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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> Thank God for the French

France has nowhere the military power to resist a country like the US. They have not invested in the military for a very long time and most of their equipment is completely outdated.

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Ah but alas: have you considered that the US is increasingly run by actual idiots?

It turns out even Iran has the power to resist a country like the US.

Iran is no joke. Everybody knew it and yet they went full ahead with it for some reason.

It's more that "military power" per se is not the be-all-end-all of conflict.

USA has not gone full force into Iran.

Need you be reminded of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War

What has happened to this site? Its all these leftie pro MENA talking points.

You can disagree with the tone on the user above but the fact is NOBODY can stand up to USA military.

t. Swede

America below the President and his appointees is an unbelievable dream team. That's why the whole machine works, regardless of who is at the top.

I agree in principle but actually much of this system has been gutted in horrific and hard-to-reverse ways.

For now, but it's working less and less well as the rot spreads.

France has completely sovereign nukes and the only first-strike nuclear doctrine in the world. It has the military power to resist any country.

It's not the only country with that doctrine. See [1]. I think only China and India is no first use.

[1]: https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nuclear-declaratory-p...

France is never going to send a nuke to the US.

It happened in the Simpsons.

They already nuked America economically twice in the 20th century.

The first time the French involvement in gold markets caused the Great Depression and the second time the repatriation of gold caused a financial system crisis which severely damaged the dollar and forced the US to decouple the dollar from gold entirely.

Nuke means no return and MAD. Not a word you use lightly.

Your attitude reminds me of this old meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/what-are-you-gonna-do-stab-me

So explain yourself instead of using memes.

I thought it was obvious, but let me explicitly spell it out for you:

You speak with an unfounded arrogance that will earn you a bloodied nose if you don't course correct.

France's nuclear policy isn't unique in that they are willing to launch a first-strike (all the serious nuclear powers claim to be). France's nuclear policy is unique in that they are willing to use nuclear fire as a warning shot: before they launch their full strategic stockpile, they'll (probably) erase a military base or aircraft carrier with a tactical nuke. That lower threshold to break the nuclear taboo is what's interesting.

Yup. No other country had an official Force de Frappe.

You don't need a lot of nuclear weapons to be able to say "Fuck off, or everyone dies". You just need enough, and the widespread belief that you'd actually use them.

France probably has enough, and is definitely credible in their willingness to use them.

Maybe not but they have enough to be useful. They do have nukes - a US invasion of France would not be a good idea. On the more realistic end of things the French are able to provide military intelligence to Ukraine to counter the US president turning it off to help his mate Vlad.

After the failure against countries with no military might like Vietnam, Irak, Afghanistan, and now Iran, I wouldn’t place a lot of importance into how much tech and quantity in the military plays a critical role into winning wars today.

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