Comment by noch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noch | Hacker News Reader

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> [...] military supremacy and having the best weapons in the world is a huge part of why the dollar is THE global currency.

However, in "How the United States Could Lose a Great-Power War" (RAND, 2019)[0], we read:

> [...] For now, U.S. forces appear poorly postured to meet these challenges. That's because both Russia and China have developed formidable networks of missiles, radars, electronic warfare systems, and the like to degrade and potentially even block U.S. forces' ability to operate in the Western Pacific and Eastern Europe to defend allies and partners in those regions. China in particular is developing increasingly impressive capabilities to project military farther afield, including through systems such as aircraft carriers, long-range aviation, and nuclear-powered submarines. Together, these forces have tilted the military balance over places such as Taiwan and the Baltic states from unquestioned U.S. dominance to something much more competitive.

And[1]

> The US keeps losing, hard, in simulated wars with Russia and China. [...]

[0]: https://www.rand.org/blog/2019/10/how-the-united-states-coul...

[1]: https://breakingdefense.com/2019/03/us-gets-its-ass-handed-t...

This is a farce.

The United States is done fighting Great Power wars. No one talks about it publicly at all because doing so would shatter America's self-image as the Lone Superpower. The military the United States has now is quite capable of wrecking any nation that is not another Great Power. I say wrecking and not defeating, because as should be obvious from the last three decades, the United States has zero interest in winning wars. It really doesn't even bother trying - too expensive, and too hard. Instead the United States has made it very clear that if you displease it too much, and aren't another Great Power, it will trash your nation, and then either walk away or hang around stomping on you every so often.

The unspoken assumption is that there never will be a "real" war with China or Russia or any other 'near peer'. Whether that ultimately turns out to have been a foolish approach remains to be seen. But, it does leave a lot of money floating around to be siphoned off by various parts of the military-security industry, because Americans think they're paying for a Cold War military, when what they're actually getting is a military good for knocking down weaker opponents and then kicking them, but that barely even tries to pretend it can do anything else. (Except via propaganda, which is really cheap compared to manpower and materiel.)

As we used to say when I was in Iraq (with the US Army), "Don't mess with America, or we'll bring freedom to you too!"

Look how well it worked out in Libya, Iran, Iraq, etc.

I think it was the British and the French who brought freedom to Libya. Foreign intervention seems to nearly always make things worse. Just the other day there was an appalling attack on a maternity hospital in Afghanistan. People are saying that the West needs to do something...

The amount of deaths and horror that freedom has brought to Libya is soul crushing. I would wager that a good percentage of Libyans would Trade that freedom for the dictatorship with all that it entails, obviously not those that suffered injustice of a dictatorship but the majority ... work home life ...

As an American, who is also a veteran of OIF II, it really dismayed me to watch what happened in Libya. Granted, I did watch the liveleak of the end of Gadaffi and I'm not sad a truly horrible human being is no longer in charge of a country. That said, I'm very sad for the people who have to endure so much upheaval.

The reality is that you can't go from a strongman authoritarian to a magical well functioning democracy overnight (or maybe even ever) without a a few generations of change. It is really heart breaking to see it.

The military intervention in Libya was initially led by the United States and then handed off to NATO. The US contribution to direct attacks consisted mostly of cruise missile strikes. The British, French and Canadian air forces also played a major roles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...

I guess "freedom" can't just be the dismantling of a government. Since "freedom" as our societies value it only emerges in the context of some ordered society and government that protects those things.

The problem in those places seems to not have been, how hard is it to get rid of the established order, but rather, how hard is it to create a new order which preserves people's freedoms.

I guess, but ISIS still seems to be a thing.

Or in geek-speak. We have the Death Star, as we are the Empire. The Empire still lost.

Fiction v non-fiction.

Yup, and it’s so ironic that the Rebel heroes are a ragtag collection of desert-dwellers led by warrior priests of a religious sect.

Except in this take, I'd still prefer the Empire to the Rebels. Star Wars tells its story through the lens of the Rebel propaganda.

I think the GP is talking about Dune instead of Star Wars.

We all know what 'the spice' is.

The poster above literally mentioned the Death Star, so unless there's something like this in Dune I don't know about...

Don't forget the brainwashing of a teenager they send on a suicide mission against the authorities

ISIS got fairly wrecked though.

Not wrecked, they just relocated. They seem quite happy over in sub-Saharan Africa.

Any complex system eventually breaks down. If not this rebellion then the next. Or the one after that.

The system accumulates damage over time, maintenance can't fix everything, eventually it's not worth it to keep it operational. Looking at Trump and Biden I'd say that time is near.

In theory, repair and creating something anew are equivalent processes; at the detail level, they both involve the same act of tearing out old pieces and inserting fresh ones. So I sometimes wonder what is it that eventually makes killing and starting over preferable to maintenance? Maybe we should address that somehow, as redoing things from scratch seem unnecessarily wasteful.

yes lets draw direct analogies to science fiction lol

>The unspoken assumption is that there never will be a "real" war with China or Russia or any other 'near peer'.

Yes, because despite Wikipedia saying that the Cold War ended in the 20th century, we still have thousands of nukes ready to launch at each other in five minutes. There may someday be unconventional war, proxy war, or cyber war, but there will not be a great war unless it begins and ends with a nuclear holocaust.

Maybe the money is going to the secret space program. And one of the duties of the regular public military and security industry is to be a front.

Wouldn't that be nice. Like in StarGate SG-1, where a lot of things in the military budget fronted for the US pax-americaning our galactic neighbourhood and bringing useful tech back.

Alas, I worry that the secret space program is merely the rare not-totally-worthless exception to the overall rule.

I don't understand, what do you mean by overall rule, and what is the exception?

The overall rule: most US military spending is utterly wasted to line the pockets of politicians and the military-industrial complex. It's not useful even for defending the country.

The exception: there will most likely be something useful coming out of a space program. May or may not be useful enough to offset the costs, but it's not going to be a complete waste.

Ah, cool. Makes sense. ツ Thank you, I'm grateful for your answer.

If America goes home China's rise is quickly OVER, without anyone providing global trade security on the open oceans. This would drive unrest internally, and over the last 1500 years when China's central control has been threatened, they have turned inward and become shut ins.

The Belt and Road is partially an attempt to deal with the risk of the US pulling out of providing global security, but they need a LOT more time, and somewhat ironically because of COVID-19 they may have run out. While the US is spending trillions to move away from global trade very very quickly.

Here's an admittedly cynical take: Analysts who suggest that the US is weak better serve the defense industry. Even your source suggests the solution is more money...

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