War gamers LARPing at being the Eastern Romans
Well, I have varying experiences. I don’t think many people with Pontic ancestry would agree with you.
It’s also easier to be friendly to Turks when your military is not that shitty, which naturally reduces the likeliness of war.
It’s unlikely that anything will happen these days between Turkey and Greece.
Less likely that what is happening now between Russia and Ukraine was in 2012, surely.
Both Greece and Turkey are still democracies (despite the latter being very flawed) and both are part of NATO. Erdoğan is also smarter than Putin who loves to play both the West and its rivals. .
This is like a day’s worth of artillery shells for them. Every bit helps.
“Haha hey guys we just forgot about all these artillery shells in the basement”
You’d be surprised.
We had a little dig between the couch cushions, and look what we came up with!
47 million deal for 75k total shells
$626 a shell? Really??
A single Javelin anti-tank missile costs around 250k. Weapons are expensive, more so when companies owned by congressmen’s buddies want to make enormous profits.
The M795 projectile is about $500, so that sounds about right. Just the “dumb” shells are fairly cheap. Once you start adding guidance and specialized fuses, the price starts to get cranked up. I don’t know too much about artillery though, but the powder charges should be fairly cheap as well.
I would have to start digging to find what the real prices are, but it’s probably still in the ballpark. The real cost is in the equipment.
Seems like they were sold rather cheap there.
https://www.technology.org/2023/01/05/how-much-do-155-mm-artillery-rounds-cost-now-and-how-many-are-fired-in-ukraine/ quotes prices like $2000-$3500 per shell.
Ukraine will be giving them to Russia for free. With express delivery too.
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It’s a fucking disgrace that the Eurozone isn’t putting that many shells out per day from its factories. 10 factories should make such an amount easily.
I don’t think anyone anywhere manufactures 203mm shells anymore, so the factories would have to be retooled for the sole purpose of supplying Ukraine.
For once, I can proudly say
'MURICA :)
In the run up to the invasion I kept thinking that it was all a giant bluff and that Putin would stop at the last minute and make Biden look like a crazy old man shouting at clouds.
You are not the only one. Any sane military analysis showed it was a.bad idea. Where you (and everyone without access to classified information) messed up was assuming Putin was sane.
Ah, let’s slow down a bit.
The war is still going on, Ukraine is still bleeding, the Ukrainian military is losing some of the more qualified personnel they had prepared before the start of the war, and the Russian military is gaining experience and becoming a bit less shit.
Which means Ukraine’s qualitative advantage is becoming smaller. Even the casualty rates have changed accordingly.
And Russian economy is not crumbling and doesn’t seem to even be on that track.
Putin and others are afraid of competing civilized polities in the ex-USSR. They very clearly don’t intend any “imperial restoration”, because their actions are inconsistent with that. They are more of a mafia group gotten very high.
They hurt Georgia so that it doesn’t become a prosperous country, they also were strangling Armenia in various forms, even with it being an “ally”, and since 2010 started supporting Azerbaijan. With Ukraine their actions were not unlike those with Armenia before government change, and then various gradations of war.
See, even if Ukraine sort of “wins”, it’s inevitably going to be more authoritarian than in an alternative reality where this war didn’t happen. If it “loses”, then, well, there won’t be such a civilized polity, just another Belarus, bigger and poorer.
Almost a win-win situation.
It’s not a sport.
I hoped he wouldn’t, but at the point where he was massing troops at the border it was surely a sign of what was coming.
“We’re not planning on invading, just putting all our troops here for shits and giggles!”
It wasn’t the massing of troops. It was the massing of blood and other perishables. You don’t do that for drills.
When the analysts found that there were massive stores of blood bags on the border, that was when it really dawned on me it was going to happen.
Russia needs to be permanently humbled and put in its place. Tired of their idiotic Chinese-riddle-threats. Go fuck yourself, and keep your gross old man mouth away from boys’ tummies baldie aha :)
make Biden look like a crazy old man shouting at clouds
I mean, he does anyway. I wish we could get a president that can string together a coherent sentence.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/oct/19/experts-say-bidens-achievements-are-similar-to-rec/
But yes, he has a speech impediment, so let’s be all ablest and focus on that, mmmkay?
Speech impediment, Cognitive impairment, And Physical impairment
He shouldn’t be president, and wouldn’t be if we didn’t have so many careless partisans in this country. And arguing that his achievements are comparable to recent presidents isn’t the good thing iu think it is.
Maybe they can find some housing or student loan forgiveness next.
Fuck this shit.
sorry supreme court said no so only thing we can do is bomb
It’s definitely weird to see comments almost filled with GLEE under articles like this.
Is this image real? Are those guys so badass that they just chit chat while this massive munition explodes behind them? Are they so desensitized?
I’d probably defecate a little bit everytime that gun went off…
You get used to big booms. I spent some time working on a military post where large caliber guns were tested regularly. The first time one went off while I was outside, I was in a crouch looking around before remembering where I was. By the time I left the contract, I would notice when a boom happened, you really can’t ignore it, but it was just a “oh, they are shooting again” reaction and not a “holy fuck, what was that?” like the first time.
Month 1 of the mortar alarms going off you go to the nearest shelter and sit until the all clear.
Month 3 you go to your room first, or if already there you take your time getting some snacks and a cell phone or gameboy to pass the time.
Month 5 you don’t even bother leaving your room unless your unit is known to have someone check trailer to trailer.
Month 7 you get so fed up with the mortar alarm that you go AWOL just to hunt down and slaughter the prick whos launching them.
Month 9 you are now the mortar guy.
We still have our own stockpile right? It’s not like we’re giving them but losing ours, right?
Why, exactly, do you think the US would require a stockpile of 203mm shells? The M110 was retired from service decades ago.
I dunno about ammo for artillery dude lol I’m just asking
Your Colonel would be disappointed, Private.
I had no colonel
You really don’t need to be worried about the US running out of munitions, if there’s one thing the USA does well, it’s pumping out obscene amounts of weapons
I was just wondering if we sell what we already have, or have more made, or our old stuff.
The US always “finds” money for more war.
Doesn’t even matter if the war is ours anymore. We’ll fund it if it makes the Democrats’ and Republicans’ golf buddies super-rich.
At least the cause is deserving this time. Fuck Russia’s naked power grab
Far less deserving than an American who needs to see a doctor but has to decide between treatment or bankruptcy.
Luckily we live in a world where it’s possible to invest in multiple things simultaneously. The US already spends more on healthcare than the rest of the world. If it was allocated better this wouldn’t be a problem. Don’t vote Republican, support single payer.
Isolationism isn’t a realistic policy in a world that is more connected than ever.
Don’t vote Republican, support single payer.
The Democrats had the chance to pass single payer. Obama had a supermajority for seven months of his presidency. They opted to make it more expensive instead.
Luckily we live in a world where it’s possible to invest in multiple things simultaneously.
Yeah, but they don’t.
No, they were always one vote short of a super-majority. Joe fucking Lieberman insisted on the ACA without a public option. The shitbag had sold out to the insurance companies, jumped ship and torpedoed the one chance Democrats had at real healthcare reform. Want to blame someone for the fucked up version of the ACA we got, instead of what was possible? Blame Joe fucking Lieberman.
Joe Lieberman was a Democrat.
And no, I’ll blame Democrats. Their one chance to do the right thing and they sold out, as they always do.
It’s a shame the people can’t eat excuses.
He was one, and chose to leave the party in 2006 and become an independent. He did continue to caucus with with Democrats. However, he also endorsed John McCain in 2008.
Yes, Democrats were within a dick hair of getting a public option but fell one vote short. Mind you, the super majority vote was only necessary because of the GOP filibustering the entire ACA, even the watered down version. We would have had better health care in this country, if the GOP wasn’t hell bent of preventing it. Could Democrats do better? Yes, but the lack of a public option is very much the fault of the GOP and Joe fucking Lieberman.
The reason we don’t have healthcare in the U.S. is conservatives. If we shipped our conservatives to Russia, we could simultanously achieve healthcare in the U.S. and rid ourselves of our primary hindrance to all other progress.
Conservatism is a plague long overdue for a cure.
The reason we don’t have healthcare in the U.S. is conservatives.
Oh, I agree.
The problem is you all delude yourselves into thinking Democrats aren’t conservatives every two years, despite the fact that they rule as conservatives when we give them power.
Blue MAGA types will never admit this. They think they are real leftists, how cute 😊
A lot of weapons supplied to Ukraine are actually old stockpiles whose value depreciated overtime. So basically hand-me-downs. 100 billion aid package to Ukraine sounds a lot, but this is cheaper if people do the math. And US allies are pitching in so US isn’t doing all the heavy lifting.
More importantly, the US is not doing this for free. The aid package to Ukraine is lend-lease, like in World War II. Ukraine will pay those back like France, UK, Republic of China, USSR, Netherlands and others who received such aid package in the past. UK, for example, fully repaid the lens-lease debt to US in 2000s. Ukraine is expected to be in debt to US all the same. Also, after the war, many Western companies could be expected to invest in Ukraine for rebuilding the country.
We heard similar excuses about Iraq (multiple times) and Afghanistan. We’re “helping them stand up so we can stand down” or “make war there so we don’t have to here”. It wasn’t that long ago that Hamid Karzai was giving speeches in Congress, and then later we found out he was a crook. In 1983 we were shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, because we were paying him to fight our enemies for us.
And yet, we still lost 20 trillion dollars in those wars, because no one in this country learns from history.
This is not our war. We should not be paying for it, not while people here can’t see a doctor.
At the end of the day, you chickenhawks just do not care about the extent to which we neglect our own people in order to enrich warmongers.
Except the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not orchestrated by US? And the blame lies squarely at Russia?
You don’t need a PhD to recognise there is a thing called just war. US interference in Latin America is bad, but so is the unprovoked invasion of Russia on Ukraine. Not helping Ukraine is like one of those moronic peaceniks and isolationists of the past advocating not to help UK against Nazi Germany, or China against Imperial Japan. As someone said already, isolationism doesn’t work this time anymore.
What’s moronic is how we already spend a trillion on war each year anyway, and now we’ve dumped 200 billion more into a war that isn’t even ours, and took it away from the IRS.
So not only are we losing money that should be serving the American people in Ukraine, future losses are compounded because the IRS is underfunded too.
What’s moronic is how you support this when the US is already making war in seven countries at once, with military bases in nearly every country in the world, and it’s still not enough for you even as you can see the vulgar extent to which our own people’s needs are neglected in order to serve it.
The Iraq wars were expensive, because the US military was directly managing it and it went on for thirty years, if I am to include an intermittent period before 2002. Funding Ukraine is less expensive so because, and I know it’s a loaded term, the proxy and taking more direct casualties.
And as I mentioned, lend-lease is not that expensive. Ukraine is receiving hand me downs and unwanted equipment. They’re not receiving latest state of the art weapons like the stealth bomber or Zumwalt class destroyer that cost $2 billion a piece. This will pay back overtime.
The US isn’t a saint and have been abusive of its power as the sole hegemon (that’s why I am an advocate to reform UN and allowing multipolar world), but letting Russia get away with invading Ukraine violates the UN charter to respect national borders, a cornerstone of what kept peace in the past 80 years. A lot more will lose than just money. Same if Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were let to annex countries and commit genocide wantonly. The US provided lend-lease and financial aid to China and UK before becoming dire involved in World War 2, and that is in spite of the Great Depression.
I understand people’s frustration with providing support to Ukraine amidst the neglect of domestic issues. But the domestic issues are the fault of neoliberal austerity policies that had been going on for decades, way before the Russo-Ukrainian war. Decades of underfunding social programmes and letting problems compound. When a new problem arises, politicians uses that to distract the people from already existing problems that are the politicians’ own doing.
