nys

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nys
@nys
This post has content warnings for: ranting about the blindness americans seem to have towards their own empire.

rotsharp
@rotsharp

not counting the secret ones

a fun* thing to do is to ask people how many bases the us has in other countries

then ask them how many bases china or russia have in other countries. idk what the numbers are now but last time i looked, china and russia have somewhere around 10. combined. it is absurd to believe anything other than the patent truth that the united states is constantly threatening the whole world in a manner so obvious it would be trite if it were written for a cartoon villain

*not fun at all. bring citations, handouts, and pepper spray


nys
@nys

threatening? you misunderstand this is for their protection and not because our defensive strategy has been—since when we “freed” Indonesia and Guam—to create a first line of defense in other countries. definitely not so that any troop movement would be vulnerable to flanking and harassment by our sphere of defense, without risking our country at all. nonsense. preposterous. and these certainly aren’t methods by which we constantly create enemies that mean we have to stay because it’s not safe.


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in reply to @nys's post:

in reply to @rotsharp's post:

I was hanging out with some “national security pros” who work in DC & when they’ve had a couple drinks they will explicitly say they are an empire. “We are the new Rome.”
(At least, the upper management types do)

pretty sure the reason we aren’t in a near peer war is because (other than nuclear weapons) there is a (dwindling) group of high level people (a surprisingly high percentage are from the military) working tirelessly to push back against those conflicts. It’s why when trump dismantled the state dept and we a lost a lot of that soft power, i got very worried about what was gonna happen. the horror stories i can’t tell because they would reveal specific people about arguments that have happened at high levels in the funny shaped building and state. chilling.

i dont doubt it but a structural reason it doesnt happen is that the american global military presence is monstrously expensive at relative rest

can you imagine if we were faced with actual attrition and had to pick up the draft again to maintain numbers? that is a thing americans wouldnt stand for. we dont give a shit about war crimes by and large but hoo boy if the military became a place you went to die instead of a career again, you would be asking for another vietnam

if we had to ever make good on our threats of force projection, especially on multiple fronts? i think it would crumble because fighting wars is not what the us military is for, it is for blowing up weddings and installing puppets

oh yeah i am not saying that more than a few are doing it out of any goodness but it’s more frightening that there are the people that only see the dollar signs or people’s lives to be traded (at that scale) to put these other countries in their place.

i am not sure if any top level military in the world is designed for a prolonged shooting war. if you look at the ethos between the US and China/Russia you’ll see the US is about defense while the others have eschewed larger traditional navies for land based anti-navy force. but even those have limits. what happens after you’ve launched the 160 of the 250ish hypersonic cruise missiles you’ve built to get saturation necessary to overwhelm/penetrate the defenses of a carrier group? and on the US side it’s basically the same but what do you do now that those VLS cells are empty? i think it’s why directed energy weapons have gotten so much funding because the US knows we can’t reliably protect a carrier group from a “dance of the vampires” type situation with a true saturation attack.

in a way it’s funny because we have 5000 m1 abrams tanks (that the pentagon is begging congress to stop buying) and the most likely threat will be from some small shore drone or the chinese swarm boats they’ve built. what happens when we outspend them by a huge factor on each engagement? the capitalist brain rot is insane and decent sections of the high levels of our leadership know it but can do nothing ironically because of the civilian control of the budget. again, not to say the military isn’t “oooh shiny” but it’s taking us so long to get the AIM-120D3 into operation bc we stopped actually innovating on missile tech until China released their PL-15 and all of a sudden every non-stealth aircraft is outranged by 40 miles. even supposing (incorrectly) that this is all a good way to spend money, it’s clear the military industrial complex is not based in reality.

also? those missiles contain parts from 15? different countries? how will we maintain production in a true war? honestly it’s why trump scares me so much.

The “could USA afford a real war” bit reminds me of a recurring segment in Bombshell podcast where they’d recount the latest naval training accident & lament just how underfunded the existing force was, just sitting ready. Actual mobilization seems…potentially not doable?

The things I could tell you about how the Pentagon used to do force readiness analysis (imagine the least efficient method for collating that data, it was worse). Hooboy. Suffice to say it is far better than it was. If this was 2017/2018 I’d be very much in agreement but I’d cautiously say we could do reasonable mobilization to a war footing nowadays. With the major caveat being that this is in absence of interference which, given current estimates of suborned US service members and cyber readiness would be a major issue to overcome.

honestly i’ve wondered how they get the estimates as well. i’ve recently seen a report that estimated roughly 20-25k active duty service members have some level of compromise. i am having a hard time locating the source though.

far more distressing is the state of our cybersecurity. due to the heavy outsourcing of contracts to external profit-driven companies (there are roughly 300k military contractors) we are uniquely vulnerable. The DoD is notoriously tight lipped though their 1 year hackerone pilot for 41 contractors resulted in the disclosure of 401 validated reports. It’s hard to find data on the scale of the US defense industry but we can look to equivalently dispersed industries and reports they have produced. This is also small but luckily a (relatively) recent report on the state of corporate security was published by softbank around 2018 (? google has gotten so bad for results older than a year) but the general rule of thumb is that subsidiaries implement roughly 60-70% of the security controls of the parent company and something like only 30% of the security protocols are accomplishing their goal. that’s changed in some ways but in others our supply chains have gotten more and more insecure (see: Solarwinds hack). I don’t have access to the cybersecurity sources I used to because I work in a new field and a different company (and I would be hesitant to share internal reports externally anyways) but it’s definitely something the US is concerned about.