United States The US Military has become a political organization

[Zachowon]

Sure, but the point at which they invade Taiwan is the point at which the DC government can't keep the power on and the DC government forces aren't capable of maintaining their own equipment.

Nah.
By that point China will be barley holding on as well. Taiwan invasion will be a way to boost national favor to keep the CCP in good light

 

[LindyAF]

Nah.
By that point China will be barley holding on as well. Taiwan invasion will be a way to boost national favor to keep the CCP in good light

That's worth nothing to Xi if it means he gets airstriked.

 

[Zachowon]

That's worth nothing to Xi if it means he gets airstriked.

So losing power in your country is nit a reason to do so?

 

[Bacle]

China won't attack the US directly, or overtly, they are not that stupid, even if the CCP needs an nationalist cause/enemy to keep it together.

What they will do if nuke Japan, if Japan comes to Taiwan's aid, regardless of what the US says or does. Now the strikes on Japan may also hit US forces, but it's different from targeting CONUS itself.

They just put in a 'Japan Exception' to their No First Use policy.

Which up's the ante, and changes, or at least makes very explicit what had been implicit before. Really the result would be the US enforcing a blockade at minimum, with help from a lot of NATO navies, the French, possibly Vietnam, and Aussies.

But that is just a hop, skip, and jump away from nuclear warfare, if anything but military units start getting targeted on either side.

I wouldn't even be surprised if Japan already has a 'nuke in the basement' that only really needs assembly to become deliverable.

However, that is older style thinking for warfare, and I do not think the Chinese will push when we are 'at our weakest'; they can read history too. they will keep it up with the grey warfare till they have enough power to absorb the losses and quell domestic unrest at the same time.

They will use the Kinman Islands for their attempt to pry bits of the outlying islands away from Taiwan under the cover of what amounts to another Color Revolution/'Independence Referendum', and that may cause internal rifts in the Taiwanese gov.

A good way to counter act all this would be to just hit China first, and break the CCP before they make an attempt on Taiwan or are able to build up their nukes stockpile.

But that's never going to happen because the elite are often in bed, sometimes literally, with the CCP, and the CCP have a fucking Manchurian Agent in the Oval Office while being able to make corporate America bend the knee at will.

 

[LindyAF]

So losing power in your country is nit a reason to do so?

You lose power in your country if you're killed in an airstrike as well.

I think people sort of overestimate the extent to which China is a paper tiger though. I'm sure they hype themselves up more than a bit, but if an economic downturn was enough to take Xi and the CCP out, wouldn't corona have done it? Regardless of whether the virus was overhyped or not, the economic impact was real.

The big issue is the demographic timebomb that was created by the one-child policy. They're moving away from that, but arguably not fast enough. Also they might have an issue with a successor for Xi (arguably the same problem Russia has) but both of those seem a ways off and I don't think the successor issue plausibly leads to war.

I don't really see the Japan thing. Japan is definitely part of the global american empire, and much more core to that than Taiwan, so I can't see China hitting them first. And Japan has a pretty lackluster military so I can't see them getting involved unless they knew the US was coming in to back them up. Also despite obvious historical tension japan has actually helped China out wrt the US before, in terms of normalizing relations.

I think ramping up tensions and squabbling over islands is enough for China internally, and if it isn't and for whatever reason they want a major war, India seems a more likely target.

 

[BlackDragon98]

There's no nation out there with the ability to execute a Pearl-style strike on the US right now. Wide-spread espionage/sabotage might have a similar scale of effect though.

2017 cyberattacks on Ukraine - Wikipedia

Lemme introduce you my friend.

Her name?

Petya

 

[Zachowon]

China won't attack the US directly, or overtly, they are not that stupid, even if the CCP needs an nationalist cause/enemy to keep it together.

What they will do if nuke Japan, if Japan comes to Taiwan's aid, regardless of what the US says or does. Now the strikes on Japan may also hit US forces, but it's different from targeting CONUS itself.

They just put in a 'Japan Exception' to their No First Use policy.

Which up's the ante, and changes, or at least makes very explicit what had been implicit before. Really the result would be the US enforcing a blockade at minimum, with help from a lot of NATO navies, the French, possibly Vietnam, and Aussies.

But that is just a hop, skip, and jump away from nuclear warfare, if anything but military units start getting targeted on either side.

I wouldn't even be surprised if Japan already has a 'nuke in the basement' that only really needs assembly to become deliverable.

However, that is older style thinking for warfare, and I do not think the Chinese will push when we are 'at our weakest'; they can read history too. they will keep it up with the grey warfare till they have enough power to absorb the losses and quell domestic unrest at the same time.

They will use the Kinman Islands for their attempt to pry bits of the outlying islands away from Taiwan under the cover of what amounts to another Color Revolution/'Independence Referendum', and that may cause internal rifts in the Taiwanese gov.

A good way to counter act all this would be to just hit China first, and break the CCP before they make an attempt on Taiwan or are able to build up their nukes stockpile.

But that's never going to happen because the elite are often in bed, sometimes literally, with the CCP, and the CCP have a fucking Manchurian Agent in the Oval Office while being able to make corporate America bend the knee at will.

If nukes are launched there is no coming back without getting launched on.
A lot of US service members would die. More then acceptable

 

[Bacle]

If nukes are launched there is no coming back without getting launched on.
A lot of US service members would die. More then acceptable

That's why they will keep at with the grey warfare, while building up conventional capabilities at the same time, and just use the threat of the 'Japan exception' to try to influence domestic politics in Japan's allies and Taiwan itself.

All while going for cyberwar/media-war frenzies.

I could also see the CCP possibly placing troops in places like say Cuba as 'peacekeepers', which would put Gitmo under ground invasion threat and allow direct attacks on the US southeast, and they may also place troops in VZ to secure the oil there, maybe even build that canal they want to bypass Panama.

China is not stupid, they are in it for the long game, and they know attacking us at 'our weakest' will only unite us even more. As long as Disney is bowing to the CCP, and they have their guy in the Oval Office, they can afford to make idle threats that can hang over future negotiations/diplomatic situations and use their economic power in the media/academia to keep up the Long March for a while more.

 

[Zachowon]

That's why they will keep at with the grey warfare, while building up conventional capabilities at the same time, and just use the threat of the 'Japan exception' to try to influence domestic politics in Japan's allies and Taiwan itself.

All while going for cyberwar/media-war frenzies.

I could also see the CCP possibly placing troops in places like say Cuba as 'peacekeepers', which would put Gitmo under ground invasion threat and allow direct attacks on the US southeast, and they may also place troops in VZ to secure the oil there, maybe even build that canal they want to bypass Panama.

China is not stupid, they are in it for the long game, and they know attacking us at 'our weakest' will only unite us even more. As long as Disney is bowing to the CCP, and they have their guy in the Oval Office, they can afford to make idle threats that can hang over future negotiations/diplomatic situations and use their economic power in the media/academia to keep up the Long March for a while more.

Putting troops In Cuba is the biggest way to get us to most likely get invovled in Cuba militarily

 

[Panzerkraken]

What makes you think that they'd care about that? Remember, we're talking about an ideology that cares a lot more about being ideologically pure than in merit of any kind. Communism has a history of that. Alternatively, this kind of reduction in effectiveness could well be the goal itself.

Because new billets require money. Money requires congressional approval from two different subcommittees, and changes to DOD policies have to be approved by the JCS, which is just about as bad as congress. Short of some kind of broad takeover of the entire government and a drawdown similar in scope to pre-Reagan 1980s, almost a full takedown and restructuring of the DoD as a whole, you're not going to be able to make it happen. Too big to fail, too big to dramatically change. Look at how long it took just to shift focus from warfighting to COIN (which never fully shifted) and how long it's taking to come back.

Communism was theorized as a long-term inevitable transformation that was predicted to happen with the shift from an agrarian society to an industrial one as the workers realized that they had more power, as they shifted from being peasants to being the proletariat. The Bolsheviks made it their business to push that change faster through revolution and forced reorganization. I suppose if it were likely that they were going to line up all the military personnel above the rank of LTC and shoot them, that they could make that kind of drastic change.

As it is, I maintain that some kind of shadow "Equity Chain of Concern" with any real power outside collating complaints to forward to the IG/CoC is less likely than the Army adopting the .300 Blackout as its standard infantry weapon caliber.

 

[Zachowon]

Because new billets require money. Money requires congressional approval from two different subcommittees, and changes to DOD policies have to be approved by the JCS, which is just about as bad as congress. Short of some kind of broad takeover of the entire government and a drawdown similar in scope to pre-Reagan 1980s, almost a full takedown and restructuring of the DoD as a whole, you're not going to be able to make it happen. Too big to fail, too big to dramatically change. Look at how long it took just to shift focus from warfighting to COIN (which never fully shifted) and how long it's taking to come back.

Communism was theorized as a long-term inevitable transformation that was predicted to happen with the shift from an agrarian society to an industrial one as the workers realized that they had more power, as they shifted from being peasants to being the proletariat. The Bolsheviks made it their business to push that change faster through revolution and forced reorganization. I suppose if it were likely that they were going to line up all the military personnel above the rank of LTC and shoot them, that they could make that kind of drastic change.

As it is, I maintain that some kind of shadow "Equity Chain of Concern" with any real power outside collating complaints to forward to the IG/CoC is less likely than the Army adopting the .300 Blackout as its standard infantry weapon caliber.

Thank you Panzer.

 

[Bassoe]

Except they will never have enough and if war breaks out you cant be picky.

If a major war breaks out, then we will see what we see. But most of the time America will be at peace, and the military will be configured to be used against the deplorables, not a near peer adversary.

We will never be at peace

An actual war between superpowers would consist of 'nukes fall, everybody dies'. Modern superpower militaries aren't designed for peer warfare since there's no plausible circumstance it could happen in which wouldn't escalate to a firsthand demonstration of the fermi paradox, they're either meant to oppress their own citizens on behalf of their leaders, justify lining the pockets of politically connected military equipment megacorps off taxpayer money or invade weaker, non-nuclear countries.

With that in mind, why wouldn't the American Empire status quo want to ideologically purge their military? They're not threatened by outside invasion so long as they've got ICBMs but they theoretically could be threatened by disgruntled plebeians.

The big issue is the demographic timebomb that was created by the one-child policy.

Solvable by economic colonialism to acquire foreign women. Which they are doing. A more suspicious man than me might even assume this was the whole point of the One Child Policy.

 

[LindyAF]

Solvable by economic colonialism to acquire foreign women. Which they are doing. A more suspicious man than me might even assume this was the whole point of the One Child Policy.

That's just a different demographic problem. Arguably a worse one. Also has no advantages over just not having had the One Child Policy in the first place.

Looking at it this is happening abroad in places China has influence over, not core China.

Edit: I've heard China is also doing a bit of this with the Uighurs and probably in Tibet as well. I'd still consider this "not core China" and I doubt it's in the numbers to really matter.

 

[Zachowon]

An actual war between superpowers would consist of 'nukes fall, everybody dies'. Modern superpower militaries aren't designed for peer warfare since there's no plausible circumstance it could happen in which wouldn't escalate to a firsthand demonstration of the fermi paradox, they're either meant to oppress their own citizens on behalf of their leaders, justify lining the pockets of politically connected military equipment megacorps off taxpayer money or invade weaker, non-nuclear countries.

With that in mind, why wouldn't the American Empire status quo want to ideologically purge their military? They're not threatened by outside invasion so long as they've got IBCMs but they theoretically could be threatened by disgruntled plebeians.

Solvable by economic colonialism to acquire foreign women. Which they are doing. A more suspicious man than me might even assume this was the whole point of the One Child Policy.

Because wars will ALWAYS be fought with infantry. Nukes are becoming less and less of a deterrent. More and newer tech to allow the destruction of nukes is coming up.
War with a peer nation is going to happen, and nukes will not be launched.

 

[LindyAF]

Because wars will ALWAYS be fought with infantry. Nukes are becoming less and less of a deterrent. More and newer tech to allow the destruction of nukes is coming up.
War with a peer nation is going to happen, and nukes will not be launched.

As a philosophical thing, offense seems stronger than defense.

The first guns were invented, what, four hundred-ish years ago? And they relatively rapidly made the existing body armor basically totally obsolete, to the point that only the most modern and rich militaries have only relatively recently started giving their infantry body armor.

Nukes were first used more than seventy years ago. And the only defense for a long time against them was the threat of mutually assured destruction, not any sort of attempt to defend against ICBMs. It's possible that now interception for the strongest military in the world has caught up... but I doubt it has for China, or any other country, and I doubt it's all that certain. But if it has, then it's only for a brief window, because offensive advancement is going to outpace it.

I agree infantry will always be involved in warfare- because to hold territory you need boots on the ground. But riflemen haven't been causing the most casualties since what, WW1? Earlier?

TBH I think that the more likely reason for a lack of nuclear weapons would be an unwillingness to escalate on both sides.

 

[Cherico]

As a philosophical thing, offense seems stronger than defense.

The first guns were invented, what, four hundred-ish years ago? And they relatively rapidly made the existing body armor basically totally obsolete, to the point that only the most modern and rich militaries have only relatively recently started giving their infantry body armor.

Nukes were first used more than seventy years ago. And the only defense for a long time against them was the threat of mutually assured destruction, not any sort of attempt to defend against ICBMs. It's possible that now interception for the strongest military in the world has caught up... but I doubt it has for China, or any other country, and I doubt it's all that certain. But if it has, then it's only for a brief window, because offensive advancement is going to outpace it.

I agree infantry will always be involved in warfare- because to hold territory you need boots on the ground. But riflemen haven't been causing the most casualties since what, WW1? Earlier?

TBH I think that the more likely reason for a lack of nuclear weapons would be an unwillingness to escalate on both sides.

Infantry is queen of the battlefield but Artliery is king and we all know what the king does to the queen.

 

[DarthOne]

Related from another thread, figured I should share it here too.
The Military Plays No Part in the Constitution’s ‘Checks and Balances’

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/18/the-military-plays-no-part-in-the-constitutions-checks-and-balances/

Recent reports demonstrate a frightening willingness by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and other high-ranking generals to undermine President Trump during the final year of his administration. These efforts began with some grumbling about the use of the military to enforce law and order during the Black Lives Matter riots of last summer. They reached a fever pitch during the uncertain period between the election of 2020 and the inauguration of Joe Biden.

Milley expressed contempt for protesters supporting President Trump, comparing them to “Brownshirts” and “Nazis.” He described Trump’s challenges to election results as a “Reichstag moment.” He even tried to say something profound: “Everything’s going to be OK. We’re going to have a peaceful transfer of power. We’re going to land this plane safely. This is America. It’s strong. The institutions are bending, but it won’t break.”

It is apparent top military officers conceive of the military as a critical part of the Constitution’s checks and balances, with a duty to review, rank, or resist the president’s orders as they deem appropriate.

The President Is the Commander in Chief
This push towards military independence from presidential control has been underway for a while. When Trump wanted to leave Syria, the president’s military advisers lied to him about troop levels. When Trump wanted to deploy the National Guard to quell violent rioting, military officials ordered that troops would not be armed. Later, on his own initiative, Milley bragged of creating a “Ring of Steel” around the Capitol to protect it from “Nazis.”

Milley’s greatest regret does not appear to be his role in the failed mission in Afghanistan, or the recent conversion of the military into a woke struggle session, or the fiscal disaster that is procurement. Rather, he seems most determined to atone for criticism he received for accompanying Trump and other executive officials in a survey of Lafayette Park. After this entirely defensible episode, the sting from his peers and the media was too much to bear. He became a born-again convert to wokeism, committed to proving his own loyalty to the Washington, D.C. political class.

While Milley and others wrap their power grab in the rhetoric of upholding constitutional principles, a cursory review of the Constitution and the founders’ writings shows that this is just a pose.

The founders were concerned with striking a balance: to create a sufficiently energetic government to protect the nation from internal and external troubles, while avoiding the kind of power that is beyond the control of the people or otherwise a threat to their rights. Thus, the words Army and Navy appear only once each in the Constitution: “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.”

Regarding this language, Alexander Hamilton elaborated in Federalist 74:

The propriety of this provision is so evident in itself; and it is at the same time so consonant to the precedents of the State constitutions in general, that little need be said to explain or enforce it. Even those of them, which have in other respects coupled the Chief Magistrate with a Council, have for the most part concentrated the military authority in him alone. Of all the cares or concerns of government, the direction of war most peculiarly demands those qualities which distinguish the exercise of power by a single hand. The direction of war implies the direction of the common strength; and the power of directing and employing the common strength, forms an usual and essential part in the definition of the executive authority.

In other words, whether Trump or Biden, the president alone is supposed to be in charge of the military. Even if other parts of government are conducted by committee, this requires singular leadership. The honor of officers and enlisted alike is intact so long as they are subordinate to him. When a group of military officers gets together to conspire against the orders of the commander in chief, it is a real case of mutiny and treason.

Within the military, there is an exception to the duty of obedience for “illegal orders.” But that is a very narrow category, typically limited to war crimes. There is no right to disobey the president on matters of policy. Generals are not constitutional scholars. Orders are presumptively valid, and disobedience is done at one’s peril.

Then Who Checks the President?
This notion of individuals within the executive branch being a check on the president is a peculiar one. One branch cannot check itself. The executive from whom their power is derived is the president. We saw the first hint of this novelty in Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman’s stated belief that the president had no authority to countermand the “consensus views of the interagency.”

The Constitution provides for three branches of government, each having separate powers. They have the limited ability to check and balance one another. Two of the branches have direct democratic accountability. The judiciary is uniquely independent of ordinary politics, but it is limited by the “case and controversy” requirement, and its members obtain their appointments from the combined decision-making of the executive and legislative branch. Executive branch agencies, bureaucrats, and most especially the military are never supposed to be a check or balance against anyone, especially the president.

Milley has said he doesn’t want the military to be political. This is a high order. As Clausewitz famously observed, “War is a continuation of politics by other means.” Furthermore, the military is controlled by an elected politician. While the military cannot avoid politics altogether, it can avoid becoming partisan and dangerous by remaining subordinate to the democratically accountable commander in chief.

Milley and others have the option to resign and should be disciplined if they defy these limits.

“Higher Loyalty” to the D.C. Hive Mind
The military’s recent foray into left-leaning partisanship is particularly toxic, because Milley, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and their fellow travelers take their cues from the “hive mind” of Washington, D.C. In the capital, the unelected bureaucrats, think-tankers, journalists, lawyers, and perfumed princes make up a privileged and insular managerial class, whose interests and views of the world deviate widely from the country at large.

In the name of defending the Constitution and its principles, the deep state and its military fellow travelers have expressed a far greater threat to democratic self-government than Trump’s challenge to the election results in the courts and in the court of public opinion. Now that someone more compliant is in office, the same people ominously offer the military to occupy the nation’s capital and turn their arms against Americans, whom they defame as Nazis.

The chief barrier to the domestic misuse of the military is the democratic accountability and control of the president, along with the “doomsday option” of American arms. But it is not clear the military would be turned back from such efforts if some future election turned out “wrong” and the military and the managerial class deemed these efforts essential to fight against “domestic extremism.”

After all, we saw civil servants, FBI heads, and military officers willingly take up the mantle of #TheResistance in response to Trump’s 2016 victory. The military, along with many others in the executive branch, convinced themselves they are entitled to resist presidents and policies they do not like in the name of vague principles derived from the Constitution, even though the words of the Constitution say the opposite.

The military’s embrace of such a principle would mean the true death of constitutionally limited government. If the military conceives of itself as subordinate not to the elected president but to an unelected managerial class, the founders’ seemingly archaic concern for standing armies would be proven to be more relevant than ever.

This push towards military independence from presidential control has been underway for a while. When Trump wanted to leave Syria, the president’s military advisers lied to him about troop levels. When Trump wanted to deploy the National Guard to quell violent rioting, military officials ordered that troops would not be armed. Later, on his own initiative, Milley bragged of creating a “Ring of Steel” around the Capitol to protect it from “Nazis.”

I need to link to this whenever folks b!tch about Trump not using his so-called, ostensible "presidential power" to fix election fraud, street violence.

That story about the military stealth-shipping illegal immigrants across the country at the request of the Biden administration was/is huge, and it has gone largely unnoticed because it preceded Tucker's admission of election fraud in his show.

The military is covertly shipping illegal aliens to specific destinations on American soil to change voter demographics.

That plus the Capitol police becoming a federal police force should worry the absolute shit out of every American.

 

[Bassoe]

Nukes are becoming less and less of a deterrent. More and newer tech to allow the destruction of nukes is coming up.

Doesn't invalidate the paradigm of MAD deterrence at all. If someone invents a perfect anti-IBCM defense, everyone else could just switch to bioengineered superplagues, orbit-to-surface KKVs or simply building really big stationary nukes as alternative doomsday devices.

War with a peer nation is going to happen, and nukes will not be launched.

As soon as one side starts losing, they can threaten to blow up the world to force their enemies to the negotiating table. Consequentially, any war with a great power is either going to be:

• The apocalypse, in which case the goverment will shortly be in no state to enforce penalties for desertion or draft dodging and being far away from anywhere people would want to nuke would be a survival trait.
• Organized behind the scenes by the leadership of both sides to dispose of redundant plebeians.

 

[LordsFire]

Doesn't invalidate the paradigm of MAD deterrence at all. If someone invents a perfect anti-IBCM defense, everyone else could just switch to bioengineered superplagues, orbit-to-surface KKVs or simply building really big stationary nukes as alternative doomsday devices.

As soon as one side starts losing, they can threaten to blow up the world to force their enemies to the negotiating table. Consequentially, any war with a great power is either going to be:

• The apocalypse, in which case the goverment will shortly be in no state to enforce penalties for desertion or draft dodging and being far away from anywhere people would want to nuke would be a survival trait.
• Organized behind the scenes by the leadership of both sides to dispose of redundant plebeians.

Or alternately, limited warfare in proxy nations like most of the Cold War was.

As there are decent odds will happen in Taiwan.