Army wants smaller brigades, stronger divisions and lots of robots
breakingdefense.com
breakingdefense.com
Are we going to see more Syria/Yemen/Sudan-type conflicts or will we get back to a conventional war with tank battles and all?
In the 20th century warfare evolved trench warfare to asymmetrical war.
You don't need divisions to make an impact, you need someone willing to set off a suicide vest in a police station, a pregnant woman to sit an a VBIED and drive past a checkpoint or someone strong enough to fire an RPG.
To assume robots or technology is going to solve those problems is probably a naive position.
It's of course important to prepare for a larger scale war against China, Russia, etc. but realistically we're more likely to be fighting a handful of goat herders in Afghanistan with an AK and a bag full of rice before we're taking on an armored division.
The best line in the article was "We can’t hope endlessly that technology will make warfare easier or less brutal or less costly, [because] The reality is, it doesn’t; it changes it. It makes it harder in many cases."
Note: I was in the US Army from 03-07 serving in the Rangers with 4 deployments and have seen ingenuity trump technology
Every major power that can manufacture tanks also can make nukes. Thus there will probably be no pre-apocalyptic war like that.
The answer is: no.
There isn't a single country in the entire world that could challenge USA to a 1-1 military battle. There is no more such thing as tank warfare. At this point it's impossible to defeat USA on the high seas, or on land.
In a few decades, they could possibly outmatch the US outside the SCS as well.
China's has a number of very big problems they have to solve before they'll reach regional hegemony let alone global dominance. India is next-door, they have a massive demographic bomb coming because of the one child policy, and buying friends is unsustainable long-term, especially as those friends get wealthier too. This isn't to mention internal instability that massive concentration camps are unlikely to solve. We'll see what happens I suppose but one thing I do wish is all the best for the Chinese populace.
The fixation on their demographic issue is quite ridiculous. Demographic problems are not problems in a vacuum. Demographic decline is only an issue insofar as it prevents economic growth.
It turns out, the CPC is acutely aware of the issue, and considered it before putting the policy into place. The crucial fact is this one:
Over 25% of the Chinese population is employed in agriculture. However, only 2% of the American population is employed in agriculture.
This fact is the root cause of the demographic decline being planned and indeed wished for by the CPC. They, in effect, have a 20+% population surplus, that could be got rid of without a negative economic impact.
Therefore, the Chinese economy is very unlikely to implode because of the upcoming demographic shock, as it will not negatively impact economic growth and will thus not lead to issues with either the retirement system (China already has one of the lowest retirement ages), nor with economic growth.
This inscribes itself further in the process of proletarianization in which the Chinese economy is engaging in order to continue its development, as well as calculated so that the peak population will coincide with the carrying capacity of Chinese arable lands. The CCP are a lot of bad things, but they really aren't idiots.
An issue that was not foreseen, however, is the gender imbalance that was created, but even that is not that bad of an issue - involuntary celibacy is significantly lower in China than, for example, the United States, and is actually one of the lowest in the world, but this is still a problem, especially for more long term relationships.
People have been clamouring for the imminent fall of China for this or that, but objectively I don't see it happening.
The rise of India as a competitor to China will likely be on timescales even longer than 5-25 years. By then, circumstances will be significantly different. In any case, India is not a problem that will prevent the continued economic development nor the increased power projection ability of China.
The fact is the SCS has too many benefactors to cede it to China. There are too many local nations that don't want that to happen in addition to the entire west.
Even if China can win head to head against the US there is no way it can compete with that alliance, and there are no other potential allies that will tip the balance in China's favor.
India has much to gain from joining such an alliance, if it were ever to come to that, they could finally resolve their border dispute and solidify it. They have already signed a military pact with the US last month. They matter.
Without US, China can, trivially. China is 3x larger in population than all other SCS claimants together with 7x higher GDP. PLA Navy is building more tonnage in ships than the region combined. There's also the fact that they will never align with each other against China because they are simultaneously disputing against EACH OTHER, a fact that many people conveniently forget. USN is pretty much the only entity preventing full blown Chinese Munroe doctoring in SCS, and in many ways they've already been squeezed out. Everyone in the region is just leveraging the situation for better deals with China, i.e. Philippines and China are finally doing co-oil exploration in the region.
>border dispute and solidify it
This would be a huge win for China. A large reason China is pressing Ladakh so hard is because India is incapable of resolving border disputes with China who has ratified 12/14 land borders, while India has poor record settling border disputes. It's hard to cede land as a democratic leader, but Modi might pull it off. India ratifying Chinese borders would basically end Chinese fears of western theater and allow China to focus on east / Taiwan / SCS and maybe allow India to get it's shit together.
And until they do, they don't substantially matter. India always matter as potential, on paper, but Indian democracy hasn't delivered, and IMO won't.
Your second point doesn't make sense. If India would just ratify what China wanted there would be no conflict. India is not doing that because they don't agree. India would take advantage of allying with NATO, SCS bloc, so that they can force China to agree with their definition, not China's.
>Even if China can win head to head against the US there is no way it can compete with that alliance
I am alleging they cannot without USN, with specific reference that USN is the only thing keeping China from rolling over the region. Also why would NATO try to contain China? A in NATO is Atlantic, which Ocean is China on? There is a lot of unsubstantiated wank of random global coalition forming blocs to contain China, but very little evidence such a coalition will form apart from QUAD, especially regionally as China integrates more with ASEAN year after year.
The second point is India is bad actor when it comes to settling border disputes. If you evaluate Indian border settlement history with her neighbors. It's not isolated to China. India doesn't agree because it's difficult for democracies to settle borders which often requires compromise, but such compromises require ceding land. Ceding ANY land is political suicide, especially in democracy. India is simply incapable of being a good actor on border issues, as seen in her settlement history. Unlike CCP China, who has settled 12/14 inherited land disputes, majority with larger concessions, because an authoritarian government has enough control over people to cede land. Which brings back to India right now, China see's in Modi someone with sufficiently strong cult following and authoritarian power to get border ratifications done, because it's now or never.
No, I didn't.
> >Even if China can win head to head against the US there is no way it can compete with that alliance
Yes, that is, even if China can win 1v1 vs the US, it can't beat the alliance that the US is in.
Given your misunderstanding I see no reason to continue. All the best.
India, no matter how much help she gets, will never ever be able to resolve their border dispute forcefully. The best they will ever be able to do is to get a settlement between the two, but India's dysfunctional political system prevents her from doing what's in her best interests here.
In addition, if you're going to put India there, you're also going to have to add Pakistan, which considerably changes the balance of force.
India is simply not that big of a challenger. It is counterbalanced by Pakistan, and has swathes of internal problems, as well as a dysfunctional economy.
In case of Chinese aggression this is no longer true. China's economy is so large because of its status as an exporter. If countries stop importing it loses much of that status.
And again with leaving the US out - do you live in a world where the US doesn't exist?
> India is simply not that big of a challenger. It is counterbalanced by Pakistan, and has swathes of internal problems, as well as a dysfunctional economy.
"nation has problems, more at 11." Every nation has problems. So what?
India on its own isn't a 1 to 1 challenger. So what? Your point is irrelevant - India ISNT a 1 to 1 challenger. You rely too much on the strawman.
The Chinese economy is mostly domestic, relying about 15% on exports, and this is declining. Indeed, the Chinese economy is more inwards oriented than many countries in the alliance you're proposing.
I'm not saying that India is a 1 on 1 challenger. It's closer to an eight of China. I'm saying that the entire coalition you're proposing is simply not enough. It's biggest member, India, doesn't have some problems - it's comparatively bordering on dysfunctional.
Moreso, you're assuming that the alliance will somehow work perfectly together and that their interests are perfectly aligned, which is ridiculous. Every single member of that alliance except India and the US rely hugely on Chinese trade, and not only that but they all have conflicts with each other!
And so, for a good alliance to form, one must have a strong, near-peer figure. This could be either India, or the US. The US is very far away and, given recent technological developments, might not even be able to project a significant amount of power versus a Chinese missile interdiction of large surface ships combined with strong bombardment of Guam and, if necessary, Okinawa, as well as other bases.
Because the US is simply very far away, while China is in its backyard. The US needs to project power from thousands and thousands of kilometers away and maintain supply lines with lead times in the weeks, while China can literally operate fully out of their mainland using a few other bases for auxiliary capacities.
So you have an alliance that falls short to begin with, but not only does it fall short; it's a very imperfect alliance with many of the members in severe conflict with each other but also economically dependent on the enemy.
All of this, while the US economy is getting more and more stagnant and while severe problems with its political structure are evolving, with seemingly no interest from the ruling class to actually solve them.
Yeah, no. Beating China in their own backyard at a time where they will be close to the global #1 economy is a pipe dream.
I’m curious, do you have a source for that?
Would you mind providing a source for this? Not doubting you, just curious.
Live by the sword die by the sword. American vessels are vulnerable to hypersonic anti-ship missiles. So are Chinese.
Firing on American boats on the South China Sea will turn the water into no man's land. Everyone will lose influence. Nobody will gain.
Naval power is a means of force projection. You can control a sea without a single ship. The US is a naval power. The US cannot project power into the South China Sea without the use of Naval Power.
China, however, can. Easily, in fact.
Indeed, if you look at the J-20, you will notice that it is significantly larger than the F-22 and F-35. Why is that? In order to store very long range weaponry, and much higher amounts of fuel.
This design aspect reflects the doctrine of sea control via air and missile power, not naval power.
So, if for some reason there were no way to sail a vessel near the SCS, the China automatically, decisively, gains control thereof.
Moreso, China and Russia are significantly ahead of the US in hypersonic flight technology.
Can. Mutual denial isn't control. (Seoul doesn't control the DMZ.)
As you said, "naval power is a means of force projection." If China can't sail the South China Sea its options for projecting force e.g. across the Taiwan Strait are diminished.
Their coastline will be safer from incursion. But offensive options will be constrained.
The US requires naval power to project power into the South China Sea, China doesn't. Without naval power, China has almost uncontested control. US Military Doctrine cannot hope to control the SCS without naval control, Chinese military doctrine is built around that.
Even with the US having access to advanced hypersonic missiles, China retains the option of an amphibious landing on Taiwan, for example. Indeed, hypersonic antiship missiles, for a great many reasons, only work very well against large, slow-maneuvering ships that are far away from their destination (and thus offer the attacker the option to choose when to launch), because of kinematic and targeting concerns far away from traditional targeting assets.
Their offensive options are more than sufficient using purely air and missile power over the South China Sea. From then on, the ability to project power can be used to disable enemy missile launch options progressively, until the point at which supply lines can be reaffirmed.
I understand your point better now. Thank you.
> Without naval power, China has almost uncontested control
The United States has bases in the region. Large bases. They're not configured to pack a strike group's firepower. But there's no reason they couldn't be.
> hypersonic antiship missiles, for a great many reasons, only work very well against large, slow-maneuvering ships
Large, slow, surface ships will go the way of the battleship when hypersonic anti-ship missile technology matures. (Unless missile defense does something unexpected.) That doesn't mean other modes haven't been discussed. (Swarms being the concept du jour.)
> offensive options are more than sufficient using purely air and missile power over the South China Sea
Planes and missiles don't hold territory. Denying large Chinese ships their coast significant curtails their force projection capability onto their neighbors.
Now, while it's very true that the US has many bases in SCS, they are completely untenable without naval power. Indeed, US bases are fundamentally cut off from US productive capabilities. In a serious war, the US won't be able to hold Guam if they cannot maintain naval control - Guam will be targeted by a large barrage of missiles, and will then be interdicted in the way we discussed earlier
Really, only Okinawa is left as a base, and China vs Okinawa is a win for China.
The truth is, the US is fundamentally a naval power. The reason why the US, like Britain before, has so many bases all around the world is because it can maintain naval dominance. Without naval dominance, US ground bases lose significant power - its still possible to supply then via air, but how do you maintain air supremacy after a missile barrage without naval dominance
This is evident from the makeup of the PLAAF and PLARF. If you look at most Chinese platforms, you can notice the emphasis on range. Indeed, the Chinese military trains to disable Guam without any naval usage, and without the use of tankers.
The US, on the flipside, cannot supply Guam sustainably without the use of naval power.
I think that we were living the past 40 years in a kind of military anomaly, where the US basically didn't have to care about overextending its supply lines, and the basis of that is unpredecented total naval domination. Without that, the world completely changes, and the advantage of any given theather being close to your mainland increases significantly.
Now, of course, while I think China would be able to achieve its strategic objectives, the US is going to inflict incredible amounts of damage before that could be possible, which is why, unless somehow the conflict is forced, I don't think they will attempt this until much more than five years.
IIRC China is in the process of launching a large number of SAR smallsats. Making it very hard to hide a carrier battle group.
China also just released video of Jilin-1 tracking planes in Atlanta airport. It's part of Gaofen group for commercial use (Yaogan explicitly military) , so they're trolling civil-military fusion capabilities. China moves fast, maybe they couldn't find a USN carrier reliably 5 years ago, but they should now.
https://twitter.com/HenriKenhmann/status/1325377922228629507
There's also... 10s thousands of Chinese commercial ships in SCS.
I'm not bigging it up.
Very nice of them to build that.
If US bases are disabled by overwhelming missile attacks, and hypersonic missiles successfully interdict the US Navy, it's only a matter of time before Chinese air superiority over them makes them completely useless and barren.
Remember, the US is a fundamentally naval power. The US simply cannot project power outside of the Northern Atlantic without it's naval capabilities.
If other militaries don't have similar issues, could they snuff american boats through simple unforced errors on the part of the Americans? They're crashing boats into stuff in peacetime, how will things go in their first real war in 80 years?
Hypersonic missiles have one advantage over ballistic missiles and that is that their flight path is much lower making detection harder but it doesn’t makes it easier to hit.
The US has experimented with hypersonic missiles in the 60’s and it became rather clear it wasn’t particularly worth it.
Wasn't worth it with the guidance systems of the time.
There's a reason everyone and their brother has or is developing a hypersonic anti ship missile.
Though building ships is an important prerequisite.
In warfare, logistics and production are major factors. In protracted conflicts, factory capacity and transportation infrastructure are vital, and therefor targets. Nukes, delivered by subs, aircraft, or ICBMs are the most effective way to destroy those targets.
The days of nation states fighting other nation states with their own production capacity are forever over on planet earth, baring full out nuclear warfare.
I guess that really depends on what you consider a "1-1 military battle." Gentlemanly warfare used to be people marching and staying in formation and going straight at each other until they died. With that battle strategy, the victor is generally going to be the one with more people covering more ground.
But that strategy hasn't been used in a long while, because there are smarter ways to fight. Tanks and so on are the old way of fighting battle. The US has a decidedly bad post-WW2 record since nobody is really fighting by the "old ways" that much of the American military fights by, and the biggest advantage is the US can just drop bombs indiscriminately basically forever (decidedly not 1-1 combat) and hope to destroy every living thing imaginable (which still failed in basically everything from Vietnam onwards).
The claim that the US will beat any country isn't backed by any evidence. At all. There are theoretical situations where maybe the US has more people, more money, more whatever and will win if you line soldiers up and have them fight Napoleonic style, but in reality, successful wars following WW2 include... the Gulf War? Which just ended up leaving Saddam in power, ending up with the unmanageable chaotic wars we've had in the middle east these past 2 decades.
Dropping bombs didn't fail in Vietnam. It succeeded. North Vietnam was defeated militarily. They only took over South Vietnam after the US Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by withdrawing funding so the US troops had to leave.
> The claim that the US will beat any country isn't backed by any evidence. At all.
Certainly it is. Given a clear objective, the US military has achieved it in every case. The reasons that the US often fails to capitalize on such victories are political, not military.
> the Gulf War? Which just ended up leaving Saddam in power
Because removing Saddam from power was explicitly not a military objective in that war; the military objective was to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, and that objective was met.
When the US decided it did want to remove Saddam from power, in the second Gulf War, it succeeded. Again, the reasons why the aftermath of that war became a debacle were political, not military.
The idea that bombing was working and political issues were the only reason America failed aren't supported by any facts. Saying politics were the issue is mostly used merely an unfalsifiable statement.
If the goal of the wars are redefined to some really narrow goal like just eliminating Saddam, which is revisionist at best, it seems like sending in troops when one targeted bomb on a political event would've worked better is a big oversight. The invasion just caused chaos and more trouble and we still haven't gotten ourselves out of it. Afghanistan is also total chaos, 20 years later. Military might sure isn't helping there.
In most recent conflicts, the winners are generally people with motivation to fight and unpredictable attacks. Sending in aircraft carriers and deploying 50000 young guys to a place they don't know or care about is neither unpredictable or fueled by any deep motivation. People handed a gun and taught how to make a bomb and acting to protect their family from foreign invaders are both.
Any of the situations you highlighted all have restrictions set by politicians, not military. For example full military might hasn't been released in Afghanistan. The politicians restrict what the military is allowed to do there. I'm not saying that's good or bad. In my un-informed opinion we shouldn't be there. But you can't claim it's the military losing there when the military is not allowed to actually use all its power and resources.
None of America's aims could have been achieved there meaningfully.
Big guys lose to small guys all the time. Sometimes you've got to know how much it's worth risking. Britain was a world hegemon. Still lost to an upstart collection of colonies.
And lots of aid from the USSR and China. Aid from two superpowers sure helps in fighting one superpower.
> None of America's aims could have been achieved there meaningfully.
It depends on what you think those aims were. The aim of preventing South Vietnam from being taken over by North Vietnam was achieved militarily; then the US Congress threw it away.
> Big guys lose to small guys all the time.
Big guys lose to small guys that are being helped out behind the scenes by other big guys all the time, yes. If the small guys have no help from other big guys, then no, the small guys pretty much just lose.
I mean, politics defined the objective for Vietnam as limiting the spread of communism and proscribed the only way in which the US could certainly have achieved that objective and 'won' the war militarily (nuke the entire population). So yes, it defined the terms of their failure, but I'm not sure one can meaningfully claim victory without politics anyway. Politics also defines the temporary grounds on which the US can be said to have enjoyed temporary and limited success (enabling a separate South Vietnam to persist whilst they were present, considering South Vietnamese losses tolerable in context)
But the military element is clearly a large part of that political failure. The US military didn't feel they could win the war on the terms they'd been given without calling up 2 million conscripts, and couldn't eliminate the Viet Cong quickly enough for the public to tolerate this, with military setbacks like the Tet Offensive strongly influencing the political shifts.
Or to quote von Clausewitz: "War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means."
Not at all. There are plenty of historical treatments that clearly document the political issues that prevented the US from capitalizing on its military victories. For example, see H. R. McMaster's book Dereliction of Duty.
It is true that much of the blame lies with military leaders; McMaster's book makes that clear. But the reason for that is that those military leaders were acting like politicians, not military leaders; they were telling elected politicians what they wanted to hear, instead of telling them the military reality. Politicizing the military does not do either the military or the country any good.
> If the goal of the wars are redefined to some really narrow goal like just eliminating Saddam, which is revisionist at best
That was the military objective, and it was achieved. No redefinition at all.
The political objective was never clearly defined, which of course is not a recipe for success.
> Afghanistan is also total chaos, 20 years later. Military might sure isn't helping there.
If you ask the military to do a political job, and don't even clearly define what the political job is, of course they're not going to be able to succeed. That's not the military's fault. It's our political leaders' fault (and our fault as citizens for allowing them to get away with it).
The US practically pioneered modern "all out war" with the civil war, which is certainly nothing like gentlemanly colonial wars. Trench warfare in WW1 turned every attack into an ambush basically. Of course by ww2, air power and moving fast with technology crushed that.
It's certainly important to add context to history by talking about the larger picture and how things play out practically. But we really don't need to replace every word with a metaphor that has a political statement behind it. Narrowing the argument to military objectives specifically (as opposed to political), and considering whether one side or the other has the ability to achieve them, is still important because when wars are against existential threats, those political gloves will come off.
That was also true of Nazi Germany. But is actually quite possible to defeat USA on the seas and on land if different countries join against it.
Europe is not Iraq or Afganistan, as a whole, it is stronger than the US. I have lived and worked in China(and the US) and while I believe they way weaker(China) than what they project, they can f*ck the world immensely. They can contaminate the Pacific Ocean (with radioactivity and other poisons) forever.
BTW most of the intelligent and educated(engineers, scientists) people in the US comes from outside the US. Not reasonable to believe they will contribute against fighting their own countries.
This "war on everything" American mentality needs to stop.
Militarily there is no doubt that Europe is not. The only country in Europe that can really project force is France. (I’m assuming the UK is not getting into a war with the United States).
> BTW most of the intelligent and educated(engineers, scientists) people in the US comes from outside the US. Not reasonable to believe they will contribute against fighting their own countries.
A lot to unpack behind this weird assertion.
First-> many (most?) of these smart people are working at companies like Facebook to hook kids into endlessly scrolling.
Second -> your claim is unfounded.
Third -> even if it were true, the skills and knowledge to win wars do not have a 1-1 correspondence with the skills of these so called experts. Even then, who is to say given the right opportunity there are plenty of other smart people around.
Fourth -> those same smart people have families in the US. You think they’re just going to go transfer some Amex points and hop on a Delta flight home? There wouldn’t even be a way to leave the US.
Finally -> the idea that “all the smart foreigners will betray the US” gives ammo to arguing points by suspicious white supremacists. So you probably shouldn’t do that.
Thank you for your service!
> but realistically we're more likely to be fighting a handful of goat herders in Afghanistan with an AK and a bag full of rice before we're taking on an armored division.
Why should we be fighting goat herders in Afghanistan? I can understand the justification for striking back at the structures that committed the 9/11 attacks, but I can't understand the failed nation building and staying there forever and putting our troops in harms way.
Prop up a secular government
Defend women’s rights and education
In the midst of an Islamic country much of which does not want us or our values there.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/08/world/asia/us...
This is true whether it’s the “Afghan Arabs” or the Taliban doing the fighting.
I understand what you're saying, but those are all self-inflicted vulnerabilities from trying to "nation build".
> It's of course important to prepare for a larger scale war against China, Russia, etc. but realistically we're more likely to be fighting a handful of goat herders in Afghanistan with an AK and a bag full of rice before we're taking on an armored division.
Broadly, I think there are 2 theories of conflict.
The first is what I'll call the "justice" theory of conflict: people fight because they are oppressed.
The second is what I'll call the "rational basis" theory of conflict: people fight because they think they can win, or because their backs are against a wall and they have nothing to lose by fighting.
IMO, the second theory has much, much more explanatory power.
If you buy the second theory, then the major reason there is no war between the US and China or Russia is because they don't believe they can win (which is probably true, as long as the US doesn't try to invade). But in order for that to continue to be true in the future, the US needs to continue to invest in military assets that are effective in fighting near peer opponents.
It is also important to be good at fighting developing nations. But ultimately, being good at that doesn't matter as much. If the US goes home from Afghanistan, that might affect the Afghans, but it doesn't really have global implications. But a hot war between the US and China would result in a truly enormous number of deaths.
Also, I don't really see much evidence that the US has ever really been successful at nation building. The last real success was South Korea. And it's just as easy to see that as a fluke rather than the result of US presence (during the peace - obviously the US helped immensely during the hot part of the conflict).
Back to the actual topic, I share the skepticism of tech Uber alles expressed like others, and trying to predict the future of warfare is mostly a futile exercise. Probably best to index on flexibility and tight training regimens and make some informed inferences about how to structure the force.
One of my favourite examples is Hans Speidel [1], a Wehrmacht lieutenant-general by the time the war ended, who got to be "Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Land Forces Central Europe from 1957 to 1963", plus the major shareholder of Mercedes in the 1960s who had been a big Nazi sympathiser during the war (his name escapes me right now, and I can't google him easily, the official Mercedes history does not mention him), to say northing of how the infamous IG Farben was split between BASF and Bayer (among others), and not immediately raised to the ground and liquidated. I don't think the Americans that occupied Iraq in 2003 were as friendly with the company that stood behind Saddam's chemical attacks against the Kurds in the 1980s.
Also overlooked in the post WWII analysis (apart from historians) is the influence of the Adenauer government: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder
There’s a great book called “the shortest history of Germany” that covers it nicely. It’s fascinating. This type of government action (included devaluation of citizens money but allowing companies to retain their value, cheap, highly motivated and educated labour force) likely had a much great impact than the Marshall Plan which is what you always hear about today. The book also goes into details on how the border of the Roman world still today predicts the richest regions of Germany, and created a split in the East/West “world”.
Do you happen to have an easy link to it? Sounds really interesting.
> The book also goes into details on how the border of the Roman world still today predicts the richest regions of Germany
Just a couple of hours ago I was looking for a .kml or .geojson file of the Roman "limes", I was trying to prove its relationship to some toponymy-data from the Carpathians. It's crazy how influential the Romans were.
> Speidel joined the German Army in 1914, fought in the First World War, and stayed with the Army as a career soldier after the war. He served as chief of staff to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel during the Second World War and was promoted to lieutenant general in 1944. Speidel participated in the 20 July Plot to assassinate Hitler, and he was tasked with recruiting Rommel for the resistance. After the plot failed he was arrested by the Gestapo. At the end of the war, he escaped from Nazi prison and went into hiding. He was the only major member of the 20 July Plot to survive the war.
> If you buy the second theory, then the major reason there is no war between the US and China or Russia is because they don't believe they can win (which is probably true, as long as the US doesn't try to invade).
There’s also the issue that even for the winner, a war is probably net negative for its people.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231748269_Rationali... has interesting reasoning on how we can still get war even if states would prefer not to.
Haha. Nation building involves a boatload of money and the US post war policy was essentially to own the governments of the rebuilt nations. SK, JP are good examples of this and have modeled their development goals to mirror American way of life. From small things like TV shows (to non americans JPN and SK television is as obnoxious as US television with everything being over the top and colourful.) To much broader economic policy.
Be that as it may, the big countries generally dont fight each other because the losses on both sides will be massive but other than the US the other countries generally dont mess with smaller countries unless it has an immediate political outcome eg. Russia and ukraine.
Miltary history can teach all of us a lot but its inportant to take it with a shovel of salt. Victors write the books and rarely do they write about shortcomings. War is a terrible mess and almost entirely dependent on allies.
Lastly I would like to point out our naivete if we think a whole state will stand and wait for a belligerent nation to invade them in their father's ancestral land. The scars of war tend to fester. Should the big countries go to war, the outcome will not be anything like we hope or predict.
You take this evidence that japanese and south korean television shows consciously try to imitate the US? Maybe that's just what most people like?
[1] https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/9701
[2] The World Audience for America's Story, US Advisory Commission on Information, 1949
[3] Coca-colonization and the Cold War, R. Wagnleitner, 1991
Compare West Germany to the GDR. Japan turned out absolutely amazing all things considered.
But they had national identities before we were there. Iraq has 10,000yr of cultural baggage that needs mopping up. Afghanistan is only really a "nation" in the sense that the land isn't controlled by any of the neighboring countries. I'm not sure where Vietnam stands. I think Korea is the only "success against the odds" story.
I would disagree that it was cultural baggage and not massive mismanagement of the post invasion landscape by the US. After the invasion, that absolutely crucial mistake made was to not have any plan on how to provide security in the immediate aftermath of the complete toppling of a foreign government.
CENTCOM, the Army War College, and the Army Chief of Staff, among others, warned that we needed a robust plan for security. These were ignored by civilian leadership and the Pentagon, so there was no real “Phase 4” post invasion plan. Policing the streets, securing weapons depots, tracking down loyalists, etc. was just not planned for and as a result, the country slipped into chaos. It is estimated that there were no more than about 5,000 fanatical loyalists post invasion, with almost everyone else being undecided and just seeing what would happen. The mass unemployment of security and military forces pushed a lot of them into the insurgency out of anger and the need for a job. The widespread looting, crime waves, and resulting economic stagnation destroyed the goodwill the US could have had for freeing people from a blood thirsty dictator.
All these things allowed for an insurgency to grow, harden, and fill its ranks with military trained fighters that would fight for the next 5 years. The chaos and lack of security allowed for jihadists like Al Qaeda to move in and take advantage, eventually splitting off into Al Qaeda in Iraq and pushing the country to the brink of civil war. It wouldn’t have been easy, regardless of the plan, but the failure of Iraq was 100% foreseeable and avoidable.
I know everyone wants to write wall of text rants about everything that went wrong in Iraq and there's more than enough content there to do that but my point is that if you take a step back from the detailed specifics of how we went about nation building it becomes clear that even a "win" doesn't look all that pretty.
The nation building was based on starving people to death and destroying any industry as well as R&D capability. It took years of "boots on the ground" reporting about growing discontent because soviet occupation zone "at least had food" till the west german efforts for independent country were accepted, with very strong shackles. And a lot of it was for a proxy war with another empire.
Islamist terrorists and white supremacist terrorists derive some motivation (but not all) from their indoctrination. If the Quran and the Hadiths were a much more tame and apolitical document then we wouldn't get the extent and mode of fighting that we experience now.
Japan in WW2 fits into this third theory of conflict as well. Yes it was partly fear of the Soviets, partly resentment (and fear of missing out) over European colonialism, but the rabid belief in nationalism and race superiority was also a big causal factor as well. Their reasons for advancing so aggressively into China and South Asia have nothing to do with oppression and nothing to do with a rational theory of conflict. Many thought the war with US was impossible to win, their industrial production capacity was 1/20th that of the US for instance. Pearl Harbor was a suicidal all-in motivated by them running out of oil combined with their inability to surrender (rabid nationalism).
Very often these human drivers related to cognitive bias, fanatic belief, tribalism, are at the root.
I think this is a mistake and is not backed up by history. Christian Europe warred for hundreds of years, often using religious doctrine as justification. But the reality is that these conflicts were struggles for resources, power grabs by heads of state, instability created by power vacuums, incompetent leaders, ect. The exact flavor of each conflict was influenced by the religion, but fertile soil for conflict was very terrestrial causes.
The Middle East had long periods of stability. It is only in the 100 years in the post WWI landscape, where the longstanding empire collapsed, European interests carved up the region with little regard, and installed puppet regimes that were often specifically tied to ethnic or religious differences. This created the fertile ground for conflict, revolution, and oppressive regimes. Since many of the puppet governments were ethnic or religious minorities only ratcheted up those aspects in the future conflicts, and it is exactly what we see now.
The idea that Islam is just destined to be violent and chaotic is just as misguided as seeing Middle Ages Europe, reading Jesus’s “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword”, and saying the same thing about Christianity.
I agree with you on this point, and this isn't my claim. My only claim is that the doctrine plays some non-trivial causal role in the entire picture, in that it provides motive in addition to the geopolitical context. I also agree with you that without the spark of geopolitical circumstance, the doctrine itself may not be a sufficient condition for war/terrorism etc. It does however acts as a significant magnifier.
Consider this thought experiment: If the Quran (or Bible for that matter) were instead absolute pacifistic in stance: explicitly condemning all political violence and terrorism, all war except that which is strictly defensive, and explicitly outlines a delineation between doctrine & state -- would we see more or less conflict, war, terrorism, etc?
These are not impotent documents that play zero role in motivating (or at least, failing to attenuate) specific behavior as a direct outcome of the prescriptions outlined in the text. To an extent they're used as a post hoc justification, but they also play a motivating role (especially if we take the words of Islamist terrorists at face value).
We have evidence of this causal role (doctrine to behavior) by looking at governance in some Muslim majority countries that adopt Sharia, e.g. in Iran. Without this specific doctrine, their system of governance would in a literal sense be entirely different. If the Quran prescribes that the state should be secular, I believe that would have had quite a large causal impact on the Arabic world.
Another example of the causal role of doctrine was when Christians cherry-picked parts of the bible in support of slavery. If the Bible was less self-contradictory in this instance, it's easy to see that it would've been easier to eliminate slavery faster than it happened.
It's also interesting that the only time that the doctrine to action causal path is contested is in the cast of Islamist terrorism. Why does this get contested but everyone accepts a causal role when it comes to white supremacist terrorism, Japanese motives in WW2, and Nazi motives in WW2 (partly driven by anti-semitic beliefs/propaganda, in addition to the more pragmatic Lebensraum motive and a wounded national ego after Treaty of Versailles & WW1 loss)?
Absolutely. But that is what I was saying, that religion determines the exact flavor of conflict, but the root causes are rarely religious. If it was different (if the Middle East was Christian and Europe was Muslim for instance) the Middle Ages would have still been a violent chaotic time for Europe, and the Middle East would have still been a violent chaotic time after WWI.
> It's also interesting that the only time that the doctrine to action causal path is contested is in the cast of Islamist terrorism
I think largely it is because it is so often been used (especially in the post 9/11 era) as a shoulder shrug “well that’s just how Muslims are” excuse. In this very thread, people have said that the post invasion Iraqi chaos was due to “10,000yr of cultural baggage that needs mopping up” when it was directly a result of the US failing to have any plan for post invasion security after collapsing the government. The picture is often painted that these issues in the Middle East are unsolvable because it’s all because of Islam and they have been fighting for 1,000 years and that’s not going to change. To use your Nazi example, it would be like looking at Germany during WWII and saying “well they are religious anti Semites. That’s why they fight and they will always fight and we can’t change their religious beliefs so that’s just the way it is.”
Of course I know you aren’t saying this, but enough people are that I feel it needs to be contextualized. How people understand the situation in the Middle East effects what strategies we support in dealing with the Middle East. If people keep believing that the situation is caused by religion (something we cannot change) instead of economic instability, proxy conflict by regional and global powers, power vacuums from collapsing dictatorships, etc., then it will continue to hamper our foreign policy. Even terrorism is primarily a small number of globally focused jihadists infecting and coopting local causes and grievances.
> Another example of the causal role of doctrine was when Christians cherry-picked parts of the bible in support of slavery. If the Bible was less self-contradictory in this instance, it's easy to see that it would've been easier to eliminate slavery faster than it happened.
Even this I think is overblown in its influence. Many Christian countries gave up enslaved Africans much easier than the US. If the Bible was silent on slavery, I think it would have still gone very similarly for the US. Slavery was propping up the plantation based economy of the southern States, the 3/5th voting rules allowed for the less populated southern states to have outsized electoral power compared to the northern states, and the rapid expansion West (and the proposed rules on slavery for incoming states) threatened to upset that Southern power. In other words, I think people put too much stock in religious justifications, when underlying structural reasons are often what really shape things.
> the root causes are rarely religious
I can agree with this, but I believe my point stands that the specific contents of the doctrine can act as a significant magnifier when the additional geopolitical context is in place.
Nationalism and belief in racial superiority in Japan (especially among the military which basically ran the show given a lack of oversight or control by representatives) played a huge causal role in their actions. I would go so far as to say it was a necessary but not sufficient condition for what occurred in the Eastern theatre of WW2.
Regarding religion, if the Bible & Quran were explicitly pacifistic and forbade war (instead of glorifying it in certain instances), I believe the world would look quite different. If we accept this, then we accept that the specific contents of the doctrine do play an important causal role. Is it plausible to see Jain individuals becoming terrorists in support of a political objective? It seems rather dubious that that would happen.
It is well known that any culture where polygyny is the norm will be more violent than a similar culture where the norm is monogamy.
I guess a big part of the broader picture is "Who would you least like to lose against?"
Losing against goat herders has consequences, but I'd argue that losing a larger-scale war has more severe consequences.
So even if you never intend to fight a large scale war, can you afford to ignore preparing for one?
> 03-07
Oof, that's a rough period. Thank you, gratefully, for your service.
Pakistan and India only (edit: ok, mainly) care about each other. The US and Britain are tightly aligned and they are separated from Eurasia by water, a non-trivial obstacle in its own right. The remaining Eurasian nuclear powers, Russia, China, and North Korea share borders. They are surrounded by essentially a skirt of nations. These nations are where proxy wars will occur. Various pretexts will develop from time to time.
The wars have not all been American. Russia has fought the Ukraine and the US continues to support Georgia (the country). China was heavily involved in Korea and Vietnam. The English Wikipedia is tracking 29 ongoing proxy wars, 21 of them are Eurasian (1).
Why are there so many proxy wars in Eurasia? First, ethnic violence. Racism is not uniquely American, and the slow migration of humanoids across Eurasia over history has left a lot of ethnic groups to quarrel with their neighbors. It is not uncommon that one of the major powers gets pulled in for some reason, and then other major powers see an advantage in supporting the opposing combatant.
Second, the major powers have always wanted buffer states like a chess player wants pawns. The US has Canada and Mexico, and a large number Central and South American states. China's empire has stretched from time to time as far as Okinawa and the Philippines to Mongolia, Korea, and brief intrusions into Japan proper. Russia has opposed the entry of the former Eastern Bloc states into NATO. Most recently, Russia has sold S-400 radars to Turkey, creating tension between NATO's newest and oldest members. Russia and China have both demonstrated they are willing to use armed force to extend their borders. Russia in Crimea, and China in the South China Sea (9-dash line). They have also demonstrated they will use economic means to advance their soft power (Russia creates dependencies through oil and gas trade, China floods various islands with money and cuts deals with the locals to "lease" their land (a trick they learned from the British, see Hong Kong).
The other battlefield is of course the Internet, ranging from intrusions and malicious behavior (e.g. stuxnet, N.K. vs Sony, Titan Rain) to open source information ops (Russian interference in the US 2016 election).
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proxy_wars#Ongoing_pro...
I don't think that's true. India's recently had border skirmishes with China, for instance.
Other than Crimea, Russia did not get any new lands. I think that in the future they'll join eastern parts of Ukraine and it's also likely that Belarus will join Russia, but for now I don't think that there are any more serious claims. Of course Russia will continue proxy wars and support pro-Russian countries, just like any other major power does.
Also possibly Israel.
I suspect the end game is to drastically reduce humans and have robots to conduct the war, remotely killing the 'enemy'.
One more sad step towards de-humanizing the enemy.
Much worse than that; it's one more step towards screening people from the monstrosities of the war, creating therefore a culture that endorses it because any negative effects are hidden. Families are often opposed to war because they know some of their kids won't make it back; that's a powerful deterrent and is the reason why after a while showing soldiers coffins was forbidden to US TV networks during the last Gulf War: they recalled the protests during Vietnam after it became clear that soldiers weren't taking a walk in the park down there.
Now if we make it certain for one side to never lose any soldier because every action is being performed from safe distance by a drone pilot, war suddenly becomes a videogame in which one side cannot lose anymore, but more importantly that same side won't have any negative feelings associated to the war because it doesn't bring any suffering. This is the recipe for creating a state of eternal war, and I'm strongly opposed to that. I want all sides - including mine - to experience deaths and mutilation, grieving families, babies who will never know their parents, etc. If we take those away, we take away all reasons to not want wars.
Our all volunteer force does war, but it's now known as "targeted killing," "combat advisory," and other buzzwords. This is because if we want to actually do war, we have to ask Congress, the American public, etc, and actually face down the moral questions inherent to that process. The last few times we actually had to do that it was plainly disastrous.
As you say, this method of doing video game wars has a way of making smaller, more automated "enforcement actions" a more or less permanent state of affairs. I believe the start of this was Vietnam. As a result, strange things happen. I remember the public's reaction to ISIS -- it was pretty much complete bewilderment. "Why the hell do these guys hate us so much?"
I think it's a step in completely opposing direction. If you're in the battlefield, you don't have any possible room to error on the side of mercy, because that kind of error will get you killed.
But when you move to Las Vegas, see your family every day, get enough sleep and don't risk even a light injury, that's exactly the kind of environment where you can allow yourself not to be so trigger-happy.
Remote control allows for escaping the horrors of war, without stopping the war.
And being shot by them, or expecting to get shot by them will?
> Remote control allows for escaping the horrors of war
That's exactly my point. Horrors of war are exactly what makes people shoot first and think second.
I think that the core reason people are opposed to this is because it just feels unfair. It is. The side of war that has the drones is much stronger than the opposition. But historically, mercy has always been the business of those who're so strong that they're sure in their victory and don't feel threatened. People who are afraid and desperate are inevitably much more cruel.
It doesn't matter how many tanks you have when your opponent has atomic bombs. The same is true for most of the airplanes, ships and robots.
So from a western perspective all those weapons are only useful in an offensive war against a weak opponent (no atomic bombs).
In this context it also makes sense to have less but better trained soldiers. Reducing casualties reduces bad press. You don't need millions of soldiers to bomb away Irak anyway.
If you assume that military leaders have basic logic reasoning (i think they are smart actually), you see that self defense is not the primary goal for western countries (except Switzerland).
> realistically we're more likely to be fighting a handful of goat herders in Afghanistan with an AK and a bag full of rice before we're taking on an armored division.
Absolutely true. And to keep this statement true in the future as well, it will make sense to heed FDR’s advice to speak softly and cary a big stick. We need advanced weapons not in order to use them, but in order not to use them.
This is the real reason we started a war against terror. Terrorism and asymmetric warfare are about the only external thing capable of actually bringing our country down.
If a conflict stays below a certain threshold, it doesn't go nuclear. Russia is always prodding to see how far they can go. Ability to answer in kind is something you need, and autonomous tanks seem to fit the bill quite well.
Look at Armenia vs Azerbaijan: drone destroying anything on the ground, one second you're not even aware you're in active combat, the next you're dead. You can also look at what ISIS is doing, strap a mortar round to a commercial drone, fly over an enemy position, drop the round [0][1]
!!! Spoiler: war footage, don't click if you don't want to see people dying
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjJ6sc1OBwA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raaYRlri4J0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz4DQWIBH50&has_verified=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKNkcM9kdf0&fea=&has_verifie...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/jquj1n/one_k...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vY7i_eR06M
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/fnrox0/isis_...
It's not quite as simple as "shoot it down" - few places have 360-degreee 24/7 coverage of all their borders that is effective (and cost-effective) against both 50,000-foot high altitude UAVs and a swarm of DJI thermite shell drones (not to speak of the semi-truck driving up five miles from your facility and unloading such a swarm.
We see more of it today because so many wars today are imbalanced. It’s not US v China.. it’s US v Afghanistan. They have no choice but to attack from the shadows.
I think you mean "back to asymmetric war" which appears to have been the norm through history, even taking in the extensive literature of set-piece battles. In fact the American revolution was primarily an asymmetric conflict.
(Otherwise I agree with your comment)
Examples?
Related, I'm currently not afraid of my government using the military against us any time soon. I think the morals of the soldiers would severely limit this. With a fleet of robots, it seems it would be much easier to suppress the people.
Everyone knows this is the future, and saw it coming, but wow, I naively thought it would take longer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_Patrol
But even if you are being sincere, and usually nobody using china as a boogeyman are, we aren't using our military to defend ourselves from a nonexistent chinese invasion. We used our military to kill iraqis, syrians, libyans, vietnamese, etc.
If chinese did 1/100th of what we did, hypocrites would be crying they were the most evil nation on earth.
We have nukes to deal with china. We don't have armies to deal with china. They've got 1.4 billion people.
Pretty much all our wars have been offensive wars of conquest/genocide/domination. But yeah, it's china that's the bad guy.
Can you think of the last defensive war we've fought? Even ww2 wasn't really a defensive war as we already attacked japan with sanctions.
Edit:
> China is not yet strong enough to do that outright with the west like it does within Asia and its maritime claims.
Within Asia? Are you saying it's china that has troops in korea, japan, etc? It isn't china that colonized philippines, indonesia, india, etc. Lets be honest here, asia isn't in need of liberation from china, it's in need of liberation from the west. Just think about it.
> With the west, it has taken on a different approach: infiltrate all levels of political, educational, and corporate institutions.
Is that why everyone has a good opinion of china? China has infiltrated everything, that's why we started a trade war with china? If anything, I could understand if you said israel or saudi arabia has infiltrated all levels. But certainly not china or russia.
When it comes to china, all I see is projection. Everything we are accusing china of doing, we are guilty of. We are the ones who invaded and brutalized asia ( including china, india, etc ). We are ones that invaded and occupied. And as best as I can tell, it's us who are meddling in chinese affairs and telling them what they should do or not do.
Edit1:
> I can't name another empire or superpower in human history that has shown more restraint.
Is this a joke? We wiped out an entire continent full of people. Dozens of native nations were exterminated. We dropped nukes on civilians. That's restraint? And we've been involved in wars in every corner of the earth. What amazing restraint.
For those hypocrites downvoting me, try replacing US with china for every historical act. 9/11 happens and china invades afghanistan and iraq murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. I bet every hypocrite downvoting would call them monsters.
I am Chinese-American, so if China were to displace the US as world hegemon and put Han people at the top of society, that would personally benefit me. However, I do not want that, as I support racial equality.
Even if we suppose that America and China are morally equivalent (which I strongly disagree with), just out of the self-interest of yourself and your family, why would you prefer China over America?
Was a incalculably powerful US that toppled democratically elected regimes in Latin America/Iran/etc. a morally acceptable one? No but that's what it is and all you other fucks had to learn English to get some of our money. Now the shoe is on the other foot and we are the fucks who will need to learn Chinese. Serves us right but I still ain't happy about it.
(In case this is on your mind: As for college discrimination against Asians in America, although many people conflate this issue with affirmative action, it is actually separate. One must make the distinction between pro-minority affirmative action and Asian penalization relative to the white majority. Asian-American penalization relative to white Americans is morally comparable to the historical Jewish quota, and the justification that affirmative action corrects for historical injustices absolutely does not justify anti-Asian discrimination. Nevertheless, I am also against pro-minority affirmative action because it is illiberal, but it is orthogonal to Asian-American rights.)
A lot of the discussion of China revolves around treatment of minorities. I would also like to draw attention to oppression of the Han majority. One example is that the Chinese government blocks websites, even for trivial or oversensitive reasons. (China recently blocked https://scratch.mit.edu, the children's website where I was introduced to programming...) Another example is that the Chinese government performed forced abortions to enforce the one-child policy. Now in America, there is a complicated political debate over the morality of abortion that involves issues of fetus rights, personhood, and choice. However, it seems to me that whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, the one-child policy, which involves abortions that are not up to choice, is profoundly immoral.
I believe that all human beings are endowed with certain unalienable rights, including the right to freedom to voice opinions without government censorship and the right to partake in democracy (whether that be a direct democracy, a republic, or another form of democracy). Everyone in the world inherently possesses these rights, regardless of whether their government recognizes them. I wish for the government of China to recognize these rights, because human rights are Chinese rights.
We "opened up" china by war. Opium wars? Boxer rebellion? I'm not chinese and I seem to know your history more than you. Why is that? And china opened up their economy as a result of threat of nuclear war by the soviets and the west.
> in the hopes that China would also grant more freedoms to its people.
This is just propaganda. Since when did we care about freedom for chinese people? Did we invade hong kong while the british ruled it to give freedom to them? Heck, for most of the 20th century, chinese people like you were banned from even coming to the US. The only nationality to specifically be banned for immigration to the US was your people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
> Now, China is also trying to expand its territory.
You mean take back its territory right? What non-chinese territory is china expanding to?
> I fear that Chinese hegemonic status will have negative consequences for other Asian peoples.
More propaganda.
> I hope that one day, people in China may enjoy their right to a liberal democracy.
More standard propaganda.
> people in China may enjoy their right to a liberal democracy.
The founders hated the idea of liberal democracy. It's why the US is not a liberal democracy but a constitutional republic. You seem to be very keen on what the US was founded for. It wasn't for equality and it certainly wasn't for liberal democracy.
It's hard to take you seriously when you claim to be chinese and you spout anti-chinese propaganda. Not just in this comment but your other comments - "false moral equivalence", "US was founded on the idea of all men are created equal", etc. It would be like an iraqi claiming that the US invaded iraq to bring freedom. You sound exactly like gordon chang except I don't think he's aspiring to be a hacker. And for an aspiring hacker you sure seem down on your state propaganda.
It's possible to have this conversation without framing it as some sort of binary choice between xi jinping's happy social currency reeducation camp club, and white america's causally racist military industrial imperialism. Imo you can't love your country without always seeking to improve it.
Our founding fathers were certainly hypocrites and flawed men, but that doesn't invalidate the truth of their words.
No it wasn't. The US was founded on the idea that a king across the ocean can't tell us we can't expand beyond the appalachian mountains.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Proclamation-of-1763
The revolutionary war started because we wanted to take more land from the natives and the king forbade that because he wanted good trade relations with the native peoples. That's it. Everything else is just propaganda.
> I am Chinese-American, so if China were to displace the US as world hegemon and put Han people at the top of society, that would personally benefit me.
China will never be world hegemon due to geographical, racial, historical, etc issues. China vs the US, Europe, Russia, Australia, Canada, etc isn't even a fair contest. Not to mention western aligned nations like india, japan, etc wouldn't allow china to be a hegemon. Also, how would it benefit you if the chinese government view you as a traitor?
> However, I do not want that, as I support racial equality.
If you equate hegemony with racial supremacy, why would you support US hegemony? How about "no hegemony"?
Don't you think the world would be better if the US didn't have to maintain a world empire? The world wouldn't have to worry about invasions and we can finally start investing in american infrastructure. When I see the amount of infrastructure china has built the last few decades ( heck just the last 10 years alone ), I have to say I'm a bit envious. Instead of sinking trillions in foreign wars, imagine all those trillions were invested in new railways, new airports, nuclear energy, green energy, reviving inner cities, etc.
The Chinese government is putting ethnic minorities in camps. The American government did that too, in WWII... The difference is, it's a point of national shame.
Either America is not ashamed of the atrocities it has committed, or it is so dense it cannot understand it is repeating them.
That's a false equivalence. While I do not endorse the treatment of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers at the US border, it's quite different from what the PRC currently doing, which is forced imprisonment and indoctrination of its own citizens.
> And performing forced hysterectomies on them.
That was a small-scale case of medical malpractice by a single doctor, not large scale government-level policy: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/ice-hysterectomies-sur...
I bet you'd feel a little different if you were born in Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria for that matter. Conflicts the US triggered have cost close to a million human lives since 2003. And honestly, a lot more can be said of the "Benevolent" superpower of yours.
Wasn't the Syria conflict actually triggered by the Assad regime's behavior?
https://www.history.com/news/syria-civil-war-assad-rebels:
> However, in March of that year, 15 Syrian schoolchildren were arrested and tortured for writing graffiti that was inspired by the Arab Spring. One of the boys was killed.
> The arrests sparked outrage and demonstrations throughout Syria. Citizens demanded the release of the remaining children, along with greater freedoms for all people in the country.
> But the government, headed by President Bashar al-Assad, responded by killing and arresting hundreds of protestors. Shock and anger began to spread throughout Syria, and many demanded that Assad resign. When he refused, war broke out between his supporters and his opponents.
What US policies, exactly?
TIL ISIS was founded in 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_...:
> ISIL was founded by the Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi under the name Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad in 1999 and gained global prominence in early 2014 when it drove Iraqi government forces out of key cities in its Western Iraq offensive,[103] followed by its capture of Mosul[104] and the Sinjar massacre.
Apparently its founding purpose was actually to overthrow the Jordanian government for being insufficiently Islamic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jama%27at_al-Tawhid_wal-Jihad#...:
> Al-Zarqawi started JTJ with the intention of overthrowing the 'apostate' Kingdom of Jordan,[1] which he considered to be un-Islamic. After toppling Jordan's monarchy, presumably he would turn to the rest of the Levant.[1]
> For these purposes he developed numerous contacts and affiliates in several countries. His network may have been involved in the late 1999 plot to bomb the Millennium celebrations in the United States and Jordan.[12]
The Japanese Concentration Camps are not a point of national shame. Instead, they are a point of American pride.
Case in point: One of Trump’s goons, Carl Higbie, referred to the Japanese Concentration Camps as “precedent”. [1]
If this word came from some random racist prick, then nobody would bother paying him any attention. But instead, it came from one of Trump’s closest associates.
This should make you sick to your stomach.
[1] https://time.com/4574680/muslim-registry-japanese-internment...
> Case in point: One of Trump’s goons, Carl Higbie, referred to the Japanese Concentration Camps as “precedent”. [1]
It's quite incorrect to generalize from a widely-condemned statement made by "one of Trump's goons" [1] to America, generally.
[1] Carl Higbie appears to be a goon, quite literally.
No. They are putting separatists/terrorists funded by the west in "camps". They aren't putting minorities in camps.
> The American government did that too, in WWII...
No. Our government exterminated our minorities. It's how a nation of 13 states became 50. Of course we became a nation of 13 states by genocide as well.
The idea of benevolence is laughable. Not only did we nuke japan, burn german cities to the ground, use biological weapons in korea, etc ( and these are our vassal, or allies ). Look at how we benevolently nuked japan. As I said, for everything we've "benevolently" done in history, switch that to china.
Invasion doesn't need to be with armies. China is not yet strong enough to do that outright with the west like it does within Asia and its maritime claims. With the west, it has taken on a different approach: infiltrate all levels of political, educational, and corporate institutions.
That's been done between nations all the time.
USA seems to be the biggest offender in this category.
Yes, they expanded along their periphery, which is how they got to their size today.
But even when they had boats, they visited as far away as Africa, and traded with them, instead of enslaving them.
However, in contrast, let’s list all the countries that have enslaved foreign lands.
Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, United States, Netherlands, Australia. Yes, you guessed it. All these are European countries that have brought an untold number of deaths and destruction to the lands that they visited.
But of course, you are free to turn a blind eye to all their injustices that they have done in the past.
I like how you inserted "distant" in there as if it matters.
Even in just recent history, China has:
- Invaded Vietnam, purely for political reasons as they were stymieing China's aspirations in SE Asia, Cambodia in particular
- They provided military support to North Vietnam as a way to increase their sphere of influence and offset the USSR in SE Asia
- They are currently expropriating land and sea for economic purposes that although justified in their own public statements, I'm not sure even they believe
He/she likely needed to include that as a way to ignore the Tibetan elephant in the room.
China also established a pretty extensive tributary system in the past, requiring a variety of local states to pay tribute every few years. This is really venturing far from my knowledge of history, but I believe this system would have included much of modern central Asia (the -stans), and all of East and Southeast Asia, through much of the Indonesian islands.
Then the Manchurians invaded China, and they also succeeded, back in the 1600s.
The key distinction here, is that the Mongolians and the Manchurians invaded China, and succeeded, only at their own peril, where they essentially subsumed themselves and their culture into the mainstream Chinese culture.
Honest question for those in the know: at what point in history did non-adjacent invasions become feasible and beneficial? I'd imagine if a country ever had a large army and a desire for more land, they would choose neighbors just because of how much simpler it'd be to fight and rule after conquering.
In a civilized world, the only thing stopping rapid equalization of technology in peoples' hands is intellectual property law, preventing thousands of copycat companies from ripping off the new iPhones until the price is so violently driven into the ground that you can find them at dollar stores. In a world at war, IP laws don't apply, and the only thing stopping the "other side" from standing up their own robot army is the will to invest in and support that technology. We may consider it to be secret government technology now, but all you need is one hardware hacker with some JTAG wires and one disabled unit for all of their secrets to spill out onto the open Web.
'The people' are never going to gain access to networks of information systems, complicated weapons, training / support etc..
You can overthrow a weak government by getting a lot of people on board, some of them with AKs, but not much otherwise.
And it's not 'IP laws' that stop China from building the same weapons as the US it's 'trade secrecy' - my gosh Boeing doesn't just 'patent and make public' their tech, they keep it very secret. Also - there's tremendous 'know how' in there, all the unspoken stuff, skill, knowledge that isn't very well summarized in any kind of document.
China in 2020 is still having a hard time making it's own 5th gen jet engines, having to buy from Russia, though that may change.
Who make up those networks if not people? Turncoats decide the fate of battles for a reason. The government cracks down hard on people like Snowden for a reason. These networks are only as secure as the weakest, and least loyal, link.
> my gosh Boeing doesn't just 'patent and make public' their tech, they keep it very secret.
How secret can you keep an aircraft once it gets shot down? The Russians reverse engineered the B-29 [1] , the Americans reverse engineered the Hind [2], the Chinese reverse engineered the F-22 [3], in part using wreckage from an F-117:
"On 27 March 1999, one of the US Air Force’s stealth bombers was shot down in the NATO raid of Yugoslavia during Operation Noble Anvil.
The wreckage was sent to China to study the stealth phenomenon except for the cockpit, which remains in a Belgrade museum."
> Also - there's tremendous 'know how' in there, all the unspoken stuff, skill, knowledge that isn't very well summarized in any kind of document.
Of course! It would take time to unravel this "know how" and get it documented. But the clues are there if you can afford to look. Almost every proprietary system can be documented and clean-room-reverse-engineered if you dedicate enough resources to it. Could a people's army do this? Maybe not, but it's not impossible either.
> China in 2020 is still having a hard time making it's own 5th gen jet engines, having to buy from Russia, though that may change.
I can guarantee you this project would advance much quicker if we were actually at a state of war, rather than peace with heightened tensions. These engines are not the end-all-be-all when compared to all their other priorities, but they could become a priority if war breaks out (obviously I hope it never does). When they do become a priority, history is on their side in terms of insurmountable odds beaten by skilled teams (see Manhattan Project, Have Blue, etc.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4
[2] https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-trending/that-time-arm...
[3] https://theprint.in/defence/china-reverse-engineered-copied-...
??? Nobody in the Middle East is going to get to 'form' or 'control' their own Military Industrial Complex.
They may be able to 'assemble a crude drone' but they are not going to be 'creating their own GPS system' and 'air force' with 'global drones' and 'hyper guided weapons'.
"How secret can you keep an aircraft once it gets shot down?"
You can't but what's your point?
How many F22's shot down? F35s? Heck F18s?
If the Russians captured an intact F22 it would take them 15 years to copy it. There's an incredible about of know-how and knowledge in those sytstems.
And what are 'People on the Arab Street' going to do with an F22? Absolutely nothing.
And yes, the Chinese are 'very aggressively' pursuing their own Engine technology, they have been for 20 years.
There are literally only like 4 countries in the world that con produce modern, 5th Gen fighter engines - let alone the 'rest of the jet' which gives you an idea of how far away the 'Arab Street' is to doing anything with tech.
They are fighting with sticks and stones. If there are a million bodies there, they can have power, but aside from that, the only hope is political terror within their own borders against dysfunctional regimes.
This needs a stronger argument.
Russia, North Korea, and Turkey have very powerful militaries, yet are much less safe for investment than various comparatively weak small European countries.
A country being a good climate for business seems to have more to do with a lot of factors other than military strength.
That is because those weak small European countries’ security is guaranteed by the United States and its allies.
Ultimately, force underlies prosperity and stability. Right now the United States maintains the greatest ability to apply force and subsidizes the security and guarantees the security of Europe.
We often talk about the human cost of war, but as I’ve gotten older and seen the never-ending military presence in the Middle East, I can’t help but wonder how much of that is driven by this political desire to provide these kinds of jobs to thousands of young men and women that don’t have many opportunities back home.
Of course, it’s not really talked about this way, but I remember first thinking about it watching Ken Burns Vietnam war series. It wasn’t the rich kids that died in that war either, it was the children of the working class.
Military is just as much of a domestic political tool as it is a force to shape geopolitics globally, and it’s deeply effective in communities that are reliant on military presence.
In other words, you're looking at a rate in the upper tens of people per 100,000 in an active war. According to https://stats.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-in..., that would probably put it in the top 5 (fishermen might still have a higher death rate than the military). In a more peaceful time, it's probably not going to hit the top 10.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/IF10899.pdf
CDC Mortality 2018
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm
Just quick stubby pencil work, probably a bit safer to be active duty at ~100 per 100k per year. Once you're out of the 15-24 age range, mortality rates start to elevate rapidly. Of course those all include military deaths, but the overall effect should be relatively low given the small percentage of active duty vs. rest of the country.
It also doesn't properly represent our vastly improved ability to keep people alive but severely injured.
Training people and providing them opportunities is expensive and the federal government has less and less desire to pay.
Such a shift in policy could have negative consequences and I hope the Army doesn't evaluate this lightly.
It’s very clear that the military has enjoyed decades of relatively lax financial oversight. IIRC, the military branches were ordered to become audit-compliant during the Obama admin and they never did. Every once in a while, some general would retire in disgrace after financial impropriety was discovered, but by and large, its been a massive cash-rich free-for-all for those with military contract connections.
I think this is just next evolution of the private military sector tbh.
This is very accurate. Similarly, the TSA doesn't protect america from terrorists, it functions as a conservative-palpable socialist jobs program.
The obvious counterpoint is that the attraction for furthering Dick Cheney's imperialist wars abroad almost entirely vanishes if you don't need to kill foreigners to get free healthcare and education.
So sure it's a jobs program, it's a path to education, and it's a guarantor of healthcare (it actually isn't, the VA is a dumpster fire), it does all three things perfectly awfully.
When you say the morals of the soldiers, maybe you mean racism of the soldiers? American soldiers are more than happy to act immorally, and it's not like suppressing and torturing foreigners is very different to home. You can look to Portland for supposedly moral people suppressing locals
You should read War & Peace, or any number of other legendary books about war written since the 19th century to learn how quickly millennia of military training has conditioned young soldiers to turn morality off when it is required of them.
Those things said I find it strange that anytime somebody mentions investment in revision of military tactics or technology somebody cries about some unrelated moral ambiguity from some value vacuum.
Otherwise, (as I assume) you are comparing foreigners killed in Afghanistan to Mexicans killed in Mexico, which doesn't seem like a fair comparison.
I'd count the First Gulf War as the last conventional war the US was involved in, although the Iraqi army did not prove up to the task of actually fighting a modern army. If you consider wars the US hasn't fought in, Russia's invasion of Georgia is probably the last conventional war, although again, it was pretty one-sided.
Azerbajan won. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/09/europe/nagorno-karabakh-s...
The risks related to traditional warfare are incredibly high, not low, and risk will continue to grow as technology becomes the strongest variable in military dominance and success. Simply put, from now and well into the future, lethality will become greater. We can kill faster and with greater accuracy than we ever could in the past. Our capacity to kill is there -- just restrained.
The situation in Mexico [and further south for that matter] is dire and probably incredibly similar to that of Afghanistan after the Russians left. The cartels are the law. There is no effective form of government in Mexico.
Twice he survived mortar attacks - one exploded on the wall behind the staff during morning assembly in the yard. Another crashed through the roof on the other side of the wall when he was in the phone room talking to his Mom.
It took years for him to finish surgeries and physical therapy at the VA. His college degree took extra years to complete because of it.
I imagine 'actual warfare' is pretty rough then.
Or the hundreds of civilians killed, raped, etc for every soldier killed. The biggest victims of war are the civilians. In ww2, vietnam, iraq wars, etc, the civilians accounted for the vast majority of the casualties, not the soldiers.
> how do you slow the war machine?
You can't. The elites who control the war machine control the propaganda in every country. Once they want war, the entire propaganda apparatus beats the war drums and anyone in their way gets steamrolled. Ask the dixie chicks, phil donahue, etc. Remember freedom fries? Go look at how quickly germany turned from being the heart of european civilization to nazi germany.
> I think the morals of the soldiers would severely limit this.
Has nothing to do with morals. Is it moral to go to another country and kill people? If you are labelled "enemy of the state" ( a great movie btw ), then you are fair game.
> Everyone knows this is the future, and saw it coming, but wow, I naively thought it would take longer.
It's not the robots that are worrisome. It's the concentration of money and power.
For a gov to take the step of gunning down crowds is significant with backlash. And while I dont doubt countries could head this way I think for the west its much easier for governments to deploy robots that use any of the less than lethal tech and keep enough of the population on side while they deal with those <insert politics you dont like> trouble makers. And this could be the start of a very slippery slope.
I really think this is going to be one of humankinds great challenges: 1) tech where few can increasingly control many + 2) Advanced nations ability to conduct war with limited human cost on their side.
Indeed. Moreover anti-war protests often are conducted on a "don't get our children killed in your war" stance, therefore 2) will considerably reduce them. See squarefoot's comment above.
1) will be useful against protests at home, and also (to some extent) to control the population of an occupied country.
> Cold War doctrine envisioned engaging the enemy along what’s called the Forward Line Of Troops, or FLOT. In the new concept, according to a briefing at the conference, a Forward Line Of Unmanned Aerial Systems (FLUA) will fly ahead through no-man’s-land into enemy-held territory, followed by a Forward Line Of Robots (FLOR) on the ground, followed in turn by the Forward Line Of (Human) Troops. The unmanned systems will flush out the enemy, stumble into meeting engagements and ambushes, take and receive the first hits, and map the enemy position for the human troops coming along behind them.
Patton famously told his scouts to “go down that road until you get blown up then, report back”. Presumably robots would be assuming this role going forward.
Just a remarkable coincidence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_in_military_affairs
We're told there's some elaborate other system at play yet they never make a decision or recommendation which goes against the margins and stock prices of the corporations funding the think tanks. Instead, if there's multiple options they always seem to conclude that the most profitable is the best.
Until this impeccably consistent 1000 batting average is broken we can be forgiven for suspecting it's all just manufactured nonsense.
If you can show a faithful effort that leads to a cost reduction then I'll rescind my claim. I'm totally open to learning however I'm also pretty suspicious of grifters passing off stories as information. The material reality has to match.
[1]https://navy-matters.blogspot.com/2016/09/uav-triton-costs.h...
I could describe the EFF in these terms. People don't want to be inconvenienced. The EFF makes inconvenience in pursuit of privacy palatable. This is profitable for the technology sector from which--surprise!--the EFF's support originates.
This model doesn't work because knowledgeable people have a vested interest in what they know. Sometimes this presents a conflict of interest. But often it's just experts converging. (Other times, you're missing most of the debate.)
> Until this impeccably consistent 1000 batting average
America produces lots of think-tank literature. I'd be surprised if more than one in five hundred proposals see light of day.
US seems to pick fights (Afghanistan, Iraq, vietnam etc) where they know the other side does not have nuclear deterrence.
In the case of desert storm, The US along with 34 other countries were coming to aid of Kuwait which Iraq invaded and annexed over an oil spat.
They might have lost the war but guess who gets the cavity search before boarding the plane to visit grandma. Guess who is freer after enjoys more privacy after the war relatively to before the war.
The war no longer ends at the battlefield.
To have a nice old school nationalistic wars you have no choice but to have a civil war first to weed out people that aspire anything else than nationalistic pride first.
It's loitering munition like the IAI Harop that are being used all this year in war.
Suicide drone, after suicide drone raining down.
We are just a little off really cheap mass production.
Harop video https://twitter.com/KyleJGlen/status/1311725913172856833 https://twitter.com/AuroraIntel/status/1320459261579796484 https://twitter.com/kamerknc/status/1318292332165402624
Home made Armenian kamikaze drone strike on an Azerbaijan military target in Karabakh. https://twitter.com/Caucasuswar/status/1320408687094226947
(And nothing to do with that stupid Slaughterbots, man I hate that video)
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/01/19/autonomous-wea...
Autonomous weapons are hard to stop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppression_of_Enemy_Air_Defen...
https://www.defensenews.com/global/mideast-africa/2019/09/26...
Yet, even at such low altitude, good luck shooting them down with guns.
(To explain the joke to everyone else: the parent is talking about Starcraft 2)
Still, I wonder how many people from Robotics would accept a military application development job offering? I would guess the number would be higher than most people would feel comfortable to admit. I certainly would, if the technical aspect of it sounds interesting & challenging (and well paid) and if the opportunity was given when other opportunities are scarce.
The latter was the case of the local market when I graduated; the country of my residence had very low number of any robotics jobs, so most people I knew went in to traditional industries (or CS) anyway. Less than 20% of the classmate I knew is right now working in robotics. If any of them would've given the chance to work in what they studied (and found fun) they would probably take it even though it would include military application.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/3r...
A million Muslims dead in the last 20 years. How many deployments is it for you now? You're the enemy.
The British empire is dead, long live the American empire.
I don't get the downvotes for this one in particular. Does anyone here _not_ want to stop droning children in the Middle East?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_cas...
This is a complicated subject. I'm not qualified to discuss it and, from the sound of it, neither are you.
But consider the rise of ISIL as a cautionary tale against oversimplifying extraction.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isi...
All these "robots" are basically technological masturbation: great for milking the taxpayer and nothing else. They do not change the situation on the ground, especially when you're fighting with a bunch of semi-literate dudes with Kalashnikovs who are not afraid to die.
1. Undermine the "Shia crescent". The US doesn't want the Iranians to have an unrestricted land corridor that extends from Tehran to Beirut. It is considered a security threat to Israel and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is the key to OPEC, and OPEC supports US Petrodollar dominance.
2. Restrict Chinese OBOR expansion. The lack of stability makes the region unviable for Chinese infrastructure building. This degrades China's ability to pivot away from their Sea Lines of Communication, which are currently a major economic weakness.
1. We like cheap gas
2. We're scared of China because China bad
Yeah that sums up the US war tactics since ww2 I guess
I can't imagine the mental gymnastics those working on this horrible idea must go through just to look themselves in the mirror every day.
EDIT: Since y'all are downvoting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYTxuW2vmzk (The Collateral Murder video, warning: war crimes)