A national security official under Joe Biden who reviewed the document is said to have turned pale on realising Beijing had “redundancy after redundancy” for “every trick we had up our sleeve”, The New York Times reported.
Last year, Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, said that “we lose every time” in the Pentagon’s war games against China, and predicted the Asian country’s hypersonic missiles could destroy aircraft carriers within minutes.
It’s fascinating because both the US and China have major corruption in the higher echelons of their respective militaries that put both at a great disadvantage.
One country has recognized the ill effects of corruption and the other hasn’t.
Ukraine is proving cheap and plentiful is the new version of superiority, like the aircraft carrier supplanted the battleships, so too does the missile
Quantity has a quality of its own
This is a lesson America knew back in the WWII days when they countered the superior Tiger and Leopard Panzers with Sherman tanks, but seems to have forgotten in recent times with its multitude of white elephant projects for “superior systems” which are much more expensive whilst yielding tiny improvements over existing systems.
Meanwhile the era of the drone is upon us, and that’s all about using said “quality of its own” of masses of cheap and easy to make drones.
Don’t suppose there was a similar report about the strength of Russia’s army before we found out the reality of it in Ukraine?
Yeah, but we all know that Russia is a country run by slovenly drunken morons with institutional ignorance, while China is country who has its shit totally together. I’m not that afraid of Russia, but China is terrifying.
After MAGA, China will be the dominant world power, and we will find out what it feels like to be a country who has to sit back and hope the machinations of other governments are good for us, and accept whatever we get.
China has huge problems domestically. They still haven’t climbed out of the hole they dug with their real estate scams.
Whatever problems they’ve got, they can’t come close to ours. Our society is literally on the verge of collapse, and the entire world sees it. China is totally ready to take over the global hegemony.
Nah.
Their demographic problem is even worse thanks to years of the one child policy.
Russia had prepared itself for the usual American strategy of a Carrier Group sitting out far way from the coast and throwing long range cruise missiles and fighter jets at it whilst too far away to be hit by return fire - as used for decades now, for example in the Gulf War - by developing hypersonic missiles and advanced AA capable of shooting down those fighter jets and cruise missiles.
Then they went and started a land war with their next door neighbor - which is almost the opposite military scenario of that which they prepare themselves for - plus on top of it it turned out EVERYBODY was on the take in their Military so it was a hollowed out shell far lesser than it seemed on paper and finally, to add insult to injury, the era of the drone was upon us changing the nature of land warfare as well as on the long range side making mass attacks with cheap quasi-cruise missiles possible.
Given the geography of it if they attack Taiwan, China is - unlike Russia - almost certainly going to be facing the decades old way of American sea-based force projection in the form of the Carrier Group, which is the one they’ve prepared themselves to counter.
The cope “muh budget” is batshit insane. The US is a dictatorship and the military budget has always gone up without needing subterfuge. Why now, that there’s a military police rounding up people in the streets randomly? Truth is, China has the manpower and tech not to fear the US, and also the natural resources…
The US seems the only vountry with more corruption in military procurement than China.
Russia had whole warehouses in its inventory that only existed on paper. When they started their war they quickly found out.
America has long wasted tons of its military budget in things with tiny or even no Return On Investment in terms of additional effectiveness for every extra dollar spent.
In a sense the greatest enemy of the US is itself, in the form of the MIL and Corruption from the lowest levels to the highest.
I mean, notice the recent change in the budget for the military which this year removed the Right To Repair for the Military, something which does nothing other than hinder Military effectiveness whilst further enriching military hardware suppliers.
The way the money is misused and redirected to feather the nests of large military companies’ shareholders and CxOs, as well retired Procurement Generals who move to cushy jobs in the very companies they bought overpriced items from and MIL-friendly politicians in subcommittees approving white elephant military projects, is sort of a twisted mirror version of what happened in Russia were everybody in positions of power was on the take and their military when finally faced with a proper adversary at the same technological level - in the form of Ukraine - turned out to be a lot less than it seemed on paper.
Also America went down a route similar to Germany in WWII when they went for tanks like the Tiger Panzer which were peak-tech and very costly to manufacture, which the Allies countered by just throwing lots and lots of not-quite-as-perfect yet much cheaper and faster to manufacture tanks like the Sherman at it.
America has the biggest military budget in the World by a large margin, but also outright wastes a huge fraction of it and pays top premium for small incremental improvements, so the results aren’t as impressive as one would expect from just looking at money spent.
If you want to see efficient use of a military budget, look at Ukraine.
Well, it does make some sense that China’s plan’s to counter the US during an invasion of Taiwan would focus on nullifying America’s main far-from-home force projection method, which has for decades been fighter planes and cruise missiles launched from naval assets 1000km plus off the coast of the target nation.
Since the US has been using the same overall strategy again and again for decades now, China would have had lots of time to develop counters for it, and it’s not as if Chinese Engineering is any less than Western Engineering.
I mean, Russia too developed hypersonic missiles exactly to counter that very same American strategy. Now, Russia is well in range of lots of land-based assets of America’s allies in Europe so it could be targeted by those, but that’s not at all the case for China which America has to approach by sea, and that will be done with the usual Aircraft Carrier Group and hence that’s exactly what China would have set itself up to counter.
I don’t like giving US credit… But all of that means nothing and is all speculative.
If US does one thing well? It’s invent shit so advanced, even when captured it can’t be reproduced. Russia has fallen flat on its face, where’s all that military might? You want me to believe China is that different? I’m having major doubts there. Hopefully I’m never proven wrong. Hopefully we never find out. But this sort of shit was said before Ukraine invasion yet here we are…
The US became a military industrial complex state built upon military keynseianism during WW2. This worked well for them because of their unique advantages in the war, specifically being able to stay relatively disengaged while Europe burned, whilst also making immense profits selling weapons to the allies.
Essentially all of the European spoils of colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade and other economies of dispossession that made Europe rich went to the US as Europe self destructed. It was not unexpected either, the destruction of cultures, societies and peoples with a worldview of white supremacy was bound to bite back at them at some point (all conservative/purity politics eventually do).
There was also a massive brain drain with scientists escaping to the US for safety.
The US has managed to leverage that with 75 years of prominence as the global hegimon (some will argue it only became unipolar with the fall of the USSR) but that was never going to last forever. I wouldn’t underestimate China. America, like all empires, has slowly become fat and lazy. China is hungry to reestablish itself.
Now, the US and NATO makes up up 80% of global military expenditure so they aren’t going to just fade away but I would look at the US’ massive bet on AGI as a negative sign. If they accomplish it then, good for them, that’s probably another 50 to 100 years of US dominace but the approach reeks of desperation. China has had a much more measured and pragmatic approach to AI. If the bubble pops and the US takes too long to pick up the pieces, China will race ahead. China is already ahead on AI implementation in robotics which will have important military applications in the future as well.
I suggest you read Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War as well as the History of the Roman Empire.
This isn’t about China or the US specifically, it’s simply a mix of strategical thinking (nullifying an adversary’s main advantage makes victory far more likely) and how nations at the specific stage of a nation’s growth that the US and China are at spend money in their military - China is a large nation climbing towards Empire stage so their resources are increasing but they’ll still parsimonious in their use (because that’s exactly how nations climb up from poverty) hence it makes sense that as they have more resources to increase their military might they’ll put a lot of them in things that give them the most bang for the buck (and that includes countering their main adversary’s most relied-upon military strategy after the Vietnam war - the Carrier Group), whilst the US is at the late stage of Empire and already in decay, which means a fat, glutonous system of power used to lots and lots of wealth floating around and prone to grandiose projects both for the seeming prestige and because they’re massive patronage operations and opportunities for corruption and taking a slice of the money sloshing around, and said waste in their military is allowed to happen because, due to their past successes and their size, they trully believe they’re unbeatable.
This shit happens again and again in History - it’s not even the exception, it’s the rule: great empires get killed by the very elites in them becoming ever worse parasites and overconfidence in their might.
Things like the rise of a “Make America Great Again” movement spearheaded by a populist who himself is the ultimate rentier parasite is actually a pretty typical phenomenon of such a phase - again just go read the History of the Roman Empire.
Russia too developed hypersonic missiles exactly to counter that very same American strategy
IIRC the russians were buying hypersonic missiles from Iran
As a DEI hire of the pedo-shield con-artist regime, Pete Hegseth is about as credible as a meth-addled mynah bird trained on a dramatic reading of the complete works of James Joyce
That has to be the most random string of words that actually works ever constructed.
If the Biden admin was the first time the seriously looked at and understood that threat… well, that’s a bit insane, because the PRC has had that capability since the mid 2010s, and it’s only gotten more effective.
Pete Hegseth explaining we lose to China every time. The guy who fucking lies about everything in the administration who fucking lies about everything.
The guy who did a tour of Europe a few months ago essentially telling our allies they will have to defend themselves because the U.S. won’t be dragged into another war.
Then committed a bunch of war crimes against civilians to drag us into yet another “war” because obviously we’re trying to plunder a bunch of oil and resources (just like the Bush administration, but even lazier story telling).
The guy who works for the administration that keeps telling us we will have to accept a surveillance state and losing even more civil rights and liberties for our own good, (just like the Bush administration, but even lazier story telling), because it’s imperative we win the “AI race” against China.
China, the “greatest threat to our freedom,” (even though we sold them the surveillance tech that enabled them spy on their citizens, which in turn helped them gain the lead in the “AI race,” which is allegedly why we now have to give up our freedom and accept our own surveillance state in the U.S. Because losing the “AI race” to China is unacceptable), wins every time we try to help defend Taiwan. So I guess we just can’t risk helping defend the people we said we would help. Once again.
The last thing I want is a bunch of war hungry NeoCons dragging us into another war, but it looks like that’s happening anyway.
So I find this “admission” from Hegseth suspicious, and I believe this is just a way to preemptively lay the groundwork so that once China does what we all know they’re going to try to do, and once Russia does what we all know they’re going to try to do, the fucking “department of war,” is going to have to be hands off because we can’t involve ourselves in the fucking war… Even if it’s to defend our allies against our own “greatest threats.”
Meanwhile we’re too busy to even try to help our allies, because we’re fighting a hot war we created by picking a fight against somebody weaker than us, and losing a made up “AI race” in the new Cold war. Which we also created as an excuse to hand over insane surveillance capabilities to the U.S. and Chinese governments, so that oligarchs in both countries could get richer helping their governments destroy civil liberty.
drone fleet can do wonders on “superior force”. Luckily China is still stuck in bigger-meaner-better mentality so pivoting to more agile warfare methodology would work… except most drone components are made in china
An aircraft carrier was appropriate in its age - just like a tank was. But times have changed.
Regarding defense of Taiwan: it has to be mostly located on Taiwan, and has to be capable of taking out maybe 1000 vessels per day for 30 days, to defeat any hope of putting an occupying force on the island.
Lower capability may help achieve defense, but may not deter enough to avoid conflict.
Once the realization dawns that one will need (30 000 * factor of not arriving) guided weapons, so maybe around 100 000 guided weapons capable of taking out a vessel, the conclusion is obvious: if bad stuff happens, the Taiwanese will be using ground launched torpedos or maneuverable mines, and these will be literally made of “cheap IT supplies and plumbing components”, because that’s how you get quantity.
If the US gets involved, both sides will wreck each other’s capital ships, because those cannot be hidden.
I wonder what modern day relevant military super vehicle would be for the navy.
Submarines that can store a couple thousand attack drones? Emerge from hiding below the water and then a bunch of drones just take off to attack various ships and planes in the area?
Since seawater is radio opaque and visually not very transparent, a submarine meets 2/3 of the criteria of being invisible… which leaves sound and magnetic field (of which the latter is rather local).
So definitely a submarine, but how does it propel itself, and how does it avoid emitting and reflecting sound?
Or perhaps, no large crewed vessels at all, since it’s unpopular to lose them to sea drones made with garage level tech.
Perhaps the art of fighting is turning entirely towards small systems, ones that carry just enough to hurt the intended target type badly, and not a kilo more.
China itself seems to be learning lessons. One of their concepts is an unpiloted cargo plane to deploy a drone swarm. Applied to sea and to a situation of projecting power to distance - an uncrewed submarine to deploy a torpedo swarm. It wouldn’t return home, just deny a certain part of the sea to opponents. It could be slow, quiet and sleep at the bottom ahead of a conflict - and open up when needed.
When I was a kid chinese people were made fun of not stop. Whether it was my grandpa making looky looky ball on hooky joke or kids pulling there eyes apart.
Now can these same people admit that China has outgrown us and beat us or are they going to double down on the racist propaganda.
