They have Biden in the Oval, and have their roots/fingers in damn near every agency both civie and military/IC, along with all those 'reasearchers/grad students' academic spies they've sent over, and control a lot of Wall Streets money (or have in the recent past). Not to mention their influence over Hollywood and the markets, or on the international stage.
I think they are close to Diplo victory by the CCP.
I think that military conflict is likely to be either something that won't happen at all, or will be world ending (in which the pipeline won't matter anyway) or an backroom orchestrated war to bleed off population by all belligerents, in which they still get an effective victory when stalemate is reached. So we might have the weapons to demolish the pipeline for good, but will there be a matching public will to use the methods needed, and would the elite even use them if they wanted their war to be a long lasting grinder?
How else can they have their 'We have always been at war with East Asia' moment their 1984 world is headed towards?
Yes, no single country.
Turns out that just means more of them team up to the point they can enforce MAD on the US.
They don't want to be Ghadaffi'ed if they become inconvenient to a US or allied leader, and they know the US military wants a 'win' so badly it glows, the rest of the world can see that, and they can also see that the US populace has no taste for the war it's military wants.
What?
The military has never lost any major engagements in recent history.
Saying A-stan is a loss because of incompetence of Biden on the militaries part is why people like you shouldn't try and act like you know.
The US Military can not be defeated in war.
It would be heavily damaged but not beaten.
And MAD...you do know our allies have the 3rd or 4th largest number of nukes right?
What?
The military has never lost any major engagements in recent history.
Saying A-stan is a loss because of incompetence of Biden on the militaries part is why people like you shouldn't try and act like you know.
The US Military can not be defeated in war.
It would be heavily damaged but not beaten.
And MAD...you do know our allies have the 3rd or 4th largest number of nukes right?
Normally its the polititcians but if the war is lost badly enough such as the south in the civil war, or Paraguay in the war of triple alliance or germany in ww2 its the milatary who gets that decision.
I get that it hurts the pride and ego to lose a war to litteral goat herders because our political class is openly retarded but winning a war is never just about the quality of troops. Or your tech or logistics leadership matters and if your leadership is shit and doesn't care then the war will be lost.
Normally its the polititcians but if the war is lost badly enough such as the south in the civil war, or Paraguay in the war of triple alliance or germany in ww2 its the milatary who gets that decision.
I get that it hurts the pride and ego to lose a war to litteral goat herders because our political class is openly retarded but winning a war is never just about the quality of troops. Or your tech or logistics leadership matters and if your leadership is shit and doesn't care then the war will be lost.
Many economists are aware of the computer industry’s outsize contributions to sector statistics. But few realize that the figures showing vast increases in manufacturing output have been dominated by a single small industry, according to Houseman.
“The dominant narrative is that there’s no problem, that it’s doing very well, and that’s kind of the end of the story, at least among economists,” she says. “Trump won to some degree arguing that trade had harmed US workers and that US manufacturing was not doing well. Very often, the mainstream media and economists were quick to point out that that’s not borne out by statistics. But that’s based on a misreading of the statistics.”
This erroneous notion, based solely on a statistical anomaly, long ago crystallized into deeply misleading consensus that high-tech advances in America’s manufacturing sector give it a comfortable competitive edge. And that’s not at all the case.
One way of gauging how the sector has been doing is to compare how much real output in manufacturing has grown, both with and without computers, compared to the private sector as a whole—which encompasses everything from finance and agriculture to retail and manufacturing. According to Houseman’s research, between 1947 and 1979, real output in manufacturing and the private sector expanded at about the same speed. Strip out the computer subsector from both datasets, and that trend is pretty much the same.
The divergence first emerged in the late 1970s, as the semiconductor industry took off and the computers and electronics subsector began driving growth in manufacturing output.
Between 2000 and 2016, the average growth in the sector’s real output was only about 63% of that of the private sector. But when you take out computers out of both data series, the trend is far more striking: Since 2000, manufacturing output expanded at an average pace equal to only 12% of the private sector’s average growth.
In fact, according to Houseman’s data, without computers, manufacturing’s real output expanded at an average rate of only about 0.2% a year in the 2000s. By 2016, real manufacturing output, sans computers, was lower than it was in 2007.
This has grim implications for what had been assumed to be healthy productivity. As with real output, productivity growth comes mostly from the computers subsector’s quality adjustment—which means that the apparently robust growth in manufacturing productivity is mostly a mirage.
To be clear, automation did happen in manufacturing. However, throughout the 2000s, the industry was automating at about the same pace as in the rest of the private sector. And if booming robot-led productivity growth wasn’t displacing factory workers, then the sweeping scale of job losses in manufacturing necessarily stemmed from something else entirely.
It’s not perfectly clear what, exactly, is the culprit behind relatively anemic growth in manufacturing output. But the signs indicate trade and globalization played a much more significant role than is commonly recognized.
Of particular importance is China’s emergence as a major exporter, which US leaders encouraged. A pair of papers by economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, found that the parts of the US hit hard by Chinese import competition saw manufacturing job loss, falling wages, and the shrinking of their workforces. They also found that offsetting employment gains in other industries never materialized.
Another important paper by this team of economists, along with MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Brendan Price, estimated that competition from Chinese imports cost the US as many as 2.4 million jobs between 1999 and 2011.
Why did China have such a big impact? In their 2016 study, economists Justin Pierce and Peter Schott argue that China’s accession to the WTO in 2001—set in motion by president Bill Clinton—sparked a sharp drop in US manufacturing employment. That’s because when China joined the WTO, it extinguished the risk that the US might retaliate against the Chinese government’s mercantilist currency and protectionist industrial policies by raising tariffs. International companies that set up shop in China therefore enjoyed the benefits of cheap labor, as well as a huge competitive edge from the Chinese government’s artificial cheapening of the yuan.
The resulting appreciation of the dollar hurt US exporters—in particular, manufacturers. A 2017 study on the dollar’s appreciation in the early 2000s by economist Douglas Campbell found that the dollar strengthened sharply, in real terms, compared to low-wage trading partners including China. The subsequent increase in foreign imports and diminished demand for American exports resulted in a loss of around 1.5 million manufacturing jobs between 1995 and 2008.
There are also observable signs that automation wasn’t to blame. Consider the shuttering of some 78,000 manufacturing plants between 2000 and 2014, a 22% drop. This is odd given that robots, like humans, have to work somewhere. Then there’s the fact that there simply aren’t that many robots in US factories, compared with other advanced economies.
Two decades of ill-founded policymaking radically restructured the US economy, and reshuffled the social order too. The America that resulted is more unequal and more polarized than it’s been in decades, if not nearly a century.
In effect, US policymakers put diplomacy before industrial development at home, offering the massive American consumer market as a carrot to encourage other countries to open up their economies to multinational investment. Then, thanks to the popular narrative that automation was responsible for job losses in manufacturing, American leaders tended to dismiss the threat of foreign competition to a thriving manufacturing industry and minimize its importance to the overall health of the US economy.
“A lot of policymakers, not everyone, but most, just missed the boat,” says Houseman. “We didn’t have the intelligent debates about what was going on with trade, etc., because a lot of people were just denying there was any problem, period.”
The problem is that manufacturing plays a significant role in the US economy. Manufacturing jobs tend to pay better, and create opportunities for learning skills that are particularly important to workers with less formal education. Factories also encourage innovation by attracting research and development (R&D) facilities, which need access to production lines to translate design into real products and to work out the kinks in prototypes. This is why when plants shutter and are moved overseas, R&D centers almost always go with them, says Houseman. Detached from the innovative feedback loop formed with R&D, US factories struggle to compete.
The received wisdom that the US was simply becoming a service-driven economy also lulled leaders into complacency about the long-term economic and social cost of lost manufacturing jobs. The establishment assumed that the apparent increase in the sector’s output and productivity would eventually solve the problem; where there was wealth, there would be new job openings to replace lost factory work. But, as a growing heap of research shows, workers hit by mass layoffs suffer unusually big wage losses throughout their careers, and many exit the workforce entirely.
While the forces of globalization battered America’s middle class, they largely benefited the country’s emerging urban professional elite—managers, consultants, lawyers, and investment bankers enriched by booming international investment and by the cheapening of imports. And as multinational corporations and their bosses gained political clout, the interests of the middle class faded.
Two decades of complacency among US leaders gave companies in Asia and other emerging export bases time to create world-class factories and robust supply chains. Tellingly, even as the real output of the computers subsector has appeared to grow astonishingly quickly, the sector has been steadily losing market share to Asian competitors, according to a 2014 paper by Houseman and economists Timothy Bartik and Timothy Sturgeon.
One reason why Houseman’s revelation is so important is that the myth of automation continues to have a strong grip on the minds of American policymakers and pundits. The lessons of the populist backlash during the 2016 presidential election didn’t seem to take. As the US gears up for mid-term elections this year, the Democrats have no vision for how to reverse the industrial backslide.
Ironically, that criticism applies to Trump, too. His campaign ignited a vitally important national conversation on the relationship between US trade policies and manufacturing’s decline. Since he took office, however, Trump has paid minimal attention to boosting US manufacturing. Instead, he’s favored counterproductiveprotectionism and ignored currency manipulation, preferring the punitive over the constructive.
US leaders’ longstanding misunderstanding of the manufacturing industry led to the biggest presidential election upset in American history. But they still don’t seem to grasp what’s been lost, or why. It’s easy to dismiss the disappearance of factory jobs as a past misstep—with a “we’re not getting those jobs back” and a sigh. Then again, you can’t know that for sure if you never try.
China's biggest problem is food imports. They have to get it from everywhere, and then they're still sending ships to foreign Economic Exclusion Zones. They've even been spotted as far as Argentina, literally going all the way around the continent of South America to start robbing other nations of their fisheries. The Argentinians had to SINK one of them when they caught them and the illegal fishers tried to ram them. If China were to really piss off the world, all they'd have to do is start sinking any fishing vessels that left the acknowledged EEZ and the US would just slow or even stop grain shipments, and they'd have to quickly capitulate or they'd basically just starve.
What?
The military has never lost any major engagements in recent history.
Saying A-stan is a loss because of incompetence of Biden on the militaries part is why people like you shouldn't try and act like you know.
The US Military can not be defeated in war.
It would be heavily damaged but not beaten.
And MAD...you do know our allies have the 3rd or 4th largest number of nukes right?
I never mentioned A-stan here, in fact it wasn't even close to what I was referring to. I was referring to the stolen election, the and the soft-power of the CCP in the domestic front (Hollywood, NBA, etc.) that no bullet or missile can handle, even if A-stan was a Vietnam level fuck up in how Biden handled the withdrawal.
And you know there are no winners in MAD, which is why it exists, and no one wants to risk MAD just so the US military can get a 'win'.
Also, it is politicians and the public who determine the 'victory conditions' in a war, not the generals or soldiers, so yes the politicians and such do determine what is and is not a victory.
What?
The military has never lost any major engagements in recent history.
Saying A-stan is a loss because of incompetence of Biden on the militaries part is why people like you shouldn't try and act like you know.
The US Military can not be defeated in war.
It would be heavily damaged but not beaten.
And MAD...you do know our allies have the 3rd or 4th largest number of nukes right?
Zach I’m gonna quote Degaulle here it does not matter if the Soviet Union has enough nukes to kill 100 million French even if there were than many French when France having enough nukes to kill 10 million Russians will still enforce MAD.
Who cares if you can destroy da world over 3 or 4 times you only need to do it once.
China cannot challenge America, especially at sea. Their fleet would either be wiped out or imprisoned in port, whilst the United States Navy chokes the life out of them.
This idea that you could lose a war with China just goes to show how effective their propaganda has been. They are a paper tiger and little else.
China cannot challenge America, especially at sea. Their fleet would either be wiped out or imprisoned in port, whilst the United States Navy chokes the life out of them.
This idea that you could lose a war with China just goes to show how effective their propaganda has been. They are a paper tiger and little else.
China cannot challenge America, especially at sea. Their fleet would either be wiped out or imprisoned in port, whilst the United States Navy chokes the life out of them.
This idea that you could lose a war with China just goes to show how effective their propaganda has been. They are a paper tiger and little else.
You see, they buy into the idea that our military is weak that our leadership will bow down.
If people who think China will hit Guam before Taiwan, them the population would be in a lot more support.
Qill they? Maybe idk
this is a map of east asia, in order for china to break out as a naval power they must get through a chain of hostle island arcipeligos.
They call this the first island chain it consists of Japan, Taiwan, the phillipines Malaysia, and indonesia. All of these islands can act like perminant missle bases and airforce bases to destroy chinese ships.
But it gets worse in order for china to get oil it must get past these island chains then it has to get past india which is a legit naval power in and of itself then it has to get into the middle east pick a side in a centuries long blood feud get the oil and manage to get through all of that again to get the oil back.
And china has pissed all of these guys off.
China has geographic limitations america does not, yes Cuba can potentially be used to shut off all trade from our third southern coast, but then you have the east and west coasts as back up. While china only has one coast that can be shut down.
You see, they buy into the idea that our military is weak that our leadership will bow down.
If people who think China will hit Guam before Taiwan, them the population would be in a lot more support.
Qill they? Maybe idk
The world has seen what happened to Cuba/Spain when the USS Maine blew up on accident (and then we went to war on false pretenses), what happened when Japan pulled a sneak attack on us, and what happened when Osama pulled 9/11.
Attacks on American soil like Guam or Hawaii aren't the CCPs main goal, because they know it would unite the US against them.
They will keep with grey zone tactics that negate US military advantage, like trying to peel off some of Taiwan's outlying islands via referendums and such, while keeping pressure on Taiwan with military shows of force that do not break the line into armed conflict.
China cannot challenge America, especially at sea. Their fleet would either be wiped out or imprisoned in port, whilst the United States Navy chokes the life out of them.
This idea that you could lose a war with China just goes to show how effective their propaganda has been. They are a paper tiger and little else.
That is rapidly changing however, so to remain stuck on that is rather the opposite; they’re currently outbuilding us 3-1 in large surface combatants and the U.S. Navy expects them to equal or surpass us by 2040.
...Are you being deliberately obtuse? Every military objective set in those was met. The problem was that the politicians didn't have a win condition, and weren't willing to let loose the military to run down and destroy the people and organizations supporting the terrorists and insurgents constantly coming back into areas that they'd been driven out of.
America absolutely lost both of those conflicts, but it was absolutely due to political failings, not military ones.
That is rapidly changing however, so to remain stuck on that is rather the opposite; they’re currently outbuilding us 3-1 in large surface combatants and the U.S. Navy expects them to equal or surpass us by 2040.
Every other major navy in the world except Russia is allied with the US, and given the CCP has demonstrated itself every time to be acting in bad faith, it's extremely unlikely that will change any time soon.
Put another way, even if the Chinese can still maintain their build rate, and the US build rate does not increase in response, they still would not have effective naval parity twenty years from now.
On top of that, given the Chinese economy is already starting to implode (Evergrande default, rolling blackouts throughout most of the nation), it is extremely unlikely they will be able to maintain that rate of military expansion. It's unlikely they'll still be building ships at this rate in five years, much less twenty.
On top of that, the People's Liberation Army has basically no meaningful military tradition or history of competence. They've only ever won one real war, the civil war against the nationalists where they basically won by letting the nationalists exhaust themselves fighting the Japanese, then had heavy soviet support to finish them off. They had a nominal victory in a two-month war against India sixty years ago, and they needed to commit four times the forces the Indians had to get even that much. With how populations have gone since then, they can't enjoy that sort of numerical disparity again.
They maybe-sort-of won a war in the taking of Tibet in 1950, but the population of Tibet was about 1 million at the time, and the Chinese military commitment outnumbered the Tibetan military by about 5:1. The conflict only lasted two weeks, so I'm not sure if it could really be considered a war, so much as reabsorption of a separatist province. Whatever you call it though, they did win it, even if that isn't at all impressive.
They had at best a draw on their involvement in the Korean war; they absolutely pushed the US forces out of China and then North Korea, but sustained horrendous losses in the process, in their final attempted offensive suffering worse than 5:1 casualties even though they outnumbered the defending forces.
The repeatedly got kicked out of Vietnam when they picked a fight there after NV absorbed SV...
...An they literally haven't had any wars since. It's been thirty years since the Chinese military has seen action any larger than fistfights with Indian soldiers on the border, which they tend to lose, and they're notorious for focusing on indoctrination into loyalty to the CCP over actually learning how to be a competent warfighting force.
The modern PLAN is, for all intents and purposes, only a single step short of completely untested and untried, all of their equipment is either 2nd and 3rd string Russian hardware or locally-built designs that have literally never seen combat, and last I checked, they're still planning on using human-wave tactics if they get into another war, like they did in Korea.
I have serious doubts that the Chinese would be able to effectively conquer Taiwan, if the Taiwanese fully commit to the fight, and have no support from other nations. If the Vietnamese and Philipinos alone throw in on their side, I don't think China could win. If Japan or India join in, Chinese victory becomes just about impossible, and if you have both join in, China probably loses Tibet to India, and North Korea is probably done for by the time the Japanese are finished.
Even if the Chinese maintain their current ship building rate, that's unlikely to change any of these factors in the next five to ten years, and trying to predict geopolitics out past that when things are so volatile is a fool's business.
Especially since we're selling anti-ship missiles to the Taiwanese faster than the Chinese are building new ships, and the Chinese have not demonstrated any ability to effectively defeat such missiles when used.
TL;DR, If the CCP is still even in power 20 years from now, they still won't have the naval power to take the US's place as world hegemon. That's what happens when you have no allies, and your military has no experience.
