Lord Sovereign
The resident Britbong
So...business as usual then?
Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.
My meaning was more "military ethos of Prussia." And Prussia's core region, Brandenburg, is still happily with us.
peter Zeihan 2020
- Thread starter Cherico
- Start date
Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.
My meaning was more "military ethos of Prussia." And Prussia's core region, Brandenburg, is still happily with us.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
...Why would the collapse of the EU accelerate US withdrawal from Europe?
The EU's nascent ambitions of forming a military have been a point of conflict between it and the US for some time now.
The French, and the Polish, and Greek's, and well...only really Germany wants the EU for military power without nukes, while France just wants to keep a leash on German's instinctual need to try to force 'order' on their neighbors, but not have Paris answer to NATO.
I also think a Polish nuclear program would be a great thing, same for Romania and the Czech's.
After what happened to Ghadaffi, Ukraine, and to a degree South Africa, no sane nation will ever give up nukes once they have them.
Poe
Well-known member
False. Prussia was a convenient name chosen by the Electors of Brandenburg only because that (very small) territory was outside of the HRE so they could be Kings "in" Prussia. All of that land in Poland you're referring to was only part of it for a less than a century when it unified Germany. At that time it encompassed nearly all of the northern German lands anyway.
Based on what exactly? Germany already dominates these countries it has no reason to invade them and every reason to protect them.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
What I said was that the United States withdrawal from Europe would accelerate the collapse of the European Union, not the other way around.
Germany dominates them right now economically through the European Union, and most of those countries are incredibly bitter about that. Once the EU collapses, Germany loses what control they have over them; which means that they'll likely be willing to use force to try and prevent that from happening.
Poe
Well-known member
[citation needed]
The UK has repeatedly fucked itself over and proven, repeatedly, that it is unwilling to face reality. With Brexit the UK should have tied itself hard to the US and done everything it could to fuck over the EU, doing so would have gotten it a NAFTA style trade deal with the US and at least mitigated the economic problems.
Instead the UK pretended that it was still relevant on the world stage, refused to really break with the EU, refused to reasonably negotiate a trade deal with the US under Trump (and Biden is very much pro Ireland/fuck the UK), and still don't actually know what they want that is realistically possible.
Essentially, the UK has managed to run out the patience of even its supporters in the US.
The US went post imperial a long time ago. In point of fact, it was the first nation to conquer an empire and then integrate it to the point that it is one nation. For all of the bitching about stuff in the US, US power hasn't decreased an iota (the US is actually, in relative terms, basically the strongest any nation has ever been) and none of the bullshit going on materially threatens the US, its territory, or its survival.
Oh yes, and the US is set to increase its lead at an ever greater rate.
The US is post imperial. The US empire/imperial stage was when we were genociding the natives, conquering North America, etc. The Civil War? That was essentially a provincial rebellion against imperial rule and it was crushed, hard, before the imperial government spent another hundred odd years on reconstruction, integration, and indoctrination.
The only territory that the US might theoretically go for would be Cuba (honestly, we should have conquered that way back).
American isolation would kill Europe deader than the dodo bird. Before you can build an effective European military you have to properly integrate Europe and that isn't going to happen.
Just for starters, multi-lingual militaries are a failure. They do not work. If you want an effective European military then it must all speak the same language. The nation best positioned (in terms of industry, technology, experience, and scale) to form the core of a European military is France. You are never going to convince France that French is not an acceptable language for said European military and that everyone must speak English, simultaneously you are never going to convince anyone in Europe but the French that French is an acceptable language for a European wide military.
To make a European military work you also need centralized and standardized training for both officers and enlisted. Along with at least fifty or so years to get the desired ethos imprinted onto the organization. So where is the European West Point or Annapolis going to be?
Then you need the technological, industrial, and resource base to support the military. Europe theoretically has the industrial and technology base to support a top flight military but it doesn't have the scale, the R&D programs, or the institutional experience to operate at the required scale. It also lacks native access to the needed raw materials. These are all, to some extent at least, solvable problems but it is the work of decades of dedicated effort after the decision is made to start and after you convince every European nation to subordinate themselves to the unified central government.
And all of this? It's downstream of culture and governance. The Italians, Dutch, French, Germans, and Polish all have very different ideas of work, much less proper government structure and behavior.
What made NATO work was that you had the US imposing its leadership, culture, and standards on everyone else. What the US expected from its NATO allies was that they would allow the US to base the US's forces in their territory with (effectively) a free hand to act as the US saw fit and that the allies would die slowly enough to slow down a Soviet advance across Europe long enough for the US to get its military deployed at World War scale onto continental Europe.
Note that in the Cold War "long enough" was about 72 hours thanks to the US pre-positioning literally an entire militaries worth of war material on the continent so that all it had to do was load up US service men onto airliners, fly them to Europe, and have them grab equipment identical to what they had in the US that was ready to head straight into battle. Those soldiers purpose was to buy the needed time to get the US fully mobilized and deployed (assuming nukes weren't being used).
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
I think that a lot of European nations, and a lot of people in the USA, watched the US play whack-a-mole in the sandbox for two decades, and thought that was what 'real war' was like logistically and economically.
The war in Ukraine has woken people up to the fact that full-scale war is a lot more demanding.
The war in Ukraine has woken people up to the fact that full-scale war is a lot more demanding.
Anyone who thought Iraq/Afghanistan was a real war in any way was/is a fucking idiot.
Those were occupations/nation building done under incredibly restrictive rules of engagement and with minimal to no non-military investment.
Ukraine likewise isn't a "real war" in many respects. Ukraine's entire logistics base is outside of Ukraine proper and is effectively impossible for the Russians to engage (ignoring the military issues with striking at the logistics chain, doing so would have unacceptable political costs to Russia) and no one is really willing to go after Russian logistics outside of Ukraine proper. For gods sake the Ukrainians aren't even sinking Russian oil tankers (and they have that capability).
Ukraine is also the beneficiary of a lot of active US support when it comes to intelligence, communications, scouting, etc. To the level of the US providing precision targeting information to Ukrainian artillery for counter battery fire.
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If the US decided to go fight a proper war (without going nuclear) it would start with power plants, transformers, oil/gas depots, water treatment facilities, and critical transportation nodes all going away on zero notice in the middle of the night when a thousand cruise missiles fired from SSGN's start things off in coordination with B-2's and F-35's. In literally the opening ten minutes of the fight there would be no intact, operational, air defense facility in the target nation, no surviving naval vessels, no surviving air craft, and essentially no surviving tanks that weren't already dispersed. Communications would likewise be down across the nation, every internet connected device in the nation would be bricked, the power would be out, municipal water would be out, etc.
The US in a real war with basically unrestricted RoE (which is what you get in a real war) can basically destroy any other nations ability to make war or sustain its forces with virtually zero notice and from facilities thousands of miles away.
Taking the enemies territory would be a different question, but rendering harmless the enemy nation would basically redefine the very concept of what the world thinks a war is.
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And the US lead is only increasing as time passes. The next generation of US military satellites is going to be a militarized Starlink with ten thousand plus individual platforms providing 24/7 complete global communications, EWAR, ELINT, and surveillance capabilities along with sufficient broadband support to allow every single US platform from the infantry man on up to be networked in real time and with all of the data from all of those feeds being piped back into some of the worlds most capable supercomputers running all manner of AI and data mining algorithms to analyze all of that take, identify problems/opportunities, generate action plans, and feed those plans to the decision makers in essentially real time.
Then comes the US actually operationalizing Starwars. SpaceX has made the launch costs reasonable and allows a network of sufficient scale to actually intercept even a full strategic launch from every other power combined. The laser technology (along with the needed computer support) is already there. Seriously, within 20 years the US is going to have an actual, effective, missile defense system that will be able to detect, track, engage, and destroy ANYTHING that attempts to exit the atmosphere (including all ICBM's and SLMB's) at essentially limitless scale.
Note that the surveillance constellation will also allow what is essentially global AWACS coverage 24/7 with the US able to track in real time literally everything airborne or on the oceans surface above the size of a helicopter.
Then comes prompt global strike. One of the best defenses against laser based air defense systems is the plasma sheath that can be created by going fast enough through the atmosphere. One of the most cost effective ways to create that sheath is re-entry. The US will park a few tens of thousands of strike platforms in orbit and be able to drop any or even all of them on targets within less than an hour of the decision being made and with basically zero tells before they start de-orbiting. And with payloads running the gamut from spreading anti-personnel bomblets over a city block all the way up to wiping out a city.
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Note that the militarized Starlink analog along with improvements in AI, self driving, and automation will make the Abrams replacement a drone tank. Drone tanks that the US will be able to produce in essentially full automated factories by the hundreds of thousands if the US is so inclined. The same technology will be applied to artillery, transport, etc. The US will turn most combat into something that doesn't require sending anywhere near as many people into harms way.
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Russia - Ukraine is what you can expect when non-US parties make war on each other. But it will teach all the wrong lessons for any nation that wants to contest or even pretend to stand equal to the US.
The US has had the worlds most advanced, and largest, technological and industrial base for a century along with investing, on an annual basis, more on its national security establishment then the entire rest of the world combined spends in a decade every single year. This has been the case for, literally, fifty or so years. Note that during those fifty years the US has also had far and away the most active combat experience and is the world leader when it comes to learning from its combat experience.
This isn't the US being the varsity team while everyone else is the JV team. This is the US being the Super Bowl champs and everyone else playing in a children's summer league. The best of the rest might be rated at high school level, being generous.
The day will come when that all drops away. Sooner or later some one will piss us off that much.
Bigking321
Well-known member
If a real war actually starts America is going to have a insanely bad time domestically.
Not only has the leadership been actively hostile and destructive to its own citizens and the hell that will bring when you want those citizens to die for them, but the southern border is being left completely unguarded and open for brainless political reasons.
You can be damn sure that every hostile nation on earth has been slipping sleeper cells into America for years. If a war ever goes hot and they get activated... we are going to see more sabotage and terrorism than we ever imagined. Infrastructure is going to be completely wrecked.
Not only has the leadership been actively hostile and destructive to its own citizens and the hell that will bring when you want those citizens to die for them, but the southern border is being left completely unguarded and open for brainless political reasons.
You can be damn sure that every hostile nation on earth has been slipping sleeper cells into America for years. If a war ever goes hot and they get activated... we are going to see more sabotage and terrorism than we ever imagined. Infrastructure is going to be completely wrecked.
The US military doesn't need (or desire) US citizens dying for it. That is kinda the point. The US has spent decades and trillions of dollars focusing its efforts on locating, targeting, and destroying everything necessary for another nation to survive (much less fight a war) on day one from thousands of miles away with virtually zero notice.
The NSA? Their primary military purpose in a real war is to utterly wreck every computer system (from smart phones to power grids to industrial equipment to inventory systems to government systems) in the first seconds of the fight. Standing US policy for cyber warfare is focused on strategic scale offensive operations. We have seen a very small sample of what kinds of things they have on hand, and they included multiple critical zero day vulnerabilities in Windows. The same code used for Stuxnex could have bricked EVERY SINGLE internet connected computer in the world running Windows.
The US's SSGN fleet give it more cruise missile throw weight on their own than every single non US cruise missile capable ocean going platform in the world combined; and those SSGN's are literally repurposed Ohio class SSBN's. They are basically the second stealthiest submersibles ever made and have a proven capability to go basically anywhere in the worlds oceans. If something is within five hundred miles of the ocean then the US can have a thousand cruise missiles crashing into it with less than an hours time between launch and impact.
The US's B-2's can fly through basically any air defense network in the world and are capable of taking off from the continental US, conducting a strike operation on the other side of the world, and returning to the continental US without landing in between.
The US's F-35's could annihilate anything that anyone else is flying without being detected and when massively outnumbered. Note that a single US air craft carrier can carry more F-35's than the entire combat capable air force of all but a bare handful of nations. Those F-35's are also fully capable of pin point accurate ground attacks.
The US's surveillance satellites and general intelligence gathering provide it real time, very detailed, very accurate views of essentially anywhere on the planet. DoD knows where literally every power plant, transformer, rail bridge, road bridge, water treatment plant, gasoline storage facility, and industrial facility on the entire planet is. If the US gets serious in a war then the opponent nation looses their entire electrical grid, their municipal water supply, their gas supply, and every factory theoretically able to make viable weapons within the first days.
We are talking about nations thrown back into the stone age with mass deaths from disease and starvation in very short order because modern populations can not be supported without industrial inputs and (in the case of most nations) imports. That is the starting position for a nation trying to fight the US.
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As for slipping sleeper cells into the US. Of course everyone has been. It wouldn't be that hard even if the border was secured. The problem is that they would be ineffective on a strategic scale.
Note that this also ignores the current reality of how the US deals with infiltration vs. the reality of how the US handles it while fighting a real war. If the US government desired to do so it could track down basically every illegal in the US in relatively short order. Doing so would just require turning the US's national security apparatus loose on the problem. In the process civil rights would become in many respects a joke and the long term consequences would be an issue but in terms of technical ability the US is able to do it.
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Being a global power is hard. It takes a massive population, shit tons of natural resources, an incredible industrial base, lots of highly advanced technology, a lot of very specific specialists, shit tons of money, and lots of time.
From around 1500 to around 1970 or so you could build militarily useful weapons systems at essentially the local level. Anyone with a modern machine shop could produce from scratch basically any WW1 weapons system without too much hassle.
Do you want to produce something that can credibly engage an F-35? You need literally hundreds of millions of dollars of highly specialized computer hardware just to run the modeling programs that you will need. Not to mention the specialized software that is running on that hardware to handle that modeling. Software that is literally the end result of decades of dedicated effort and billions of dollars of R&D along with millions of man hours. Oh, and is reliant on information that requires extensive experimentation and R&D to even gather in the first place.
The armor on an Abrams tank? That was several years of work and billions of dollars along with a long list of custom designed and produced machine tools and industrial processes.
The chips that make basically any modern weapons system what it is? You are again looking at tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of dedicated infrastructure investment along with a decade plus of lead time to even get started.
The US military is the product of more money spent annually than the combined nations of the EU have spent on their militaries since the EU was founded. It is the product of the dedicated work of literally millions of specialists over generations. It is the product of an industrial and infrastructure build out done over seventy plus years.
Trying to compete doomed the Soviet Union. Trying to compete has seen the PRC spend a not insignificant part of their man power and treasure for thirty years only to see the US's relative position increase.
It doesn't matter how good your weapons are, or your tools are or the capabilities of your troops if your leadership has no desire to let you win then your not going to win.
The fact is america's polititions as of now have clearly stated that they value the lives of enemy combatants over that of our own troops. You cant win with that kind of leadership.
Sure, and that state of affairs persists because those politicians are operating with different considerations.
Yes, the US could end Iran (for example) as an entity tomorrow with a relatively minimal effort and with relatively minimal physical risks to the US or its citizens. Doing so would also have massive geopolitical and economic consequences along with substantial domestic political consequences.
Now say that Iran decides it is a good idea to attack a US aircraft carrier in the Gulf and they happen to be incredibly successful, sinking it and killing a few thousand US sailors in a surprise attack.
Suddenly the entire calculus has changed. Geopolitically, the US has to destroy Iran for that affront because doing anything else paints a target on all US forces everywhere in the world. The domestic political considerations are also drastically different.
The US military is designed and built to fight World War 3. Fortunately we haven't had WW3 yet and so the US military gets used for whatever other purpose(s) float the President of the days boat without any real consideration for efficacy or efficiency.
AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
I'm curious as to how this would be done w/o using nuclear weapons