Also the US literally does not have the capacity to fight a war like that without resorting to nuclear weapons, because after WWII and Korea they realized that indiscriminate leveling of entire cities thing was very expensive and not actually very effective at all, and so they began to pivot towards being able to reliably hit things that might actually be worth hitting while assuming that if things ever got to the point of an apocalyptic total war again then nuclear weapons would do the trick better than large flights of very vulnerable conventional bombers.

And then they went even further into the pricy low-volume wunderwaffen graft as war transitioned from an actual peer/near-peer conflict model to a terroristic "shock and awe" imperial hegemon chest beating model where they need to have just enough reserves to crush any upstart periphery states while settling in for permanent occupations that provide wonderful opportunities for endless graft and exploitation.

And then even that's been rotted away to the point that it struggles with anything longer than the briefest exchanges and none of them have an answer because the failsons running things have forgotten how the industrial economy was all hollowed out for fun and profit and don't understand the concept of simply not having the capacity to produce enough wunderwaffens or even just like normal conventional munitions.

[–] WhatDoYouMeanPodcast@hexbear.net 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think what you said in whole cannot be stressed enough. Indiscriminate killing in Korea and Vietnam is what got us in this mess in the first place. Even if you don't say post WW2 one can say that elevating warfare to its natural conclusion makes the people who did it go "we should make some rules".

I've had this pocket theory disciplined by 0 actual theory that perhaps being too high, fat, and depressed to do warfare is the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice. It's all "men used to go to war" but most everybody who's ever been seems keen on not continuing to do it for its own sake. Hurting people sucks and no matter how much you dehumanize them nobody sans 3 or 4 fuckos seems to relish in causing death.

The way war is done now is absolutely a response to how it has been done and the super structure around them. Nobody worth their salt is accusing people of not murdering hard enough

[–] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

the IOF seems pretty gleeful, but i don't know how much stock to take in the occasional reporting we hear about trash taking itself out

[–] WhatDoYouMeanPodcast@hexbear.net 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I can cite that there are IDF soldiers who do the atrocities who absolutely suffer the ghosts of the people they torture and the morbidity and mortality that comes with it.

And the glee around them is absolutely fucked up. You'll never see me calling isntrael a well-adjusted culture.

[–] TreadOnMe@hexbear.net 15 points 1 week ago

The problem with "running lean" is that it is extremely difficult to rapidly ramp up your capacity, because if you are running lean that forces your suppliers to run lean, which trickles down the entire supply chain. So even if you want to suddenly ramp up your capacity, your supplier suddenly has to ramp up theirs, and their supplier etc. etc. and suddenly you have three to four different corporate entities that have to ramp up their capacities, independent of each other, without the ability to truely communicate. It's almost as though the only way this works is through either the Fordist model of vertical integration (which is considered extremely inefficient by modern profiteers) or a command economy (which is bad and communist).