Taiwan fell in ‘24.
The next war began in 2035.
Americans turned on each other at the pull of a psychological trigger. Hawaii under occupation.
Helljumpers on Mars and a war of attrition in orbit.
Your only hope is hellfire.
Welcome to the nightmare:
Everybody makes fun of Sun Tzu for giving basic advice like
“The terrain is to be assessed in terms of distance, difficulty or ease of travel, dimension, and safety”
and then the Iranian Pres and his FM still fly into the fog in rough weather and terrain in a 50 year old helo
The recent revelation that the Philippines secretly transferred materials to reinforce the dilapidated military vessel illegally grounded at Ren'ai Jiao underscores the root cause of the current tense situation in the South China Sea - the Philippines' ongoing provocations with
(Bloomberg) -- A US citizen was detained in Moscow on suspicion of assaulting a police officer, the Interfax news service reported Wednesday, citing Russian investigators.
Personally, I’m more inclined to believe the CCP will say “the Russians chose their fate” and behave like vultures on the ashes of a failed empire than actually provide significant support to Putin’s war now.
The entire legacy of the Olympics is proving that assholes aren’t superior because of the color of their skin, their ideology, or whatever.
And it has, and always will, annoy a lot of people with nothing better to do or who to cling to that nonsense.
You can’t make fun of Sun Tzu and then also say that the basics are hard in war. Thats exactly what Sun Tzu was trying to get across.
*But* you absolutely can make fun of MBAs that use Sun Tzu, that is always acceptable.
If you’re an officer in the US military and your political views include preemptively surrendering a US ally to a hostile foreign nation, just take the uniform off so we can give it to someone we can trust to fight.
I’ve said this for years but I will hear officers and academics go off about how basic Sun Tzu is and how smart Clausewitz is and then they’ll still lead their formation into impassible terrain w/o food or comms.
Xi’s dad got purged twice and his answer when he took over was more purges and a genocide. Trauma doesn’t actually ensure you treat other people well, it can very easily make you more selfish and less empathetic.
That was one of the worst endings in sitcom history.
The sitcom Malcolm in the Middle ends with Malcolm's mom telling him that she made his childhood painful on purpose so that when he grows up to become president of the United States his memories of suffering will stop him from betraying the working class
Say it with me folks: GDP is not an appropriate 1 to 1 measure of potential military power. I don’t care that the Dutch economy is the size of Russia’s, the Russians would roll over them in half a day. Industrial capacity, logistics, training, resolve, and force structure matters
Depending on a variety of factors, we produce about 100-200 Tomahawk missiles a year. People love to talk about the cost of them and other systems cheap assymetric stuff. Thats the wrong thing to worry about.
Stockpile and replenishment is the real concern every time we burn one
The Navy abandoned its right to run INDOPACOM a decade ago when you sold access to the Pacific fleet to a 300 pound Malaysian businessman in exchange for strippers and dinner.
*puts on CNN commentator hat*
“The difference, Jake, between China and the United States is that when their Minister of Defense is missing, it’s at Xi’s direction. In the United States, ours disappears of his own free will. That’s democracy at work.”
lol SECDEF looked at that plea deal and the future of democracy and was like “we are not handing the election over for a plea deal for the guys who did 9/11”
It’s kind of funny that the staffer/policy takeaway from those Obama era wargames was that American actions towards Russia are escalatory and not worth the tradeoffs and not that maybe the staffers themselves don’t know what they’re doing and aren’t trained well.
In addition to a whole bunch of Russians, this war seems to have also killed the think tank talking point that “the future of war is cyber.”
Unless I missed something, yeeting a turret off a T-90 at 300 meters doesn’t usually involve a keyboard.
NEW: The US Army will be forced to cut its artillery production target by over 25% if Congress can't pass the $106B national security supplemental.
The Army would top out at 72,000 rounds/month by end of 2025 with no bill, far short of their 100K target.
BREAKING: The New York Times reports that in a classified document approved in March, President Biden ordered American forces to 'prepare for possible coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea'.
This isn’t about one specific thing, but people are starting to find out that most Gen Z and junior millennial RW staffers are completely cracked out on election conspiracies, nihilism, and incel internet politics.
If they politically came of age 2019-now, that’s all they know.
The Guam cyber battlefield prep news has me thinking about this image of Iron Dome from a few years back.
In the event of war over Taiwan, the skies over Guam would look like this, tenfold, every night, until someone runs out of ammo.
If you think 12 BTGs can turn on a dime after block to block fighting in Mariupol to then fight large-scale maneuver warfare across the Donbas I have a bridge on the Dnieper to sell you.
Graphic is making the rounds again and the concept for a few years, but this really uh…demonstrates operational intent.
Like launching in the middle of the crowded Singapore strait by a seemingly commercial vessel.
I feel like the big win for the US on the defense tech side is proving that even the earlier model Javelins work against T-90s.
Should make nice work of their PLA counterparts too.
🚨 SENTENCE: Leading Petty Officer David Elizalde sentenced to 30 days home detention w/ no probation.
Judge Nichols agreed w/ defense rec to try to save Elizalde's Navy career: "Not because it's my job... but because he has served our nation honorably."
If you want to know why Beijing is freaked out over our response it’s the same reason they thought we would back down in August.
They’ve been drinking kool-aid for a decade that America is weak, decadent, and in permanent decline. That is an incredibly dangerous and stupid thing
Cannot stress how bad this is. CCP infiltration of the highest level of hawks in the UK. Dude ran around causing chaos and making it harder to coordinate counter-CCP policy while posing as a hawk.
That we’re just finding out about this now is even worse.
Wow. The Tory parliamentary researcher arrested on suspicion of spying for China is Chris Cash, the director the China Research Group co-founded by the security minister, Tom Tugendhat.
Full Times scoop 👇
I’m a single issue voter until one party stops trying to end American democracy.
And that single issue is the continued survival of American democracy.
#JackPosobiec
#CPAC
"I just wanted to say welcome to the end of democracy. We're here to overthrow it completely, we didn't get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here, we'll replace it with this right here."
Bruh if the entire Northern Axis just walked off the job due to lack of food, fuel, and water just ten days into the war…
I’m gonna quit ever trying to wargame something again.
Of course that’s your contention. You’re a first year graduate student at Georgetown SFS. You just finished reading some book- probably 2034- and are convinced that you know exactly what’s wrong with US-China policy and can’t morally differentiate between America and the CCP.
If we don’t develop the production capacity and missile stockpiles to kill the PLA, it’s gonna cost us a helluva lot more in blood and treasure than a multi-year procurement scheme will cost us.
Without those systems, we lose the war for Taiwan. Full stop.
NEW: Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee are making significant cuts to an ambitious Pentagon plan to ramp up missile production through multi-year procurement as it seeks to arm Ukraine and prepare for a conflict with China. w/
@LeeHudson_
Why US ops in Mexico are bad:
-no end state
-ignores economic drivers of violence
-manifested out of thin air
-drains $$$, troops, and focus away from Russia/China
-manifested out of thin air
-doesn’t address violence and cartel safe havens south of Mexico
-repeats GWOT failures
BREAKING: The White House says the United States is seeing increasing levels of aggressiveness from China's military and it will not be long before 'someone gets hurt'
You know, a continuous theme over the last few years is that no one wants to believe US intelligence when they knock on your door and tell you bad things are coming your way.
The US secretly warned Iran that ISIS was planning a potential terror attack inside Iran’s borders before the group carried out a deadly attack on January 3, according to a US official. Confirming WSJ:
Maybe I’ve just been lucky with who I’ve worked for but you could not waterboard these quotes out of me.
Any good staffer briefs well, knows the issues, and knows their why.
“We promise we’re not controlled by the CCP, which is why our legal argument is that the CCP won’t let us have control over our algorithm and divest it.”
Mattel and Nokia will launch a Barbie flip-phone that will cost $130.
• It will only be able to text and call, with no internet or social media.
• It will greets the user with a “Hi Barbie” voice message when turned on.
If I was to pull the four most important takeaways for policymakers and the average American out of 60 Minutes’ piece on the US Navy and the China fight, it would be these:
At some point, regardless of what happens in Ukraine, we’re gonna go through the same hand wringing when the PLA builds up to invade Taiwan.
And the same folks will mirror, downplay, lecture the US, stick their heads in the sand, and say “no, they wouldn’t dare” or “they can’t.”
I have to be very delicate when I say this:
This is not espionage like SolarWinds or the 2010s IP theft.
This is battlefield prep, or rather, what you would most certainly do as part of battlefield prep.
It does not mean a war is imminent, but jfc it is outrageous.
Volt Typhoon, a Chinese state-sponsored actor, uses living-off-the-land (LotL) and hands-on-keyboard TTPs to evade detection and persist in an espionage campaign targeting critical infrastructure organizations in Guam and the rest of the United States.
Reminder that Allison likes to go on CCP propaganda shows to promote his book, that the CCP loves to promote his book, and that Thucydides’ Trap is built upon a poor reading of history, US-China relations, and removes moral analysis from Beijing’s actions.
Im gonna laugh if the corruption charges against the head of NYPD are in any way connected to those CCP illegal overseas “policing” operations they ran out of Brooklyn.
Itll probably be something more cartoonish, but interesting timing with other foreign influence investigations
Between the decline in USN fleet size, no coherent shipbuilding plan, SECNAV’s comments that China can’t build good ships (it is in fact one of the things they’re best at), and now DEPSECDEF’s comments that Javs and Stingers aren’t needed for the wars of the future…man I dunno.
There won’t be any fun memes from a Taiwan war because the PLA won’t let a single digital transmission get off the island. We’ll be too panicked by losing half the fleet to the bottom of the Pacific.
Use the sense of urgency from Ukraine to prepare for that future, and stop it.
I’m just saying that if the CCP is anti-gay rights and Taiwan recognizes marriage equality, then the weapons made by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to sink PLA ships are technically designed to enforce equality.
DEI in this case stands for “Detect, Engage, Intercept”
Singapore is a lovely city, it’s a shame many of its elite are in the bag for Beijing.
The first foreign national to complain to me about AUKUS was a Singaporean diplomat who was suddenly very concerned about how “the French” were upset…
Do you know what will happen to the American people’s way of life and the U.S. system of government if the U.S. becomes No. 2? Absolutely nothing,
@DannyQuah
writes. FP’s upcoming print issue, “Dear America,” is out next week.
If you preach Sun Tzu, I assume you have an MBA.
If you preach Clausewitz, I assume you went to a war college.
If you preach Kautilya, you went to Georgetown SSP.
That you can Venmo another country to support its artillery habit is an aspect of modern warfare that I don’t think anyone could’ve predicted and I think it’s just amazing.
For the record the reason I refer to anti-Ukraine folks as “isolationists” is because it won’t just apply to Ukraine and will fuck us on Taiwan. It’s the same pseudo-fascist rhetoric as was present in the 1930s, just with different gift wrapping.
"The U.S. is a “fat buffalo trying to take a nap” as hungry wolves approach, the European ambassador mused. “I can hear those Champagne bottle corks popping in Moscow — like it’s Christmas every fucking day.” via
@politico
Every argument being used against Ukraine aid will be used in the near future against Taiwan aid.
Failing to help Ukraine now will only embolden and validate those voices, and make it even harder to stop the war on democracy.
the tiktok ban with no receipts on actual reasoning is really feeling like the government admitting: “more people are seeing news we don’t want them to so we are going to ban that place they are seeing it”
I don’t condone China’s military drills around Taiwan. But walk in Beijing’s shoes for a moment. Lai completely ignored “One China” in his inauguration speech—not even a nod to 1992 Consensus like his predecessor. He speaks of Taiwan as already independent. China must react.
It’s simple, if you’re an American, you shouldn’t travel to any country listed as a threat on pages 4 and 5 of the 2022 National Defense Strategy.
Each has a record of targeting, kidnapping, and falsely imprisoning (and sometimes torturing) Americans for political purposes.
It’s not that the Russians could never execute a plan against NATO, it’s that they’ve sustained such great losses, particularly to PGM stockpiles and elite units (armored formations, VDV, etc) that now they likely cannot mount a serious operation against NATO for another decade.