Well, Russia is destabilizing the US and winning which is why I think we're acting like that. And it seems all of our military and counterintelligence capabilities can't stop it. Too much offense, not enough defense, it seems.
They can be really stupid on their own and it can also be Russia who's got their buttons labeled and is pushing them as needed for the dance recital. Except the recital was 4 years ago.
It's going to be difficult to get more of a smoking gun than a plan to drop sanctions and ceasing offensive cyber operations against Russia, as well as the US's lopsided Ukrainian peace deal and pulling financial support for Ukraine.
Russia has no military advantage against ours, so there is no reason to placate them due to a threat of war (nukes excluded here, unless Russia has rapidly outpaced us). The only thing that's left is the relationship between the leaders themselves.
If Trump were truly interested in isolationism, he'd instead have simply pulled support for Ukraine and not offered to be a part of negotiations, but many more things were offered for no obvious gain to us.
Russia is running a full-scale war against US and NATO weaponry in Ukraine for three years, studying it and refining its tactics.
What was the last battle for USA? Houthis in Yemen? Few airstrikes and limited engagements.
It is very naive to believe Putin doesn’t want to cripple the US economy or that war is not a real threat. The US is critically dependent on semiconductors, and TSMC is much closer to Russia than to America. Think it through.
The US has perhaps the most battle hardened military in the history of the world. It’s had real combat deployments continually for going on 25 years.
At best you can suggest it would be too allocated to counter insurgency but combined arms battles is the heart of American doctrine and its shown its value in Ukraine not its weakness.
I think there are real questions about US military composition, particularly its navy, but battle experience is not a problem.
The US military might be battle-hardened and ready for war, but the US public is not. The public is soft and fragile and totally unready for the sacrifices and losses that come from a serious war where we're not an overwhelming force against a tiny Middle Eastern country. The public will not work together collectively to get through a war. We're not going to put up with rationing programs, collecting scrap metal, Victory Gardens, buying war bonds, and take a detour from our careers to work in factories producing ammunition. Hell, half the public couldn't even deal with stay-at-home during COVID and went out protesting when they couldn't eat at the Olive Garden and buy their khakis for a few weeks. Ain't no way we have the intestinal fortitude to put up with a sustained hot war.
There is no military in the world without nuclear weapons that can put enough of a fight to require the US public to collect scrap metal. If the US goes to war with a nation with nuclear weapons, what's left of the whole planet's gonna be collecting scrap metal for the next 200 years.
We acted quickly post-9/11, buying duct tape and trash bags and taking off our belts at the airport.
You may be surprised how the public can be united against a human enemy. The success of the Right during COVID was turning the outrage away from the invisible virus and onto the humans forcing them to wear a mask.
I'll believe it when I see it, hopefuly we never have to. 9/11 was almost 25 years ago--an entire generation. A lot has changed since then. Today, the public is softer, fatter, less healthy, less sane, lonelier, more individualistic and isolated from each other, more addicted to drugs, more addicted to phones, chronically online, narcissistic, and self-obsessed than they were in 2001. And when it comes to playing well with other people they are less tolerant, angrier, more belligerent, less capable of cooperating, defiant against even minor sacrifices that might help others... We have this "in it for ourselves" religion that wasn't as strong in 2001. I don't think even a land invasion by a foreign aggressor could unify us anymore.
You assume that continuous combat deployments automatically translate to full-scale war readiness, but there's a big difference between counterinsurgency operations and peer-to-peer warfare.
The US military has been engaged in conflicts for decades, but most of them involved fighting non-state actors or weaker conventional forces, not a high-intensity war against an advanced military.
The US military is far a cut above everything else, in terms of tactical readiness, sheer firepower and especially effective size.
We outspend any other nation - China included of which we spend an estimated 2.5 times more than - and we have been in that lead position for decades, not just years.
While yes, US forces haven’t squared off against conventional militaries of any note in some time, the US military has at least been engaged in real conflict. To my recollection the Chinese military have undertaken no significant military campaigns in the last 20+ years and lack the air & sea power to functionally match anything the US military can throw at it by comparison.
Which leaves ground forces, which is both vulnerable to air power and is effectively the numbers game the Chinese can win outright in a protracted war that escalated to that level, and cyber warfare, which the Chinese have proven to be quite adept at but the US military has been aware and developing counter measures against that for a long time as well
This talking conventionally of course.
China being a nuclear power means it would be unlikely to escalate past a certain point if anyone is acting rationally. There’s no reason you want to give another nuclear power a reason to use those weapons, and certainly the US nuclear arsenal is not one anyone wants to see fired either.
I agree with the spirit of your statement, I truly believe that the US military is the by far most advanced and well equipped force on earth.
Nonetheless, I feel the need to point out that it's budget is a terrible indicator for that.
I'm not even american and have heard just how massively overcharged everything is that's sold to the US military.
It's entirely possible that i.e. China, that can produce their military equipment could actually be way better equipped then it's budget implies. I don't think that Chinas military has caught up to the US yet, but the military spending feels like a bad comparison considering how differently they're financed.
As the comment from phillistine notes this doesn’t square with known data and I have no evidence to the contrary.
To which I want to add, that even though the DoD modes have its own (and worth addressing) budget process issues they’re at least largely getting what they are paying for in most circumstances as well as continuing to fund R&D at a fairly robust clip.
In the area of defense R&D in particular that large gap in budgetary spending will matter a lot more than building any “well known” military equipment as the next generation will come online faster than other nations can keep up without ramping their own spending
Doesn't square with any sort of real data we have. The West have better, and more, of everything. For crissakes, the Germans have artillery that fires while driving full speed with the same precision as any other nation's artillery.
>China being a nuclear power means it would be unlikely to escalate past a certain point if anyone is acting rationally.
Well, Russia is a nuclear power, and not everyone is acting rationally. Russia got part of it's own territory occupied now, and some important oil and gas facilities are literally being bombed, not talking about regular cities and homes.
Russian nuclear doctrine is: Russia could launch nuclear weapons in response to an attack on its territory by a non-nuclear-armed state.
Their warheads are still at bay, why is that? I don't believe they will ever fly, because no-one is stupid enough to make the first move, and the war can go on neglecting them.
It would probably depend a lot on the type of conflict. The US would almost certainly have air-superiority, which would have a significant difference. Of course, air-superiority didn't "win" the US wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, but those were more guerilla-style wars with a somewhat (at least) hostile larger population. A US-Russia conflict would probably look pretty different. Or it would just go nuclear, in which case... well, so much for tactics.
I think you have to be careful about assuming the US would have air superiority. It doesn't take a lot for what, on paper, looks like a superior air force to turn out to be not fit for purpose.
The famous example is the F4 Phantom getting beat in dogfights against the Mig 21 in Vietnam. It was mostly solved by changing the tactics and to improvements to later model aircraft.
Obviously dogfights aren't realistic in the modern age but that is just one of many variables which might lead to an unexpected deficit. Robustness, reliability, repairability, availablity of parts, ability to operate out of unimproved airfields, using poor qualify fuels etc.
I think future US-Russia conflict will revolve around semiconductors, and you know where it will take place. It would not be possible to just use nukes or airstrike it to the ground, because factories need to stay. Also, a nasty marriage of convenience between China and Russia would work perfectly for the case, what then?
And the Russians had to get re-enforcement from North Korea to bolster the bodies they’re losing to a significantly smaller force.
Western military tactics are still working well against Russian commanders, but they being simply larger population wise, can if they’re willing, win a war of attrition simply because the Ukraine doesn’t have the bodies or internal resources to fight forever. It’s the same strategy general Grant used to decisively win the US civil war
Putin really waited out the US election. For reasons I can’t seem to grok Trump wants to ally with the world’s dictators. He’s proven himself a reliable ally to Putin at this point.
Had Trump lost the election I imagine we would see Russia seriously considering or even starting its withdrawal from the conflict.
Back to the military bit again: there is no way the war in the Ukraine is showing anything other than how vulnerable and poorly aged the equipment of the Russian military is and how their tactics have not improved much if any since the 1980s
They can, but they won't because nobody dares to stick their neck out for fear of losing their job. And that's been going on for decades, the slow dismantling (if there ever was any) of job and income security, to the point where the majority of Americans, including federal workers, are only one or two paychecks away from financial ruin. Nobody wants to lose their job.
Of course, if they get fired and there's nothing else for them to do, there will be uprisings.
> There is almost zero causality in the U.S. government’s hiring and firing right now. Particularly relating to current conduct.
The first firings were all people who knew a guy who knew a guy who wronged Trump. With that kind of retaliatory example, do you not think openly trying to course-correct would result in being fired?
As a matter of personal character, the people who would be more likely to stand up and shout or protest vigorously in today’s situation are the people which society generally considers obnoxious and disruptive.
So in each workplace most were already marginalized or learned to hide these traits for their benefit. There are way more people in the ‘flight’ than the ‘fight’ camp.
Russia is surely involved, but it's pushing on an open door - there's a huge streak of the American right that actually wants this massive catastrophe to befall the US and for the US to become ungovernable and largely ungoverned.
no, they don't, this is a very dumb thing to think.
there's a medium sized chunk the American Right, which has now won, who unrelated to Russia or China or whatever actually want the US to become sci-fi dystopia of authoritarian christo-white-nationalism.
To say that Russia is destabilising the US basically takes the agency of the US out of the equation. Makes the US (the so-called greatest country in the world, so-called leaders of the free world) unaccountable for its own actions.
The US is destabilising itself with the help of Russia.
People like to say that Obamas jokes about Trump got him to run. But I wonder if Obama never helped Ukraine keep their democracy if we still would have ours.
That’s what the successful decades long Russian psyop would want you to believe.
I’m not talking primarily about agent Krasnov allegation from a top Kazakh ex-spook (though that is an actual possibility), but about the well known Russian influence operations by financing what used to be extremists (both far-right and far-left) across the West.
And one day they'll get into an accident, run into the wrong person, or die of old age and then what? Their legacy will be AI generated gold statues and maybe their name on a building.
If they ctually used that wealth to advance the human race (on the ground, not a hypothetical but infeasible future on another planet) that'd be another matter. A percentage of Musk's theoretical wealth can solve every American's financial trouble, give them an education, and make the US great again. But that means giving some of it away and they may need it for... What, anyway? What does Musk use his money for besides buying companies and spawning babies against their will?
At least MBS (an autocrat whose wealth and country are one) spends his money on stupidly large building and opulence like The Line and whatnot, which will either make the UAE the center of world wealth and prosperity, or which will be interesting to archeologists in 2000-4000 years.
> And one day they'll get into an accident, run into the wrong person, or die of old age and then what? Their legacy will be AI generated gold statues and maybe their name on a building.
But that's the problem of the 'capitalist west' (i'm not sure what is better or what would work); everyone is out for short term gain. Most people care about themselves and some of their close family/friends, but in the end, they couldn't give a flying f if the entire planet implodes when they die. We should be planning on a 2000 year timeline as humanity but instead we plan on 4-8 years instead. So far (but that might be reading the wrong propaganda), China seems to have a plan beyond 4 years and beyond Xi's life and not be in such a neckbreaking hurry of breaking everything over a few years more or less.
Or in jail. We’re not at the coup stakes of life and death, but we’re also like two months into this Presidency. (For what it’s worth, Trump isn’t currently being coup-ish. That’s been left to the pretender.)
It doesn't look like they're targeting the right things, given how much they've put into going after the FAA, NHTSA and NOAA. Not exactly dark-state power centers. Rather, they're people who've pissed of Elon specifically.
It seems like they're spending 30% of effort on the areas that are likely to foment a counter-coup and 70% of their time attacking groups they have personal beefs with.
But of course they're not just focusing on the powerless, they're also annoying the powerful enough that I don't see how it ends well for them.
Haha, yeah, it's not like the president hasn't put in 3 of the SCOTUS judges who give him a 6/9 majority. Or replaced the chief joint of staff and each respective head of every military branch and each respective judge of each military branch. Or the head of the FBI or the director of the FBI. Or the secretary of defense. It's not like he once ordered protesters to be shot for a photo op and had to be stopped by people in those very positions saying "no". That would be crazy.
It's not like he's stopping aid to Ukraine while ruminating on dropping sanctions on our second largest enemy state and repeating word-for-word Kremlin talking points after having a prior relationship with their criminal enterprises for his real estate and an intelligence community espouse the use of foreign power to influence his election outcomes. That would be nuts.
It's not like he attempted to overthrow the government when he lost an election 4 years ago, then pardoned the violent criminals who were incarcerated for that act. Or outright saying he will ignore judicial rulings from unfavored judges while making executive orders that change explicitly language in the constitution, with an EO making it illegal for his executive branch employees to oppose his interpretation of law and installing Aparachniks in each agency to report those in non-compliance. That's a loony idea.
It's not like he's destroying all trade partnerships with allies and internal infrastructure/manufacturing investments simultaneously. That would be silly.
Reaching the altitude of space is much, much, easier than reaching orbital velocity.
This meant that during the Global War on Terror, people had legitimate questions about if Al Qaida could damage the ISS. The answer then was "no", but amateurs reached the Kármán line in 2004, students in 2019, and the current altitude record holder is 143 km.
I suspect that it is well within the capacity of random drug cartels in the US, Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Haiti and Jamaica to destroy a Starship during launch, if they so desired.
A functioning US government is a reason not to do that. Nobody in any of those countries will want to risk Musk asking Trump for a favour in the form of a USSOCOM operation.
Destroy a Starship on the pad? Possible. Destroy a Starship during ascent? That's much harder.
There are two problems: You have to have enough greater acceleration that you can catch it, and you have to have good enough targeting (and maneuverability) to actually hit it. Those are highly non-trivial problems.
You don't have to catch it from behind, just put yourself in it's path and let Starship's own kinetic energy cause the damage with your own velocity being nearly stationary vs the ground at the time.
Aiming is one of the easier things: huge target, multi-gigwatt heat signiature.
For an extremely well advertised launch into a predetermined flight path of something which isn't even trying to hide its signature and where you can watch the livestream of the countdown?
Perhaps I'm still underestimating the challenge, but I think boost stage vs Starship is a much less of a challenge than boost stage vs. an actual weapon.
But yeah, given your background, if you say I'm wrong, I know to defer to you on this.
The fact that Musk will probably end up like Hugenberg if nothing changes doesn't make me jump in joy. 2 of every 5 people living in the US don't deserve it (the fifth who voted against and the fifth who can't vote), and I'm quite sad that they will have to bear with it for at least a few months (it took 6 months for Hugenberg to lose his empire and power, but I don't see the long knives happening in the US in the future, so it might take longer). At least the week-long pogrom didn't get a pretty name this time and was quite limited thanks to activists and pissed of neighbours. USians are a lot of things, maybe too passive at times, but cowards they are not.
It used to be that the US government had pride in its own professionalism. The US is now acting like the countries it loves to destabilize.