Tervell

we've been having some discourse on Chinese foreign policy and the potential (or lack thereof) of Chinese military support for other countries in this thread (the subthread from @Boise_Idaho@hexbear.net's comment downwards)

not sure if that's an appropriate example, but we're just entering territory and I thought I'd draw attention to it. any other input or takes would be appreciated, I've perhaps gone too hard for the lack thereof side and I'm so I may have missed something

I think you've misunderstood my argument about US military power (or I haven't made myself clear, the comments are getting kind of long ) - the US's superior airlift capacity and airpower doesn't necessarily translate to them being able to easily steamroll anyone. My argument is just that Russia or China have a very limited capacity to meaningfully help, in a direct military way (rather than just selling weapons), a country far from them, which presents complications in the formation of any prospective alliances, as it's difficult for those countries to justify entering into such an arrangement with someone who won't even be able to help them that much. We should note that alliances between countries that aren't in close geographic vicinity have been relatively rare throughout history.

This doesn't mean that those countries are helpless by themselves, or even that what limited Chinese/Russian aid could be provided would be worthless - the US may have superior airlift capacity, but it's still not infinite, and airpower by itself doesn't win wars. It has long been the fantasy of Strategic Air Command ghouls that if only they were given enough gajilions of dollars, eventually the US would never again need to risk a single soldier and would just be able to bomb anyone into submission, but that has so far not materialized - eventually, some actual fighting on the ground has to happen for any strategic results to actually be achieved. The US has a capacity to deploy troops that no-one else has, but the deployment itself doesn't equal victory

(This is a further point as to why it's difficult to justify developing this capability - all these resources spent, and it doesn't even guarantee you that you'd be able to do anything other than bully countries which are practically city states like Grenada and Panama. Only real sicko ghouls would bother... And again, a historical note - the very idea that a state could military aid one so far away within a reasonable timeframe has only been a thing for less than a century, back in the day you'd be like a Roman client kingdom and wait for several years for some consul to mobilize a bunch of legions and drag their ass over to Asia Minor or wherever).

Ideally, everyone could get together and go "we can very slightly help each other out", and make arrangements, but it's just hard to do so in practice - any security guarantees by Russia or China just wouldn't be treated very seriously, since they wouldn't be able to guarantee all that much. Russia even did have bases in Syria, and the country still fell (although that had more to do with its own military collapsing - the Russians did bomb the hell out of the HTS forces, but this in fact proves exactly the point I made above, airpower doesn't win wars, someone has to fight down on the ground, and if those guys give up...). China's last experience with this kind of stuff is what, tributary kingdoms in the 18th century? Well, I guess we can count the Korean war in a way, but "hundreds of thousands died and we ended up with the country split in two" isn't a scenario anyone would want to emulate - we can recognize how impressive it is for the North Korean and Chinese forces to have achieved even this given the imperial might they were facing, but "we can get things down to a stalemate, very bloodily" still just isn't a very enticing offer to other countries.

So, countries in the region wouldn't necessarily be willing to accept anything (again, there has to be input from the protected country, you can't just go declaring that you guarantee this or that country without telling them first), and I kind of doubt the West would really take such things seriously anyway, given their rabid dog behavior - how many "red lines" have they crossed in Ukraine? The Europeans are on the cusp of discrediting their entire banking system just to keep Ukrainian financials going.

The Soviets could have more credibly given proper guarantees, but current Russia or China cannot. And if they do give guarantees, the US acts anyway, and the guarantors are exposed as not being able to actually provide meaningful counters, it would make them even less credible (and this has already happened to some extent for Russia, with the Syria kerfuffle as mentioned above, as well as the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict).

As for the bombings - we still don't really know how much meaningful damage was actually done. Recently the Israelis came out with a statement that they overestimated the damage they did (although we of course have to consider the possibility of this just being more "they're literally days away from developing a nuke" propaganda to justify more military action). I don't think it makes sense to frame this as some completely geopolitics-upending move. The US being able to sneak in and hit a few highly specific targets doesn't prove they'd be able run a sustained bombing campaign - and again, airpower doesn't win wars.

The thing about defense networks is that they have to be reciprocal - Iran entering into such a pact would benefit their defense, but also potentially drag them into other conflicts. Military alliance between co-equal partners (rather than a hegemon and its vassals) inherently involves the sacrifice of some degree of sovereignty - and not all countries are willing to do that. The DPRK weighed these aspects and accepted a treaty with Russia, and did indeed end up having to deploy troops to fight Ukraine, as well as in more ancillary roles (I think there was something about them helping with mine-clearing?). Would the Iranian government have been fine with sending soldiers over to Kursk? How would the Iranian populace have reacted?

This is what always annoys me about the "China/Russia should have aided X country" discourse, it seems to ignore that the X country in question kind of has to ask for aid in the first place - has there been indication that the Iranians asked for such support and were rebuffed? You generally can't just start leaving missile systems at someone's doorstep like a cat with dead mice. You can't just walk up to another country and go "we're in an alliance now" (again, unless you're the hegemon and just giving your vassal an order). There's a reason the US did so many coups and interventions and other schemes - the actual populaces of many of the countries in which the US has a presence didn't exactly agree with the idea, and had to be suppressed. Would the Iranians accept Chinese or Russian bases on their territory?

Alliances are a fraught affair, and their history is full of switching sides, refusing calls when war actually starts, and lots of ass covering (even NATO's famous Article 5 that bloodthirsty chuds love to meme about is deliberately phrased as "such action as [the country] deems necessary", because no-one sane would actually sign onto absolutely irrevocably having to fight WW3 because some Baltic dipshit started shit, they want to keep their options open).

although Russia is being forced to do so in Ukraine and is seemingly capable of holding off the entire NATO/Collective West, so I wouldn’t write them off just yet

Fighting off an enemy close to your home-turf is very different from being able to sustain a military campaign on the other end of the world. The logistical strain is much lesser, reinforcements can be brought in much faster, troop morale can be kept up more easily as they have a very direct and easily comprehensible idea of why they're fighting which they wouldn't necessarily have overseas. Ukraine has also conducted this war in a rather sub-optimal manner for political reasons (although admittedly, given the glacial pace at which NATO militaries are learning lessons from it, they'd probably perform even worse).

So, yes, I won’t deny that the US is still ahead, but that doesn’t mean China and Russia cannot provide the defense cooperation that they did more than half a century ago. What made the US imperialists feared Mao was his willingness to fight a “10,000 years war with the imperialists”.

Okay, but treaties for defense cooperation are meaningless without the actual military capacity to provide said cooperation. The Soviets could, conceivably, deploy a decent amount of troops and assets to help protect some faraway country, because they had made substantial investments to develop that exact capability. They were still far behind the Americans even after all these investments, and this clearly did not help to stop a wide variety of American military interventions.

Today, Russia and China have way less capability than the Soviets had (although fortunately, as mentioned above, American capability is decaying as well). There's simply not much they can actually promise any prospective alliance partner - they can sell them equipment (which both countries are in fact doing, although Russian exports have somewhat slowed down due to the need to prioritize arming their own military), but as for sending allied troops (or air-defense systems, which would still involve personnel to staff them) over in an actual war? They just don't have that much capacity for it. The only viable thing would be a full-hog "you invade Iran, we invade Taiwan and the entire Pacific" (or in Russia's case, "we invade, uh, Europe I guess?") type deal - which is:

1. A type of deal that no-one's actually entered into since WW1. As mentioned above, even NATO isn't this kind of deal - and if, God forbid, we do get a real escalation into WW3, that "such action as deems necessary" part is going to be tested pretty hard, and we're going to see a whole lot of interpretations of "deems necessary". The fucking Axis in WW2 wasn't that kind of deal - Bulgaria didn't join the war against the Soviets, and Hitler had to do a whole diplomatic charm offensive of "just one more offensive bro, this time we'll finish them, I promise" to get Italy and Romania to commit troops for the push into the Caucasus.

2. What good does that do the invaded country? Like, yes, certainly some of the invader's resources will be diverted to handling the other front that just opened up, but they're still getting invaded! Again, referring back to WW1 - what happened to Serbia? The Entente wasn't able to deploy forces to actual Serbian territory in time, they got defeated and occupied, and had a good dose of ethnic cleansing done to them for good measure. So again, bringing back the fact that a pact ought to be reciprocal - why would Iran, or any country for that matter, enter into an alliance which can only promise them "well, in the long run we'd win! (notwithstanding any brutal occupations you might have to suffer in the meantime)". Ostensibly, there should be a deterrence effect, but you're betting a lot on that - and, well, that was the deal with the whole network of treaties European powers had prior to WW1, and look where that got us.

And I again have to bring up popular support - it's easy for Mao to make declarations about millennium long wars, but how would the Chinese people, after decades of civil war and warlordism, and an incredibly brutal war with Japan, have actually handled getting into one? Intervening in Korea's one thing, this would be another. Like, we do the whole "Stalin shouldn't have stopped at Berlin" bit, it's a fun joke, but the reality is that war exhaustion is in fact a real thing, and the world war getting restarted and having to continue for years more would have rather disastrous consequences for the Soviet home front (there was literally already a famine happening!). Don't we, in our efforts to counter anti-communist propaganda, constantly talk about how communist countries weren't totalitarian dictatorships and were, in fact, in a lot of ways more genuinely democratic compared to liberal "democracies"? Communist countries can't just declare global anti-imperialist jihad willy-nilly, as much as we might think it would be cool and based for them to do so (the "we" here being a group mostly living in the imperialist countries that would, hopefully, be getting defeated, thus saving "us" the trouble of having to build an actual communist movement at home since millions of people from the developing world will instead have spilled their blood to win that battle)

Just assign a tank with the team then

The trouble is that modern Abramses weight like 67 tonnes, which is getting them into Tiger II territory. Their strategic mobility isn't very good, and their logistical costs are really high due to the amount of fuel they burn as well as the maintenance of such complex machines. Sometimes (or in fact, very often) you just need a mobile somewhat-armored cannon to lob HE shells at bunkers and the like, and all the bells and whistles of a modern Western MBT just aren't necessary (and if fact, become counter-productive due to all the extra weight and complexity), so several militaries have been looking into lighter vehicles focused more on infantry support.

The Stryker MGS is one of the worse ones, since the chassis just really wasn't designed for all that weight, but the base idea of a wheeled fire-support vehicle isn't completely stupid, and there have been more successful examples. There've also been developments into fire support vehicles based on tracked IFV chassis - the US itself had such a program, which of course got cancelled shortly after adoption

Now, the proper solution to this problem is to just not make your tanks the fucking Tiger II, and keep them to a reasonable weight and cost, like the Russians have done, but y'know, can't have that. (although tbf, Russia also fields the BMP-3 as an IFV armed with a 100mm cannon, so they kind of already have that fire support capability in vehicles lighter than tanks baked in)

The real, historical task remains: to abolish the social instruments and privileges that gave rise to Stalinism through political revolution and the international organisation of the working class.

wait wait wait, I thought we were abolishing capitalism?!

abstract prohibitions on violence toward a tyrant

Organisation and independence: the working class must develop its own political independence and revolutionary leadership, not rely on individual “great men” or secretive acts

which is why we killed 8 billion people to save Trotsky in order to "not sacrifice the living continuity of a revolutionary program and leadership"

do they straight-up have some Elon-esque hardcoding that the bot must never besmirch Trotsky, lmao

Are you telling me that China today can only competently protect its interest in Eurasia only if it has numerical advantage to the US?

China can certainly protect its own territory and its immediate vicinity - but what capacity does it have to actually deploy forces further away, like, say, to Iran, or even further away, to some Latin American country now that the US is flexing its muscle in that region more visibly? There's a reason the US fields literally tens as many times worth of heavy transport aircraft compared to other countries (https://hexbear.net/post/6836613/6714558#%3A%7E%3Atext=massive+transport+aircraft+like+this+are+a+very+US-specific+niche).

The Soviets back in the day made major investments in their airborne forces precisely because they realized, especially after Cuba, that they didn't have much capacity at all to project power outside of Europe - if the Americans actually had done a ground invasion, there wasn't much the Soviets could do (other than escalate to nukes, of course, but that's not exactly the ideal scenario). However, that capacity has of course substantially degraded in the post-Soviet years. China, on the other hand, never had such capacity in the first place, although they have been building it up recently - even so, their heaviest airlift aircraft, introduced a little over a decade ago, has less capacity than the lighter American one. I posted some time ago about some (alleged) deal with the Russians focused precisely on the development of airborne forces, so if that's true, it's a further indication of China working towards improvements in that area, but it'd still be a long way off from actually bearing results.

We can mock the US for its corrupt MIC and decaying equipment and recruitment crisis all we want, but at the end of the day, they are still the only power actually capable of deploying and sustaining large military forces at great distances. There are different kinds of military power - life isn't a videogame, where we can just quantify militaries as some abstract number of points and say "well, country A has more points than country B so they'd win" (although honestly, even strategy games still have the concept of different factions with different strengths, so even that isn't the best comparison... now that I remember, Red Alert 2 literally had America's faction-unique power being free paratroopers they could drop anywhere).

Whatever capabilities Russia and China might have, they simply cannot compete with the US when it comes to faraway deployments. It's unfortunate, but such capacity is very expensive to build up and sustain (in fact, the US itself is now struggling with it - USAF plan to fly C-5, C-17s even longer elicits concern), and countries that aren't imperial hegemons will find it pretty difficult to justify such investments - the Soviets could, since they were competing with the US, but even still, they couldn't reach anywhere near the American levels of airlift capacity, and of course Russia today is no USSR.

I guess we can hope that with American reindustrialization unlikely to happen, their airlift capacity will slowly wither away and eventually China will end up superior just by virtue of actually continuing to build planes (as has pretty much already happened with sealift capacity). But in the immediate moment, the US is still ahead.

https://xcancel.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1999892823210947002

Is a US power crisis unfolding?

Power demand is expected to exceed available electric generation at peak moments by 2028. Peak demand is projected to reach 1,160 gigawatts, above the 1,158 gigawatts of anticipated supply. By 2033, the power capacity shortfall could widen to as much as 175 gigawatts, a level that materially threatens grid stability. This would stem from peak demand rising to 1,229 gigawatts, while anticipated peak supply declines to 1,128 gigawatts. The US is facing a surge in electricity use from AI data centers, factories, and EVs that is expected to overwhelm generation capacity and drain emergency reserves, sharply increasing the risk of outages and blackouts.

We need more power.

https://archive.ph/H9mtU

Switzerland reduces F-35 buy after $610 million price hike

"Due to foreseeable additional costs, it is not financially viable to maintain the originally planned number" of aircraft, said a Swiss statement.

https://archive.ph/51Rpk

GAO finds V-22 ‘serious accident’ rate shot up in 2023, 2024

The GAO's report was published the same day that the Navy released its own report on the V-22, saying it was committed to the program.

is the 3rd one supposed to be implying that the drone is responsible for breaking the chains? y'know, drones, famed symbol of freedom in the Middle East

:david-mitchell-WE-USED-TO-MAKE-STEEL: https://archive.ph/HVLib

Every Hull Different - Challenger 3 Program Faces Nightmare Of Inconsistent Old Frames

Britain wants build Challenger 3 on old Challenger 2 hulls, revealing both old machine wear and production quality problems

HAHAHAH https://archive.ph/ROeX0

Britain’s nuclear submarine fleet ‘no longer fit for purpose’

Former Navy chief calls for ‘radical’ action to revive programme after catastrophic failures