PDA

View Full Version : From asymmetric warfare back to the great game


tartare
28th Feb 2017, 21:29
Interesting piece here (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39112925).
He makes the case that counter insurgency wars are winding down (even if not over) and that arguably, the US military focus has been lacking on state actors - a newly resurgent Russia, and China.

KenV
1st Mar 2017, 14:05
US military focus has been lacking on state actors? Hmmmm. The F-35 is not a counterinsurgency weapon system. Neither is the F-22, nor the B-21. Nor are the upgrades to the B-1 and B-52. Nor the EA-18 Growler. Nor the Zumwalt class and the latest versions of the Arleigh Burke class of DDs. Nor the latest upgrades to the SM series missiles and Aegis weapons systems. Nor the Columbia class SSBNs. Nor the upgrades to the Minuteman system and development of its replacement system. Nor the upgrades to the strategic nuclear warhead stockpile. Nor the development of longer range anti-ship missiles. Nor the upgunning of Styker APCs. I could go on, but I think the point was made.

racedo
1st Mar 2017, 14:24
And the Military Industrial Complex runs its hands as it see more profits to be made.

Spending all of this on equipment which will be obsolete quickly will eventually bankrupt the US.

Iraq and Afghanistan cost what was it couple of Trillion dollars with 55,000 dead or physically injured US service personnel and it achieved exactly what ?
In the 55,000 quoted this doesn't include the thousands who returned who will have ongoing mental issues to the end of their lives or those who took their own lives on returning or the impact on their families.

But never mind the MIC will still fund US elections.

Mac the Knife
1st Mar 2017, 21:59
KenV

War is coming, Bannon has warned. In fact, it’s already here.

" It’s war. It’s war. Every day, we put up: America’s at war, America’s at war. We’re at war. " - White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, 2015

“You have an expansionist Islam and you have an expansionist China,” he said during a 2016 radio appearance. “They are motivated. They’re arrogant. They’re on the march. And they think the Judeo-Christian West is on the retreat.”

“Against radical Islam, we’re in a 100-year war,” he told Political Vindication Radio in 2011.

“We’re going to war in the South China Seas in the next five to 10 years, aren’t we?” Bannon asked during a 2016 interview with Reagan biographer Lee Edwards.

“We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism,” he said in a speech to a Vatican conference in 2014. “And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.”

"To confront this threat, Bannon argued, the Judeo-Christian West must fight back, lest it lose as it did when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453. He called Islam a “religion of submission” in 2016 — a refutation of President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 description of Islam as a religion of peace. In 2007, Bannon wrote a draft movie treatment for a documentary depicting a “fifth column” of Muslim community groups, the media, Jewish organizations and government agencies working to overthrow the government and impose Islamic law."

Bannon believes in Julius Evola, Ayn Rand, Howard Zinn, Strauss & Howe and the need for a "Fourth Turning" to "return" to an imaginary pre-Reformation Nietzschean Judeo-Christian National Socialist West.

If he gets his way, indeed a War will be manufactured and fought - thought whether there will be anyone left to enjoy his Brave New World seems rather dubious.

Mac

:ouch:

West Coast
1st Mar 2017, 22:57
With that mind set, China could sink an aircraft carrier and you'd tie it back and lay the blame on Bannon.

Lonewolf_50
2nd Mar 2017, 01:49
Mac, are you familiar with a Gaul named Vitalstatistix?

Just to let you know: when I was in the pac fleet navy, early 1990's, the Spratly Islands (and a few other bits and pieces in the region) had already become an issue of regional strategic concern. There was concern then about where or when there'd be a flash point. What intrigued me the most, at the time, was how it might influence our relationship, in a positive manner, with Vietnam.