This does not track for me at all. I'm sorry but why would anybody in the DOD have an incentive to "make Americans believe in US military and intelligence superiority"?
You want people to feel safe and pay their taxes. You want your citizens to believe that the $2 trillion spend on defense every year goes to good use, creating the kind of military and intelligence apparatus that Hollywood portrays.
We fund these types of propaganda campaigns for the same reasons we have military parades and air shows. We saw how well these kinds of "overwhelmingly powerful" government myths worked for both the Soviets and Axis powers in WW2 and we copied it. Every government chasing power and status wants its citizens to feel like they are the most powerful. China and Russia have similar kinds of myths.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Please, continue to believe that spaceships from other planets have crashed and some elite division within the US government managed to retrieve them and keep it secret for 50+ years. Look past the failing state of our infrastructure and continue to believe that an alien species capable of interstellar travel is interested specifically in Americans, but "they" are keeping you from knowing the truth!
You're presenting a false choice between two conspiracy theories as the only ways to view this situation, which certainly doesn't make your particular conspiracy theory look any more credible.
I don't believe any such thing.
“You spend a lot, but you get the best!” sounds a lot better than “You spend a lot, but we still suck!”
This argument doesn't make any sense. The US military is better than the next top three militaries combined. The Ukraine war is showing the superiority of decades old Western tech.
The US military might be better than the rest, but they were still defeated by poor people in the desert with some Casio watches and decades' old AKs.
Similarly, it seems that small drones are another potential avenue of exploitation in asymmetric warfare.
Partially due to institutional experience and economies of scale (for certain capabilities). We probably still exceed what the next top 3 powers (China, Russia, India, BTW) are spending in PPP terms, so it shouldn't be that surprising.
> The Ukraine war is showing the superiority of decades old Western tech.
For every video of HIMARS blowing up a Russian ammo depot, there's a video of Ka-52 helicopters popping M2 Bradleys from 5+ km away.[1] M777s were lauded for their accuracy....until they broke. [2] Ukrainian brigades have been lavishly equipped with Western armored vehicles and they've bounced off a brick wall of positively-ancient minefields and artillery, very similar to the defense-in-depth that the Soviets used to defeat the Germans at Kursk ...in 1943.[3]
This conflict is so complex in terms of difficult-to-measure soft factors that are influencing the battlefield (training, maintenance, corruption, NATO ISR support, information operations/propaganda, etc.), that drawing conclusions about the merits of individual technical systems or especially the overall tech base of the two main powers (Russia vs "the West") as a whole is....unwise.
[1]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraines-armor-appears...
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/25/us/ukraine-artillery-brea...
[3]https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/world/europe/ukraine-coun...
The US just lost a 20 year war in Afghanistan against cave dwellers with Soviet-era rifles, homemade explosives and random bits from the bottom of a toolbox. You'd think maybe they'd have busted out the ray guns or spaceships instead of taking the L.
As for Afghanistan, well, of course never get involved in a land war in Asia. But that wasn't a conventional war, and our military is intended to fight conventional wars. Our forces really are not set up to respond to the Taliban.
To be fair the US left Afghanistan and the remaining Afghani army crumbled to the taliban pretty quickly.
I’d say the two situations are very different, the US successfully occupied a country that was ~7000km from them.
The Russians have so far failed to take a city that’s ~200km from their own border in about 1 and a half years.
We had control for a long time.
If you have control of an area and mismanage it for years, that's not a military loss. Failure at that point is something different.
But it’s still not comparable to Ukraine.
The sheer scale involved is completely different and really shows the ability of the US to project force.
Whereas Russia is currently struggling to get 200km from their own border.
The causalities scales are also hugely different. The Russians have taken likely close to 5x the causalities in about 1/4 the time.
Russia is clearly not a super power but that doesn’t mean other countries like America aren’t.
Especially when NATO hasn't fired a shot in Ukraine, but is supplying real-time intelligence to the AFU.
US cold war era surplus + EW helped break an entire Russian army, and may yet break a second.
However, if people think they're aliens, that instead turns psychological warfare on its head and into something that inspires awe, wonder and possibility. No one is scared in the ways adversaries want them to be scared, and no one doubts the government is actually capable of handling threats from adversaries.
"Aliens" as an explanation quells the potential for panic, versus adversaries successfully inducing the panic responses they desire. It also gives the opportunity for those who care too much about this to be painted as quacks.
> China/Russia/whoever
As a placeholder for potential US adversaries who might have the motivation do something like this. If you don't like that I said Russia, ignore it and fill it in with China.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/china-air-force-may-take-a...
If you think people are seeing real flying saucers that are defying the laws of physics, I don't know what to tell you.
>China/Russia/whoever can send whatever they want into US airspace and there's nothing that anyone, including the military, can do about it.
So it's not "whatever they want", it's cheap drones and balloons. You make China out to be some scary powerful Boogeyman (which requires the USG to invent alien stories as a cover) and then admit they don't have such capability.
I personally am not scared one iota about Chinese aircraft threatening US airspace. And I am very confident that if such a scenario did arise, the US military would address it in the most appropriate and effective way. Which could range anywhere from ignoring it, to neutralizing with extreme prejudice.