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The week's question
In December 2024, in the thread "Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?", sykesix asked the members: "What do you do if you arrive early at movie besides go to the snack bar?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Author: albaby1 ✶❂🐝 GOLD
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Number: of 88916 
Subject: Re: Let’s See If This Pans Out for Putin
Date: 08/21/25 2:55 PM
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Other that stuffing the British Navy at Yorktown?

Yes - because, again, that didn't drive the British off the mainland. Beating the British at Yorktown demonstrated the Crown could defeat the Continental Army - not that the Continental Army could dislodge British forces. That's why it took Parliament to drive the King into the Treaty of Paris negotiations. The British military position was sufficiently strong that they could have kept fighting indefinitely, but the cost to the country was more than Parliament was willing to keep supporting.

You guys are straining mightily to use the American Revolution to equate to the Ukraine even though they're not remotely similar. In almost any way.

They're virtually identical along the characteristics relevant to your argument. Both involved a smaller military force winning a conflict against a larger military force, not by dislodging the larger military force physically from the territory, but by ratcheting up the costs of the war to the larger country until it was no longer sustainable for them to keep fighting. It's an excellent historic example of that dynamic playing out. The details are different, but not in a way that matters to the strategy.

Not relevant? You understand the difference between the Colonies being official British Territory vs. the Ukraine being invaded by an outsider?

Yes, and it's utterly irrelevant to the question of whether it is feasible for a smaller force to force a large force to leave without being able to physically dislodge the larger force from the position they hold, by way of the mechanism of making it too costly for the larger force's country to maintain the fight.

No, they don't. The French were engaged in fighting, NATO is not.

Again, that doesn't matter to the argument. The French didn't contribute enough soldiers to the Colonial cause to allow the colonists to drive out the British; if NATO sent Ukraine 10,000 troops, that wouldn't let them drive out the Russians, either. The value of the French participation was to make it too costly for Britain to continue a war that it could not hope to end on its own, leading them to choose to back out. The same is true of NATO.
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