Pistols have never determined who won a war. In WWI, they were less than .1% of kills and wounded. Modern, more compact rifles are more useful than pistols. Rifles have more range, accuracy, and can better punch through modern armor. For some troops, it may be better to carry more rifle ammo than a pistol. Modern pistols are like modern smartphones, there isn’t a huge difference between brands and the chance that one company’s pistol saves your life when another company’s would not, is low.
““On the territory issue, Americans are simple: Russia demands Ukraine to give up territories, and Americans keep thinking how to make it happen,” a senior European official familiar with the negotiation process told POLITICO on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
“The Americans insist that Ukraine must leave the Donbas … one way or another,” the official added.
Ukraine has insisted that any peace deal must involve the war being frozen on current lines. At present, some 30 percent of Donbas is still in Ukrainian hands.”
Defenders are more likely to win longer wars. So, the idea that Ukraine can’t win because the war is going on so long, is backwards. The U.S. revolution was an eight year war.
The Americans were largely getting their asses kicked and were dependent on foreign aid, but in the end, they won.
The aggressor usually sustains more casualties compared to the defender. The defender often gains resolve the longer the war lasts, while the invader questions why they are doing this in the first place. The defender is fighting for their homes, their territory, and their independence, while the invader is fighting to gain something.
“Back in early September, he declared that the newly renamed Department of War would favor “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”
The secretary of war clearly meant it, judging from a story in The Washington Post. The paper reports that Hegseth issued verbal orders to the military forces striking suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific to “kill everybody.”
When the inaugural strike in this campaign against a boat off the Trinidadian coast left two survivors clinging to the wreckage of the craft, the commander in charge of the operation, in accordance with Hegseth’s spoken directive, ordered a second strike to take them out too.
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The administration’s officially secret legal justification for these strikes asserts that “narco-terrorists” are using the money earned from trafficking drugs to finance their war against the United States and its allies. Suspected drug smugglers are therefore, it claims, a legitimate counter-terrorism target.
Many international law experts have retorted that the boats themselves pose no imminent threat to Americans, and that the people on board the boats are not combatants but suspected criminals who one would normally expect to be arrested, not executed.
The administration’s position “can justify almost anything the government wants to do to anyone,” wrote Reason’s Matthew Petti back in September.
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Even if one accepts the dubious idea that these strikes are legal, the second strike described in the Post report would violate the laws of war. More plainly, it would be murder.
An order to kill boat occupants no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations, told the Post.
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The Trump administration is using the military to target people suspected of breaking criminal laws against drug trafficking. It’s choosing to kill these suspected criminals when they pose to immediate threat to anyone, instead of simply arresting them.”
If reports are true, the Secretary of Defense broke the laws of war according to U.S. law by ordering killed, people in the water whose vessels had already been destroyed.
Also, because this war has not been authorized by Congress and criminal suspects are entitled to due process, not killed on suspicion, even those killed on the boat were murdered.