When it comes down to it, this is a hell of a deal for the US. We spend a tiny fraction of our military budget to de-fang Putin and don’t have to fire a single shot ourselves.

Better than defanging is real world testing.

What worked as expected, what didn’t, how we can make it better etc.

I’m not sure just how much the US spends on weapon testing, but I imagine it’s a bonkers number. And now they get an opportunity to test in a real environment, with some other country’s army to do much of the heavy lifting?

I do software dev and testing stuff is expensive. Real world testing is a particularly difficult and pricey thing to do. It’s not easy to simulate realistic usage and it’s super common to discover all sorts of issues only when something is used outside of controlled conditions. That’s why so many web products get the hug of death. It’s why Lemmy has had so many problems not just with scaling, but things like UX. It’s so easy to not realize even “obvious” problems when you don’t have a large number of real users.