I recommend that we all stop referring to Communist China, and start referring to National Socialist China, because that's closer to what they are.
I want loopholes! And so I will try some nitpicks, not out of any sense of personal competence in this area, but just looking for less woe.
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The business of switching from manufacturing consumer and commercial goods to making war machines has changed dramatically from the Roosevelt days. Military contractors tend to be more dedicated to doing just military stuff than in days past. In the US the mindset for military contracting is completely alien to the market world because the federal government is both purchaser and investor. (I have seen this personally, as I used to be in that world.)
The US of the 1930s was super peacetime. Recall the Kellogg Briand pact, and how pacifist the American Right was. On the other hand, we had mothballed a lot of industrial capacity due to the Great Depression. Today, military equipment is what supports the US dollar as you have pointed out in past posts. This might be an anti loophole!
On the gripping hand, we have some capabilities mothballed from the Cold War days. And we have a vast reservoir of potential factory labor and cannon fodder in the form of able bodied welfare recipients and tough guys twiddling their thumbs in jail. There are also many mothballed factories on the civilian side from our policy of Subsidized Outsourcing.
Finally, America has grown mighty soft. But if war becomes existential, we could harden up substantially. If we accept that casualties are going to happen, we could take a more Total Quantity Management approach to fighter planes, for example. We could offer military service as an alternative to prison for street toughs, like we did in the old days. We could give drill sergeants real power to punish for such recruits. We also have a vast reservoir of illegal immigrants. A policy of Go Fight or Go Home would give us a foreign legion real quick.
But could we transition fast enough? Or could we recruit real allies in time, say a remilitarization of Japan or an official alliance with Vietnam?
In my previous comment I suggested calling China a national socialist state, and for good reason. But national socialism gets tricky when you govern more than one nation. You can do all the flag waving and patriotism drills you want, but if you govern more than one fatherland, something is going to ring hollow.
Just today I got a clickbait post on Facebook from some site with language based maps. One of them was for China, and it showed a large swath of the southeast which did not speak Mandarin. (Sorry, I don't have the link handy now.)
This takes me back to an old memory from grad school, where there were many students from "communist" China. One who shared my office was quite insistent that I know that he was from Shanghai; he didn't want to be thought of as merely Chinese. The full significance escaped me at the time.
Back to that map: I think Taiwan was linguistically closer to Shanghai and related parts of southeast China. Enthusiasm for an invasion of Taiwan may be less than enthusiastic.
But, you might say, China has included the southeast for much of the past 2000+ years. How could it be a different nation?
Well, by virtue of astrological alignment, there is this recent book review on Scott Alexander's blog:
China has many centuries as an empire, and with a Deep State of Extraordinary Magnitude at that. But the book review linked above indicates that there was also a great degree of local governance, and Imperial government paid attention to Taoist philosophy, which seems rather more libertarian than what we associate with China. Perhaps that semi-libertarian mysticism was their version of federalism.
So maybe, just maybe, there will be problems with a national socialist China going into expansionistic mode.
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But before ye get too much hope, note that half the US has lost faith in its unifying principles. We are not a single nation and never have been. We have lost both the Constitution and the Protestant Consensus as unifying principles.
I'm just suggesting that China might have similar problems, not that we have any advantage in this regard. Or, to be more precise, our disadvantage might not be as bad as it seems at first glance.
The southern Chinese are still Han for the most part, if I recall correctly. Their written language is close enough, as are the Taiwanese (with difficulty in the latter case, as I have seen personally.) Cantonese, their dialect, however, might as well be a different language in terms of mutual spoken comprehension if they have not learned both, according to the mainland Chinese teacher who taught Mandarin in my high school. (By the by, Mandarin is a fun language to learn about, though anyone who wants fluency in it without having a great reason to is mad, I believe.)
Tibetan and Uyghurs are not Chinese, and there a LOT of other minorities in one way or another. But by and large they are a very homogenous culture and people, with a huge density of *their* people where they care most about, and the will to displace or kill anyone who will not toe the line from about the those they conquer/import/tolerate as riffraff.
China will have huge problems exerting military power overseas outside of their region, but more of the economic, financial, spiritual/ideological, and demographic kinds. I seem to recall their population actually began contracting a few years before COVID, according to their leaked internal memos based on revised demographic data. Even with the easing of the One Child Policy, no one wants more kids because the economy/society are structured to disincentivize it heavily. The huge debt bubbles (there is more than one) they are facing mirror the US's. The infrastructure is new... but crumbling rapidly due to graft and legal structures such as lacking private property protections.
All in all, the US and China going to war would be like two elderly, armless drunks smacking each other with their broken denture held in their gums. Lots of blood and gnashing of teeth, and one might even fall over dead from his liver cancer during the fight, but still sad and pitiable (and a little funny too.)
The Ukrainians and Russians are both Slavic. Last I checked they aren't getting along so well.
The Germans and the French use the same Roman alphabet. The French and the English have a huge number of shared words.
The effects of the One Child policy are ambiguous. On the one had, it produced a lot of Only Children. Not ideal for cannon fodder. On the other hand, it produced a huge imbalance between men and women. In some respects it's rather surprising that China has gone imperialist for that reason alone. Lots of pretty ladies that look close enough to Chinese in places like Thailand, Vietnam and the Phillipines...
Yes, but the question was "are they a nation." They are of the same ethnic background, ruled by the same government, with a culture that has largely homogenized at least among the greater masses due to rapid urbanization and mass education/media, with a shared history and shared values...
They are a nation. They have imperial territories, certainly, but they represent a smaller proportion relative to the central population than the American Empire. Even before America's Empire, America was less of a unified nation.
I do expect an implosion of China long term, but not imminently, and not for that reason. More "Solomon driving the people too hard and his heir breaking the camel's back" than "ethnic tensions."
I think it's a very smart call, from an analysis perspective, to label the PRC a national socialist state - small letters. This is exactly how they conduct themselves - the Marxist/Leninist/(even)Maoist stuff is merely window dressing. Deng and Zhou Enlai oversaw this transition - they knew communist is consumptive/extractive, but national socialism builds the socialism part with the energy of the nationalism part. In 2002, after a sabbatical in China, I authored a paper about PRC being national socialist. My home university thought it was great, but when I went to present it at national forum, Mr. Mega-Professor laughed at it and wouldn't allow me to present. I still stand by it. Couldn't understand why people couldn't see it, but then, that was a time when I though the USA was a serious country.
The Chinese are a Civilization first, and a State only insofar as they continue being a Civilization proper. This means that if the Westphalian model is "overcome" by something else (a la being able to generate the results, outcomes, etc that they want) they will pursue that without worry.
It is a 'world unto itself', in that it has existed coherently for well over 5000+ years. The only other peoples who have a similar temperament and history would be the Indosphere and Indic Civilization, whose peoples although currently fractured into a large India and a couple of smaller states such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc; are basically of that mindset.
India cannot be called a "nation" either thus. It has 22 Official languages (hundred more unofficial), several hundred ethnicities, vastly divergent cultural mores if one travels even 30-40 miles on average, etc. However, this "pool of chaos" (from the Western lens) is nevertheless united.
Again, it's the same situation- Westphalianism is just expedient (at least for now). I fully expect it be chucked out in favour of something more resembling "empire" in the future by these Two Historically Dominant Masses of Humanity (i.e. the Sinosphere and Indosphere).
And this will not be a pair of "expansionary" empires (given the last few thousand years of how these peoples have conducted themselves). Rather, it will be two "genocidal" ones. The Han (the second dynasty who had China-proper under them) were born in a similar manner, so too were the Maurya (who had most of the Subcontinent under their suzerainty).
For the Han, it was the genocide of the Xiongnu (who ran away Westwards and whose descendants sacked Rome eventually given the genocide from 300+ years prior hardening their resolve) and for the Maurya it was the massacre of the Kalingans and other "forest dwellers" who unfortunately were not lucky enough to run away or escape.
Any Global War will by necessity involve a Pearl Harbour style Nuclear Strike by the Yankees on the Chinese people (their military planners know that someone producing 10x more steel than them will Rape them lest they Strike First and annihilate the 'Dirty Y******'). The reasoning will be that if they vaporize 200+ million people, they will buckle and sue for peace.
It's actually driven by a similar set of reasonings (i.e. "They are not a Nation, it's just an Empire"). Sadly for the Murican Yankee, a Civilization and "world unto itself" is a stronger Unit than a mere Westphalian "nation". The last 5000+ years of Human History has proven this decisively.
And it will end ultimately with Eurasian coalition forces having tens of millions of boots on the ground in CONUS-proper going door to door, street to street, ditch to ditch eliminating the "vile Anglo-Saxon wretches who nuked our peoples". Motivation is not needed here.
If your 7 year daughter was vaporized during piano recital by Yankees, you will have no issues with your "Motivation". You will commit every war crime on the books (and those yet to be invented, recorded or even contemplated about) GLADLY. You have lost the reason to continue living as a proper human being, so you will just go *all the way* by default.
This will end in a Carthago Delenda Est Rout. The death toll will be in the 800 million to 2 billion range; and whole peoples (The Anglo-Saxons and anyone with even a hint of said genetic material) will be erased; both physically (person to person eliminations) and genetically (a la the genetic material being edited and erased).
New words for the sorts of atrocities committed would need to be invented. Because there will be no stop until the elimination is complete.
No differentiation will be made between the common people vs the governments of those peoples. "Collective Responsibility" will be the default mode employed by the victorious Eurasians; given the trauma they received from the Nuclear First Strike.
I couldn't quite bring myself to put a little "heart" next to this post. "YAY genocide of my civilization!" We need a "wheel of pain" emoji instead of a "heart".
This "Greek Tragedy" on steroids could have been avoided in its entirety on multiple occasions. One of which was the post 90s environment where Russia (and the former Soviet republics) were in economic free fall. Even the most paltry of helping hands, if extended with genuineness, would have worked wonders!
... Rather than sending busloads of Oligarchs and Contractors to Rape, Pillage, etc the livelihood of the Russian people (i.e. their firms, factories, etc), a different course could have been pursued. The Yugoslav Rape (I don't call it a "War", it's just classic Feral Yankee Raping at its most Base and Vile) meanwhile was the last straw.
It was then that the Russian People knew that these folks "really want to kill us in mind, body and spirit like they tried to do to our Serbian and other Slavic brethren". It's been downhill since then with regard to the West's relations with the Orthodox world (of which Russia is the standard bearer). There is no salvaging this relationship.
As for the Sinitic world... The Chinese people have a long memory. The Rape of the Opium Wars is well remembered; and it only has been reinforced by Yankee pillaging, rapes, etc of Korea, Vietnam, etc ... peoples and nations who have had relations (thousands of years old mind you) with the Chinese (both as friend and foe).
So basically these avenues of "friendship" (or at the bare minimum 'let's not be enemies') are cut off; and we move deterministically towards the End Game.
I think our civilization is more approaching mass senility than genocide, but there are yet children of the blood to it.
And the idea of mutual invasions/nuking does come across as rather doomsaying or wishful thinking. How, pray tell, can one or two or even five million soldiers from either side control the other? And economic deprivation only goes so far in controlling either population. Even if, less than, say, 1% of Chinese resist an invasion... ten million partisans. On the US side, even if 2% resist (as a less collective, communal culture and a massive gun culture, that seems fairly conservative), still six million partisansand at a minimum 8 or 12 million guns. And the machine shops to covertly convert salvage/scavenge into guns, IEDs, and simple mortars enough to give jihadis a cold sweat. (Partisan defenders needing far less in terms of physical capabilities than line soldiers. China too is having huge recruitment/maintaining force quality problems in their military, though for other reasons.)
Personally, I think the fall of a civilization that has lost the Mandate of Heaven (a very real thing) is a good thing, and better the sooner it happens. The longer it is prolonged, the worse the aftermath. I am optimistic that those who would crush the innocent peoples of Europe and North America beneath their boots will be taken down in the fall of the postmodern West, for it is not those on the bottom who fall furthest or hardest when the palanquin-bearers trip.
It's funny, as you're now the third person who has assumed that World War III necessarily assumes that we invade each other. That this would be everyone's default assumption didn't occur to me so I didn't address it at all in my essay.
I don't think anybody's going to invade anybody's homelands, not right away. They're going to invade each other's allies' homelands, and key strategic points of interest, while waging bio- and cyber-war on each other.
>>Ahnaf's whole shtick is passing off his anti-American revenge fantasies as some kind of reasonable strategic analyses.<<
What's coming is coming; and no amount of Copium, Lampoon or Ad Hominem is going to stop said practical "on the ground realities" from transpiring.
>>>The Kalingans weren't genocided. <<
After the battle, the soldiers ravaged the peoples. So this is just a Lie. As someone from that part of the world, I know far better than you the Yankee who merely learned about it in passing in some generic "World History" class.
As for the "Ashoka turned over a new leaf"-story; that's more mythology than history, if by the latter we mean something with a testimonial chain of the sort modern scholars would be content with.
>>The larger and more diffuse a unit is, the weaker it is. China has been a "world onto itself" by virtue of being isolated from all other civilization centers.<<
For most of the last 2500 years (save for this "blip" in history of roughly 300-400 years), the "Larger Diffuse" units that are China and India (i.e. where most of humanity have tended to reside) have proven your assertion wrong given their Material, *Physical* Economy dwarfing others (Europe for much of human history has been a backwater).
>> China's much vaunted 5000+ civilizational history consists of them being conquered by every barbarian tribe that rolls off the steppe<<
False. Whilst some did succeed (the Mongols are the key case), they eventually all get culturally assimilated and (centuries later) are driven to genetic and cultural extinction via maneuvering in the fields of culture, economy, etc
Take the Manchu (i.e. the founders of the Qing imperial dynasty) for instance- Their language is lost (Spoken and Written Manchu are mere artifacts in the museum) and their genetics have basically been "assimilated" almost entirely by the Han-majority.
Yankee time-preference is low, so all this seems "too slow and far fetched"... but that's just wishful thinking and copium. There will be a large scale genocide of CONUS-proper; and it will end with not just Physical eliminations, but also Genetic Erasures. The Muricans will ensure that once they Launch their Nuclear First Strike on every major Chinese City.
Westphalianism is about to end. The nation-state unit in its current form (i.e. with a focus on sovereignty, citizenship by blood and descent, etc) has been around for some 350-400 years now. It is going to end in what will become one of the Bloodiest Massacres of Mankind.
In a way, this was always going to be the outcome. The "nation-state" born out of the Westphalian Peace is a primarily Western Construct; and so with the West's Fall and Erasure (cultural, demographic, spiritual and material), so too it will fade into the dustbin of History.
> After the battle, the soldiers ravaged the peoples.
That was SOP for most of history.
> As for the "Ashoka turned over a new leaf"-story; that's more mythology than history, if by the latter we mean something with a testimonial chain of the sort modern scholars would be content with.
It's based on his actually carved edicts. It's not history only in the sense that the Indians didn't bother recording history the way the Westerners or Chinese did until the Muslims introduced it to them.
> False. Whilst some did succeed (the Mongols are the key case),
And the Xianbei, and the Liao, and the Jurchen Jin, and the Manchus, and those are just the major ones.
> they eventually all get culturally assimilated and (centuries later) are driven to genetic and cultural extinction via maneuvering in the fields of culture, economy, etc
That's what I said, the Chinese overawed the barbarians with the sophistication of Chinese civilization. Incidentally, the Chinese were significantly less successful at overawing the Mongols since the latter's empire was large enough to include other centers of civilization.
> Yankee time-preference is low
You know nothing of Anglo history do you?
> There will be a large scale genocide of CONUS-proper; and it will end with not just Physical eliminations, but also Genetic Erasures.
Sorry, your having a revenge fantasy doesn't make it likely.
You agreed in essence with most of what was said; ergo not much else needs to be iterated on that side of things.
As for the rest-
Anglo-Saxon History is Naval-oriented. And that history is already doomed now that the Carrier has been thrown into the dustbin (i.e. the 800 mile effective range of said floating metal fortresses will not be able to intercept Salvos of Mach 9+ Hypersonics).
9-10 mins reaction time tops basically means that in mere minutes and hours, "Ruling the Waves" will become a fantasy/delusion once hostilities commence.
That's the military and "elite" side of things.
The general population meanwhile have very low time preferences. The general Decadence of "the West" these past few decades or so demonstrate that practically speaking; the Yankee "Sheeple" are in many ways worse than Cattle when it comes to keeping their governments in check.
Why is that? It is because their "long term memory" is merely as long as the next news cycle. And this is just the material "reality on the ground".
Finally, it is less a revenge fantasy and more a "projecting future outcomes given how past trends tend to shape up". There is going to be no "benevolence" shown to the defeated West, it will be "Total Removal" because that will be the fundamental ethical argument being made by the Victorious Eurasian powers; namely:
>>These are the people who used Nukes in a First strike against us.
Why ought they deserve to exist in the first place then as a people? Should we not Remove them to prevent future calamities? And for good measure, let's make sure they are never, or can never even be born again! <<
If you wish to continue lacing yourself with the Copium of "Yankee Numbah Wan!" and "Yankee = Good Guise", that's all well and good!
But this practical reality will still transpire, regardless of how you holler on and on.
> Sadly for the Murican Yankee, a Civilization and "world unto itself" is a stronger Unit than a mere Westphalian "nation".
That's absolute nonsense. The larger and more diffuse a unit is, the weaker it is. China has been a "world onto itself" by virtue of being isolated from all other civilization centers. This is not a source of strength.
> in that it has existed coherently for well over 5000+ years.
China's much vaunted 5000+ civilizational history consists of them being conquered by every barbarian tribe that rolls off the steppe, and then so overawing said tribe with the sophistication of their civilization that their new overlords adopt Chinese ways.
There have been Chinese dynasty that have exerted great military and economic might, but yeah, not for long most times.
Chinese civilization is rather solipsist, and while "isolated" is perhaps not fair in my eyes, they did not care about the world outside of China much until the last few hundred years, same as most places. They'd *go* there, exert some soft power/flex muscles, but only as a way of getting more for their positions back and China, and many of their previous empires were only de jure rather than de facto.
... Ancient China was the Hollywood of the ancient world. Cultural power brewed with potent solipsism/narcissism.
China has a fascinating history, and achieved some wondrous things. But I agree that you can't say it's a 5000 uninterrupted reign. For one they have frequent collapses of epic proportions. Fall of Rome was Europe's only mega collapse in our 2200-ish year history of civilization, and if similar happened in China it would be a footnote. In the same period China had 70+ dynastic collapses, with several resulting in population dropping to 1/3. China's several Warlord Eras make our single version, the Medieval Era, look like a tea party.
> Maurya it was the massacre of the Kalingans and other "forest dwellers" who unfortunately were not lucky enough to run away or escape.
The Kalingans weren't genocided. The Mautyans won a battle against them. The battle was no doubt bloody, but probably not that bloody in historical context. Nevertheless, it was bloody enough to send the Mauryan emperor Ashoka so completely over the edge with guilt, that he basically became a bugman and decreed everyone in his empire do likewise.
Given the preamble and the noting down that this will be a multi-part series most likely; perhaps a few “pushbacks” if you will:
>>“Better trained and Better Equipped”.
What is the objective standard being employed here by yourself?
If we look at (say) training hours per Jet-pilot; Chinese pilots net over 200+ hours (far higher than their Murican counterparts). This would be a “Quantitative” standard for being “better trained”.
Or if we look at Hypersonics; Kinzhals being deployed on Nuclear Subs are “Better Equipped” than their Murican counterparts (some of whom only having a bunch of subsonics deployed).
>>”the winner will tend to be whichever side has better-trained and better-led troops with better equipment”
Well, the quality of ground forces has to go hand in hand with your C4ISR. And the Muricans have never had disruptions to said structure; even in the heyday of WWII. The Oceans have helped them on that!
But this is no longer the case.
They are fully untested as a people. Could it be that the Yankee is a Natural “superman” of sorts who doesn’t even flinch in the face of mass Contusions, given his “Manifest Destiny” and the fact that the “Exceptional Nation” has raised him to be the most moral, heroic, etc soldier courtesy of Uncle Sam’s “Red, White and Blue”?
Perhaps…. but call me skeptical!
Especially if you have low altitude (so basically radar can’t see them coming) Hypersonics gliding along to their destination en masse. Unblockable and Industrially produced in peacetime as we speak!
Murican forces likely cannot withstand FIRE impact. Imagine the world’s “Extremophiles” (weird lichens and stuff) and the places they live in. Now imagine a battlefield where that environment is replicated within seconds. Contusions-galore make “better training” (if that is even true in the first place) utterly moot.
As the esteemed Andrei Martyanov notes: “If I see you I kill you”. That is the motto for the coming World War. The Russians have Glasnost and Universal C4ISR denial (China has yet to develop analogues). His works are a must read to understand Modern trendiness with regard to weaponry, strategic elements in warfare, etc.
Satellites need to be shot down first, otherwise Glasnost et al will get all those Kinzhal and Zircon hits in.
OSINT who often get a lot of stuff wrong, are thus “more correct” on this front when they give the Russians a value of 0.501 and the Chinese 0.511 (lower number is “better” for their Power Index). Muricans have a 0.453 (as of this writing) which I challenge for reasons noted here and elsewhere I have in mind.
In terms of the CEV values therefore:
I think the First case actually is underestimated here. Russian combat prowess (per soldier) is likely above the Muricans, given the fact that their denial capabilities for C4ISR & “better equipment” outclass the Muricans. The average Chinese soldier is more likely to be on par with their Murican counterpart; but only at this slice of time.
And then we need to look at the most important variable too, which is Industry.
A nation (i.e. China) producing 10x more steel than you in Peacetime is going to have no problem with “Technology”. I for one think the “Asians steal our Great MURICAN technology” is just Anglo-Saxon conceit.
Mind you, Russian steel production is a mere 0.8x to 0.9x of Murican production, even though it is a nation which has a mere 0.4-0.5x Murica’s population. And up until recently, Russian Rockets were Uber-ing Yankees into space, because said Yankees couldn’t build a feasible propulsion system that was repeatable.
So… “better technology/equipment” is unlikely; it’s more a case of basically a toilet seat being built using Gold (thus the inflated prices) and then being passed off as “Master Craftsmanship” by the Muricans… at least on the Weaponry and Military Tech side of things that is what seems to be the case.
The numbers for industry are always correlated strongly to a nation’s Martial prowess. When Victorian Britain reached a certain “critical mass” with regard to Coal Production; it had no issues with other materials.
In a way, they “sorted themselves out” since like a line of dominoes, the thresholds for each of them (steel, oil, tungsten, chrome, etc) got breached effortlessly. And so you have just flat-out Rapes like the First and Second Opium Wars; which were more “let me violate you and Drug up all you Dirty Y*****s” rather than serious Wars.
Did it matter that the Redcoats were better trained? No doubt! But that was more a “Bonus” than a Causal variable. Really it came down to *Material* Economy (producing actual physical “stuff”) which in turn can be fed into the War machine of labour, national unity, etc.
Yup, yup. Good thoughts. It would not be difficult to persuade me that the US fighting forces today have a lower CEV than Russia's do, and are only on par with China. That case could be made, as you've started to above.
But most Americans, and even most of the defense community, assume the opposite, and just question by how much the US is better and in what fields. People tend to dismiss out of hand views that are too far outside their baseline. So for purposes of making a point, even if OSINT's CEVs are right, I'd still probably include all the cases I did, to show that even more favorable assumptions still don't lead to a happy ending for Team America.
Point taken! (Re: The "Defence" folks swallowing the 'Murica Numbah wan!' Kool-Aid)
And yes, I too have found (by personal experience) that even suggesting (or starting to) that "maybe these guys are BETTER" is a no-go zone. Either you get shut out (as an "enemy collaborator" or whatnot) or labelled as Loony/Nutty. Ergo, your strategy of using more favourable stats for Team Yankee is definitely more Rhetorically Salient.
I guess, there does come a breaking point where (say) the nominal "defence" bloke cant really be saying "Dey steal our Technology" when the Yankees themselves *don't even have anything in that league yet*. But alas, that "Aha!" moment has yet to arrive for the vast majority of Muricans. And when it does; that's when the Woe-ception kicks off!
Even nonhypersonic missile production is hampered by a procurement system that could hardly have been designed on purpose to be slower or less reliable. Which isn't an awful thing when you have decades of low-level engagement and can maintain somewhat constant inventory.
When things get serious, however, that is insufficient. And short of shooting the bureaucats involved in the process (not going to happen while the US still stands in its current form), there is no way to fix that process with any speed, especially under pressure.
Nukes falling on the US I view as unlikely. Invasion of the continental US extremely unlikely. The US nuking China without a coup removing the current system extremely unlikely, given how the Chinese have openly coopted so many US leaders, and how averse the US public would be to such a thing.
But both powers are paper tigers (or glass cannons, if you would rather), especially compared to Russia. But Russia's population base is too small and insufficiently young, and its dispersion of resources and population/transportation density too low for them to be a serious player at a superpower as they currently are... and I believe they know it. Hence Putin trying for over a decade to not start even a true proxy war, until now (when energy prices were already giving him huge budgetary leeways and provocations getting too severe to ignore without weakening Russia long term.)
As for the population bases of the US and China... both are cratering horribly. Very few places aren't. Which adds to the sense of desperation I smell in the air.
Looking at the same question from a variety of angles. My evaluation is that the US is in an extremely weak position, due to the combination of low industrial capacity, demoralization, poor leadership, low physical quality of the recruiting pool, and a foreign policy that has left the US with allies only amongst militarily insignificant countries.
I'm glad you enjoyed it. That's high praise coming from you - your recent piece on the Mandela effect had me in stitches (and I couldn't help relating your hypothesis to some physicists I know over beers).
An excellent and much needed analysis. I was oddly gratified to see that your experience at West Point mirrored my experience in ROTC - hence no military career for me either. It chafed at the time but I still managed to work for the Pentagon and can truly appreciate not having to take orders the same way as my uniformed friends must.
As other's have said, I fear that the combat effectiveness of the US military is grossly exaggerated, though I understand the reasons you mentioned in comments for doing so. Without going into discussion of equipment, which is laughably obsolete in most cases, the two most important aspects in a war, especially a long one, are morale and logistics.
Simply put, the logistics tail to maintain a US fleet or division is so long, complex and contains so many points of critical failure, that I don't see these units maintaining cohesion in the face of opposition. We can barely manage in peacetime, when we aren't shipping vast quantities of inventory to Ukraine. Speaking of San Antonio-class, an entire embarked MEU was stuck at sea last spring with nothing but MREs for two weeks because of a supply breakdown.
Which feeds into morale. The US military is almost delusionally hyper-convinced of it's own superiority in battle. This is a vicious pendulum on the field - when you enter the field of battle thinking you CANNOT lose, and then CANNOT win, or are totally outclassed, it creates panic in the short term and combat hesitancy in the long term. Americas will be thunderstruck when the first two or three carriers go down to kinetic kill vehicles, hypersonic missiles or good old fashioned SS torpedoes. The danger of nuclear escalation by a totally impotent US military structure is very high in all these scenarios.
I'll add my area of expertise to another commenters thoughts about East Asia. Vietnam will never join the US against China. They are pragmatists to the n-th degree, focused solely on survival. The Japanese are much more likely to join Russia than to remilitarize and join the US against China and Russia. They are already deeply wary of the US's commitment and capabilities - it's an open secret in Japanese military circles. No one knows better how feeble the US 7th Fleet is than Japan. They MAY remilitarize. If they do it will not be for the benefit of the US. Their long-term strategic interests lie with Russia, which can provide energy as no one else on earth can, and also provide a counterbalance to China, which Russia would need to have. This was part of Abe's life's work - a life that was suddenly and violently ended, I might add.
It sounds like the morale and logistics situation is even worse than I feared.
I didn't know that Japan was considering a reorientation to Russia. That makes sense. It would have made sense for *us* to ally with Russia against China, too. Allowing Russia to enter China's sphere is the greatest strategic mistake we could have made.
Morale is in a terminal velocity plummet. Skyrocketing suicides, largest peacetime desertion rate, Vaxx mandate discharges of the most competent and respected and mandatory degeneracy celebrations - I seriously worry about unit cohesion in garrison, let alone when deployed into combat.
Japan's been trying to resolve issues with the Russia a long time - amicably. Even when they were forced under the US umbrella, the Japanese made sure the alliance treaty wouldn't pull them into an American war with the USSR. They've been forced into the US orbit, but alone amongst all the US-aligned "powers" they've resisted the siren call of the GAE; for example, they routinely buy oil from Iran.
For Japan it's all about energy and staying ahead of China. Until the Oil Crisis of the 70s, Japan assumed America would take care of that. Crack #1.
After Tiananmen Square, the Japanese expected harsh penalties would be laid on the Chinese. Instead, to their complete shock and dismay, the US spent a decade selling/sending advanced weaponry, advanced industrial secrets, and a globe spanning industrial capacity (the one you reference in the article) to China. Crack #2.
Since 9-11, the US has been trying to get the Japanese to break their Constitution (that the US foisted on them at gunpoint in 1945) in ordered to fight wars in the Middle East. As this would disrupt energy supply, the only thing that matters to Japan, they demurred and began building up a large energy infrastructure with the Russians - natgas & oil - in the Russian Far East. Billions and billions went to develop these fields, with Japan receiving, for the first time in history, stable nearby supplies of energy. These pipelines and terminals were just coming fully online in the last few years when the US forced Japan to boycott Russian energy. The much ballyhooed privation facing the denizens of the EU is nothing compared to what the energy starved Japanese will be going through this winter. Crack #3
All Japanese leadership now knows, as the Russians do, the US cannot be trusted - "non-agreement capable", as I think Lavrov said. They are a dangerous loose cannon whose monetary polices almost sent the yen into a complete tailspin this spring. Remember, the Japanese are not bound ideologically and religiously to the GAE as the EU is. So Japan has 3 options:
1. Stay with the US, who they view as an increasingly irrational, dangerous to their sovereignty, economy, and, with the spread of transsexual theology, their culture.
2. Succumb gradually as an arch-satrapy of a Clinton-empowered Super China.
3. Partner with a Russia that has neither territorial nor economic designs on the Japanese sphere, and which needs a high tech Asian superpower to partner with. China is a positively unnatural choice for the Russians. The Russians grasp feebly at India but India is a basket-case.
They will try to quietly wind down #1 and try to spin up #3, to avoid #2.
The Japanese, who, as John Dower has pointed out, are almost uniquely unable to change course absent outside influence, will have a major crisis, likely economic. The political turmoil that follows will see the victor reach out to Russia. Secure stable, cheap energy supplies and a secured northern flank will not only protect Japan from metastasizing Chinese incursion, but will give Japan the boost it needs to reclaim it's economic vitality.
I hope it doesn't take that crisis, and I hope Russia isn't too deeply in the thrall of China by then.
Has there been any movement on the Kuril dispute lately that I missed?
Japan reorienting toward Russia has always made a ton of sense, and were they less sensitive about public face (though less so than China by far) and less under the shadow (threat) of the US umbrella, it likely would have happened sooner.
Abe's diplomatic team (everything is team based in Japan) had reached a tentative (in 2019) agreement with Russia for a sovereign, but not jurisdictional return of the southern 2 of the 4 Kuriles Japan claimed. Essentially a kind of Hong Kong deal - Japanese sovereignty would be recognized but for many decades would remain under Russian jurisdiction for the sake of the Russian islanders, then a period of handover and eventual Japanese sovereignty per treaty. That was all scuppered in 2019 when the US forced Japan into condemning Russia and withdrawing negotiating teams.
Because the negotiations were very much a personal endeavor between Abe-Putin, like Reagan-Nakasone, the issue of rapprochement is dead. This gives me dark thoughts about the motivations behind the Abe assassination.
If it comes to an international WWIII, as opposed to a domestic Civil War II going international only as other players support sides locally, the United States has a weak hand. No doubt about it. The citizen peoples of the various states within the US, however, could well have a stronger hand vis-a-vis those peoples whose castes within the US have crafted and maintaned the petrodollar system, the hyper-financialization that began even before that, the social disintegration, etc.
Personally, I view more proxy fighting ending in a North American nuclear-armed domestic conflict more as likely than a maximum-effort foreign conflagration. Having been in the financial side of US defense aviation parts manufacturing (as a small cog with avid curiosity) during the beginning and heights of COVID, the degradation in materiel available for actual warfighting (including quality) is, I believe, going to shock people. And since the petrodollar system has not absolutely imploded quite yet, there are yet still some in military leadership who want to hide the capability degradation to prevent the whole US institutional/legal infrastructure from collapsing.
I agree that civil war is as or more likely than world war. "Why not both?" may also be the correct answer. It would be easy to imagine a secession state inviting China or Russia to help it, much as the Confederacy hoped to gain help from France.
That's disturbing to hear about our defense industry, but each person who has chimed in with any insider information has all had the same theme -- "Woe, it's worse than you think."
I wouldn't. They are becoming more internationally hated, and ignored, by the day and have proven themselves agreement incapable. No one trusts them and no one likes them.
Late to the party, sorry I missed the early festivities!
One thing that you seemed to have missed re: a WWN is that there are more potential great powers than the 3 you mention. The biggest being India. Watch some presentations Peter Zeihan makes to Indian elites and watch how they salivate when he tells them they'll be an up-and-coming nation in the future. They almost whip it out to finish themselves off when he points out that in a chaotic world they'll get 1st dibs on ME oil, with China at the far end getting the leftovers.
Re: CW2-
Even if China has some leverage in DC, if they are playing for the big enchilada they'll want to see the US split in 2+ chunks. No matter how much influence they might have in DC, they are only a President Hitler, Stalin, Putin, or similar away from being booted out completely, with the US reverting back to being their biggest threat. But now with serious leadership. OTOH, a split up and weakened US would allow China the freedom to advance it's interests internationally far more than currently.
Therefore I think whichever side looks the weakest is the side that would get support from Chin/Rus, and only enough support to keep the CW going. Of course, India might jump in on the other side, with the same intent of keeping the CW going to drain China/Rus.
A further complication is that I'm not sold on the stiffness of the China/ Rus alliance. China is massively expanding it's influence in Asia, including the central Asian 'stans that are traditionally within Russia's sphere of influence. If the US was serious, it would have teamed up with Russia against China as China is the obvious threat to both. Rus is a declining power with a surplus of territory while China is a rising power with a dearth of territory. That rarely ends well for the declining power, and Russia is not the type of nation to let itself play 2nd fiddle.
If I was writing a book of fiction I'd probably have the US split up into 4 parts, with China/Rus backing Aztlan People's Republic of CA and the SW, EU backing northeast Regime, Japan backing White people's Midwest/ PNW alliance, S America backing Wakanda for no reason other than to get back at the US for fucking with them for so many decades. India would also back Wakanda just to keep it going, but would eventually say "Africa wins again" and trade it to the Regime for Guam.
In the 5th book of the trilogy I'd have Rus backstab China by joining Japan, with technology suddenly being able to negate nukes so they could invade the mainland. Then every nation destroys its enemies' infrastructure with conventional weapons, so my next trilogy could be a Mad Max scenario.
You are 100% correct about the industrial capacity, in a long war we loose.. My take is thet the naval war is a make or break event. If the US can successfully blockade China and use unrestricted submarine warfare. We can strangle thier greater production and starve them. You cannot make more steel if you cannot get iron ore. Regardless of what people believe, China is a maritime nation more than 90% of thier trade comes from the sea. This is why they are building coal and nuclear power plants because they know the oil supply is at risk. The aircraft carriers are huge targets for the CCP and we need to stop building them, ramp up SSN construction and consider building of AIP Diesel boats. The destruction of even one super carrier would be a massive propaganda victory. Based on the operation history of the USN ans idiotic social policies, I fear we may take substantial losses early on. On the plus side the CCP has now significant naval warfare history, but they are close to thier bases and the US is not.
Great points. The only thing I'd quibble about is calling the US "we." I don't identify with our ruling elites, and have little empathy with those who signed up to do it's bidding.
I've heard good arguments that large surface ships are virtually useless in a peer-vs-peer war, for the same reason that battleships were obsolete in WW2. The range at which ships can be spotted and sunk by non-capital ship assets is far greater than the range that capital ships can reach.
Planes can fly 1k+ miles, launch a missile with 1k+ mile range, return to get more missiles. Even if anti-missile tech works as advertised (which never happens) its still just a matter of how many millions of dollars do you want to spend to destroy billions of dollars of ships and kill thousands of men. Ships and missiles can be replaced far faster than capital ships.
That makes sense to me. I suppose the open question, then, becomes the match-up between Chinese missiles and US carriers, between our and their fifth generation fighters, and so on.
- Where and how is China getting its resources for this war? Thinking iron ore, hydrocarbons and a growing amount of imported food. It already imports huge quantities of raw materials, and I'm assuming its hunger for them would only increase in a total war? If its plan is to grab them quickly at the very start....well we've been here before. We know how that story ends.
- America is not alone. In fact far from it. It is an alliance structure, and some of the members of that alliance structure are significant nodes in the global industrial and economic system. Japan, the UK and other Five Eyes, the European Core, even as it it currently stands India as part of the Quad.
- China is old, as is Russia. They both have collapsing birth rates. Seems to me they better act soon or its pretty much too late.
- How are they both financing this war? Are they paying for it with US dollars?
1) Russia and the rest of the none western world which is quiet happy to trade with China (& Russia as well)
2) The UK hasn´t been a significant industrial node since the 80´s, Europe has been hollowed out deliberately by the Germans vie the Euro over the last 30 years, India will not join a US war against China/Russia and Japan has no raw resources or ability to protect it´s ports.
3) A sold-out myth based on circumstances that no longer apply.
4) They have their own fiat currencies so they can pay for it like the USA and unlike the USA they are net exporters.
Looks like jack beat me to the punch, but here's my thoughts.
1) Russia can supply most of the resources that China needs. For this reason, the grand strategy we've chosen is moronic -- we've created the very thing we feared, a World Island.
2) I agree, America will have some help from allies. But it's not clear *how much* help. And it's also not clear how much help China and Russia will get from, say, Iran, Turkey, etc. So I figured I'd just leave that out of the analysis, at least for now.
3) I agree completely. This is why I think war is imminent.
4) I have previously predicted that the petrodollar system will collapse. The war will come simultaneous with, or after, that collapse, IMO.
- On point one, the vast majority of Chinese import inputs come via the sea. As do their exports. That’s a hard problem for them to overcome. Even with the money they are splashing in these Belt Road things, sea transport still dwarfs rail/road. I think this matters, and it matters a lot. We don’t live in the Pax Mongolica era, we still live in the seaborne trade era. This is why I don’t get Jack saying Japan is a right off because of its “ports”. If it gets so bad America no longer controls the first and second island chain, then I’ll be the first to start learning Mandarin.
- Americas control of the high ground of the worlds financial and monetary system matters greatly. War is finance. This mattered during both previous World Wars for the Allies
- Both if you are really underplaying Americas current political dominance/control of vital parts of the worlds industrial centres outside its borders, while at the same time talking up China and Russia’s game. Jack mentions Iran? Come on. Turkey maybe, but it’s currently supplying Ukraine with kit, has been a competitor with Russia since Ottoman times, has vied with Iran since it’s inception, and if it really wants to be regional hegemon would be best placed backing the faraway US.
There are going to be so many grand bargains coming, so many cards being played, and in this the US and it’s alliance structure still has the most cards
Hence the BRI, which includes pipelines. Pipelines which are also vulnerable, but so are our pipelines...
Interesting side discussion all around. The one thing I'd add is that Japan is not the weak sister some might think she is. Japan has some of the most advanced subs in the world, and many of the ships in their current navy just happen to have the same name as warships of the IJN...
If Japan wanted nukes, it would have them very quickly. Unless Japan is stupid, they want nukes. Japan isn't stupid...
Everything you have said is true but subs can´t protect ports from missiles. In a real BIG war China will simple destroy the cranes and the offloading facilities. Good luck manhandling a 20t container. Also what cargo crew is going to commit suicide to dock in Japan? Japan like the west has no real air defence against missiles/rockets. Russia does and it is willing to sell (Turkey, China etc).
I´m going to answer Nathan´s points since I think he is speaking in good faith but just doesn't understand the reality and that will cover the Malacca Straights nonsense. Just busy and it will probably be slightly long & I´m lazy about something I have no control over.
TLDR: The USA cannot win a sea war against combined Russia/China in the Pacific/Indian oceans. Also I think the US submarine force is the best in the world but that still wont matter.
N subs USA 69, RF~24, UK/FR 6 each, others meh.
To joe : Malacca Straights nonsense, well why doesn´t China use some of those trillions of US $ it has to build a canal over Thailand with US money? It was estimated to cost $8-10 billion! Well everyone knows it is stupid to waste money on nonsense. Think about this, how will the US navy cut off the Malacca Straights without going to war with everyone there, use a map. This isn´t the 1840´s or even the 1940´s.
The Malacca Straights was never a chokepoint for Japan after they took control of Malaysia, Singapore & Dutch Indonesia. Also bulk shipping is around 1-3% of the cost of what you are shipping (LNG is much more for reasons, petroleum is less than 1% normally), rail is around 3-8% depending on circumstances such as ROI. Look at a map of the Malacca Straights and think ´how would I survive´, then explain why the US navy has super powers.
One major difference between the present brewing conflict and past conflicts however, that few people seem to really be accounting for, is that native populations of these powers are shrinking, not growing. China especially has an inverted population pyramid, but so does Russia and the U.S. Each successive year of the war will see fewer new bodies coming of age to replace losses and maintain economies.
I also haven't seen much analysis on the issue of India. What is the likelihood they get involved, and for which side? Thats a LOT of potential bodies, and a growing population, with an ok industrial sector.
India is very much a swing state. I'm not sure if even India knows which side it would choose if a major war broke out.
The inverted population pyramid that China is facing makes me think they'll want to fight sooner rather than later. Time isn't on their side in that regard.
Time isn't on almost anyone's side right now. Official fertility rates are dropping in most every country that isn't being paid to inflate their reported figures.
A bit of information: At this point you would think that someone would start to be worried about the Chinese and Russians potentially eating our lunch in a hot or at least "warm" conflict. Though organizations such as the US Navy are starting to mouth some platitudes at the uppermost levels, all of the counterproductive programs of a stupid, fat, lazy nation are still in place. Personnel are told to be innovative but to still follow all the rules that squash innovation and productivity.
I don't have any inside information or Pentagon access to know such things, but what you are describing definitely matches what I have heard elsewhere.... the military is now run by clown world and is in no shape for real war.
William S Lind would probably disagree re the USA having better-trained soldiers, given his schtick about the US military largely being a 2nd generation war military. I don't know about the Chinese military, but if they can control the Indian Ocean with their allies, they can just wait until their industrial advantage is overwhelming.
The other thing of course is the issue of diversity - China is much more homogeneous than the USA, and so is Russia. How many of the Hispanics coming over the southern border will want to take up arms and go off to fight China...?
My understanding is that the PLA is structurally a very poor military, but a very good domestic enforcement and industrial production institution, with many military assets being invested not in military production, but in production of goods for the domestic consumer markets over there.
The US is a poor military due to defects in the upper echelons of the officer corps and the civilian instituional controls.
Like the US, the Chinese homeland is pretty much uninvadable from the outside at the moment, unless their invader was willing to rack up a proportionally greater civilian body count greater than the An Lushan Rebellion. (The US is uninvadable due to the huge number of civilian owned weapons of mindboggling variety.)
At this point, I think two of the three potential combatants in the scenario are paper tigers in the boots on the ground arena. And the third seems mostly focused on regional dominion.
Troops that are disillusioned tend to go AWOL or just avoid the fight as much as they can.
Imagine the women, soyboys, trannies and dykes reaction to real combat. Russia and China don't have that problem which is a massive multiplier.
No one fears the US anymore, and for good reason. They all know we can be beaten quickly, they have all been preparing for this for decades and the time is right.
They have only a few more keystrokes to wipe the US dollar off the face of the planet and then it's over. (Or maybe the beginning? I'm trying to be optimistic!)
Morale is of course the topic of the second installment, which I published today. My assessment of American morale finds it to be rather poor, with limited will to fight....
Given the 'world island' concept earlier, and the role Russia is likely to play here, i think a plausible american strategy might be: "try and hold china away from taiwan, and take our russia early, then negotiate a peace with china."
Maybe you keep up a constant barrage on the straight between taiwan and china, while allowing ships to come in from the southwest side of the island; make it impossible for Chinese land troops to cross. without trying to go at china directly.
I would think american would also have help from countries near china that actively don't want china to be the global superpower - but this could be wrong
I do think America would have aid from other parts of the world, but so would China and Russia. It seemed plausible to me to assume that the world would be split between the sides and that would balance out.
I think "try to take out Russia first" is, in fact, our strategy.
Any idea how much the rest of the world matters here, in the conflict?
I got the impression that LOTS of countries would love to see the US empire ended. Depending on how it starts and the posturing, i imagine that plenty of other countries would say, look, we don't feel like helping you hold onto power, America.
India seems like they'd be the biggest question here, and could play kingmaker. I imagine if i'm India i'd rather see the us hegemony end but i really don't want china running the world. I _think_ if i'm india, what i want is this conflict to play on long enough for china to break due to domestic turmoil, so i can lead a coalition of democracies that plans to replace the us/eu hegemony, possibly offering olive branches to russia and china.
Fascinating piece. I agree with your conclusion that a manufacturing economy beats a service economy when mobilizing for war. Factories beat out burger flippers and retail space. Someone should inform the neocons in Washington. This is the first analysis I’ve seen that takes into account the kind of GDP as opposed to the level of GDP. I also think your analysis of the relative effectiveness of military spending is interesting. The difference in cost between a Chinese aircraft carrier and a US one is startling. It also seems that some of our high-level military people are very focused on issues not related to preparing to fight. It’s my understanding that other militaries concern themselves with being able to achieve military objectives.
A few questions:
• Much of your examples involve older conflicts or conflicts between non-nuclear powers. Doesn’t the possibility of a war going nuclear change the strategic calculations?
• I’m also curious about your thoughts on the location and aims of a conflict on your projected outcome.
o A US invasion of China might be impossible. Besides a huge geography and huge population, my understanding is they have hypersonic projectiles that can sink an aircraft carrier. No idea how we’d land.
o I can’t see how invading Russia would work due to the size of the place, the weather, and their nuclear stockpile. How do we maintain supply lines?
o I also don’t see how China or Russia could invade the US and occupy it. Even putting aside our nuclear arsenal, the country is 3,000 miles wide by 1,000 miles long with varied terrain and half a billion guns. The only way that works is if the communists in our government succeed in disarming the population prior to an invasion. FWIW, a former Presidential National Security Advisor I know thinks a substantial portion of US corporations, the media, and many of our government officials are already on the Chinese payroll.
• If we’re not contemplating an invasion of the homeland, then where’s the conflict geographically?
o The US can tie Russia up in Ukraine for a while. Both countries got caught in Afghanistan forever and know how to fund an insurgency against the other side. This assumes Europe can go without Russian gas and the world can go without Ukrainian wheat.
o I spoke with a former high level military officer and Presidential military advisor who thinks the US can defend Taiwan. I’m skeptical we can/would bring enough firepower to China’s border on what they consider to be an existential issue. Plus, what happens to Taiwan Semiconductor and a tech-enabled world that can no longer get the best computer chips in the world.
o China is busy getting much of South America on its side, but they seem more interested in colonizing Africa than invading S. America.
• I’m also curious about your thoughts on non-military warfare
o The Chinese already own our media and all mass communication is filtered to fit their preferred narrative.
o My understanding is the US can pull chip designs that TSMC needs and stop high-level manufacturing. But if anyone destroys those plants or stops them, I think our military might be in trouble. Not sure how much we get from TSMC and how much from Samsung, but those are the best chip-makers in the world.
o I also think most of our military equipment relies on foreign semiconductors including all missile guidance systems. As much as I’m a free market guy, I’d pay TSMC to build plants here and hand out green cards to everyone who works there from the engineers to the janitors.
o China makes 90% of our pharmaceuticals. We used to make them in PR, but someone in Congress thought they could get more taxes from the pharma Cos. and they all moved production to China. The Chinese can turn off the spigot and kill grandma (along with everyone with a heart or cholesterol problem). How much of our population is currently on anti-depressants? That level of withdrawal all at once would be startling - not to mention people who have other urgent medical conditions.
o The Russians have shown an ability to hack our electrical grid and could possibly take it down. My understanding is that we could harden the entire system for a few billion dollars which is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but no one has shown an interest in doing so probably for the Thomas Sowell reason – politicians get no credit for spending money to prevent the thing that didn’t happen.
o No idea what US capability is for non-military warfare, but the US and Russia probably have the best hackers in the world. Strange to think the whole thing could come down to a newly found backdoor in someone’s military access. Kind of the 2022 version of the enigma machine.
Just my thoughts for the day. Again, thanks for the great article.
• Much of your examples involve older conflicts or conflicts between non-nuclear powers. Doesn’t the possibility of a war going nuclear change the strategic calculations?
Yes, it does. However, my personal opinion is that nuclear weapons will be to the Third World War what poison gas weapons were in the Second World War. In WWII, everyone had poison gas in their inventory, but nobody deployed it the way they had in WWI. Somehow, even in the midst of firebombing cities and unrestricted sub warfare and so on, somehow they restrained themselves from largescale use of chemical weapons. I think it will be somewhat similar with nuclear weapons. We might see some small scale use, of course; and I could just be totally wrong and we all get blown up. Part of the reason there'll be no nukes is I don't think the war will be fought in homefronts (see below), at least not initially.
Corollary to this belief is a second belief: the really nasty stuff in WWIII will be new types of weapons not previously deployed, such as biological weapons and cyberwarfare targeting the civilian population. Nobody has caused mass starvation with cyberwar yet, so there's no taboo.
• I’m also curious about your thoughts on the location and aims of a conflict on your projected outcome.
I think the most likely scenario is imperial overreach by increasingly-desperate American leaders, leading to an unintended escalation with China or Russia. Then, in order to drum up support, one or both sides will engage in false flag attacks, to justify further escalation. The war aim for both sides is global hegemony.
o A US invasion of China might be impossible. Besides a huge geography and huge population, my understanding is they have hypersonic projectiles that can sink an aircraft carrier. No idea how we’d land.
o I can’t see how invading Russia would work due to the size of the place, the weather, and their nuclear stockpile. How do we maintain supply lines?
I actually think most of the fighting will take place outside of the home territory of the great powers. For instance, in the Korean War, the US fought China, but since the American and Chinese troops were in Korea, this wasn't "really" a war between US and China.
We might fight China in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, or India. We might Russia in one of the Baltic States, Poland, Iran, or Syria, say.
o I also don’t see how China or Russia could invade the US and occupy it. Even putting aside our nuclear arsenal, the country is 3,000 miles wide by 1,000 miles long with varied terrain and half a billion guns. The only way that works is if the communists in our government succeed in disarming the population prior to an invasion. FWIW, a former Presidential National Security Advisor I know thinks a substantial portion of US corporations, the media, and many of our government officials are already on the Chinese payroll.
They would occupy us but only after we'd already been defeated. Think "peacekeepers" sent int to oversee the "administrative downsizing" of the American empire. I'd like to believe there'd be an insurgency to resist them, but.... I agree with the NS Advisor, btw.
• If we’re not contemplating an invasion of the homeland, then where’s the conflict geographically?
See above!
o The US can tie Russia up in Ukraine for a while. Both countries got caught in Afghanistan forever and know how to fund an insurgency against the other side. This assumes Europe can go without Russian gas and the world can go without Ukrainian wheat.
Personally I don't think Europe can go without Russian gas, and I do expect to see worldwide starvation starting this winter... And refugee population movement will follow in the aftermath, sending further shocks.
o I spoke with a former high level military officer and Presidential military advisor who thinks the US can defend Taiwan. I’m skeptical we can/would bring enough firepower to China’s border on what they consider to be an existential issue. Plus, what happens to Taiwan Semiconductor and a tech-enabled world that can no longer get the best computer chips in the world.
In playtesting of my World War Next wargame (unpublished), America was not able to defend Taiwan.
o China is busy getting much of South America on its side, but they seem more interested in colonizing Africa than invading S. America.
Yes, I think because Africa is so resource rich and, perhaps, easier to exploit. In South America you always run the risk of Americans shouting "Monroe Doctrine" ruining all your plans...
• I’m also curious about your thoughts on non-military warfare
It has already begun...
o The Chinese already own our media and all mass communication is filtered to fit their preferred narrative.
Indeed.
o My understanding is the US can pull chip designs that TSMC needs and stop high-level manufacturing. But if anyone destroys those plants or stops them, I think our military might be in trouble. Not sure how much we get from TSMC and how much from Samsung, but those are the best chip-makers in the world.
My understanding is that we no longer have the know-how to make those chips ourselves. How we lost it, I don't know, but we're now second rate in chips.
o I also think most of our military equipment relies on foreign semiconductors including all missile guidance systems. As much as I’m a free market guy, I’d pay TSMC to build plants here and hand out green cards to everyone who works there from the engineers to the janitors.
Agreed.
o China makes 90% of our pharmaceuticals. We used to make them in PR, but someone in Congress thought they could get more taxes from the pharma Cos. and they all moved production to China. The Chinese can turn off the spigot and kill grandma (along with everyone with a heart or cholesterol problem). How much of our population is currently on anti-depressants? That level of withdrawal all at once would be startling - not to mention people who have other urgent medical conditions.
Agreed, this will be devastating.
o The Russians have shown an ability to hack our electrical grid and could possibly take it down. My understanding is that we could harden the entire system for a few billion dollars which is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but no one has shown an interest in doing so probably for the Thomas Sowell reason – politicians get no credit for spending money to prevent the thing that didn’t happen.
o No idea what US capability is for non-military warfare, but the US and Russia probably have the best hackers in the world. Strange to think the whole thing could come down to a newly found backdoor in someone’s military access. Kind of the 2022 version of the enigma machine.
Agreed. Referencing my comments above, this is exactly the sort of "unrestricted warfare" I expect them to undertake.
> I also think most of our military equipment relies on foreign semiconductors including all missile guidance systems. As much as I’m a free market guy, I’d pay TSMC to build plants here and hand out green cards to everyone who works there from the engineers to the janitors.
You'd also need to give them exemptions from all the bureaucratic rules that made it impossible to build semiconductors here in the first place.
> China makes 90% of our pharmaceuticals.
Well, most pharmaceuticals are over-prescribed to the point of having a negative effect on health.
> How much of our population is currently on anti-depressants? That level of withdrawal all at once would be startling
It would certainly be traumatic. Then again, if the bluehairs curl up in a ball of pain, they're not throwing sand into the country's functioning. However, in the long run everyone involved would probably be better for it.
The exemptions would take time. Which, when we don't know what is going to happen, isn't likely going to start until missiles are flying. And would be fought tooth and nail by the paperpushers unless they were all shot or imprisoned.
Yes, but that would still take years to resolve even a disruption, much less a stoppage. In the meantime, most everyone would know *someone* going nuts and needing tons of assistance, diverting resources. Economic warfare.
The trauma would not only be to those going into withdrawal. Our whole population would be traumatized *even though most could use it long term.* Fasting and detoxing from BigPharme would solve a lot of ills, but millions would just die with shortages and the rest would struggle with the rapid change and the resultant trauma.
A truly terrifying analysis!
I recommend that we all stop referring to Communist China, and start referring to National Socialist China, because that's closer to what they are.
I want loopholes! And so I will try some nitpicks, not out of any sense of personal competence in this area, but just looking for less woe.
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The business of switching from manufacturing consumer and commercial goods to making war machines has changed dramatically from the Roosevelt days. Military contractors tend to be more dedicated to doing just military stuff than in days past. In the US the mindset for military contracting is completely alien to the market world because the federal government is both purchaser and investor. (I have seen this personally, as I used to be in that world.)
The US of the 1930s was super peacetime. Recall the Kellogg Briand pact, and how pacifist the American Right was. On the other hand, we had mothballed a lot of industrial capacity due to the Great Depression. Today, military equipment is what supports the US dollar as you have pointed out in past posts. This might be an anti loophole!
On the gripping hand, we have some capabilities mothballed from the Cold War days. And we have a vast reservoir of potential factory labor and cannon fodder in the form of able bodied welfare recipients and tough guys twiddling their thumbs in jail. There are also many mothballed factories on the civilian side from our policy of Subsidized Outsourcing.
Finally, America has grown mighty soft. But if war becomes existential, we could harden up substantially. If we accept that casualties are going to happen, we could take a more Total Quantity Management approach to fighter planes, for example. We could offer military service as an alternative to prison for street toughs, like we did in the old days. We could give drill sergeants real power to punish for such recruits. We also have a vast reservoir of illegal immigrants. A policy of Go Fight or Go Home would give us a foreign legion real quick.
But could we transition fast enough? Or could we recruit real allies in time, say a remilitarization of Japan or an official alliance with Vietnam?
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Yes, I am grasping at straws.
Welp, The Straw Grasping is moot.
Here is how Violent the coming Rape is going to be:
Steel (million metric Tonnes), 2021 figures a la World Steel Association:
China - 1,032.8
....
USA - 85.8
Russia - 75.6
... All GDP numbers, all these other fancy "economic" indicators are scams.
What one needs to look at is the *Physical* Economy of Manufacturing, Mining, Production, etc.
With numbers like these... this is going to make Opium "Wars" Rape look like a sideshow.
Wow.
I deeply appreciate that you casually dropped "on the gripping hand" without explanation. 10/10
Personally I hope your sentiments above are correct. So if you're grasping at straws, I'll grasp with you.
"deeply appreciate that you casually dropped "on the gripping hand" without explanation. 10/10"
I was going to say exactly the same thing.
I have one more straw for your grasping pleasure.
Is China truly a nation?
In my previous comment I suggested calling China a national socialist state, and for good reason. But national socialism gets tricky when you govern more than one nation. You can do all the flag waving and patriotism drills you want, but if you govern more than one fatherland, something is going to ring hollow.
Just today I got a clickbait post on Facebook from some site with language based maps. One of them was for China, and it showed a large swath of the southeast which did not speak Mandarin. (Sorry, I don't have the link handy now.)
This takes me back to an old memory from grad school, where there were many students from "communist" China. One who shared my office was quite insistent that I know that he was from Shanghai; he didn't want to be thought of as merely Chinese. The full significance escaped me at the time.
Back to that map: I think Taiwan was linguistically closer to Shanghai and related parts of southeast China. Enthusiasm for an invasion of Taiwan may be less than enthusiastic.
But, you might say, China has included the southeast for much of the past 2000+ years. How could it be a different nation?
Well, by virtue of astrological alignment, there is this recent book review on Scott Alexander's blog:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-1587-a-year-of-no
China has many centuries as an empire, and with a Deep State of Extraordinary Magnitude at that. But the book review linked above indicates that there was also a great degree of local governance, and Imperial government paid attention to Taoist philosophy, which seems rather more libertarian than what we associate with China. Perhaps that semi-libertarian mysticism was their version of federalism.
So maybe, just maybe, there will be problems with a national socialist China going into expansionistic mode.
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But before ye get too much hope, note that half the US has lost faith in its unifying principles. We are not a single nation and never have been. We have lost both the Constitution and the Protestant Consensus as unifying principles.
I'm just suggesting that China might have similar problems, not that we have any advantage in this regard. Or, to be more precise, our disadvantage might not be as bad as it seems at first glance.
The southern Chinese are still Han for the most part, if I recall correctly. Their written language is close enough, as are the Taiwanese (with difficulty in the latter case, as I have seen personally.) Cantonese, their dialect, however, might as well be a different language in terms of mutual spoken comprehension if they have not learned both, according to the mainland Chinese teacher who taught Mandarin in my high school. (By the by, Mandarin is a fun language to learn about, though anyone who wants fluency in it without having a great reason to is mad, I believe.)
Tibetan and Uyghurs are not Chinese, and there a LOT of other minorities in one way or another. But by and large they are a very homogenous culture and people, with a huge density of *their* people where they care most about, and the will to displace or kill anyone who will not toe the line from about the those they conquer/import/tolerate as riffraff.
China will have huge problems exerting military power overseas outside of their region, but more of the economic, financial, spiritual/ideological, and demographic kinds. I seem to recall their population actually began contracting a few years before COVID, according to their leaked internal memos based on revised demographic data. Even with the easing of the One Child Policy, no one wants more kids because the economy/society are structured to disincentivize it heavily. The huge debt bubbles (there is more than one) they are facing mirror the US's. The infrastructure is new... but crumbling rapidly due to graft and legal structures such as lacking private property protections.
All in all, the US and China going to war would be like two elderly, armless drunks smacking each other with their broken denture held in their gums. Lots of blood and gnashing of teeth, and one might even fall over dead from his liver cancer during the fight, but still sad and pitiable (and a little funny too.)
The Ukrainians and Russians are both Slavic. Last I checked they aren't getting along so well.
The Germans and the French use the same Roman alphabet. The French and the English have a huge number of shared words.
The effects of the One Child policy are ambiguous. On the one had, it produced a lot of Only Children. Not ideal for cannon fodder. On the other hand, it produced a huge imbalance between men and women. In some respects it's rather surprising that China has gone imperialist for that reason alone. Lots of pretty ladies that look close enough to Chinese in places like Thailand, Vietnam and the Phillipines...
Yes, but the question was "are they a nation." They are of the same ethnic background, ruled by the same government, with a culture that has largely homogenized at least among the greater masses due to rapid urbanization and mass education/media, with a shared history and shared values...
They are a nation. They have imperial territories, certainly, but they represent a smaller proportion relative to the central population than the American Empire. Even before America's Empire, America was less of a unified nation.
I do expect an implosion of China long term, but not imminently, and not for that reason. More "Solomon driving the people too hard and his heir breaking the camel's back" than "ethnic tensions."
I think it's a very smart call, from an analysis perspective, to label the PRC a national socialist state - small letters. This is exactly how they conduct themselves - the Marxist/Leninist/(even)Maoist stuff is merely window dressing. Deng and Zhou Enlai oversaw this transition - they knew communist is consumptive/extractive, but national socialism builds the socialism part with the energy of the nationalism part. In 2002, after a sabbatical in China, I authored a paper about PRC being national socialist. My home university thought it was great, but when I went to present it at national forum, Mr. Mega-Professor laughed at it and wouldn't allow me to present. I still stand by it. Couldn't understand why people couldn't see it, but then, that was a time when I though the USA was a serious country.
The Chinese are a Civilization first, and a State only insofar as they continue being a Civilization proper. This means that if the Westphalian model is "overcome" by something else (a la being able to generate the results, outcomes, etc that they want) they will pursue that without worry.
It is a 'world unto itself', in that it has existed coherently for well over 5000+ years. The only other peoples who have a similar temperament and history would be the Indosphere and Indic Civilization, whose peoples although currently fractured into a large India and a couple of smaller states such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc; are basically of that mindset.
India cannot be called a "nation" either thus. It has 22 Official languages (hundred more unofficial), several hundred ethnicities, vastly divergent cultural mores if one travels even 30-40 miles on average, etc. However, this "pool of chaos" (from the Western lens) is nevertheless united.
Again, it's the same situation- Westphalianism is just expedient (at least for now). I fully expect it be chucked out in favour of something more resembling "empire" in the future by these Two Historically Dominant Masses of Humanity (i.e. the Sinosphere and Indosphere).
And this will not be a pair of "expansionary" empires (given the last few thousand years of how these peoples have conducted themselves). Rather, it will be two "genocidal" ones. The Han (the second dynasty who had China-proper under them) were born in a similar manner, so too were the Maurya (who had most of the Subcontinent under their suzerainty).
For the Han, it was the genocide of the Xiongnu (who ran away Westwards and whose descendants sacked Rome eventually given the genocide from 300+ years prior hardening their resolve) and for the Maurya it was the massacre of the Kalingans and other "forest dwellers" who unfortunately were not lucky enough to run away or escape.
Any Global War will by necessity involve a Pearl Harbour style Nuclear Strike by the Yankees on the Chinese people (their military planners know that someone producing 10x more steel than them will Rape them lest they Strike First and annihilate the 'Dirty Y******'). The reasoning will be that if they vaporize 200+ million people, they will buckle and sue for peace.
It's actually driven by a similar set of reasonings (i.e. "They are not a Nation, it's just an Empire"). Sadly for the Murican Yankee, a Civilization and "world unto itself" is a stronger Unit than a mere Westphalian "nation". The last 5000+ years of Human History has proven this decisively.
And it will end ultimately with Eurasian coalition forces having tens of millions of boots on the ground in CONUS-proper going door to door, street to street, ditch to ditch eliminating the "vile Anglo-Saxon wretches who nuked our peoples". Motivation is not needed here.
If your 7 year daughter was vaporized during piano recital by Yankees, you will have no issues with your "Motivation". You will commit every war crime on the books (and those yet to be invented, recorded or even contemplated about) GLADLY. You have lost the reason to continue living as a proper human being, so you will just go *all the way* by default.
This will end in a Carthago Delenda Est Rout. The death toll will be in the 800 million to 2 billion range; and whole peoples (The Anglo-Saxons and anyone with even a hint of said genetic material) will be erased; both physically (person to person eliminations) and genetically (a la the genetic material being edited and erased).
New words for the sorts of atrocities committed would need to be invented. Because there will be no stop until the elimination is complete.
No differentiation will be made between the common people vs the governments of those peoples. "Collective Responsibility" will be the default mode employed by the victorious Eurasians; given the trauma they received from the Nuclear First Strike.
I couldn't quite bring myself to put a little "heart" next to this post. "YAY genocide of my civilization!" We need a "wheel of pain" emoji instead of a "heart".
Quite true.
This "Greek Tragedy" on steroids could have been avoided in its entirety on multiple occasions. One of which was the post 90s environment where Russia (and the former Soviet republics) were in economic free fall. Even the most paltry of helping hands, if extended with genuineness, would have worked wonders!
... Rather than sending busloads of Oligarchs and Contractors to Rape, Pillage, etc the livelihood of the Russian people (i.e. their firms, factories, etc), a different course could have been pursued. The Yugoslav Rape (I don't call it a "War", it's just classic Feral Yankee Raping at its most Base and Vile) meanwhile was the last straw.
It was then that the Russian People knew that these folks "really want to kill us in mind, body and spirit like they tried to do to our Serbian and other Slavic brethren". It's been downhill since then with regard to the West's relations with the Orthodox world (of which Russia is the standard bearer). There is no salvaging this relationship.
As for the Sinitic world... The Chinese people have a long memory. The Rape of the Opium Wars is well remembered; and it only has been reinforced by Yankee pillaging, rapes, etc of Korea, Vietnam, etc ... peoples and nations who have had relations (thousands of years old mind you) with the Chinese (both as friend and foe).
So basically these avenues of "friendship" (or at the bare minimum 'let's not be enemies') are cut off; and we move deterministically towards the End Game.
I think our civilization is more approaching mass senility than genocide, but there are yet children of the blood to it.
And the idea of mutual invasions/nuking does come across as rather doomsaying or wishful thinking. How, pray tell, can one or two or even five million soldiers from either side control the other? And economic deprivation only goes so far in controlling either population. Even if, less than, say, 1% of Chinese resist an invasion... ten million partisans. On the US side, even if 2% resist (as a less collective, communal culture and a massive gun culture, that seems fairly conservative), still six million partisansand at a minimum 8 or 12 million guns. And the machine shops to covertly convert salvage/scavenge into guns, IEDs, and simple mortars enough to give jihadis a cold sweat. (Partisan defenders needing far less in terms of physical capabilities than line soldiers. China too is having huge recruitment/maintaining force quality problems in their military, though for other reasons.)
Personally, I think the fall of a civilization that has lost the Mandate of Heaven (a very real thing) is a good thing, and better the sooner it happens. The longer it is prolonged, the worse the aftermath. I am optimistic that those who would crush the innocent peoples of Europe and North America beneath their boots will be taken down in the fall of the postmodern West, for it is not those on the bottom who fall furthest or hardest when the palanquin-bearers trip.
It's funny, as you're now the third person who has assumed that World War III necessarily assumes that we invade each other. That this would be everyone's default assumption didn't occur to me so I didn't address it at all in my essay.
I don't think anybody's going to invade anybody's homelands, not right away. They're going to invade each other's allies' homelands, and key strategic points of interest, while waging bio- and cyber-war on each other.
I didn't think you thought that. I was arguing against the idea brought up by other commenters of invasions on either side's homelands.
Ahnaf's whole shtick is passing off his anti-American revenge fantasies as some kind of reasonable strategic analyses.
>>Ahnaf's whole shtick is passing off his anti-American revenge fantasies as some kind of reasonable strategic analyses.<<
What's coming is coming; and no amount of Copium, Lampoon or Ad Hominem is going to stop said practical "on the ground realities" from transpiring.
>>>The Kalingans weren't genocided. <<
After the battle, the soldiers ravaged the peoples. So this is just a Lie. As someone from that part of the world, I know far better than you the Yankee who merely learned about it in passing in some generic "World History" class.
As for the "Ashoka turned over a new leaf"-story; that's more mythology than history, if by the latter we mean something with a testimonial chain of the sort modern scholars would be content with.
>>The larger and more diffuse a unit is, the weaker it is. China has been a "world onto itself" by virtue of being isolated from all other civilization centers.<<
For most of the last 2500 years (save for this "blip" in history of roughly 300-400 years), the "Larger Diffuse" units that are China and India (i.e. where most of humanity have tended to reside) have proven your assertion wrong given their Material, *Physical* Economy dwarfing others (Europe for much of human history has been a backwater).
>> China's much vaunted 5000+ civilizational history consists of them being conquered by every barbarian tribe that rolls off the steppe<<
False. Whilst some did succeed (the Mongols are the key case), they eventually all get culturally assimilated and (centuries later) are driven to genetic and cultural extinction via maneuvering in the fields of culture, economy, etc
Take the Manchu (i.e. the founders of the Qing imperial dynasty) for instance- Their language is lost (Spoken and Written Manchu are mere artifacts in the museum) and their genetics have basically been "assimilated" almost entirely by the Han-majority.
Yankee time-preference is low, so all this seems "too slow and far fetched"... but that's just wishful thinking and copium. There will be a large scale genocide of CONUS-proper; and it will end with not just Physical eliminations, but also Genetic Erasures. The Muricans will ensure that once they Launch their Nuclear First Strike on every major Chinese City.
Westphalianism is about to end. The nation-state unit in its current form (i.e. with a focus on sovereignty, citizenship by blood and descent, etc) has been around for some 350-400 years now. It is going to end in what will become one of the Bloodiest Massacres of Mankind.
In a way, this was always going to be the outcome. The "nation-state" born out of the Westphalian Peace is a primarily Western Construct; and so with the West's Fall and Erasure (cultural, demographic, spiritual and material), so too it will fade into the dustbin of History.
> After the battle, the soldiers ravaged the peoples.
That was SOP for most of history.
> As for the "Ashoka turned over a new leaf"-story; that's more mythology than history, if by the latter we mean something with a testimonial chain of the sort modern scholars would be content with.
It's based on his actually carved edicts. It's not history only in the sense that the Indians didn't bother recording history the way the Westerners or Chinese did until the Muslims introduced it to them.
> False. Whilst some did succeed (the Mongols are the key case),
And the Xianbei, and the Liao, and the Jurchen Jin, and the Manchus, and those are just the major ones.
> they eventually all get culturally assimilated and (centuries later) are driven to genetic and cultural extinction via maneuvering in the fields of culture, economy, etc
That's what I said, the Chinese overawed the barbarians with the sophistication of Chinese civilization. Incidentally, the Chinese were significantly less successful at overawing the Mongols since the latter's empire was large enough to include other centers of civilization.
> Yankee time-preference is low
You know nothing of Anglo history do you?
> There will be a large scale genocide of CONUS-proper; and it will end with not just Physical eliminations, but also Genetic Erasures.
Sorry, your having a revenge fantasy doesn't make it likely.
You agreed in essence with most of what was said; ergo not much else needs to be iterated on that side of things.
As for the rest-
Anglo-Saxon History is Naval-oriented. And that history is already doomed now that the Carrier has been thrown into the dustbin (i.e. the 800 mile effective range of said floating metal fortresses will not be able to intercept Salvos of Mach 9+ Hypersonics).
9-10 mins reaction time tops basically means that in mere minutes and hours, "Ruling the Waves" will become a fantasy/delusion once hostilities commence.
That's the military and "elite" side of things.
The general population meanwhile have very low time preferences. The general Decadence of "the West" these past few decades or so demonstrate that practically speaking; the Yankee "Sheeple" are in many ways worse than Cattle when it comes to keeping their governments in check.
Why is that? It is because their "long term memory" is merely as long as the next news cycle. And this is just the material "reality on the ground".
Finally, it is less a revenge fantasy and more a "projecting future outcomes given how past trends tend to shape up". There is going to be no "benevolence" shown to the defeated West, it will be "Total Removal" because that will be the fundamental ethical argument being made by the Victorious Eurasian powers; namely:
>>These are the people who used Nukes in a First strike against us.
Why ought they deserve to exist in the first place then as a people? Should we not Remove them to prevent future calamities? And for good measure, let's make sure they are never, or can never even be born again! <<
If you wish to continue lacing yourself with the Copium of "Yankee Numbah Wan!" and "Yankee = Good Guise", that's all well and good!
But this practical reality will still transpire, regardless of how you holler on and on.
> Sadly for the Murican Yankee, a Civilization and "world unto itself" is a stronger Unit than a mere Westphalian "nation".
That's absolute nonsense. The larger and more diffuse a unit is, the weaker it is. China has been a "world onto itself" by virtue of being isolated from all other civilization centers. This is not a source of strength.
> in that it has existed coherently for well over 5000+ years.
China's much vaunted 5000+ civilizational history consists of them being conquered by every barbarian tribe that rolls off the steppe, and then so overawing said tribe with the sophistication of their civilization that their new overlords adopt Chinese ways.
There have been Chinese dynasty that have exerted great military and economic might, but yeah, not for long most times.
Chinese civilization is rather solipsist, and while "isolated" is perhaps not fair in my eyes, they did not care about the world outside of China much until the last few hundred years, same as most places. They'd *go* there, exert some soft power/flex muscles, but only as a way of getting more for their positions back and China, and many of their previous empires were only de jure rather than de facto.
... Ancient China was the Hollywood of the ancient world. Cultural power brewed with potent solipsism/narcissism.
China has a fascinating history, and achieved some wondrous things. But I agree that you can't say it's a 5000 uninterrupted reign. For one they have frequent collapses of epic proportions. Fall of Rome was Europe's only mega collapse in our 2200-ish year history of civilization, and if similar happened in China it would be a footnote. In the same period China had 70+ dynastic collapses, with several resulting in population dropping to 1/3. China's several Warlord Eras make our single version, the Medieval Era, look like a tea party.
> Maurya it was the massacre of the Kalingans and other "forest dwellers" who unfortunately were not lucky enough to run away or escape.
The Kalingans weren't genocided. The Mautyans won a battle against them. The battle was no doubt bloody, but probably not that bloody in historical context. Nevertheless, it was bloody enough to send the Mauryan emperor Ashoka so completely over the edge with guilt, that he basically became a bugman and decreed everyone in his empire do likewise.
Excellent Writing as always!
Given the preamble and the noting down that this will be a multi-part series most likely; perhaps a few “pushbacks” if you will:
>>“Better trained and Better Equipped”.
What is the objective standard being employed here by yourself?
If we look at (say) training hours per Jet-pilot; Chinese pilots net over 200+ hours (far higher than their Murican counterparts). This would be a “Quantitative” standard for being “better trained”.
Or if we look at Hypersonics; Kinzhals being deployed on Nuclear Subs are “Better Equipped” than their Murican counterparts (some of whom only having a bunch of subsonics deployed).
>>”the winner will tend to be whichever side has better-trained and better-led troops with better equipment”
Well, the quality of ground forces has to go hand in hand with your C4ISR. And the Muricans have never had disruptions to said structure; even in the heyday of WWII. The Oceans have helped them on that!
But this is no longer the case.
They are fully untested as a people. Could it be that the Yankee is a Natural “superman” of sorts who doesn’t even flinch in the face of mass Contusions, given his “Manifest Destiny” and the fact that the “Exceptional Nation” has raised him to be the most moral, heroic, etc soldier courtesy of Uncle Sam’s “Red, White and Blue”?
Perhaps…. but call me skeptical!
Especially if you have low altitude (so basically radar can’t see them coming) Hypersonics gliding along to their destination en masse. Unblockable and Industrially produced in peacetime as we speak!
Murican forces likely cannot withstand FIRE impact. Imagine the world’s “Extremophiles” (weird lichens and stuff) and the places they live in. Now imagine a battlefield where that environment is replicated within seconds. Contusions-galore make “better training” (if that is even true in the first place) utterly moot.
As the esteemed Andrei Martyanov notes: “If I see you I kill you”. That is the motto for the coming World War. The Russians have Glasnost and Universal C4ISR denial (China has yet to develop analogues). His works are a must read to understand Modern trendiness with regard to weaponry, strategic elements in warfare, etc.
Satellites need to be shot down first, otherwise Glasnost et al will get all those Kinzhal and Zircon hits in.
OSINT who often get a lot of stuff wrong, are thus “more correct” on this front when they give the Russians a value of 0.501 and the Chinese 0.511 (lower number is “better” for their Power Index). Muricans have a 0.453 (as of this writing) which I challenge for reasons noted here and elsewhere I have in mind.
In terms of the CEV values therefore:
I think the First case actually is underestimated here. Russian combat prowess (per soldier) is likely above the Muricans, given the fact that their denial capabilities for C4ISR & “better equipment” outclass the Muricans. The average Chinese soldier is more likely to be on par with their Murican counterpart; but only at this slice of time.
And then we need to look at the most important variable too, which is Industry.
A nation (i.e. China) producing 10x more steel than you in Peacetime is going to have no problem with “Technology”. I for one think the “Asians steal our Great MURICAN technology” is just Anglo-Saxon conceit.
Mind you, Russian steel production is a mere 0.8x to 0.9x of Murican production, even though it is a nation which has a mere 0.4-0.5x Murica’s population. And up until recently, Russian Rockets were Uber-ing Yankees into space, because said Yankees couldn’t build a feasible propulsion system that was repeatable.
So… “better technology/equipment” is unlikely; it’s more a case of basically a toilet seat being built using Gold (thus the inflated prices) and then being passed off as “Master Craftsmanship” by the Muricans… at least on the Weaponry and Military Tech side of things that is what seems to be the case.
The numbers for industry are always correlated strongly to a nation’s Martial prowess. When Victorian Britain reached a certain “critical mass” with regard to Coal Production; it had no issues with other materials.
In a way, they “sorted themselves out” since like a line of dominoes, the thresholds for each of them (steel, oil, tungsten, chrome, etc) got breached effortlessly. And so you have just flat-out Rapes like the First and Second Opium Wars; which were more “let me violate you and Drug up all you Dirty Y*****s” rather than serious Wars.
Did it matter that the Redcoats were better trained? No doubt! But that was more a “Bonus” than a Causal variable. Really it came down to *Material* Economy (producing actual physical “stuff”) which in turn can be fed into the War machine of labour, national unity, etc.
Yup, yup. Good thoughts. It would not be difficult to persuade me that the US fighting forces today have a lower CEV than Russia's do, and are only on par with China. That case could be made, as you've started to above.
But most Americans, and even most of the defense community, assume the opposite, and just question by how much the US is better and in what fields. People tend to dismiss out of hand views that are too far outside their baseline. So for purposes of making a point, even if OSINT's CEVs are right, I'd still probably include all the cases I did, to show that even more favorable assumptions still don't lead to a happy ending for Team America.
Point taken! (Re: The "Defence" folks swallowing the 'Murica Numbah wan!' Kool-Aid)
And yes, I too have found (by personal experience) that even suggesting (or starting to) that "maybe these guys are BETTER" is a no-go zone. Either you get shut out (as an "enemy collaborator" or whatnot) or labelled as Loony/Nutty. Ergo, your strategy of using more favourable stats for Team Yankee is definitely more Rhetorically Salient.
I guess, there does come a breaking point where (say) the nominal "defence" bloke cant really be saying "Dey steal our Technology" when the Yankees themselves *don't even have anything in that league yet*. But alas, that "Aha!" moment has yet to arrive for the vast majority of Muricans. And when it does; that's when the Woe-ception kicks off!
For sure. I don't think most Americans have processed the fact that they have hypersonic missiles and we do not, for instance.
I am stealing the phrase "The Woe-ception". The Woeception is imminent!
Even nonhypersonic missile production is hampered by a procurement system that could hardly have been designed on purpose to be slower or less reliable. Which isn't an awful thing when you have decades of low-level engagement and can maintain somewhat constant inventory.
When things get serious, however, that is insufficient. And short of shooting the bureaucats involved in the process (not going to happen while the US still stands in its current form), there is no way to fix that process with any speed, especially under pressure.
Nukes falling on the US I view as unlikely. Invasion of the continental US extremely unlikely. The US nuking China without a coup removing the current system extremely unlikely, given how the Chinese have openly coopted so many US leaders, and how averse the US public would be to such a thing.
But both powers are paper tigers (or glass cannons, if you would rather), especially compared to Russia. But Russia's population base is too small and insufficiently young, and its dispersion of resources and population/transportation density too low for them to be a serious player at a superpower as they currently are... and I believe they know it. Hence Putin trying for over a decade to not start even a true proxy war, until now (when energy prices were already giving him huge budgetary leeways and provocations getting too severe to ignore without weakening Russia long term.)
As for the population bases of the US and China... both are cratering horribly. Very few places aren't. Which adds to the sense of desperation I smell in the air.
Interesting analysis. It seems that the only way the US does well are if extremely generous assumptions are made about US combat effectiveness.
I wrote this up a few months ago:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/why-america-cant-win-world-war-iii
Looking at the same question from a variety of angles. My evaluation is that the US is in an extremely weak position, due to the combination of low industrial capacity, demoralization, poor leadership, low physical quality of the recruiting pool, and a foreign policy that has left the US with allies only amongst militarily insignificant countries.
That's a great essay. We seem to have reached nearly the same conclusion on different grounds.
I just signed up for your substack, thanks for linking it. Do you want to cross-recommend?
I'm glad you enjoyed it. That's high praise coming from you - your recent piece on the Mandela effect had me in stitches (and I couldn't help relating your hypothesis to some physicists I know over beers).
Sure, I'm down for a cross-recommendation!
An excellent and much needed analysis. I was oddly gratified to see that your experience at West Point mirrored my experience in ROTC - hence no military career for me either. It chafed at the time but I still managed to work for the Pentagon and can truly appreciate not having to take orders the same way as my uniformed friends must.
As other's have said, I fear that the combat effectiveness of the US military is grossly exaggerated, though I understand the reasons you mentioned in comments for doing so. Without going into discussion of equipment, which is laughably obsolete in most cases, the two most important aspects in a war, especially a long one, are morale and logistics.
Simply put, the logistics tail to maintain a US fleet or division is so long, complex and contains so many points of critical failure, that I don't see these units maintaining cohesion in the face of opposition. We can barely manage in peacetime, when we aren't shipping vast quantities of inventory to Ukraine. Speaking of San Antonio-class, an entire embarked MEU was stuck at sea last spring with nothing but MREs for two weeks because of a supply breakdown.
Which feeds into morale. The US military is almost delusionally hyper-convinced of it's own superiority in battle. This is a vicious pendulum on the field - when you enter the field of battle thinking you CANNOT lose, and then CANNOT win, or are totally outclassed, it creates panic in the short term and combat hesitancy in the long term. Americas will be thunderstruck when the first two or three carriers go down to kinetic kill vehicles, hypersonic missiles or good old fashioned SS torpedoes. The danger of nuclear escalation by a totally impotent US military structure is very high in all these scenarios.
I'll add my area of expertise to another commenters thoughts about East Asia. Vietnam will never join the US against China. They are pragmatists to the n-th degree, focused solely on survival. The Japanese are much more likely to join Russia than to remilitarize and join the US against China and Russia. They are already deeply wary of the US's commitment and capabilities - it's an open secret in Japanese military circles. No one knows better how feeble the US 7th Fleet is than Japan. They MAY remilitarize. If they do it will not be for the benefit of the US. Their long-term strategic interests lie with Russia, which can provide energy as no one else on earth can, and also provide a counterbalance to China, which Russia would need to have. This was part of Abe's life's work - a life that was suddenly and violently ended, I might add.
It sounds like the morale and logistics situation is even worse than I feared.
I didn't know that Japan was considering a reorientation to Russia. That makes sense. It would have made sense for *us* to ally with Russia against China, too. Allowing Russia to enter China's sphere is the greatest strategic mistake we could have made.
Morale is in a terminal velocity plummet. Skyrocketing suicides, largest peacetime desertion rate, Vaxx mandate discharges of the most competent and respected and mandatory degeneracy celebrations - I seriously worry about unit cohesion in garrison, let alone when deployed into combat.
Japan's been trying to resolve issues with the Russia a long time - amicably. Even when they were forced under the US umbrella, the Japanese made sure the alliance treaty wouldn't pull them into an American war with the USSR. They've been forced into the US orbit, but alone amongst all the US-aligned "powers" they've resisted the siren call of the GAE; for example, they routinely buy oil from Iran.
For Japan it's all about energy and staying ahead of China. Until the Oil Crisis of the 70s, Japan assumed America would take care of that. Crack #1.
After Tiananmen Square, the Japanese expected harsh penalties would be laid on the Chinese. Instead, to their complete shock and dismay, the US spent a decade selling/sending advanced weaponry, advanced industrial secrets, and a globe spanning industrial capacity (the one you reference in the article) to China. Crack #2.
Since 9-11, the US has been trying to get the Japanese to break their Constitution (that the US foisted on them at gunpoint in 1945) in ordered to fight wars in the Middle East. As this would disrupt energy supply, the only thing that matters to Japan, they demurred and began building up a large energy infrastructure with the Russians - natgas & oil - in the Russian Far East. Billions and billions went to develop these fields, with Japan receiving, for the first time in history, stable nearby supplies of energy. These pipelines and terminals were just coming fully online in the last few years when the US forced Japan to boycott Russian energy. The much ballyhooed privation facing the denizens of the EU is nothing compared to what the energy starved Japanese will be going through this winter. Crack #3
All Japanese leadership now knows, as the Russians do, the US cannot be trusted - "non-agreement capable", as I think Lavrov said. They are a dangerous loose cannon whose monetary polices almost sent the yen into a complete tailspin this spring. Remember, the Japanese are not bound ideologically and religiously to the GAE as the EU is. So Japan has 3 options:
1. Stay with the US, who they view as an increasingly irrational, dangerous to their sovereignty, economy, and, with the spread of transsexual theology, their culture.
2. Succumb gradually as an arch-satrapy of a Clinton-empowered Super China.
3. Partner with a Russia that has neither territorial nor economic designs on the Japanese sphere, and which needs a high tech Asian superpower to partner with. China is a positively unnatural choice for the Russians. The Russians grasp feebly at India but India is a basket-case.
They will try to quietly wind down #1 and try to spin up #3, to avoid #2.
The Japanese, who, as John Dower has pointed out, are almost uniquely unable to change course absent outside influence, will have a major crisis, likely economic. The political turmoil that follows will see the victor reach out to Russia. Secure stable, cheap energy supplies and a secured northern flank will not only protect Japan from metastasizing Chinese incursion, but will give Japan the boost it needs to reclaim it's economic vitality.
I hope it doesn't take that crisis, and I hope Russia isn't too deeply in the thrall of China by then.
Has there been any movement on the Kuril dispute lately that I missed?
Japan reorienting toward Russia has always made a ton of sense, and were they less sensitive about public face (though less so than China by far) and less under the shadow (threat) of the US umbrella, it likely would have happened sooner.
Abe's diplomatic team (everything is team based in Japan) had reached a tentative (in 2019) agreement with Russia for a sovereign, but not jurisdictional return of the southern 2 of the 4 Kuriles Japan claimed. Essentially a kind of Hong Kong deal - Japanese sovereignty would be recognized but for many decades would remain under Russian jurisdiction for the sake of the Russian islanders, then a period of handover and eventual Japanese sovereignty per treaty. That was all scuppered in 2019 when the US forced Japan into condemning Russia and withdrawing negotiating teams.
Because the negotiations were very much a personal endeavor between Abe-Putin, like Reagan-Nakasone, the issue of rapprochement is dead. This gives me dark thoughts about the motivations behind the Abe assassination.
Ah, yeah, I remember hearing a little about a torpedoed deal now.
Sounds reasonable to have such thoughts with that background in mind.
If it comes to an international WWIII, as opposed to a domestic Civil War II going international only as other players support sides locally, the United States has a weak hand. No doubt about it. The citizen peoples of the various states within the US, however, could well have a stronger hand vis-a-vis those peoples whose castes within the US have crafted and maintaned the petrodollar system, the hyper-financialization that began even before that, the social disintegration, etc.
Personally, I view more proxy fighting ending in a North American nuclear-armed domestic conflict more as likely than a maximum-effort foreign conflagration. Having been in the financial side of US defense aviation parts manufacturing (as a small cog with avid curiosity) during the beginning and heights of COVID, the degradation in materiel available for actual warfighting (including quality) is, I believe, going to shock people. And since the petrodollar system has not absolutely imploded quite yet, there are yet still some in military leadership who want to hide the capability degradation to prevent the whole US institutional/legal infrastructure from collapsing.
I agree that civil war is as or more likely than world war. "Why not both?" may also be the correct answer. It would be easy to imagine a secession state inviting China or Russia to help it, much as the Confederacy hoped to gain help from France.
That's disturbing to hear about our defense industry, but each person who has chimed in with any insider information has all had the same theme -- "Woe, it's worse than you think."
We're gonna need a bigger tree
I'd picture the illegitimate people already in power calling in help more easily than secessionists. But I cannot read the future, praise be.
I wouldn't. They are becoming more internationally hated, and ignored, by the day and have proven themselves agreement incapable. No one trusts them and no one likes them.
Well, given the evidence in Chinese infiltration among them, I could imagine them getting some support from China.
China, other countries run by puppets like them, etc. Yeah.
Late to the party, sorry I missed the early festivities!
One thing that you seemed to have missed re: a WWN is that there are more potential great powers than the 3 you mention. The biggest being India. Watch some presentations Peter Zeihan makes to Indian elites and watch how they salivate when he tells them they'll be an up-and-coming nation in the future. They almost whip it out to finish themselves off when he points out that in a chaotic world they'll get 1st dibs on ME oil, with China at the far end getting the leftovers.
Re: CW2-
Even if China has some leverage in DC, if they are playing for the big enchilada they'll want to see the US split in 2+ chunks. No matter how much influence they might have in DC, they are only a President Hitler, Stalin, Putin, or similar away from being booted out completely, with the US reverting back to being their biggest threat. But now with serious leadership. OTOH, a split up and weakened US would allow China the freedom to advance it's interests internationally far more than currently.
Therefore I think whichever side looks the weakest is the side that would get support from Chin/Rus, and only enough support to keep the CW going. Of course, India might jump in on the other side, with the same intent of keeping the CW going to drain China/Rus.
A further complication is that I'm not sold on the stiffness of the China/ Rus alliance. China is massively expanding it's influence in Asia, including the central Asian 'stans that are traditionally within Russia's sphere of influence. If the US was serious, it would have teamed up with Russia against China as China is the obvious threat to both. Rus is a declining power with a surplus of territory while China is a rising power with a dearth of territory. That rarely ends well for the declining power, and Russia is not the type of nation to let itself play 2nd fiddle.
If I was writing a book of fiction I'd probably have the US split up into 4 parts, with China/Rus backing Aztlan People's Republic of CA and the SW, EU backing northeast Regime, Japan backing White people's Midwest/ PNW alliance, S America backing Wakanda for no reason other than to get back at the US for fucking with them for so many decades. India would also back Wakanda just to keep it going, but would eventually say "Africa wins again" and trade it to the Regime for Guam.
In the 5th book of the trilogy I'd have Rus backstab China by joining Japan, with technology suddenly being able to negate nukes so they could invade the mainland. Then every nation destroys its enemies' infrastructure with conventional weapons, so my next trilogy could be a Mad Max scenario.
You are 100% correct about the industrial capacity, in a long war we loose.. My take is thet the naval war is a make or break event. If the US can successfully blockade China and use unrestricted submarine warfare. We can strangle thier greater production and starve them. You cannot make more steel if you cannot get iron ore. Regardless of what people believe, China is a maritime nation more than 90% of thier trade comes from the sea. This is why they are building coal and nuclear power plants because they know the oil supply is at risk. The aircraft carriers are huge targets for the CCP and we need to stop building them, ramp up SSN construction and consider building of AIP Diesel boats. The destruction of even one super carrier would be a massive propaganda victory. Based on the operation history of the USN ans idiotic social policies, I fear we may take substantial losses early on. On the plus side the CCP has now significant naval warfare history, but they are close to thier bases and the US is not.
Great points. The only thing I'd quibble about is calling the US "we." I don't identify with our ruling elites, and have little empathy with those who signed up to do it's bidding.
I've heard good arguments that large surface ships are virtually useless in a peer-vs-peer war, for the same reason that battleships were obsolete in WW2. The range at which ships can be spotted and sunk by non-capital ship assets is far greater than the range that capital ships can reach.
Planes can fly 1k+ miles, launch a missile with 1k+ mile range, return to get more missiles. Even if anti-missile tech works as advertised (which never happens) its still just a matter of how many millions of dollars do you want to spend to destroy billions of dollars of ships and kill thousands of men. Ships and missiles can be replaced far faster than capital ships.
That makes sense to me. I suppose the open question, then, becomes the match-up between Chinese missiles and US carriers, between our and their fifth generation fighters, and so on.
I have a few quibbles:
- Where and how is China getting its resources for this war? Thinking iron ore, hydrocarbons and a growing amount of imported food. It already imports huge quantities of raw materials, and I'm assuming its hunger for them would only increase in a total war? If its plan is to grab them quickly at the very start....well we've been here before. We know how that story ends.
- America is not alone. In fact far from it. It is an alliance structure, and some of the members of that alliance structure are significant nodes in the global industrial and economic system. Japan, the UK and other Five Eyes, the European Core, even as it it currently stands India as part of the Quad.
- China is old, as is Russia. They both have collapsing birth rates. Seems to me they better act soon or its pretty much too late.
- How are they both financing this war? Are they paying for it with US dollars?
1) Russia and the rest of the none western world which is quiet happy to trade with China (& Russia as well)
2) The UK hasn´t been a significant industrial node since the 80´s, Europe has been hollowed out deliberately by the Germans vie the Euro over the last 30 years, India will not join a US war against China/Russia and Japan has no raw resources or ability to protect it´s ports.
3) A sold-out myth based on circumstances that no longer apply.
4) They have their own fiat currencies so they can pay for it like the USA and unlike the USA they are net exporters.
Looks like jack beat me to the punch, but here's my thoughts.
1) Russia can supply most of the resources that China needs. For this reason, the grand strategy we've chosen is moronic -- we've created the very thing we feared, a World Island.
2) I agree, America will have some help from allies. But it's not clear *how much* help. And it's also not clear how much help China and Russia will get from, say, Iran, Turkey, etc. So I figured I'd just leave that out of the analysis, at least for now.
3) I agree completely. This is why I think war is imminent.
4) I have previously predicted that the petrodollar system will collapse. The war will come simultaneous with, or after, that collapse, IMO.
- On point one, the vast majority of Chinese import inputs come via the sea. As do their exports. That’s a hard problem for them to overcome. Even with the money they are splashing in these Belt Road things, sea transport still dwarfs rail/road. I think this matters, and it matters a lot. We don’t live in the Pax Mongolica era, we still live in the seaborne trade era. This is why I don’t get Jack saying Japan is a right off because of its “ports”. If it gets so bad America no longer controls the first and second island chain, then I’ll be the first to start learning Mandarin.
- Americas control of the high ground of the worlds financial and monetary system matters greatly. War is finance. This mattered during both previous World Wars for the Allies
- Both if you are really underplaying Americas current political dominance/control of vital parts of the worlds industrial centres outside its borders, while at the same time talking up China and Russia’s game. Jack mentions Iran? Come on. Turkey maybe, but it’s currently supplying Ukraine with kit, has been a competitor with Russia since Ottoman times, has vied with Iran since it’s inception, and if it really wants to be regional hegemon would be best placed backing the faraway US.
There are going to be so many grand bargains coming, so many cards being played, and in this the US and it’s alliance structure still has the most cards
"Where and how is China getting its resources for this war?"
Aye.
Oil? All that steel is useless...unless you can 'move' it.
The chokepoint for that oil coming from the Middle East is the Malacca Straights.
Control that and China faces the same dilemma Japan did... trying to move steel...without oil.
Hence the BRI, which includes pipelines. Pipelines which are also vulnerable, but so are our pipelines...
Interesting side discussion all around. The one thing I'd add is that Japan is not the weak sister some might think she is. Japan has some of the most advanced subs in the world, and many of the ships in their current navy just happen to have the same name as warships of the IJN...
If Japan wanted nukes, it would have them very quickly. Unless Japan is stupid, they want nukes. Japan isn't stupid...
Everything you have said is true but subs can´t protect ports from missiles. In a real BIG war China will simple destroy the cranes and the offloading facilities. Good luck manhandling a 20t container. Also what cargo crew is going to commit suicide to dock in Japan? Japan like the west has no real air defence against missiles/rockets. Russia does and it is willing to sell (Turkey, China etc).
I´m going to answer Nathan´s points since I think he is speaking in good faith but just doesn't understand the reality and that will cover the Malacca Straights nonsense. Just busy and it will probably be slightly long & I´m lazy about something I have no control over.
TLDR: The USA cannot win a sea war against combined Russia/China in the Pacific/Indian oceans. Also I think the US submarine force is the best in the world but that still wont matter.
N subs USA 69, RF~24, UK/FR 6 each, others meh.
To joe : Malacca Straights nonsense, well why doesn´t China use some of those trillions of US $ it has to build a canal over Thailand with US money? It was estimated to cost $8-10 billion! Well everyone knows it is stupid to waste money on nonsense. Think about this, how will the US navy cut off the Malacca Straights without going to war with everyone there, use a map. This isn´t the 1840´s or even the 1940´s.
The Malacca Straights was never a chokepoint for Japan after they took control of Malaysia, Singapore & Dutch Indonesia. Also bulk shipping is around 1-3% of the cost of what you are shipping (LNG is much more for reasons, petroleum is less than 1% normally), rail is around 3-8% depending on circumstances such as ROI. Look at a map of the Malacca Straights and think ´how would I survive´, then explain why the US navy has super powers.
joe : To make it clear, explain how the US can cut off the Malacca Straights.
Interesting as usual.
One major difference between the present brewing conflict and past conflicts however, that few people seem to really be accounting for, is that native populations of these powers are shrinking, not growing. China especially has an inverted population pyramid, but so does Russia and the U.S. Each successive year of the war will see fewer new bodies coming of age to replace losses and maintain economies.
I also haven't seen much analysis on the issue of India. What is the likelihood they get involved, and for which side? Thats a LOT of potential bodies, and a growing population, with an ok industrial sector.
India is very much a swing state. I'm not sure if even India knows which side it would choose if a major war broke out.
The inverted population pyramid that China is facing makes me think they'll want to fight sooner rather than later. Time isn't on their side in that regard.
Time isn't on almost anyone's side right now. Official fertility rates are dropping in most every country that isn't being paid to inflate their reported figures.
A bit of information: At this point you would think that someone would start to be worried about the Chinese and Russians potentially eating our lunch in a hot or at least "warm" conflict. Though organizations such as the US Navy are starting to mouth some platitudes at the uppermost levels, all of the counterproductive programs of a stupid, fat, lazy nation are still in place. Personnel are told to be innovative but to still follow all the rules that squash innovation and productivity.
I don't have any inside information or Pentagon access to know such things, but what you are describing definitely matches what I have heard elsewhere.... the military is now run by clown world and is in no shape for real war.
Yeah...but they got them some hellacious 'prounouns' by gawd!
William S Lind would probably disagree re the USA having better-trained soldiers, given his schtick about the US military largely being a 2nd generation war military. I don't know about the Chinese military, but if they can control the Indian Ocean with their allies, they can just wait until their industrial advantage is overwhelming.
The other thing of course is the issue of diversity - China is much more homogeneous than the USA, and so is Russia. How many of the Hispanics coming over the southern border will want to take up arms and go off to fight China...?
But diversity is our strength, Teleros. It even says so on our coins, "e unumus plurum." From one, many. =\
My understanding is that the PLA is structurally a very poor military, but a very good domestic enforcement and industrial production institution, with many military assets being invested not in military production, but in production of goods for the domestic consumer markets over there.
The US is a poor military due to defects in the upper echelons of the officer corps and the civilian instituional controls.
Like the US, the Chinese homeland is pretty much uninvadable from the outside at the moment, unless their invader was willing to rack up a proportionally greater civilian body count greater than the An Lushan Rebellion. (The US is uninvadable due to the huge number of civilian owned weapons of mindboggling variety.)
At this point, I think two of the three potential combatants in the scenario are paper tigers in the boots on the ground arena. And the third seems mostly focused on regional dominion.
Shawn
I have had this video book marked for all most 20 years. Siener was a South African prophet during the Boar war.
Siener Van Rensburg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2lSgXMgRU0
KI5UMB
Duly noted!
It eventually comes down to Morale.
Troops that are disillusioned tend to go AWOL or just avoid the fight as much as they can.
Imagine the women, soyboys, trannies and dykes reaction to real combat. Russia and China don't have that problem which is a massive multiplier.
No one fears the US anymore, and for good reason. They all know we can be beaten quickly, they have all been preparing for this for decades and the time is right.
They have only a few more keystrokes to wipe the US dollar off the face of the planet and then it's over. (Or maybe the beginning? I'm trying to be optimistic!)
Morale is of course the topic of the second installment, which I published today. My assessment of American morale finds it to be rather poor, with limited will to fight....
Given the 'world island' concept earlier, and the role Russia is likely to play here, i think a plausible american strategy might be: "try and hold china away from taiwan, and take our russia early, then negotiate a peace with china."
Maybe you keep up a constant barrage on the straight between taiwan and china, while allowing ships to come in from the southwest side of the island; make it impossible for Chinese land troops to cross. without trying to go at china directly.
I would think american would also have help from countries near china that actively don't want china to be the global superpower - but this could be wrong
I do think America would have aid from other parts of the world, but so would China and Russia. It seemed plausible to me to assume that the world would be split between the sides and that would balance out.
I think "try to take out Russia first" is, in fact, our strategy.
Any idea how much the rest of the world matters here, in the conflict?
I got the impression that LOTS of countries would love to see the US empire ended. Depending on how it starts and the posturing, i imagine that plenty of other countries would say, look, we don't feel like helping you hold onto power, America.
India seems like they'd be the biggest question here, and could play kingmaker. I imagine if i'm India i'd rather see the us hegemony end but i really don't want china running the world. I _think_ if i'm india, what i want is this conflict to play on long enough for china to break due to domestic turmoil, so i can lead a coalition of democracies that plans to replace the us/eu hegemony, possibly offering olive branches to russia and china.
Everything points to India being a HUGE x-factor.
Fascinating piece. I agree with your conclusion that a manufacturing economy beats a service economy when mobilizing for war. Factories beat out burger flippers and retail space. Someone should inform the neocons in Washington. This is the first analysis I’ve seen that takes into account the kind of GDP as opposed to the level of GDP. I also think your analysis of the relative effectiveness of military spending is interesting. The difference in cost between a Chinese aircraft carrier and a US one is startling. It also seems that some of our high-level military people are very focused on issues not related to preparing to fight. It’s my understanding that other militaries concern themselves with being able to achieve military objectives.
A few questions:
• Much of your examples involve older conflicts or conflicts between non-nuclear powers. Doesn’t the possibility of a war going nuclear change the strategic calculations?
• I’m also curious about your thoughts on the location and aims of a conflict on your projected outcome.
o A US invasion of China might be impossible. Besides a huge geography and huge population, my understanding is they have hypersonic projectiles that can sink an aircraft carrier. No idea how we’d land.
o I can’t see how invading Russia would work due to the size of the place, the weather, and their nuclear stockpile. How do we maintain supply lines?
o I also don’t see how China or Russia could invade the US and occupy it. Even putting aside our nuclear arsenal, the country is 3,000 miles wide by 1,000 miles long with varied terrain and half a billion guns. The only way that works is if the communists in our government succeed in disarming the population prior to an invasion. FWIW, a former Presidential National Security Advisor I know thinks a substantial portion of US corporations, the media, and many of our government officials are already on the Chinese payroll.
• If we’re not contemplating an invasion of the homeland, then where’s the conflict geographically?
o The US can tie Russia up in Ukraine for a while. Both countries got caught in Afghanistan forever and know how to fund an insurgency against the other side. This assumes Europe can go without Russian gas and the world can go without Ukrainian wheat.
o I spoke with a former high level military officer and Presidential military advisor who thinks the US can defend Taiwan. I’m skeptical we can/would bring enough firepower to China’s border on what they consider to be an existential issue. Plus, what happens to Taiwan Semiconductor and a tech-enabled world that can no longer get the best computer chips in the world.
o China is busy getting much of South America on its side, but they seem more interested in colonizing Africa than invading S. America.
• I’m also curious about your thoughts on non-military warfare
o The Chinese already own our media and all mass communication is filtered to fit their preferred narrative.
o My understanding is the US can pull chip designs that TSMC needs and stop high-level manufacturing. But if anyone destroys those plants or stops them, I think our military might be in trouble. Not sure how much we get from TSMC and how much from Samsung, but those are the best chip-makers in the world.
o I also think most of our military equipment relies on foreign semiconductors including all missile guidance systems. As much as I’m a free market guy, I’d pay TSMC to build plants here and hand out green cards to everyone who works there from the engineers to the janitors.
o China makes 90% of our pharmaceuticals. We used to make them in PR, but someone in Congress thought they could get more taxes from the pharma Cos. and they all moved production to China. The Chinese can turn off the spigot and kill grandma (along with everyone with a heart or cholesterol problem). How much of our population is currently on anti-depressants? That level of withdrawal all at once would be startling - not to mention people who have other urgent medical conditions.
o The Russians have shown an ability to hack our electrical grid and could possibly take it down. My understanding is that we could harden the entire system for a few billion dollars which is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but no one has shown an interest in doing so probably for the Thomas Sowell reason – politicians get no credit for spending money to prevent the thing that didn’t happen.
o No idea what US capability is for non-military warfare, but the US and Russia probably have the best hackers in the world. Strange to think the whole thing could come down to a newly found backdoor in someone’s military access. Kind of the 2022 version of the enigma machine.
Just my thoughts for the day. Again, thanks for the great article.
Gary, great to see you here.
• Much of your examples involve older conflicts or conflicts between non-nuclear powers. Doesn’t the possibility of a war going nuclear change the strategic calculations?
Yes, it does. However, my personal opinion is that nuclear weapons will be to the Third World War what poison gas weapons were in the Second World War. In WWII, everyone had poison gas in their inventory, but nobody deployed it the way they had in WWI. Somehow, even in the midst of firebombing cities and unrestricted sub warfare and so on, somehow they restrained themselves from largescale use of chemical weapons. I think it will be somewhat similar with nuclear weapons. We might see some small scale use, of course; and I could just be totally wrong and we all get blown up. Part of the reason there'll be no nukes is I don't think the war will be fought in homefronts (see below), at least not initially.
Corollary to this belief is a second belief: the really nasty stuff in WWIII will be new types of weapons not previously deployed, such as biological weapons and cyberwarfare targeting the civilian population. Nobody has caused mass starvation with cyberwar yet, so there's no taboo.
• I’m also curious about your thoughts on the location and aims of a conflict on your projected outcome.
I think the most likely scenario is imperial overreach by increasingly-desperate American leaders, leading to an unintended escalation with China or Russia. Then, in order to drum up support, one or both sides will engage in false flag attacks, to justify further escalation. The war aim for both sides is global hegemony.
o A US invasion of China might be impossible. Besides a huge geography and huge population, my understanding is they have hypersonic projectiles that can sink an aircraft carrier. No idea how we’d land.
o I can’t see how invading Russia would work due to the size of the place, the weather, and their nuclear stockpile. How do we maintain supply lines?
I actually think most of the fighting will take place outside of the home territory of the great powers. For instance, in the Korean War, the US fought China, but since the American and Chinese troops were in Korea, this wasn't "really" a war between US and China.
We might fight China in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, or India. We might Russia in one of the Baltic States, Poland, Iran, or Syria, say.
o I also don’t see how China or Russia could invade the US and occupy it. Even putting aside our nuclear arsenal, the country is 3,000 miles wide by 1,000 miles long with varied terrain and half a billion guns. The only way that works is if the communists in our government succeed in disarming the population prior to an invasion. FWIW, a former Presidential National Security Advisor I know thinks a substantial portion of US corporations, the media, and many of our government officials are already on the Chinese payroll.
They would occupy us but only after we'd already been defeated. Think "peacekeepers" sent int to oversee the "administrative downsizing" of the American empire. I'd like to believe there'd be an insurgency to resist them, but.... I agree with the NS Advisor, btw.
• If we’re not contemplating an invasion of the homeland, then where’s the conflict geographically?
See above!
o The US can tie Russia up in Ukraine for a while. Both countries got caught in Afghanistan forever and know how to fund an insurgency against the other side. This assumes Europe can go without Russian gas and the world can go without Ukrainian wheat.
Personally I don't think Europe can go without Russian gas, and I do expect to see worldwide starvation starting this winter... And refugee population movement will follow in the aftermath, sending further shocks.
o I spoke with a former high level military officer and Presidential military advisor who thinks the US can defend Taiwan. I’m skeptical we can/would bring enough firepower to China’s border on what they consider to be an existential issue. Plus, what happens to Taiwan Semiconductor and a tech-enabled world that can no longer get the best computer chips in the world.
In playtesting of my World War Next wargame (unpublished), America was not able to defend Taiwan.
o China is busy getting much of South America on its side, but they seem more interested in colonizing Africa than invading S. America.
Yes, I think because Africa is so resource rich and, perhaps, easier to exploit. In South America you always run the risk of Americans shouting "Monroe Doctrine" ruining all your plans...
• I’m also curious about your thoughts on non-military warfare
It has already begun...
o The Chinese already own our media and all mass communication is filtered to fit their preferred narrative.
Indeed.
o My understanding is the US can pull chip designs that TSMC needs and stop high-level manufacturing. But if anyone destroys those plants or stops them, I think our military might be in trouble. Not sure how much we get from TSMC and how much from Samsung, but those are the best chip-makers in the world.
My understanding is that we no longer have the know-how to make those chips ourselves. How we lost it, I don't know, but we're now second rate in chips.
o I also think most of our military equipment relies on foreign semiconductors including all missile guidance systems. As much as I’m a free market guy, I’d pay TSMC to build plants here and hand out green cards to everyone who works there from the engineers to the janitors.
Agreed.
o China makes 90% of our pharmaceuticals. We used to make them in PR, but someone in Congress thought they could get more taxes from the pharma Cos. and they all moved production to China. The Chinese can turn off the spigot and kill grandma (along with everyone with a heart or cholesterol problem). How much of our population is currently on anti-depressants? That level of withdrawal all at once would be startling - not to mention people who have other urgent medical conditions.
Agreed, this will be devastating.
o The Russians have shown an ability to hack our electrical grid and could possibly take it down. My understanding is that we could harden the entire system for a few billion dollars which is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but no one has shown an interest in doing so probably for the Thomas Sowell reason – politicians get no credit for spending money to prevent the thing that didn’t happen.
o No idea what US capability is for non-military warfare, but the US and Russia probably have the best hackers in the world. Strange to think the whole thing could come down to a newly found backdoor in someone’s military access. Kind of the 2022 version of the enigma machine.
Agreed. Referencing my comments above, this is exactly the sort of "unrestricted warfare" I expect them to undertake.
> I also think most of our military equipment relies on foreign semiconductors including all missile guidance systems. As much as I’m a free market guy, I’d pay TSMC to build plants here and hand out green cards to everyone who works there from the engineers to the janitors.
You'd also need to give them exemptions from all the bureaucratic rules that made it impossible to build semiconductors here in the first place.
> China makes 90% of our pharmaceuticals.
Well, most pharmaceuticals are over-prescribed to the point of having a negative effect on health.
> How much of our population is currently on anti-depressants? That level of withdrawal all at once would be startling
It would certainly be traumatic. Then again, if the bluehairs curl up in a ball of pain, they're not throwing sand into the country's functioning. However, in the long run everyone involved would probably be better for it.
The exemptions would take time. Which, when we don't know what is going to happen, isn't likely going to start until missiles are flying. And would be fought tooth and nail by the paperpushers unless they were all shot or imprisoned.
Yes, but that would still take years to resolve even a disruption, much less a stoppage. In the meantime, most everyone would know *someone* going nuts and needing tons of assistance, diverting resources. Economic warfare.
The trauma would not only be to those going into withdrawal. Our whole population would be traumatized *even though most could use it long term.* Fasting and detoxing from BigPharme would solve a lot of ills, but millions would just die with shortages and the rest would struggle with the rapid change and the resultant trauma.