The doctrine of the US Air Force is that they will have the best airplanes at any cost to achieve air dominance. They literally don't care about price as long as they get the lethality and qty. they want.
Hence they will never look at low-cost fighters like the F-5, A-10 or A-29 for their own use, except as maybe trainers or Marine use.
The F-22 is no longer made. Around 189 were built and there's about 150 left. It's a great plane, but the low count is a great concern in case of war (with China.) You can lose 150 planes in a couple of days in a kinetic war.
The F-35 has numerous show-stopping problems, plus even more numerous irritating problems. The US needs about 1,000 operational ones, plus another 1,000 for our allies, to be an effective deterrent to China. (Since the US has 11 carriers, that's enough F-35s to populate them.)
The reason we need so many planes is that China has almost 18,000 ships, which can be used to blockade (defend) the S. China Sea (a tactic they accidently discovered in the last Taiwan Strait conflict.) So that leaves aerial/ICBM attacks.
The US MIC has prioritized pork instead of results, so we need to work on qty. The Biden administration is perceived as weak gobally, which is unacceptable for a superpower - that gets millions of people killed until the US demonstrates dominance again.
(WW2 in Europe started due to US isolationism. Both Germany and Japan thought of the US as country bumpkins in 1940. Today, the CCP thinks of us as decadent and divided, thanks to BLM and antifa.)
During a border dispute in 1969, Russia decided to nuke Beijing because they wouldn't take no for an answer, but the US foolishly told them not to. The CCP has already threatened in 2020 to use nukes against the US if the Three Gorges Dam is attacked.
The only reasons the CCP hasn't successfully invaded Taiwan yet are:
- the Taiwan Strait is about 80 miles wide at the narrrowest. Considering Germany couldn't invade Britain, which is only 20 or so miles from France, you can see how 80 miles is a very strong deterrent.
- Russia told the CCP to stop saber-rattling on previous attempts
- The US came to Taiwan's aid in the last two attempts, and has a policy of including Taiwan under its umbrella (like half the world's countries.)
So here we are, on the brink of war with a President who can't climb a flight of stairs on his own.
>Russia decided to nuke Beijing because they wouldn't take no for an answer, but the US foolishly told them not to.
>So here we are, on the brink of war
There seem to be some wildly conflicting points here? Are you advocating for the use of nukes and also complaining about warmongers?
Surely protesting against racism is what is makes the US weak. Not income inequality or the almost complete lack of social security net or poor access to education.
</sarcasm>
We will see what happens in US as weather warms up.
Have we already forgotten Hong Kong?
I don't know what leads Americans to be consistently misinformed other than memetic doomsaying but the USA is 5th for education expenditure per capita, and 10th in per capita social welfare spending, both far ahead of OECD average and ahead of Japan, Switzerland, AUS, NL, UK, etc.
Can anyone go to University? Are down on luck individuals more likely to receive housing or being sent to prison? Can old folks live off of their pension or do they have to work as greeters?
I seem to have a distant memory of a grotesque orange trust fund baby that I think could be described as decadent and divisive, is it possible that he had something to do with this?
They're symptoms so obvious that even we can see them. I suspect that the CCP was well aware of the divisions without needing to have it pointed out to them by BLM and Antifa.
>..nukes against the US if the Three Gorges Dam is attacked.
I'm not sure this statement paints the CCP as the villain you imagine it does. No country with options is going to stand by while the largest hydropower dam in the world is attacked, and possibly millions of their citizens are killed due to flooding and famine.
> (WW2 in Europe started due to US isolationism. Both Germany and Japan thought of the US as country bumpkins in 1940.
In 1940, Hitler's actual words, which presumably were not too different from the rest of the Nazi leadership, were "WHAT is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records and Hollywood?" That doesn't sound much like bumpkinism to me. (Not to mention the Henry Ford connection, or the IBM one)
> Considering Germany couldn't invade Britain, which is only 20 or so miles from France, you can see how 80 miles is a very strong deterrent.
How do you explain June 6th 1944? The Nazis didn't do Operation Sealion because it was too far, they didn't do it because they didn't have air and naval superiority.
Once there, Taiwan is fortified and ready to fight with a large army. China will be unable to establish air superiority due to Taiwanese 4th gen fighters plus air support from American and Japanese assets, along with the ANZACs if they have any gumption left in them.
The PRC's been pushing hard on anti-ship missile capabilities and I don't know if I'd say they're any worse off than we are.
I seem to remember a major conflict in the last century where we had a POTUS that similarly couldn't climb a flight of stairs on his own and we seemed to do just fine...
But great to have some diversity of thought from MAGA facebook here on HN, it does get a bit echo-chamber-ish
Are you trying to tell me that Leonid Brezhnev, in 1969, was going to let Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger dictate foreign policy to him?
> The CCP has already threatened in 2020 to use nukes against the US if the Three Gorges Dam is attacked.
At attack on Three Gorges would be a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions (Protocol I, 1977). The US has not ratified Protocol I, but the PRC has.
In the event of such an attack, what would you consider a reasonable level of retaliation?
For example:
> Today, the CCP thinks of us as decadent and divided, thanks to BLM and antifa.
You're right that internal division is a major geopolitical liability, but you're missing half the story. Yes, when rival powers see BLM-themed looting they lick their chops, but they also do that when they see a QAnon-themed "capitol insurrection". It takes two or more to tango. If you had talked about division more generally it would have been better-received.
But yeah: Can you imagine the US having a draft? Very few people would get shot at to defend "America as an idea" any more. Pretty sure that millions of Angry Youth have more conviction in their cause than Americans have in theirs.
> The Biden administration is perceived as weak gobally [...]. [...] So here we are, on the brink of war with a President who can't climb a flight of stairs on his own.
First of all, I'm not convinced that Biden's administration is perceived as weak, relative to Trump. Yes, he's more conciliatory on the surface with China, just like Obama was -- but it was Obama/Biden who started the Pacific pivot. And Trump, while more "hard on China" on the surface, could well have been perceived as inexpert and flatterable/manipulable.
(And Biden's physical state is mostly irrelevant. FDR was in a wheelchair and Timur was lame. Whatever. Dude doesn't go out and punch geopolitical adversaries with his fists.)
But when you say
> [The US] is perceived as weak gobally, which is unacceptable for a superpower - that gets millions of people killed until the US demonstrates dominance again.
... you're right. You were also right with your first six paragraphs. And your observations about strategy and tactics were interesting. These are areas where you could educate HN, if you toned down the Trump/Biden stuff.
> During a border dispute in 1969, Russia decided to nuke Beijing because they wouldn't take no for an answer, but the US foolishly told them not to. The CCP has already threatened in 2020 to use nukes against the US if the Three Gorges Dam is attacked.
This is the most interesting tidbit. A quote from [1]:
> William Hyland, the author of this paper, was a Soviet analyst at CIA's Directorate of Intelligence before he was recruited for Kissinger's NSC staff. In this memorandum, Hyland critiqued an interagency study on Sino-Soviet relations that Kissinger has requested in National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 63. In the course of the analysis, which Kissinger characterized as "1st rate," Hyland acknowledged that a limited Sino-Soviet war was "by no means a disaster for the US." For example, implying that a war would involve Soviet strikes to destroy Chinese nuclear facilities, Hyland observed that it might be a "solution" to the China nuclear problem.
The relevant Wikipedia article is also interesting [2].
[1] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB49/
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_border_conflict
> WW2 in Europe started due to US isolationism
... you may want to start reading non-US-centric books