President Trump is discovering something President Putin has learned. Wars one fights with volunteer troops do not cause the same intense reaction at home as wars fought with drafted soldiers. There is an implicit understanding that volunteering for the military puts the volunteer in lethal harm’s way.
Russians are not as crabby about the war in Ukraine as they were about that in Afghanistan. Seeing this Putin has gone to extreme lengths - big signing bonuses, get out of jail ‘cards’, etc. - to send only volunteers to the fight in Ukraine. Relatively few of the casualties have been people from the Moscow and St. Petersburg regions, where ethnic Russians predominate.
At this point in our history all of our military personnel are volunteers. Presidents are permitted to put them in harms way insofar as it is done judiciously, with care, and most important - successfully.
Our losses to date in Iran do not yet equal the lives lost to violence on an average long weekend in Chicago, about which we shrug.
