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Nowhere is safe

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Re: Nowhere is safe

#311

Post by dTal »

fingerlocks wrote: post #310
dTal wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing comments that refer to Iranians as "brown people" - usually to emphasize their perceived "otherness" by the ignorant, as in this case. But Iranians aren't brown, or Arab apart from a small minority, and relatively speaking their culture isn't even that "other" - it would probably feel more familiar to the average American than some European countries even. Do Americans really hear "Iran" and think of du…

Correct, “Iran” literally translates to “Ayran”. But America is a big place. Americans living in cities probably know a first or second gen Persian, there’s lots of them everywhere. They even have a reality TV show. Outside the urban archipelago the average person couldn’t tell you the difference from India, Turkey. and everything in between.

*Aryan - Ayran is Turkish buttermilk :)

Re: Nowhere is safe

#312

Post by anovikov »

verdverm wrote: post #277
anovikov wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only trick is Hormuz strait blocking by Iran... and it's very hard to tackle without a land invasion which Trump is reluctant to execute. Nothing else Iran could possibly do, matters at all.

> Nothing else Iran could possibly do, matters at all. This is a naive belief and contains the same hubris as Trump held when entering this war. They have also destroyed billing of US military planes and radars on the ground, taken US company data centers in the region offline, and damaged refineries for oil, aluminum, and water (desalination). They can still get missiles and drones through air defenses in the region…

[flagged]

Re: Nowhere is safe

#313

Post by maxglute »

carlosjobim wrote: post #268
maxglute wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's borderline nonsense scenario. Superpowers aren't going to be existentially invaded via lesser proxy. We're talking about being quagmired in war of choice where proxys being supplied. Lots of escalation rungs up the ladder that run before looping into superpower vs superpower peer conflict.

That's the scenario of the article. He suggests putting all US infrastructure in tunnels, bunkers, and in space, to protect it from Chinese drones. I say, how about bombing the drone factories. Which idea do you think is more realistic? Have you started digging?

Obviously the former, hint: that's what PRC is doing, basically Third Front 2.0. The retardation of the second is instead of fighting an underpowered proxy with limited CONUS strike you fight a peer power with enhanced CONUS strike, see latest China Power report that suggests all west coast is open to PRC conventional global strikes. In the mean time, PRC IS hardening and digging, (and distributing) - corollary to that is they aren't sunk cost in US naval/airforce model that requires physical sanctuary and can in fact build out entire survivable underground prompt global strike complex with high end rocketry, i.e. you can shelter TELs but not carriers (maybe b21s).

The real answer is of course, do as much of A as feasible and simply accept/recognize technology has made fortress America increasingly obsolete. CONUS vulnerability is baked into the medium term tech stack and will increasingly constrain US expeditionary model. Nevermind PRC drone factories, irbms and shaheed tier poverty moped drones that can hit CONUS is well within Monroe countries industrial capabilities, and the techstack is only going to get more commoditized with time. It's not just PRC US has to worry about, it's general global tech uplifting/proliferation. So what can US do to protect CONUS... harden CONUS at extreme cost... and restrain itself because blowback 10-20 years from now is not some terrorist attack on CONUS soil but PADD3 refineries going boom.

Re: Nowhere is safe

#314

Post by esseph »

dragonelite wrote: post #287
esseph wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> struggling against Iran Idk what to tell you, but any target that seems to get marked in Iran blows the fuck up. > couldn't outproduce Russia on the battlefield ??? What does this even mean? It's not like the US is in a wartime economy.

The Russians have been blowing up what ever they want in Ukraine for like 4 years now. Yet Ukrainians are still holding on. Its well reported in the western press that the US and Europe haven't been able to outproduce the Russian side regarding shells, drones and missiles etc.

> Its well reported in the western press that the US and Europe haven't been able to outproduce the Russian side regarding shells, drones and missiles etc.

I don't think either the US or the EU have even tried to ramp up production that much. Only one of the countries listed here are in somewhat of a "wartime economy".

Re: Nowhere is safe

#315

Post by maxglute »

XorNot wrote: post #245
maxglute wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's borderline nonsense scenario. Superpowers aren't going to be existentially invaded via lesser proxy. We're talking about being quagmired in war of choice where proxys being supplied. Lots of escalation rungs up the ladder that run before looping into superpower vs superpower peer conflict.

The scenario being unlikely doesn't make the OP's point irrelevant: the situation you see today is because that scenario doesn't happen , and it doesn't happen because countries are relatively circumspect about the way in which their military aid is deployed for exactly this reason.

I'm not questioning relevancy, but escalatory logic. CONUS vulnerability is going to increase with mid/high end missile/drone proliferation. But skipping over proxy fight vs lesser adversaries with limited CONUS strike capabilities vs peer adversaries with significant CONUS strike capabilities is not particularly sound. Now it may get there if existential, but that's far from first run on escalation ladder.

Re: Nowhere is safe

#316

Post by psd1 »

spwa4 wrote: post #262
majormajor wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the "petrodollar" exactly prop up the US dollar? The price of a barrel of oil has oscillated quite a bit in dollar terms, so it's not like there's anything like a fixed or artificially-maintained 'exchange rate' there. There's, what, a 10x swing between highest and lowest USD price of oil in the last 10 years alone? The dollar has fluctuated vs other currencies too. I've never fully followed how trading for…

I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion from the comment. How can you read that comment and not conclude that this is the way of thinking from before "Pax Americana"? They are talking about "wealth extraction" ... in other words, free labor (not money), without paying. In other words, slavery. Nations used to fight for extracting tax, and with it free labor, from each other, and that situation was pervasive, and…

> Before WW2, France and England extracted (a LOT of) tax, without doing anything, from Germany

If you mean Versailles, there was a little kerfuffle leading up to that, called WWI.

Re: Nowhere is safe

#318

Post by poulpy123 »

_heimdall wrote: post #257
brianjlogan wrote: post #15

Hmm... Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict. Despite the proxy wars we've had a relatively peaceful world since WW1/WW2. Please humor me here, I'm not saying the world is horror free. The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people. Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peac…

I've never understood the post-WWII goal of permanent peace. Its a great vision to have, but unless its completely infeasible. Unless we've managed to find ourselves alive at the point in all of history where humanity forever abandoned war all together, there will be another war at some point. That doesn't mean it needs to happen today or that fighting to sustain peace isn't an admirable, and necessary, action to tak…

> I've never understood the post-WWII goal of permanent peace. Its a great vision to have, but unless its completely infeasible.

You have to be an American sheltered from any war on your soil for 150 years to not understand the goal of permanent peace.

Re: Nowhere is safe

#319

Post by TheGRS »

cicko wrote: post #97
TheGRS wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Globalization offered the model for this. When the economy is globally linked there is more pressure for stability than conflict. I think that theory still holds. The fallout of the last 10 years is that the distribution of the wealth created in that system has not been even at all, and we are seeing huge wealth gaps. Jobs were redistributed to poorer nations and lost in a lot of wealthier markets. If nations can sol…

So the problem is that people in poor countries are finally not starving but not that the person with a chainsaw owns hundreds of billions of dollars?

How'd you get that from what I wrote? I literally said the problem is that the wealth created was not redistributed. The issue is that the masses suffer and elect people who are ill-suited to solve their problems.

Re: Nowhere is safe

#320

Post by TheGRS »

pedalpete wrote: post #103
TheGRS wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Globalization offered the model for this. When the economy is globally linked there is more pressure for stability than conflict. I think that theory still holds. The fallout of the last 10 years is that the distribution of the wealth created in that system has not been even at all, and we are seeing huge wealth gaps. Jobs were redistributed to poorer nations and lost in a lot of wealthier markets. If nations can sol…

I agree with your comment regarding fairer distribution, but I think when we look at globalisation's impact on war, I'm not sure this is really playing out. Iran has not benefitted hugely from globalisation (unless I'm missing something), however because of globalisation and their ability to impact the global economy, they have an outsized hand to play relative to their GDP.

Did Iran as a country participate in the global economy outside of trading their commodities? Commodity trading existed well before the global economy and was often a cause for wars. I was under the impression Iran was fairly shut down from the rest of the world economically and culturally.
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