I didn’t use quotes to mean quoting from the article - sorry if I confused things - that wasn’t my intention.
Even “potential adversaries" raises the same questions for me - adversaries to what?
I’m just so frustrated that world leaders are still all warmongering when it’s been perfectly obvious for some time that a global conflict will result in a loss for all parties - even more so as technology advances.
This is more acute in the US, they are decades deep into being the world’s only superpower. The ascension of China is absolutely a threat to that order. Americans are definitely not capable of taking a line where they just work with China to reduce their own pain. They will fight the inevitable every step of the way.
America is The Greatest Country In The World.
I mean, China’s a potential adversary because they want to conquer Taiwan, which is an important trading partner, and Russia is a potential adversary, among other reasons, because it’s invading Ukraine, which is something the United States said it would try to prevent.
I think it’s insufficient to say that a war would cause losses for everyone, therefore everyone shouldn’t do wars. It’s been obvious for a long time that wars are bad. People thinking wars are great is not the problem. The problem is that countries have conflicting aims, and there’s no general process that can resolve those disputes in a way that is credible to and binding on all parties.
Consider Taiwan. If China renounces the use of force to conquer Taiwan, Taiwan will declare independence and be its own country and China will never have it. If Taiwan renounces the use of force to defend itself, or (likely) if the U.S. and others renounce the use of force to defend it, China will promptly invade it. So, who should win and who should lose? Personally, I think China should lose this one, but that’s not a popular position in China.
Taiwan is very unlikely to agree to be conquered by China, and China is unlikely at the present time to agree to let Taiwan become independent, so the specter of war, if not the actual thing, seems inescapable. Indeed, the supposedly anti-warmongering thing, making it clear that the US and other western powers would never intervene to defend Taiwan, will likely result in an immediate and terrible war, as China invaded Taiwan.
It’s not as simple as “if you want peace, prepare for war,” because being over prepared for war can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. There certainly are warmongers who just like to see defense spending because a lot of it ends up in their pockets. But war has been going on for thousands of years because international disagreements are inherently hard to solve, and because renouncing the ability to resort to war means that you’re likely going to lose all your international disagreements right away.
Russia is massing troops for an invasion of the rest of Ukraine and constantly their fighter jets violate the airspace of other countries. Their submarines do the same underwater.
China’s ambitions include hegemony in SE Asia. They antagonize Taiwan and build artificial islands to make territorial claims. Amiong other things.
I’m aware of what Russia and China are up to in their backyards but are we really going to move to an armed conflict if Russia moves on Ukraine or China moves on Taiwan. (By we I mean either US alone or NATO).
US has been supplying Ukraine with weapons and who knows what else for some time. Russia could be walking into another Afghanistan if they invade.
Russia and Ukraine? No. Thats a ground war and nasty. You’d have to include ridiculous mounts of ground troops and equipment and it could go downhill badly.
China trying to take Taiwan? I don’t know, might not be worth the economic fall out to either country. But Militarily the US navy is light years ahead of the Chinese one. The Navy alone would dominate China trying to invade Taiwan and it would never really become anything other than a Navy war with US dominating. So thats just mostly a political/economic question. I don’t think China would even consider this option during our lifetime because they know that it just leads to their Navy destroyed, they never get to Taiwan, and economic collapse of both countries but one in China leads to revolution.
One factor that is likely to play a major role in future warfare is artificial intelligence - AI. This can massively speed up commanders’ decision-making and response times, allowing them to process information far more quickly.
Here, the US has the qualitative edge over its potential adversaries and Michele Flournoy believes it can offset areas where the West is outnumbered by the vast size of China’s People’s Liberation Army.
Ah yes - the AI edge. I feel so much more secure.
Doesn’t a large portion of Ukraine, like 30% or something, want to join Russia? I remember reading that somewhere, and if so thats a much different situation. You could set up that 30% to dominate the rest militarily.
Like we did in Vietnam? Seems like a potential clusterfuck for Russia if they actually want to hold on to the territory with 70% of Ukrainians in opposition and the West shipping unlimited guns to resistance movements.
hypersonics aren’t shit. lolBBC always on time for the party.
drones and cybersecurity are a much more impactful warfare r&d at this time. the drone and information advantage won the last 15 years worth of conflicts, and it’s not looking like that will change.
according to the politburo, the appropriate patriotic qualifier now has to read “in the history of the world.”
ukraine is 41m people. russia can amass maybe another 100k troops on the border, for a total of like 260-300k. it’s questionable how many of those could sustain a campaign, but let’s just say it would be impossible to take control, much less hold even half of ukraine. like you would be have to be talking about both russia and ukraine requiring the draft and sending kids to the front. meanwhile it’s virtual suicide to take them out of universities and mortgage the future of an entire generation like that.
According to today’s Post, Russia has like 170,000 dudes on the border and they’re considering attacking in late Jan or Feb. Ukraine has at least a comparable military. I’m not any kind of an expert but imo it seems like an enormously risky venture for very little gain. A “superpower” getting stymied by some border territory sounds like a PR disaster for Putin.
Ukraine can’t even defeat their Donbass separatists.
“Dumbass Separatists” is what we should call the MAGA chuds in the US.
Didn’t Russia just pull 10k troops away from the border a few days ago? I thought everybody had gotten bored with the posturing and decided to deescalate a bit.
the leader of donbass separatists is currently sitting in the russian state duma. ukraine just has to defeat separatists is a false reading.
they did it as a way to finagle a biden-putin or macron-putin call or something. it’s a virtually meaningless number.