China and Russia would get smoked in a conventional war. We straight **** them up.
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"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
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It depends, if the leadership uploads into a celestial self-replicating living super weapon that's spreads across both within and outside the earth, it will be impossible to defeat or kill such.
Now such weapon only needs a few ingredients to be instantiated in the real world, superintelligence(high power algorithms and computational hardware), high speed molecular tape sequencer, high speed molecular tape synthesizer, large multidomain knowledge data base.
Once built it is impervious to all forms of attack, and becomes more resilient through time, such that even mobile black hole or entropic death can no longer stop it.
"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
You couldn't beat Canada, and your celebrities know it. It's a good thing for your American pride that the Keystone XL pipeline hasn't been built yet; we'd just flood the U.S. with oil and drop a match.
__________________ Recently Produced and Distributed Young but High-Ranking Political Figure of Royal Ancestry within the Modern American Town Affectionately Referred To as Bel-Air.
More like run them ashore with an ocean full of crude.
To be fair, Georgians are hardcore. I hear they wipe with sandpaper.
__________________ Recently Produced and Distributed Young but High-Ranking Political Figure of Royal Ancestry within the Modern American Town Affectionately Referred To as Bel-Air.
Well I hear they encourage investment and then hold foreign businessmen hostage when they come over and drop trumped up charges of espionage when said businessmen transfer all their assets to the Georgian government.
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“Where the longleaf pines are whispering
to him who loved them so.
Where the faint murmurs now dwindling
echo o’er tide and shore."
-A Grave Epitaph in Santa Rosa County, Florida; I wish I could remember the man's name.
They could be waiting for the right moment, waiting for a weakness in their potential enemies. Plus, not showing what they are capable of gives less information away as to what techniques/strategies they might use.
China could be hype but like Russia they aren't majorly fighting anywhere but WE are, losing troops, resources, morale etc. I'd say they're keeping themselves fresh while we're running ourselves into the ground trying to fight something we largely created and fanned the flames of in the first place.
Then it's a generational war. China's entire economy is dependent on the world buying from it. They don't necessarily have to wait until their battle tactics and technology are second-to-none, they need to wait for their economy to be self-sufficient. Any aggression on their part will dry up foreign wells, so they need to be able stay afloat without them. If China goes to war with anybody else, they're going to war with the world. For them to win, they'd better be the only country on Earth with an economy.
__________________ Recently Produced and Distributed Young but High-Ranking Political Figure of Royal Ancestry within the Modern American Town Affectionately Referred To as Bel-Air.
The reason the US military seems weaker than it truly is at the moment comes from the fact they are fighting an enemy against whom their most powerful weapons are essentially useless. It has taken a radical redesign of the role of infantry as counter-insurgent forces, and basically benched much of the military hardware that would be relevant in conflict with a more formal military.
However, such a conflict is not what would be seen in a war against China (unless America tried some type of long-term occupation, that would fail terribly). China is a generally industrialized nation with a huge military budget and investment in modern military technology. They have planes, boats, tanks, etc. They would fight with tactics that are what the Americans have planned to fight against for decades. The entire defense strategy of the American military is specifically designed to counter the type of military threat China or Russia would pose.
In terms of technology, America is still far superior to China on every front, and in terms of numbers, America has more essential equipment than do the Chinese. They may not have the same number of ground troops, but they have more Air Craft carriers, air fortresses and nuclear subs... by at least a 2:1 ratio (though, for something like Aircraft carriers, I don't believe China is expecting to have a single operational one for another decade).
China might be "biding their time", but as I was saying earlier in this thread (or a different one), assuming they continue the level of growth they are currently seeing (which they wont), they may develop a clear military advantage over America in 50+ years, but that almost assumes America collapses or no longer pursues global military dominance. Best estimates I've seen say it will be 20+ years before China can fully assert itself within its own sphere of influence.
This is, of course, excluding the nuclear option. China and America aren't even playing the same game when it comes to that. China has some nukes and some defenses, America has the most sophisticated and robust nuclear offenses and defenses on the planet.
To be frank, China will not surpass America in military power for the foreseeable future, and America isn't losing manpower or treasure all that fast either. By comparison, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been incredibly cheap in terms lost money or soldiers. Additionally, war between China and America may favor America in terms of economics.
As a consumer nation, America has many people looking for work but no demand for their labour because of the cheap goods from China. If that were to stop in a military situation, the government and the private sector could invest in getting these people to work almost akin to "war communism" that was a major part of "total war" theory. China stands to loose employed labour force in such a conflict, as they are a supplier nation. If trade between America and China was cut off, China would now be stuck with a surplus of goods its own population wouldn't be able to buy, and would face tremendous economic constriction. Sure, the Chinese state could invest to offset the impact, but that investment would be at the expense of investment into military goods. Even just converting the factories into military factories wouldn't offset it entirely. It would be devastating for both economies, with no doubt, but as with militarization in Germany prior to WW2, American investment into the production of more war-machines may have beneficial economic impacts that would see them fare better in an America-China conflict.
Fair point, but as you said all they have do is have to wait and they do appear to be waiting now. They don't seem to be reacting as of yet but how close will they let US/UK get to their borders before they do?
With Russia they could jointly re-take the former Soviet states and threaten any tenuous 'grip' we might have by that time on Iraq and Afghanistan. They might not have many allies to start with for sure but we've rubbed a lot of noses the wrong way already so sympathy may come in short supply in some countries.
I'm not an expert on military matters so don't quote me here, I'd love to be wrong!
On the flipside it also means they have no practical experience and have no idea how they would perform either.
If anything morale would go up during a war with China. Look at the Vietnam War: whenever NV forces launched major conventional offensives US troops would experience surges in morale because they finally had an enemy they could fight in the manner they'd been trained to fight.
Ask any American soldier if they'd prefer fighting Chinese troops on open battlefields or fight Mujahadeen in bombed out towns and in barren hillcountry and they'd probably prefer the battle they actually received training for in BT.
__________________
“Where the longleaf pines are whispering
to him who loved them so.
Where the faint murmurs now dwindling
echo o’er tide and shore."
-A Grave Epitaph in Santa Rosa County, Florida; I wish I could remember the man's name.
Good analysis and I agree but with the nuclear option all of our strength and resources could be useless. Now I know MAD protects against regular launches but without a clear enemy how can one determine who dealt it? If suitcase nukes do exist for example, or other transportable bombs (either clean or 'dirty') then before a country knows it they could be defenceless before the invading army. Now, this could apply to all countries because if one has them we all do.
Practical experience no, but they've been watching us operate for a long time and we have never actively engaged the Russians (at least not officially) before, so how does that fit in US training? Ask the Nazis what it felt like to have the Red Army bear down on them;yes, they had support from us at the time but they're not reliant on us now.
Bringing up the Vietnam War doesn't help your argument because you lost, they won. Your weapons/technology couldn't beat their strategies and philosophy. This same philosophy will undoubtably be shared by China and certainly N.Korea. I don't think they could invade/occupy you but they certainly could defeat you by attrition alone.
I seriously doubt there's any difference between a Mujahadeen fighter and a Chinese soldier, save maybe discipline, both of them would be prepared to die to take down any opponent, both use the terrority to their advantage and weaponise it you will, use scare tactics, psychological warfare. As did the Vietnamese and they drove you out, if they had had a bigger country/arsenal they could have retaliated, and with your country brutalised by that encounter who knows what could have happened.
The Red Army took a few years to organize and build up to the point that it could actually push the Germans back.
The current Russian airforce has such a poor budget that it's fighter pilots have a tiny fraction of the number of hours spent training in the air compared to American fighter pilots.
That's irrelevant to my point, which was that American morale goes up if the enemy is a traditional, conventional one like China.
I'm not talking about a war of occupation, I'm talking about a conventional conflict in which the enemy plays America's game, which China will.
The philosophy had little to do with it. It's all about homefield advantage.
The Japanese Empire had soldiers that were MUCH more zealous than either the current Chinese army or the Vietnamese and they lost because they played America at it's own game: a conventional war.
What gives you this impression about the Chinese military?
Like do you actually know anything about it?
__________________
“Where the longleaf pines are whispering
to him who loved them so.
Where the faint murmurs now dwindling
echo o’er tide and shore."
-A Grave Epitaph in Santa Rosa County, Florida; I wish I could remember the man's name.
not really. China doesn't have enough nuclear missiles. I will elaborate, but one of the sort of misconceptions about nuclear warfare in the public mind is that the most effective place to nuke is a major city or whatever. Nuclear war is about taking out opposing military capacity. If you look at the way missile silos were placed in America (before the days of MIRVs at least ), the calculations were done such that they believed it would only be possible for soviet missiles to target each silo individually. Basically, it became a game of how to create a nuclear system that could survive the initial strike and retaliate, making the cost of striking first too much to justify the advantage of attacking.
China has the capacity to hit a bunch of cities and kill a lot of people, but they have no capacity to disable the American military in a single strike. Even if they could (they can't) take out America's land based missiles, America has numerous nuclear armed subs constantly patrolling with the ability to launch sub based ICBMs, essentially guaranteeing China will be struck back after attacking first. China may have 5 such subs.
actually, there is no MAD with China. America could quite easily obliterate their nuclear capacity and such with ICBMs and China would have no ability to retaliate whatsoever.
? I thought we were talking about a military conflict between China and America...
regardless, MAD style ICBM attacks wouldn't be too hard to determine the origin of, especially given all the radar and such set up during the cold war specifically to monitor such things.
see, this is what I was talking about above though. A suitcase bomb or a dirty bomb are things used to kill many people or hit single targets to cause panic. How are you going to cripple the entire American military capacity with suitcase bombs? sure, you can kill people in a city discretely, but man, the cost associated with that... If America even suspected Chinese involvement in such an action, they would be almost forced to vaporize them...
well, you can sleep safely knowing that while both the Americans and Russians have tried and may have succeeded in building such bombs, they are certainly more prominent in fiction than they are in national military conflict.
Terrorists and the like are different, but for nations, suitcase bombs make little sense.
one wears a uniform of a single nation, is part of a sophisticated command structure and is learned and engages in modern mixed unit tactics whereas the other uses asymmetric tactics while supported by local populations, loyal to nothing but an ideology.
Like, given the structure and size, the Chinese army would be at a detriment if they moved to mujahadeen/insurgent combat tactics. Insurgent groups are hugely limited in their capacity to project their forces, have very limited win scenarios and generally rely on the "morality" of the more powerful force to not just murder all the civilians. ugh, wont get into another long ramble here... the main point is that China would fare far worse against the Americans if they attempted asymmetric tactics than they would with conventional tactics. The asymmetric option really only helps in a scenario where America tries to occupy China, not in a conflict between the two armies. Asymmetric combat would only be worthwhile largely after the Chinese army proper was defeated.
Last edited by tsilamini on Mar 26th, 2012 at 12:56 AM
This is the reason that security services exist. If the enemy thinks you're bringing a bomb into the country they will be very angry. Most tactically important targets are also hardened against attack (either with actual bomb resistance or layers of localized security).
Security services also tend to advocate redundancy and secrecy. If you want to cripple the military of a nation large enough to actually have a military you need extensive intelligence gathering abilities and very impressive coordination. Lots of people, planting lots of bombs, after months or years of surveillance to make sure it happens. It's a very effective form of passive defense, the only weapon that can get through is so huge and unweildy if it doesn't trip up and collapse on its own it will be seem coming a long ways away.
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Timely that I read in the paper today that Asia's economy is going to represent about 60% of the world's GDP by 2050. 50% of that will be China and India.
I wouldn't be worried too much about Russia. Their birth rate's in the can. Their numbers will be plummeting by the millions by 2050. 1000's of terrorists attacks go largely unreported, their military couldn't even handle Georgia, and if Putin/Medvedev are gonna be in til '24, you can bet on some internal strife and disorder. Those protests we've seen are just the beginning. They're either gonna be too busy tearing themselves up, or too busy stamping themselves down. And I doubt very much that the EU will take kindly to Russia annexing their Eastern members. Germany's GDP alone is higher than all of Russia's, it's population is at a ratio of 140 Russia:80 Germany. And that's just Germany.
China's population is also set to fall. It doesn't seem like a big deal considering their current numbers, but their birthrate isn't what it once was, and that One Child policy is going to come back and bite them ass. Apparently it's already started happening.
India's the one I'd be worried about in the mid 21st century. Billion+ numbers, high birthrate, massive economy, nuclear. But still... their GDP per capita stinks, and like China are very much reliant on international markets.
And that last bit's the great thing about globalization. Nations, especially the powerhouses, are too reliant on trade and international cooperation. Our economies are nowhere near self-sufficient enough to withstand a war with one another. China makes war with the West and NATO, kiss its economy goodbye. It doesn't have enough powerful friends to trade with to maintain it's massive population, economy, and war machine.
Penn Jillette said it best on Bullshit!. Jump to 4:55:
__________________ Recently Produced and Distributed Young but High-Ranking Political Figure of Royal Ancestry within the Modern American Town Affectionately Referred To as Bel-Air.
KMC Community Forums
Mar 25th, 2012 05:19 PM
), the calculations were done such that they believed it would only be possible for soviet missiles to target each silo individually. Basically, it became a game of how to create a nuclear system that could survive the initial strike and retaliate, making the cost of striking first too much to justify the advantage of attacking.
